Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  I stayed late with Ansel that night and returned early the next morning. He seemed to be doing quite well: his appetite was better, and he was looking forward to seeing his friends and family after the concert. After lunch, as concert time drew near, Ansel absolutely positively insisted that I go. His other physician, John Morrison, assured me that he would stay with him until I returned.

  A palpable pall was hanging over Ansel and Virginia’s house when I arrived. Although no one else had been apprised of the seriousness of Ansel’s condition, people seemed to know that this concert was to be his unscripted elegy. Vova was gravely concerned and asked me to tell him all about his friend. I talked positively, but Ashkenazy’s face remained set in melancholy.

  Vova had chosen Schubert’s Sonata in B-flat Major, Schumann’s Papillons op. 2, and Chopin’s Ballade op. 52, no. 4, and Scherzo op. 54, no. 4. For an encore, he played Schubert’s haunting Impromptu op. 90, no. 3. The music reminded us of Ansel’s own lifelong devotion to beauty. I felt as if the notes were floating gently to heaven; the concert provided a protected island in time where nothing bad could happen.

  We had planned this Easter, a day of sunshine and warmth, as a celebration. Following the performance, the guests milled about outside, where assorted food and drink stations offered the best California wines and Russian vodka, raw oysters shucked to order, home-cured salmon, locally made grilled sausages, a sushi bar presided over by a Japanese master, and, of course, a kilo of Malossol Beluga caviar for Vova. No one ate much. No one had much fun.

  After we had stayed an acceptable length of time, I drove Vova and Dody to the hospital. Earlier, when I left, Ansel had seemed quite weak, but now, as we entered his room in the ICU, he sat straight up in bed, extended his arms with a dramatic flourish, and, in a powerful voice, boomed, “Ashkenazy! So great of you to come!” There followed big bear hugs between the two men, and much joking and laughter. Ansel acted like his old self; he was so vital that it was impossible to believe he could be seriously ill. Vova presented Ansel with his latest recording on cassette tape, of Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto.

  The Ashkenazys departed, and then Otto and Sue Meyer arrived. Thoughtfully, they stayed only a few minutes. Ansel ate a bit of dinner, and then almost his whole family came in: Virginia, Michael and his wife, Jeanne, and their two children, Sarah and Matthew; and Anne and her husband, Ken, with two of her three daughters, Ginny and Alison (only Sylvia was missing). Ansel was in great spirits, drawing happiness and energy from them as they surrounded his bed with stories from the day and laughter.

  When it was just the two of us, knowing that the Ashkenazys were coming to our house for dinner, Ansel said, “Good-bye, dahlinnk,” in his best Russian accent. As I left, I told him I would return later to tuck him in.

  At about nine-thirty that night, as I was preparing to go back to the hospital, Dr. Morrison called and said that Ansel was having some problems. I was out the door in a flash, and ten minutes later I ran into the ICU. Ansel’s room was full of doctors and nurses, his bed barricaded behind a battery of machines. Without thinking, I quickly squirmed through the complex paraphernalia, under tubes and between wires, and climbed up on Ansel’s bed. I hugged him as best I could and placed my cheek next to his, my lips at his ear.

  A clear plastic oxygen mask covered his mouth and nose, and lines seemed to be attached all about his body. I started softly talking to Ansel, explaining to him what was going on. I told him that he was going to be fine, that he had been through many things in his life and would get through this, too.

  Dr. Morrison asked if he was conscious and responsive. As I whispered in his ear, Ansel briefly squeezed my hand. He tried to talk but couldn’t. I put my face right in front of his, nose to nose, and kept eye contact with him. He looked at me with resignation.

  Ansel’s Walkman was on the bed next to him, its earphones dangling over the side; he had been listening to the Brahms tape when struck by a severe heart attack. Ashkenazy’s giving him that recording on this day was a bizarre coincidence: the Second Piano Concerto was the featured music in Ansel’s recurring nightmare of failure, the piece he did not know how to play.

  Dr. Morrison now asked me if Ansel still wanted to live. If he did, he would have to be intubated, with a breathing tube inserted down his throat so he could be placed on artificial respiration. There was no way that Ansel could tell me himself, but I knew he was not a quitter and would want to fight for his life, so I said yes.

  It was just at this time that I looked up at Dr. Morrison and asked, “Where’s Virginia?” I realized it was she who should be making this decision, but in the midst of the crisis no one had thought to call her. She was immediately telephoned.

  After I said yes to the intubation, Dr. Morrison insisted that I leave the room while the procedure was performed. He said it would be difficult, and the staff would need to be all around Ansel’s head. I hugged Ansel to me and told him I would be just outside. He looked at me, his eyes now seeming to plead that he needed to die, but I had already set the wheels of medicine in motion.

  I stood in the hallway, somehow holding on to a wall, and totally broke down. Virginia arrived just as Dr. Morrison came out to tell us that Ansel had died during the intubation. Virginia went in to be alone with him for a short while; when she emerged again, she was ready to go home.

  By this time, Anne’s daughter Ginny, who had driven her grandmother to the hospital, was waiting with me outside the room, as were Jim and a few other friends of Ansel’s, including Maggi Weston. While most chose not to go in for a last visit, Maggi and I both wanted to. I got back up on the bed on one side and Maggi got up on the other. We both put our arms around him, just as I had done a few minutes before. He was still warm. Knowing that hearing is often the last sense left intact, I placed my cheek next to his once more and whispered that it was time for him to go. I thanked him for fighting so hard to stay with us and told him that I loved him and that he would always be with me. Maggi stroked Ansel’s hand and murmured in his other ear. I had a strange feeling, and turning around, I saw Ansel up in the corner of the room looking down at us. Maggi saw him, too. It may be that our need to detain this courageous and magnificent man was so great that from the depths of our beings we envisioned him as still with us; or perhaps the evidence provided by our eyes was for real, and we saw AA as he left his body.

  Ansel’s death certificate states that he died at 10:18 p.m. on April 22, 1984. An autopsy revealed that the immediate cause of death was respiratory arrest due to cardiogenic shock and congestive heart failure caused by acute myocardial infarction, or heart attack. Under the circumstances, it was a great comfort to know he had died so quickly.

  One of Ansel’s last wishes was that after he died, tissue samples should be taken to determine what effects the years of photographic chemistry had had on his body; he was sure that some of the more toxic chemicals, such as selenium, had pre-embalmed him. Dr. Morrison complied with his request, but months later we learned that nothing of significance had been found.

  Virginia wanted closure. Ansel’s body was taken the next day to the Little Chapel by the Sea in neighboring Pacific Grove, and that afternoon, his family, his staff, and a few friends gathered for the cremation. Ken Helms, Virginia and Ansel’s son-in-law and former Unitarian minister, said a few beautiful words, and then Virginia was presented with her husband’s ashes in a cardboard box, tied with a string and still radiating heat. We drove to our house and poured stiff drinks, and I put Virginia in our recliner with her feet up as we all watched the national and local news. Ansel’s death was the lead story on every channel.

  Chapter 22: Post-Mortem

  Most biographies would end here, but not this one, because Ansel Adams did not well and truly die on April 22, 1984. With great artists, their art lives on. Ansel and I had almost completed the autobiography manuscript. Bent on meeting our fall deadline, I did not skip a beat, but kept on organizing his text, filling in the gaps with a minimum of my own writing.
After years of total immersion in his life, I discovered that I could write almost like him, and if my efforts lacked his soaring inspiration, they nonetheless served to stitch his pieces into what I hoped was a seamless, finished narrative.

  Ansel’s exclusive publishing contract continued along with an unabated series of projects. All of his books authorized by the AAPRT are published by Little, Brown, whose staff I worked very closely with both before and after his death. I was on the phone daily to Janet Swan Bush, an unsung hero who skillfully coordinated all aspects of the autobiography from editorial through production. Early on, Little, Brown assigned senior editor Ray Roberts to the project, flying him out to Carmel with company president Arthur Thornhill, Jr., in April 1981 to introduce us. I was concerned about how much control Ray would want to have over the book, but Ansel was even more worried than I: he thought the boys back east were sending a watchdog. It turned out that Ray was really there to help us. Never negatively interfering, he was hugely supportive of Ansel and of me, providing wise and honest counsel that resulted in a much better book.

  I shipped off the manuscript to Ray and Janet on October 12, 1984, making a note to myself that after five years of gestation and labor, the newborn weighed five and a half pounds. I had come right down to the wire but managed to complete the text by the deadline, having spent two weeks in an isolation cell (OK, it had a view of the Pacific), with my hands grafted to the keyboard, wearing the same flannel nightgown day in and day out.

  At the time of his death, Ansel had begun selecting photographs for only one chapter, “Yosemite.” Resolved that his autobiography would not be illustrated by the same images that had appeared time and again in earlier books, he put off making any decisions until all his forty thousand negatives could be proofed. It might seem astonishing that this had never been done, but it had been his lifelong habit to speed from project to project so quickly that he had examined most of his negatives only peremptorily, and had made prints from only a small fraction of them.

  When Ansel moved from San Francisco to Carmel in 1962, he had a concrete bunker carved into the hillside right outside his office door. Although it was designed as a nuclear fallout shelter, there was never so much as a bottle of water or a package of freeze-dried food within its walls. Its impressive metal-clad door bore the silk-screened message danger, high voltage emblazoned in red paint to discourage break-ins. Encased in the earth, the vault maintained a stable, cool temperature year-round, and a dehumidifier kicked in when necessary, so Ansel felt justified in describing it as humidity and temperature controlled. Inside, the vault was lined with steel filing cabinets and cardboard boxes holding his negatives, of which only about two thousand had ever been printed. The remaining thirty-eight thousand were anything but lousy; in fact, Ansel was convinced that a large number of them were as fine as anything he had ever made. All along, he had destroyed all those negatives that he did not think were any good, since to print them would be a waste of considerable time and effort.

  When he died, we were still completing the proofing project, making uncorrected, rough contact prints directly from the negatives.1 Ansel saw both the autobiography and a projected book of letters as showcases for his unknown photographs, providing him with compelling reasons to make new prints.2

  Chris Rainier had first come to Ansel’s attention as an eager young student (and recent graduate of the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara) in the 1980 Yosemite Workshop. After the departure of John Sexton in 1982, Chris became Ansel’s last photographic assistant. The incredibly capable John was a very hard act to follow, but Chris had his own strengths and made the job his own. While he seemed a centered presence at all times, a huge bonus for us when the pressure was on, Chris’s recurrent nightmare was of accidentally dropping Monolith’s glass plate right in front of Ansel, watching in horror as it hit the floor, shattering irrevocably in slow motion.3 It was Chris’s responsibility to proof all the negatives and make most of the reproduction prints for the autobiography. Because we were overwhelmed with work, shortly before Ansel’s death, I hired Rod Dresser, a former Navy officer and photographer by avocation, to help us out. He proved invaluable during the difficult years that followed, assisting in the production of the autobiography and the letters. 4

  Not long after sending in the manuscript, I began reviewing the many boxes of reproduction prints, and then I tackled the proofs. Ansel had been so clear in his instructions that I felt as if he were Jiminy Cricket sitting on my shoulder guiding the selection of each image. In the end, a full 40 percent of the pictures in the autobiography had never before been seen.

  Ansel had not wanted the photographs to be merely illustrative; they were also to communicate a mood, an attitude. With this in mind, for the “Family” chapter, about his difficult childhood and critical mother and aunt, I selected dark and moody images, while lyrical pictures that seemed to sing on their own found a home in the “Music” chapter that opened with a booming waterfall.

  Chapter 5, “Yosemite,” began with a full-page reproduction of The Cliff of El Capitan, an image that only Ansel himself could have selected (somehow I wouldn’t have heard his little voice in my ear on this one) and the sole picture that I knew he definitely wanted to include. For me, the spirit of Yosemite is best communicated in his views of the entire valley, but for Ansel himself, Yosemite was granite walls, and this image shows just that: the flat, gray cliff of El Capitan framed without its top or bottom, visually independent of both heaven and earth. There is no sense of El Capitan’s enormous scale, just of its rockness, the essence of Ansel’s Yosemite.

  All of our deadlines were met, and Ansel Adams: An Autobiography appeared in bookstores in October 1985, in time for the gift-giving season when fully half of all books are sold. If the autobiography was not quite as handsome as Ansel’s purely photographic books, it was a milestone: four hundred pages loaded with 250 illustrations, released at a retail price of fifty dollars.

  Shortly before the actual publication date, I received a phone call from the head of Little, Brown’s publicity department. He had read the manuscript and with some excitement told me, “This will make the New York Times bestseller list!” He had a great feel for the book, and I could tell he really liked it. (He also was privy to the book’s pre-sales.) He placed the resources of Little, Brown behind the autobiography, springing for significant advertising. Life was good. I sent him a dozen long-stemmed red roses.

  The autobiography was released to coincide with a major exhibition of Ansel’s work at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In his stead, I had to represent the book as best I could, giving interviews on National Public Radio and on Today, the most important morning television show in terms of book sales.

  The only task I dreaded was lecturing at the National Gallery. The museum had scheduled a full day of Ansel-related activities, including one speech before mine, by John Szarkowski of MoMA. When W. C. Fields cautioned against following children or animals he should have added John, who was a consummate speaker and photographic intellect, to his warning list.5 I stayed in my hotel room during his lecture; I knew if I listened to him I would never have the confidence to go out there on my own. But despite my fear that the audience would walk out, my lecture went fine, although we had to surmount a major technical glitch. We had assembled the glass-mounted slides in the humidity of Carmel. Jim was my projectionist and discovered during the half-hour break between lectures that when an image was projected on the auditorium’s huge screen, dampness trapped inside the slide evaporated under the heat of the projector lens providing a distracting visual effect of some blob slithering across the surface. He ran to our room, grabbed my hair dryer, returned to the projection booth, and began hand-drying each slide. When I finished the lecture, I had nearly overtaken him, but we just made it.

  The autobiography found a huge and responsive public, and the reviews were terrific. As predicted, it did appear on the New York Times best-seller list and stayed there for six weeks—the most
expensive book at that date to achieve that honor, and the first (and so far only) book of Ansel’s. It probably would have stayed on the list much longer had Little, Brown not sold out of books, making it unavailable in many markets for much of the holiday season. In 1990, Ansel Adams: An Autobiography was selected as one of the hundred most important books of the decade by the American Library Association. To my disappointment, a reduced-format paperback appeared in 1996, stripped of most of its photographs and therefore grievously missing what had been so important to Ansel, the synthesis of his images with his words.

  My involvement in this book brought me great rewards, far beyond the financial. Nearly once a week someone still tells me how much he or she loved the book and was moved by it; on occasion I have even been told it was “life-changing”! I hear such comments in my heart.

  The National Gallery exhibition was another Adams coup. That museum had traditionally been the stuffiest of the stuffy in terms of photography, but had lately relented and deemed the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz, then Paul Strand, and finally Ansel Adams worthy of its hallowed walls. For such an occasion, a catalog was essential, but it had to be something that would neither compete nor conflict with the autobiography.

  The National Gallery exhibition was sponsored by Pacific Telesis, a California communications company that had purchased one of the last complete Museum Sets just before Ansel died. (Pacific Telesis was absorbed in 2005 by AT&T.) This was not a mere matter of handing over the money: Ansel insisted on interviewing the president of the company and the president and director of their foundation to personally assess their intentions. Over drinks at his home, Ansel questioned them for more than an hour before giving his consent. They promised they would actively tour their photographs, and they kept their word: their Museum Set was the core of the National Gallery exhibition, supplemented by murals and screens chosen by Nick Cikovsky, who was then the eminent curator of American Art. Ansel’s show attracted 651,652 people, far greater than any other photography exhibition before it.6