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An
Improvised Life
Lisl Steiner, Caramoor’s longtime chronicler-in-residence,
recalls her adventures as a fearless photojournalist. |
by
VIVIAN SWIFT |
Lisl
Steiner’s self-portrait, |
Steiner’s,
photo of Louis Armstrong in 1959. |
Steiner’s
photo of Henri Cartier-Bresson taken in NYC, 1960. |
Steiner’s
photo of a 1977 informal White House Press Office gathering,
with an about-to-light-up Jody Powell at the podium. |
Steiner’s 1980 photo of Ray Bradbury. |
The
Nixons at the Republican National Convention in Miami,
1968. |
Artist
and photographer Aldo Sessa puts Lisl Steiner on a pedestal. |
If
there is an art to name-dropping, then Lisl Steiner has mastered
it. It helps that she’s had a long and adventurous life,
starting as the daughter of Austrian immigrants in Argentina
in the 1930s and ca-reering through the “other Americas”
(North and Central) for 60 years as a fearless photojournalist
known as Fosforito, “little matchstick.”
“When I started working I was skinny and I had red hair,”
she explained as we looked through her photographs of famous
friends in her Bedford, NY, studio one recent Saturday morning.
At 77, she is longtime chronicler-in-residence (famed for
her signed portraits of its many performers) at Caramoor Center
for Music & the Arts (located in nearby Katonah), and
there is still as much of the Fosforito about her as caught
the eye of Louis Armstrong during his triumphal tour of Latin
America in the 1950s.
“Oh yes, he invited me to spend the night with him,
but I refused, and this picture I took at the moment that
I said no,” she says, showing me a photo of Louis Armstrong
in Buenos Aires in 1959, looking astonished and directly into
the camera. “We were in his dressing room when I took
that,” she says, pushing it aside to find another image
of the great musician taken in his hotel room.
In this photograph, Armstrong has his arms outstretched above
his head as if in victory and his smile is exultant. It’s
not what you think: “Louis had just hung up the phone
on the American Ambassador to Argentina when I took this.
The Ambassador had called to ask him to play ‘The Star
Spangled Banner’ at a state function and Louis told
him [off], since in the U.S. he couldn’t even stay in
a hotel like the luxury hotel he was in, in Argen-tina,”
Ms. Steiner says, pointing out the details in the background
of the photograph. There is an old reel-to-reel tape deck
on a table and spools of tape stacked up in boxes all around.
“Louis’s hobby was taping his concerts,”
she recalls fondly. “He was always making his tapes,
traveling with so many tapes!” To dish personal details
about Louis Arm-strong in the same breath as presenting him
as an iconic Armstrong-the-jazz-musician-in-exile —
this is how you name-drop.
And
like this: “Henri Cartier-Bresson [the renowned twentieth-century
photographer] was famously reclusive, you know,” Ms.
Steiner continues, holding a photograph of the famous man
that she took in New York City in 1960. “I was waiting
in front of Fidel Castro’s hotel in Murray Hill when
I saw Cartier-Bresson in the crowd. I took this photograph
and, for years afterward, I tried to get him to comment on
this picture. Thirty-five years later, I found out that he
likes to fly kites. So I ordered a very expensive kite from
Vienna and I sent it to him and he wrote me the kindest note,
that he loved the kite and wanted me to come to his house
in the Luberon to fly it with him. Can you imagine?”
Ms. Steiner laughs, “He must be ninety-five years old,
flying a kite!”
Not only does the Fosforito own one of the few images of Cartier-Bresson
in existence, she also owns her place in this moment in history
in front of the Shelburne Hotel on Lexington Avenue, for Castro’s
visit to the United Nations in 1960 was notorious. His residence
at the Shelburne was abruptly ended when Castro, looking for
a more politically correct headquarters in Manhattan, decamped
to the Hotel Theresa on 125th Street in Harlem. It was there
that the Cuban leader met with Malcolm X and Nikita Khrushchev.
“This is Khrushchev’s interpreter,” Ms.
Steiner says with fondness about the photograph of a sad and
weary man that she took at the United Nations during that
trip. “I’d like to know how his life in Russia
turned out,” she adds.
As for being front- and backstage with Khrush-chev and Castro,
Ms. Steiner was likewise on board with Richard Nixon. Her
photograph of the Republican nominee and his wife, taken at
the party’s national convention at Miami Beach in 1968,
captures the couple in a moment of goofy triumph (Nixon had
staged the ultimate comeback that year, after having been
out of politics since losing his race for California governor
in 1962). But besides bearing witness to his public redemption,
Lisl Steiner was a witness to his near-downfall in 1958 when
the then-Vice President Nixon was making a goodwill tour of
Latin America.
“I was with him in Venezuela, when the anti-American
crowd threw rocks at his car,” she says, understating
the vicious mob attack upon the procession, which was finally
escorted to safety by the Venezuelan military. Nixon included
the incident in his memoirs as the fourth of his famous Six
Crises.
“Oh, I was never afraid,” says the intrepid photographer.
“In fact, it gives me the chance to tell people that
I was stoned with Richard Nixon!”
The
Carter Administration was more to Ms. Steiner’s liking,
and her photograph of the White House Press Office in 1977
shows an almost incomprehensible informality by today’s
standards of media self-consciousness. Pres-ident Carter’s
Press Secretary Jody Powell, lighting his cigarette, holds
forth at the podium while the press corps lounges rather inattentively.
In the foreground sits Helen Thomas, who maintains her professional
decorum as a legendary doyenne of the Washington press corps.
Lisl Steiner was an accredited White House correspondent when
she took this photograph, although she had unusual artistic
proclivities: “Jody Powell was a chain smoker,”
she says, “and I collected his cigarette butts. I made
them into a collage.” By scrounging through the Press
Secretary’s ashtray, Lisl Steiner must have stood out,
even then, as spectacularly anti-careerist.
“There are two ways of having a career,” she advises.
“You can get yourself fixed up with a famous organization
and become a household word, or you can work your ass off
and end up with a good body of work. My motto is, to quote
Juan Gris, ‘Improvisation is the ultimate freedom.’
I have improvised my whole life!”
There are rewards for not being a household name, besides,
that is, a collage made from Jody Powell’s cigarette
butts (Note: Despite his history of heavy smoking, Jody Powell
is still alive and now heads a powerful PR firm in Washington).
Ms. Steiner fishes one such reward out of her cache of mementoes
from her improvised life. First, the backstory: “Ray
Bradbury and I took a train trip together from Los Angeles
to New York in 1980. We drank four bottles of wine and I told
Ray a story about being with Louis Armstrong in Buenos Aires,
when Louis was constantly mobbed by admirers. For protection
he had to wear a baseball catcher’s mask whenever he
went out in public.”
This conversation reappeared as a poem by Ray Bradbury, titled
“Satchmo Saved,” printed in The Los Angeles Times
on October 5, 1980. Lisl Steiner owns a copy inscribed by
Mr. Bradbury: For Lisl – who inspired this! Love from
Ray B.
Lisl Steiner, the little matchstick, is still inspiring her
fellow artists. Just witness a recent photograph of her by
Aldo Sessa, a well-known Argentine artist who credits Lisl
as being “the reason I am a photographer today.”
Mr. Sessa has posed his septuagenarian muse on a pedestal,
draped her like a classical statue and put a lighted torch
in her hand. “I don’t take myself seriously,”
Ms. Steiner says. “I am low maintenance. I have met
many great artists, and the greatest were always humble. To
grow old well, it takes humor and curiosity.”
But really, it can’t hurt to be put on a pedestal now
and then.
“I have 19 collectors in Europe,” Ms. Steiner
says, “and the Austrian National Library has an archive
of all my drawings – 50 years of drawings! – of
musicians, many of them signed portraits like the ones I make
at Caramoor as the chronicler-in-residence.
My
association with Caramoor goes back to 1960, when I had tea
with Mrs. Rosen.” That would be Lucie Rosen, the sprightly
widow of Caramoor’s founder, Walter Tower Rosen, who
built the estate as a center for music and art.
“I knew of Caramoor even before I knew I would one day
live in Westchester. You see, I have been drawing musicians
my whole life. When I am listening to performers, I am inspired,
and I draw in the rhythm of the music,” Ms. Steiner
says, trying to explain the trance state in which she produces
her drawings. “It’s the same state that musicians
enter when they play. It’s all guts, no intellect.”
The finishing touch on each of her portraits is provided by
her musical collaborators, an autograph that is often in style
with the expressive lines with which she has interpreted her
subject.
Michael Barrett, chief executive and general director at Caramoor,
says, “Lisl Steiner is creating a historical document
through her drawings.” Plans for a gallery for her on
Caramoor’s website are being considered.
Ms. Steiner’s work at Caramoor is not the only kind
of art she makes these days: “I have been invited to
create a fall ‘happening’ in Vienna !”
The prospect clearly excites her: “I did happenings
with Allan Kaprow [the artist who invented the happening in
1959 to blur the line between art and life]. On my first trip
to Vienna in 1965, the first person I met was a chimney sweep.
In Austria, sweeps are luck – so I will have 125 sweeps
at my happening and everyone can touch a sweep and have lots
of luck for 2005!”
To blur the line between avant-gardist and national treasure,
Lisl Steiner has been allowed to “re-do” Vienna.
“Vienna will be surrounded by kiosks, 30 feet high,
with my image of a chimney sweep on all of them!” she
exclaims, as if this were going to be her greatest prank of
all time, more fun even than getting stoned with Nixon. “I’ve
asked the sweeps to collect soot. I’m going to give
a bag of soot to everyone. It will be the pet rock of the
millennium!” And, saving the best for last, Lisl Steiner
gushes, “And guess who will be there? The oldest chimney
sweep in Austria!”
The oldest chimney sweep in Austria?
No one, but no one, can drop a name like Lisl Steiner. |
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| Vivian
Swift is a writer and jewelry historian who lives in Pelham,
NY. |
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