Ansel Adams (55 page)

Juan Hamilton, then O’Keeffe’s chief assistant, was very much in evidence throughout our visit; as I watched his “handling” of her, I made a personal vow to be the complete opposite in my work for Ansel. O’Keeffe had hired him as an occasional handyman when he appeared on her Abiquiu doorstep in 1972, handsome, strapping, dark-mustached, and fifty-nine years her junior. He eventually took charge of every aspect of O’Keeffe’s life and business, doing all those things that she did not want to do herself, as Bill Turnage had once done for Ansel. Eventually no one could talk to her without his say-so, a power he wielded with gusto. (In complete contrast, Ansel often beat everyone else to the phone when it rang, although he answered with a disguised voice, often saying that he was the gardener, although why the gardener would be answering Ansel’s phone was a question never answered.)

By the late 1970s, it was widely rumored that O’Keeffe and Juan were married. At a 1978 dinner at Ansel’s, O’Keeffe had clung to Juan’s arm, her face beaming with adoration. When someone asked if they were husband and wife, they both dodged the question just coyly enough to make us continue to wonder.

Physically, Juan treated O’Keeffe with great brusqueness. During the filming in 1980, he pulled her clothes into straighter lines with rough tugs, chastising her for her appearance as she, a woman of well-known and revolutionary independence, sat meekly without saying a word.

Later that year, it was revealed that far from having married his employer, Juan had in fact been secretly wed to a young woman named Anna Marie. At first furiously jealous, O’Keeffe eventually mellowed. In 1981, in celebration of her ninety-fourth birthday, we gave a dinner at our house attended by O’Keeffe, Ansel and Virginia, Juan, his bride, and their baby, Albert (not Alfred, as in Stieglitz). That night I learned a new respect for Juan. With O’Keeffe settled into our rocking chair by the fireplace before dinner, young Albert crawled about, finally seizing on her leg to pull himself up to a standing position. Such delight appeared on O’Keeffe’s face as she enjoyed the child or grandchild she had never had! She and Juan were family, and he brought her a measure of happiness in her last years.

Following the morning of filming with O’Keeffe, we moved on to Hernandez, New Mexico, where, in one of the movie’s strongest sequences, Ansel is shown once again driving the same route he had taken nearly forty years earlier, when he made
Moonrise.
Through the eyes of this movie, we can imagine what it was like that darkening autumn afternoon, and it becomes clear how truly remarkable Ansel’s vision was, because the actual landscape (even discounting the changes wrought by the passage of time) bears little resemblance to the completed photograph.

The Saint Francis Church at Ranchos de Taos provided the backdrop for the scene with Beaumont. Close comrades for four decades, Ansel and Beaumont were warm and relaxed, both reflecting on their lives, so much of which they had shared. Their moments together are one of the highlights of
Ansel Adams, Photographer.

The scare over Ansel’s health in New Mexico may have caused all of us some anxious moments, but the seventy-eight-year-old refused to let it disrupt his typical whirlwind schedule. From Santa Fe, we decamped for Yosemite, where he would teach his annual workshop and continue to participate in filming.

The movie’s Yosemite scenes capture Ansel at his best. In one of these, he stands before his view camera among the boulders and trees near the Ahwahnee Hotel, surrounded by attentive students whom he patiently instructs on the subtleties of framing an image; another shows him sitting at the base of a granite cliff and nostalgically paging through a photo album filled with his earliest Yosemite pictures, made when he was fourteen years old. Only in these shots does Ansel finally seem genuinely at ease. We left the valley three weeks later; the film and workshops had together consumed one month of his time.

For Ansel, the weeks set aside annually for his Ansel Adams Yosemite Workshops, in operation since 1955, were inviolable. He loved all aspects, from teaching and interacting with the students and fellow faculty, to just being in his cherished Yosemite. Each year, as a bellman trundled in his trunks full of equipment and his one small suitcase, Ansel would move through the lobby and halls of the Ahwahnee Hotel greeting the many people whom he had known for years and who now ran up to welcome him home with a hug, a warm handshake, a slap on the back, or an old chestnut of a joke hoarded in the teller’s memory in anticipation of his next appearance.

Ansel was never pretentious about himself or his art. One employee of Best’s Studio cooked up such great chocolate fudge (a real Ansel weakness) that he offered to trade his photographs for them, square inch for square inch; when she brought him an eleven-by-fourteen-inch pan of the candy he would give her a print of the same size. No fool, one summer she presented him with a whopping sixteen-by-twenty-inch extravaganza of fudge and received a
Moonrise
print in the same size. Ansel thought it a fair trade.
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Ansel enjoyed the routine of each workshop and led sessions most mornings, after consuming a sizable breakfast in the Ahwahnee dining room at a table filled with students and faculty. One day was always reserved for a road trip, usually up to Tuolumne Meadows and then down to Mono Lake, with the return journey to Yosemite by moonlight. At Tenaya Lake, while an assistant set up Ansel’s camera and tripod so that he could conduct a demonstration by the side of the road, Virginia would climb up a smooth-surfaced dome, dotted with twisted junipers, to get the best view she could, outdoing many of her younger companions.

The students hung on Ansel’s every word and followed his advice to walk to the base of Yosemite Falls during the full moon to witness a moonbow, like a rainbow but composed of shades of gray. Throughout the park, photographers stumbled about with gray viewing cards in front of their faces, peering through simple cardboard windows, another Ansel invention that helped students learn to frame an image by seeing in terms of a rectangle.

Traditionally, Ansel and Virginia hosted the entire population of each workshop, including significant others, at a grand cocktail party held in the yard of their old Yosemite home, behind the Ansel Adams Gallery. Fumiye Kodani, their cook in Carmel, would arrive with a carload of food and drink and commence preparations for a crowd of 150. The spread inevitably included a great variety of cheeses, fresh vegetables with a dill dip, water chestnuts wrapped and baked in bacon, and thin slices of buttered toast. Ansel especially savored Fumiye’s cheese puffs, though a review of the ingredients therein (white bread, mayonnaise, green onions, and Parmesan cheese baked until golden) might cause the sensitive to shudder.

Returning to Carmel from Yosemite in 1980, Ansel sought the comforting refuge of his bed. His lifetime pattern was to work with extreme intensity and then to collapse for a few days’ recovery. He
liked
being in bed, and for years balanced a typewriter on his lap to maintain his voluminous correspondence. An insomniac, he spent his nights alternately dozing and reading, his bedroom light always left on. He was usually into at least three books at any given time, one a humor or joke book, one a scientific tome, and (near the end of his life, and under my influence) one a detective novel. Piles of magazines shared space and time with the books, among them
Scientific American,
the
New Yorker
, and both
Newsweek
and
Time.
Ray Taliaferro’s late-night talk show on San Francisco’s KGO radio claimed him as a regular listener and caller.

Sitting at my desk that July, I calculated that I had been working for Ansel for 213 days (weekends did not mean days off) and that we had been out of town for sixty-two of those days. It was clear to me that he needed someone else to say, “No more travel,” since he himself seemed unable to refuse any invitation.

Ansel was in constant demand as a lecturer, but with his stamina in decline, he had begun to find it difficult to give the combination slide show–lecture presentation on his life and work; a few minutes into the talk, his voice would weaken and his words become a mumble. His schedule had been planned well into the future by the departed Andrea, who loved traveling, but when we discussed the situation, he realized that unless he stayed at home, he would never be able to write his autobiography or complete the Museum Sets. He gave me the green light to turn on the stoplight, and I immediately canceled a two-week lecture tour booked for October, as well as a trip to Brazil. There were many calls of complaint (which I fielded), but Ansel was hugely relieved.

All too painfully aware that everything else was taking precedence over the autobiography, I decided that the book’s best chance lay in Ansel’s getting those Museum Sets and technical books completed and not allowing some new project to cut in. But there were always special circumstances and obligations, and I came to see that as much as he complained of being overwhelmed by so many responsibilities, Ansel thrived on variety. With this in mind, I began to look for any opportunity to insinuate work on the autobiography into his life.

Ansel had an extraordinary ability to take on a number of difficult tasks simultaneously, but in this he was also assisted by a hardworking, professional staff. We all used to marvel at how busy he kept us, like a circus juggler with ten balls in the air at once. Two of his most important employees at this time were John Sexton and Phyllis Donohue.

John had attended the 1973 Yosemite Workshop and impressed Ansel with his already keen photographic eye and technique as well as his confident manner. After assisting at subsequent workshops, he joined the staff (not long before I came aboard) as Ansel’s photographic assistant, responsible for ordering supplies, schlepping and setting up the heavy equipment, prepping the darkroom, washing and toning prints, and carrying out many of the tests for the technical books. John found a great mentor in Ansel, who left him a memo on his first day stating, “The place is yours. Organize it yourself, then tell me where things are.”
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Under Ansel’s tutelage, John became a more masterful photographer and brilliant printer. He grew so proficient at explaining the Zone System that Ansel turned over that lecture at his workshops to him, the ultimate compliment. John continues to make and sell beautiful photographs and books, the negatives often taken during what he calls “quiet light,” the time after sunset but before true darkness. His John Sexton Photography Workshops are held annually in spring and fall, most often at his studio in Carmel Valley. They are highly regarded and very popular for a good reason: John learned well from Ansel to become one of the best teachers of landscape photography in the world.
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Phyllis worked for Ansel for years. She was our print technician and probably the best spotter in the world; she also had a knack for finding the unfindable negative or reproduction print. Ever serene, Phyllis would tackle impossible piles of SEPs or Museum Sets with the patience of Job, sitting for hours each day on a stool placed in front of an easel propped on the gray worktable, spotting photograph after photograph.

As careful and fastidious as Ansel was, he could not change the fact that all negatives attract dust and are easily scratched, small imperfections that usually find their way onto the finished print as tiny white spots. Like other spotters, Phyllis had a variety of permanent inks that she carefully diluted and used to cover over, or “spot,” the white dots (or the “LP” in
Winter Sunrise
) so they would match the surrounding area. On rare occasions, she might also etch out a black scratch with a very sharp blade and then spot the space. She was absolutely the best at what she did, and fast!

Miscellaneous projects were forever popping up, but some of these were less taxing than others. In 1980, Little, Brown’s sister company Time-Life Books (both were owned by Time Inc.) requested that Ansel authorize the mail-order sale of twenty thousand autographed copies of
Yosemite and the Range of Light.
The initial plan called for him to actually sign each copy himself, but we quickly discovered that there was no way we could physically cope, either personnel-wise or space-wise, with so many large books. Ansel spent the better part of his non-darkroom time for two months signing labels that would then be stuck onto the appropriate page. Since he preferred working at every moment, even when he was “flu’ed up” in bed, Ansel adored this do-anywhere assignment.

For the first few months I got along just fine with the trustees, my reputation as an “uppity” woman having somehow not preceded me. I do not think it began intentionally, but over time, things seemed naturally to evolve to a point where Bill was invariably on one side of an issue and I was on the other, with Ansel in the middle. As I saw it, Bill was urging Ansel to agree to a number of potentially lucrative projects not unlike the Museum Sets, which seemed to have little else to recommend them besides profit; Ansel really did not need the money, and his time and energy were increasingly limited. But my questioning any one of Bill’s decisions did not endear me to him one whit.

Then, too, Bill also made significant demands on Ansel’s time in his role as executive director of the Wilderness Society, insisting that he meet with influential members of Congress, give interviews, hold press conferences, and travel, all to a greater extent than Ansel wanted. Under such pressures, his old robust and sure strength was crumbling. Sometimes, in a small but urgent voice, Ansel would whisper to me, “Help!”