From The Vault Of Art Shay: Remembering Marcel Marceau

By Art Shay in Arts & Entertainment on Mar 21, 2012 6:20PM

Like most artists, Marcel Marceau loved to \"live\" off the land. He had a \"mime\'s notebook\" on which he sketched or wrote down ideas. I tried to do this as a \<em\>Life\<\/em\> story. (They didn\'t like it as much as I did.) Nelson Algren and I took him to a North Avenue low life pool hall, where he had a great time \"collecting tableaux\". Later that night, he used some of these \"notes\" on stage, We were thrilled.\r\n

He was known through the world for his white-faced clown \"Bip.\" Algren and I drove him to the St. Charles Reformatory where he performed for 2000 young inmates. At first when they saw him in his tight Bip outfit, they whistled. Marceau was aghast. European audiences whistled when they meant to boo. Soon the inmates, whose whistles at first were sex-whistles, began to dig and cheer for his Walking Against the Wind and especially, understand the horror and symbolism behind his \"prisoner\" who can\'t escape from his invisible cage. Any more than these kids could, or adapt. Many of them \"read\" Marceau as a homosexual.They were wrong. He adored and chased women all his life. \r\nMarceau was widowed once and left with two sons he had to grudgingly support, living the expensive French Hippie life on Ibiza. He married again and left two daughters from that union.\r\n\r\n

Marceau faces an overflow crowd at the Chicago Theatre on his last tour in the 90s. My favorite Marceau performance?

Marceau loved cars and was always \"on\" even in a taxi, where he added the cabbie to his dramatis personae.\r\n\r\n

At the Art Institute of Chicago he studied the work of Italian and Spanish masters, but the guards began to get suspicious of my camera and of his being recognized by the crowd. \r\n\r\n

He toyed with the idea of doing all the characters in the \"Sunday in the Park\" tableau. Real Seurat title: \"A La Grand Jatte.\" Here a matronly patron tugs at her husband\'s sleeve to ask him to decipher what the hell we were doing with camera, mime and painting. Marceau immediately took on the gravitas of innocence that all con men use to get through the rushing stream of life dry shod, as Peer Gynt peerlessly put it.

Marceau sensed I wanted him thrown out for my story on him. He was polite and non resistant and got thrown out politely. I\'ve always regretted that the august Art Institute , which has bought about 10 of my Chicago pictures, has never acquired one from this series. More painful: they \'ve never acquired my picture of Big Tuna Tony Accardo passing one of the Institute\'s famous Big Lions , growling forever at Tony from the front steps of the sacred building. Full disclosure: Life rejected this picture too, using as a full page instead my candid of Accardo \"emerging from the shadows\" of the new courthouse holding pen. \r\n

At an Irving Park restaurant, Algren, left, displayed an historic gun to Marceau and his date, the beautiful poet and T.S.Eliot expert, Dorothy Terry. Terry was chief writer of Marlin Perkins\' TV show, Zoo Parade.

Algren and Marceau, donning western gear from the restaurant\'s box of props, staged a mock duel.

Marceau loved Maxwell Street and, for my camera, hijacked the ancient instant (tintype) camera of another street photographer.

Marceau and his acquaintance&mdash;and Algen\'s great love, Simone de Beauvoir&mdash;both hied themselves to Maxwell Sreet on their Chicago visits. She for no-nonsense Bourse-quality walking shows, he to gather mime material on the customers and to please me and my Leica.

Algren, famous for self-deprecatingly calling himself \"the tin whistle of American letters,\" one day discovered a sell of tin whistles, and we bought a few and played a passable \"Good Night Irene\" on them.

(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 reflects on his friendship with the legendary mime, Marcel Marceau.)

The world's greatest mime, Marcel Marceau, was born a year after I was, almost to the day. We remained friends until he died in 2007. He loved Chicago, how its wind whipped up the skirts of the women, "all the time—not just sometimes as in Paris."

"What lies under those skirts has been man's secret quest for centuries." he told me. "I have had maharajahs in India, Maoris in New Zealand, and Chaplin in Switzerland, tell me so in word and—in the case of Chaplin—in mime. I met Chaplin but once: in a Swiss airport. I began telling him of my favorite venues, and he startled me by holding up his hand and said, 'Not once have I done anything as beautiful as Youth, Maturity, Old Age and Death,' his famous cradle-to-the-grave tableau in which he ages as you watch.

"Then he walked away becoming smaller and smaller as he did on the screen, as I kvelled (pardon my Yiddish) over this unacknowledged fellow Jew somehow knowing and admiring my work."

When Marceau was five, his mother Ann Werzberg and father, a kosher butcher named Charles Mangel took him to see a Chaplin movie, and the future master of pantomime was never the same. His tableaux are like Mozart tunes you can never get out of your head. "Walking Against the Wind:" holding that invisible rope, pausing for breath, floating on that invisible wind... I see it now. His immortal "Mask-Maker"—a mask-maker tries out several masks, then can't get the one with the eternal stupid grin off his face, no matter how he tugs! (His father would die in the Holocaust at Auschwitz. He would change his name to Marceau, after a heroic French general in the Revolution, and work against the Nazis in the French underground. His specialty: helping children escape and outmaneuver the race laws. )

In the 50s I introduced him to Nelson Algren, who showed him the joys of shopping on Chicago's Maxwell Street. "Very much," he said, like the Paris Bourse. (I just missed photographing Simone de Beauvoir shopping for sensible walking shoes while Nelson talked to some resident gypsies.)

I took him to a Time magazine staff lunch one day at Riccardo's. A TV comedian someone did some shtick-involving making grimaces and talking funny. Respectful applause. Hugh Moffet, the Time bureau chief, said, "Our other guest is the master of silence. Just take a bow, Marcel."

Marceau, without leaving his seat, began creating. He seemed to be saying in mime: "There is zee husband and he has learned he has lost heez job! He peeks up zee telephone and calls his girl-frand: Nozing to be concerned about. We will still eat in the same expensive restaurants, stay in ze big resort hotels, shop for jewelry… not to worry."

Marceau set it up: the same man, telling his wife he lost the same job! Jumping into life is the unspoken dialogue: "My darling, a terrible thing has happened. I lost my job. We will now have to tighten our belt—buy cheaper food, cheaper clothing for the kids—perhaps place them in schools more in keeping with our new poverty, etc."

How well Marcel Marceau would have limned the noisy election campaign we're going through! How Bip's clown face would have exulted in Romney's description of his wealth and, changing positions, not only doing Romney but getting on his ''canvas" the two-faced arrogance of Newt's social life, Newt's trying to pillory Clinton for the same type of blow job, searching for Obama's real birth place. And oh yes, detailing the million bucks a year it costs Santorum to educate his children well enough so they hate, or at least disesteem, education.

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, Nelson Algren's Chicago, is also available at Amazon.