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Bob’s younger brother Cornell, a star Life staff photographer, resigned to join Magnum, although he would continue to work for Life. We all met in Paris on the last day of June, at the Cartier-Bresson family apartment on the Rue de Lisbonne. George Rodger came from England, where he was establishing a family with his wife Jinx, my former assistant at Ladies’ Home Journal. Chim came from Rome, Ernst Haas from Lausanne.
It was a grim meeting. George proposed moving Magnum’s European headquarters to London. Merger with Rapho or Black Star was even discussed. Nobody wanted to step into Capa’s shoes as president. It became clear, however, that Chim would be our next leader. He went off to Rome, where he would work with his friend, businessman Henry Margolis, to put Magnum’s house in order. At the meeting we made Cornell Capa vice president for New York and George Rodger vice president for Europe.
It gave George such a headache, however, that he quickly resigned in favor of Henri, who had not the slightest desire to be a Magnum executive. He solved the problem not by executive expertise but by going off to Moscow with Elie. Months previously they had applied for visas to the Soviet Union. Stalin had died and there was great interest in what would happen there. Henri had no interest in covering the political situation but, as Capa had done with John Steinbeck in 1947, he would photograph everyday life. Henri’s prestige was now such that I had three major magazines bidding for his Soviet reportage: Life wanted it, Holiday would do a special issue, and Look wanted to get it away from Life. Henri and Elie returned from Moscow in November and took their time editing and captioning hundreds of normal-size prints. I flew to Paris to go over it with them and returned to New York shortly before Christmas.
When I returned to New York my wife told me that she had seen two license plates on the car ahead of her as she drove home from seeing me off at Idlewild airport. Her double vision was the first sign of multiple sclerosis, which would slowly bring her down over the next ten years.
Sensing that neither Holiday nor Look would pay more than $25,000, I gave first look to Life’s Managing Editor Ed Thompson, a longtime friend. He agreed to run it in two consecutive issues and offered $35,000. I got him up to $40,000 by throwing in Life’s international edition. Then he turned to me and said, “What do you see for a cover?” I was ready for him: there was a picture of two Russian army officers ogling two pretty girls. It was Russian, it had a little sex, and thee was room for the Life logotype. Thompson bought it.
I knew that magazines in Europe would follow Life’s lead. I returned to Paris after the holidays. Paris Match, under Roger Thérond, was an easy sale. In Milan, Arnoldo Mondadori, who owned Epoca, was a great admirer of Henry Luce. No problem. Germany was more complicated, as the publishing industry was then divided between Hamburg and Munich. Magnum’s agent, Paula Wehr, was in Munich, so I went there. She had good news. Henri Nannen, the young publisher of Stern in Hamburg, would come to Munich to bid for the story. I asked him for 5,000 DM, a fabulous price at that time. In England the story went to Picture Post, and in the smaller countries our agents gladly sold it. Henri, who never really paid much attention to money, was impressed. He later told me, “That’s what bought our (first) house in the country.”
Henri’s first book publisher was Tériade, of The Decisive Moment. He followed up with another book in 1955 called The Europeans. This time the cover, equally colorful, was commissioned to Miró, the Spanish painter. It was almost as beautiful, but Henri was never as happy with the second book. It was the last with Tériade. In 1953 I met a young publisher named Robert Delpire in the Magnum office. He was then in medical school and came in his white coat. He was about to publish a beautiful book on Japan by Werner Bischof, which ended up being posthumous, and he was doing a small book with Henri on Balinese dance, remarkable for its color cover. He would become Henri’s closest editor for the rest of his life, the one who best understood what Henri’s photographs have to say. Delpire saw a book in Henri’s Russian material, not on Russia but on Moscow. The three of us spread the pictures out on the floor of Henri’s studio. I was delighted when Delpire chose as cover the photo I had recommended to Ed Thompson for the cover of Life.
In the fifties I got to work with Henri on many stories. He finally let me edit his contacts with him. His method was to quickly mark possibilities with a grease pencil on one side of the frame, then to go back a second time, marking a second side, and finally a third, to go to the lab for printing. Not since he began photography had Henri cared either to develop his own film or make enlargements. That he left to the laboratory of Pierre Gassmann’s Pictorial Service, later abbreviated to Picto. Pierre, a Berliner who began as a press photographer, was devoted to Henri and to Magnum. Following a long illness, Pierre died, in Paris, only weeks before Henri died.
I accompanied Henri only once when he was shooting on assignment. In 1960, when Vice President Richard Nixon was almost certain to get the Republican nomination for President, following Dwight Eisenhower, Vogue asked Henri to make a portrait of Nixon. I happened to be in Washington and accompanied Henri to the Vice President’s largely ceremonial office on the Senate side of the Capitol. It was essentially one big room; as we entered we could see Mr. Nixon across the room, dutifully posing with Miss Idaho Potato Queen for another photographer. We waited our turn, and were eventually introduced to the Vice President. He agreed to pose for Henri, seated at a desk; I retired from the scene but noticed that Henri made fewer than a dozen exposures. One, when Nixon momentarily clenched his fist, seemed to do the job for Vogue. Henri himself was more critical. When in 1998 Henri finally put together a book of his portraits, he omitted the Nixon photo, whether out of disdain for the man or for the image I do not know.
Working with Henri held its share of frustrations. I never succeeded in matching verbal journalism to his great photojournalism. No writer accompanied him on his 1954 journey through the USSR. Eli merely took notes and wrote simple captions. In 1958, when Henri returned to China, I tried to team him up with the great journalist Edgar Snow, whom we both knew and respected. But my letter to Snow in Peking never reached him.
Henri’s prestige was such that he was accorded remarkable access. In 1957, also for Vogue I believe, he photographed a dinner at the Vietnamese embassy in Washington attended by the Eisenhowers, the John Foster Dulleses, New York’s Cardinal Spellman, Field Marshal Montgomery and Chief Justice Warren of the U.S. Supreme Court, in honor of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. I have always felt that fuller reporting of the period following the French defeat in Indochina might have prevented America’s disastrous involvement in Vietnam. God knows what was said on this occasion, but John Foster Dulles was a leading protagonist of the Cold War and the Catholic Church was solidly behind the regime in South Vietnam.
There was also the war against French colonial rule in Algeria in the fifties. There was very little reporting of that war in the French press, particularly on the side of the Algerian rebels, the Front de Libération National, or FLN. In 1957, Kryn Taconis, a Dutch member of Magnum, managed to hook up with the FLN for two weeks in Algeria. The story was considered so sensitive in Paris that I arranged to meet Kryn in Amsterdam to edit it with him. I was then to hit the road, not even attempting to sell it in France. But, at the request of Michel Chevalier, then Magnum’s Paris bureau chief, Henri phoned me in Zurich and told me not to sell it at all. The excuse Chevalier gave was that the story was too dull (there had been little action). In his final interview with Le Monde, Henri remarked, “Il y a d’ailleurs un trou chez Magnum, c’est la guerre d’Algerie.” (Magnum was lacking when it came to the war in Algeria.)
By 1961 I had begun to tire of Magnum and some Magnum photographers were tired of me. It was impossible to keep all of them happy all the time. I referred to Magnum as “collective insecurity.” In August, at a stormy meeting of Magnum members at Cornell Capa’s Fifth Avenue apartment, it was voted – while I stepped out of the room – that I could be removed by the executive committee at any time. The end was nigh. I don’t know how Henri voted, but I remember that after the meeting we walked together, in companionable silence, from the Capa residence on 31st Street to the Magnum office off Fifth Avenue on 47th Street. I took it as his way of showing friendship.
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