Authors: Mary Street Alinder
Ansel Adams (47 page)
Virginia confined herself for most of the day to her little room, devoting herself to reading. She would climb the stairs at eight in the morning to prepare a simple breakfast of oatmeal mush, toast, juice, and coffee for them both as they studied the paper, then would descend to her room again until she returned upstairs to make lunch. Afternoons saw a quick return to reading, fully dressed, propped up in bed. Then back upstairs to set out the drinks for cocktail time.
The Carmel house was Ansel’s dream home, a place intended to potentiate the future business of his photography. The entrance was pure Ansel, eclectic as all get-out. Inside the front door, made of simple frosted sliding glass, hung a mobile with fingers pointing in all directions. Bookshelves lined the long entry, holding volumes on architecture and artists’ monographs. Smack-dab in the middle of these books sat a hologram of a pretty young brunette blowing you a kiss. The Adams family’s old grandfather clock, whose wooden works the four-year-old Ansel had played with after the “oh-six” earthquake left it in pieces, steadfastly ticked away next to a Piranesi engraving of an aqueduct. Much to Virginia’s chagrin, the guest bath, just inside the front door, sported Ansel’s diploma from grammar school—“Mrs. Kate M. Wilkins Private School, San Francisco, Grammar School, June 8, 1917”—grandly framed in beveled gilt splendor next to his Kentucky Colonel certificate. Virginia did not think her husband should flaunt the fact that this was the sum total of his formal education.
To great benefit, Virginia presided over almost all the rest of the interior decoration. For years, she acquired fine Native American pots, baskets, and Navajo rugs in natural colors of brown, gray, and black; her personal favorites were of a pale yellow. The new house profited immensely by Virginia’s collections, with her handsome rugs punctuating the dark wood floors and her pots and baskets lining shelves and mantle. Downstairs, one guest-room wall was filled with Virginia’s marvelous group of miniature ceremonial baskets, beaded, feathered, and plain.
Teal was Virginia’s color. The living-room drapes and sofas were of that vibrant hue, set off by black tables on which pink camellias floated in small crystal bowls. Most of the furniture had been given to them years before by Ansel’s parents or Albert Bender. A carnival of mismatched chairs lined the walls of the gallery, including Ansel’s high chair from when he was a child.
The windowsill below the large north-facing window displayed Virginia’s phalaenopsis orchids, most of them white, that seemed perpetually in bloom. In later years, the blossoms hid a bronze bust of Ansel that, although less than becoming or true, had been a thoughtful gift from a friend. Occasionally a hat would appear on the poor thing’s head, or a bandanna or bolo tie about its neck, just to humanize it a little.
Besides contributing to the basic design of the house, Ansel chose the varying shades of gray for the walls and ceiling, whose light-gray slats were spanned by massive old bridge beams painted Zone V (or medium gray), the color of the walls that Alfred Stieglitz had selected for Ansel’s 1936 An American Place exhibition. In a contrarian touch, the long, west-facing wall with its potentially great view of the ocean held but one window on either end and a huge stone fireplace with a twenty-four-foot-long mantel. At the mantel’s center presided Ansel’s mammoth Chinese temple drum, nearly six feet in diameter, years earlier acquired from William Colby. This drum, the same one he had played at the Parillia in 1938, was the heart of the house. Its rim, now hundreds of years old, had originally been in the drum tower of the Black Pagoda in Beijing, and its stretched skin bore a colorfully painted, ornate dragon set against a red background. When Ansel decided that the evening was over, he would bang the drum, sounding a huge bass thump that would cause both floors and, by that time of night, bibulous livers to tremble. Without question, everyone would know it was time to go.
The fireplace, with its large black andirons from his San Francisco house, was flanked by wooden bookcases holding photography books on the left and natural history and Sierra Club coffee-table books on the right. Two of Ansel’s proudest possessions sat among the books: a marble bust of a young woman and an amazing ammonite he had picked up at a rock shop in Utah.
Projecting from the living room was the gallery, to one side of which was the big gray work table where Phyllis Donohue spotted prints for more than twenty years. A mural of
Monolith
, three by five feet, commanded one wall, and Ansel’s Mason and Hamlin piano, the same one he had bought in 1924, took up the room’s opposite end, next to a three-panel screen of
Leaves, Mills College
, with hanging panels for photographs—an ever-changing exhibit held in place with pushpins—occupying the walls in between. On unusually warm days, the gallery would heat up courtesy of the skylights, and the dreaded sound of “ping!” “ping!” “ping!” “ping!” then “flop!” would announce that key pushpins had popped out of the board and an unprotected picture had hit the floor. There would be a mad scramble to take the rest of the prints down before they suffered the same fate.
The gallery’s third wall consisted of very tall sliding doors concealing deep storage shelves for prints. Photographs were hung wherever there was space, with a dozen in frames right on the doors. Only a few pictures by other photographers ever appeared on these walls; Ansel had to really like an image to accord it such an honor. He was never shy about the fact that his favorite photographer was himself. On the main floor nearly all the prints were his own, save for a Bill Brandt nude and a J. B. Greene salt print of the Colossi of Memnon, dating from the late 1840s, a gift from art dealer Harry Lunn. The lower, bedroom floor was another story. Downstairs there was nothing by Ansel. Most of the photographs were by Gerry Sharpe, who had died young and tragically and whose prints seemed a living memorial.
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Ansel’s small office back on the main floor, on the other side of the wall behind the piano, featured an unpretentious metal desk covered in green linoleum. Next to it, camouflaged with papers, was a heavy wooden table that gave no indication of its history as the Sierra Club’s original meeting table, over which John Muir had once presided. Beyond was the original garage, which of necessity had become makeshift staff office space for at times upward of four people. Parallel with the gallery lay the work room, where Ansel’s photographs were dried, trimmed, mounted, and stamped. At one end, and within talking distance of Ansel’s office, was the desk for the current photographic assistant; at the other, large-capacity drying screens were stacked almost to the ceiling. A very long, dark-gray Formica table occupied much of the room, with storage for printing paper and mount board along one wall and a deep counter for the dry-mount presses, copy camera, and other essentials along the other.
The spick-and-span darkroom with its black-painted walls was entered via a heavy sliding door leading off the workroom. Like much of the rest of the house, it had nothing luxurious about it. Ansel’s big horizontal enlarger for large-format negatives and two vertical enlargers for smaller ones were spaced along the left wall. The opposite wall was lined with deep sinks for processing, toning, and washing. Ansel’s Carmel house worked for him very well.
In 1963, with the nearly four thousand prints of
Portfolio Four
breathing down his neck, Ansel lamented to Brett Weston that he could find no one to spot them. With a twinkle in his eye, Brett assured him that he knew just the right person for the job. When Ansel asked if she could start today, Brett demurred, “Pasha (his nickname for Ansel), she will come tomorrow.” The next day Liliane De Cock appeared at Ansel’s door, a young, intense woman who proved to be a champion spotter. Not until much later did Ansel learn that she had known nothing about spotting when he had called Brett, who had taught her everything in the one-day grace period before she began work. Liliane served as Ansel’s chief assistant for longer than anyone else, from 1963 until her marriage, in 1972, to Doug Morgan, son of Willard and Barbara Morgan and Ansel’s publisher at the time.
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Liliane’s prior experience in photography consisted of making snapshots; Ansel taught her technique in a natural and slow progression. She began with the scutwork of rinsing prints in the darkroom and progressed to developing, then to matching a master copy determined by Ansel, and then, finally, to taking full charge of the Yosemite special-edition prints, from exposure through shipping. After her boss loaned her a four-by-five-inch camera, Liliane discovered that she had not only a knack for photography, but a passion for it as well. As she eagerly attacked a new career, she recognized that Ansel had little creative spark left. In the nine years that Liliane worked for him, he made only one significant new image,
El Capitan, Winter Sunrise.
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Why an artist stops creating is often impossible to understand, but a persistent nightmare that troubled Ansel may provide an important clue.
[I get into] a taxi and [am] driving to a music hall or an opera house or a symphony hall, and seeing great placards screaming that Ansel Adams is going to play the
Brahms Second Concerto
with the Boston Symphony. It’s all very real. I’m in a terrible state because I don’t know the Brahms Second Concerto at all. But I nevertheless am disgorged at the stage entrance and go in. All the musicians are there backstage, tuning up and talking, and the conductor comes forward and says, “I’m so glad to see you. Our rehearsal was encouraging.” And I sit there, and a slight feeling of perspiration—“What am I doing here?” I take a glimpse, and the hall is completely packed with hundreds or thousands of people. Finally the conductor invites the orchestra to go out on the stage, and they go out and take their places. And I’m supposed to lead, so I walk out and the conductor follows me, and I get as far as the piano. And the conductor bows and we all bow, and he steps to the podium. And at that time I wake up from the situation with the screaming heeby-jeebies because I don’t know the work, I don’t know anything about it, even the first notes! I’m absolutely incapable of doing it . . . And I keep getting this dream over and over again.
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Ansel had become world famous, his name synonymous with photography, Yosemite, and the growing environmental conscience. He had created an awesome string of important images that spoke only of his vision and no one else’s. But with time, an ambivalence grew deep inside him, his past achievements both a flower and a thorn in his side, a source of monstrous performance expectations from the public, the critics, and himself. Ansel’s creative genius had become paralyzed by fear—the fear of failure.
Over the years, many environmental skirmishes and battles found Ansel at their center. He came to wield political clout as did no other environmentalist. For decades he personally knew each secretary of the interior and director of the National Park Service; his pleas did not end up at the bottom of a pile on some underling’s desk. Fluent with photograph, pen, and tongue, he bombarded Washington with telegrams, letters, personal appearances, and phone calls. His persistence was a most important virtue. He attended meetings day after day, year after year. His commitment lasted a lifetime.
Since the 1920s, when he became an active member, both Ansel and the Sierra Club had grown up. The enormous growth in membership the club achieved in the twentieth century was in large part due to the leadership of David Brower. The two men had first met while hiking in the Sierra in 1933, when Ansel was thirty-one and David twenty. Their lives held many similarities. Both had been bright, awkward, and lonely children. Brower’s early love of nature took root as he played in and about Strawberry Creek in Berkeley, while Ansel traced his environmental beginnings to his daily wanderings along Lobos Creek in San Francisco. Both boys felt physically self-conscious: Brower’s front teeth were missing from an early accident, and even Ansel’s broken nose could not distract the eye from his prominent ears. Each had discovered the powers of the Sierra in his youth, and both were determined to preserve that experience for future generations.
1
Before World War II, Brower had enjoyed a brief career as the publicity manager for YP&CC, where he worked with Ansel and his photographs. Closely observing the younger man, Ansel was greatly impressed by his energy and abilities. He had long believed that the Sierra Club needed a full-time executive director, and he began a campaign to appoint Brower to that position. Before this could be accomplished, however, the war immediately superseded everything.
Following his discharge from the Army, Brower assumed the editorship of the
Bulletin.
In 1947, the purposes of the Sierra Club were still, as they had been since its founding, “To explore, enjoy, and render accessible,” et cetera. Later that year, Brower published the first
Sierra Club Handbook
, which opened with a call to members to examine the club’s goals. With Brower’s encouragement, the organization finally began to consider the direct linkage between accessibility and destruction of wilderness. In 1948, the phrase “to render accessible” was omitted, leaving as the remaining goals “to explore and enjoy.” By 1967, under Brower’s leadership, the shift was complete: the club’s aim was “To explore, enjoy, and preserve.” (Today the motto reads “Explore, Enjoy, and Protect the Planet.”)
Largely due to Ansel’s insistence, Dave Brower was appointed the club’s first executive director in 1952. He led the transformation of the Sierra Club (sometimes kicking and screaming) from a provincial, rather elitist group concerned mainly with keeping the mountains of the Sierra intact for their own personal enjoyment, into an organization dedicated to a new philosophy of preservation for the sake of the earth, which would be touched in places by no more than an occasional soft footprint. He achieved this success through the brash force of his character and the abiding belief that he was in service to the greatest cause.