Читать книгу L'Americain - John Launois - Страница 8

On November 4, 1950, my day of departure finally arrived. My brothers and sisters all stood around, hugging and kissing me. Mother remained upstairs, crossing her arms, resting her elbows on a window bar, watching me cross the garden for the last time. She didn’t say a word, not even goodbye. It hurt. I never knew what she felt. As she looked down from her window, I said, “Mother, you wanted me to get out, so I am getting out, and I’m not coming back till my name is in Life magazine!”

Father tried to hand me an envelope with the family’s small savings, but I refused it. He walked me down the long driveway and hugged me, saying, “You do understand why I can’t go to the station with you.” Tears were streaming down his face. So we said goodbye and I walked to the station with my cardboard suitcase and brown hand-me-down suit.

All my friends from Marly and my oldest sister, Paulette, with tears in her eyes, came down to Gare St. Lazare in Paris to the boat train for Le Havre. Girls kissed me, guys hugged me, and all wished, “Bonne chance!” and “Bon voyage!” I later heard that my friends thought I was crazy, making comments and predictions like “Where the hell is Jean going?” and “He’ll be back soon.” Soon would be 10 years.

Boarding the Liberté on November 5, I was finally on my way with no regrets, but my stomach was in excruciating pain. A strange feeling overcame me when the ship left the shore of France, and the Liberté whistle blew.

I shared a two-bunk cabin with Jonathan, a young American student. He gave me a pamphlet about the Statue of Liberty. French artist, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, created the statue, a monument to liberty, and dedicated it to America on October 28, 1886. Frenchmen like Bartholdi, long before I was born, crossed the Atlantic to express a longing for freedom. For me, it was symbolic: like them, I was leaving France to find liberty in America.

From the booklet, I learned “Lady Liberty” was 151 feet high and over 300 feet with the pedestal. I read Emma Lazarus’s poem, “The New Colossus,” inscribed on the pedestal. My tears flowed as a I read, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.” I wasn’t tired, just poor.

But “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore” angered me. “Damn it,” I thought, “I am not wretched refuse.” I was again moved reading, “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me.” I was not homeless but my soul was certainly tempest-tossed.

After five days, the Liberté sailed into New York Harbor. The crew woke everyone to see the Statue of Liberty. When I saw her, I remembered, “I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Approaching Manhattan, I was amazed by the endless array of big yellow cabs cruising silently by, flanked by massive skyscrapers.

After docking, we went through customs. I had two expensive bottles of Chanel No. 5 perfume for Joe’s wife, Paddy, but only one bottle was duty-free, so I left the other with customs.

Standing in a huge crowd was good old Kurt Kornfeld of the Black Star picture agency waving to me. Years ago, I gave Kurt a tour of the liberated streets of Paris. Welcoming me to America, he hugged me and took me on my first cab ride through the avenues of Manhattan.

Handing me a dollar bill, he said, “Keep this as your first symbolic American dollar.” He took me straight to Saks Fifth Avenue, saying, “I want to be the one who buys you your first American necktie.”

I thanked Kurt, and we shook hands. I put on my new necktie, walked to Grand Central station where I had left my cardboard suitcase in a locker, and took a bus to upper Manhattan’s YMCA hostel. It almost seemed as far away from Saks Fifth Avenue as America seemed from across the ocean.

I checked in, paid for the first night, flopped on the bed, and felt such painful cramps, I thought I had appendicitis, or worse, peritonitis. I broke into a heavy sweat and fell asleep.

Waking at daylight, I touched my belly, felt no pain, and had breakfast. Somehow the anxiety had passed. I decided to walk all the way to the Black Star agency in the Graybar Building at 420 Lexington.

Kurt Kornfeld, one of the three founders of Black Star.

Walking downtown, again fascinated with the yellow cabs, towering buildings, and people in the streets, I talked to myself out loud, “I am in the new world!” I kept repeating in French, “le nouveau monde” and then in English, “the new world.” As people heard me, some waved, others said nothing, yet many smiled. No one was surprised. By the time I got to Black Star I was elated.

When I reached the office, I told Kurt Kornfeld about my talking to myself. He understood immediately—he had left Nazi Germany many years earlier.

“Yes, this is the new world,” he assured me.

Kurt took me around the office, introducing me to Kurt Safranski and Ernest Mayer, two key figures who introduced photojournalism to America, the men who helped Life magazine get started in 1936, the same men who eventually lost their best photojournalists to Life’s generous salaries.

In Mayer’s office, I could see he and Kornfeld were anxious to give me some good news. The agency had sold my picture story on an American girl who opened a riverboat bar on the Seine in Paris.

Black Star had sold it for $100. Since I’d get $50, I wouldn’t have to borrow from my mentor, Joe Pazen. I could buy a one-way ticket to Burbank, California, and start life in the new world without debt.

Black Star reserved me a seat on American Airlines. To me in 1950, all airlines were American. It was late November, somewhat cold. On my last day in Manhattan, I checked out of the YMCA.

After putting my suitcase in a midtown bus terminal locker, I walked to Central Park. Falling leaves had turned yellow and brown. Soon the trees would be bare. I sat on a bench by a pond and fell into a reverie, musing about seasons, other autumns and winters far away.

No one informed me whether American Airlines would serve food on the 16-hour journey to California, so I went downtown to an Automat, the strangest restaurant I’d ever seen. With rows of glass boxes filled with food and snacks, it was the ultimate in self-service. I got three sandwiches and a Coke to last me halfway across the country. After that, I could eat at numerous stops scheduled on the California flight.

In the Automat, I noticed a very old lady sitting at the next table with a single cup of coffee. Watching her discreetly, I saw that before each sip, she’d put several spoons of sugar in her cup. She repeated the ritual until her cup was empty. Then she used the spoon to finish the sugar at the bottom of her cup. Looking at her drawn features and shabby overcoat, I realized she was hungry and poor, and that she was consuming the sugar for energy.

She was the first poor person I had seen in America. Poverty in the U.S. made no sense to me. So as she left carrying her two heavy black bags made of oily cloth, I ran after her. “Excuse me, this dollar dropped from your bag.” She turned and said sternly, “Young man, all I own is in these two bags, and I can assure you there wasn’t any money in my bags.” I said, “Maybe someone dropped a dollar into one of your bags. That would explain why it fell out.”

At that moment, I kept remembering the GIs in France giving chocolate, C-rations, and cigarettes to people lining their routes. Reluctantly, the old lady took my dollar. She said, “Thank you, young man,” and left the Automat.

With hours to spare, I left the Automat and walked south to the Lower East Side. I found myself in blocks of tenements, hearing languages I’d never heard. They were not English, French, or German, but I was sure they were European. By late afternoon, I returned to the bus terminal, retrieved my suitcase from the locker, and boarded a bus for LaGuardia.

LaGuardia Airport in 1950 had an easygoing atmosphere. Flights were not posted. A friendly woman at American Airlines told me, “We’ll announce your flight over the loudspeakers. Since you’ve already checked in, we’ll find you. Relax.”

I couldn’t possibly relax, but finally my flight to Burbank, California, was announced. In small groups, we were herded into the airplane, a Douglas DC-4 carrying about only 30 passengers. We’d fly across the United States at an average speed of 220 miles an hour at an altitude of 14,000 feet. We made four or five refueling stops as we crossed Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, and Arizona.

It was a smooth flight until I thought our right engines were on fire. I pointed out the burning engines to the stewardess. She reassured me, “Those flames are just from the exhaust pipes. Relax.”

After about 15 hours of flight during the night, I had seen nothing. Daylight broke somewhere between Kansas and New Mexico. Even at 14,000 feet, the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona looked beautiful.

At all stops, the airports looked the same. Coffee tasted the same, cherry pies tasted great, and I loved them. I expected my journey to California from New York to take 16 hours, but it actually took 21. Thinking that flying robbed my sense of travel, I vowed to one day cross America on land.

Our plane touched down at Burbank Airport around noon Pacific Time, November 14, 1950, nine days short of my 22^nd birthday. As our aircraft taxied to the terminal, I didn’t recognize any of the passengers who had boarded with me at LaGuardia. Most had left during night stops.

Looking out my porthole, I could see Joe, Paddy, and their two-year-old son Mark, standing behind a wire fence 20 feet from the plane. The Burbank terminal had an even more casual setting than LaGuardia. After stairs had been rolled to the door of the DC-4, Joe, Paddy and Mark came to the foot of the stairs. I hugged Paddy first, then Joe, and kissed little Mark on both cheeks.

Suddenly the heat overwhelmed me in my heavy, hand-me-down brown suit. Everybody else was in short sleeves. It must have been 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit). It was hot.

Paddy wore a light blouse and shorts, revealing her nice legs, no longer English ivory but California tan, while Joe was in khakis and short sleeves. It was southern California.

Joe and Paddy were full of questions about my trip, about Marly, which they loved, and about how my parents felt about my coming to America. Our conversations overlapped.

We walked to Joe’s 1949 Chevrolet station wagon with sidewood panels and took off for Van Nuys in the San Fernando Valley. Seeing me sweat profusely in the front seat, Joe decided then and there to take me to a sports clothing store. Within 45 minutes, I too wore khakis and short sleeves, and I threw away the hated brown suit. All I had left was Kurt Kornfeld’s symbolic dollar and some loose change, but Joe said, “Don’t worry Johnny, I’ll deduct it from your pay.”

As we drove westward on Vanowen, I remarked that everything seemed to have been built overnight. “In a European sense it was,” Joe said. “Don’t look for medieval cathedrals or castles here. We don’t have any. Thank God America doesn’t have a medieval past. We’ve had enough troubles in our 170-year history to last us a long while.”

After we had driven miles along Vanowen, I couldn’t believe we were still on the same street. Keeping track of house numbers, I was amazed to see number 10,000. At 14,000, Joe turned south toward Van Nuys Boulevard. The longest street I had ever walked on in 1941 Paris was Rue de Vaugirard with 407 numbers. I imagined no country in Europe with a medieval past could ever have built a straight street with over 14,000 numbers. The last time I checked a map of the San Fernando Valley in 1996, Vanowen had 24,000 numbers.

Paddy spoke from the rear seat, “Let’s take Johnny to Van Nuys and show him Main Street and the center of town.” I looked at all the movie houses, coffee shops, parking meters, the Bank of America, the hardware store, drug stores with soda fountains, the Veterans of Foreign Wars building, the vacuum cleaner store, and the U.S. Army Recruiting Office.

Joe pointed out the post office, the photo shop where he bought supplies, and the Western Union Office where he said I’d often go. Paddy teased my hair and said, “Johnny, that’s Main Street Van Nuys, but it could just as well be Main Street in San Fernando Valley. They all look the same.” I realized later that there was a note of nostalgia for old England in Paddy’s voice.

As we drove through the residential area of Van Nuys to Joe and Paddy’s house, I immediately noticed there were no fences or walls around the houses. The San Fernando Valley in 1950 looked prosperous, open, optimistic, and if nothing else, disturbingly uniform.

Joe and Paddy’s ranch house was a couple of miles from Van Nuys Boulevard. When Joe rolled into his driveway, I saw a pleasant house with a green lawn and a red, tile-covered roof. They gave me a tour of their three bedrooms, two bathrooms, kitchen, dining, and living room. In the back, there was a garden with a huge walnut tree and double-car garage, which Joe turned into a photographic lab, where I’d spend many nights processing color films.

In the living room, I gave Paddy her bottle of Chanel, and in return, got two kisses. I gave Joe a bottle of father’s Pommard, which father had wrapped in my sweater with rubber bands, and Joe asked me to write him a thank you note. But for little Mark, I had nothing. He had been an infant when I last saw him and I had forgotten to get him a gift, but eventually I made it up to him.

I returned Paddy’s Rolleicord that I had used to produce my first story sold in America. Paddy wanted to know about my days in the French Army. As I narrated my adventures, she laughed and hugged me a couple times.

Joe wanted to know about the counterfeit $300 he had paid me. He remembered the luxurious hotel in Paris that had exchanged his traveler’s checks. I had taken the phony dollars to the same hotel but they denied any wrongdoing, confiscated the counterfeits, and gave me a receipt. When I translated the contents of the receipt to Joe, he blew up and said, “I’ll sue them!” But we had no proof.

Joe’s sense of outrage eased after calling the hotel’s cashier a “bastard” one last time. “Johnny, let’s celebrate your coming to California,” he said. Paddy talked me into trying a Bourbon Seven Up. Joe went to the kitchen to prepare drinks, calling out, “Two Bourbon Seven Ups for Johnny and Paddy, one Coke for Mark, and one Jack Daniels on the rocks for his daddy.”

Then we all toasted my arrival in California with my very first whiskey. I basked in the warmth of our reunion, pleased Paddy and Joe seemed so genuinely happy to see me.

Strangely, I had no sense of place. On the road to Van Nuys, I noticed hundreds of shining American automobiles rolling along or displayed in new and used car lots. I saw hundreds of palm trees and one-story houses, yet I kept asking myself, “Where is California?”

In New York City, I felt excitement running through my veins, heart, and head—it was exhilarating. I immediately felt creative there, thinking of poems I might write. But here in the San Fernando Valley, I felt adrift without an anchor. Something was missing. I attributed my sense of loss to exhaustion.

I asked Joe if greater Los Angeles had a center somewhere. “Los Angeles has a downtown,” Joe said. “I’ll take you there, but you wouldn’t want to live there.”

In the evening, he lit a torch light by a huge walnut tree in the back garden as we continued our conversations under the nearly leafless branches. Sitting under the tree felt reassuring, and my brooding eased. I asked Joe for a second Whiskey Seven Up and felt mellow.

Soon after, we ate Paddy’s meat loaf and salad. Then my hosts walked me to my bedroom and told me to sleep as long as I wanted. I fell asleep almost immediately, still thinking, “Where is California?”

After sleeping 14 hours, I woke to find Paddy had already prepared bacon and eggs with toast. Joe walked in through the kitchen’s back door and said, “Paddy and I talked about you last night because we saw you so forlorn, so I want you to know that even though you’re working for me, you’re family to us.” Then Paddy showed me the kitchen “where all the goodies are,” cookies, chocolates, and candies.

In France and England, Joe and Paddy never treated me as an employee. Joe had always been a leader, teacher, and mentor. Paddy had always been a confidante, an abstract love in my life. She treated me like a little brother, even though she was not much older than I was.

After breakfast, Joe and I talked business. He said a large part of his work involved photographing movie stars for covers of Sunday newspaper supplements. He also filled me in on his latest purchase of stroboscopic lights, the largest on the market, which made it possible to photograph a jet taking off at night in multi-exposures, or a man flying out of a circus cannon, or the trajectory of a baseball thrown by a pitcher.

He said, “In London with me, you learned more about strobes than nearly anyone in the business, so your experience will help us with my new ideas.” It all sounded exciting—movie stars, jets in the night—but I didn’t know what a curved baseball was.

Joe proposed a salary of $20 a week, plus room and board. For that, I’d assist him on all assignments while having the right to use his equipment to shoot my own stories for Black Star. I’d have to process all color films overnight in his new air-conditioned lab.

I could also go to San Fernando College at night as long as I processed our previous day’s shoot, and I could use the station wagon to drive to college until I could buy a car of my own. Twenty dollars a week wasn’t much in 1950 California, but I’d learn and be paid. Money was profoundly academic to me. Elated, I shook hands with Joe.

While Joe was between assignments, he wanted me to immediately familiarize myself with his new strobes. I’d never seen such monstrously huge equipment. They had to be rolled on a dolly strong enough to carry a grand piano. Each condenser box was 8 inches high, 8 inches wide, 2½ feet long, and each weighed nearly a hundred pounds.

The four condenser boxes had to be connected by cables thicker than my thumb. Each condenser stored thousands of volts, which when released into a gas tube, sounded like a cork exploding from a bottle of champagne. All this energy was released when you squeezed a camera shutter connected to the “monsters,” as I came to call them, by a straw-thin wire synchronizing their light energy with the opening of the lens aperture.

I once calculated that in a 30-foot radius, Joe’s monsters were four times more powerful than the California sun at high noon. With so many technological advances in the early twenty-first century, it might be hard to understand how technically complicated color photography was in 1950. Film emulsions could not be trusted for accuracy: they had to be tested and corrected with Kodak CC color correction filters.

Photographers in the 1950s who could master color were paid twice the normal day or page rate. In that day and age, Joe Pazen commanded a leading edge and could take any assignment in color. We had enough strobes to light a stadium at night in color. It was a technical skill and advantage but not really a creative innovation.

Trying to recoup his expensive investment, Joe rented out his “monsters” with the station wagon and his technician, me. I became part of a package deal: technician, station wagon, and strobes.

I made several trips with the strobes. Once I drove to Phoenix, Arizona, for a photographer shooting a Ford Motor Company’s double-page, print advertising campaign. The idea was to show a Ford running over a railroad track to demonstrate the great performance of the shock absorbers. We had to capture one picture, shot at night with multiple exposures to show the operation of the wheels on the track. I set up the shot at dusk, tested a release for five exposures, and it worked. Then the photographer, his assistant, and I waited for deep night in the desert of Arizona to shoot the final photographs of a Ford sedan gliding gracefully over a railroad track.

When total darkness came, I gave the “go” signal to the photographer. The Ford drove over the track, touched my first four electric contacts perfectly, then a condenser blew up before the fifth exposure. Suddenly I had the photographer, art director, account executive, Ford executive, and all the assistants on my back screaming about the thousands of dollars that the project cost.

I felt ashamed, not about the thousands lost but because I was the one who had prepared all of “Joe’s monsters.” I turned to the photographer and said, “If you can open up a quarter of a stop on your shutter, I think I can bypass the burnt-out condenser unit,” which was still smoking. He said, “Alright.”

The manual indicated, “To discharge a condenser: Touch the positive and negative poles simultaneously with a safely insulated instrument. Caution: A disabled condenser can still store a very high amount of voltage.” So I wrapped the plastic handle of a huge screwdriver with cloth and used it to cross the negative and positive poles. Sparks flew out and the screwdriver melted. I had bypassed the burnt-out condenser, giving us another chance at the shot. The Ford ran over the track again, and all five exposures worked.

The next day, the photographer called my motel very early in the morning. “You were heroic,” he said. “The ad agency people are enthusiastic. The picture looks great. Look for it as a double page!” He also called Joe. Driving back from Phoenix to Van Nuys took about 12 hours including stops to eat where I could keep my eye on the heavily loaded station wagon. Those advertising people screaming about “thousands of dollars lost” left me unnerved. Hell, I thought, I made it work, all that on my $20-a-week salary.

Joe congratulated me upon my return and made me a Bourbon Seven Up. I wanted to tell him I didn’t like being packaged with his strobes. Advertising was not what I wanted to do, but I said nothing. He was my mentor, and after my initial anger, I still admired him and was learning.

For my 22^nd birthday on November 23, 1950, Joe and Paddy gave me a short-sleeved shirt. During my war years, my parents only celebrated the children’s birthdays when there was enough food. In California, Paddy had prepared so much, we had leftovers for days.

When I blew out 22 candles, I felt I was running out of time. I was an old man. I had already worked 10 years, never had time to be a teenager, and was nowhere. I wasn’t a photojournalist yet, and all my photographs were based on what Joe wanted.

Later that afternoon, doing errands in Van Nuys, I was enticed into a drag race by seniors from the local high school. I didn’t understand their hand signals and roaring engines, and was squeezed into the right lane, endangering Joe’s wood-paneled station wagon, so I pulled onto a curb.

Seconds later, the students came back, calling me, “chicken.” In French slang, “chicken” meant “police.” I had been terrorized by French police checks during war years in France, so I reacted by instinct, expecting police cruisers, but there were no police in sight. Puzzled, I finished my errands and drove back to Joe and Paddy’s place.

I related the story to Joe. Laughing, Joe told me, “Johnny, ‘chicken’ in America also means coward, but I’m glad you didn’t understand, because my station wagon isn’t made to drag race against souped-up cars.”

My American education was underway. Joe taught me about drag races, souped-up cars, hot rods, and the double meaning of chicken. By midnight, I thought again of the students from Van Nuys High, driving to school, tinkering with their engines and turning their cars into hot rods. They were not yet 18, and they belonged to a golden age in a country that seemed to worship its youth. Still, I felt no envy.

When I spoke to Joe about the easy life of California students, he said, “Their parents became adults during the Great Depression, a time essentially left behind after World War II when America emerged as the only wealthy nation on earth. So most parents of the kids who challenged you today wanted to give their children what they never had.”

He elaborated, “America is a story of booms and busts. Right now we’re experiencing the biggest boom we’ve ever had. From 1930 to 1941, there were bread lines and soup lines across the country. You only know the generous GIs liberating France from when you were a kid. When you go to night college next year, you should concentrate on American literature and American history.” Nearly half a century later, I came to think that the generation of the Great Depression was exceptionally generous and humanistic.

Shortly after my birthday, I learned from Joe’s newspapers that the Chinese had entered the Korean War. American forces were said to be retreating in disarray under a huge assault by the Chinese. The U.S. Eighth Army was outflanked, while Marines, trapped at the frozen Chang Min reservoir, south of the Yalu River, were fighting their way to the Sea of Japan.

In my mythical America, U.S. forces never retreated. I imagined they always turned things around as they had in Europe and the Pacific, but on December 16, 1950, President Harry Truman declared a national state of emergency as “U.S. and U.N. forces suffered further setbacks in Korea.”

My war years and service in the French Army were events of the past, best forgotten. The Korean War was an abstraction. In 1949, my father, an idealistic French liberal, warned me about the dangers of international communism and Mao’s victory in China. He showed me an old world map, outlining the territorial gains of the Soviet Union and China, and told me, “The Communists intend to rule the world. They are as ruthless as the Nazis were.”

Discharged from the French Army, I was put on “active reserve,” but by leaving France, I was classified as “unavailable.” In America, I was a French citizen, so it never occurred to me that I could be drafted into the Korean War.

That Christmas, 1950, I helped Paddy put colored lights on the walnut tree. Unlike France, where Christmas Eve was celebrated after midnight, we ate turkey late in the afternoon on Christmas Day.

All of us were in short sleeves in the balmy weather—it felt more like we were celebrating the summer solstice than Christmas. Always shining, the sun seemed to be going nowhere anytime soon. I missed the Paris winters, but I did not miss France.

For New Year’s Eve, Joe and Paddy invited a few friends, and we all toasted 1951 with champagne. I shook hands with men and kissed women on both cheeks. Paddy teased me, saying I kissed the prettiest women twice, but I pointed out that it was the women who came to me for a second kiss. Paddy laughed, so I kissed her cheeks again. She said, “Johnny, you’re a cheeky boy.”

I was not a social drinker, and being sober in a very merry crowd was somewhat depressing, so I asked Joe for the keys to the Chevy. Heading south, I drove to the crest of the Santa Monica mountains on Mulholland Drive where the view of Hollywood and Los Angeles revealed a magical sight: endless miles of still and moving lights. I was reminded, that first day of 1951, of the great contrast to my home—how dark Paris, “the city of light,” had been during the war, and how we had come to call the darkened Eiffel Tower, “the Black Widow.”

Seen from above, great boulevards sliced through darkness in straight illuminated miles. I was mesmerized by the sight and returned often to those mountains.

From there I drove down into Hollywood and cruised aimlessly up and down the Sunset, Santa Monica, and Hollywood boulevards, joining other cars. Everyone was shouting, singing, and honking horns in the first hours of 1951. In Santa Monica, I walked barefoot on the beach and encountered revelers in funny hats, blowing noisemakers and wishing Happy New Year to the Pacific Ocean.

On the other side of the Pacific, four days after the New Year, Seoul, Korea, fell again to the Communists. While some World War II veterans on reserve status were shipped to fight in the new war, many of the new draftees were younger brothers of the men who had liberated me in France in 1944. As Joe was over 30, he escaped being recalled into service.

Each week as the war escalated, I was thrilled by Life magazine’s photographic coverage. I studied photographs by top professionals like John Dominis, David Douglas Duncan, and Hank Walker. I had no way of foreseeing my future—that in a few years I’d work with Dominis in the Far East; then in the early ‘60s in the south of France, I’d discuss Dave Duncan’s book on the Korean War, This is War, with the author himself; and in 1962, I’d meet Hank Walker in Vietnam in an encounter that would change my professional life.

In 1947, I met Robert Capa, the legendary war photographer in Paris. I’d been impressed by his pictures of the landings in Normandy, published in Life and other publications. His work seemed glamorous and dangerous—the sheer drama of recording war and its horrors at once attractive and repulsive. Seeing the Korean War in the pages of Life, I felt the same attraction to the danger and action but was repelled by the idea of men killing one another

As Joe’s assistant, I was introduced to the glamour of Hollywood. My job was to help Joe while he shot cover stories on Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Cyd Charisse, Anne Miller, and many other film stars.

In London, I’d been surprised when a waitress called me “dear,” but in Hollywood, I was dumbfounded when several stars called me “darling” as they asked me to do minor things during a shoot.

The first time a gorgeous star called me “darling” on the set, I blushed. On the way home, I couldn’t wait to tell Joe. He laughed and said, “Johnny, I don’t want to destroy your dreams but didn’t you notice that all the women stars call everybody ‘darling’—the director, assistants, gaffers, electricians, makeup men, the parking attendant?” All I could say was, “You’re putting me on.”

On the next shoot, I paid attention and Joe was right. More than 20 years later, when I met Ginger Rogers again after one of her last performances in Las Vegas, I told her the story. “That’s very dear of you,” she said, and gave me a kiss.

Joe and I were once assigned to photograph Gene Kelly. When I saw his film, An American in Paris, I felt no nostalgia for Paris. I had entered my “Americanization” phase and was trying hard to forget France. Although women found my French accent charming, I was trying hard to erase it by imitating American voices I heard on the radio.

Early 1951, I started night school at Van Nuys Junior College, limiting courses to American history and literature. For me, the opportunity was invigorating—in 1940 France, high school was a privilege only for the wealthy, where in California, higher education was open to all.

All my notebooks from those years had been lost or destroyed except for one containing quotations from Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

One passage I particularly related to was from Jefferson’s January 16, 1787, letter to Colonel Edward Carrington: “Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.” Although Jefferson’s letter had been written two and a half years before the French Revolution of 1789, I felt it described the French government and society I had just left.

From Lincoln, I saved a passage from his March 17, 1865, address to a regiment in Indiana: “I have always thought that all men should be free; but if any should be slaves, it should be first those who desire it for themselves and secondly those who desire it for others. Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”

Except for historical dates, I knew almost nothing about the history of slavery in America. Imagining such abominations, all I could think about was the brutality of the German-Nazi occupation of France and harsh treatment even from my own people, such as Monsieur Jeanret working me 12 hours a day at age 12, stacking 120-pound sacks of potatoes. That felt like slavery to me, yet it technically was not. What I experienced was brutal oppression and shameless exploitation, but slavery was a far greater crime. It would be many years into my “Americanization” before I learned more about this great American shame.

In my notebook, I saved a passage from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s June 27, 1936, speech accepting his renomination: “Out of this modern civilization, economic royalists carved new dynasties…The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business.”

All three quotations inspired me because they reflected conditions in France that I had known between 1940 and 1950. Interestingly, those words were not written by Frenchmen but by three American statesmen in three different centuries.

By May 1951, while in college, I had saved enough from my $20 weekly salary to buy my first automobile. It had been on sale for several months at Palmer’s Texaco gas station where we serviced Joe’s Chevrolet.

It was a 1936 black Chrysler Coupe with an asking price of $75. I had looked at it several times, and Palmer said he would give me a fair price, so one fine morning, we haggled over the price and finally settled on $60. I paid cash, Palmer took care of the registration, and I drove home to Paddy and Joe who congratulated me.

The car’s black paint was somewhat faded. There were traces of rust on the bumper but no holes in the body, and the tires were okay. The hood was incredibly long, and the interior included a single-bench seat, a floor shift, oil pressure, water gauges, and not much else.

I immediately washed the old Chrysler. As I removed the ashtray to clean it, I found an envelope containing $60, exactly what I had paid for the car. So I drove back to Palmer and played a guessing game with him, “Guess what I found in the ash tray?” He answered, “Cigar butts.” Then I showed him the envelope with the money. He had completely forgotten that he used the ashtray to hide his horsetrack betting money from his wife.

Palmer was so impressed I had returned his money that he gave me a bear hug. He said, “Johnny thank you. That’s so nice of you. Listen, if you ever need a credit rating in the future, I’ll gladly give you one.”

He did a year later when I needed a loan from Bank of America to buy a newer Pontiac for $400. While approving my loan, the officer said, “This is the most glowing credit report I’ve ever seen!” It was my first credit rating report in America.

Palmer had warned that my Chrysler was a “gas guzzler” and advised me to check the oil constantly. He was right: I got an average of seven miles per gallon on highways and less in the city. It burned one quart of oil per hundred miles. For long trips, extra cans of oil were in the trunk. But I never had any real problems with it. My Chrysler had over 200,000 miles on it when I exchanged it for a 1938 Buick with spare wheels on the front fender.

Having my own car gave me a degree of independence. I had often gone on long walks rather than ask for Joe’s car, but southern California was designed for automobiles. During one of my walks on Vanowen, the State Police stopped to ask if I needed help. “It’s okay,” I said, “I’m just walking.” But they gave me a ride home, saying, “The main drags aren’t made for walking. You might get hit since there’s no sidewalk.”

My earliest encounter with the police occurred when I arrived in California and was driving while Joe slept. A strange car with flashing lights appeared behind us. I thought someone was trying to run us off the road, so defiantly, I wouldn’t let them pass. Suddenly, sirens blared and Joe woke up saying, “Jesus! What are you doing? Pull over!” He had to explain that I had just arrived from France and didn’t know they were police. After looking at my French driver’s license, they let us go.

I hadn’t been in California long and was already working on my own during my free days. I had bought a car and had the means to move. Moving, it seemed, was my way of life.

I assisted Joe photographing some of the greatest stars in Hollywood, walked in the Pacific Ocean, and looked at the stars in the desert sky, yet I kept asking myself, “Where is California?”

Shortly after my arrival, I already felt a sense of the restlessness of California. Unconsciously, I knew I had to move in order to survive.