Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (30 page)

In her reply to Curtis’s invitation, Greene was cryptic about her plans for the night,
sending “our best wishes for your success in your lecture this evening.” It wasn’t
a lecture, damnit! This was something new, groundbreaking, a picture opera. Here was
a chance for Belle to see Curtis in another light. Not the desperate man of those
lengthy letters from some distant outpost, answering accounting questions, begging
for more time, another check in advance, please, please, Miss Greene. Not the harried,
deadline-driven artist whose latest installments always carried a note of apology
for the tardiness of the publication schedule. Yes, he knew he’d promised Morgan to
deliver twenty volumes in five years, and with the time almost expired on their agreement,
he was just bringing out the eighth volume. He was reminded regularly that he was
woefully short of the five hundred subscriptions he’d promised to sell as a way to
keep himself from going back to the well of the tycoon. So be it, Curtis told himself:
doing something world class meant deadlines and dollars were never going to fall in
line.

Belle Greene did not lack for a social schedule, most of it on behalf of Morgan. At
night, she liked to be seen, and was known to drink and flirt with people ranging
from the archbishop to the artist yet to sell a first painting. By day, though, she
was all business. “If a person is a worm,” she once said, “you step on him.” She wrote
many of Morgan’s letters. She bought gifts that he presented to others as his own
thoughtful touch. She gossiped, in private parlors and in letter form, about the mistresses
of Mr. Morgan. She posed for the painter Paul César Helleu, who presented her in a
regal side profile. And, most importantly, her influence over what artifacts of artistic
or literary merit would find their way into Morgan’s library had expanded as the rich
man grew befuddled and sluggish in his eighth decade. The secret of her past was intact,
though still subject to much speculation. Her father was far out of sight, living
at the world’s edge in a diplomatic post in Siberia. Belle had not spoken to him in
at least ten years. And she kept lying about her age: was she twenty-five or thirty?
“She moved her birth date around like a potted plant,” the Morgan biographer Jean
Strouse wrote. At the time that Curtis was hoping to impress her at Carnegie Hall,
Belle was twenty-seven years old and in an open love affair with a married man, Bernard
Berenson, a Renaissance art historian whose principal home was a hillside villa outside
Florence. How could Curtis compete with that?

For adulation, he had to settle on the man who introduced him that night in New York,
Henry Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History. A nephew
of J. P. Morgan, Osborn was wealthy by birth, hugely influential in some circles,
and largely in the Curtis camp. He was also a kook who believed, like other educated
men of his age, in the inferiority of some races and their inherent criminality, which
could be determined by the size of a person’s skull. He had even written President
Roosevelt, going on at length about the head size of people from Sicily, implying
that the great wave of Italian immigration sweeping over the United States was not
a good thing, and raising concern about “the blending of long-skulled and short-skulled
types.” In other writings, he said the “Negroid race” was in a “state of arrested
brain development” because blacks had come from hot equatorial climes that did not
foster intellectual advancement. (How might he explain the intelligence and charm
of Miss Greene, his uncle’s keeper, had he known she was from a black family?) Nordic
whites came in for much praise, defined as “broad-headed, gray-eyed Alpines or Celts,
short of stature, very Irish in appearance, but without the excitable Irish temperament.”

Though such nonsense passed for science in the highest New York circles, Curtis would
have none of it. His theme, consistent from the beginning, was that Indians were spiritual,
adaptive people with complex societies. They had been massively misunderstood from
the start of their encounters with European settlers, and were passing away before
the eyes of a generation, mostly through no fault of their own. For them, the present
was all of decline, the future practically nonexistent, the past glorious.

“The average conception of the Indian is as a cruel, blood-reeking warrior, a vigorous
huntsman, a magnificent paint-and-feather-bedecked specimen of primitive man,” said
Curtis in a full-page profile in the
New York Times,
reading from his talking points for the picture opera. “Of such we have no end of
mental pictures, but to the wonderful inner and devotional life we are largely strangers.”
The
Times
praised Curtis for the work he had done to preserve tribal languages—twenty-nine
vocabularies, recorded and transcribed, thus far. The paper was one of the few institutions
to notice this remarkable feat. “Five hundred years from now the value of this work
will be beyond all calculation,” the
Times
said. “And it is chiefly for posterity that he and Mr. Morgan are working.” But for
the first time, in print, Curtis revealed the bare truth about his schedule. He was
far, far behind, he acknowledged: it would take at least eight more years, until 1919,
to finish all twenty volumes.

Osborn appeared nervous as he introduced the man now heralded as the world’s foremost
expert on American Indians; his voice was weak, tinny, and he failed to rouse the
audience. But as the house lights dimmed and the orchestra burst into sound, as images
filled the screen and Curtis walked to the side of the stage to read his words, Carnegie
Hall was transformed. Gilbert conducted the musicians with one hand and guided the
projectionist with the other, synchronizing pictures with music. The screen jumped
to life with terraced houses reaching into a desert sky and deep gorges where the
first Americans still lived, followed by pictures of slender canoes in the crashing
Pacific surf, whirling rapids of the Columbia River, the wind-raked high plains east
of Glacier National Park, the red earthen pueblos of New Mexico.

“My greatest desire tonight is that each and every person here enter into the spirit
of our evening with the Indians. We cannot weigh, measure or judge their culture with
our philosophy. From our analytical and materialistic viewpoint, theirs is a strange
world. Deity . . . is everywhere present.” And off Curtis went on his oratorical flight,
explaining the Great Mystery, the logic behind fasting and sweat lodges, the offerings
to the sun, to snakes and to cedar. But it was wrong to see nothing more than primitive
animism in these rituals. “It is often said of certain tribes that they are sun-worshippers,”
Curtis told the audience. “To call them sun-worshippers is, I believe, in most instances
about as nearly right as it would be to call all Christian people cross-worshippers.
In other words, the sun is but the symbol of the power.”

The music swelled as the painted slides passed by, featuring faces to match the surroundings:
deeply lined elders on a bluff and smooth-cheeked maidens nearly naked by a waterway,
idyllic in their settings but also, especially in the portraits, steely and recalcitrant.
Just look at Joseph, and Geronimo, and Red Hawk. Men who never sold out their people,
hauled off to prisons far from the lands of their birth, then sent to their graves
in humiliation. He let these dead warriors glare at the Carnegie crowd, a bit of psychic
revenge. The cinematic portion of the night included the Yeibichai Dance of the Navajo
and the Hopi Snake Dance that Curtis had participated in.

The audience loved it. They were “lifted out of the prosaic into the wild, romantic
life of the redman,” the
New York Evening World
wrote. A few days later, Curtis was given an equally rapturous reception in Washington,
at the Belasco Theater, where he entertained a sold-out crowd that included foreign
ambassadors, judges, senators and President Taft. “A pictorial and musical gem,” the
Washington Times
called it. Roosevelt was not in town, having vacated the White House more than two
years earlier, but he sent Curtis a note praising him for doing “a good thing for
the whole American people.” Curtis was hailed by one paper as “a rare interpretive
artist,” and by another as “at once a national institution and a national benefit.”
And lo, shortly thereafter, he finally cracked the thick sandstone walls of the Smithsonian
Castle: the board agreed to buy a full subscription of
The North American Indian.
Writing to Meany, Curtis was euphoric at the reaction. In New York, Osborn had turned
to him and said Curtis had just won over an audience “that few men in their lifetime
have the privilege of facing.” One night, a show at the Brooklyn Institute got off
to a rough start with a host, the scientist Franklin Hooper, who was skeptical of
Curtis’s contributions to native scholarship. By curtain’s close, Hooper told Curtis
he was the first man to give “the real Indian” to an American audience.

“Dear Brother Meany,” Curtis reported on his New York appearances, “the enthusiasm
was quite out of the ordinary.” As usual, this triumph had come with no small amount
of sweat and pain. “I passed through 17 kinds of hell in getting this thing underway.”
In a rare breach of modesty, Curtis confided that he might allow himself to revel
in his reviews—if only for a moment. Go ahead and gloat, Meany advised. “You are too
sensible to let your head swell too much, but the temptation would certainly entrap
an ordinary mortal.” The swelling could never last anyway, Curtis indicated. In a
letter to his editor Hodge, after recounting all the standing ovations, all the over-the-top
reviews, the record crowds, the grueling pace (five shows a week), Curtis once again
found himself in a familiar redoubt. “Just at the present moment we are somewhat broke.”

The picture opera was supposed to solve the money woes that had shadowed Curtis ever
since he abandoned a prosperous life of studio photography to hitch his years to Indian
pictures. A fresh infusion of cash from Morgan, $60,000 in late 1909, went straight
to Curtis’s creditors. As a condition of that new money, Morgan had Curtis incorporate
The North American Indian
and put the operation in the hands of a board of directors in New York. The decision
would haunt Curtis, but he was out of options. The 1910 fieldwork—on the Columbia,
along the Pacific Coast of Washington and among tribes of Vancouver Island—had been
conducted on a shoestring, without money for interpreters or an aide to handle logistics.
And since Curtis had also moved out of his house—“address me at the Rainier Club,
as usual,” he told Hodge beginning in 1910—he had to set aside a certain number of
hours to earn his room and board. By the summer of 1911, Curtis was faced with putting
the Indian project on indefinite hold. It would be the first summer in more than a
decade when he didn’t spend all his time on tribal land. He was embarrassed, humbled,
his confidence rattled, as he finally told his editor the truth about his impoverishment.
“Outside of some absolute miracle there is no chance whatever for my getting funds
for field work this year,” he wrote Hodge.

It was while stuck in this eddy of despair that Curtis had come up with the idea of
the traveling picture opera. The Curtis name was enough to quickly attract backers,
who set up an itinerary stretching over two years. A business agent booked halls,
found musicians and arranged screen setups, hotels and other work. Curtis hoped that
the tour would generate enough money to get his team back into Indian country, the
only place where he now felt at home. But by early fall, just as Curtis was about
to launch the road show, he was already physically spent. Simultaneously, he had tried
to finish the fieldwork with Columbia River tribes, initiate photographic forays among
Northwest Coast Indians and handle the myriad tasks of putting together a traveling
picture opera production. It was no exaggeration when Curtis was told he was trying
to do the work of fifty men. For the second time in two years, he was confined to
his bed at the Rainier Club. He collapsed in exhaustion.

After rousing himself for fresh touring in 1912, he took a break of sorts in the
summer to work with the tribes that lived along the Pacific shore, from the Strait
of Juan de Fuca north. He also managed a quick trip to the Southwest, an opposite
climate. After spending time with the Hopi in 1900, 1902, 1904, 1906 and 1911, this
latest visit was both jarring and familiar. No tribe had been more welcoming, save
perhaps some members of the Crow. He knew enough of the language to greet old friends,
and he knew enough of the religion to take umbrage at the creeping vines of missionaries
moving over Hopi land. He was startled by how much things had changed. Automobiles
rambled along ancient sheep paths. Packaged and powdered food from the government
was taking the dietary place of traditional dried meat or cornmeal. The children,
back from boarding school, had short hair. Curtis felt fortunate that he had taken
so many pictures early on, for there was little of original Hopi life left to be seen,
he complained. The habits and routines of daily existence, refined over centuries,
had been swapped for those of mainstream America. For the anthropologist, whether
a self-educated one with a camera or a pedigreed one backed by a federal grant, there
is nothing more disappointing than the banality of modern life.

His views of God had expanded considerably since his days as a boy in a canoe with
the colicky preacher and his Bible verses. Early on, Curtis came to believe that the
key to getting deep inside the Indian world was to try to understand—and experience,
if possible—its religion. He rarely proclaimed the superiority of a Christian deity
over one that was alive in the rocks or a small creature. In his enlarged tolerance
for the native spiritual world, Curtis grew increasingly impatient with those who
tried to impose a dominant religious orthodoxy on these people. And, no doubt, self-interest
was at stake: his life’s toil, after all, was devoted to Indians “still retaining
their primitive ways.” Could his camera ever find anything in a church pew, the men
in clipped and combed hair, the women with dowdy shawls, to match a naked priest in
glorious body paint at dawn?