Stephanie Tames

2009

The Shah on Yuma Street

“What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality…”  Susan Sontag, On Photography

His royal highness, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, greeted me at the front door.  He was dressed in his royal uniform, his chest heavy with medals and sashes and official insignia. He held his arms straight and long at his sides, not stiffly as if he was angry or uncomfortable, but in a posture that was at once both formal and quite natural. He bent forward slightly from the waist, his head down but his face fully visible, bowing gracefully. Even from a distance I could see how handsome he was; his black hair streaked with gray at the temples, strong nose, dark eyes and heavy eyebrows, olive skin. He was of medium build. He looked fit, healthy. There was a feeling about him that was learned, aristocratic, and powerful, yet vulnerable in a way that belied the history of his regime.

Every time the doorbell rang or the mailman dropped letters through the slot in the door or I went to retrieve the different daily newspapers from our porch, I would pause to look at the Shah in his perpetual gesture of respectful greeting – to me, it seemed, but really to someone else. The photograph always stopped me no matter how many times I saw it, and forced me to study its details: the lush red carpet, the officers in uniform standing behind the Shah, the paintings on the walls, the well-powdered women in their stiff, jeweled gowns and elbow-length gloves, . I have often wondered why, of all of the photographs that hung from floor to ceiling and from basement to attic throughout our house, the photograph by the front door of the Shah of Iran was the one that always called out to me.

***

Our house wasn’t decorated; it was filled.  Antiques, photographs, things packed every space and covered every wall. To my father it was a museum and he gladly gave anyone who asked a tour, something my sisters and I hated so much we roped off our rooms and hung “do not enter” signs until he got the message. The house, near American University, was three-stories tall and had a driveway on one side stopped by a heavy iron gate that was covered in red climbing roses during the summer and which led to the house, garage, and large backyard. Over the garage was a small guest house. At the far end of the yard an old wooden arbor swayed under the weight of grape vines thick as a man’s forearm and which over the years had twined through the chain link fence nearby. In the center of the yard grew the oldest oak in the neighborhood and from one of its thick branches hung a rope swing put there in the early 1920s by the original owner, the builder, whose signature granite houses dotted the neighborhood. The house was in a nice part of the city, close to schools and the bus, and its size meant that all five children had their own rooms – (my two sisters shared a complete apartment on the third floor) and my older brother had the garage guest house.  We had lived in a much more modest house across Connecticut Avenue on Broad Branch Road and my father was proud that he could afford the new house and prouder still that he could fill it with things he loved.

What my father loved was history, so our house was filled with American and European antiques, anything that caught my father’s eye and from any time period. He didn’t discriminate. That meant we lived with impractical (and uncomfortable) couches and chairs and tables that stood on spindle-like legs and tipped or groaned under the weight of teenage elbows. While neither of my parents had heirlooms handed down over generations, my father seemed just as pleased, maybe even more so, with his finds, and with each English dresser or bed, with each French Provincial table, and with each Civil War rifle or early American clock came the story of the piece, where he found it, and who sold it to him.

My father’s love of history was organic: it grew from deep within him and his own sense of importance. He photographed the most powerful people in the mid-twentieth century for over 40 years as the chief photographer in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, and the part of my father that created some of the most iconic pictures of our time is the same part that enabled him, without modesty, to turn our home into a living tribute to his own life. Our house, our lives, did not just reflect him but were literally filled with him as well, from every photograph hanging on the wall to each piece of antique furniture that became our family heirlooms.

Across from the Shah, hanging on the wall closest to the den, hung a picture of Betty Ford pinching my father’s face so hard his lips jumped out like a caricature of a fish. In a mirror image, she mimicked his exaggerated pucker, her lips just inches from his. She looked as if she were ready to kiss him but she could just have easily been chiding him for something he said or a practical joke he played, for which he was known all over Washington, so much so that he was often referred to as the “court jester of Congress.”

The photographs probably spilled over from the crowded den where my father hung photographs of himself, from ceiling to floor, above the door, around the windows, wherever there was an empty space. Additional photographs were stacked on the flowered Victorian love seat tucked under the bay window and in the den’s small closet where my father stored his cameras and which had the sharp chemical smell of unexposed film.

His photographs of the powerful made him famous, but in the den he unashamedly displayed the legend behind his legendary photographs, for my father cultivated his persona as carefully as he composed a photograph.  It was in the den I could see my father posing with presidents or taking photographs at a Congressional hearing or during a campaign. There was Richard Nixon trying out my father’s camera, my father all smiles nearby; Tip O’Neil surrounding my father in a giant bear hug; Hubert Humphrey with my father in our kitchen during my parents’ 20th wedding anniversary party. There he was, geared up like a paratrooper for an assignment who knows where, and with Field Marshall Montgomery after losing a bet with him on a football game.  In the spaces between photographs and tucked in corners were my father’s many awards and all the press passes he saved from congressional or presidential trips, campaigns, and rallies. Campaign buttons were everywhere. Credentials for inaugurations from Truman to the first President Bush hung from hooks throughout the room.

On one wall of the den, shelves were filled with souvenirs and keepsakes, which for my father was anything he could fit in his camera bag: wooden name plates for Senators from Humphrey to Kennedy, a silver sugar and creamer from the U.S. Senate dining room (stamped on the bottom), presidential signing pens, a football from a friendly game he played with the Kennedy’s at Bobby Kennedy’s Hickory Hill home, a plastic peanut from a cake for Jimmy Carter, a gavel from the Speaker of the House, a shell from Key Biscayne, a rock from Camp David, a brick from the Capitol, a piece of black ribbon from President Kennedy’s funeral, a coin given to him by Spiro Agnew.

Some of these things he took, palmed when no one was looking and tucked into his heavy camera bag between camera bodies and lenses, flashes and bulbs, and rolls and rolls of film, until he got home where he would remove each of his finds and place it ceremoniously on the shelves in the den. Others were given to him by those who knew his penchant for collecting.

Whatever treasure he found or was given, when he set it on the shelf for display, like the antiques that filled the house, it became a part of him and he would tell its story when visitors or admirers inquired, cradling the object in his hands as if conjuring the spirit of the giver or calling forth the object’s secret tale. He often mimicked the voices, peculiar posture and gestures, or cadence of speech that went with a particular find and his impersonations were acute, coming as they did from the kind of intimate observation only available to someone looking at his subjects through the invisibility of his viewfinder. His stories became as much a part of the object as the object itself and he could hold visitors in the grip of his storytelling for hours.

  Outside the den -- in the halls, up the stairs, wherever there was a bare wall – were the images my father created. In every frame you could sense his presence, the way he maneuvered, prowled the background, became invisible, and always won his subject’s trust to get just the right shot. It was my father’s signature. Each time I climbed the stairs to my room, Lady Bird Johnson would greet me. Along the way I’d see Attorney General Bobby Kennedy looking pensively out a window, a U.S. Marshal’s helmet in the foreground. Jimmy Carter smiled his toothy smile at me as he stood chest-deep in a pond in Plains, Georgia. Richard Nixon sat putting on his socks to play golf, Lyndon Johnson pulled the ears of his basset hounds, John Kennedy reached to shake hands at an airport. I saw Amy Carter hugging her father, Caroline Kennedy and her brother, John, playing in the Oval Office or climbing on their hands and knees the wide stairs to the president’s private rooms in the White House. There were photographs of a White House wedding, Susan Ford getting ready to leave for school. Everywhere in our house, from kitchen to bedroom (and even in one of the bathrooms), were pictures of people I had never met yet they were as familiar to me as my own family, whose pictures, ironically, were nowhere in the house.

In the living room in a glass case, my father kept the collection of holiday cards from the White House, invitations to receptions or parties from Senators and Congressmen with special notes or a thank you for a photograph he took. It was in that case that the invitation to the state dinner for the Shah of Iran was kept. It was May 15, 1975.

When my father died, my mother sold the Yuma Street house. She was eager to be rid of the oppressiveness of all the antiques he collected, the photographs he took that lined the walls, the photographs of him with presidents, senators, and congressmen, and all his memorabilia, that eclectic collection of treasures in the den. Much of it was sold, some distributed among all the children, a few things were given to people close to him. I might have had an opportunity to keep the picture of the Shah when we chose which items we each wanted to keep, or maybe one of my siblings chose it before I could. I know I was reluctant to take anything. I had always tried to put if not a physical, then psychic, distance between myself and my father and I was unsure even at his death how much of him I wanted to own.

But the photograph of the Shah, rather than any other picture that hung in our house, still haunts me. I am curiously drawn to the memory of it with trepidation and awe. Like a ghost, it has an uneasy presence I feel as more than  I see; the Shah of Iran and the man he is greeting, my father. 

***

My father died in 1994. He was 75. He had undergone heart surgery six weeks before and in his typical fashion had sought the quickest recovery, the earliest discharge, than anyone who had ever had coronary bypass and aortic valve replacement surgery. He wanted to be the best, even when it came to recovering from surgery.

He had always been healthy and robust, something he didn’t mind pointing out. I remember seeing him do push-ups in the mornings at the foot of his bed. He liked to pat his flat stomach, do a couple of quick deep-knee bends, and pull the loose waistband of his slacks, and say, “What do you think of your old man?” I knew the answer he wanted and I always obliged.

My father was fit but not athletic; he claimed to be quite adept at sports although I never saw him play tennis or basketball or football (he did say he used to play football with the Kennedys and although I’m sure he did, I have no memory of ever seeing him play any sport). He was a small man, barely 5’8, compact, and had been almost completely bald since his early 20s. I loved his perfectly shaped head with its little semicircle of hair that ran around the back of his head from ear to ear, and what he referred to as his classic Greek nose. He thought himself quite good looking.  I can’t say that I ever thought him handsome although he was charming and flirtatious and women seemed drawn to him. Wherever he went, he was the center of attention.

Sometimes after dinner when he would relax still sitting at the dining table, he would ask me to rub his head. Standing behind him in his captain’s chair, with his head cradled in my hands, I could feel his deep voice as it moved up and into my fingertips and arms as I massaged his head, pressed my fingers deeply into his temples, and kneaded the muscles in his neck. I watched the faces of my sisters and brothers and mother watching him, and me, and knew from their eyes that they, like me, were wrestling with the two parts of this man, the benevolent, talented photographer who was admired and befriended by colleagues and politicians, and the malevolent father and husband whose insatiable need for affirmation and power provided the framework for our family life.

The smell of his hair tonic lingered on my hands for hours. 

***

In the ICU after surgery, while other patients undergoing the same surgery were barely conscious, my father requested a television so he could watch the news. I’m sure he wanted to keep up with world events; it was, after all, an integral part of his livelihood even as a freelance photographer after his retirement from The New York Times. But I suspect the request had more to do with his need to assert his uniqueness. Even naked and hooked up to a catheter my father was a tireless self promoter.

It was that ego – that intense need to be admired, to be the best -- that killed him. At least that’s my theory. His recovery was too quick, he ignored warning signs of an infection and by the time he finally admitted that he didn’t feel well, the infection that was growing near his new valve was virulent and invasive. It had already begun entering his bloodstream when a last resort surgery was recommended. He had always abhorred illness of any kind, even in himself, and rarely got sick. He treated anyone with an illness as weak physically and mentally.  Even the rare cold didn’t slow him down; I never remember him missing a day of work.

We took turns caring for him after the first surgery but he rarely napped or rested. He roamed the house looking for something to do or waited restlessly for a visitor. When it was my turn as nurse, just a few weeks post surgery, he insisted I drive him to pick up film and photographs and run other errands despite deep snow and the bitter cold of that January. Safely strapped in the car, we took off, skidding and sliding our way downtown, my father barely resisting the urge to yank the steering wheel out of my control as we careened down Massachusetts Avenue. 

Several weeks later, when it was obvious something was terribly wrong and his health was deteriorating, he was forced into the hospital for the second surgery. I think my father knew that his ego had finally betrayed him. I often wondered if the stress of the outing that day with me in the bitter cold triggered the infection. My mother had warned him not to go; they fought.  She was upstairs in her bedroom nursing a migraine that had persisted for about as many days as my father had been home from the hospital.  He was belligerent and sarcastic in his usual way. That day, he wanted my mother to know he didn’t care what she thought, he was going out. Heart surgery be damned. From the hallway downstairs he made sure I could see him as he flipped one arm up, bent at the elbow, and quickly moved the other arm over in a sign that meant “fuck you,” and we left the house.

***

I was happy when he died. I had wished it for a long time. Maybe my whole life. That’s not an easy thing to say. I was always told by friends, colleagues, total strangers – even many of the people my father photographed -- how lucky I was to have him as my father both because of his undeniable talent and his personality. People liked him.

That isn’t what I felt. The father I knew made me feel both invisible and completely exposed at the same time. Invisible because in the larger scheme of my father’s life, I – none of us in the family -- mattered, and exposed because in every way that he saw me, I was imperfect, like an out-of-focus or overexposed photograph.

The things that endeared my father to others were used against us. The famous joking and raucous laugh turned malicious. The unwearied waiting for the perfect exposure that helped make him famous morphed into a lightening-quick temper which he unleashed at the least provocation -- a glass of spilled milk at the dinner table, a missed phone call, unexpected traffic. He was kind and generous to others, demeaning and petty at home. 

I didn’t cry when he died. I wanted to but the tears just weren’t there. I didn’t find in his death the relief I waited for and was sure would come once he was gone. For years after his death I would dream that I was at the funeral waiting for the casket to arrive when someone announces my father really didn’t die; it had all been a mistake.  In the dream, I cry inconsolably. 

***

“The Shah would never bow to anyone else,” my sister Tina says incredulously.  When I found out recently she was the one in the family with the picture I asked to see it.

Tina, like my father, can be quarrelsome at times, especially when she knows she’s right and you’re incredibly, stupidly wrong.

“Dad bowed to the Shah, that’s the protocol,” she says, directing me to the corner of her small living room where she’s hung that photo and others and displayed some of the political memorabilia. It is a tiny recreation of the den in our house in Washington. “President Ford was introducing Dad to the Shah, Mom was in line to meet him and Mrs. Ford was on the other side of the Shah.”

I couldn’t believe how wrong my memory had been. For at least fourteen years I had imagined a completely different photograph, one that didn’t exist. The only thing I had remembered correctly was that my father was bowing. The room was wrong, the women’s gowns were different, and the Shah was not wearing his formal attire with his medals and insignias, nor was he bowing.  I had no memory of President Ford being in the photograph much less holding my father at the elbow, that queer habit of politicians meant to convey both power and familiarity,  as my father shook hands and bowed to the Shah.  And, I realized, I didn’t grow up looking at the picture. I had already moved away from home by the time my parents went to that particular White House dinner.

Still, I know that I passed that photograph many times and that it hung by the front door. I know that my mother was excited about the invitation, that she would have gone to Woodward and Lothrop, a department store in Chevy Chase, to buy her dress and as much as she might have reviled my father at that point in their marriage – although she would never have admitted it -- she also reveled in his success and the attention that it brought to her.

I know, too, that the photograph still intrigues me. My memory is that the Shah and my father were in a position that I thought reflected mutual respect – bowing to each other. That wouldn’t be unusual.  My father was admired by those in the political world in which he traveled.

But the reality is that he is the only one bowing, in deference to the Shah’s position, and in bowing my father is in a posture that suggests humility and regard, neither of which was something that I often saw in him. It was that posture, that appearance of modesty in my father’s face in the photograph that stopped me every time.

I loved my father. He was gregarious and fun-loving and laughed too loud. He had a mischievous grin and a glint in his smiling eyes. Nothing gave him more pleasure than taking a car-full of neighborhood kids to the zoo in his convertible with the top down singing songs about the animals we were going to see as he sped through Rock Creek Park, our hair flying in our faces. He taught me to fish. He dressed up every Halloween in an old raccoon coat and Frankenstein mask and scared children who came to the door before gleefully filling their bags with candy. Every Saturday he made pancakes for the family.

My father was a complicated man. He grew up on the streets of Washington, D.C., grubbing for coins, hawking newspapers, running through the alleys and narrow streets of the immigrant neighborhood he grew up in at the foot of the Capitol looking for trouble or adventure or a way out, or all of those things. His father was a hard, cold man, a poor Greek-Albanian who sold fruit and vegetables from a push cart until one day he stopped and forced my father, the oldest, to drop out of high school and support the family. His father never learned English and never adjusted to life in the United States, referring to his children as “you Americans.”  Yet here was my father, a man who learned to hustle and charm to get what he wanted, who taught himself how to use a camera, and who not only created a career out of photographing the people who shaped our nation in the heady, risky, post World War II decades, but actually changed the way the rest of the world saw them.  His photographs are what the documentary film maker Ken Burns calls “the DNA of our political story in the last 50 years.”

***

Not long after the White House dinner, the Shah of Iran and his monarchy were overthrown and in 1979 he was forced into exile. He had come to power with the help of the United States in the mid-1950s and initiated many social reforms, but his quest for supreme power was built on the suppression and marginalization of his opponents. The widening gap between the elite and the disaffected majority helped fuel the Islamic revolution that, by 1979, put the Ayatollah Khomeini in power. In the same year, students in Tehran took US hostages, who remained captive until 1981. Regional wars, the build-up of a nuclear arsenal and now, in 2009, the policies of Iran’s ruler Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have continued the 30-year-old tensions between the US and Iran.

The Shah died in 1980 in exile after a short battle with cancer.

***

I remember how odd it was to have among the photographs hanging in the house the picture of the Shah of Iran. Clearly, my father was pleased with the photograph despite what he later knew about the Shah and his rule. But it also made sense that he would like the photograph, that he wanted everyone to see him, a guest of the president of the United States.

My father experienced the inequities of the world and the powerlessness of those at the bottom of the social ladder but turned that hurt into an idealization of the symbols of democracy,  like the Capitol building he so loved, and the human, all those who governed, those who hoped to govern, and those who surrounded them. And he romanticized his childhood, his struggle, his lack of education, until at last he became the story he created, itself a symbol of democracy, the everyman who makes good in America. But I think my father was also afraid that at any moment it could all unravel.

I now have a copy of the photograph of my father and the Shah of Iran but it still lays unframed in a cabinet drawer in the living room. I can’t bring myself to look at it, much less frame it and have it a part of my life as it was in my parents’ home.  Yet I am still drawn to it, or more correctly, the memory of the photograph, the same way I am drawn to the memory of my father, and every now and then I take out the picture, rub my sleeve against its glossy surface, flatten its curling corners and stare at the improbable meeting of these two men.  In my hands I hold them both, miniatures of reality.