I
can’t
remember the last time we had sunshine and blue skies.
Lunch at Michael’s. Michael
McCarty, the owner, who commutes
between here and Malibu (the original and still extant Michael’s
is in Santa Monica) told me the rains out there got to the scary
point. They closed Pacific Coast Highway from all traffic. And a
lot of the canyons including Coldwater and Benedict because of the
slides and rocks. So the McCartys couldn’t go home (they live
in the hills above Malibu) for a couple of days. Sixteen inches of
rain in less than two weeks. Versus three inches for all of last
year. Right after that, once the sun comes out, however, there’s
a moment when it’s crystal clear, smog-free, and driving along
the boulevards or freeways, heading east, you can see the magnificent
San Gabriels, snow covered and majestic. Which makes me think: ahhh….LA!
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DPC
and Jill Krementz at Michael's. Photo:
Steve Millington/NYSD.
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Meanwhile, Michael’s was jumpin’, back to
its old self after the holiday lull when so many head for the mountains of Colorado
or the beaches of Florida and the Caribbean. Among the many: Sally
Sussman of Estee Lauder, Mark Patricof, Jack Romanos,
President of Simon & Schuster, Larry Kirschbaum, President of Warner Publishing
Group, Eugenia Ulasewicz, president of Burberry, Cathy
Black of Hearst;
48 Hours producer Susan Zirinsky, Jonathan Wald, Today
Show producer,
Alice Mayhew, editor from S&S, Jerry
Byrne and Sara Nelson, new
editor of Publisher’s Weekly, Dr. Gerry Imber,
one of New York’s
top plastic surgeons, Jerry della Femina, Michael Fuchs with Michael
Wolff, Jerry Inzerillo of Atlantis and the Ocean Club; Chris
Meigher of Quest, Pamela Fiori of Town & Country, Binky
Urban, Barry Diller; father and son public relations titans, Steve
and Howard Rubinstein, David Carr of the New York Times, John
Sykes of VH 1;
Michael Barker of Sony Classic Pictures, Helen
O’Hagan with
Alex Hitz and Peter Rogers. You get the picture, and that was only
the half of it; you shudda been a fly on those walls.
Meanwhile, I was lunching with Jill Krementz, the distinguished
photographer whose works have graced these Internet pages from time to time. Jill
has published 31 books of her work including A Very Young Gymnast,
A Very Young Dancer, How It Feels To Be Adopted, How It Feels When
Parents Divorce, Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers,
etc.
For the past eight years, she’s done a calendar book for Barnes & Nobles
(now on sale half-price), which I use to keep track. It’s called
The Writer’s Faith and contains several portraits
of authors – Alice
McDermott is on the cover and John Updike is
on the backcover. The author’s page also has some of each writer’s
words. James
Baldwin’s has the following: “If the concept
of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger,
freer
and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time to get rid
of him.”
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The Writer's
Faith
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Kurt
Vonnegut in The Writer's Faith
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I
include Jill’s portrait of her husband Kurt Vonnegut sitting
in a rocker on the porch at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut,
and his quote:
“I am not the writer Twain was but I am what I believe
he would call a Humanist. Nowadays it means persons like my parents
and both sets of grandparents,
who
try to behave ethically without any expectation of rewards or punishments in
an afterlife. They serve as best they can the only abstraction of which they
have any real familiarity, which is their community. What about Jesus? I say
what one of my great grandfathers wrote, as follows: ‘If so much of what
Jesus said is ethically brilliant, and especially the Beatitudes, and Forgive
us our Trespasses as we forgive those who Trespass against Us, what can it matter
if he was God or not?’”
Jill also has an exhibition of 100 her photographs at the Mark Twain House running
through January 31.
I was first aware of her in the New York Herald-Tribune in its last great days
before the newspaper strikes killed it in the 1960s, when it was owned by Jock
Whitney and had some of the freshest journalistic talent in America. It was regarded
as the official Republican paper in New York, versus the then liberal “good,
grey” Times. The (afternoon Post) was the Lefty rag. And Jock Whitney’s
brand of Republican was about as far to left as most Democrats go these days,
which tells you a little something about how the times, they are a-changin’.
But the talent was the test: Clay Felker, for example, was the
editor of the
Sunday Magazine, which was called New York and later became ... New
York (with the same Milton Glaser logo). Tom Wolfe made
his name and fame writing
for it.
His piece on Baby Jane Holzer, a then unknown-to-most-of-us
society girl who’d
joined the Andy Warhol Factory gang, made her, the Warhol Factory
gang, the author himself and the magazine famous, all in one fell swoop on a
Sunday morning. Jimmy
Breslin had funny and powerful columns about the antics of the political/underworld
side of the city three times a week. Dick Schaap wrote on sports, Eugenia
Sheppardon fashion and society. And Jill Krementz was the credit you saw on a lot of
the photos.
Brought up in Morristown, New Jersey, she had a year of university
when she decided to come to the Big Town at nineteen to become a photographer.
She was a kid in
her early twenties, working at Huntington Hartford’s Show magazine,
which
folded, when her boss Otto Guernsey, who used to review theatre
for the Trib,
got her the gig free-lancing with the Trib. They used her at first — paying
her $15 a picture — for a lot of the night-time stuff because she came
cheaper
than staff photographers who were union and got overtime. Soon she was turning
out so much that she was making more than any of them even on overtime, so they
put her on the payroll.
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Jill
Krementz and Kurt Vonnegut at Literacy Partners'
20th anniversary Gala. Photo:
JH/NYSD.
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They’d call her for a fire or the opening of the opera and the ballet.
She’d go to Paris with Eugenia Sheppard to cover the couture collections.
The couture houses were very particular about what she could and could not
photograph. Not one piece of the collection was allowed, for example. Joe Eula could
sketch,
but no pictures. That was because in those days, Saks and Orbach’s (no
longer in business), the department store on 34th Street, used to buy certain
numbers of the collection – and for a lot of money. They’d then
take the garment apart, produce a pattern and make it for the mass market.
That way,
there were a lot of fashionable young women running around New York wearing
beautiful Givenchy couture. A photograph would have made it easy for a lot
of people to
knock
off the design.
After the
Trib, Jill spent a year (to the day) in Viet Nam working on a book
and doing free-lance work for magazines and newspapers. This was in 1965 before
the public opposition to the War had heated up. She stayed at Caravelle, just
across the street from the Continental. Some of the biggest media names were
first making their reputations there in Saigon, such as David Halberstam, the
Sheehans, Morley Safer, Peter Arnett.
I asked her what it was like living in the midst of war. Her answer served
to remind me that she has that intrepid aspect to her personality that is found
in so many photographers: she was fearless. She added that she was so young
it
never occurred to her that her parents back home in the States were probably
terrified for her. Instead, she befriended, among others, a couple of missionaries
who were in the business of delivering medicines to people in the villages.
Because of that, she later learned, she was on a list of the Viet Cong of people
who
were not to be hurt. “All the villagers knew all the Viet Cong, and vice
versa.”
Back in the US she began what has been a rich career as
photographer and author of books, especially for young people growing up and
on the subject of writers.
She and Vonnegut have been married for years (I don’t know how long) and
are established members of the New York literary scene. Their parties are the
kind one imagines authors and photographers might have – all kinds of
well-known writers, personalities, actors and artists. With a smattering of
us civilians
eager to please in order to hear.
Below are
some examples of Jill Krementz' Photo Journal, published in New
York Social Diary in 2002: |
