Men Page 5

  Maybe it’s this supreme lack of shame that gives his photos such a compelling immediacy. “Look over here! Look over here!” he’d beseech, using a nickname or anything to draw the victim’s attention, and often capturing something unstudied in these familiar faces, wresting something “real” from a world of over-managed surfaces. His most famous shot, of a windswept Jackie, glancing back at the camera with a half-smile, has an undeniable aura—it’s hard to take your eyes off her. Galella calls it his “Mona Lisa,” though he readily admits that Jackie only smiled because he disguised his voice, and she didn’t realize he was the one hailing her.

  The term “paparazzo” derives from the name of one of the swarming photographers in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, though it’s also supposedly a play on the Italian word for the annoying buzzing of a mosquito. One thing you can say about Galella is that he never shirked the physical hazards of being an annoyance. Marlon Brando knocked out five of his teeth when Galella wouldn’t stop photographing him; Galella sued (he called his lawyer before he called a doctor), settling for 40K—the amount it cost him to reconstruct his jaw, minus a third for the lawyer fees. Which didn’t prevent him from once again lying in wait for Brando following a benefit at the Waldorf-Astoria, though this time he wore a customized football helmet emblazoned with his name. Mindful of his own increasing legend, he made sure to have himself photographed trailing the reclusive stone-faced star through the lobby.

  Having reached his eighties, Galella has been racking up the tributes lately, with shows booked well into 2015, proving that annoyances who stick around long enough eventually become cultural darlings. No doubt he deserves some credit too as a forerunner of today’s 24/7 celebrity harassment—yes, he should get a mention in the history books for that wonderful feat. But let’s talk about this salvage process that hoists professional vulgarians who sprout a few gray hairs into respectability, rebranding them as benign and lovable figures. You see it happening all over the place these days: another renowned aggressor-against-proprieties, the scatological countercultural cartoonist R. Crumb, has been the subject of countless museum retrospectives and tributes too. Why can’t thorns-in-sides just keep on being thorns-in-sides—do they have to get adoration for it too? It’s disheartening to watch the former cultural nuisance join in his own rehabilitation, so moved by all the love that he forgets to thumb his nose at the niceties he used to abhor. He begins speaking of his artistic process, his childhood, his personal demons, and fitting his story into the over-familiar templates and sanctimonies his career was once devoted to smashing.

  It was the same thing with professional thorn-in-the-side Larry Flynt, rehabilitated by Milos Forman’s biopic. In fact, Galella too has been the subject of a loving film treatment by an award-winning director, the 2010 documentary Smash His Camera, by Oscar winner Leon Gast (When We Were Kings). It’s an enjoyable film, but the clanking of the cultural elevation machinery is a little deafening. It premiered at the Museum of Modern Art fittingly, given the artistic burnish Gast confers on Galella, opening with him in the darkroom swishing his prints around in developing fluid like a latter-day Stieglitz. Galella happily plays along, throwing himself into the role of an aging paparazzo-auteur, leading the film crew to the sites of his most famous Jackie shots and letting them trail him to a photo shoot, though he doesn’t actually do that kind of thing anymore. You can see why. This one’s a stage-managed red carpet event featuring Brad and Angelina—press passes required—and Ron can barely get a clear shot of them through the thicket of other paparazzi, his soulless spawn, with their press credentials and digital cameras.

  The film feigns evenhandedness about its subject—diehard elitist and former Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving is trotted out to denounce Galella as an “obscene bottom-feeding so-called journalist”; others brand him everything from a parasite to a sociopath. On the “Is it art?” front, Gast gathers a collection of photographers and photo editors to sit around a table and squabble about Galella’s artistic legacy: does his work have something going for it beyond his famous subjects, or is he just a second-rater who’ll be forgotten fifty years from now?

  It’s Jackie who’s brought in to settle the question—if she was his muse, then Ron is an artist. Or maybe she was more than muse? “It was a relationship conducted through the camera, but it was nevertheless a personal relationship,” contends a former Life magazine editor. Galella “captured something that was very elusive about Jackie,” gushes gossip columnist Liz Smith. “He loved her,” lyricizes magazine editor Bonnie Fuller. “And he loved her children.” Both Jackie and Ron benefited from “this push-me-pull-me thing,” Smith adds. “In the end, she was posing for him—she must have had a little feeling for Ron.”

  Here things take a turn toward the sentimental and plummet into sheer mythology, though it’s a myth Ron’s apparently come to believe in himself. He too speaks about Jackie as though they were entwined in something deep together. When the film attempts to probe Ron’s innermost feelings about her, he’s happy to help. Why did he have this obsession with Jackie? he’s asked. He says earnestly that he’s tried to analyze it: It was because he had no girlfriend at the time. He wasn’t tied down or married, so “she was my girlfriend in a way.” (Those bouts of self-analysis don’t seem to have been too taxing.)

  The film is more successful at sounding his inner life when it proceeds less directly. After Onassis brought Galella back to court for repeatedly violating the restraining order and he was threatened with six years in prison if he didn’t desist from photographing her for the rest of her life, it seemed he might be forced to finally abandon the fixation. But no one ever abandons a true fixation; we just find creative work-arounds. When Ron first spoke on the phone to his future wife, Betty, a photo editor, her voice reminded him of Jackie’s, he recalls: soft and sort of whispery, a laughing sort of voice. They arranged to get together, and he proposed marriage within the first five minutes of meeting her. She said yes. They went to the nearest motel to consummate the deal (he says), and have been happily married ever since. Betty also handles the business end of things.

  Their mansion in Montville, New Jersey, makes the Sopranos’ place look modest, its indoor acreage a monument to the world’s insatiability for celebrity images. The warehouse-sized basement is devoted to the massive Galella archive—aisle upon aisle of floor-to-ceiling industrial shelving holding literally millions of Ron’s photos, with a staff to monitor the illnesses and deaths of celebrities, making sure to have prints on hand whenever one shuffles off the mortal coil, or seems about to. The grounds of the place are lavish too, replete with Italian gardens, columns, burbling fountains and windmills—and an array of spray-painted silk flowers and polyurethaned topiary, lovingly planted by Ron himself. (“It’s an utter and absolute humiliation,” says Betty, whose parents were florists.) Ron is also strangely obsessed with rabbits and keeps them as pets. “They’re cleaner than cats,” he explains. “They don’t smell. And when you pick up their poop it’s like raisins.” Gass provides a cute montage of Ron rolling around in bed with a few of his cuddly friends. Rabbit memorabilia is strewn throughout the mansion, and out back there’s a private cemetery for pet rabbits past, replete with a sculpture garden of bunny statuary—including the famous Bugs—some as big as full-grown men.

  What’s with all the fucking bunnies? It’s one thing to sublimate aggression and violation into art (or even “art”), it’s another to transform them into kitsch and cuddliness. All this cuteness about the bunnies and flowers is overdone, as though rebranding Galella as Mr. Quirky will be good for his legacy. I get that transforming a photo archive into an oeuvre means convincing us that there’s a consciousness behind the work, one with depth and interesting contours, meaning Ron needs to be set apart from your usual hired-gun magazine photographer out on assignment. An oeuvre is the product of a sensibility, whereas the other thing’s an industrial product. And art is worth a lot more, monetarily speaking, than celebrity journalism. Unde
rstood; we just don’t need all this sensibility jammed down our throats.

  It’s not that I begrudge Galella whatever cultural respect anyone wants to confer on him. Ron learned photography in the Air Force, then went to a commercial art college, while I went the fine arts educational route, where we learned early on to nurture our obsessions as the path to cultural respect. It was never precisely stated but simply understood that your obsessions were your bread and butter, your ticket to eventual gallery shows, and, someday—hopefully before you were too old to enjoy it—reverential articles in Artforum and the attendant perks. The more obsessed you were, and the more committed to your weirdness, the more seriously people took you, especially the instructors.

  I was doing some photography in those years too, though I never really mastered the technical stuff like exposure. For my final project in one class, following the tracks of my weirdness, I did something that in retrospect seems bizarre but proved to be the ticket to unimaginable success. I was living in San Francisco’s Mission District, which also served as a landing strip for squadrons of the homeless and deinstitutionalized (though at the time they were still known as bums and winos), and somehow got the idea of asking one of these neighborhood habitués to come home with me and having him dress in my clothes, then photographing him for an installation project. There was an accompanying sound track I’d written and recorded on the theme of brief encounters and dashed romantic illusions. The piece was called Brief Encounter.

  I paid him of course, and he was pretty amiable about the whole thing, though looking back I don’t know what I was thinking. I showed the piece to an influential visiting artist who was doing critiques of student work. She pronounced it unethical and reprehensible but also made a phone call that got me invited to a prestigious fellowship program in New York for budding artists—I’d passed the “Is it art?” test with flying colors apparently—which eventually led to a grad school fellowship, then another fellowship, and then a teaching job. Looking back, I guess the homeless guy was sort of my Jackie.

  What’s odd about it all isn’t just the happenstance of how careers get off the ground, it’s realizing how much the themes of that piece continued to haunt my work, even after I drifted away from the art world and started writing books. When I came across the script for the piece in a box of papers from those years, there were lines almost identical to some in a book about love I’d write twenty-five years later. Things turned out okay, I guess; still, I wonder whether Ron’s choice of muse was a little more propitious than mine. What does it say about our respective inner lives that his was a famously gorgeous woman and mine a local wino?

  But that visiting artist was right: we exploit our muses and it’s not a two-way street. It’s what Gast and Galella’s other partisans resist acknowledging—they’re eager enough to designate Ron an artist, yet want to sentimentalize away the aggression and egotism of art and make him cuddly. But it’s not exactly evident that being an artist and being an upstanding guy were ever one and the same thing.

  Some of the Jackie images, out of his many thousands, were included in a 2012 retrospective of Galella’s work in Berlin—the exhibit is still traveling around Europe, speaking of artistic success—and in the sumptuously produced volume Ron Galella: Paparazzo Extraordinaire! that accompanied the show. Replete with admiring essays by a bevy of German critics, it’s a beautiful object in its own right: two hundred gilt-edged pages each the weight and thickness of shirt cardboard; 104 gorgeously printed black-and-white images with a running commentary on Galella’s antics over the years. Though many of the original images were actually color, the lush black-and-white confers more artistic gravitas, which seems to be the idea. But that gilt-edged paper tries too hard—it’s gravitas jammed down your throat.

  Ron is determined that he and his muse will go down in history arm in arm: his website, which advertises a new collection called Jackie: My Obsession (available for $300, or in a limited edition for $2,000), asserts rather gracelessly that “our collective memory of Jackie would be non-existent if it weren’t for Ron Galella.” But graceless or not, posterity is still calling, and Ron’s there with the prints.

  Juicers

  I struggle with an embarrassing affliction, one that as far as I know doesn’t have a website or support group despite its disabling effects on the lives of those of us who’ve somehow contracted it. I can’t remember exactly when I started noticing the symptoms—it’s just one of those things you learn to live with, I guess. You make adjustments. You hope people don’t notice. The irony, obviously, is having gone into a line of work in which this particular infirmity is most likely to stand out, like being a gimpy tango instructor or an acrophobic flight attendant.

  The affliction I’m speaking of is moral relativism, and you can imagine the catastrophic effects on a critic’s career if the thing were left to run its course unfettered or I had to rely on my own inner compass alone. To be honest, calling it moral relativism may dignify it too much; it’s more like moral wishy-washiness. Critics are supposed to have deeply felt moral outrage about things, be ready to pronounce on or condemn other people’s foibles and failures at a moment’s notice whenever an editor emails requesting twelve hundred words by the day after tomorrow. The severity of your condemnation is the measure of your intellectual seriousness (especially when it comes to other people’s literary or aesthetic failures, which, for our best critics, register as nothing short of moral turpitude in itself). That’s how critics make their reputations: having take-no-prisoners convictions and expressing them in brutal mots justes. You’d better be right there with that verdict or you’d better just shut the fuck up.

  But when it comes to moral turpitude and ethical lapses (which happen to be subjects I’ve written on frequently, perversely drawn to the topics likely to expose me at my most irresolute)—it’s like I’m shooting outrage blanks. There I sit, fingers poised on keyboard, one part of me (the ambitious, careerist part) itching to strike, but in my truest soul limply equivocal, particularly when it comes to the many lapses I suspect I’m capable of committing myself, from bad prose to adultery. Every once in a while I succeed in landing a feeble blow or two, but for the most part it’s the limp equivocator who rules the roost—contextualizing, identifying, dithering.

  And here’s another confession while I’m at it—wow, it feels good to finally come clean about it all. It’s that … once in a while, when I’m feeling especially jellylike, I’ve found myself loitering on the Internet in hopes of—this is embarrassing—cadging a bit of other people’s moral outrage (not exactly in short supply online) concerning whatever subject I’m supposed to be addressing. Sometimes you just need a little shot in the arm, you know? It’s not like I’d crib anyone’s actual sentences (though frankly I have a tough time getting as worked up about plagiarism as other people seem to get—that’s how deep this horrible affliction runs). No, it’s the tranquillity of their moral authority I’m hoping will rub off on me. I confess to having a bit of an online “thing,” for this reason, about New Republic editor-columnist Leon Wieseltier—as everyone knows, one of our leading critical voices and always in high dudgeon about something or other: never fearing to lambaste anyone no matter how far beneath him in the pecking order, never fearing for a moment, when he calls someone out for being preening or self-congratulatory, as he frequently does, that it might be true of himself as well. When I’m in the depths of soft-heartedness, a little dose of Leon is all I need to feel like clambering back on the horse of critical judgment and denouncing someone for something.

  I suppose some will condemn me for taking these shortcuts. I know the whole idea is that your moral outrage springs from some authentic place deep within the fibers of your own superego, and you’re not supposed to be enhancing your performance with artificial supplements cribbed from the Internet.

  These remarks are prefatory to admitting that, having gone the mother’s little helper route on occasion myself, I find it especially difficult to pass judgmen
t on the increasingly long list of those suspected of, or admitting to, juicing their game in some way or another too. I wish I could work myself into a lather about it—I realize the consensus view is that juicing is a moral affront. They hold Senate hearings on it, for God’s sake. But frankly, I’d rather juice than slip down in the rankings too. Like so many other ambition-wracked bastards, I’ll do what I have to when it comes to staying competitive.

  But men have it far worse when it comes to staying competitive at the moment. They’ve lost it, apparently: their edge is gone, they’re lumpish, unemployed, and increasingly obsolete. Or so it’s been reported, notably by Hanna Rosin in a much-lauded magazine article with the guillotine title The End of Men (later expanded into a bestselling book). “What if modern postindustrial society is simply better suited to women?” asks Rosin provocatively. Patriarchy may have been the organizing principle up until now, but the era of male dominance is finally over, largely because eighty percent of the jobs lost in the last recession were lost by men (prompting the jokey term “man-cession”) and, according to Rosin, men aren’t bothering to retool sufficiently to find new ones. We all know about declines in traditionally male industries like construction and manufacturing (of course, capital crushing the labor movement was part of the job loss story, too). The good news for women is that the information economy doesn’t care about your size and strength, which were men’s sole advantages in the past. What’s needed today is social intelligence. Also obedience, reliability, and “the ability to sit still and focus”—traits seen by employers as women’s particular strengths. Which is why women are procuring the largest percentage of what few jobs remain, and are now, for the first time, a majority of the workforce.