The Devil Made Me Do It
A Hell of a Time with Elvis Costello
On an ovenlike afternoon, a shifty creature scudded through the streets of San Francisco, hellbent for my studio. He wore a disguise to draw the kind of public attention he craved but without tipping off his terrifying true identity. He’d made himself a dead ringer for rock star Elvis Costello, whom the wily hotshot knew I hoped to photograph one day. But, first, there was the matter of a Spy magazine cover; and I’d been assigned to shoot it.
Spy was the rapscallion of New York City periodicals, a preeminent rag notorious for roasting reprobates in print. After basting them in ink, its next edition was about to skewer Gotham’s tycoons, politicians, and socialites whose much heralded and self-reverential exploits were less magnanimous than what they would have you believe. Truth be told, they were about to be exposed as swindlers, thanks to the prime instigator of their nefarious pursuits who had been lured to my studio with the promise of seeing his face on the cover of a major magazine bearing the headline, Let’s Make a Deal with the Devil. In exchange for this sinister publicity, and with infernal delight for the chaos it would unleash, he fingered his Faustian minions by double-crossing them with a satirical takedown.
