The Hip Nip
A Portrait of Pat Morita
If you were a photographer back in the day when print magazines were thriving and photo agencies made big bets on speculative projects in far-flung locales, a ringing telephone could mean damn near anything. So when my business manager Marty LeAnce called me from his car phone — remember those? — one day in 1980, sounding a bit…emotional…and asked if he could come over with a “very special friend” to pose for a picture together, I both was and wasn’t surprised. My life back then was a blur of movie stars, musicians, world leaders, and passionate eccentrics with an occasional natural disaster thrown in to cleanse the palate. Photographers have a name for a day when anything can happen and often does. We call it Tuesday, or sometimes Friday, or Christmas.
How deep was I into the forest of photography? When my father died, I didn’t find out for a week. I was off on assignment — a story about privately-run prisons in Florida — and my family couldn’t find me.
Normally, Marty was my rock. As a nomadic photojournalist freelancing for Time, Rolling Stone, Forbes, People, Money, Look and other glossies here and abroad, with commercial assignments, too, shooting for movie studios and ad agencies, I relied on him, back home, to make sure my bills got paid. But that day he was playing a different role: sensitive subject. As he drove toward my…
