From The Vault Of Art Shay: Shooting Authors

Segue 13 years forward to Chicago in 1968. There, in the park east of the Hilton, sit a phalanx of anti-war, anti-Nixon, anti-establishment Hippies and sympathizers, Including the French genius Jean Genet, the druggie and heir to a drug fortune, William Burroughs, and Terry Christian, author of the sacrilegious \"The Magic Christian.\"\r\n

In the lobby of the small hotel at the western edge of Lincoln Park the tear-gassed jailbird genius (playright, novelist, philosopher, intimate of Jean-Paul Sartre) Jean Genet gets treated for a head wound from a police billy club.\t\r\n

My most famous author picture—my nude of Simone de Beauvoir after her bath in an apartment I borrowed for her—appeared on the cover of a French magazine and sparked a world-wide controversy that the author of \"The Second Sex\" would be treated as nakedly sexual. My favorite article of comment was a lead story in a 2008 New Yorker. They much admired Simone\'s derriere and said it had disturbed two entire countries. They dragged in the French President and his babe of a wife, nude model and movie actress Carla Bruni but attempted to invoke both men as \"using\" the women- Carla as anotch onthe President\'s belt- and Simone as a canoodler of an American novelist who raced her, presumably before the lens to salve his ego. Meaning Nelson hired me to do the picture! Bullshit, as I\'ve written to no avail. The \" New Yorker\" does fiction\r\nif it helps along their fixed idea!\r\n

I photographed Edward Albee when he came to Chicago to help director Ina Marlowe produce one of hsi plays in the 60\'s, not, alas, :\"Who\'s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?\" He liked his portrait so much he bought the rights to it. \r\n

My wonderful archivist, Erica de Glopper, found this 1960\'s shot of James Jones working out the other day. Getty, which used to handle Time Inc.\'s library, misplaced it.\r\n

I think it rhymes nicely with my picture of Nelson Algren working out on the heavy bag to stay in shape for orgies with Simone.\r\n

Gwendolyn Brooks in a quiet moment on her south side porch.\"Where I sometimes sit to write in warm weather.\"\r\n

James Baldwin made a sudden appearance in Deerfield, mid housing dispute. Deerfield, or a builder with land in Deerfield was trying to build 40 houses in lily-white Deerfield of 1959. And sell two to African-Americans. Shamefully 16 local lawyers got together to seek-and find- a legal way to exclude them from the $45,000 homes.\"We need parks- yeah, that\'s it,parks...\" Harvard did a classic study of this shameful case, and a current hit play moves the situation to the south side of Chicago. I was in charge of public information for the Human Rights Group and resisted being thrown out of the first rump meeting by saying I was there for Life Magazine-which I was- The line that kept me in? \"Life is doing a story on human rights...\" The story made national TV:including one weeping woman who\'s aargument on camera was: \"If God wanted blackbirds and white birds to live in the same tree-He\'s have put them there originally. \"The\r\nprogram ended on the cheers that greeted this religious note. Shameful.\r\n

I told you about Hemingway.\r\n

Nelson didn\'t like Doubleday\'s editor-in-chief Ken McCormack- so he mocked the role of a flunky carrying Ken\'s baggage into his, Nelson\'s, cottage at Miller Beach, Ind.\r\n

I used to do a lot of work for North Shore Magazine in its prime-but they weren\'t comfortabe \"breaking\" stories like the one I suggested on this novelist working on a laptop going down to work on the North Shore line day after day. After Scott Turow appeared on the cover of Time and his first novel was made into a movie,did timid North Shore deign to further enhance Scott\'s burgeoning career and get aboard. \r\n

George Plimpton is the famous author who liked to dabble ineveryone elsre\'s sport-He\'s played in the Detroit Lion backfield, has flown the ColeBrothers\' high wire for an ABC special—which is where I met the multi-talented, absolutely fearless dynamo. In Philadelphia, shooting for an ABC-TV ad showing him as a daring young etc. The ad ran full page in papers across the country and I photographed the multi-man through a multi-image lens.

Robert Crumb -shown with his banjo band- is the best living cartoonist in the world. His work graces New Yorker covers and whole sections, and my portrait of him appears inthe National Portrait Gallery in Washington. He was a friend and associate of local cartoonist, the gifted Jay Lynch , a family friend. He had helped Crumb produce \" Mr. Natural\" and other early classic comics. You remember- those long feet looming at you...?

My 60s portrait of the now 84-year-old Elie Wiesel is, in his classic \"silence,\" contrast to the startling one of him full page by Zbiegniew Bzdak in the latest Printers Row. His life as a survivor has aged Wiesel beyond the ordinary cruel brushwork of Nature. In the text, Trib art critic Howard Reich, whose mother survived the holocaust too, accords us a heartwrenching view of the man, his achievement and his fate, going far beyond the page. It is the magazine\'s brilliant essay granting Wiesel the Tribune\'s prize for a lifetime of Literary Achievement.