Unscrewed

Before "Wax on, wax off," a stranger came to my home with a bottle of vodka and a broken heart.

If you were a photographer back in the day when print magazines were thriving and photo agencies made big bets on speculative projects in far-flung locales, a ringing telephone could mean damn near anything. So when my business manager, Marty LeAnce, called me from his car phone—remember those¹—one day in 1980, sounding a bit…emotional…and asked if he could come over with a “very special friend” to pose for a picture together, I was and wasn’t surprised. My life back then was a blur of movie stars, musicians, world leaders, and passionate eccentrics with an occasional natural disaster thrown in to cleanse the palate. Photographers have a name for a day when anything can happen and often does. We call it Tuesday, or sometimes Friday or Christmas. How deep was I in? When my father died, I didn’t find out for two weeks—off on assignment.

Normally, Marty was my rock. As a nomadic photojournalist freelancing for Time, Rolling Stone, Forbes, People, Money, and other glossies here and abroad, with commercial assignments, too, shooting for movie studios and ad agencies, I relied on him, back home, to make sure my bills got paid. But that day he was playing a different role: sensitive subject. As he drove toward my place from downtown Los Angeles, he filled me in on the basics of his predicament while taking occasional gulps of something that clearly was not iced tea.

Apparently, Marty’s friend had gone through a cement mixer of a divorce. Marty had tagged along to the courthouse, not merely as chauffeur but to hold his friend’s hand before and after the signing of papers, officially dissolving the marriage. The power and beauty of their friendship deserved to be memorialized in a photograph, they both thought, but the emotional truth of the moment would be lost, Marty said, if they had to go through the rigmarole of booking my studio in L.A.’s Fairfax District, or even just making me drive there to meet them. Could they just swing by my apartment in Beverly Hills instead, he asked, since they were already close? I heard the need in Marty’s voice. I heard something else, too. I wanted the two of them off the street A-SAP. So I said, “Sure, come on by.”

I pushed some furniture out of the way to create a shooting space in my one-bedroom upper-duplex, a neighborhood anachronism with wainscoting, stained-glass windows, and a fireplace. I took a framed picture off the wall so we could have a plain background. I went outside to the garage to fetch lights and stands from the trunk of my car, lucky to have them with me after a recent shoot on location. The doorbell rang while I was fastening my Hasselblad onto a tripod.

There they were: Tweedledum and Tweedledee with the party of the third part, Mr. Smirnoff, all looking half-empty. I invited them in and stood them side by side—with Smirnoff waiting in the wings—while I shot a couple of Polaroid tests; just routine, to make sure the flash fired in sync with the camera’s shutter. I loaded a roll of black-and-white film and shot just a few more frames before Marty excused himself to visit the bathroom, leaving me alone with his friend: Pat Morita.