Jun

28

I was a hotshot kid from the Bronx and I had successfully completed two tours– 52 missions in all– as a combat navigator routing out Nazis. I had, all 52 times, beaten the highest combat rate of attrition in WW2–71%. That is, each time I went out I had a 30 or so % chance of coming back. My squadron commander was Col. Jimmy Stewart, who flew a spate of missions but not with me. Twice our plane, Sweet Sue, had led the entire 8th Air Force, once against Berlin, once against Hamburg, 1100 and 800 planes. I was 22 and volunteered for a third tour, taking the wounded home from islands in the Pacific between Australia and Japan.

I was determined to become a great writer from the time I became addicted to reading at James Monroe High School in the Bronx. My immigrant father, Herman Shay, had entertained the same hope for himself, but at 25 in Russia, he was befriended by Leon Trotsky and had a falling out with him. He came to America and ended up in the family trade, a semi-employed tailor during the Depression who taught me chess and gave me a lifetime reverence for Chekhov, Tolstoy and Hemingway. He taught me to be a mensch and how to forgive. And as a Bar Mitzvah present in 1935, he gave me his folding Kodak.

In Paris, hours after the war ended in 1945, I duplicated with my Leica the picture my father made of himself with the Kodak, with the Eiffel Tower behind him in 1905. I see photography as an extension of literature. I sold features to The Washington Post while stationed at the Pentagon. I had turned down jobs at Look and the Post and took the Life job as a reporter when Joe Thorndike, then editor of Life, pointed out Life had recently hired some 20 refugee photographers –guys like Eisenstaedt. He liked the story I had written about my plane crash and said he'd like to hire me to work with Life Photographers to help them do stories and to schlep their gear. Surviving a flying-blind plane crash in Newfoundland had put me in contact with Life and Look.

I went to work for Life and became their youngest Bureau Chief ever. Went to San Francisco when I was 26, and lasted three years on the staff before I went out on my own in 1951 in Chicago. I had learned and practiced my craft of photo journalism in NY, Washington, SF, and then Chicago, where Florence and I settled with our two, then five, kids.

I had worked with two score of the best photographers in the world on some 70 stories. A reporter on Life in those days was an idea man too. I did some 70 stories before I picked up my own Leica for real. First year out I made $30,000, second I did 60. By my third year I had more work than I could handle. My client list included Time, Life, Fortune, The Saturday Evening Post, Forbes, Business Week, CBS, Ford, NBC, Baxter Labs, Amana, National Can and the Blue Cross. In 1954 came Sports Illustrated.

I refused to specialize– the long lenses I got for my SI work I used in staking out the Mafia– some 60 times, often using my late, beautiful wife, Florence as a decoy or fotog with a camera in her purse. She became a successful international rare book dealer and some of her clients became my friends too, and collectors of my pictures: David Mamet, Joseph Heller, various governors, rock star Billy Corgan– who sang at her funeral last year.

My favorite mentor on Life was Francis Reeves Miller, who looked like W.C. Fields and gave me the nickname of "DeMille" for "directing" certain difficult Life pictures. Like getting together the 17 congressmen and senators who had vainly introduced legislation that would fight the Dairy Lobby's greatest achievement– keeping the American housewife from buying factory colored margarine. It was to their advantage to keep Mrs. America buying white marge then coloring it at home with dye from a little bottle. Picture ran a full page and helped end the Lobby's hegemony.

My photo philosophy has always been if there's a way to tell the truth, show it in pictures. The only no-no was bad taste or corn, like showing a mouse succumbing to an ingenious new trap. It wasn't the kind of thing Life readers wanted to stomach with their breakfast.

Francis Miller always said my greatest achievement was "Life Crashes a Party". The party I picked? The Hungarian Ministry's celebration of the 100th Anniversary of the Hungarian Ides of March. Best picture? I maneuvered the Ministry's buxom charge de affaires (our crasher's "date") in her low-cut blouse into leaning over the table of Hungarian goodies flown in from Budapest that very morning. Under her bosom, describing the tidbits, was a sign that said, "Hungarian Delicacies." If a picture was on the racey side and had a double meaning, Life would sometimes use it. Working for Life, in which I had 900 pictures ultimately as a photographer, was like channeling Mel Brooks playing for the Yankees.


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