by Sally Mann
So, you might wonder why I’m not showing you the contact sheet of this photo shoot, as I had originally intended. That’s an interesting question.
And the answer, as ever, hinges on the power, interpretative lability, and multifarious hazards of photography itself. In preparing this book for publication, I contacted Kit and Calvin about using the pictures. Kit, now a semiretired medical doctor, responded with alacrity, saying she was honored. Not so easy with Calvin, who was at first delighted to hear from an old school chum but then had second thoughts. He wrote that he was no longer a happy-go-lucky youth, and that he was now working “in a corporation with political colleagues,” and that “the photos could suggest that teenaged sex has or is about to take place.”
So, respecting Calvin’s fear of being mistaken for someone who might have had teenaged sex forty-five years ago, I won’t show you the tender and unambiguously nonsexual pictures I decided to print up that spring at Putney. Images can have consequences.
They had consequences then: within thirty-six hours there I was sitting, not for the first time, before furrow-browed Ben Rockwell, the headmaster. I wasn’t surprised to discover that it had been the photography teacher, Ed Shore, who had turned me in. He had submitted this report on my work a few weeks before:
Oversensitive and insecure, I felt it to be lackluster and somehow read “appealing from an artistic point of view” as a pejorative.
Shore turned me in for inappropriate subject matter but also probably for sexual misconduct, of which I was guilty in a general sense, but it was a charge I resisted vehemently in the case of this perfectly innocent afternoon.
With the force of that conviction I oiled with charm and denials the choppy administrative waters and despite the now-familiar threat of expulsion ultimately took my seat, to the strains of Bach’s Magnificat, in the graduation procession.
Many times on my account that bending arc of the moral universe has allowed me a bypass in its route toward justice, maybe because I was flat lucky or maybe because, if you want to think cosmically, some redeeming attributes justified the detour. Difficult I was, conniving I was, without a doubt rebellious I was, but six months after squeaking out of Putney the universe gave me a pass on all of those things, bringing me face-to-face with Larry Mann.
Those who say I am lucky to have found him are right.
4
The Family of Mann
After Putney and a wayward summer writing poetry and taking pictures in Mexico, I enrolled at Bennington College, figuring it would be pretty much the same as Putney, forty-eight miles away. I wasn’t any fonder of being way up north, but it was a known quantity, as opposed to Sarah Lawrence or Barnard, schools that I decided were too urban for me.
Flying the familiar route on Piedmont Airlines to tiny Weyers Cave airport, I arrived home for Christmas in 1969 and finally met Larry, three months after our destiny, unbeknownst to us, had been sealed on the afternoon he moved the epic stone. The farmhouse where my Lexington boyfriend lived had an odd layout, and one night as I slouched in a satanically bad mood on the edge of his bed, Larry walked through the room to the shared bathroom. I had no idea who he was, he did not so much as glance in my direction, but my eyes followed him with a warm, glittering interest. We were married six months later.
Everything about Larry’s past, not just his horse history, was the opposite of mine. Where I had that laissez-faire, semi-neglected, rural upbringing, he had a suburban New Canaan, Connecticut, childhood of parental pressure, social climbing, and embarrassing excess. As a toddler he was dressed in starched sailor suits, brass-buttoned, double-breasted jackets, and bow ties.
Just by way of comparison, at roughly the same time, this is what I was doing.
By the time I met him at twenty-one, he owned five custom tuxedos: white ones, everyday ones (apparently there is such a thing as an everyday tuxedo), and a black one with tails. His starchy tuxedo shirts hung in his closet like expectant armor, and blue boxes with engraved cuff links shared his dresser drawers with freakishly uncool madras cummerbunds.
Since the age of fourteen he had been instructed to hand out embossed Tiffany calling cards. His sterling silver hairbrushes were monogrammed, and it wasn’t just them. Everything was monogrammed: the Brooks Brothers shirts, his sheets, towels, even the most diminutive washcloths. And of high quality, too. This one is still serving me as a darkroom towel some fifty years later.
Since the time he could stand up to pee, he had been given dance and etiquette instruction, and then came private piano, tennis, swimming, skiing, and art lessons. To appear to have been born into the upper classes, Larry had to memorize Emily Post right down to the footnotes. He knew how much to tip the washroom attendant at the opera, when to pick up the fish fork, how to cut in on the dance floor. His diction was perfect.
The rules were smacked into him by his mother, Rose Marie. She was a commanding woman, tall enough to hold her own against Larry’s six-foot-five father, and she had glossy black hair that in middle age sprouted a striking white forelock.
Formidable enough right there, but by the time she was getting down to the serious work of beating on Larry she was quite hefty. She hadn’t started out that way; in fact most of the pictures we have of her in her youth show a beautiful and slender young woman. But she bore a torment within her. She had been born in 1925 to a young, unmarried Little Rock woman and put up for adoption at birth. That in itself should not be a problem, but for some reason her adoptive mother passed her on a few years later, like a hand-me-down dress, to her younger sister.
Just guessing, but I’d say that might make her want to light into someone with an oversized wooden spoon, as she did with Larry. And maybe the fact that after she moved to Chicago and fell in love with the jazz that she heard there, her priggish young medical student boyfriend, Warren Mann, insisted that she throw away all her 78 rpm jazz records, reminders of those good times, and attend to the business of being a doctor’s wife—that also might make one want to bring out the spoon.
But which of the two newlyweds was more dedicated to improving their social status is hard to say. They both appeared to be scrambling up the ladder in tandem and with a similar and relentless desire for a higher rung. Warren was a young shrink on the rise, and during the years when Larry was still small enough to be smacked around, Dr. Mann was enjoying a stimulating and prosperous practice with some highly placed Greenwich and New Canaan socialites under his care. Rose Marie was, even for a socially conscious town like New Canaan, stunningly class-conscious and all too aware of her humble and murky origins.
Whatever the reason for her fury, she vented it so often upon Larry that when I first met him he would still flinch at a sudden movement of my hand toward his face. If he inadvertently allowed his forearm to stray from its proper position at the family dinner table, his mother would stab it with her fork. To this day, there are tine marks in that cherry-veneer dining table testifying to the quickness of Larry’s reflexes.
Gangly, solitary, over-mannered, mistreated at home, Larry was painfully aware of what his parents were doing, their obvious ambitions for him, their manipulations and control. He describes himself during this time of his life as a prisoner, and like all prisoners, he contrived subtle ways to preserve some independence. For a time he was allowed to go to school and return on his own, but his mother insisted on dressing him in Lord Fauntleroy–like outfits. Trying to fit in at school, he would switch them out at the end of the driveway for cooler clothes he kept stowed in a bag under a bush, reversing the process at the end of the day.
In general, when he was not in school or at after-school lessons, he was confined to the home, where he could be protected from the influences of the common world. But the fatal mistake in that strategy was that, alone in his room, he found the prisoner’s treasured sliver of daylight, the soft tapping at the walls, the hidden hacksaw: he found books.
Along with a purchase of the Encyclopedia Britannica his parents had also bought, as libra
ry ornaments, the fifty-four Great Books of the Western World. They never suspected the subversive potential behind all that gleaming leather and gold. Larry read damn near every one of them, methodically moving along the shelf: Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Locke, Hegel, Melville, Tolstoy, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dickens, Twain, and Heidegger. These great minds cracked open the door and gave him a peek at his legal future, although at the time, of course, he didn’t recognize it as such. He became a philosophy major in college and eventually, through a program started by Thomas Jefferson encouraging self-disciplined but impoverished Virginians to become lawyers in that state, he “read the law” for three years to become an attorney.
As though he were practicing for the long hours in his future with dense law books, Larry would read alone as the afternoon sun leveled its rays through the gap in his curtains and the sounds of the children playing outside diminished. He would be so lost in reading that he would miss the call from his mother to change to the more formal dinner clothes that were expected at every evening meal. In the exhilarating world of ideas, he found himself free for the first time in his life, teaching himself in the process to be content alone, to read carefully and to reason, and most of all, to watch and listen.
You’d never know it by looking at the parents’ allocation of resources and time, but there were two sons in the Mann family, Larry and Chad, two years younger.
The Manns had chosen to concentrate their efforts on Larry, probably because of his exceptional good looks, tractability, and general social ease. Directly inside the front door of their home was a large, gilt-framed painting of Larry the equestrian executed in the fawning style of an ancien régime court artist. Nowhere in the house was there any sign that there was another child in the family, no pictures or trophies or framed diplomas. Chad also came in for physical abuse by his mother, but he surmises that because he wore glasses he didn’t get the hard facial slaps that sent Larry to school with his ears ringing and reddened, and instead got just the spoon and the brush. Except for the beatings, Chad was basically ignored, which in a way was a blessing.
The Manns zeroed in on the horse world as the best place to show off their handsome son and to make contacts with the right kind of people. Every afternoon after school, Larry was picked up by his mother in a Mustang convertible, her bouffant covered by an Hermès scarf, and driven to Ox Ridge Hunt Club for intensive lessons in dressage and jumping by their top instructors. In fact, he loved horses and riding, even ring work and the fancy horse shows. Like me, he found time on a horse transcendent and healing in some way, but especially in the less structured disciplines, playing polo, fox hunting, or occasionally just galloping on the cinder paths that lined the fields.
While his mother drank martinis at the club bar, Larry hung out with the forbidden groom underclass and realized, all the more clearly, the trap into which he had been born. But even into his late teens he remained pliant, escorting the daughters of the rich to balls at the Ritz while, with the avidity of a Spanish conqueror seeking Inca gold, his mother scoured the hunt clubs and society pages for just the right wealthy daughter-in-law.
The girl Larry brought home in spring 1970 was far from meeting any of their criteria.
“She goes to Bennington??” they had asked incredulously, responding to the news of our romance as if he had found me in a leper colony outside Baton Rouge. Implacably, Larry said yes. Bending to his unexpected defiance, they offered a grudging invitation for me to visit. When Larry and I arrived over Easter, his mother placed a Lilly Pulitzer outfit on the bed in my room as an alternative to my 501s and Frye boots. I decided right there that she was a ring-tailed yard bitch. The feeling was clearly mutual.
At the midday Easter dinner, when we announced we were going to get married in six weeks, his parents and grandparents burst into tears and left the table. We looked over at Chad, who raised an eyebrow and smiled, then, spooning mint jelly onto his plate, continued eating. We did the same and, that night, Larry crossed from his bedroom to mine and we made noisy love before leaving at dawn. We found out later that after that week his parents made an appointment with their lawyer to cut Larry out of their will.
Their disapproval only increased our determination and the perverse pleasure we took in our unacceptable love. The preparations for the wedding were easy: we bought two simple gold rings at Ed Levin’s shop in Bennington and I designed a demure cotton dress that I had a local seamstress stitch up. My father dusted off his Linhof and shot a few pictures, one of which Larry’s parents grudgingly put in the New Canaan newspaper.
The one that didn’t make it into the paper is the real portrait, capturing the fey, Golightly feeling of the weeks before the wedding and, not incidentally, the Great Dane Tara in the background, the dog that had run my mother out of her marriage bed. My mother salved her injured feelings by purchasing the biggest Zenith that Mr. Schewel had in his showroom and moving it into my old bedroom, in defiance of my father’s rip-snorting disdain for and prohibition of television in our home. My brother Chris and I date the moment when a TV was allowed in the house as the end to the family dynamic as we knew it, and the beginning of a corresponding decline in our mother’s intellectual acuity.
Meanwhile, Larry’s parents ostentatiously refused to come to the wedding, making a point of starting every phone conversation with, “Don’t think for a minute that we’re coming for your wedding.” Certainly they sensed our see-if-we-care shrugged shoulders as we replied, “It’s okay, don’t.”
So they did. Two days before the June twentieth wedding they announced they’d come but only, in their exact words, “tanked up on Miltown.” I dreaded to see the bagful of spiders they would surely pull over our heads but, sedated, they were the picture of probity and forced good cheer. At dinner the night before the wedding, they made a show of announcing that they were giving us a car as a wedding present, and around the table was rejoicing—and relief. It seemed that they had made peace with the marriage and would finally embrace our union, as disappointing as it was to them.
The wedding was held a little after dawn in my parents’ garden. It was modest; only our two families and a few friends attended—there couldn’t have been more than two dozen people, tops. We had some difficulty finding someone to marry us because there was no mention of “God the Father” or “the Holy Spirit” in our handwritten vows. We solved it by reading aloud the E. E. Cummings poem “i thank You God for most this amazing day,” that first line satisfying the God requirement, and, as for the Holy Spirit, we figured Cummings had it covered in “the leaping greenly spirits of trees.” The almost childlike lack of punctuation and capitalization that characterizes Cummings’s poetry and his affirmation of the natural “which is infinite which is yes” somehow caught the innocent spirit of those barefoot nuptials, our green optimism, and the wingding gaiety of the day.
Another sure proof of the divine presence was that the man who married us, David Sprunt, looked like the brilliant offspring of a coupling among God himself, Judge Parker from the funny papers, and Atticus Finch.
A small reception followed and, for a moment at least, Larry’s parents, there on the left with Chad, deigned to step into the picture with their new in-laws, whose heedlessness of status, unconventional tastes, and political liberalism they despised.
It was a near-perfect day from our point of view: low-key, modest, and relaxed. And cheap, as my delighted mother would report afterward: the most expensive part of the whole thing was the wheel of Brie.
We honeymooned at the cabin on the Maury, of course.
The wedding may have been cheap, but my parents were generous with their gift to us, a check for $1,000. Right away, we deposited it in our newly opened joint account, and it comprised every cent we had. We were nineteen and twenty-two, and for us this was a fortune. Now I look back at that endearingly optimistic, cash-flush young couple with the rueful headshake of an old marital veteran, many cash-flow wars behind her.
We still needed the promised car and a few months after the wedding found one that would suit our needs: a used front-wheel-drive Saab station wagon. With the taxes, it topped out at $990. Perfect! We called Larry’s parents, told them about our choice, and they said airily, “Just go ahead and pay for it and we’ll pay you back.”
Of course we should have known what was going to happen next, so eager still were his parents to sabotage the marriage, but when it did, we were knocked flat with the disaster it meant to our young lives together. I have not forgotten the cruelty in his mother’s voice when we called to see when they could repay us. Mockingly, she began the predictable sentence with something like, “Oh, please, did you really expect we’d…”
Despite this treachery and its damning financial consequences for the start of our marriage—a ten-dollar bank balance being all that remained from our wedding present—we toughed it out. Larry’s parents continued to do everything they could to undermine our relationship, such as giving us expensive carving sets for Falstaffian cuts of meat that we could not afford, knowing full well we were eating out of a twenty-five-pound bag of soybeans that also served as a beanbag chair in our basement apartment.
Through those rough years we clung to each other tenaciously: I sure wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of seeing us come apart. We were flat broke, always, and my parents, for reasons I have never quite figured out, did not offer to help, paying only my tuition and a small food and housing allowance. But now, in retrospect, I believe that made us stronger. Not that any of it was fun. Not at all.