Judith Krantz (29 page)

Jazz wasn’t sure if this was the atmosphere in which she always wanted to work, but she knew that there was a quality about it that was supremely right for her now. It made her flourish, it helped her grow the skin of a fresh experience over the tumult of the past two years. In shopping for unusual bread baskets with Tinka, in learning how Mel would go about lighting a dish of bouillabaisse or how Sharon would use her skills to beautify an artichoke, Jazz could, for minutes at a time, forget her horribly wounded heart.

“I can’t find Mel’s birthday card,” Jilly said to Jazz, looking unusually distracted, as she rummaged in bulging file cabinets, on a day in June of 1982.

“How can you find a card in there? Those are the negatives of stuff he took last year. Do you want me to go to a card shop for you?”

“No, that’s not it, Jazz. Every year on his birthday, Mel sends a food shot to all his clients and all the art directors who might become clients, and all the photo buyers for magazines—to everybody in the magazine and advertising businesses. They don’t
even know it’s his birthday. You know how shy he is, but he likes to do it. And Phoebe says it’s great for getting new business.”

“Just one shot?”

“Yes. He has it enlarged and printed on the world’s most expensive, heavy, glossy paper and signs it on the bottom. A lot of people frame them. It’s become a tradition.”

“Shall I help you look?”

“Thanks, but it won’t help. I’ve shown him fifty great shots and he’s turned them all down. He says they don’t say anything new. Now I’m starting on last year’s work. He’s been doing this birthday-card thing since he opened the studio.”

“With due respect, Jilly, why don’t you try something different?”

“Jazz!”

“Think about it. Something that could personalize even a … a bowl of Jell-O?”

“Jell-O! Mel
hates
Jell-O. How many new ways do you think he’s had to find to shoot Jell-O?”

“O.K., not Jell-O. What I mean is, what about doing pictures of all the people who work here, showing how each one contributes to a single food shot, with a line saying that this is the team that works for Mel Botvinick? It could be laid out as a sort of … booklet … right, a booklet with the food shot itself on the last page. Nobody really appreciates the effort that goes into food photography.”

“Wouldn’t it cost a fortune to do?” Jilly objected.

“Not if you got the pictures for nothing and didn’t print it on such expensive paper.”

“Who’s going to shoot the pictures for nothing?”

“Me.”

“You?”

“Sure. I’ve had experience in doing photo stories. It’s fun for me, and you can buy the film.”

“Gee, I don’t know …”

“You, for instance, Jilly, I’d shoot you talking on the phone to Phoebe or running up and down the stairs, or conferring with Sharon on the next job, or
explaining to Tinka what Mel’s conception is, or organizing the lunch orders, or handling the billing, or chatting up one of the clients, or digging up negatives like today, or any one of the hundreds of things you do every day, managing the studio.”

“Hundreds?”

“You’re like a perpetual-motion machine. This place would stop functioning if you took a day off.”

“I never thought about it that way,” Jilly said, entranced by Jazz’s vision of her, the kind of vision based on truth that a photojournalist conjures up to convince an unwilling subject to allow a photograph to be taken.

“That’s because you take it for granted. I’m a fresh eye. For example, in this light, I can really see the fine bones in your face and the fascinating set of your ears—you have perfect ears, did you know that?”

“Well … I have been told that they’re pretty …” Jilly blushed with pleasure.

“Not pretty. Perfect. Almost no one in the world has perfect ears. I’d never shoot you on the phone unless you held it in the off-camera hand.”

“Wouldn’t all this mean a lot of posing, Jazz? I feel self-conscious already.”

“Jilly, I promise you won’t even know I’m working. I’ll only take informal, working shots. When do you have to mail out the birthday card?”

“In a month.”

“No problem. Let me see that ear again, Jilly.
Oh yes!
An ear for the ages. If you say to go ahead, you’ll have contacts in ten days and then you can decide if it’s a good idea. If they don’t look good, you can always go back to your usual approach.”

“Let me ask Mel. It all depends on what he decides.”

“Tell him it says something interesting about the power of people working together.”

During the next week, when Jazz found herself with a rare second to think, she would wonder why she had
deprived herself of using a camera of her own for so long. As she took her first tentative shots of Sharon icing a cake, she felt as if a part of her body that had been numb had started to function again, more alive than ever. The thrill of capturing a human image, that thrill she had first known when she was eight, was not only undiminished by the passage of time, it was enhanced by all the other work she had done in the last few years.

Jazz hadn’t realized how much she had learned until the week she shot Botvinick’s birthday card. The personal invisibility, the speed, the accuracy, so perfected that they had become second nature, and the ability to see and seize the perfect moment, all of which were essential to a photojournalist, belonged to her.

The awareness of the importance of motion, the meaning of facial expressions, the understanding of the playfulness of activity, the sensitivity to mood and fleeting thoughts, all of which were essential to a photographer of children, belonged to her.

The vision of the most eye-catching and original graphic composition of a variety of elements, which was essential to a food photographer, belonged to her.

Her understanding of lighting had grown a thousandfold, so that Jazz was able to use whatever light was available without resorting to flash, which would have been a disruption of the mood of the studio, where everyone was deep in preparation for a double spread of a post-football-game buffet supper.

She did her own work in effortless triple time, her loaded Nikon F-2 around her neck, and shot whenever she could steal a moment, flitting back and forth, here and there, an inquisitive winged creature, wearing her uniform of jeans and work shirt, tireless, exhilarated, finding angles she hadn’t known existed, seeing her co-workers in ways she’d never seen them before, and always, during that week, aware of the love she had for all of them, a love that had been growing during the six months she had worked in the nurturing, beneficent atmosphere of the studio.

Each one of the three food stylists was beautiful in her own special and different way, Jazz realized as she looked into the viewfinder. Tinka, the prop stylist, and her two equally elegant assistants were whirling, high-stepping creatures who seemed to have danced in from the pages of fashion magazines; Jilly was everything Jazz had told her she was, and more, for she was the energetic element of the real world of business in the quiet creative buzz of the studio.

Although Mel Botvinick had agreed to Jazz’s idea for his birthday card on the stipulation that she not do a portrait of him, he hadn’t specifically excluded his hands, Jazz thought, as she shot away, nor had he mentioned his unmistakable shadow, that of the only man in this world of women.

By the end of the week she had a great bagful of rolls of black-and-white film, for it had been agreed that the only color picture in the birthday booklet would be the food shot. Jazz drove home to the ranch, as she had been doing every weekend since she moved to Los Angeles, and stayed there developing film in her darkroom night and day, from Friday night, when she arrived, until early Monday morning, so excited that she felt no need for sleep. Susie brought her trays of food, and Mike Kilkullen looked in on her from time to time to make sure she was all right, but Jazz just waved them away, the expression on her face reassuring them more than any words.

She left the ranch before dawn on Monday morning and drove straight to the studio. Mel and Jilly were discussing a billing problem in the loft office when she climbed the stairs and put the sheaf of contacts down on the desk.

“Done,” Jazz said, as calmly as she could.

“Well, I suppose we’d better take a look,” Mel Botvinick said heavily and reluctantly, putting out his hand for his magnifying glass. Jilly hesitated, looked nervously around the room, but found no way out, and slowly forced herself to pick up another magnifying glass. As the two of them began to inspect the contact sheets, they maintained a guardedly noncommittal silence,
for the two of them had agreed that if the pictures weren’t acceptable, they couldn’t use them, no matter how much it was certain to upset Jazz. They both regretted the sudden impulse that had made Mel first agree to Jazz’s proposal. When their first enthusiasm wore off, they realized that being a splendidly willing Girl Friday did not make a photographer.

Jilly and Mel peered long and closely at each small contact, cagey and vigilant, determined not to express any premature judgment, tensely mindful not to relax their circumspect attitudes. They exchanged no words or glances, they never looked up at Jazz with an approving smile, but the gathering speed with which they began to slide their magnifying glasses from one image to another, the growing swiftness of the rhythm with which they passed the contact sheets back and forth to each other, gave away their rising excitement.

Jazz watched their hands, not their faces, and started to breathe again. She leaned back against one of the walls of the office, her arms folded, her feet crossed at the ankles, an expression as calculatingly blank as theirs on her face, so that when they finally both looked up at her in wonder, they didn’t see the great wave of triumph that was holding her up.

“You … you …” Mel Botvinick breathed, and then stopped, shaking his head in a mixture of awe and utter astonishment.

“You never said.”
Jilly’s words tumbled out of her mouth, accusingly.

“
Where
did you come from?” Botvinick demanded, as if he’d never seen her before.

“You never—I didn’t know—why didn’t you
tell
me?” Jilly asked, as wonderingly as if Jazz had lifted her up, twirled her overhead and revealed that she was Misha Baryshnikov in drag.

“I did, I told you I’d had experience with photo stories.” Jazz tried to maintain her cool, but she couldn’t prevent a tear from rolling down each of her cheeks as she looked at the absolute delight on their faces.

“Experience!” Botvinick exploded. “If I hadn’t seen you with my very own eyes, shooting these all by yourself, I’d swear that they were taken by one of the best photographers in the world.”

“Why, thank you, Mel. That
was
a compliment, wasn’t it?” Jazz grinned, wiping away her tears,

“Huh? Oh. You know what I mean.” Mel Botvinick’s round face turned bright red as he heard his own words.

“Jazz, there aren’t any pictures of you here,” Jilly realized.

“I’ll do a shot of Jazz,” Botvinick announced. “I’ve been dying to try to light her hair for months now. It looks like French toast, a little burned around the edges, with melted butter streaking over it. And her eyes … they’ll be tricky. Christmas-tree ornaments? Yellow diamonds under water? Pieces of eight? Leave that to me. In color, of course. No other way to do her.”

“Mel, how are we going to pick the best picture of each person?” Jilly asked. “There are just so many I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“Process of elimination,” Botvinick said briskly. “Let’s say each page is ten by twelve; let’s say we can get nine clearly visible pictures on a page and still leave room for the person’s name and what she does at the bottom; let’s say three pages for the food stylists, three pages for Tinka and her assistants, one page for you, Jilly, and the last page for the food shot, with Jazz’s picture on the back and her photo credit for the booklet and mine for the food shot, that’s eight pages in all, plus a cover shot of … well, maybe … sort of a tease, nobody’d have to know what it was, of course …” His voice trailed off. “Sort of an inside joke,” he said at last.

“This one?” Jazz asked, pointing to her favorite picture of the tabletop where the hero food for the football game feast was laid out. Mel’s hands were making a final adjustment in the placement of a fork, and his shadow loomed over the entire scene.

“As a matter of fact … yes. I mean, it is my birthday, so why not go for it?”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather use this one?” Jazz pointed to another picture of Mel, seen from the back, sitting on the floor in the process of conception.

“Oh no,” he said hastily. “Somebody might recognize me.”

“Mel,” Jilly protested in her office manager’s voice. “That makes a nine-page booklet. Even with the least expensive paper we can decently get away with, it’s going to cost a bundle to do this.”

“What are you talking about? We’ll use the paper we always use, of course. It would be criminal not to. Criminal! With these pictures! And it’s a legitimate business expense.”

Jilly made a muffled noise of agreement. She was taking another look at the shots of her making phone calls. Jazz had been perfectly right. Her ears were perfect.

Three weeks later, hundreds of art directors and photo buyers all over the United States and Europe were looking with stunned fascination at the phenomenon of Mel Botvinick’s birthday booklet. Each and every one of them knew immediately that it was destined to become a collector’s item. Only every two or three years did their jaded eyes see the work of a photographer with a fully formed style that was entirely original, a style that owed nothing to any other photographer, a photographer capable of work that had never been done before. Jazz’s work, as new and fresh as the day after tomorrow, revealed a strong personal point of view that turned a static portrait shot of someone into a virtual conversation. This unknown photographer, with her total mastery of technique, a photographer who had jumped into center stage as a fully formed star, was as young as she was beautiful, to judge by the small, exquisite color portrait of her that Mel Botvinick had taken. They called every photo rep they dealt with and asked only one question.