Ansel Adams (58 page)

As sunset approached, the green-flash vigil would begin. Everyone would stand, drinks in hand, gazing out through the large, west-facing window, across the unbroken tops of pines and cypress to the Pacific. Just as the sun disappeared below a clear horizon, Ansel and Virginia would sometimes gasp, “Did you see that?” They would then describe the exquisite puff of emerald green they had just witnessed—the fabled green flash. At first I thought it was a snipe hunt, but even after they convinced me it was real, I never saw one.

After a few months of being trapped in the dead calm of a flashless existence, I arrived at work to find my daily note from Ansel, but this one was different. He suggested that I go with him to visit his eye doctor that afternoon; he had already made the appointment. He was certain I was color-blind. When physical impairment was ruled out, Ansel found an article in
Scientific American
that he presented to me as proof that the green flash was real. Still, as sun after sun passed from sight, I never beheld this phenomenon.

One cold, very clear day a few months after Ansel’s death, when Jim and I were sitting on a picnic bench at the ocean in Pebble Beach with Andrea and her new husband, Stanley—both of whom were also green-flash virgins—the flash was so big we couldn’t miss it. Since then we have seen it countless more times.

The scientific explanation goes something like this: As sunset approaches, the sun’s rays must pass through a volume of atmosphere much greater than when the sun is directly overhead. This thick layer of atmosphere acts like a prism and bends, or refracts, the light, separating it into the colors of the spectrum. As in a rainbow, the slowest wavelength, and thus the first to disappear, is red. Next to go are orange and yellow, their intensity weakened by their natural absorption by ozone and water vapor in the atmosphere. Then come green and blue. The blue is refracted more than any other color, its light broadly scattered by our atmosphere, which makes our sky blue but greatly reduces its intensity. Green is therefore the last color that we can usually detect. When, on a very clear day, the green is unimpeded, the sun departs with an emerald-green flash or glow.

Ansel and Virginia were lucky to have the services of Fumiye Kodani, a wonderful woman and a fine cook, for nearly twenty years, both in Carmel and Yosemite. Because she was of Japanese ancestry, she had been imprisoned during World War II at Poston, Arizona. There was one good thing that came out of that experience: it was there that she met her future husband, Seizo. We all treasured Fumiye’s peaceful spirit and her beautiful cuisine, and she, in turn, enjoyed cooking for Ansel, modestly saying, “It was easy to cook for him. He was good about eating anything.” Ansel’s favorite meal was probably sorrel soup followed by roast lamb with fresh mint sauce and hominy-grits casserole. He also loved to escape into Carmel in the late afternoon for a “meeting” with Robert Baker—actually an excuse for a root beer float.
3

Just as Ansel and Virginia had embraced me as family, they also became family to my own. Our children fondly remember Ansel as an unusual grandpa. The Adamses came to dinner at our home at least once a month through the years. The morning after one such occasion, I found a typed greeting from Ansel addressed to “Dear Little Mother of All,” followed by a list of appreciative adjectives ending with a burp.

Now that he was never camping, Ansel rarely cooked and never set foot in a grocery store. Because he had nearly always employed a cook, those kinds of responsibilities had never been a part of his life, except perhaps when he was on the road. I knew how much he had missed us when Jim and I returned from a rare two-week vacation to find our dining room table covered with jars and boxes of the most outlandish foods; Ansel had gone shopping because he knew our larder would be bare. We were all set with such staples as Bavarian mustard, pickled beans, bottled artichokes, hot-fudge topping, and a box of Hamburger Helper. It was an infinitely sweet gesture.

Thriftiness was a habit with Ansel. Our work area was walled with storage boxes, stacks of metal drawers, and cubbyholes. We were instructed to keep everything, including the rubber bands that bound the daily papers. Defective photographs were torn apart and then sent for silver reclamation. Ansel was thrilled when I followed his suggestion to reply to most correspondence using Adams picture postcards; seconds from Museum Graphics, the cards were free to Ansel by the boxful, saving on both expensive letterhead stationery and postage.

Ansel’s personal needs were simple. He always felt well dressed if he had doused his beard, bald head, chest, and underarms with his beloved Vitalis, believing that all women within his wafting power were now susceptible to his charms. When it came to dress, the biblical Joseph had nothing on Ansel, who used his body to display an amazing combination of colors. He had that one wool suit and a handful of sports coats, his favorite a maroon polyester number that he paired with a mustard-hued, short-sleeved sport shirt or one in a green and white Provençal print, loosely cinched at the neck with a choice of bolo ties. He owned four pairs of shoes: desert boots, lace-up canvas-and-rubber hiking boots, black dress shoes, and house slippers.

When he was photographing, he wore the respected uniform of a photographer’s vest, fitted with pockets of every size and shape to hold his light meter, miscellaneous filters, and a few horehound drops or wintergreen Lifesavers. In fact, he had two vests, one in khaki and the other in a more Anselesque shade of red. Of course, a white Stetson hat was his signature finishing touch for any occasion, substituted some years before for his black one. He had four hats—three in well-lived-in states of disrepair and one that we had bought him and he kept for dress occasions.

Ansel proudly wore a $29.95 digital wristwatch that kept time better than any fancy one and what was more, served as his personal edema measuring device. If the watchband was tight in the morning, he knew he had ingested too much salt the day before.

Ansel was never one for holidays. Christmas and birthdays as a child were not very cheering, and he especially hated New Year’s Eve, when just to spite convention, he would go to bed extra early. Come the next morning, of course, he would feel terrific and be ready to celebrate. He and Virginia had a long-standing tradition of giving an annual blowout on New Year’s Day. January 1 is the worst day of the year to give a party: half the world is hung over, and the other half is depressed because it had such a dreadful New Year’s Eve. The Adams festivities, a gigantic open house, began at four-thirty in the afternoon. This would be a working day for me, so I would arrive at three to help hostess. There were never invitations; people just knew, and hundreds showed up each year.

Ansel’s eightieth birthday, in 1982, was a community-wide affair. Having decided that the best celebration would be of his work, we arranged for exhibitions of his photographs to open in three different Monterey Peninsula venues. The Weston Gallery in Carmel mounted a “greatest hits” show; Jim curated
The Unknown Ansel Adams
, featuring a group of little-known or previously unexhibited photographs, at the Friends of Photography; and I assembled
The Eightieth Birthday Retrospective
for the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art.

All three premiered on Friday night, February 19. The streets were thronged with hundreds of people. As his birthday gift from the staff, I had a computerized electronic horn that could play fifty different tunes installed in his big old white Cadillac embellished with a “Save Mono Lake” bumper sticker. Ansel got a huge kick out of this toy, and after each opening, the streets in front jammed with people singing impromptu “Happy Birthday”s, he would drive musically away with “When the Saints Go Marching In,” “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy,” or “The Marseillaise,” leaving smiles of astonishment in his wake. For Ansel, it was a grand evening.

His birthday dinner the next night was an extravaganza for two hundred, hosted by the Friends of Photography and organized by Jim and me. We wanted it to be an evening of great fun, leavened with the surprise bestowed on the birthday boy by the French Consul, of the title of Commander of Arts and Letters of the Republic of France. Toasts were offered by such luminaries as Richard Oldenburg, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Jehanne Salinger, a dear friend of Ansel’s for fifty years and mother of the famous Pierre.

The meal, cooked by Ansel’s favorite caterer, Michael Jones of Carmel’s A Moveable Feast, began with Ansel’s beloved sorrel soup and ended with an untraditional birthday cake. In full regalia, the marching band of a local high school escorted the cake grandly past the tables and presented it, ablaze with eighty candles, to Ansel. The cake was to have been a vertical, three-dimensional chocolate version of Half Dome, but too late we discovered that the pastry chef had never been to Yosemite; the resultant creation more closely resembled Devil’s Tower in Wyoming as seen in
Close Encounters of the Third
Kind
, but it was nonetheless a delicious mountain of chocolate, and Ansel blew out the candles with gusto.

I had spent months trying to figure out what to give Ansel, who professed not to really want anything for this momentous birthday. And then one day it came to me: he had instructed me that when he died, he did not want a funeral, adding, “If you must do something, have some music for my friends.”

With great excitement, I ran downstairs to share my idea with Virginia. Why not have the music with friends while Ansel was still alive? His favorite pianist was Vladimir Ashkenazy. There were many technical virtuosos, Ansel felt, but Ashkenazy’s touch was the most extraordinary, and his interpretation truest to the music—and perhaps, as well, closest to how Ansel himself would have liked to play it.

I asked Virginia if she might be willing to split the cost with me. She was as delighted with the idea as I was and clasped both of my hands in hers as we both literally danced in a little circle of joy. In a more sober moment, I worried that I could not afford my half of the fee, but then I decided what the hell. Somehow I would get the money. It would be worth it.

We knew
of
Ashkenazy; we did not
know
Ashkenazy. I found the name and address of his agent in New York and sent a letter asking if the pianist would play a private concert at Ansel and Virginia’s home in celebration of Ansel’s eightieth birthday. Amazingly, we soon received a handwritten reply from Ashkenazy himself. He was a fan of Ansel Adams’s! He would be pleased to perform, although he had never before agreed to a private house concert.

We kept all of this a secret from Ansel for as long as we could, but finally it had to come out: Ashkenazy was to arrive two days early to practice, and before that we had to remove Ansel’s treasured Mason and Hamlin piano and replace it with a Steinway. Ashkenazy is a Steinway artist, and he also told us he might destroy Ansel’s old piano with the force of his playing. His only other stipulation was that we engage his piano technician in San Francisco to tune and maintain the instrument until the performance. I tracked down a suitable and rentable Steinway and corralled the technician.

Ansel was completely happy; it was the perfect gift. Ashkenazy practiced all day long for two days, and we listened with our full attention to every minute. It was such a privilege to hear him play and replay, again and again, the same troubling passages, although they sounded quite perfect to us. Everyone kept hidden in adjoining rooms so as not to distract him.

I finally decided I must get closer to where he was playing and feel the music move through my body. Quietly and oh so slowly, I crawled on my hands and knees from the workroom across the entry, but just when I thought I was safe, rounding the corner toward the kitchen, my lowered head met up with a pair of shoes. Tilting my head upward, I saw Ansel, hiding himself in a small recess. Both of us were guilty as charged, Ansel trying to stifle his laughter.

At two in the afternoon on Thursday, April 29, 1982, Vova (we now addressed Ashkenazy by his nickname) performed Beethoven’s Sonata in A Major, op. 101, no. 28, and Sonata in E Major, op. 109, no. 30. After an intermission, he presented five pieces by Chopin, Nocturne in B-flat Minor, op. 9, no. 1; Nocturne in B Major, op. 9, no. 3; Polonaise in F-sharp Minor, op. 44; Impromptu in F-sharp Major, op. 36; and Scherzo in C-sharp Minor, op. 39, no. 3.

It was a transcendent performance. Led by Ansel, we all flew to our feet and clapped and bravoed until we no longer could. It was time to party! I had asked Ashkenazy what his favorite food was, and Russian that he is, he had replied, “Caviar.” We had a kilo of caviar air freighted to Carmel.

Following the concert, I walked back to the office to check on our children, whom I had closeted close enough that they could hear but far enough away that they wouldn’t have to sit still the whole time. I found Jasmine, Jesse, and Zachary staring in perfect awe at Ashkenazy, who was seated cross-legged on top of my desk with a big tin of caviar in one hand while devouring the roe with the fingers of his other hand, intent on leaving no evidence. Although not the biggest of bodies, he polished off the entire kilo with a satisfied smile.

This event concluded with a fantasy ending for me. Ansel, greatly moved by both the performance and the days spent with Vova, took Ashkenazy into the workroom and asked him to pick out his two favorite photographs. That was the only payment (besides the caviar) that the pianist would accept; my fear of having to take out a second mortgage on our house to pay for my share of the concert evaporated.

Broad-ranging though his interests could be, Ansel was not well acquainted with pop culture in any form. The last movie he had seen was probably in the thirties, his taste in music allowed for few composers born in this century, and his reading material was usually of a serious nature. Television was a late addition to the Adamses’ Carmel household and rarely turned on except for the six-o’clock news.