Judith Krantz (28 page)

“What have you been doing since you left Graphics Central?” Jilly asked, closing the book with an approving nod.

“I had a chance to go to Europe for a few years.”

“Lucky you. What were you doing there?”

“It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but I ate my way from one city to another, from one country to another. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. It seemed more important than anything else. I’m passionate about food.”

“We all are here. Mel says that food photography is as much a calling as an art.”

“I agree entirely,” Jazz said fervently.

“Do you cook?”

“I can open cans, including sardines, I can make myself a sandwich if I’m starving, but I feel that serious cooking is too important for amateurs to meddle in. What I really love to do, when I get a chance, is clean up a kitchen.”

“Isn’t it
satisfying
when it’s all sparkling again?” Jilly said devoutly.

“It answers a deep need for me,” Jazz answered. “And the best part is that you know that it won’t stay that way long.”

“When can you start?” Jilly asked.

“Right now.”

“Good. Come on downstairs and I’ll introduce you.”

Jazz followed Jilly and met the head food stylist, Sharon, and her two assistants, Molly and Barbara, the women who were working at the wooden table. Each of them had a pile of mint leaves in front of them, which they were examining for the most microscopic of flaws, discarding hundreds of leaves before they found one that was absolutely perfect in shape, size, texture and color. At their feet were piled dozens of cases of various fruits which were to undergo the same selection process.

“We’re doing a fruit bowl for a cover shot,” Sharon told Jazz. “I need stand-in leaves for Mel to use while he composes the picture, and hero leaves for the actual photograph.” She looked at the three piles. “I think that’s enough, gals. Let’s put them in the fridge and get started on the strawberries.” There was a muted whisper of a sigh from her assistants, a noise somewhere between pleasure and pain.

“Strawberries are utter hell,” Sharon informed Jazz, with a calmly proud smile, like someone showing off a splendid baby and complaining that it has learned to walk sooner than its peers. “It’s almost impossible to find a perfect strawberry, and when you do, the little ruff of leaves at the top is never just right, or else the stem is damaged in some way. If we were doing just one small fruit cup, I’d have to buy a case of each kind of fruit, so that I’d be sure to get one good stand-in cup, one hero cup and three backup heros. With a bowl, it’s ten times as much work. But at least we’re not doing raw mushrooms. There is
no
such thing as the perfect mushroom. Of course, the worst of all is a decent slice of packaged bread. Once I had to go through five hundred loaves to find a good-looking one.”

“Holy moley,” Jazz murmured. “And then you have to do all that cooking too.”

“Cooking? Nothing to it. It’s the way the stuff
looks
that drives you mad.” Sharon smiled beatifically.

“Shall I get rid of all this mint you’ve discarded?” Jazz waved at the heaps of green that lay on the studio floor among the fruit baskets.

“Good idea. But first pass up the strawberries, will you?”

As Jazz carefully placed dozens of baskets of strawberries in front of the three food stylists, she asked, “Where’s Mr. Botvinick?”

“Over there.” Sharon pointed to an almost invisible figure in gray who had been sitting in front of the tripod, motionless on the floor in a yoga position. Jazz realized that she had seen him there out of the corner of her eye when she first entered the studio almost an hour earlier.

“What’s he doing?” Jazz whispered.

“He’s conceiving.”

“In the dark like that?”

“He has to figure out a way to shoot a fruit bowl in a way that’s never been done before.”

“Never ever?”

“Exactly. As if it were the first fruit bowl in creation. He may be there all day.”

“The poor man,” Jazz said sympathetically.

“That’s why he’s a genius,” Sharon explained reverently, as a red hailstorm of defective strawberries rolled from her adept fingers onto the floor. “The rest is purely technical, and ninety-five percent of it is lighting. You need one kind of light for mint, another for strawberries, another for grapes, another for kiwi, another for the bowl they’re in, another for the table-top, another for the accessories, and so on. But it’s the conception that makes it or breaks it.”

“A fruit bowl from hell,” Jazz said, almost to herself.

“We did that one last year,” Sharon said kindly. “For Halloween.”

Within a few months, Jazz had made herself indispensable at Mel Botvinick’s. During the first weeks, no one let her do anything but pick things up and put them down, but when they were sure she wasn’t clumsy or reckless, they gradually gave her more and more to do.

She was allowed to unroll the bolts of fabric that were thrown over the tabletop to simulate different tablecloths—although the fiercely elegant prop stylist, Tinka, a beautiful Japanese woman, actually arranged the folds of the material. Jazz was permitted to take Sharon’s heavy metal work kit from her hand when she arrived at the studio, to unlock the various hinged drawers so that the complicated battery of dozens of knives and scissors, pipettes, atomizers, bamboo shoots and tacky wax were revealed. Eventually, as Sharon came to trust her, Jazz might be instructed to hand over one or another piece of equipment, like a surgical nurse in an operating room.

After Jazz had demonstrated her ability to clean the eight-burner Wolf range, the microwave and the double sink to Sharon’s satisfaction, these jobs became her undisputed province. She was sent almost daily to the supermarket to buy the paper towels, sponges, Windex and plastic bags that the studio consumed in huge quantities; she was given the opportunity to put ice cubes into Baggies that were destined to be hidden under salads to keep them looking fresh under the lights. When Tinka arrived with her arms filled with twenty different bunches of fresh flowers, in case one or two were needed in a shot, Jazz’s job was to put them into deep containers of water. Sometimes Tinka let Jazz carry back the packages from the trade shows, retail stores or antique shops where she bought or borrowed the plates, silver and serving pieces that were used to create the mood of the picture. Soon Tinka added Jazz to her two free-lance assistants, who built the sets which were sometimes needed in the background of a shot; everything from a tropical beach to a Tuscan farmhouse kitchen.

Jazz became the unquestioned source of the vital Q-tips that Sharon dipped into a mix of chemicals and concealed in the food so that they simulated rising steam; she learned how to crouch under the table and pop up between shots to pump up the foam in glasses of beer with a turkey baster; she was entrusted with the secret of the mixture of Angostura Bitters, Kitchen Bouquet and detergent with which all roasted fowl were painted and then browned with a little torch to make them look cooked.

“If I really roasted them for more than a half hour,” Sharon explained, “they’d shrink and look dried out.”

“But what about the women who wonder why their chickens don’t look like yours?” Jazz asked.

“Food pictures are fantasies, like the photographs in fashion magazines, or rooms in interior design magazines. Nobody looks like that, do they? Nobody really lives like that, do they? But they do give you an idea of the potential, of the way to go.”

“I guess,” Jazz said, realizing that food pictures had the same relationship to reality that a publicity photo has to a movie star’s face when she wakes up in the morning. At least it wasn’t photojournalism.

As Jazz slowly came to know round, Buddha-like Mel Botvinick, she discovered him to be a gentle, shy, lovable man with a never-satisfied passion for his work. He allowed nobody to approach the tabletop on which he composed and lit each food photograph, working with the stand-in food until he had taken enough eight-by-ten Polaroids with the big Toyo on the tripod to be satisfied with his conception and start to shoot color film.

Soon, Mel let her take the Polaroids, and when she proved equal to that task, he reluctantly entrusted her with a Hasselblad and permitted her to take small detail shots of a single egg yolk in a cup, of a whisk, of a sack of rice, of a slice of cut onion.

“Mel, why won’t you let me light these detail shots?” Jazz asked.

“I’m sure you know how, but I can’t.”

“Mel, they’re going to be less than half an inch square on the page,” Jazz objected.

“The client is paying for my lighting,” Mel said, in a kindly but uncompromising voice.

When he was working on lighting, Mel was as set apart as he was when he was conceiving and composing the shot. Jazz studied his techniques as intently as possible. She realized that what she was learning from him more than made up for the second year of tabletop lighting she had missed when she dropped out of Graphics Central.

She hovered, unseen, as she watched him bring to life the sparkle of the crystal of a wine goblet, the patina of the skin of a purple grape, the heavy brilliance of a well-polished silver fork, the contrast between the surfaces of a boiled shrimp and the mayonnaise in which it was dipped, not in a series of shots but in one single shot which contained a dozen other elements as well.

Often, when Jazz was left to close the studio at the end of a long day, she’d relight the detail shots she’d taken during the day, experimenting with ways to do it better than Mel, but she never found a method that made a slice of onion more vividly onion-esque than he had. He had a magic she didn’t yet understand that made food more real than it looked to the naked eye. Every bit of food jumped out of his pictures, as if it were alive and would eat you if you didn’t eat it first. She could light small food shots almost—but not
absolutely
—as well as Mel Botvinick, but she couldn’t improve on him, Jazz admitted to herself.

Dissatisfied, she started practicing on the various tabletops laden with stand-in food that remained in place overnight, gathering dust, until the hero food was ready to be photographed. Endlessly she rearranged platters, plates, table decorations and flowers, struggling to find greater excitement and harmony and graphic power than Mel had. Sometimes, looking at her efforts upside down in the Toyo, she decided that she had managed to achieve a more interesting composition than Mel’s. When this happened she
quickly shot the picture with her own color film and labored for hours to restore the setup to exactly the way it had been when she started.

Later, when she compared her shots with Mel’s, Jazz was forced to admit that hers were almost as good—but never
absolutely
as good—as his. In spite of the sober deliberation with which Mel plotted each photograph, he made a clear leap into new, uncharted territory each time he finally shot the picture. His mind worked with dazzling innovation within the possibilities of food photography, in a way hers did not and never would. All she could do was learn from him.

She had rented a one-room furnished apartment near the unfashionably located studio. When Jazz got home at eight or nine at night, weary and footsore from the miles she walked every day, both inside the studio and running errands, she was content to make herself a light meal, take a hot bath and go to bed. Everyone at the studio ate a huge lunch and a high tea, ordered in from a variety of places. None of them would dream of tasting the food they were working with, since they knew too well what had been done to beautify it. It would have been, Jazz thought, like a plastic surgeon wanting to make love to a woman whose breasts he had enlarged, whose saddlebags he had diminished, whose kneecaps he had lifted.

She felt tranquilized by the work she had been doing for the first six months of 1982. No matter how good a food photographer and everyone who worked with him were, they all had to have enormous reserves of patience. Two long days, often three, of painstaking, detailed preparation were normal before a single major photograph could be taken.

Yet the relaxed, humorous patience that permeated the studio was the reverse of laziness. There was absolutely no slackness; the studio hummed with an undercurrent of disciplined determination to finish each tiny job at hand and get on to the next tiny job. At all times they worked under deadlines fixed by the advertisers or magazine art directors who counted on getting the finished pictures on a certain date.

This was the first time that Jazz had ever worked with a team, a dedicated, cohesive team, in which ego could play no part. Mel Botvinick, shy and modest as he was, was a leader who knew how to inspire total loyalty in his troops.

When an important detail proved faulty and had to be done over, as was bound to happen in each and every separate food shot, Mel stayed so calm that he never allowed an atmosphere of crisis to develop. There was no blaming of individuals when things went wrong, no competition for getting things right; nothing short of an invasion of roaches would have provoked anger. Botvinick’s studio was a supremely
safe
place to be, a cosmos into which no discussion of the riots and terrors of the outside world ever made their way. When Sharon announced that she had decided never to eat anything that had eyelashes, this was as close to a political statement as anything Jazz had heard since she started as a Girl Friday.