Ansel Adams (59 page)

If Ansel was quite aware of current politicians, he was absolutely in the dark when it came to celebrities. He just did not care. In early 1982, Clint Eastwood, another Carmel resident, telephoned and asked if he could come by and get some advice from Ansel about photographs for the upcoming U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. As he would to any such request, Ansel generously replied, “Sure, come on over tomorrow afternoon,” having no idea who Eastwood was until nearly the entire staff swooned.

The appointed hour chimed, the doorbell rang, but Ansel was back in the darkroom, excited about a print in progress. Although there were five people working, not one consented to answer that darn door, so the “painful” task was up to me. I slid the door open, and the man in the movies stood facing me. I ushered him in and explained that Ansel would be out soon, but just how soon, I did not know—once he was in the darkroom, there was no telling. I showed Eastwood around the gallery and began yammering to him at length about the various photographs. (He was not one to make small talk.) After forty-five grueling minutes of my spiel (my normal loquaciousness was definitely challenged), with hardly one intervening word from Eastwood, Ansel at last emerged, grasped the actor’s hand in a firm shake, and sat him down for their little talk, which was far more brief than my monologue. Exit Eastwood.

Garry Trudeau and Jane Pauley fared better. While trekking in the Himalayas, Trudeau had run into the photographer Marion Patterson, who discovered that her longtime friend Ansel was one of Trudeau’s heroes. She supplied him with AA’s address, and Trudeau scribbled a postcard with a cartoon showing himself and his wife contemplating nature.
Doonesbury
was, in turn, Ansel’s very favorite comic strip, the first thing he turned to in the morning paper, and he was hugely tickled to learn that
Trudeau
respected
him.
He invited the two to come out for a visit, which they soon did, causing Ansel to smile like the Cheshire cat. Garry’s gift of all the
Doonesbury
books instantly enriched Ansel’s sleepless nights with a hefty ration of laughter. After Ansel died, Garry very generously donated a large number of original strips to be sold to raise money for the Friends of Photography.

In 1983, then-mayor Dianne Feinstein requested that a large exhibition of Ansel’s photographs be sent to San Francisco’s sister city, Shanghai, China. Jim, Robert Baker, and I were honored to be appointed the experts to accompany the show. The Chinese hosts installed the nearly two hundred prints with great sensitivity, hanging them on brightly lighted and freshly painted white walls above polished floors with welcome pots of greenery in the corners of each of the many galleries. Ansel’s show proved extraordinarily popular—tickets were sold out by eight o’clock each morning. Thousands of people moved slowly in reverential silence through the exhibition, staring rapt for long periods at image after image; there was no problem with translation. The show,
Ansel Adams: Photographer
, was then invited to move to the National Museum of Art in Beijing, where it became the first exhibition by an American artist to be so honored since the Chinese revolution.

Some friendships combined work and pleasure. After wrestling with the Museum Sets and finally completing them in 1982, Ansel began once more to hear the call of photography, which for him meant the call of the outdoors.
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He had always enjoyed having companions along while he photographed in the Sierra, on the trail with Cedric or other members of the club. Sometimes on a rare free Saturday or Sunday, when the quiet of his house proved too much for him to bear, Ansel would call Jim to ask if he would like to go photographing. Ansel and Jim had become good friends by this time, seeing themselves as comrades under the dark cloth, so to speak, although neither was using a view camera. Ansel knew that since he assumed the leadership of the Friends, Jim had had little time for his own photography and welcomed any chance to expose some rolls. Together, they drove over most of the roads of Monterey County, stopping when either one saw something he liked.
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On our periodic trips to San Francisco, Virginia and I would take the backseat of Ansel’s 1977 Caddie, each with plenty of reading material, while the boys sat up front. Just as Ansel and Jim were camera buddies, Virginia and I were book buddies. Their cameras and tripods stashed in the trunk, Jim drove and Ansel navigated, an open bag of cookies and a sack of hard candies between them.

The men followed every devious route and back road possible, so that what should have been a three-hour trip often took most of a day. They did not need much of an excuse to pull over, get out, walk around, and confer with great seriousness about a scene’s photographic possibilities. Without saying a word, Virginia and I would just pick up our books and continue where we had left off.

Often we would wend our way up Highway One all the way to the city. Ansel loved to stop for lunch at Duarte’s, an old tavern in Pescadero that had knotty-pine walls and a bar with pool tables and served artichoke soup and homemade olallieberry pie à la mode.

Home base in San Francisco was the house of Otto and Sue Meyer, steadfast friends of Ansel and Virginia’s who lived just two doors away from Ansel’s old family abode in West Clay Park, on Twenty-fourth Avenue. With affection, Ansel dubbed their place the Meyerhof; he had recuperated there for two weeks following his open-heart surgery in 1979.
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The Meyers always welcomed Ansel and Virginia and their supporting cast with open arms. As president of Paul Masson Vineyards, Otto had hired Ansel in 1961 to document the building of the company’s new champagne cellars in Saratoga. He was a longtime trustee of the Friends of Photography and a pillar of the San Francisco opera community. By all appearances the spark plug that kept Otto’s engine going, Sue was a leader in the arts community, having blazed the trail for the acceptance of contemporary crafts as art in San Francisco with her groundbreaking Fort Mason gallery Meyer, Breier, Weiss, next door to the famous vegetarian restaurant Greens.
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One morning at breakfast in late 1982, when the Alinders and Adamses were all comfortably ensconced at the Meyers’, Ansel suggested that he and Jim go out and make a day of it. Agreed. Virginia and I snuck sly smiles at each other, already luxuriating in the peaceful day before us.

Ansel dressed in attire appropriate to the occasion: lug-soled boots, dark trousers, bold plaid shirt, red photographer’s vest, and Stetson set at a jaunty angle. With their dueling Hasselblads and various lenses, our intrepid men rode off. (It was to Jim’s benefit that they both used the same camera, as it allowed him to borrow Ansel’s complete assortment of the latest lenses if the image dictated it.)

Ansel directed Jim across the Golden Gate Bridge and up along the headlands that oppose San Francisco. At a turnout, they turned in. Almost every place they photographed on these camera trips, Ansel had been to before, often many times. In the Bay Area as in Yosemite, his best pictures were made at locations that he knew very well, although changes of season, light, and weather could make all the difference.

They both photographed the Golden Gate Bridge. Ansel made some particularly strong compositions, including one looking through the bridge’s north tower and vertical suspension cables to the gray silhouette of the city beyond, which I later selected for his autobiography.
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Ansel found this viewpoint a bit mournful. As a boy, he had often taken the ferry across to these same steep hills, where he had thought nothing of hiking up and down and up again. These memories sadly reminded him of his age and precarious health. Confined to the pavement, he suggested to Jim that they drive on.
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Their next stop was an abandoned military gun emplacement, empty and cold but with gray concrete bunkers enlivened by particularly energetic, almost refined, graffiti. Although this was unlikely Adams subject matter, Ansel’s eye stopped as he began visualizing first one image, then another. His enthusiasm building, Ansel exposed four negatives. Jim made a portrait of an obviously happy and relaxed Ansel sitting in a recess of the bunker, smiling right at the camera.

Another reason that Ansel and Jim had such a good time together was that they were both always ready to eat, and neither was terribly fussy about what or where. Now, with their dinner bells ringing, Ansel knew exactly where to go for lunch: with pride he guided Jim to an old building in Sausalito, the former site of a famous brothel, now home to particularly succulent hamburgers.

Sated for the moment, they drove north and into the hills about San Rafael, where Ansel remembered a fine cemetery that he wanted to photograph again. They cruised street after street, but to no avail. After photographing an old white church sans graveyard, Ansel gave up, and they headed west to the ocean near Bolinas. After a couple of exposures of the weathered side of a building, it was time for a snack—an ice cream cone would do just fine. Nothing further appealed to them visually, however, and they wandered back to Hotel Meyer for short naps before dinner.

When he returned to his darkroom in Carmel a couple of days later, Ansel was still excited about the graffiti photographs. Having developed the negatives and made two large prints of a luminous orb of paint underlined with quick brushstrokes at its center, he tacked one print up with pushpins in the gallery area of the house and, after some deliberation, sat down and began to write about it.

For Ansel, the graffiti represented the power and beauty of art that could never be put into words. He had no idea why it had been painted or by whom, but to him, that made no difference. Recalling Stieglitz’s view, Ansel saw this picture as a symbol of the elusiveness of trying to define art, the basic quality that cannot be verbalized.
Graffiti, Abandoned Military Installation, Golden Gate Recreational Area, California, 1982
became a chapter in 1983’s
Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs.
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Ansel and Jim continued to photograph together all through 1983, perhaps a day every other month, Ansel’s health permitting. One Saturday morning in February 1984, just as I was opening my eyes, I heard a sharp knock on our front door. Wrapping a robe about myself, I answered it to find Ansel on the other side. Almost bashfully, he asked, “Can Jim come out and photograph?” though I knew he meant “play.”

Ansel came in and stood behind the couch watching cartoons with the kids as Jim and I got dressed. Eager to get going, his fancy not caught by
Scooby Doo
, Ansel wandered out onto our back deck. Fog covered the Monterey Peninsula, our house included. The sun’s light was diffused and flat through this damp shroud.

Jim habitually made portraits of the many great photographers who came to our house over the years, and for just this purpose, he had attached an old movie screen under an eave on the deck that he could unroll and use as a plain backdrop. He now pulled out a kitchen stool and asked Ansel if he would sit for him. Ansel kindly obliged, and with his trusty Hasselblad on a tripod, Jim made the best portrait of Ansel that ever was. It was the unanimous choice for the cover image of Ansel’s autobiography, and I have always thought that one of the major reasons that the book became a bestseller was the warmth of his face in that photograph. Ansel himself seems to come right through the image and into life.

Next, Ansel picked up his own camera and photographed Jim and me. And then they were out the door and down the road to the oldest grove of Monterey cypress in the world, tramping around and making exposure after exposure—all in all, a fine way to spend a Saturday.

An expanding list of ailments had been besieging Ansel for years, with accelerating frequency. While he was still in his twenties, his teeth plagued him so much, the pain especially severe on freezing High Sierra nights, that he had them all pulled. He was afflicted with arthritis and gout. His prostate had been removed, a hernia had been repaired, and his heart had a new valve and a triple coronary bypass. As a long-lasting side effect of the surgery, he suffered from vertigo.

Most proud that his new heart valve was of direct porcine descent, Ansel occasionally allowed this new body part to announce itself with a brotherly hoglike snort, which sometimes proved quite startling to those unfamiliar with his love of a good joke.

Undoubtedly my biggest failing as far as Ansel was concerned, even bigger than my inability to see the green flash, was my mental density when it came to jokes. Ansel had certain friends whom he would ring up almost daily to regale with his latest story and to coax a new one from. Since I was almost always with him, I was his closest audience. As with the green flash, he never gave up on me, but too many times, I just didn’t get it. Even worse, I could never remember or retell a joke told to me so AA (as we called Ansel) could add it to his repertoire.

The one joke that he probably told more times than any other—including to President Ford’s wife, Betty—I wrote down one night so that I wouldn’t forget it. Props and sound effects were added bonuses when Ansel told a joke. At the end of dinner, Ansel took his napkin and plopped it on his head like a doily on the crown of a sweet old lady. Setting the stage, he explained that a hen had just fled across the yard, pursued by a randy rooster. Ansel then went into character and commenced rocking, his hands miming knitting motions. With just slightly crossed eyes, his first old woman exclaimed, “Dearie me, would you look at that!” A second old lady (who looked just like the first) responded, “Oh, my!” Our narrator returned to relate frantically that the hen, in her terror, had fled across the highway, been hit by a truck, and was now reduced to drumsticks. Rocking and knitting again, Ansel coyly demurred, “See? She’d rather die!” No matter how many times he told this joke, it always made him bellow with laughter, and everyone else, too. His great enjoyment was infectious.