Distant Voices (44 page)

Most of Elsie's large family – she was the fifth of nine children – did not wish it to be known publicly that ‘the Stain' was upon them: that is, they had convict blood. (It is now fashionable to admit it.) In order to obliterate all evidence of this congenital flaw, her siblings embraced certain sub-Thatcherite poses, such as attempts (often hilarious) to eradicate the nasal sound from their speaking voice and the adoption of ‘English ways', including an obligatory xenophobia towards all non-British elements: that is, Tykes, Yids, Refos, Krauts and Abos, to name but a few. Once in my presence, when a sister questioned the veracity of our criminal pedigree, Elsie managed to silence the room by saying, ‘I'm proud of the McCarthys. They didn't belong to some false respectable deity. They had guts. Give'em a break.'

She met Claude when she was sixteen and he was eighteen. I have a sepia photograph of them swooning beside a lake: she was a few inches taller than he. She was always self-conscious about this; and I would thank her for giving her height to me. Although she spoke fondly about a medical student, and later on there was a shadowy character called Lex, Claude was her life-long love; and I hope she will forgive me for saying that out loud. This piece is a tribute to them both.
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They had grown up in the Kurri Kurri, New South Wales, where Claude was an apprentice coal miner, having left school at fourteen during the First World War, when his father, an old clipper sailor, was forced out of the pits for being of German birth, even though he was one of the first naturalised Australians. This was wine-growing country; and Claude became famous as the boy who beat Ebenezer Mitchell's record by tying four acres of vines in a single day. With the proceeds, he supported his impoverished family.

Elsie didn't meet him until both had come to Sydney, where she was one of the first ‘scholarship girls' at Sydney University. Claude was then an ‘artisan in training' at the SydneyMechanics Institute, where he read avidly for the first time: Dumas, Dickens, Shakespeare, Marx and his favourite, the American writer, O. Henry. Elsie would smuggle him into the university library, which was still being built. He was one of the early members of the Australian Socialist Party, which was an offshoot of the American ‘Wobblies' and in the new world radical tradition. Long ago he told me, in his cautious way, that he and Elsie shared ‘decent politics'.

When in 1922 she took him home to her family it was just as well she asked him to wait at the railway station, because they made it clear to her they didn't want a Bolshie carpenter with a German name for a son-in-law. Her response to this was to marry the Bolshie carpenter. On the morning of her wedding, she sent her family a one-word telegram, ‘GOING'. That afternoon she followed it with another, ‘GONE'.

She claimed it was pure coincidence that they got married within sight of the Female Factory, where Mary, her great-grandmother, had been interned, and which was now the Parramatta lunatic asylum. ‘During the ceremony,' said Elsie, ‘I remember the wailing from the imbeciles' yard. I said to your father, “God, I hope this isn't a bad omen!”'

They moved into a room overlooking the surf at Bondi, and she began to teach Latin and French, almost losing her first job when her headmistress found a copy of
The Socialist
in her locker. She was accused of ‘bending young minds'. Her students at this school so loved and admired her that
every year until her death, they held a dinner in her honour – and often in her absence: she had long lost confidence in herself.

She lost it perhaps because, as she wrote in her letter of resignation, there were ‘domestic considerations'. That meant that she and Claude were coming apart. I cannot remember when it happened; there was shouting in the night and she seemed to grieve constantly; and I resented her tears. It doesn't matter who was to ‘blame'. In truth, neither was. She made her demands, and he found another.

Suddenly, she changed her life. She went to work in factories, on assembly lines making fake leather handbags and model aeroplanes; she cherished many friends there and her rumbustiousness returned from time to time. Claude now had a government job driving in the Outback; and he relished those dawn mornings when he would strap a canvas water bag to the front bumper of his Vauxhall Velox and head west, where his freedom was.

In 1962, on the wharf at Circular Quay, she told me she knew I was ‘going for good'. Something happened then. In her sixties, with little more than her state pension, she set off around the world. She would disappear from view occasionally, turning up once in the Solomon Islands. In London, she stayed in my eight foot by six foot garret in Old Compton Street, Soho, where I would find her on the doorstep laughing with the prostitutes from the club next door. ‘Do you know my son
very well
?' she would ask them as I approached.

And when we went to Paris that weekend she distinguished herself by ordering, in her fluent Aussie French, a brute of a taxi driver to open the door for her; and he did. When a stroke took most of her language, she continued to speak in French, as sometimes happens with stroke victims who are bilingual. Our discussions on the beach, joke-telling and family bitching included, were now conducted in fractured French, with slabs of Latin.
Nil illegitimi carborundum!

She and Claude had not seen each other for thirty years, though they had spoken once on the phone, accidentally.
That last day on the beach I told her he had died. She stared out at the Heads, then said, ‘Well, he was getting on . . .' The next morning she watched me put on a dark suit and tie and go off to his funeral; she waved from the balcony. Something made me turn back, and I found her on the floor of the kitchen.

August 2, 1991

WALKING ALONG BROADWAY,
navigating the hustlers and beggars, I came upon a familiar New York event. A hospital truck, which takes away the dead, had just made another call; someone had collapsed and died on the street. No one knew who it was. No one had seen it. A human tide had washed over him, or her, before a cop had arrived; and New Yorkers will tell you why. Helping someone can be an invitation to a mugger, whose accomplice may be the ‘victim'. So, in this case, as in most, the treadwheel of the city did not stop. And when the body had gone, Santa Claus selling gold watches took its place. This made me think about Curt.

Curt died like that the other day. He suffered a heart attack on Sixth Avenue near the corner of 50th Street and lay on the sidewalk for how long we do not know. Whether or not he was still alive, and frightened, we do not know; he was dead when the truck came. His name was Curt Gunther and he was both an old friend and a remarkable man.

Lizette, who married Curt in his sixties and gave him what some call ‘stability' and others call happiness, had been waiting for him in their hotel room and was beside herself when he didn't come back. She knew that trouble used to stalk Curt and she intended to take him home safely to California the next day. ‘We have him,' said a Manhattan hospital and no more: that is the rule.

At his funeral in a Catholic church, she looked on in amazement at a huge floral tribute shaped like a 35-millimetre camera. Jewish like Curt, she had never been inside a church and wondered if this spectacular offering was a
Christian icon. It had come from his oldest colleagues and friends, and especially Ken Regan, with whom he started ‘Camera 5', the great New York picture agency that has recorded contemporary history, and America, with few professional equals. Curt's is an American story that Damon Runyon or Woody Allen might have written. Indeed, he was in real life the character Woody Allen likes to play: a brilliant calamity.

I knew Curt was different when we first met on assignment in Calexico, in the vineyards of California, twenty-three years ago. Robert Kennedy, then a candidate for president, was due the next morning. We put up in a fleapit with a Coke machine beneath the staircase. When the machine took Curt's money and gave no Coke, he pushed it sideways to investigate and the staircase collapsed.

The next day, flying with Kennedy on his campaign plane, I had arranged an interview with the candidate. Only one of us was allowed to join him. As Kennedy and I talked, there was a piercing ‘Owww!' A bony hand extending from the lavatory had been snapping Kennedy's picture when someone slammed the door on it. Later, the same extraterrestrial periscope with a camera perched on the end appeared next to our seat. ‘What's this?' asked Kennedy. ‘Curt Gunther,' I said. A face that tried to see through often shattered pebble glasses, a face that never smiled, appeared at our elbow. ‘How do you do?' said Curt, as always overdoing the formality. He then took arguably the finest, final pictures of the man who would have been president and who the next day was shot in front of me.

Curt, more than all of my American friends, embodied immigrant America: the huddled mass. He was born and grew up in Berlin and, at the age of thirteen, acquired his first Leica camera; photography became his obsession. His photographs of Berlin under the Nazis were through the eyes of someone watching the approach of his own violent death. During a parade of SS stormtroopers he was thrown into a doorway and arrested. He struggled free and escaped from Germany; his family died in the death camps. When he
arrived in New York he was eighteen, broke and spoke no English. He remained broke. He also bore throughout his life that melancholia and
chutzpah
, that audacity and sense of irony, that distinguished so many in a generation of refugees from Jewish Germany, who became America's greatest scientists, musicians, film-makers and comics. Milton Berle, Jack Benny and Curt Gunther could have been triplets. Curt was, above all, a supreme photographer.

He loved to photograph boxing, and not only because people used to hit him from time to time. Straight off the ship in 1938, he headed for Joe Louis's training camp in upstate New York where the world heavy-weight champion was preparing to defend his title. Curt slipped past the guards and managed to confront Louis and, with no English, asked if he could take his picture. Taken aback by this unusual person, Louis not only agreed, but handed Curt $100.
Life
magazine published Curt's pictures of the champion. They are now classics.

Disaster, of course, beckoned. Hitch-hiking back to the Louis camp, Curt fell asleep and found himself in Canada from where he was deported back to Germany. He escaped again, returned to America, met Maggie, a devout Catholic from Texas, and moved to California, where they had six children. Hollywood claimed him. He knew most of the major studio stars and several were his close friends: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Ava Gardner among them. Rhonda Fleming had a serious crush on him, as did numerous women. When the Beatles arrived in America in the early sixties, Curt was the only photographer they asked to stay with them, partly because he could match John Lennon at poker and partly because they found it difficult to believe that Curt could fall off a ladder or horse at the very moment he was taking a picture.

For a while, to make a dollar, Curt specialised in ‘Americana'. He photographed a waterskiing elephant. He photographed a funeral parlour where they built ‘dream coffins', such as one shaped like a Rolls-Royce. He found an organisation in Atlanta, Georgia, that hired out an embalmed body
under the slogan: ‘Have dinner with Mike. He's 115 years old.' Whenever Curt said. ‘Lissen, you're not gonna believe this . . .' he was invariably right.

In 1969 we went to Las Vegas on serious business and were temporarily distracted by an Elvis Presley concert, during which Curt sang ‘Blue Suede Shoes'. The next day he persuaded the billionaire recluse Howard Hughes to lend the two of us an aircraft and a pilot who would fly as close as possible to the Nevada nuclear test site (Hughes, who owned a lot of Las Vegas, was opposed to nuclear testing). As a result, we were able to land in places where the contamination threatened the food chain and people and to describe a nuclear wasteland and peril in the heart of America. This, like many of the stories I did with Curt and his partner Ken Regan, appeared in a
Daily Mirror
that was pre-Maxwell and a very different newspaper than it is today.

During the early Ronald Reagan years, Curt and I traced the journey in John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath
as much of America went back on the road in search of work. We found the new unemployed in caravan parks and tents, in cardboard shacks and under bridges. They were small farmers forced off their land by rising interest rates, and skilled workers for whom there was no longer anything on offer in an economy increasingly polarised between high-paying new technology and low-paying service industries. They represented a new breed of American ‘loser' and the beginning of a depression that now impoverishes almost one American child in four. From Oklahoma to Arizona to California, Curt's camera engraved them brilliantly on metal-grey February skies.

Not surprisingly, he had a house built right on the San Andreas fault in California, and he phoned once to say there was a tidal wave in his backyard and his house was disappearing into the earth. It almost did. He was the only photographer to cover the British Open Golf Tournament wearing carpet slippers: his only shoes having been stolen from his Blackpool hotel the night before. During a brief affair in the 1960s with a very tall woman, her even taller
husband would appear on cue to break Curt's cameras and ribs. When a drunk driver smashed into Curt's old Chevvy on the California freeway, he survived and Maggie did not.

The way Curt finally went, lying on the Manhattan pavement, with people walking round him, was simply inappropriate.

December 6, 1991

‘
TO CONFRONT A
mind that radically alters our perception of the world', wrote James Peck in his introduction to
The Chomsky Reader
, ‘is one of life's most unsettling yet liberating experiences. Unsettling because it can undercut carefully constructed rationales and liberating because at last the obvious is seen for what it is.'
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