Eight Girls Taking Pictures Read online

  “One must be resourceful.”

  “And your sign outside—Madame Amadora—Portrait Photographer—more resourcefulness?”

  “I wanted to stand apart. I’m not the only one taking pictures in London.”

  “If the photography doesn’t work out, perhaps you can tell futures.”

  “Or run a house of ill repute.”

  “You have more imagination than that.”

  “More than you know.”

  “Actually, I quite like the new name. Doesn’t truly suit you at the moment, but I suspect one day it will.”

  “I suppose it’s by great good luck I’ve adopted an art-trade-profession-science that, like myself, is not properly grown-up.”

  “Amadora,” he began, “I wanted—I wanted to bring you something—to wish you well—” He shyly handed her a narrow box.

  When they had gone to dinner (“Three months, four days, and two hours”), they had had a wonderful time. George Clifton was twenty-four years old; a reporter for The Guardian, he was assigned all manner of random stories, covering a variety of topics, many of them, to him, pure fluff. He didn’t want to be a features reporter as much as he wanted to write a serious, political column. One of the weightier subjects he had been allowed to write about was the recent conflict over women’s rights. He absolutely supported the vote and thought the government’s dealings with many of the suffragettes were despicable. Saying as much was the very thing that had forced him back onto light human interest stories.

  But he told none of this to Amadora, saying only that he was a reporter who longed to be a playwright.

  When he began telling her stories about his job, his subjects, and his life, she noticed a self-deprecation that had been absent in their previous encounters. He asked her questions, encouraged her opinions. He himself was an easier laugh than she had imagined. He kidded her. He was, in short, one thing and another and Amadora found herself completely charmed by him.

  But when he didn’t get in touch after their dinner, she supposed that what she’d felt must have been one-sided, though she could’ve sworn he enjoyed her company as much as she enjoyed his. She kept her disappointment to herself, reminding herself of her decision never to marry, to make her own way, and quickly became distracted by leaving Miss Charles. And, shortly after that, laying the foundation for her own business. George Clifton became someone she thought about in the odd moment, sometimes dreamt about and sighed for without truly allowing herself to want him. How it was possible to feel the absence of someone she barely knew was a mystery.

  Now here he was, in her little studio, offering her a gift.

  Inside the slim box was a string of fairly gorgeous pearls. She took them out, held them aloft as they tangled in her fingers.

  “In case you decide to get a dog.”

  She threw herself on him, her arms around him as she pressed her face into his jacket, holding him as tight as she could, hoping he hadn’t heard the small sob that she tried to hide.

  Within months—months that Amadora spent taking pictures for free of well-known figures, mostly in entertainment, which the local papers ran, and which Amadora believed George had influenced, though he claimed otherwise—the Great War broke out. With the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo that June, every European country began to line up, each with its own established political alliance.

  As a consequence, Madame Amadora’s primary clientele went from stage stars to soldiers and sweethearts, young wives and mothers. Fathers. All those pictures that found their way into rucksacks, helmets, shirt pockets. And their counterparts, the photographs of the soldiers themselves, which ended up in purses, and on mantels and dressers, so serious, so young.

  Amadora had worked hard in the preceding months to shake off the romantic techniques she had learned from Lallie Charles, as well as to teach herself to use materials that allowed her images to remain fixed. Her lighting made people look like themselves, instead of some dreamy versions of themselves, and this was the best thing she could’ve mastered for all those wartime separation pictures, in which the thing most needed was the real face of someone you loved.

  The war was supposed to be over by Christmas.

  Then Christmas came and went and the fighting went on.

  Amadora and George were falling in love over lunches and dinners and park walks, and engaging in lively discussions that sometimes bordered on arguments in the way that two opinionated people discuss. However, they laughed together more than they argued, each discovering that they shared a similar worldview, George with his dry wit and Amadora with her playful remarks. Life, in general, still delighted her, and because of that she could coax George out of a mood when necessary. If he was a little less forgiving than she about the world and its frailties, he found humor in most things. She knew he wasn’t perfect, but, since she didn’t expect perfection from anyone, except maybe sometimes herself, his shortcomings didn’t bother her. She would much rather have life with all it flaws and unpredictability.

  If she were asked the secret to her love affair with George, she would answer that they let each other be who they were. Also that most things were actually quite funny if you only allowed yourself to see them that way.

  George, being of imperfect health (a touch of asthma), was allowed into the reserves, which in his case meant staying home to write articles about the war. These articles would have been written by his colleagues had they not been pressed into service. Once or twice a prowar suffragette marched up to George, dramatically handing him a white feather. The women still had their own grievances against the government, and now they were divided on the war. Those who supported it took it upon themselves to present a white feather of cowardice to any man out of uniform who seemed to them perfectly able to serve. It was only at Amadora’s insistence that George began wearing his uniform. “If only to keep me from pulling these women apart,” she said.

  “In the interest of saving lives at home, I will do as you ask,” he said.

  “I’m very protective of you,” she said.

  “I’ll never know why,” he said, gently touching her face.

  It wasn’t until 1916, when everyone was being drafted, that George Clifton was informed that he too would be sent to the front, as a correspondent.

  “How does a German know that you’re a writer and not a soldier!” demanded a tearful Amadora.

  “Perhaps by the obvious insecurity,” said George. Amadora playfully hit him even as she tried not to cry.

  He told her that he’d be back. He said he was too cranky to kill. She insisted they marry. He said, “Timing is everything.” And it was his refusal of her request that frightened her most of all.

  No one really survived the Great War. No person, no place. It was too far-reaching, too catastrophic, too unimaginable. Those who made it home weren’t the same, and those who waited at home were also changed. Everyone became a stranger of the most dislocating sort because everyone became, once again, unknown. Unknown yet looking familiar, everyone resembling someone he or she used to know. Sweethearts, young marrieds, parents and children, children and parents all had to relearn each other. This didn’t even take into account those who returned yet never seemed to come back at all. Gertrude Stein coined the expression “a lost generation,” but isn’t every generation following any war a little lost?

  After George Clifton went off to war, Madame Amadora was too distracted to continue to be Madame Amadora. While he flew in planes and sent his dispatches to The Guardian, The Times, and The New York Sun, writing his more personal dispatches to Amadora, she answered the call of the country asking its young women to work the land while the men were away.

  She was assigned to a farm in Essex that was cold and the work dirty; the day began too early and ended too late, and in between she mucked stalls, milked cows, cleaned buckets, sheared sheep, took animals to and from pastures, fed them, and worked the garden. She lost weight, lost her good humor for the first time
in her life, lost her health, lost sleep.

  When she saw German planes flying overhead, bound for London, she fell to her knees in the muddy field, angry and weeping. Then she would pick herself up and go inside.

  Then George came home, and again Amadora found herself on the ground, crying again but this time they were tears of relief.

  But George’s changes were deep. In the same way that his physical infirmities weren’t visible to the women with the white feathers, his interior had been, as he once told Amadora while they lay awake in the dark, in the middle of the night, “rearranged.”

  He said this in response to her asking him to (finally!) marry her.

  “I will give up my work for you if you ask,” she said.

  He gave her the sort of smile that scared her a little because she could detect a kind of pity in it, as if all her efforts would never, ever really be able to reach him. “I wouldn’t ask,” he said.

  And because she so much wanted to offer him something, anything, so he would know how much she loved him, how scared she had been for him, every day, all day and all night; because the thought of handing over her independence before the war had been unthinkable, but if he was to be changed by the war, then so would she; because of all this, when he said the one thing he didn’t want, should they marry, was children, she agreed.

  It was an unthinking pact she had made because the war had driven home the possibility of losing him (and she couldn’t lose him), and it was then that she realized she had always imagined having children.

  George quoted Stephen Crane, “ ‘You can depend upon it that I have told you nothing at all, nothing at all, nothing at all.’ ” He said, “Amadora, for all that I have said about the war, I have told you nothing at all.”

  By 1930 Amadora and George had been married for ten years. In that time, Amadora had reopened her studio as Madame Amadora and was so successful that, only four years into her new business, she was invited to speak at the Congress of the Professional Photographers’ Association. Her lecture, titled “Photographic Portraiture from a Woman’s Point of View,” was smart, witty, and theatrical, and everyone was charmed.

  Among the things she said: “Women seem to possess all the natural gifts essential to a good portraitist . . . such as personality, patience and intuition. The sitter ought to be the predominating factor in a successful portrait. Male portraitists are apt to forget this; they are inclined to lose the sitter in a maze of technique luxuriating in the cleverness and beauty of their own medium.”

  She went on to discuss the dangers of repeating oneself, of having “won fame by some special style or thought; to repeat ourselves is not only noncreative and purely mechanical.” Then she declared that one must always reach higher, want more. She said, “Here I am talking about myself; the complacency that comes with success.”

  Her clients were all manner of famous people—politicians, actors, actresses, writers, aristocrats. She took a picture of a lord in his coffin, and another of an ancient duchess who arrived in Amadora’s studio with her young male “assistant,” then proceeded to strip naked to the waist. She wore diamond earrings, and a diamond brooch in her unnatural red hair. “Her enormous breasts, with large purple nipples, hung below her waist like gourds. She smiled with the utmost self-possession and asked if I liked the idea of the jewel in her hair . . . ‘I suppose you only want a head?’ I said, doubtfully glancing at the extraordinary effect below the waist. ‘Head and shoulders,’ she said with a simper, ‘I have always been complimented on the whiteness of my neck . . .’ ”

  George said, “You do get only the best people.”

  She did advertising work.

  Amadora met Amelia Earhart and was befriended by Charlie Chaplin. Her cousin became a famous race car driver, once inviting George to accompany him to the South of France.

  “How was it?” asked Amadora.

  “Fast,” said George. “Very fast.”

  “Was it exciting?”

  “You know, it’s such a fine line between excitement and sheer terror, don’t you think? I think I may pass on Miss Earhart should any invitations come my way.”

  The self-portraits she made were as whimsical as her worldview: She dressed herself as a harlequin and a modified eighteenth-century noblewoman in a tricorn hat; she created an optical illusion in which she was tiny, like something that could be held in the palm of someone’s hand, standing beside her camera, which now loomed like a five-story building. In her hand was a shutter-release cable, making her camera look as if it were on a leash.

  Her black cat sat on a table against a white background, wearing on its collar a framed oval portrait of its mistress.

  The studio too had gone upscale, to a new, more stylish address, with more space, more lighting and staff.

  George quit his job when his first play was produced with moderate success, then adapted as a failed movie. He wrote other plays, which found audiences without making him a household name. He seemed unconcerned with a career that was one step forward and two steps back, but she knew that wasn’t all of it. Amadora could see that, regardless of their individual accomplishments and their brisk social life, the war was in him. Nightmares interrupted his sleep and his waking life, since it took more than merely waking up to pull him back to the present day and their fancy address.

  They would still laugh; the part of George that was prone to judgment still appeared on occasion, usually following some dinner party or opening, Amadora often enjoying the quick, humorous remark later, in private, that deflated some deserving guest.

  What she did not like, and did not tolerate, was his lashing out just to lash out, which he did at times and not always in private. It was moments like these that had people wondering what the lovable Amadora saw in this mercurial man. She didn’t care what they thought; she was never a believer in perfection. She knew his goodness and she knew his nightmares and she never explained anything to anyone.

  Three things happened in 1930 for Amadora. The first was her boredom with black-and-white photography. She couldn’t understand “everyone being in love with beautiful shadows,” when all she wanted to do was work with color. Her father’s livelihood was color. Painters worked with color. They knew that reality didn’t lie solely in line and form, contrasts of dark and light; life was color.

  A new photographic development process, the Vivex process, invented only a few years before by Dr. D. A. Spencer, a color chemist, joined with Colour Photographs Ltd. of Willesden. In it there was none of the delicacy of hand tinting; these colors were saturated, wild, pushed to that point where dreams begin, with the resulting images on large glass plates fixed at a processing plant. Amadora went out and bought a Vivex Tri-Colour Camera, an automatic repeating back camera that held three glass plates, which pulled behind filters of green, red, and blue, and weighed twelve pounds.

  Colored cellophanes on the studio lights created even more color effects.

  So, boredom with black-and-white was the first thing, and the Vivex process (the perfect mode of expression for Amadora’s passion for color and whimsy and the visual kick of life) was the second thing.

  The third thing, which was really the first, was George Clifton and her love for him, and the trip to Paris that she arranged, in the heart of spring, when everything was brilliant and in bloom, and the sky that perfect shade of blue that is never taken for granted. There were roses and women wearing lipstick. Amadora and George didn’t talk about all his lost earnings in the recent stock market crash. Nor did they mention that Madame Amadora’s studio was seemingly immune to the downturn. Paris was a distraction, not quite a vacation.

  At Deyrolle, the taxidermy shop that was over one hundred years old, they saw a pair of gazelles, standing on their hind legs and dressed like shopkeepers. Upstairs they found glassed drawers and cases of butterflies—thousands of butterflies in every color: shimmering, iridescent blues, fiery oranges, a shock of red, a shot of green, a spark of yellow, the cool touch of purple. Two polar bea
rs standing on a counter faced off over a pair of relaxing deer, while a lioness stretched on top of a chest of drawers, ignoring a nearby fox and geese and a flamingo.

  Another lion with an impressive mane stalked between the cases, accompanied by a tiger and an Arctic wolf.

  Sheep wandered around with badgers. Elands, dik-diks, and a wildebeest had a tea party with four zebras, one of whom sat on the table among the china. A llama looked out the window on the rue du Bac, while a horse poked its head through an interior oval opening over the stairwell.

  “The butterflies,” said Amadora. “The stuffed animals.”

  The place was provocative. Like a beautiful, disturbing masquerade ball.

  They walked by the Seine. They had dinner, then walked the boulevards at night, listening to the sounds of cafés and bars and taking in the lights.

  They walked the Galerie des Glaces, and Marie Antoinette’s hamlet at Versailles. They strolled the gardens, circled the fountains, their shoes crunching gravel.

  Amadora loved the eighteenth-century palette of the clothes, upholstery, wall coverings, and clothing; of Watteau and Boucher: powder blue, eggshell white, pale pink, light dusty green, the faintest trace of yellow.

  They visited the Palais des Mirages, where they stood among a small crowd in an exotic mirrored room, in which they would be plunged into darkness only to find a new location in the mirrors each time the lights came on. They were in an Indian palace; they were lost in the forest. The mirrors provided depth and repetition and the effect of being held within an enormous, tumbling kaleidoscope.

  They went to the Bois du Boulogne, the Tuileries, and the Luxembourg Gardens. Along with the writers and artists they knew, they visited Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s painting-filled atelier.

  “I rather liked Miss Stein,” said George, who could barely hide his disdain for the rich in the beautiful apartment where they had been dinner guests the night before, no one there the least affected by the ruined economy.