Irish Above All

by Mary Pat Kelly

  But would people come? Ed, with the help of FDR, was dragging the city into solvency. Still families worried about food and the rent. Could they pay fifty cents to see fancy new gadgets in the “Home of the Century” or to watch how cars were made? But then, of course, Chicago was Chicago, and for all the big important scientific exhibits that were advertised, there was another part of the Fair that had become the real draw. Like the Columbian exhibit before it, with its carnival midway and Ferris wheel, the Century of Progress had nightclubs with exotic names, an animal circus and the Sky Ride. In the same way all of us Kelly kids had longed to ride the Ferris wheel and see the lights come on in the White City, a new generation lined up to rocket straight up into the air and ride through the whole Century of Progress from two hundred feet in the sky. Huge crowds from the day it opened.

  I could understand why Ed wanted me to photograph the Century of Progress for the Chicagoan. Besides being good publicity, the publisher, Martin Quigley, was a friend of his. One of the fellows who went to daily Mass at St. Peter’s. Odd he would bring out a magazine like the Chicagoan, which was supposed to be sophisticated and a little bit risqué. But then Quigley had made his money putting out movie magazines, and the Chicagoan echoed the art deco sets and snappy dialogue of Hollywood.

  The magazine contained reviews of nightclubs and dance bands, pictures of men in tuxedos, women in furs, along with articles that mixed intellectual musings with Chicago moxie. Quigley had gotten a group of writers and artists together and had done well from 1926 to 1929. Then the Depression hit. A glossy advertising cars and jewelry should have failed miserably, but the Chicagoan, like the movies, provided an escape, as did the Century of Progress itself. And now the Chicagoan was focusing on the Fair, and expected the mayor to help.

  “Alright,” I said to Ed, and thought, I was put out with Ed for banishing me from city hall, but I must admit I was intrigued by the Chicagoan. Their offices were at 20 East Wacker. Hard to be soignée on a floor full of dentists, I thought as I got off the elevator the next morning. I could smell mercury and silver fillings.

  Martin Quigley himself looked like a man picked to usher the noon Mass at Holy Name, the top tier, just the fellow to hold the collection basket in front of Chicago’s wealthiest Catholics. He had very black hair and blue eyes. Black Irish, I thought. “Quigley,” I said, after he’d invited me to sit down in front of his desk, “is that a west of Ireland name?”

  “It might be,” he said. “But our family has been in Chicago for so many generations, we’ve lost track of where we came from. Of course, I’m very proud of our heritage. The Irish have championed the faith in this country. Did you know that Chicago is the biggest archdiocese in the United States with the most Catholic schools? We’ve had incredible leaders, starting with Archbishop Quigley himself.”

  “A relative of yours?” I asked.

  “A connection,” he said. This guy seemed more like the head of the Knights of Columbus than the publisher of a racy magazine.

  “But,” he said, “it’s your relative that we should be discussing. I have enormous respect for Ed Kelly and how he is saving this city, and I’d like to do him a favor and take you on. But we already have an excellent and rather temperamental photographer. I’m sure you’ve heard of George Miller?”

  “I have.” How couldn’t I have? Famous for his artsy work. Though I’d always preferred plain portraits.

  “And you understand the high bar he sets for the Chicagoan? So…”

  “What’s going on in here?”

  The man who stood in the doorway of Quigley’s office wasn’t old. Thirties I’d say, but he didn’t hesitate to interrupt his boss. A skinny fellow, blond, and the only one in the Chicagoan’s offices not dressed in a suit. He wore gray flannel slacks and a sweater.

  “You hire another photographer, and I quit.”

  Quigley and I turned in our chairs to look at him. “Oh,” he said, “they told me Martin was interviewing a photographer, but you’re a woman. Are you applying for the job of sorting the photography archives?”

  “I’m not,” I said, and I held up my Seneca, “I am a photographer. Though I’m not trying to put you out of a job, Mr. Miller.”

  He laughed. “You wouldn’t have much chance with that thing. Is it an antique? Where’d you get it?”

  “From Eddie Steichen,” I said. Well that stopped him for a minute, but he came right back at me.

  “What? Did you grow up with him in Milwaukee or something?”

  “I met Eddie in Paris when we were both doing fashion photography.” Alright, that was a slight exaggeration. Steichen’s pictures of couturier gowns were published in Art et Décoration, and mine were used by Madame Simone to make illegal copies of the designs. “Though Eddie told me my forte was women’s faces.”

  Miller snorted. “The Century of Progress is about innovation in architecture and technology—progress—not portraits of googly-eyed Ma and Pa up from Kewanee to take in the Fair,” Miller said.

  “But how can you get the feel of the impact of the Fair without looking at the people who are attending, finding out their stories?”

  “Oh no, another sob sister,” Miller said to Quigley. “A so-called journalist who exploits ordinary decent people for circulation.”

  I decided not to tell him I was the one who’d exclusively photographed the women who Maurine had turned into the characters Velma Kelly and Roxie Hart in her play, Chicago. Exploitation no question, though the women themselves were desperate to be taken advantage of. “Make us famous,” they’d said to me when they posed.

  “Take it easy, George,” Quigley said. To me he said, “Have you ever had anything published?”

  “Do you have yesterday’s Tribune?” I asked Quigley.

  He lifted a pile of newspapers from the floor next to his desk and handed them to me. I rifled through them and pulled out the front page with my photograph of Ed being greeted by admirers at city hall. Miller came over, took the paper away from me, and held it up.

  “First of all, the composition is bad. Ed Kelly’s the story, and you have him almost blocked out by the crowd. Too many faces and hands, too. All of them distracting from the main subject. Though the quality and the lighting is okay. And you shot it with this?”

  He reached for my Seneca, but I pulled it away.

  “Of course you could never photograph structures with that,” he said.

  “Oh I don’t know. I did some shots of Notre Dame.”

  “In South Bend?”

  “In Paris,” I said. “Henri Matisse found the photographs interesting. I concentrated on details, took a Cubist approach.”

  Now I was babbling a bit but, dear God, this young fellow was so arrogant. No wonder he took no pictures of people. Probably offended them with his attitude. “But, as I said, it was the candid shots I took of women that Eddie and Henri liked best.”

  “French socialites, I suppose,” Miller said. “How boring.”

  “My subjects were American tourists actually.”

  “Worse,” he said.

  “Matisse didn’t think so,” I said. Though I didn’t add that the Master liked my women tourists because I brought them to his studio where they often bought a painting. Miller looked at Quigley.

  “So she was friendly with the Hairy Mattress himself,” Miller said.

  “And, Mr. Miller, I suppose you were one of the Art Institute’s students who copied his paintings and burned them.”

  “Let’s just say I danced around the bonfire, and regret it,” Miller said.

  “I have no idea what you two are talking about,” Quigley said. “But Nora here can arrange for you to get on the fairgrounds to take those predawn shots you’ve been agitating for.”

  “She can?”

  “Through her co—” Miller started. I cut him off.

  “My boss, Mayor Edward J. Kelly, has agreed to let me escort you through the gate at five a.m.” Now, Ed hadn’t said any such thing, but if I was going to show
this blowhard that my photographs were just as good as his, I had to get this job. And after all, wasn’t that what Ed intended?

  So. I was hired. Or at least Quigley agreed to pay me five dollars per photograph, much higher than the going rate. I would be partnered with the magazine’s best writer, Marvin Mayer, and we would interview attendees. I would have preferred to just wander round and do candid shots, but Quigley thought Mayer could come up with clever questions that would show how superior the Chicagoan was, what an arbiter of taste. I was beginning to think the whole staff were stuck-up pains in the ass. Yet, the magazine was so beautifully produced that I longed to see my photographs printed on its pages. Plus, Ed didn’t want me around city hall.

  “Fine, fine,” is what Ed said to me the next day when I told him I’d committed to a dawn tour of the Fair for George Miller.

  8

  I was at Twelfth Street and the Drive, the employee gate at 5:00 a.m. Miller got out of his car. He carried a large format Hasselblad in one hand and a tripod in the other.

  “No assistant?” I asked, as a Chicago policeman opened the gates to us. Still dark, and the lake a stretch of black water. Only the morning star for light.

  “The idiot didn’t show up,” Miller said. “I hired him for his muscles and because he has no opinion. The Art Institute sent me some students, but all they wanted to do was argue about f-stops.”

  He looked over at the policeman. “Want to make a few bucks, officer? Lugging my equipment?”

  The cop laughed. “I had enough of that kind of labor when I landed from Ireland. My job is to stay on this post. I was told Miss Kelly here could be trusted to escort you, but nobody said anything about heavy lifting.”

  “I can carry the Hasselblad,” I said to him. “After all, my Seneca weighs very little.”

  “Alright,” Miller said. “But no bright ideas.”

  Now Miller was a jerk no question, but as I watched him work, I saw the man was an artist. He used light and shadow the way a painter would. He’d chosen the GM building for his first shot because the sun rising out of the lake would turn the steel building red. “The color will be saturated,” he said.

  “But aren’t you shooting black and white?” There were a lot of rumors that Kodak was experimenting with color film that would be easy to use. Now, I’d taken color photographs in Paris using Autochrome Lumière plates myself, but they were very cumbersome. I’d gotten used to my Seneca. Push a button and get a picture. What if taking color could be that easy?

  “Man and God,” he said to me, “are getting close.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The fellows at Kodak, the two Leopolds, Mannes and Godowsky, nicknamed ‘Man and God.’ An odd story. They’re both professional musicians from famous orchestral families. I guess they met playing together somewhere and found out they were each experimenting with color film. Quite a coincidence.”

  “Or Providence,” I said. But he didn’t hear me. He was stretched out on the blacktop in front of the building looking up. I was beginning to see my life as an unfolding of Providence, both the good things and the bad. I hadn’t planned to be in Miami that night, or to become so much a part of Ed’s life just when he faced the challenges of being mayor. I mean, what if Margaret hadn’t come to visit me? She and Ed wouldn’t have married. And wasn’t it because I was working at Montgomery Ward that Michael met Mame? And, of course, Paris was one providential encounter after another. All leading to Ireland and Peter Keeley and … But Miller was on his feet now and yelling for me to set up the tripod.

  “Hurry up, hurry up,” he said. “The sun, the sun.”

  He held up his hand as if to keep the red ball below the horizon.

  Good luck, buddy, I thought. But I did manage to anchor the three legs of the tripod in time for him to fasten the Hasselblad to the head just as the sun came up over the lake. Miller held his breath as he depressed the shutter release that hung from a wire on the camera. And me? Well I just lifted up my Seneca and got a shot of Miller squinting at the sunrise, his face absorbing the light.

  Next, he set up the camera under the Sky Ride. It took us a half an hour to get exactly the angle he wanted.

  “That’s it,” he said, “the light’s gone flat now.”

  We finished at eight, and the cop pointed us toward a shack where the Fair’s ticket takers, attendants, as well as some of the early morning barkers at the midway attractions were having breakfast. The smell of bacon and coffee pulled us in. About twenty people sat on benches at two wooden tables, both men and women, lots of chatter—even this early. Why not? Each of them had a job and a free breakfast.

  “Would you mind?” I said to one woman about my age, but with white-blonde hair, a heavily powdered face, and red, red lipstick. I’d like to see Miller’s color film capture her. Still, even in black and white, her face would be dramatic. The woman thought I wanted to sit next to her and moved her plate, but I held up my camera. “May I?”

  “You don’t want to take my picture,” she laughed. “I’m a behind-the-scenes girl. Lola’s my name. I do the costumes and makeup for the dancers in the Streets of Paris nightclub.”

  “Streets of Paris? Then you must…” I stopped. That was where Sally Rand, the Fair’s most famous attraction, danced.

  “Keep Sally Rand’s fans in shape, and make sure her bubbles are big and round and transparent.” She smiled. “And it’s not just Sally, you know. There are twelve other girls in the chorus, too. You should be taking their pictures, not mine. Except, of course, there’s no photography allowed.”

  Now Chicago had plenty of strip shows in theaters downtown. In fact, Sally Rand had been performing at the Paramount for years. But for her to do her act right out in the open, on the midway with families strolling by, made her striptease more sensational. There’d been some pressure on Ed to ban Sally, but he’d taken a turn-a-blind-eye attitude. Told the press he hadn’t attended her performances and couldn’t say whether Sally was actually nude. “Probably wearing some sort of bathing suit,” he’d said.

  Rand herself said she never let anyone close enough to see what she was wearing or not wearing. In her publicity shots, the fans were modestly placed, and she allowed no one to take pictures during the show. Nor would she pose afterward.

  “I work for the Chicagoan magazine,” I said. “It’s a very classy publication. Do you think Sally and the girls might let me take their portraits? I’m only interested in their faces.”

  “You must be the only one,” she said.

  “I’m sure they’re lovely girls.”

  “They are, after I get finished with them. Amazing what mascara can do. Come around sometime before the show. I’ll introduce you. Then, it’ll be up to the girls.”

  Miller was eating. I got a bacon and egg sandwich on a roll and paid only ten cents for it. I sat next to him. The woman was gone. Miller finished and left. I’d do my Chicagoan assignment, then investigate the Streets of Paris.

  * * *

  I met Mayer an hour later at the main gate and we started on the assignment Quigley had given us, interviewing the “great unwashed” as Mayer put it. I suggested we start at the Irish Village, a cluster of thatched roof cottages set around a village green. Very like the exhibition my granny Honora had brought the whole family to during the World’s Columbian Exposition forty years before. A blacksmith hammered away at his anvil, the sparks shooting up. An elderly woman led a couple and three small children up to the threshold of a cottage next to the forge. She touched the horseshoe set over the doorway and turned to them. I lifted my camera and got a shot of her as she spoke to the man, her son I supposed. “Brings back memories,” I heard her say to him. She’s doing what Granny Honora did for us, I thought, trying to share her past. The man saw me watching them.

  “My mother says this is the closest I’ll ever get to Ireland. She came to Indianapolis fifty years ago but really I don’t think she’s ever left Ireland in her hear
t,” he told me.

  Then he said to his mother, “This is all very nice, Ma, but the kids want to go on the Sky Ride.”

  Just like us at the other fair, Granny desperate to make us curious and interested in Ireland and all of us straining for the Ferris wheel. Mayer walked up to the son. “Could you give me a short interview on your impressions?”

  “As long as it is short,” he said, looking over at his wife, impatient, the two older children were pulling on her hands while the grandmother held up the youngest so she could look in the window of the cottage. She put her cheek against the little girl’s face and the two leaned forward. I raised the camera and looked into the viewfinder. I not only had the two of them, but their reflection in the window, and even a bit of the hearth where a turf fire burned. I snapped the picture.

  “That fire never goes out,” I heard the woman tell the little girl. “When a young couple marries, the bride carries a burning piece of turf to her new home and lights a fire the first thing.”

  “Did you do that, Granny?” the little girl asked. The woman set her down and bent over, talking quietly, though I could hear every word.

  “Ah well,” she said, “I was very young when I came to Amerikay and I met your grandfather at a dance at St. Bridget’s Hall. I was from Kerry and he was from Tyrone. Different customs up there. Now I could hardly carry fire onto a ship, but I did pack a sod of turf in my bag. A fellow at Ellis Island tried to take it off me. Said it could be infested. That I might be bringing foreign pests into the country. But the other official said let her keep it. The only bit of Irish soil she’ll set foot on ever again.”

  She passed through Ellis Island, I thought, so must have come in the 1890s, later than my granny, who fled the Great Starvation in 1849. Still this woman had been forced out by bad times. She’d come to a more prosperous Chicago than the frontier hardscrabble my family found. She’d then gone down to Indianapolis with her new husband. He must have had work. No chance for her ever to return home.