Marianne Wiggins - The Shadow Catcher

“Who can we get to play J.P. Morgan?” she asks Michelle. “They were fat , weren’t they. Big men, back then. All those guys…Roosevelt and Morgan…”

“It was a sign of wealth,” Jon puts in. “Even with the women.”

“If only there was, like, a white James Earl Jones,” Michelle says.

“Nicholson could do it,” Stacey suggests.

They’re so busy seeing movies in their heads I wonder if they’ve heard a word I’ve said. “All I want you to understand, before you read the book I’ve written, before you even spend another day entertaining the idea that Edward Curtis was a saint, or a poet, or a hero, is that his life was long. His life was, as I’ve said, complicated. And, like every one of us, he was less than perfect. Less than ideal. Certainly not the man he strove so hard to make everyone believe he was. Possibly destructive. Certainly painfully dangerous to anyone who loved him. And never without blame.”

“— oh my god ,” Alison recognizes: “You fell out of love with him.”

“She did and she didn’t,” Jon tries to explain.

“—I did . And then I didn’t.”

I push another portrait forward.

“What’s this?” Alison asks.

“Our hero. A later version.”

“— yikes . What happened to him?”

“Life. Eighty-four years is a lot of living. I know you have a version of him that you’re fond of, but all I’m saying is you have to understand that there are several versions of your man out there, as I was disappointed to discover. What I finally had to do was make a kind of map of his whole life, draw a sketch of it, as if it were a landscape — then look down on it, like I was flying over it, so I could see the patterns.”

“And what were they?”

“Well, you’ve got the beginning years over here, the early life. Then there’s the middle bit where Curtis meets the woman who will change his life — Clara — marries her, has kids, establishes a studio in Seattle, Washington, as a society portraitist. Then, when he’s thirty-two, there’s another part: he meets the then Chief of Forestry by pure chance while climbing Mt. Rainier and the next thing you know this guy takes Curtis to the Southwest where he sees his first Plains Indian. Then, for nineteen years, from 1900 to 1919, all Edward does is photograph Indians. He’s away from home ninety percent of the time, but pretty nearly every time he comes back, his wife gets pregnant — until he just stops coming home at all. He doesn’t even meet his last child until she’s eighteen years old. Clara divorces him in 1919—bitter mess; real ugly. Edward is now fifty-one years old. He has a sister who’s sided with his wife in the divorce; a brother he hasn’t seen since he was six, another brother who’s denounced him as a charlatan and thief — he’s made his wife an enemy and he barely knows his children. And he’s perennially in debt. So he reinvents himself again and comes to Hollywood and lands a job with Cecil B. DeMille as the still photographer for The Ten Commandments . By the 1920s he’s in debt to Morgan, whose heirs force him to relinquish all his copyrights to American Indian, Inc. He sells off part of the Indian art and jewelry he’s acquired, borrows more money and opens two studios here in Hollywood, one in the Biltmore Hotel and one in Glendale, where he slogs away as an average studio photographer for another sixteen years. Then around 1937 he drops out of sight, wandering around Nevada and California, searching for gold. Down and out, eighty years old, he tries to get the U.S. government to pay him for his work as an ethnologist. Instead, he’s condemned by the Secretary of the Interior and denounced as a phony and a fake on the floor of Congress. On October 19, 1952, he drops dead in his daughter’s apartment from a heart attack and dies, in L.A. County.”

“Wow — he died in ’52…he lived that long. That’s, like, during Elvis,” Michelle blinks.

“Wait, I’ve got a scene,” Stacey says: “It’s 1952. We start in the daughter’s apartment,” she acts out. “California sunshine streaming through Venetian blinds. A TV plays in the corner. An OLD MAN, 84, lifts a slat of the Venetian blind to gaze at traffic on the street outside. A THUNDERBIRD goes by. ( 50’s right? those BIG FINS?) A CADILLAC. Followed by a PONTIAC. The names of Indians —THUNDERBIRD, CADILLAC, PONTIAC — turned into CARS! Seeing this, the OLD MAN grabs his chest, falls down, has a heart attack and dies. The OLD MAN is actually Edward Curtis! Then — FLASHBACK: YOUNG CURTIS (the handsome one) on horseback, his CAMERA on a packhorse, on THE PLAINS. TIPIS in the middle distance. He rides in. What do you think? It’s kind of Citizen Kane meets Dances with Wolves .”

“— Citizen Kane ?” I repeat.

“—oh: hey: oh, my god: isn’t there even an Indian reservation that’s called ROSEBUD?”

I look at Jon. Jon looks at me. “I’m curious to know how you fell back in love with him enough to write the novel,” Jon asks.

“Because of this,” I say.

I draw out a Polaroid and lay it on the table.

“What is it?”

“Read the stone.”

“—oh my god it’s Curtis’s grave. You went there?”

“I went everywhere I could. I went up to Seattle to find the buildings he and Clara lived in — I went out to the reservations. I went to the Smithsonian, the Morgan Library. Then finally I drove to Forest Lawn one day. And sat down next to him.”

“— our Forest Lawn?” Alison asks.

“He’s buried in Glendale. You should go. Before you make your movie.”

“— why ?”

“Because that’s where the story is.”

She tilts her head, looks at the photograph, then back at me: “I need more. ”

“He was an absent husband and a disappearing father,” I explain. “A shit to everyone who loved him all his life.”

“Geniuses always are.”

“Well, you can believe that if you need to.”

“—don’t you ?”

“For a long time, I couldn’t figure out if there was anything that Edward Curtis ever loved .”

“Why did he have to love something?”

“Because it makes a better story.”

“Well then — he loved taking photographs of Indians.”

“—then why did he stop ?”

“You tell me.”

“I have. That’s what my book’s about.”

The room goes suddenly astonishingly quiet . It’s almost like a stunned reaction to my saying That’s what my book’s about. It’s frightening. You can hear a pin drop. It’s as if every sound has been sucked out of the room and then I feel A PRESENCE loom and a beautiful tanned hand falls on Stacey’s shoulder. Don’t mean to interrupt, the car is waiting for us, and there He is. Like a vision. Probably the most beautiful human I have ever seen and Stacey is saying You know Jon and Jon is shaking hands with Him and Stacey is saying And this is Marianne who’s going to write the Curtis project for us and He flashes me a smile and extends his perfect hand in my direction saying I’m really looking forward to hearing your ideas, and I lift my hand and slide it into His, look up into His eyes and tell Him, “Ga.”

Thousands of women have probably said exactly the same thing to Him since He was twelve so He fields my stupefaction with impeccable grace and then Stacey tells Jon she’ll call him to confirm a meeting for next week and she tells me that she’s looking forward to reading The Shadow Catcher on the weekend, then they’re gone and Jon and I are left there all alone, at the table, in His life-altering absence.