Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

“Let’s have a salute,” I said.

He refused. “I ain’t a soldier and this ain’t a war. This is just a white man’s movie.”

The uniform, he said, had been issued by the wardrobe department of Universal Studios. As I did him he reminisced and said how glad he had been to see his “people” in my exhibitions, referring to my portraits of Robeson and the negative prints of Doolum, Pigga, and Teets and Negro Swimming to a Raft . He began to cry, and crying revealed everything of himself. The tears splashed down the cheeks of this troubled sentimental soul. Actors are unembarrassed and can cry facing the camera, but crying is impossible to control once the first blubs have started — it is as unselective and telling as anger or lust.

It gave me a good idea. After he introduced me to other actors — who readily agreed to be photographed — I asked them to cry for me at the end of the session. Alan Ladd, Loretta Young, Charles Laughton, Henry Fonda: I had people crying for me, and with greater effect, long before Philippe Halsman had them jumping. Bogart was the one man who refused to cry for me, but I knew that if he had there would have been no stopping him. All he said was, “Get her out of here.”

Raymond Chandler said something similar, but he had more reason. I had been taken out to eat by Aldous Huxley, whom I had visited in connection with an assignment I’d asked for, a Saturday Evening Post photo-essay about Huxley’s The Art of Seeing , which had come out two years before. The book had been severely criticized and even ridiculed, but I was in a good position to judge it and I believed much of it to be true. Huxley was interested that I had done D. H. Lawrence and said that he was still in touch with the throbbing turnip, Frieda. At the Mexican restaurant, Huxley read the menu with his cheek against it, looking sideways at it with one swiveled eye.

“Pass the salt, please,” he said, after we were served our enchiladas.

I deliberately handed him the pepper. He did not detect this until he shook it. He sniffed and put it down and said, “That is pepper. I’d hate to think you did that on purpose.”

“Gosh, no.”

One eye squinting, one bulging, and both clouded and misshapen with a kind of gruesome tissue, he described the Bates Method of seeing. He said, “The eye must be re-educated. I want you to look behind me and tell me what you see.”

“A man — tiny, tweedy, and drunk — with a little old lady. He’s dapper, fifty-odd — but, Christ, that woman is seventy-five if she’s a day. She’s walking very upright, as if she’s afraid her wig is going to fall off. Now they’re sitting down and the man’s snapping his fingers at the waiter.”

Huxley hadn’t turned. He said. “That’s Chandler.’

“So you have eyes in the back of your head. The Bates Method sure is something!”

Huxley laughed. I excused myself and, taking my camera and pretending to head for the ladies’ room, I looked for a vantage point to shoot this mismatched couple. I saw concealment between a pillar and palm not far from the Chandlers’ table and did a few preliminary shots. Screwing on my flash attachment I marched up to them. In situations that called for quick timing I always made a prior adjustment, setting the focus for six feet, since it is an easy distance to gauge — focusing is impossible in an emergency.

“Applesauce!” I yelled. They looked up and froze, as people do when surprised by a camera, and I snapped. Chandler, bug-eyed in the light, had the gape of a man in a mug shot. His wife, Cissy, being elderly, was slow to react. Her face had been plaster, but the flesh whitened it further: she had no lips, no shadows, only the faintest dusted lines of panic, like cracks in a porcelain monkey. Then the light abated, her face slackened, and she looked a hundred years older, as stale and ruined as yesterday’s oatmeal.

“Jesus, who do you think you are!” Chandler snarled.

“Sorry,” I said. “My mistake. I took you for Jiggs and Maggie.”

Cissy, who was rigid, touched at her face as if to make sure it was still there, and she began to whimper. Chandler cursed me and put his arm around her. She inched over into a swoon, a richly grotesque pieta I could not resist snapping.

“Waiter!”

Already I regretted the pictures. They were perhaps the cruellest ones I had ever done, taken in the most hammer-hearted way — faultless timing, nastily motivated.

“Meet you outside,” I said to Huxley, and dashed out of the restaurant.

“What was that kerfuffle all about?” he asked in the taxi, undermining my respect for his treatise on the Bates Method.

“A case of mistaken identity,” I said. I looked out the window and seeing that we were on Hollywood Boulevard I said, “Mind if we stop?”

“Not at all.” Huxley loved the sleazy glamor of Hollywood. As an intellectual he could have it both ways, be mocking about the cheap glitter, and blamelessly wallow in it because he knew it was cheap. His streak of vulgarity was a mile wide in any case: he secretly lusted after a huge whorish success, since having it was the only convincing way of despising it. But success, even vulgar success, is denied to those who belittle it as they drool.

We got out of the taxi and I did my Huxley pictures there on the sidewalk, using available glare — Huxley sticking out like a sore thumb among the bellowing movie marquees, the clip joints and dives and neon curlicues. This pecker-up Englishman in his wrinkled suit and shapeless wool tie, with his hair raked back Russian-style and his ears sticking out and in the glare a dozen blurred criminal faces: he looked owlish and prim. It was how he wanted to be photographed, yet another slumming foreigner who thought he was a real devil. But how was he to know that his eyes would appear as two useless polyps, and that he would look — smiling there on Hollywood Boulevard — like a blind man who had lost his way and wandered into a fleshpot and praised it because it sounded jolly. The title was Huxley , but I thought of it as Eyeless in Gaza .

He had convinced himself that he could see and persuaded others of his belief. I think myself that he was partially sighted and that the rest, like much of his writing, was sheer nonsense. It was not the Bates Method, but drugs, will power, brains, and bullshit, and if my picture of him showed anything it was a man kidding himself.

“You should stop awhile in Los Angeles,” he said. “This is one of the great cities of the world, a mixture of Babylon, Vienna, and—”

“Cleveland?”

“I was going to say Chichén-Itzá, but have it your way.”

“I have to go to Europe.”

“Europe is here,” he said. “The thinkers, I mean, and they’re the only ones who matter. But not only them — Schönberg, Einstein—”

“He’s in New Jersey.”

“Thomas Mann.”

“ He’s here? I’d love to do him.”

“You’ll need an introduction,” said Huxley. “But I might be able to help you.”

Two days later my taxi was bowling along San Remo Drive, Mann’s street in Pacific Palisades. I fought my way through the palms in the front yard and rang the bell.

“He is expecting you,” said the German girl at the door. “He will be down presently.”

It was one of those reverently old-world households in which one detected a great hidden presence. The German girl had whispered; another tiptoed in and smiled at me. The house was private, and dense with bourgeois upholstery and family intimacy, sanctified with feather dusters and furniture polish. Somewhere, in a room I could not see, a concentrating man was preparing his entrance.

But when it happened the spell was broken. He shuffled into the room, a stooping mustached man of about seventy, his face creased into thoughtful planes. He had a storekeeper’s kindliness, he could have been a haberdasher.