From The Vault Of Art Shay: Parallel Lives

By Art Shay in News on Feb 29, 2012 8:00PM

Former Astronaut and future Sen. John Glenn talks to a backer while wife Annie gets some rest between campaign stops in Ohio.

Directing this chase scene in the Kreuger Forest, I would almost certainly have wiped the smiles off the faces of the cannibals and their prey, an NBC accountant, to keep our \<em\>Zoo Parade\<\/em\> crew on budget.

I\'m sure I\'d have used Leica and Nikon as a notebook,as I did in this Vegas adventure. It\'s grueling work, but someone has to do it. I don\'t know what you\'re looking at&mdash;but look at the hair I had at 40! How could I turn down such a bright starlet for a bit part?

The resemblance of this poorhouse resident to the young Newt Gingrich would be intentional in my movie. So would the force-feeding. I\'d do a close-up of the shocked witness behind him.

Chances are I\'d mix politics and humor in my movie. Here I\'d actually show how a candidate gets the fire in his belly to run for the Presidency, and I\'d get his daughter to show how she burned off his whiskers by accident one day.

Chances are I\'d ridicule both major parties and the Storm Trooper guarding them. A friend of mine, Xander Soren, is music director of Apple. Chances are I\'d turn him loose on this scene.

I would naturally show President Santorum\'s Navy having a permanent on-board Tea Party to end all our wars by 2015. Or use Newt Gingrich\'s second-term promises to either gain less weight or get a stronger wife. I would sneak in dialogue avowing to let the wives of servicemen&mdash;or husbands if applicable&mdash;have input on \"Do ask and I\'ll proudly tell.\" Could be a musical, this post-Obama bombshell.

I would fight my producer to use this proof of how Hugh Hefner started: He copied the names of his first 20 Bunnies from MY address book. I sort of like the \<em\>deus ex machina\<\/em\> lighting on my head. Hef had the Mansion strobed from the ceilings so you could shoot anywhere Photo by my 17-year-old son, Harmon.

(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. In this week's look at his archives, Art thinks about the possibilities his life could have taken.)

I once slept with Elizabeth Taylor. (Full disclosure: chastely, in the back compartment of a Continental Airlines plane flying from LA to Chicago. You could look it up.) I remember the perfume; the fur; my previous Life-time with her; what she said; how tired those lavender eyes were from partying all night. Hollywood stuff.

Management here told me you peppered my story with thousands of readerly hits. A number, I understand, just recently surpassed when a London newspaper referred to Johnny Depps's agent calling me about my pals Nelson Algren and Simone de Beauvoir. The Piccadilly interest in Pirate-ing continues. Hollywood stuff.

Accordingly, I've explored my dystopian imagination and photo adventures and, not surprisingly, come up with several lives alternate to the exciting one in which I'm in my last chapter.

Thanks to the cheery Time magazine nod to astronaut John Glenn last week, acknowledging it's been 50 years since his first three earth orbits, I suddenly remembered being hired by The Saturday Evening Post to document John's run for the Senate. I was in New Concord, Ohio to photograph him with his modest-but-proud parents. Afterwards Glenn, at the wheel of his doughty family Chevy, said, "Let's take an ice cream break. I'll show you a shortcut, Navigator." (I had proudly told this greatest of fighter pilots that I'd been an 8th Air Force flyboy.)

We had our ice cream and swooped through an alley—and were almost creamed by a pick-up truck on New Concord's main street. Calmly, Glenn hit the brakes, stopped us four feet short of termination, and said, "My fault Navigator. Sorry."

Looking both ways after an apologetic wave to the other driver, John said, "Can you imagine the headline? War hero dies on New Concord street in traffic accident with astronaut John Glenn at the wheel?"

If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Chicago’s Nelson Algren, is also available at Amazon.