She threw up her hands. “Living hand-to-mouth, that’s what it is! I just hope you’re better at handling money than your father was.”
It was late fall in Ohio, and the clouds were spectacular, glowing as though they were lit from within by thousands of candles. Every spare hour during the week and all day Sunday, I spent taking pictures in the Flats. Once, when I was alone around eleven o’clock at night, I was accosted by two policemen.
“Whatcha think yer doin’ out here at this hour, young lady?” demanded the younger, taller cop.
“Why, I’m taking pictures!” I explained with a big smile. “Just look at how that bridge gleams in the moonlight! Have you ever seen anything like it? And over there”—I pointed to flame-colored smoke erupting from a tall stack—“won’t that be a great shot?”
“By golly, she’s right,” growled the older, paunchy cop. “But it’s dangerous for you to be here alone, miss. Some men might get the wrong idea and mistake you for a lady of the evening. Let us tag along, to make sure you’re safe.”
I thanked them, and they stayed with me until I was done and promised to watch out for me whenever they were assigned that beat.
Finally, I got a real break. I heard that the public relations officer for Union Trust Bank was looking for a photograph to use on the cover of their monthly magazine. I showed him my portfolio. He flipped through it, stopping at a photograph I’d done of the new High Level Bridge, which soared above the Cuyahoga River. “This one,” he said. “Fifty dollars.”
It would have been unprofessional to jump up and down and clap my hands, so I simply nodded and said, “An excellent choice.”
Each month I went back to the bank and sold another picture—of bridges, trains, smokestacks, factories, steel mills, the whole industrial landscape of the Flats. No one told me what to photograph. They liked my work and gave me a free hand. Now I had an almost guaranteed income of fifty dollars a month!
I also earned money working for wealthy people, taking pictures of their beautiful mansions and carefully tended gardens, manicured lawns, and shimmering reflecting pools. I delivered the finished photographs in a handsome custom package that looked expensive, and I charged high prices to make sure my clients appreciated the work they were getting.
But my fanatical dedication to my work left no time for a social life, and I had few friends. My brother, Roger, busy with who knows what, was rarely around when I visited Mother. Ruth was working in Chicago. Mostly I was alone, except for Beme, who was like a doting uncle, and brotherly Earl, and I was happier than I had ever been in my life. I bought a battered old green Chevy, named it Patrick, and enjoyed a new kind of freedom. My twin goals—to be a famous photographer and a rich one—were beginning to feel like real possibilities, not just idle pipe dreams, and my drive to reach them kept me focused.
The year 1927 was an exciting time to be in Cleveland. A new skyscraper was going up on Public Square—Terminal Tower, with fifty-two floors, designed to be one of the tallest buildings in the world. Two mysterious brothers, the Van Sweringens, known around Cleveland as “the Vans,” were financing the project. They had the power to buy up almost anything they wanted, especially railroads, and the money to build whatever they chose. Rumors circulated that they planned to have their private apartments at the very top, accessible by a secret elevator.
I photographed the Vans’ tower at all times of the day and night from a distance as it climbed higher. I longed to get closer to it, and one day I decided to simply ignore the fences and barriers and KEEP OUT signs, skirted around them, and set up my camera.
In less than a minute I heard a watchman shouting at me. I pretended not to hear him until his hand clamped down hard on my shoulder. “Just what in blazes do you think you’re doing?” he roared.
“Just trying to take a picture, sir,” I said, smiling apologetically. He ordered me away, telling me not to come back under any circumstances, and I had to obey. I vowed that someday I would have my studio in Terminal Tower, but first I had to establish my reputation, and that was taking longer than I wanted. Something big had to happen.
20
A New Direction—1927
MY FRIENDS AT UNION TRUST CALLED TO ASK ME TO photograph a prize steer in the bank lobby. No explanation of how it got there, or why.
I paid a call on my subject, a jet-black devil with fearsome horns, a fierce eye, and a belligerent reaction to finding himself in a roped-off enclosure surrounded by stark white marble. A couple of schoolboys had raised the steer for a school project, and the photographs would be used as part of the bank’s public relations program.
I ran to Beme for help. When I described the black subject and the glaring white background, Beme figured out that I would have to use artificial light. I’d never used flash powder. Beme promised to lend me what I needed and, in the interests of safety to myself and anyone who happened to be in the lobby as well as the steer, he would also lend me Earl Leiter.
The beast was snorting and stomping and tossing his massive head when Earl showed up. Earl and I climbed gingerly over the ropes and began to set up our equipment. A curious crowd gathered to watch, as though we were a pair of matadors at a bullfight. The steer bellowed.
“Timing is everything,” Earl said. “I’ll set off the flash powder just as you trip the shutter.”
I put my head under the blue camera cloth. The steer lowered his head, swished his tail, and glared straight into my lens. I froze.
“What’s wrong?” Earl muttered.
“I can’t remember how to do this,” I whimpered. “Beme told me exactly what to do, and now I’ve forgotten everything he said.”
Earl’s hand reached surreptitiously beneath the camera cloth and fumbled for the shutter release cable. “Focused?” he whispered.
“Focused,” I breathed from under the cloth.
Earl set off the charges of flash powder, simultaneously clicking the shutter. There was a burst of light and a billow of smoke. A cloud of ashes rained down. The steer appeared stunned. Earl and I grabbed our gear, climbed over the ropes, and raced back to Earl’s darkroom. A short time later I returned with a proof of the photo to show to the bank officials. It was not my greatest photograph, but it did portray a powerful beast pawing the ground and poised for a charge.
The bankers were pleased. They wanted 485 copies by the next morning to distribute to newspapers and schools. “Can you do that, Miss Bourke-White?”
“Certainly,” I said, wondering if I actually could do it, and rushed to tell Earl and Beme the news.
“Four hundred and eighty-five glossy prints?” Beme groaned, slapping his forehead. “You’re kidding, right? You couldn’t print that many in a week with that enlarger of yours, even if you worked around the clock.”
“Maybe some commercial studio could do it,” I suggested, worried that I was about to lose everything.
“Not a chance, kiddo. Not a chance.”
I blinked back tears. Beme grimaced. “Okay, okay, cheer up. We’ll give it our best shot.”
After the camera shop closed for the day, with me behind Patrick’s wheel, Beme beside me, and Earl wedged in the back seat, we drove to a steakhouse to fortify ourselves for a long night. Then we climbed up to Earl’s fifth-floor darkroom and went to work. Around one o’clock, with almost half the order left to go, we ran out of the ferrotype tins used to put a glossy finish on photographs. Beme rounded up all the tins he had in stock.
“Never fear, kiddo,” Beme said, “I’ll wrap ’em all up just like new when we’re done, and nobody will ever be the wiser.”
We finished sometime around dawn. I knew very well that I couldn’t have pulled this off without Beme and Earl. I still had a lot to learn. Beme promised to have the prints delivered to the bank. “Go get some sleep. You look like you’re about to pass out.”
Bleary-eyed, I took the long way home, driving past the steel mills just as the sun was coming up. On a high point overlooking the Otis Steel plant, I pulled over
and watched a line of slag cars filled with the waste remaining after the metal had been separated from the ore. One by one the cars dumped the redhot slag in a brilliant cascade down the hillside.
The sight re-ignited my desire to get inside a steel mill; the question was how to accomplish that. I’d tried several times, but each time I asked, I was told the same story about a visiting schoolteacher who had keeled over in a dead faint from the heat and the fumes. It had happened some twenty years earlier, but the story was repeated as though it was a biblical truth. The message was that women were not welcome.
A few days later, when Beme and I were eating goulash in a restaurant near the camera shop, I asked, “So how do I wangle my way into a mill? That fainting schoolteacher has made it impossible.”
“It all comes down to who you know,” Beme said. “So, kiddo, who do you know who’s got connections?”
I made a list of everybody I’d done work for and thought of Mr. John Sherwin, the president of the bank where I’d photographed the steer. Mrs. Sherwin had once hired me to photograph her garden. When I found out that Mr. Sherwin was on the board of Otis Steel, I called for an appointment. His secretary informed me that he was a very busy man, but I persisted until he agreed to see me.
“Stunning photograph of the animal, my dear,” said the courtly Mr. Sherwin, “but I cannot understand why a pretty young girl like you, who takes such lovely pictures of gardens and flowers and the like, would want to be around rough-talking workers in a dirty, noisy steel mill.” He sighed. “But if you’re determined to do this, I’ll send a letter to Mr. Kulas. He’s the president of Otis.”
I told Beme about my triumph, knowing he’d be as excited as I was. But I had something else on my mind: I wanted to ask him for a loan. Beme had often told me, “If you need a few bucks to get you through, just say the word.”
I needed more than a few bucks. I needed fifty dollars. To look the part of a successful professional when I walked into Mr. Kulas’s office, it would take more than just a hat and matching gloves. I had my eye on a sheared beaver jacket I’d seen in a shop window.
Beme looked at me incredulously. “You can barely pay your rent, and you want to buy a fur coat?”
“It will be a good investment. You have to spend money to make money.”
Beme rolled his eyes. Then he pulled out a sheaf of bills and peeled off five tens. I bought the jacket and wore it back to the camera shop to model it.
“You do look swell, I’ll grant you that,” Beme acknowledged gruffly.
Mr. Sherwin kept his word, and a week later I had an appointment with the president of Otis Steel. Confident in my furs, I marched into Mr. Kulas’s office with my portfolio. He occupied a massive leather chair behind a massive mahogany desk and asked me why on earth I wanted to take pictures in a steel mill. He leafed idly through the photographs I’d brought to show him. “Why not stick to flower gardens, which you do so elegantly?”
“Because I see a different kind of beauty in a steel mill, sir,” I said.
I had to convince him that I was not trying to sell him anything. I wasn’t asking him to buy my pictures. All I wanted was a chance to experiment with a subject that deeply interested me.
“Very well,” he said at last, “I will notify the supervisor that you are to be admitted any time you come to the mill. I’m leaving next week for an extended tour of Europe. I hope to see you when I return.” He stood up—he was short, stocky, broad-chested, imposing—and reached out to shake my hand. “My best wishes in your endeavors, Miss Bourke-White.”
I plunged into my new project. Beme called it my “obsession.” He volunteered to go with me that first night, and he looked me over disapprovingly. “What kind of a getup is that? A skirt and high-heeled shoes? You look like you’re going to a cocktail party.”
I made every mistake possible, not just my clothes. What I wanted to do was beyond me technically. I didn’t realize how much I still did not know. I had no idea how to deal with the sharp contrasts of light and shadow. The results were not just disappointing—they were terrible.
“Underexposed,” Beme pronounced when the film was developed. “There’s no actinic value in the light given off by the molten metal.”
Actinic value? I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“The molten metal gives off a red glow, like the red light you use in the darkroom,” he explained. “Red light doesn’t register on the negative. You might think it’s lighting up the whole place, but it isn’t.”
Night after night I went back, sometimes alone, sometimes with Earl and Beme. It was a continuing struggle, but it was the most exciting thing I’d ever done. We tried using floodlights and setting off flash powder. We changed lenses and tried different angles, but nothing worked. The mill was too vast, too dark.
At first we had been welcomed into the mill. Then we were tolerated. But now we were a nuisance. My camera and I got in the way. There were places I was absolutely forbidden to go, and I went there anyway, determined to get the kind of artistic shots I could see in my mind’s eye, or die trying. And that’s what everyone at the mill was afraid would happen—that I’d fall and break my bones or tumble headfirst into a ladle of molten steel.
The night superintendent’s attitude ballooned from mild impatience to anger, until he’d had enough. He claimed that I was interfering with the men’s regular work. They wanted to help, and they’d drop everything to hold up a shield to keep me from getting burned by the intense heat. I was cutting into their production, he said. Looking out for me was not what they were paid to do. If the boss found out, there would be trouble. The superintendent threw me out.
Even Beme was discouraged. We had exhausted every possibility we could think of to capture the magic of steel-making. It would take a miracle, Beme agreed.
And then a miracle actually did occur. A traveling salesman named Jackson stopped off and visited Beme on his way to Hollywood, where he planned to sell a new type of magnesium flare to the movie industry. Beme thought these big flares might provide the right kind of light for my pictures and talked Jackson into coming to the mill with us one cold, snowy night. We knew when the superintendent took his break, and we could sneak in and evade him long enough to try out Jackson’s flares. He agreed to let us use two of them.
Two weren’t enough. We tried again, using four. Finally, with only one flare left, I captured a trail of sparks that showed up brilliantly on the negative. Success!
I hugged Jackson. But I’d celebrated too soon.
The negative was perfect, but the prints turned out gray and dull, the fault of the printing paper. I chalked up another failure.
And then a second miracle: a second traveling salesman appeared, this one named Charlie, whose specialty was photographic paper. Over a steak dinner Charlie told us about a new kind of paper that he thought was better suited to the kind of high-contrast dark-and-light photographs I was taking. We left our dinners unfinished and hurried back to the darkroom. The image appeared vividly on this new paper, and the results were exactly what I’d been struggling to achieve. I let out a whoop of pure joy.
I heard that Mr. Kulas was back from Europe. I chose a dozen prints from the many pictures I’d taken inside the mill and mounted them on heavy white stock. I begged Beme to drive to Otis Steel with me. Beme saw how nervous I was and squeezed my hand as I climbed out of the car. “You’ll do just fine, kiddo. Nobody’s done anything like the pictures you’ve got in that portfolio.”
I headed for the office building, my heels tap-tap-tapping on the wooden trestle across the mill yard and echoing the thudding of my heart. Mr. Kulas was in a meeting, and I had to endure an endless wait until I was finally in front of his desk, clutching my portfolio to keep my hands from shaking.
“Ah, my dear Miss Bourke-White! Here you are! Let me see what you’ve got.”
I watched as he lifted out each print and laid it on his desk until all twelve were lined up perfectly. He studied each one briefly, but his
gaze lingered over the photograph of white-hot molten slag overflowing from a ladle and reflecting on the shields that covered the men’s faces.
“Amazing,” he said. “Absolutely amazing. I’m quite sure no pictures like these have ever been taken before. I’m not even sure anyone has even tried. This is pioneering work. What is your price?”
I allowed myself to breathe. I had told Mr. Kulas the first time we met that I wasn’t trying to sell him anything. All I’d asked for was the chance to take photographs. But I knew that wealthy people—and Mr. Kulas was very rich—valued work only if they had to pay handsomely for it. I replied carefully, “You may choose to buy as many or as few as you wish, but the price is one hundred dollars a picture.”
“Agreed,” he answered shortly and proceeded to pick eight. Then he commissioned me to make another eight. “Our stockholders would be delighted to see these photographs. Corporate clients, too. Perhaps in a book—The Story of Steel, or some such. Privately printed, expensively done, fine stock, nicely bound, everything first class. Eh, Miss Bourke-White? What do you think?”
I was nearly speechless, thinking of the eight hundred dollars I’d soon have in the bank with another eight hundred coming. I wanted to throw my arms around this man, but naturally I did no such thing. I thanked him, we shook hands formally, and I nodded at the receptionist as I left the office with my head in the clouds. Then I let out another joyous whoop and clattered across the wooden trestle to tell Beme the incredible news.
“Ha!” said Beme. “I knew you’d pull it off, kiddo. This calls for champagne.”
We bought a bottle on the way to the camera shop and dashed up to the fifth floor to Earl’s darkroom. Beme yanked out the cork, releasing a geyser of the fizzing golden liquid all over my fur jacket.
Girl with a Camera Page 13