WORK

Photograph by Brett C Vermilyea

Harry Benson at home in Manhattan

‘I Get the Picture’

By Janis Turk

If there are 8 million stories in the naked city, at least a billion more rest just behind the blinking black and white eyes of Harry Benson.

One of the most celebrated photographers of our time, Benson is a treasure trove of memories. With the puckish, knowing half-smile of a man musing to himself over a joke he once heard, this handsome Glasgow-born New Yorker takes his signature kelly-green handkerchief out of his breast pocket to wipe his brow. We’re seated at Benson’s favorite table at Elaine’s, under a photograph of Elaine that Benson took for Life magazine. A waiter sets a glass of iced Pellegrino in front of him, and we begin to talk.

I ask him to tell me a story, and Benson begins a very funny one about Frank Sinatra, only to stop mid-sentence and say, “Never mind — surely you’ve heard this one before.”

He’s right, of course. Because I’ve known Harry for years, I’ve probably heard them all before — or most of them, anyway — but a gleeful “Oh please, Harry, go on! Tell it again!” springs from my lips, offered up like a little prayer over our late-night table. Benson’s eyes sparkle as he leans in and begins again.

Harry Benson’s work, clockwise from far left: Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow show up for Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in 1966; on the cover of Benson’s new book, Donny and Marie Osmond in their kitchen.

For the past 50-odd years, as one of the world’s most prolific photojournalists, Benson has gathered photographs and memories in the most remarkable places. He was there when the Berlin Wall went up and when it came down. He was with the Beatles in a Paris hotel room when their first hit record “I Want to Hold Your Hand” went to No. 1.

“They hopped right on the bed and had a pillow fight… in their jammies!” recalls Harry.

Benson was with Martin Luther King, Jr., on the march during the Civil Rights Movement, and with Robert Kennedy as he blazed the campaign trail. Benson stood beside King’s open casket when he was laid to rest and next to Bobby Kennedy at the moment he was shot. Harry stood near the podium as Richard Nixon resigned and the First Lady cried. He has been an invited guest in the private White House quarters of every president since Eisenhower, and was the official photographer for a Kennedy wedding or two. He has rubbed elbows with royalty as well – although he’s dined with dukes and earls and chatted with Princess Di, he claims that seeing the throne in Michael Jackson’s Neverland bedroom was a lot more interesting.

Benson was with John and Paul while they composed “I Feel Fine” at the piano, and he was in Mark David Chapman’s prison cell when Chapman apologized for murdering Harry’s friend – John Lennon.

Harry was sailing by on a catamaran when Greta Garbo took a lonely swim, just months before she died. He’s snapped shots of Willie Nelson in a red bathtub, Frank Sinatra wearing a kitty-kat mask (with Mia Farrow at Truman Capote’s legendary Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in 1966), Dennis Rodman naked in a field near Dallas, Liz Taylor in a hospital recovering from brain surgery, O.J. Simpson in the shower.

The aphorism “Been there, done that,” should be Harry’s motto.

Harry gets around.

President John F. Kennedy in Paris, 1961.

Benson is a veritable “Forrest Gump” or “Zelig,” but only in the sense that, with chameleon-like facility, he always seems to be where history is being made. And at the zenith moment, he’s already poised to go in for the kill with his camera. This plucky 75-year-old professional voyeur blends in effortlessly everywhere, easing his way into places and situations others would never imagine. And Harry does it with a confidence and a charm that is utterly disarming. Benson has documented our nation and our world in a way that has sharpened our perspective of history, and, as he is quick to tell you, he had “ a hell of a lot fun doing it.”

When he’s not on assignment for Vanity Fair or for any of a hundred other magazines, Benson is in New York, walking his dog Tillie, going to Sette Mezzo, or a new restaurant the Bensons have just found – “Fredericks! Have you been there yet? You should, you know” – and dining at Elaine’s.

Harry and his wife Gigi are here tonight to celebrate the international success of Harry Benson’s America – the newest of his nine books.

“My book was doing great until Harry Potter came out,” says Harry with a laugh. Gigi explains: “We love our local bookstore, Lenox Hill, owned by Jeanette Watson. It’s a very savvy, tiny store. For weeks now as we’ve walked past, they’ve had the Harry Benson’s America counter card on an easel outside, but today we saw they’d replaced it with a big Harry Potter poster instead.”

Harry inserts: “Not only replaced, but by a younger Harry at that!”

Harry Benson’s America (Abrams) takes a peek into an America very much unlike yours and mine: Donny and Marie Osmond eating hamburgers in their kitchen, Farah Fawcett leaping in the air in a bathing suit, Andy Warhol lunching with Bianca Jagger, Jamie Wyeth and Larry Rivers at The Factory. You get the picture. Or, rather, Harry does.

“For this book, Gigi and I went through hundreds of photographs to find those that had never been published,” says Harry. “Even my friends were surprised when they saw it.”

It’s all surprising, for there is nothing mundane about Harry Benson’s America. And yet, perhaps in another sense, Harry’s America is everyone’s America. He’s been right there beside us, capturing important moments as the world turned and changed, there every step of the way.

Even Harry’s arrival in this country was unlike that of most immigrants. He first stepped foot on American soil after disembarking from a plane with the Beatles, surrounded by a sea of hysterically happy fans. With a welcome like that, who would want to go home?

“I came to the U.S. with the Beatles and just stayed. I never looked back. I met them in 1964 when I was a Fleet Street photographer for the London Express. I was told I had to go with them to Paris, but I wasn’t keen on the assignment, so I tried to talk my editor out of it. I wanted to be a serious journalist, and was all set to go to Kenya to document a celebration of the country’s independence. I wanted to cover history – not some relatively unknown band – but the editor made me go.

“Well,” says Harry. “I covered history all right. I traveled with them for quite a while, photographing everything. There are some stories in my life that I’d love to go back and do better, but not the Beatles. I know I covered them to the best of my ability.”

Thirty-five years later Benson took the U.S. citizenship test, and the oath, and on September 10, 1999, became an American citizen.

“Not long after that, I was in Texas at the governor’s mansion with young George W. Bush just before his first presidential election. He was playing around, swinging his golf club and paying me little mind, when I mentioned in passing that I had recently become an American citizen. He says to me: ‘So now you can vote! I’m asking for your vote.” So I quipped: ‘Well, let’s just see how this shoot goes first.’ Naturally, I didn’t want to be booted out before I got my picture.”

As if Benson would miss his shot.

“I once photographed Ronald and Nancy Regan in the Map Room as they were walking into a state dinner at the White House. Their staff didn’t think I’d get the shot. They said, ‘When they come through this way, you’ll have two minutes, tops.’ So I made sure the lights and seamless paper were all ready, and I had brought something else – something they wouldn’t expect – a cassette playing ‘Nancy with the Laughing Face.’ The First Lady heard the music, grabbed the President, and they began to dance. That was the moment I was looking for,” says Benson.

“When taking a portrait, I much prefer the subject’s own environment to a studio. If I ask them to walk across the room, then they will have to walk back and you get some movement.  I always like to have something going on in my photos, not have the subject standing like a statue.  I don’t always succeed, but that’s what I aim for.” Harry certainly succeeded with the Reagans: the photo would become one of their favorites.

“As for presidents, I have liked every one that I have photographed and every First Lady as well. Nixon was the most fascinating. There was always something going on. Just days after he resigned, I photographed him at San Clemente, and when I left I said: ‘Thank you, Mr. President, for I know this is not a good time for you.’ He answered: ‘You must let professionals do their job.’ I thought that very decent of him.”

Not all Harry’s stories are uplifting. Benson tells of watching heroin addicts shoot up in the bowels of New York, of driving undercover through impoverished Havana in 1969, being with troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, seeing the swollen bodies of starving children in Somalia, watching the tragedy of September 11 unfold in his beloved city.

“I remember that morning well. It happened that I was home in the city between assignments. It was about 8:40 a.m., and Gigi and I had just turned off the television as the morning shows were going into their cooking segments when the phone rang. It was Gigi’s brother, Dan Daniels, calling from Texas to say, ‘New York is being attacked!’ We were shocked and turned the television back on and saw a plane hit the second tower. I raced down there as fast as I could, but by the time I arrived the police had cordoned off the area. It’s probably a blessing as I feel I would have gone into the tower had I been there.

“Still, I stayed all day in the heat taking photos. Late that day I saw Amo, one of the police dogs who had been looking for survivors. He walked toward me and then collapsed. His trainer got him to the first aid center where they gave him intravenous fluids. Revived, Amo went back to work. I always hate to see animals in distress.”

At 75, Benson isn’t slowing down, and quitting isn’t in his vocabulary. Still, when his youngest daughter, Tessa, became the West Coast bureau chief of Self magazine, it crossed his mind. “Her success pleases me no end, but it gave me pause to think: ‘If Tessa is running things, maybe it’s time to retire!’ But, no,” Harry says, “I still get excited by an assignment, and this summer I have been very busy. I just completed several assignments for Vanity Fair – I’m still under contract – and I’ve just done a fashion shoot on white suits for Playboy in which my pug, Daisy, was the only one naked on the set.”

And Harry is keeping up with times: “I have just started to use a digital camera, and it is magic. I have the Canon Mark II, and I could not do what I am doing without it. The quality is that of a 4 x 5 camera,” says Harry, who just won the American Photo magazine’s 2005 Achievement in Photography Award for his new book. He also received the International Photography Lucie Award for Lifetime Achievement in Portrait Photography on October 17, at the American Airlines Theater on 42nd Street. Next year a retrospective of his work will be at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh from August 5 to November 5, to coincide with the 2006 Edinburgh Festival.

So what’s ahead for Harry?

“It’s hard to say,” he says, though Gigi confides that her husband’s working on a new book. Its working title: I’ll Take Manhattan.

“I started in this business a long time go, and I intend to keep working,” says Harry, “You know, it’s just like in a photo shoot: The first and last pictures you take are often the key pictures of a story. I haven’t taken my last one yet. I’m out there looking for my story. I still get the picture.”

***

Janis Turk is a freelance writer who has appeared in Southwest Airlines Spirit, Country Lifestyle, Tinta Latina, Ranch and Country, Texas Hills, and numerous other magazines, newspapers, and literary journals.

***

Home

Written permission of the publisher must be obtainedbefore any of the contents of this newspaper, in whole or in part, can be reproduced or redistributed.