NAN GOLDIN AT MoMA

“Trixie on the Ladder, NYC” (1979): Goldin “showed life as it was happening.”PHOTOGRAPH BY NAN GOLDIN /

HILTON ALS, NEW YORKER

Just as certain works of literature can radically alter our understanding of language and form, there are a select number of books that can transform our sense of what makes a photograph, and why. Between 1972 and 1992, the Aperture Foundation published three seminal photography books, all by women. “Diane Arbus” (1972), published a year after the photographer’s death, documented a world of hitherto unrecorded people—carnival figures and everyday folk—who lived, it seemed, somewhere between the natural world and the supernatural. Sally Mann’s “Immediate Family” (1992), a collection of carefully composed images of Mann’s three young children being children—wetting the bed, swimming, squinting through an eyelid swollen by a bug bite—came out when the controversy surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe’s “The Perfect Moment” exhibition was still fresh, and it reopened the question of what the limits should be when it comes to making art that can be considered emotionally pornographic.

Nestled between these two projects was Nan Goldin’s “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” (1986). (An exhibition of the slide show and photographs from which the book was drawn opened this month, at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.) “The Ballad” was Goldin’s first book and remains her best known, a benchmark for photographers who believe, as she does, in the narrative of the self, the private and public exhibition we call “being.” In the hundred and twenty-seven images that make up the volume proper, we watch as relationships between men and women, men and men, women and women, and women and themselves play out in bedrooms, bars, pensiones, bordellos, automobiles, and beaches in Provincetown, Boston, New York, Berlin, and Mexico—the places where Goldin, who left home at fourteen, lived as she recorded her life and the lives of her friends.

What interests Goldin is the random gestures and colors of the universe of sex and dreams, longing and breakups—the electric reds and pinks, deep blacks and blues that are integral to “The Ballad” ’s operatic sweep. In a 1996 interview, Goldin said of snapshots, “People take them out of love, and they take them to remember—people, places, and times. They’re about creating a history by recording a history. And that’s exactly what my work is about.”

Goldin’s parents, Hyman and Lillian, grew up poor. They “were intellectual Jews, so they didn’t care about money,” she told me. “Most of all, my father cared about Harvard. He attended the university at a time when there was a kind of quota on Jews. It was a very small quota. Going to Harvard was the biggest thing in his life.” Hyman and Lillian met in Boston and married on September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland. Hyman went to work in the economics division of the Federal Communications Commission. Nancy was born, the youngest of four children, in 1953, and grew up, first, in the suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland, a quiet, orderly place, where, Goldin has said, the main goal was not to reveal too much or pry into the well-manicured lives of your neighbors. As a girl, she longed to know what was behind those closed doors. She also longed to escape that world of convention, she told me, in her high-ceilinged, top-floor apartment in a Brooklyn brownstone—which she moved into, in part, because it’s O.K. to smoke there, an eighties vice that she has carried into the new millennium. (Goldin also lives in Berlin; she left the U.S. in 2000, when George W. Bush was elected.)

Her older brother Stephen, a psychiatrist who now lives in Sweden, was one of her first protectors, she said, but it was her older sister, Barbara, who claimed her emotional attention. Barbara confided in her and played music for her and had all the makings of an artist herself…. “There was a lot of bickering going on, and I wished they’d get divorced most of my childhood.”…. Barbara acted out and could not be controlled—she was, according to Stephen, often violent at home, breaking windows and throwing knives—and her parents had her committed to mental hospitals, on and off, for six years. …“Barbara said, ‘All I want to do is go home.’ She was fifteen. And my mother said, ‘If she comes home, I’m leaving.’ And my father just sat there with his head down….The one good shrink I’ve had says I survived because, by the age of four, my friends were more important to me than my family,”

“I was eleven when my sister committed suicide.”

I was very close to my sister and aware of some of the forces that led her to choose suicide. I saw the role that her sexuality and its repression played in her destruction. Because of the times, the early sixties, women who were angry and sexual were frightening, outside the range of acceptable behavior, beyond control. By the time she was eighteen, she saw that her only way to get out was to lie down on the tracks of the commuter train outside of Washington, D.C. It was an act of immense will.

In the week of mourning that followed, I was seduced by an older man. During this period of greatest pain and loss, I was simultaneously awakened to intense sexual excitement. In spite of the guilt I suffered, I was obsessed by my desire.

From the  introduction to “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.” 

By the time Goldin was thirteen, she was reading The East Village Other, listening to the Velvet Underground, and aspiring to become a junkie, a “slum goddess,” a bad girl free of the limiting roles with which so many women define their social self—daughter, wife, mother. At fourteen, after being kicked out of a number of boarding schools “for smoking pot or some bullshit,” Goldin left home. For a time, she lived in communes and foster homes.

Suzanne with Mona Lisa, Mexico City” (1981). © NAN GOLDIN /

“I met Nan when she was fourteen,” the performer Suzanne Fletcher told me. “She was in a foster home in Massachusetts. I was aware of her because she was so cool.” The two became close friends the following year, when Goldin enrolled in the Satya Community School, where Fletcher was a student. ….There Goldin met David Armstrong, a gay fellow-student who eventually became a photographer, too, and was Goldin’s closest male friend for decades. (He died, of liver cancer, in 2014.)  The two were involved, from the first, in a kind of mariage blanc. They went to movies all the time, were fascinated by the women of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and in love with thirties stars like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. “We were really radical little kids, and we did cling to our friendships as an alternative family,” Fletcher told me. “Even at the time, we could have articulated that.”

Goldin became the school photographer and found her voice, both through the camera, she says now, and through Armstrong, who taught her that humor could be a survival mechanism. She became able to joke and laugh; before that, she said, she barely spoke above a whisper. (Goldin also told me that, for her, the camera was a seductive tool, a way of becoming socialized.) Fletcher remembers Goldin’s “passion to document”: “She kept journals, then the photography became a visual journal,” recording the lives of her friends. (Fletcher is one of the most memorable subjects in “The Ballad.” )

By the time Goldin was eighteen, she was living in Boston with a much older man…. Eventually, she fell in with a group of drag queens, who hung out in a bar called the Other Side, and began to photograph them. She wanted to memorialize the queens, get them on the cover of Vogue. She had no interest in trying to show who they were under the feathers and the fantasy: she was in love with the bravery of their self-creation, their otherness.

Goldin never had any real truck with camera culture—the predominantly straight-male world of photography in the sixties and seventies, when dudes stood around talking about apertures and stroking their tripods, in an effort to butch up that sissy job, otherwise known as “making art.” She took a few courses at the New England School of Photography, but was less engaged by the technical instruction than by a class taught by the photographer Henry Horenstein, who recognized the originality of her work. He turned her on to Larry Clark, who had photographed teen-agers having sex and shooting up in sixties Tulsa. The intimacy of Clark’s pictures—you can almost smell the musk—inspired Goldin. Here were noncommercial images that promoted not glamour but lawless bohemianism, or just lawlessness.

In 1974, she enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, where she studied alongside Armstrong, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and Mark Morrisroe—photographers driven by their color fantasies of relationship drama and alienated youth.

In the summer of 1976, Goldin rented a house with Armstrong and his lover in Provincetown, where she met the writer and actress Cookie Mueller, who appeared in a number of John Waters’s films, and whom she photographed extensively. In her 1991 book, “Cookie Mueller,” Goldin writes:

She was a cross between Tobacco Road and a Hollywood B-Girl, the most fabulous woman I’d ever seen. . . . That summer I kept meeting her at the bars, at parties and at barbecues with her family—her girlfriend Sharon, her son Max, and her dog Beauty. Part of how we got close was through me photographing her—the photos were intimate and then we were.

 (Mueller died, of aids, in 1989.)

Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, New York City” (1983). © NAN GOLDIN

At the end of that Provincetown summer, Goldin had image after image of her friends in the dunes, partying, living their lives as if they had all the time in the world.

Nan Goldin and Marvin Heiferman

The curator Marvin Heiferman was working in New York then, at Castelli Graphics, a business run by the art dealer Leo Castelli’s wife, Antoinette. While Leo dealt with artists like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg in then funky SoHo, Antoinette helped push graphics and photographs—which weren’t always considered “real” art—in a stuffy Upper East Side town house. One day, Heiferman got a call from a young woman who said that the photographer Joel Meyerowitz had referred her. Heiferman told her that he wasn’t looking at new work, but the voice on the phone was insistent. “Then this person shows up in a blue polka-dot dress with a whole lot of crinolines and wacky hair and a box under her arm,” Heiferman recalled. “She shows me this box of pictures, and they’re really weird and curiously made, with a very strange color sense about them, and they were of everything from people smoking cigarettes to fucking. There were probably twenty to twenty-five pictures. And I had never seen anything like that, in terms of their density and their connection with the people in them.” Heiferman told Goldin to bring more work the next time she came. A few months later, she arrived with a wooden crate full of photographs. “Again, I’m thinking, This is extraordinary work, right? I loved them and wanted to show them, but Mrs. Castelli thought they were too raw. She worried that they would upset people, that Ellsworth Kelly wouldn’t like them.”

Although Heiferman eventually included Goldin in a group show, it was almost a decade before she got her due as an artist. There’s an unspoken rule in photography, not to mention in art in general, that women are not supposed to be, technically speaking, voyeurs—they’re supposed to be what voyeurs look at.

“ ‘The Ballad’ was a brilliant solution for someone who shoots like her,” Heiferman said. “It showed life as it was happening, and she wound up with something that was an amalgam of diaristic and family pictures and fashion photography and anthropology and celebrity photography and news photography and photojournalism. And nobody had done that before.

“Nan on Brian’s Lap, Nan’s Birthday, New York City” (1981). © NAN GOLDIN

Goldin was tending bar at Tin Pan Alley, an “Iceman Cometh” type of watering hole on West Forty-ninth Street, when she met an office worker and ex-marine named Brian, a lonesome Manhattan cowboy with a crooked-toothed smile, who eventually fell into acting. Goldin ended their first date by asking him to cop heroin for her in Harlem. He did. Drugs consumed them, as did their physical attraction to each other. In “The Ballad,” we see Brian sitting on the edge of Goldin’s bed, smoking a cigarette, or staring at the camera with lust, certainly, but wariness, too, his hairy chest a sort of costume of masculinity.

Nan and Brian in Bed, New York City” (1983). © NAN GOLDIN

[Writer and friend Darryl] Pinckney describes Goldin’s lover as “tall but uncertain.” He adds, “His only asset seemed to be that he was a man, but it was his physical advantage as a man that allowed him to convert into a weapon his sense of entitlement and injury, his resentment at being the backstage husband.” In 1984, the couple were in Berlin, and, Goldin told me, “Brian was dope-sick. We were staying at a pensione, and he started beating me, and he went for my eyes, and later they had to stitch my eye back up, because it was about to fall out of the socket. He burned my journals, and the sick thing was that there were people around who knew us and who wouldn’t help me. He wrote ‘Jewish-American Princess’ in lipstick on the mirror.”

Goldin made it back to the U.S., where Fletcher helped get her to a hospital so that her eye could be saved. While recovering, she made a self-portrait, “Nan one month after being battered” (1984), which is, perhaps, the most harrowing image in “The Ballad.” We see Goldin’s blackened eyes and swollen nose and, in a stroke of pure genius, her red-lipsticked lips. It’s the tender femininity of those lips that brings the horror into focus.

“Nan One Month After Being Battered” (1984). © NAN GOLDIN

Goldin was physically afraid of men for a long time after the beating, and her drug use became less and less controlled.

Mark Holborn, an editor at the Aperture Foundation, first saw “The Ballad” in 1985, at the Whitney Biennial. He went back to his office thinking that it was among the most powerful visual experiences he’d ever had. “It was not something that would have happened at that point within the Museum of Modern Art,” he told me. “And I welcomed that. I felt that, as much as I respected this great lineage that was being established at moma—Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander—in a sense, it was coming to its conclusion.” Goldin, he said, was not making work that responded to other photographers’ work: “She had her own visual language, and this was unusual.” Holborn, Heiferman, and Goldin decided to make a book out of “The Ballad.” Many images were considered, discarded, picked up again. (Fletcher was very involved with the selection.) As the project progressed, so did Holborn’s relationship with Goldin, which became emotionally intense, though Holborn was married and a father.

The book came out in 1986. Reviewing it in the New York Times, Andy Grundberg wrote, “What Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ was to the 1950’s, Nan Goldin’s ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ is to the 1980’s.” Goldin was not unaware of the contradiction involved in her iconic work’s, so wild in spirit, becoming, to a certain extent, institutionalized. For me, “The Ballad” is poised at the threshold of doom; it’s a last dance before aids swallowed that world. (Goldin also recorded the aids era, in her 2003 book, “The Devil’s Playground.”)

She recently put out a new book, “Diving for Pearls,” a series of photographs of art works linked to her own work from the past. In the introduction, she explains the title:

Since David Armstrong and I were young he always referred to photography as “diving for pearls.” If you took a million pictures you were lucky to come out with one or two gems. . . . I never learned control over my machines. I made every mistake in the book. But the technical mistakes allowed for magic. . . . Random psychological subtexts that I never would have thought to intentionally create. The subconscious made visible—though whether mine or the camera’s I don’t know. . . .

GIANTS WALK THE EARTH: PAUL MCCARTNEY

ADAM GOPNIK, NEW YORKER

 …even though we’re drowning in Beatle fact, something mysterious remains, and that mysterious thing, as always in the lives of artists, is how they did what they did. There is something fated about the Beatles. The first photograph of them in their final fourness, with Ringo on drums, was taken on August 22, 1962; the last was taken exactly seven years later, on August 22, 1969. The space between was filled with music…The seven years are still almost unbelievable in the growth they evidence. The Beatles were a[fine-Esco]. provincial rhythm-and-blues group, then they were masters, and they departed having made only masterpieces. How and why it happened—and why, having come so far so quickly, they broke apart so soon—remains the biographer’s puzzle.

The mystery won’t be solved in “Paul McCartney: The Life,” Phillip Norman’s biography, but we’ll be reminded of it. And this portrait serves another purpose: it is, essentially, biography as apology. Norman admits that in his earlier books, including a biography of the Beatles called “Shout!” (a weird title, given that the Beatles never recorded and only rarely played that song, and given that shouting is what they didn’t do), he accepted the cheap stereotype of Paul as a self-centered trivialist. Now he sees that Paul was not only a man of genius but also someone who has, past seventy, handled the madness of mega-fame about as well as anyone ever has. Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson died of something very much like suicide; John Lennon was murdered—hardly his fault—but after a long period of withdrawal. Paul is a grandfather and a father, by all accounts a good one, who made a bad rebound marriage after losing a much loved wife, but who has otherwise spent the past twenty-five or so years doing the good work of entertaining countless people and accepting innumerable awards. It’s a nice life to look at. He still strolls the streets of New York, smiling and dismayingly normal. So, if there are no new facts, there is a new attitude: all is forgiven.

As Norman shows, McCartney has worked so hard at seeming an ordinary bloke that it is easy to miss the least ordinary and least bloke-ish thing about him: the magnitude of his melodic gift. A genius for melody is a strange, surprisingly isolated talent, and doesn’t have much to do with a broader musical gift for composition; Mozart certainly had it, Beethoven not so much. Irving Berlin could barely play the piano and when he did it was only in a single key (F-sharp major: all the black keys), and yet he wrote hundreds of haunting tunes; André Previn, who could do anything musically as a pianist and a conductor, wrote scarcely a single memorable melody, although he did write several shows and many songs. McCartney, as Norman reminds us, had the gift in absurd abundance. 

Of  all the Beatles’ biographical conundrums, the most baffling is their breakup. One minute they were represented, in “Yellow Submarine,” as four Edwardian children inhabiting a magical shared space; the next they were in the midst of squabbles so bitter that they had hardly healed when, ten years later, John was murdered. “Musical differences, business differences, personal differences” was McCartney’s own laconic formula, offered when he released the first post-Beatles album, in April of 1970. The business differences may have been the biggest of all, and they are nicely illuminated by another good recent Beatle book, Fred Goodman’s “Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out the Beatles, Made the Stones, and Transformed Rock & Roll.”

The subsequent machinations, as Goodman relates them, have mostly to do with the politics and practices of music publishing. All biographies of pop artists, to a first approximation, seem to end up being studies in the music-publishing business. The story is always the same, and as unvarying as the tale of the stepson in a Brothers Grimm fable. A young pop star eager for fame and money makes a deal for a few promising beans with a grizzled music manager-publisher he meets on the road to town; the youngster climbs the beanstalk that grows up, and fights the giant at the top, only to find, on his descent, that the grizzled vet has made off with most of the fortune that fell from the clouds.

Klein, Goodman shows, was a virtuoso of this kind of swindle, not just selling the beans but keeping them moving, in a perpetual shell game. Which is not to say that he was simply a villain. He worked by the rules of Brill Building business: he consistently helped his clients—chiefly, by forcing audits on unwilling record companies, which almost invariably turned out to be hiding a few beans themselves—while helping himself, too. The problem is not that he was a thief but that he worked in a business where thieving, of one kind or another, was the business. He saw his job as getting as much money as possible for his clients and as much money as possible for himself, without stopping to reflect on whose was whose.

With the Beatles, he increased their royalties while trying, at least, to insinuate himself into the ownership of their songs. McCartney, dubious, consulted his prospective in-laws Lee and John Eastman, the father and brother of his girlfriend and soon-to-be wife, Linda. New York lawyers and artist managers of, among others, Willem de Kooning, they warned him off Klein. Far more sophisticated (and mindful of their fiduciary obligations), the Eastmans considered the value of the Beatles something to be cultivated and constructed in the long term. The Beatles, they saw, were more like de Kooning than like Bobby Vinton. The Eastmans won out, at least with McCartney, and eventually made him an unequalled fortune.

In 1970, McCartney and the Eastmans launched a lawsuit to break up the Beatles partnership. That became the trigger for John Lennon’s toxic onslaughts against his former partner, feeding all the hostile stereotypes that Norman is now trying, decades later, to remedy. 

In fairness to Klein, it should be said that few people imagined that the pop music of the period would be remembered eighteen months afterward, much less that it would still be hugely valuable half a century later. No one anticipated that pop-song publishing deals signed in 1961 would have significant financial consequences in 2016; it would be like supposing that a YouTube cat video today will be generating revenue in 2070. Managers of Klein’s generation simply assumed that a hit was a six-week event and a career a matter of three years, and that you grabbed what you could while you could. Everybody took a piece. Peter Watkins’s 1967 movie “Privilege,” a satirical account of the rise of a Beatlesque pop star, ends with the notion that after his brief fame nothing remains but a single, silent film clip.

To read about these fights today is to feel the glow of the irretrievable past. Few hope to make huge sums from popular music now; the business has traversed an improbable arc where careers were once assumed to be short-lived and records to be minimally profitable, through the Golconda era of almost unbelievable wealth, to the new era where careers are once again assumed to be precarious and recordings minimally profitable.

Even a staunch fan has to acknowledge the musical fall that came after McCartney wrestled himself free from his partners. What happened? One of the first things he did was begin to write with his wife, Linda, while still working within the confines of the old partnership, allowing her to claim royalties that he would otherwise have had to split with the businessmen (not Klein; this was another gang of bottom-feeders) who had bought the Lennon-McCartney music-publishing business. For a long time, he refused to sing Beatle songs—in part, no doubt, for artistic reasons but also, surely, because he didn’t want to go on putting money in the pockets of those who had stolen the songs. He formed a band, called Wings, but it was a band only in name: he wrote all the songs and sang all the songs and picked all the musicians, changing them as he wanted and paying them as sidemen, not as partners, while remaining deeply invested in the notion that this was a new band, making its way to the top. That the people who turned out had turned out to hear not Wings but him—that they were prepared to put up with the band in order to hear him—still seems, if Norman is to be credited, genuinely surprising to him.

It’s true that the sound of the band was very un-Beatles-like—pop where they had been rock…. This was deliberate. McCartney didn’t want to sound like the Beatles. (In concert these days, he plays two and a half hours of mostly Beatles music, having revived even oddities like “Another Girl” and “Hello, Goodbye.” But for a long time he wouldn’t.)…[But still, there is that question of the musical fall.] Perhaps the simpler truth is that each of us has only so many heartbeats. All artists have fat years and leaner ones afterward. They just hope that the lean years don’t turn into a famine, and that there’s enough seed corn left over for sweet if stressed fruit. To have had a rich harvest more or less guarantees a comedown later. The issue is the grace with which you fall.

Sir Paul McCartney marries Nancy Shevell in October 2011.

THE GUARDIAN, NEIL SPENCER

McCartney had long nursed a clutch of grievances about the established mythology of the Beatles, foremost that he is invariably portrayed as the “safe”, soft-centred obverse to John Lennon’s acerbic, iconoclastic rocker; doe-eyed, “cute” Beatle Paul, handy with a melody and a bassline but lacking the fire and edginess of “clever” Beatle John. This view was vigorously promoted by Lennon himself in the wake of the group’s bust-up (and later upheld by Yoko Ono), brandishing Tomorrow Never Knows and A Day in the Life against “granny music” like When I’m Sixty-Four and Your Mother Should Know.

Norman [as mentioned above] presents a different picture. In the squalid Hamburg residencies of the Beatles’ early career, fuelled on booze and uppers, McCartney was an eager participant in the orgiastic craziness. Later, during the Fabs’ mid-1960s peak, it was McCartney who immersed himself in the burgeoning London “underground”, championing the Indica bookshop and gallery (where John first met Yoko), helping found International Times and exploring avant-garde composers like Stockhausen and Luciano Berio. Meanwhile Lennon, as Paul puts it, “was living on a golf course in bloody Weybridge”.

Nor was McCartney’s music any less innovative than his partner’s. Always the Beatles’ most evolved musician and a keen student of classicism after lodging with the family of his actor girlfriend Jane Asher, he demanded a string quartet for Eleanor Rigby, while Penny Lane was as brilliant as Strawberry Fields. In the judgment of their equable producer George Martin, “John was lemon to Paul’s olive oil.” The Beatles’ magic required them both.

McCartney had himself to blame for perceptions of his role, always playing Mr Nice Guy, developing an affable but vacuous interview technique that Norman aptly terms “soufflé-speak”. Steeped in antique pop by his beloved father, an amateur musician, McCartney was often led astray by sentimentalism during the solo career he doggedly built with Wings, though it delivered chart success (the vapid Silly Love Songs remains his biggest US hit).

As if atoning for his earlier misjudgment, Norman offers scant criticism of McCartney’s erratic solo output, and diplomatically tiptoes around his subject’s less appealing qualities – the abrupt dismissal of loyal employees, the control-freakery that grated on the other Beatles, the close-handedness that saw Wings members paid a modest £70 a week.

[But, all things considered,]  a [well done] portrait of a gifted artist – the most successful songwriter of modern times – and a complex, contradictory personality. For all McCartney’s ruthless business sense, he has maintained his dignity and decency.

GIANTS WALK THE EARTH: THE QUEEN: ARETHA

PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD AVEDON

DAVID REMNICK, NEW YORKER

—-

Franklin has won eighteen Grammy awards, sold tens of millions of records, and is generally acknowledged to be the greatest singer in the history of postwar popular music. James Brown, Sam Cooke, Etta James, Otis Redding, Ray Charles: even they cannot match her power, her range from gospel to jazz, R. & B., and pop. At the 1998 Grammys, Luciano Pavarotti called in sick with a sore throat and Aretha, with twenty minutes’ notice, sang “Nessun dorma” for him. What distinguishes her is not merely the breadth of her catalogue or the cataract force of her vocal instrument; it’s her musical intelligence, her way of singing behind the beat, of spraying a wash of notes over a single word or syllable, of constructing, moment by moment, the emotional power of a three-minute song. “Respect” is as precise an artifact as a Ming vase.

The Queen

——

“I don’t care what they say about Aretha,” Billy Preston, who died in 2006, once said. “She can be hiding out in her house in Detroit for years. She can go decades without taking a plane or flying off to Europe. She can cancel half her gigs and infuriate every producer and promoter in the country. She can sing all kinds of jive-ass songs that are beneath her. She can go into her diva act and turn off the world. But on any given night, when that lady sits down at the piano and gets her body and soul all over some righteous song, she’ll scare the shit out of you. And you’ll know—you’ll swear—that she’s still the best fuckin’ singer this fucked-up country has ever produced.”

Read the entire profile at DAVID REMNICK, NEW YORKER

GIANTS WALK THE EARTH: SIDNEY POITIER

 

SIDNEY POITIER has sworn off alcohol, red meat, milk, sugar — and refers to his occasional scoop of ice cream as ”falling off the wagon.” His dietary discipline is legendary in Beverly Hills, where his frequent dinner companions include the romance novelist Jackie Collins and the billionaire businessman Marvin Davis. At breakfast recently at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles, Poitier consumed an omelet made of egg whites, to avoid cholesterol, and a side dish of broccoli, in keeping with his habit of eating vegetables at every meal. But the highlight was the serving of granola topped with blueberries. Instead of milk, Poitier poured water into the bowl.

Poitier has been a health food and exercise enthusiast for at least 40 years, and it has served him well: at 73, he is 6-foot-3, 200 pounds, trim, fit and still smiling the incandescent smile that started his career five decades ago. His eating habits, however, constitute more than a diet. They flow from an iron-willed self-control that covers his every waking moment, allowing him to present himself as the cool and elegant gentleman, even through periods of enormous personal strain.

People who know him from his first days as a stage actor in New York, like Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, know a different person, however. As Dee says: ”Sidney is the smoldering flame that you don’t think will catch fire and burn down the house. He has a capacity for explosion that is incredible. It takes possession of him.” Davis adds that having to sit on that temper in Hollywood ”is a prison I certainly would not wish to occupy.”

—-

Before Sidney Poitier left New York for Hollywood, African-American characters in the movies consisted mainly of butlers, maids and Stepin Fetchits who shuffled across the screen in dimwitted bewilderment. Poitier broke this mold in 1950, playing a black doctor who treated white patients in ”No Way Out” — a film that was so threatening at the time that the authorities banned it in parts of the United States and in Poitier’s native Bahamas, then still a colony of Britain. By the late 1960’s, Poitier became the first black recipient to be awarded an Oscar for best actor for ”Lilies of the Field.”He made more than two dozen films in the same vein, allowing Americans to envision black people not just as butlers and maids, but also as doctors, psychiatrists, engineers, war correspondents, teachers and police detectives.

The attack on Poitier began in earnest in 1967, when he starred in three hit movies during the same year. While ”To Sir With Love,” ”In the Heat of the Night” and ”Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” made him the biggest box-office star in the country, Poitier came under ferocious fire. White critics savaged his work as superficial. African-American critics like the playwright Clifford Mason, writing in The New York Times, branded him ”a showcase nigger” who coddled white racists instead of punching them in the face. All at once, black radicalism begat the questionable blessing of the black exploitation films with pimps, prostitutes and tough guys yelling ”Get Whitey.” Poitier was suddenly reviled as a Stepin Fetchit in a gray flannel suit.

Everything changes if you live long enough, and now Poitier has gone from outcast to hero once more. Over the last several years, the critical establishment has beaten a path to his door bearing laurels and awards. The period of rejection in the 1960’s, according to those who knew him, was a living hell. But when Poitier speaks of it today, he does so with the typical reserve: ”I didn’t feel victimized by any of it. There was never a time when I didn’t take those attacks without giving them their due natural measure, and saying, ‘Is there value in this?’ ”…Those long-gone blaxploitation heroes screaming ”Kill Whitey” at the camera are gone now, [ but Mr. Poitier, turning 88 on February 20, received the 2016 BAFTA Fellowship Award for Career Achievement.]   Brent Staples,NY Times

President Barack Obama presents the 2009 Medal of Freedom  to  Academy Award-winning actor Sidney Poitier