The Shadow Catcher

  Take Topanga Canyon.

  Take Sepulveda Pass.

  Take Beverly Glen, Coldwater or Laurel Canyon.

  Or take Cahuenga Pass.

  I take Beverly Glen, which means first I have to take the Winnetka exit to Ventura Boulevard which takes an added fifteen minutes because a Dodge Dart with a half-a-dozen 12-step decals plastered on it overheats on the exit ramp, its slogans asking What Would Jesus Do? which is not the existential exercise I need right now because, let’s face it, ain’t Jesus running late, Himself? What would Jesus take is what I want to know, and having called the Hotel Bel Air once already from the 101 to say I’ll be slightly delayed, I now call again to say I’ll be there in ten minutes but when I get to Beverly Glen I have to downshift into first behind a long slow line of similarly-minded-short-cut-takers and I inch uphill behind a Saturn with a vanity plate that reads UP4PART. And maybe it’s because at this point I’m already forty minutes late, maybe because at this point I’ve blown the possibility of salvaging this meeting at the Hotel Bel Air, that I entertain the very real possibility of DOING SOMETHING CRAZY, doing something crazier than sitting in traffic for two hours for the ridiculous proposition of AUDITIONING, because that’s what this meeting is: another Up 4 Part. Another loony desperate writer coondoggin’ the shiny penny, and maybe it’s because in my standard transmission vintage model PT Cruiser I can either go uphill or I can turn the AC on, but never both at the same time, which means I’ve been breathing fossil fuel exhaust for the better part of ninety minutes with the windows down and the sunroof gaping, or maybe it’s because there’s just something about THE WEST, the CALL OF THE WILD and the prospect of ANOTHER ARTIST screwing up, that suddenly I want less to know what Jesus would do than what would Dr. Gonzo do? The question What would Hunter S. Thompson do? presents itself as a reasonable fallback strategy as I take the turn into Stone Canyon at 40 mph, leave the keys with some kind of valet posing as a mariachi guy and rush (what’s this? a footbridge? are those swans?) through the full faux Alhambra of foliage into the faux provençal dining nook toward the table, breathless, rumpled and apologetic, with my hair all EINSTEINED, giving off its own exhaust, mascara/lipstick smeared and bargain Nordstrom Rack linen/rayon MADE IN INDONESIA jacket rutched across my tits to encounter THEM: two women in Armani, militantly trim and toned.

  ME: So so sorry, I’m so late.

  They smile and show their pearly whites. JON, my agent, signals I have lipstick on my teeth. STACEY, the producer for the star, has brought along MICHELLE, a young assistant They have finished eating their chopped greens. A WAITER comes to take my order and to take their plates away. I notice my manuscript lying between them, faceup. I can read the title upside down. THE SHADOW CATCHER. From her briefcase Stacey extracts a phonebook-thick paperback feathered with yellow Post-it notes. I know it well, this book, it’s the Taschen paperback edition of Edward S. Curtis’s COLLECTED WORKS.

  “—what can I say?” she says. “EDWARD S. CURTIS. What passion! What personal courage!” She layers her palms on top of the book, as a NUN would, on a BREVIARY, and breathes, “There’s a movie in here!”

  And she wants to turn it loose, I can tell, like an exorcist on call. That would be a great idea for a movie is only ever meant to be a compliment. Not only here in Tinseltown but all across America. It was like a movie always means something happened, you saw something happen right in front of you in an emotionally charged larger-than-life context. It was like a movie can only ever mean that you’re a camera. It can only ever mean that while you’re looking at what’s happening in front of you, you’ve also managed to step back from the experience, you’ve willed yourself into the position of spectator, you’ve willed yourself to be detached in the observance of performance. But There’s a movie in here means the stuff is still a little messy, too messy to be construed as entertainment. Too messy to offer up a possibility for profit, for a lesson or a parable. It’s not art. It’s life. And if you were Cartier-Bresson you’d move yourself into position, you’d align yourself along the arc of possibility and wait for a decisive moment when life, itself, composes into art. Or, if you’re Edward Curtis, you dress the mess to play the part. You disguise the truth to make the image that you want. You find the movie in there at any cost.

  “Of course ever since we’ve been attending Sundance—how many years is it now, Michelle, thirteen? fourteen?—there’s been a writer in Park City flogging a new Curtis project.”

  “Mine isn’t a new Curtis project,” I put in, surprised by what I hear as a little trill of stridency in my voice. “Mine is a novel.”

  “Well of course it is,” she smiles. “Which is why I knew we had to have first look.”

  She pats my manuscript and I realize, with relief, she hasn’t read it. Jon must have brought it with him to the table.

  “‘The Shadow Catcher.’ It’s the name the Indians called him, no? The name they gave him when he showed them pictures of themselves?”

  “That’s the legend, yes.”

  My voice seems to be coming through a mask.

  “Look, I want to be honest with you,” I say as a way to help her crib my work “Curtis lived a long, long time. Eighty-four years. He had a very complicated life.” I gesture toward THE COLLECTED WORKS. “The time he spent taking photographs of Indians is only one of many chapters in his long and complicated life, and the story that I’ve written might not be the story that you want.”

  I look at Jon, and Jon looks pained.

  “Curtis is dead,” I continue. “His children are all dead. His life has passed into public domain. You could hire someone to write the script you’re looking for. You don’t need to option my version of his life.”

  “I’m paid for picking winners,” she tells me.

  She pushes Curtis’s self-portrait toward me.

  “How could someone who looks like this and risks his life to make gorgeous images of Indians not be perfect for a movie? How tall was he?”

  “Six feet.”

  “Blue eyes?”

  I nod.

  “As I was telling Jon before you came, we’ve had our sights on a Curtis project for years—but nothing’s been right for us so far. What we’re looking for is a story that combines all the elements—the outdoors—adventure—romance—plus it’s got to have the do-good message. No one would ever know the history of these tribes, what they wore and how they lived, if Curtis hadn’t risked his life to track them down and make these photographs.”

  I blink a couple times. I, too, have brought along some books and now I place them on the table.

  “I don’t know if Jon has told you, but I researched the book for several years before I started writing it. So I’ve become something of an expert on his life…”

  “—the expert,” Jon puts in.

  “I started out with admiration toward the body of this work, these stunning photographs, the breadth of their achievement, and toward the man who was responsible for making them. You could say I fell a little bit in love with him.”

  “Me, too,” Stacey confesses.

  “Who wouldn’t?” her assistant comforts her.

  “What’s not to love?” Jon poses.

  “I thought, as you obviously still do,” I continue, “‘Gosh, what a hero, what a masterpiece of service to his nation.’ Here’s a guy, no formal training, no formal education, who builds his first camera from scratch, learns through trial and error, on his own, what was then still considered the science of photography, not the art, and not only masters the technical difficulties of recording light but turns the processes of capturing it into works that are noble and magnificent and beautiful to behold. A man who, out of the blue, out of a commitment to his nation, sets himself the task of photographing every native tribe west of the Mississippi, every one of them, including the natives of Alaska, before they vanished to dust, before their tribal customs disappeared under the burden of colonization, under the weight of the white man’s coming. And then—on top of all of that—m
iraculously—gets the job done.”

  “I’m loving this guy more and more,” Stacey confides.

  “Let me ask you something,” I propose. “When do you think these photographs were taken?”

  I push one forward.

  “This is Red Cloud,” I point out. “Revered Sioux warrior. When do you think Curtis made this picture? Or this one,” I suggest. “These are Apaches.”

  Michelle suggests, “Around the Civil War?”

  “That seems right,” Stacey agrees. “I’d say…mid-nineteenth century?”

  “Twentieth,” I emphasize. “Every one of these. Taken, not as you believe, or as you’re led to believe, when the tribes were roaming the Plains, hunting buffalo, camping by rivers in their tipis, but after they’d been neutralized, confined in high-security encampments, herded onto reservations, deprived of their livelihoods, forced into the manufacture of ‘Indian-ized’ tourist junk, their children forcibly assimilated into Christian schools. After every one of them was no longer a free individual but a prisoner of war. Curtis didn’t risk his life finding them—he paid the Bureau of Indian Affairs a fee to photograph inside the reservations, that he drove to, in most cases, in his car. This is a test exposure that he took—”

  I push an image toward her. It’s a photograph Curtis made of his Ford parked next to a Sioux tipi.

  “It’s a car next to a tipi…so what?” she says.

  I push another image forward.

  “—this is the image of that location that he published in The North American Indian. See the difference? No car.”

  I show her a print of two Piegan braves seated in their tipi with a prized clock between them; and then I place Curtis’s preferred version of that print, the one he published, next to it. The clock has been erased, manipulated in the darkroom.

  “Curtis would take one Indian from one tribe, a Piegan, let’s say, and dress him up in Assiniboin regalia, and that was fine by him. Dressing Navajos as Siouxes. But if there was any totem of modernity—a car, a clock, a zipper or a waistcoat, Curtis would do everything he could to guarantee it was erased.”

  “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.”