Sontag

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Sontag Page 44

by Benjamin Moser


  Susan had never been one for moderate nonconfrontational approaches. And the apparently modest cocktail party, described by one Korean paper as “an illegal gathering,” attracted 150 people, including friends and relatives of imprisoned writers. The attendees read from the prisoners’ work and described their plights. When told that the party was regarded as an insult to the Korean government, Susan riposted: “We are writers here to help other writers. It is not our job to be silently polite house guests. The job of writers is to speak out.” The event was offensive enough to the regime that President Roh Tae-woo canceled his scheduled address.24

  The protests were noted. One writer, San-Ha Lee, had been arrested in 1987 for a poem about American brutality toward civilians during the Korean War. In prison, his lawyer informed him that Sontag wanted to make him an honorary member of American PEN.

  During the long legal process, Sontag, in New York, demanded that the South Korean government release me several times. . . . So the government started to be embarrassed because the Olympic Games would be held in South Korea that year and the government had to be cautious about international public opinion. So the government gave some sort of commitment to her regarding my release, that’s what I’ve heard about it. Susan Sontag requested an interview while I was in prison several times, but the office rejected all her requests.25

  As soon as the government could bury this incident, it did: one publisher was released in October, three more in December, and San-Ha Lee in 1990.26 But he was forbidden to leave the country.

  I was only able to travel, finally, to Japan ten years later, in 2000. And in the end, Susan Sontag passed away due to cancer at age 71 in 2004, so I was not able to meet her. Periodically Susan Sontag appears on my television screen, or I come across Regarding the Pain of Others, and her name functions as a reminder: to consider how my thinking has developed, if I have walked a proper path, and how deep the tracks are that I’ve left behind.27

  * * *

  The Seoul Congress was a dress rehearsal for the far more important role Sontag would soon be called to play. Her fearsome reputation, long record of activism, and position as president of PEN America would combine to put her at the center of one of the most notorious sagas in modern literary history. On Valentine’s Day 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran, issued a death sentence against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, a novel published in London a month after Susan returned from Seoul. The ayatollah and his government had not read the novel in question, whose title alluded to an incident in the life of Muhammad in which Satan tempted the prophet to utter the names of three pagan goddesses.

  The author was accused of blasphemy; and the fatwa—the word would soon need no italics—set off a wave of terror in which at least sixty people ultimately died. Bookstores in Britain and America were bombed. Rushdie’s Norwegian publisher and Turkish and Italian translators were shot and wounded. His Japanese translator was murdered. For Rushdie himself, it was the beginning of many years of safe houses and fruitless and humiliating “apologies” to the Iranian authorities. It was also the beginning of what Rushdie saw as abandonment by fellow writers who favored a “moderate nonconfrontational approach” that, in practice, meant blaming Rushdie for deliberately provoking the calamity. “I don’t think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity,” said man-of-the-world John le Carré; and anti-Semite Roald Dahl called Rushdie “a dangerous opportunist” who “knew exactly what he was doing and cannot plead otherwise. This kind of sensationalism does indeed get an indifferent book on to the top of the best-seller list,—but to my mind it is a cheap way of doing it.”28

  In 1989, the fatwa, like the word itself, was a new phenomenon, and the fear that it provoked was real. “It was the first taste we had of the theocratic sensibility,” said E. L. Doctorow. “It was our first taste of the relationship between faith and violence in that part of the world.”29 The book had not yet been published in the United States—it was scheduled for February 22, little more than a week after Khomeini’s pronouncement. At first, many thought that there had been some misunderstanding; and when the fatwa was issued, prominent American writers—including some of those who had spoken out against censorship in Korea—made themselves scarce. “I’m saying this now only because they’re dead,” said Karen Kennerly. “But Arthur Miller said he didn’t want to have anything to do with it. Vonnegut said the same thing. Until they died I always pretended this wasn’t true.”30

  The danger was real: the PEN office received repeated hang-up calls; Penguin had to hire bodyguards; major chain bookstores, fearing the violence that had erupted in other parts of the world, refused to sell the book. Rushdie had the protection of the British security services, but others involved with the book did not. “I know American journalists who were phoning around trying to get comments, who said that they were surprised by how many leading American writers were suddenly unavailable,” said Rushdie.31 Even Mailer—normally so combative—hesitated; but he had not reckoned with one American writer more combative than he.

  Within days, something changed. “Whipped into line by Susan, almost all of them found their better selves,” Rushdie wrote.32 The idea was to place the emphasis on the book, which almost nobody had seen, rather than on the controversy. PEN lined up leading writers to read excerpts. Mailer turned up, and so did Joan Didion, Don DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow, Diana Trilling, Larry McMurtry, Edward Said, Robert Caro, and Leon Wieseltier. “I’m glad it was Susan who was president rather than somebody a little more timid,” said Rushdie.

  This solidarity gave Rushdie, dispirited by “non-Islamic hostility,” an important source of support. “The cardinal of New York, the British chief rabbi, the pope were all on the other side. All perfectly willing to condemn the novel they hadn’t read.” The day after the reading, the chains B. Dalton and Barnes & Noble announced that they would, after all, carry The Satanic Verses. “It was very important for me,” he said, after hearing recordings of the reading. “To have allies is very strengthening.” First among them was the woman he called “Good Susan.”

  Chapter 30

  Casual Intimacy

  When she met Susan, Annie Leibovitz was famous even by the standards of Susan’s world. Not yet forty, she had been prominent since the time most people her age—she was born in 1949—were in college. Her father was an air force officer, which meant that Anna-Lou, like Susan, had a nomadic childhood. This reinforced the centrality of her family: “My sisters and brothers”—she was one of six children—“have always been and still are my best friends.”1 Constantly pulling up stakes made relationships outside the family difficult to maintain. But for a photographer, the ability to pop up anywhere, read the room, and get what she needed proved an essential gift.

  Like Susan, she had an alcoholic mother; like Susan, she displayed the characteristics of the adult child of the alcoholic: insecure and anxious to prove herself, tormenting herself and others with impossible perfectionism; lurching from crisis to crisis, veering from opulent generosity to impetuous violence. Like so many children of alcoholic homes, she had a propensity to substance abuse,2 though in contrast to Susan she described her childhood as “extremely happy” and remembered “a strong feeling of being loved.”3

  During the Vietnam War, her father was posted to Clark Air Base, the giant military city in the Philippines from which much of the war was staged: he himself was often in Vietnam. In 1967, at the height of the antiwar movement, Annie started art school in San Francisco, the center of that movement. After a year studying painting, she visited her parents, and she and her mother took a trip to Japan. There, she bought her first serious camera and took it up Mount Fuji. She loved the immediacy of photography and its promise of a path out of the isolation of the painter’s studio. “There were a lot of angry abstract expressionists in the painting studios,” she said. “I wasn’t ready for abstraction. I wanted reality.”4 Later, as a photographer, she retained a painterly sensibility tha
t would become ever more refined as her means, financial and technical, increased.

  In 1969, torn between loyalty to her father and agony about the war, she sought a third option, heading to a kibbutz. But “becoming an expatriate wasn’t going to solve anything,” she realized, and returned to America with a pile of Photograph of Israel. A year after “Trip to Hanoi,” Annie began to respond to the war with pictures of the antiwar protests roiling San Francisco and Berkeley. With the encouragement of a boyfriend, she took these, along with her work from the kibbutz, to the art director of a new magazine. “In the younger generation,” said Roger Black, who would become art director a few years later, “Rolling Stone was probably more important a magazine than any magazine since.”5

  Annie Leibovitz gave a face to that generation’s heroes, and in the process became one herself. She made a spectacular debut when, still only twenty, she prevailed upon Jann Wenner to let her photograph John Lennon. Only three years older, Wenner was notoriously cheap; Annie snagged the assignment by mentioning that she could fly to New York on a youth fare, and her expense report for the two weeks was twenty-five dollars.6 “Yoko said later that she and John were impressed that Jann let someone like me photograph people who were so famous.”7 Her close-up portrait was on the cover of Rolling Stone’s January 21, 1971, issue. The cover put Annie on her way to becoming what Kathy Ryan, the renowned photo editor of The New York Times Magazine, called “the court painter to some of the most famous people of our era.”8

  Less than two years later, Shel Silverstein wrote a song that became a hit for the group Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show:

  We take all kinds of pills that give us all kind of thrills

  But the thrill we’ve never known

  Is the thrill that’ll getcha when you get your picture

  On the cover of the Rolling Stone.9

  “That was an endorsement,” said Andrew Eccles, who became her assistant a few years later. “To say I want to be on the cover of the Rolling Stone was to say: I want to be photographed by Annie Leibovitz.”10

  * * *

  Leibovitz was lucky to be in the right place at the right time—San Francisco at the peak of the counterculture. She was lucky to happen upon a fledgling magazine that became the symbol of a generation. But to reach the summit of her profession and stay there for a career spanning nearly five decades took more than luck, and part of her secret was her ability to get places other people could not.

  She got in people’s faces, said Timothy Crouse, who wrote for Rolling Stone in the early years:

  She had this thing that I never saw in any other photographer, which was that she was able, literally, to get in people’s faces. The lens was in their face and it could be a person that she had worked with and had time to establish some rapport with or that she knew a little bit, or it could be a person that she had met one second before in the street. It wasn’t only that she was fearless. It wasn’t like she was just in their face in a brazen way. In one second, she was able to establish some kind of rapport.11

  She got in people’s homes, said Andrew Eccles:

  The subject would say, “Well, you can’t come to my house.” That became the thing that she would have to do, is go to their house. “How am I going to get to their house?” We’re going to keep asking. We’re going to maybe stake out the house. Whatever it was. There was a relentless drive.12

  She got people naked. The number of people who appeared in Rolling Stone partially or entirely undressed became a running joke, and part of the magazine’s appeal.

  It’s really a lot of fun taking pictures with me. And then I slap them in the mud! And then I hang them from the ceiling! And they say, “I heard you were hard, Leibovitz. I heard it wasn’t easy.”13

  She got into people’s beds. “Sexuality plays a huge part in her work,” said Karen Mullarkey, who became Rolling Stone’s photo editor in 1974. “All really excellent photographers are seductive—because they deal in casual intimacy.” A childhood spent on the move, negotiating new towns, new schools, new people, had given her a talent for casual intimacy.

  They make you think they’re your friend, they’re your whatever, and then they get what they need, and they’re fucking out of there. You’re photographing a celebrity. You do whatever it takes to suck up to them, make them feel safe. Then they’re vulnerable—then you go in for the kill—and then it’s over.14

  Getting in people’s faces, getting into their houses, getting them naked, getting them—literally—into the mud: this was the photographer’s game of dominance, said another Rolling Stone veteran, Max Aguilera-Hellweg:

  Annie knew from the beginning the photographer’s psychology of dealing with people. You are controlling your subject from the minute you call them. Everything you say is a constant, evolving equation, to get more time with them, to get more intimacy, to get them to open up more—and to stay dominant. To get them on film. For them to reveal themselves. Sometimes it’s exposing yourself, becoming more intimate yourself. Sometimes it’s saying the wrong thing on purpose to get them to challenge you. But if you don’t do it from the very first second, you’ve lost.15

  * * *

  In the early years, before she herself became a celebrity, Annie had to find a connection to her subjects. On the one hand, she approached them as Susan approached her portraits of Canetti or Artaud: “with really tremendous thought and respect, and admiration for who the person is. She celebrated them,” said Eccles.

  She really loved her subjects. Sometimes really loved her subjects, but she just would flatter everything that the person did. Sometimes photographers don’t have those people skills. Someone will be in front of the camera, and they’ll say “Oh, don’t do that, you look fat” or “Don’t sit that way.” The only things to come out of Annie’s mouth were how wonderful what you were doing was—but maybe try this instead. She made people feel great about themselves. That allowed people to relax and feel safe, and maybe take their clothes off or maybe be gently coaxed into an idea that they were a little on the fence about.16

  Annie’s subjects made love to more than just the camera. The number of subjects she reportedly slept with, from Mick Jagger to Bruce Springsteen, was also fabled.17 “There’s a whole series of pictures of Jerry Garcia, and he’s clearly waking up in the morning and climbing out of bed,” said Sarah Lazin, who started working at Rolling Stone in 1971. Karen Mullarkey recalled how Annie shot Linda Ronstadt in medias res, spread out in bed, ass in the air, clad in a slinky red negligee.

  You just don’t get pictures like that. “Hey, why don’t you get on the bed? Hey, why don’t you hike your skirt up?” That didn’t happen that way. It was much more personal.18

  Ronstadt was thirty when Annie took those pictures. She had been constantly portrayed as a girl half her age, so Annie decided to show her grown-up side. Ronstadt later “bitterly regretted” the pictures, claiming that Annie tricked her, and that they were taken on a “break.”19 Despite her protestations of love toward her subjects, Annie prided herself on being a vulture:

  I like to work with these people where they’re going to have the time, and they’re going to be bored shitless and have nothing else to do. You know, get them when they’re vulnerable.20

  This was the camera-as-vampire that Susan had denounced. The Photograph of Ronstadt put the viewer above her. Her face is invisible, removed along with her clothes; her nearly exposed genitals invite penetration. To get the pictures, Annie had used the techniques of Diane Arbus: “I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do—that was one of my favorite things about it,” Arbus wrote, “and when I first did it I felt very perverse.”21 Susan quoted the phrase in On Photography; Leibovitz admired Arbus, and Annie’s flattering of her subjects in order to dominate them echoes Susan’s description of Arbus’s methods: “Far from spying on freaks and pariahs, catching them unawares, the photographer has gotten to know them, reassured them.”22 This was another way of asserting the dominance Susan saw behind every
use of the camera.

  To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.23

  * * *

  Seduction was part of the trick. Another was on the mirror on the nightstand that Ronstadt was reaching for, just out of view. “She was lying on her stomach with her legs spread in the teddy and she’s reaching over,” Mullarkey said. “That’s because there’s cocaine on the mirror.”24

  At the time, neither sex nor drugs caused alarm. “Everybody was sleeping with everybody,” said Lazin. “It wasn’t like it is now, verboten and illegal.” It was the same with drugs: “It’s hard to explain that drugs in that period was everywhere and normal,” said Mullarkey. “We hadn’t known anybody yet who died,” said Black.25

  Rolling Stone began in 1967, the year of the “Summer of Love,” when a song invited people to San Francisco with flowers in their hair. Thousands flocked to “love-ins,” and marijuana smoke wafted over concerts, meditation gatherings, and sexual celebrations made possible by the birth control pill and advances in treating venereal disease.

  Besides weed, the emblematic drug of the Summer of Love was LSD; but in the seventies, more, harder, drugs became widely available. Though two early Rolling Stone icons, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, overdosed within days of each other in the fall of 1970, the dangers of cocaine and heroin had not yet sunk in. Rolling Stone even had in-house drug dealers, who worked from a room known as the Capri Lounge. “You could buy your reefer there,” said Mullarkey. “You could get your cocaine there. It was a company store.” The two hippies who ran the Capri Lounge photographed all their customers to make sure they would never be turned in, and—like all smart drug dealers—refrained from indulging in their own merchandise. Both retired in style: “One has a giant farm in the Catskills with a view of the Hudson,” said Roger Black. “The other lives on an Alabama horse farm with two thousand acres, and giant stables, and Range Rovers.”26

 

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