PHOTOGRAPHY

My answer to a casual question triggered the beginning of the end of my career shooting pictures.

Jeff Cohen had one of the most enviable business cards in the world: Photo Editor, Playboy. I’m sure he never paid for drinks. Jeff assigned me to photograph Apple CEO John Sculley, in 1987, for the September “Interview” section of the magazine. It was my first time to meet Sculley, and two years after Steve Jobs had left the company. Contrary to popular myth, Jobs was not fired. He resigned at the behest of Apple’s board of directors. Although he’d held the title…

PHOTOGRAPHY

Apocryphal stories abound about Tom Waits, though it’s my understanding he likes it that way. He seems to encourage biographical ambiguity; not to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes but because a wild and wooly backstory was part of his schtick. The schtick was art. Performance was, and is, his life: “I was born at a very young age in the backseat of a Yellow Cab in the Murphy Hospital parking lot in Whittier, California.” The first thing he did was, “. . . pay, like, a buck eighty-five on the meter [and go find a job].”

Waits’s career spans…

PHOTOGRAPHY

When I entered the University of Southern California as a freshman music major, in 1969, my ambition was to become the first-chair clarinetist in a preeminent symphony orchestra. I’d won an audition and the prize of a scholarship. I found out the same week Armstrong & Aldrin landed on the Moon. I was over the moon. But the scholarship came with a quid pro quo: conscription into the USC Trojan Marching Band.

The Trojans were hands down the best-sounding college band in the United States — in the world, with its unparalleled musicianship stemming from the faculty’s ability to recruit…

PHOTOGRAPHY

Let me tell you about the first time I saw Groucho Marx, who happens to be the subject of my very first portrait. But my story begins before I took up photography.

Protect your bagels; put lox on them. It sounds like something Groucho might say. But it was just a clever admonition from the locals to visit Nate ’n’ Al’s Delicatessen in Beverly Hills. I was there eating brunch with several buddies before heading over to the Fairfax Theater in West Hollywood for a Marx Brothers double feature. Their zany humor from the Depression era was enjoying a revival…

PHOTOGRAPHY

I ’ve said it many times: actors are uncomfortable in front of a still camera because they’re not acting. When they have have no lines, no action, and no recourse but to be themselves, they feel vulnerable being stared at through a lens. — exposed, if you will. Let me tell you about a quintessential example. (How about that! Two puns in one paragraph.)

My opportunity to photograph Anthony Quinn came while he was on a business stopover in LA, traveling between locations for two films. Quinn’s most memorable role was Zorba in “Zorba the Greek.” Lots of people thought…

PHOTOGRAPHY

Part One

A Time magazine assignment took me to Sausalito to cover the outset of an historic journey: the first non-stop, trans-continental flight over North America in a balloon. It would be a milestone achievement in aviation history. Kitty Hawk, referencing the most singular aviation milestone of all, was the name of the craft (the gondola, actually), co-piloted by Maxie Anderson, a businessman and gubernatorial prospect from New Mexico, and his son Kristian. Maxie helped pioneer Albuquerque’s International Balloon Fiesta, an annual mass ascent of hot air balloons, arguably the most photographed event in the world: five hundred gargantuan confections arrayed willy-nilly…

A powerful black sedan sped through the capital chasing two American flags whipping above the hood. A short motorcade kept up behind in single file. The streets were essentially empty of other automobiles; a smattering of foreign jalopies, rows of miasmatic buses at the curb. This was typical on any given day in 1981. Traffic was mainly bicycles, thousands and thousands of them pedaled by uniformly-costumed commuters; men and women buttoned up to their chins in ill-fitting tunics; green ones and just-as-baggy blue ones. Many of them wore caps adorned with a red plastic star in front.

Daylight spilled inside…

Gore Vidal, that perspicacious paladin of the pen, wielded a sharp nib and was keen to skewer his opponents with it. Those who were foolhardy enough to joust with him orally were soon excoriated by a tongue-lashing and should have known better than to engage in a battle of wits only half-prepared. He had a mean streak and was unapologetic about it. “Beneath my cold exterior,” he claimed, “once you break the ice, you find cold water.”

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Jr. rounded off his well-connected name as he thought would befit an aspiring author. As Gore Vidal, and no…