“So what’s your point?”
“—my ‘point’? My point is these photographs have been constructed for a purpose. An artistic purpose, yes — they’re beautiful to look at. But they’re lies. They’re propaganda.”
“Oh come on — look at these faces. These faces don’t lie. These faces are beautiful. And they’re full of truth…“
…I see dignity. Humanity. And strength,” she adds.
“—and I see something bought and paid for by Big Business. In this case, by Union Pacific. By J.P. Morgan and the railroads. Where do you think Curtis got the money to finance all these photographs? Granted, he tried to raise the funds outside the corporate sphere by appealing first to Teddy Roosevelt and the Smithsonian—”
“Curtis was in touch with Teddy Roosevelt?”
“He photographed him.”
“—when T.R. was president?”
“Curtis photographed T.R.’s daughter Alice’s White House wedding.”
“—he was a wedding photographer, too? — more and more I love this guy! How well did he know T.R.? Did they talk? Do they have scenes together? Who can we get who’s big enough to play ‘Teddy Roosevelt’?”
I ignore this and plug on: “When the Smithsonian turned Curtis’s project down, Roosevelt wrote a letter of introduction to J.P. Morgan for him. And they met.”
“What a great scene.”
“—yes, it was. And Curtis got a lot of mileage from it. According to his version of their meeting, Morgan turned him down at first, but Curtis refused to leave until Morgan promised him the money. Curtis asked for $15,000 a year for six years to put the collected photographs together — more than half a million in today’s dollars — and Morgan told him the Bible had cost less, but he finally wrote the check. And that’s where I start to question our hero, as a hero. The man who built the transcontinental railroad, the man who was Union Pacific, the man who was behind the wholesale slaughter of the Plains buffalo is the man Curtis goes to to finance these portraits of Plains Indians, who depended on the buffalo for their existence. Don’t you think that’s — oh, I don’t know—suspect?”
“Who can we get to play J.P. Morgan?” she asks Michelle. “They were fat, weren’t they. Big men, back then. All those guys…Roosevelt and Morgan…”
“It was a sign of wealth,” Jon puts in. “Even with the women.”
“If only there was, like, a white James Earl Jones,” Michelle says.
“Nicholson could do it,” Stacey suggests.
They’re so busy seeing movies in their heads I wonder if they’ve heard a word I’ve said. “All I want you to understand, before you read the book I’ve written, before you even spend another day entertaining the idea that Edward Curtis was a saint, or a poet, or a hero, is that his life was long. His life was, as I’ve said, complicated. And, like every one of us, he was less than perfect. Less than ideal. Certainly not the man he strove so hard to make everyone believe he was. Possibly destructive. Certainly painfully dangerous to anyone who loved him. And never without blame.”
“—oh my god,” Alison recognizes: “You fell out of love with him.”
“She did and she didn’t,” Jon tries to explain.
“—I did. And then I didn’t.”
I push another portrait forward.
“What’s this?” Alison asks.
“Our hero. A later version.”
“—yikes. What happened to him?”
“Life. Eighty-four years is a lot of living. I know you have a version of him that you’re fond of, but all I’m saying is you have to understand that there are several versions of your man out there, as I was disappointed to discover. What I finally had to do was make a kind of map of his whole life, draw a sketch of it, as if it were a landscape — then look down on it, like I was flying over it, so I could see the patterns.”
“And what were they?”
“Well, you’ve got the beginning years over here, the early life. Then there’s the middle bit where Curtis meets the woman who will change his life — Clara — marries her, has kids, establishes a studio in Seattle, Washington, as a society portraitist. Then, when he’s thirty-two, there’s another part: he meets the then Chief of Forestry by pure chance while climbing Mt. Rainier and the next thing you know this guy takes Curtis to the Southwest where he sees his first Plains Indian. Then, for nineteen years, from 1900 to 1919, all Edward does is photograph Indians. He’s away from home ninety percent of the time, but pretty nearly every time he comes back, his wife gets pregnant — until he just stops coming home at all. He doesn’t even meet his last child until she’s eighteen years old. Clara divorces him in 1919—bitter mess; real ugly. Edward is now fifty-one years old. He has a sister who’s sided with his wife in the divorce; a brother he hasn’t seen since he was six, another brother who’s denounced him as a charlatan and thief — he’s made his wife an enemy and he barely knows his children. And he’s perennially in debt. So he reinvents himself again and comes to Hollywood and lands a job with Cecil B. DeMille as the still photographer for The Ten Commandments. By the 1920s he’s in debt to Morgan, whose heirs force him to relinquish all his copyrights to American Indian, Inc. He sells off part of the Indian art and jewelry he’s acquired, borrows more money and opens two studios here in Hollywood, one in the Biltmore Hotel and one in Glendale, where he slogs away as an average studio photographer for another sixteen years. Then around 1937 he drops out of sight, wandering around Nevada and California, searching for gold. Down and out, eighty years old, he tries to get the U.S. government to pay him for his work as an ethnologist. Instead, he’s condemned by the Secretary of the Interior and denounced as a phony and a fake on the floor of Congress. On October 19, 1952, he drops dead in his daughter’s apartment from a heart attack and dies, in L.A. County.”
“Wow — he died in ’52…he lived that long. That’s, like, during Elvis,” Michelle blinks.
“Wait, I’ve got a scene,” Stacey says: “It’s 1952. We start in the daughter’s apartment,” she acts out. “California sunshine streaming through Venetian blinds. A TV plays in the corner. An OLD MAN, 84, lifts a slat of the Venetian blind to gaze at traffic on the street outside. A THUNDERBIRD goes by. (50’s right? those BIG FINS?) A CADILLAC. Followed by a PONTIAC. The names of Indians—THUNDERBIRD, CADILLAC, PONTIAC — turned into CARS! Seeing this, the OLD MAN grabs his chest, falls down, has a heart attack and dies. The OLD MAN is actually Edward Curtis! Then — FLASHBACK: YOUNG CURTIS (the handsome one) on horseback, his CAMERA on a packhorse, on THE PLAINS. TIPIS in the middle distance. He rides in. What do you think? It’s kind of Citizen Kane meets Dances with Wolves.”
“—Citizen Kane?” I repeat.
“—oh: hey: oh, my god: isn’t there even an Indian reservation that’s called ROSEBUD?”
I look at Jon. Jon looks at me. “I’m curious to know how you fell back in love with him enough to write the novel,” Jon asks.
“Because of this,” I say.
I draw out a Polaroid and lay it on the table.