Girl with a Camera

by Carolyn Meyer

  We decided to get out of the city for the summer and rented a cottage in Connecticut. Erskine’s writing went so well there that we bought a house together and called it “Horseplay Hill.” Our new neighbors assumed we were married, and we never told them differently.

  But still I said no.

  All those years when I was striving to make a name for myself, I had sworn that I would not marry. I had achieved my goal. Thanks to Life magazine, my photographs and I were famous. For six more months I wrestled with the question: Why not marry? I was thirty-four, I truly loved Erskine; maybe I needed him as much as he needed me. It had become almost too much trouble not to be married.

  On Sunday night, February 26, 1939, I stopped agonizing. I said yes.

  Having come to that momentous decision, neither of us was willing to wait even one more day. Very early the next morning we were at the airport, ready to fly on the first plane to Nevada, where we could get a marriage license without the usual three-day delay. Erskine brought champagne to drink on the flight, but I had something more important in mind.

  “I want to draw up a contract listing certain conditions of our marriage,” I told Erskine as we flew west. “We can drink champagne later.”

  My bridegroom seemed surprised, but I insisted. “We need to be absolutely clear about certain things.”

  “Such as?”

  I ticked them off on my fingers. One, that if a disagreement came up, we would discuss it and solve the problem before bedtime. Two, that he would treat my friends as well as he did his own. Three, that he would try to control his moods. Four, and this was the most important: that he would not try to interfere with my work.

  I wrote it, and without even looking at it, Erskine signed it.

  The pilot announced that we were stopping for fuel in Reno. “Shall we get married here?” Erskine asked, and I said, “Skinny, nobody gets married in Reno! This is where people get divorced!”

  We borrowed a map from the pilot and looked for a town within a hundred miles that sounded more appealing. Silver City had a nice name. When the plane landed in Reno, we hurried to the courthouse to get our license and hailed a taxi to drive us to Silver City. The driver pointed out that Silver City was a ghost town. We’d have to take a minister with us, and another witness as well.

  “Where will we find a minister?” Erskine asked the cabbie.

  “Carson City,” said the helpful cabbie. “It’s the state capital. We’ll find somebody there.”

  And we did. Or rather, the cab driver did—a member of the state legislature, who happened to be sitting in the lobby of a hotel near the capitol. The lawmaker, authorized to perform a marriage ceremony, was delighted to be of assistance and climbed into the taxi with us. It was late afternoon when we pulled into Silver City, with not a soul in sight. The fact that it seemed completely deserted made it as charming as a stage set, and we knew immediately it was the right place. There was no time to lose in finding a church, because Erskine was determined that the knot would be tied before sundown.

  We did find a lovely old church, but when Erskine tried the weathered wooden door, it was locked. The cab driver was undaunted. He would find a key! The legislator pointed out a tobacco shop with a faded OPEN sign in the window. I hurried inside. “Do you happen to know how we can get into the church?” I asked the owner, whose face was as weathered as the church door. “It’s terribly important!”

  The tobacconist miraculously produced a key to the church from her apron pocket, and she volunteered to serve as our second witness. Five of us packed into the taxi, and back to the church we roared. The tobacconist turned the iron key in the rusty lock, and the door creaked open. A delicate blanket of dust lay over the wooden pews. Late afternoon sun filtered through unwashed windows and sparrows flitted among the rafters. We stood in front of the bare altar, Erskine pulled a wedding ring out of his pocket, the legislator recited whatever parts of the ceremony he knew by heart, and our witnesses nodded and smiled as though they were our closest relatives.

  After the ceremony the others went outside to wait. Erskine and I stood alone, holding hands, gazing out over the stark landscape of mesas and bluffs and desert, like unfinished sculptures in the fading light. I squeezed my new husband’s hand, and whispered, “I love you, Skinny.” My throat tightened with a rush of tenderness for the gentle man by my side who had waited so long for this moment.

  Our grinning cabbie dropped the tobacconist off at her shop and drove the state representative to his hotel in Carson City, where we decided to spend the night. The next morning we hired a private plane to fly us on to San Francisco, and that afternoon we sailed on the SS Lurline for a honeymoon in Hawaii.

  Once again I was somebody’s wife, and if I had any misgivings, I ignored them.

  27

  Europe at War—1939

  OUR FIRST MONTHS AS HUSBAND AND WIFE WERE all I could have reasonably wished for. Our book, North of the Danube, was praised when it came out, but I knew it wasn’t nearly as good as You Have Seen Their Faces. For my sake Erskine struggled to tame his unpredictable moods. I didn’t take on assignments that involved being away from home for long stretches, but there was too much happening in the world. I simply could not sit at home with the situation in Europe worsening by the day. I had to be in the midst of the action. My reputation depended on it, no matter what Erskine said.

  Late in the fall of 1939, I left for London. The good-byes were harder than ever. Erskine’s cables addressed to “Child Bride” found me there, and when I moved on to Rumania in December, even those he dispatched to “Honeychile” somehow found their destination. I missed our first wedding anniversary at the end of February, and in March 1940, I reached Syria by way of Turkey; from there I intended to go on to Italy. I sent a constant stream of cables, assuring my husband of my love, my adoration. It didn’t help. He begged me to come home. He said that he could not deal with the loneliness, and I wasn’t sure I could deal with his needing me so much.

  Meanwhile, things were not working out with Life the way they had in the past and the way I wanted. Where were the credit lines for my photographs? Life’s new policy of publishing photographs anonymously angered me. More photographers were being hired. Why were some of my pictures being set aside to make room for theirs? Where was the fame I deserved? My relationship with Harry Luce had cooled, and I began to have doubts about whether I wanted to stay with Life.

  A daily newspaper called PM would be launched soon, and I was offered a job. It promised to be more inventive, more daring, more progressive than any other newspaper out there—and it sounded exciting and more interesting than Life. It would be a new challenge, a new adventure, and I wanted to be part of the “new.” The pay was not as good, but it would mean less travel and a wider audience, and Erskine and I could work together on stories.

  I made the decision to resign from Life and cabled Harry Luce from Syria. He was not pleased that I was planning to leave his magazine for an archrival. In fact, he was furious. But he did nothing to change the situation and cabled back: GOOD LUCK. HENRY LUCE.

  After only a few months, PM flopped. Nothing had worked out. I went back to Life. Harry didn’t turn me away, but neither did he give me a warm welcome. But there was no time to lick my wounds. In 1941, Germany was preparing to invade Russia, and Life’s picture editor, Wilson Hicks, wanted me to be there when the invasion began. I knew how things worked in Russia, and I’d have no trouble getting permission to photograph. Erskine and I could travel together. Erskine was one of America’s most important writers, and his stories and novels were well known in Russia.

  Because the German army had overrun Europe in 1940, we couldn’t simply take an ocean liner across the Atlantic to Cherbourg or Southampton and board a train to Moscow. Instead, we would fly west from California to China and work our way into Russia, ultimately to Moscow.

  I spent a month figuring out what equipment I’d need. Erskine and I took off from Los Angeles in March 1941 on a flight to Hong Ko
ng with 617 pounds of luggage. All but seventeen pounds were mine. Erskine knew how to travel light. From Hong Kong we flew to Chungking, and then across the Gobi Desert. From a sand-swept little town on the border, we made the last leg of the journey into Russia. It took us a full thirty-one days, most of that time spent trying to cut through red tape, find planes that were capable of flying, wait out sandstorms, or simply wait.

  On June 22, a month after our arrival, while we were traveling in the Ukraine, we heard the news: German troops had invaded. We jumped onto a train headed for Moscow.

  The Russian military had forbidden the use of cameras, and anyone seen with one could be arrested and sent to prison. The order cancelled out my official permission to take pictures. I had to find a way around it, and I had to get to the center of the action and figure out a way to stay there.

  We spent our first nights in a hotel with a balcony overlooking Red Square and the Kremlin, turreted government buildings, and churches with colorful onion-shaped domes. If we had been tourists, this would have been a prime view of Moscow. Now I had a prime view of bombs falling on the city. The American ambassador came to try to persuade us to leave; there were two seats on the train to Vladivostok.

  “For your own safety, Mrs. Caldwell,” he said.

  We turned them down. I told him, “We were sent here to do a job, and we’re going to do it.” I added, “And the name is Margaret Bourke-White.”

  The military issued another order: when the sirens began screaming, everyone had to take shelter in the subways. Wardens searched our hotel, room by room, to make sure everyone was out. The first time, Erskine and I obeyed the order, spending the night in a huge underground subway station with thousands of Muscovites.

  “Listen, Skinny,” I told him when we were allowed to leave the next morning, “this is no way to cover a war we traveled thousands of miles to witness. I’m not doing this again.”

  Dodging military patrols, I sneaked over to the American embassy, where the Russians had no authority to order us anywhere, and climbed out on the roof. German bombers droned overhead. The view was spectacular, but it offered no protection. I hunkered down near an airshaft and watched the Luftwaffe planes roar over with their payloads. A kind of sixth sense told me that a bomb was about to fall nearby. I dived through an open window and flung myself on the floor as far from the window as I could, protecting my camera with my body. The blast came, shattering the windows. Glass fragments fell on me like rain. When the roar of engines had faded, I crept down the sweeping staircase, broken glass crunching under my feet, and took pictures of the wreckage and wired them to Life. These were the first photographs of the bombing of Moscow to be published in the United States.

  Our hotel suite was furnished with a grand piano, a marble bust of Napoleon, and a magnificent white bearskin rug. The sitting room became my workshop. I filled the bathtub with developing trays and hung wet negatives on cords strung among the overhead pipes, hoping a siren wouldn’t go off and interrupt a process that must not, under any circumstances, be interrupted. When a siren did sound and an air-raid warden burst in to make sure we weren’t breaking the rules, I rolled under the bed and Erskine draped the bearskin over his head and shoulders and ducked behind the sofa. Did the warden not notice the glassy-eyed polar bear, or did he choose not to? Eventually he left us alone.

  Crouching low to avoid being spotted by soldiers stationed in Red Square below, I set up cameras on the balcony, two facing in opposite directions to take in the sky and two more on the windowsill. A fifth camera was stored in the basement of the embassy, in case the others were destroyed. As the Germans bombed Moscow for twenty-two nights, I took photographs, developed and printed them, got them past the censors, and sent them to my editor in the United States.

  My biggest challenge was to photograph Josef Stalin. Every time I’d asked permission, I was turned down. Then President Roosevelt’s personal envoy arrived in Moscow. I had met him once before, and he remembered me. I dogged his steps, begging him to intervene, until he agreed to do what he could.

  “All right, Margaret,” the envoy reported at last. “You’ve got permission.”

  I’d heard that Russians like red, and I dug out from my luggage a red bow to wear in my hair. On the day of my appointment with Stalin I paced outside his office for two hours before I was finally admitted. The much-feared dictator turned out to be short, pockmarked, and unimposing—the opposite of what I expected. But nothing I did could make that stone face register any expression. Then, when I crouched to make some low shots, a handful of little flashbulbs spilled out of my pocket, and I went down on my hands and knees to gather them up. This appeared to amuse Stalin. A hint of a smile appeared beneath his brushy mustache and lasted just long enough for me to snap the shutter twice before it vanished. I had what I wanted.

  The German Luftwaffe was about to launch another air raid, the sirens were already going off, and I couldn’t risk having the wardens burst into my hotel bathroom while I was developing these precious pictures. I had my driver take me to the embassy instead. It was deserted; everyone had gone off to shelters. The driver helped me set up a makeshift darkroom in the servants’ bathroom. I scribbled some notes to the photo editor, packed up the prints, and left the package for President Roosevelt’s envoy to deliver to the Life offices when he flew home the next day.

  My major goal was to get to the front where the fighting was intense and both Russians and Germans were taking heavy losses. But no matter how many strings I tried to pull, I was always turned down. Time was running out. Erskine and I would soon have to leave for commitments back in the United States

  Suddenly permission was granted. A five-car convoy took us and a group of British and American correspondents to the Smolensk front, some two hundred miles west of Moscow. I had less than a week to accomplish my goal. Six days of pelting rain and mud up to my knees made picture-taking nearly impossible. On the last day the weather cleared. Wearing my red coat turned inside out so that I wouldn’t be a target for German riflemen, I got photographs of a bombed-out town, of its dead and dying victims and grieving survivors of another air raid. When I developed those negatives, I couldn’t bear to look at them.

  Erskine and I began our journey home. At a port on the Arctic Ocean we boarded a cargo ship traveling in a convoy to Scotland; from there we flew to Portugal. Lisbon was crowded with Americans who had waited weeks to book a flight to the United States. We went to the airline office to inquire about our reservations. There was, indeed, a seat for Mr. Caldwell, but nothing for Mrs. Caldwell. The only other unclaimed seat was for a lady from Russia. I asked the lady’s name.

  The clerk looked it up. “Margaret Bourke-White,” he said.

  Erskine had wired ahead to our secretary to have Sunday dinner ready for us when we arrived in New York, chicken and steak and “all manner of fresh fruits and vegetables.” But before dessert, I left for the airport again without a chance to recover from the nearly eight-month journey. I was starting off on a lecture tour that would take me across the country, speaking to women’s groups. I would be paid well, but it was not just the money: I planned to use the lectures as a first draft of a book I wanted to write without Erskine’s collaboration. I would call it Russia at War.

  There was another compelling reason for the lecture tour: I needed to get away from Erskine. While I raced from one speaking engagement to the next, Erskine’s volatile moods veered from bright sun to ominous clouds in a matter of seconds. At each stop another message waited for me, as he alternately ordered and coaxed me to move with him to a house we’d bought in the Arizona desert.

  “I want to settle down,” he argued. “I’ve always said a writer’s life is good for only about ten years, and then it’s time to switch gears.”

  I didn’t believe that was true. And it certainly was not true of photographers.

  When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, settling down was the last thing I wanted to do. Our country was at war, and within
days the president declared war on Germany, too.

  “Skinny, they’re going to need photographers to take pictures and send them back so the people at home know what’s going on,” I explained. “I’ve got to do this, if they’ll let me.”

  “It’s always what you want, isn’t it, Kit?” Erskine said bitterly. “You always call the shots.”

  I’d given up arguing with him. I sensed that he had always been jealous of my work, even though he was proud of it, but he left no doubt that he was jealous of Life for the claim it had on my time and energy. I’d learned to let it go. But I didn’t know how much longer I could do that.

  Early in the spring of 1942 I flew to New York, walked into Life’s offices, and went straight to the picture editor’s desk. Wilson Hicks looked up and flashed a pleased grin. “Maggie, hello! Sit down! Bring me up to date!”

  I leaned my hands on Hicks’s desk and brought my eyes level with his. “I won’t sit until you promise to send me to Europe,” I said. “I want an overseas assignment to cover this war. You know I have skills that could be important to the war effort.”

  Hicks’s eyebrows shot up. “OK,” he said. “But in the meantime, please sit down while we figure out how to do this.”

  It took longer than I would have liked—I always wanted things to happen more or less instantaneously—but there were a lot of i’s to be dotted and t’s to be crossed until Hicks and Harry Luce succeeded in having me accredited as a war correspondent by the Pentagon. I pleaded and nagged, begged and bullied every day until I got the accreditation. I would shoot pictures for the Army Air Forces, and Life had permission to use the pictures after they’d been cleared by the censors.

  Obviously, I needed a uniform. Although I was the first woman war correspondent, I would not be the only one, and I pointed out that we needed to be properly attired if we were to be recognized as professionals. The War College went to work on the design, with my suggestions. I would have a blouse—the military word for jacket—and slacks, and also a skirt of the same olive drab material for everyday wear. I also had “dress pinks,” actually a rosy gray, for formal occasions. A shoulder patch identified me as a war correspondent, insignia marked my rank as first lieutenant, and a jaunty flight cap matched my uniform.