Twenty-Six Seconds Page 13

  There was, of course, a darker side to her personality—she could be overbearing and strong-willed, trying the patience of her more reserved loved ones. I was the last of her grandchildren, and the only girl, so I never saw any of her faults. I only cared that I got to sleep in her bed with her when we visited, sit on the toilet watching her put on her makeup while she offered detailed tutorials on how to apply powder and mascara, and rummage around in her jewelry box to play with her gold bangles, long strands of pearls, and diamond-studded pins.

  As strong-minded as she was, the quotes she gave news reporters on behalf of her husband show both her pride in him and her deference to his wish for discretion. “It’s embarrassing but it’s also wonderful,” Lil is quoted as saying. “We didn’t want publicity and we want none now. He’s a wonderful man but he just doesn’t want to talk to anyone.” It follows, then, that if Abe wanted to ignore the hundreds of admiring letters he received after the assassination, she would not push him. But she certainly was not going to even tacitly endorse the idea that he should be ashamed of his gift to Mrs. Tippit.

  After he died, she made sure that his family would know exactly who Abe Zapruder really was and how generous he had been by making the letters accessible and visible. And when it came time to decide on the albums in which she would display the letters, did she choose discreet black leather for the cover, or an understated navy? Perhaps a traditional dark red, like the books my mother used for our family photos? No. She had them bound in the brightest, loudest golden yellow she could find, a color that shamelessly called attention to itself and would not be ignored.

  The letters—in Abe’s conflicted hands, then bound and given pride of place in Lil’s apartment, and then stored away in Myrna’s closet—seem to reflect all the contradictory feelings that the film evoked in our family from the very beginning. As I sifted through them as an adult, I came upon one letter that seemed to simplify the matter beautifully. I dearly hope my grandfather read it and remembered these words. “Dear Mr. Zapruder,” the stranger wrote, “I do not know how much you received for your film… but I want to add my voice to the voices of countless Americans who say, ‘God bless you, and thank you for your great gesture in making this gift.’ Acts such as yours reaffirm our faith in the inherent goodness of human nature. It would have been terribly easy to keep all that money.”

  CHAPTER 5

  IMAGES IN PRINT

  One day in early March 2013, I walked the short half block from my cousin Joanne’s apartment in midtown Manhattan to Sixth Avenue and down to Fiftieth Street, where the iconic art deco Radio City Music Hall sits on the corner. It was the perfect morning for a walk: The city streets were just waking up and my boots hit the pavement in the satisfying, rhythmic way they seem to do only in New York City. I waited at the light, Radio City behind me, briefly remembering my parents taking me to see the Rockettes when I was a kid, and looked across the Avenue of the Americas to the broad sweeping plaza that lies in front of the towering forty-eight-story Time & Life Building. As I crossed the plaza and entered the building, I did not realize that I was retracing the steps that my grandfather and father had taken in 1968 and that my grandmother and father took again a few years after that. I was greeted warmly by my friend Ali Zelenko, who was then senior vice president of communications for Time Inc. We went immediately to meet a small group of editors who were putting together a LIFE book on the Kennedy assassination for which I was going to contribute an essay. At the end of the following day I was due to meet the legendary Dick Stolley for the first time. But before that, I had two days to go through the Zapruder film records in the LIFE archives.

  Bill Hooper, the chief archivist of the Time Inc. archives, which contain more than six million items and have rightly been called “America’s attic,” is slim, with close-cropped gray hair, a subtle white goatee, round tortoiseshell glasses, and a bow tie. He is soft-spoken and gentle, and when he smiles, which is often, his mouth turns down in a wry, knowing way. He was, like everyone I met at LIFE that day and since, warmly welcoming to me, treating me with a sort of familial kindness and deference that I had neither expected nor particularly understood until later. I have done a lot of research in a lot of archives. Usually, there’s a kind of businesslike formality, even in institutions with the friendliest and most helpful archivists. The work is essentially contractual—you are there to see something and they are there to provide it for you. It was nothing like that at LIFE. For me, it was less like doing research in an archive than it was like showing up at the home of a long-lost relative who’s been saving a lot of stuff for you and wondering when you’d take an interest and turn up. After all, LIFE was the guardian of the Zapruder film for its first twelve years and weathered its own share of media, legal, and public firestorms because of it. The film is an important part of LIFE’s history and its identity, and it exists on the cellular level in the cultural memory of the institution. Those who were there at the time, and those who are knowledgeable about the Kennedy years and the assassination coverage, show an attachment—almost an affection—for the film that is difficult to describe. So when I arrived, it was as if that familiarity and affection were extended to me, as if I was already part of the family somehow. For my part, as with so much related to the film and the research for this book, I was a little late to the party, finding myself catching up and backfilling my confused impressions and questions with information after the fact.

  Bill set me up in an office and left me with a few gray archival boxes packed with hundreds of documents, some typed on bright blue and pink memo paper, others on pages yellowing with age—handwritten notes, clippings, and letters. As I opened the first box and pulled out a stack of pages, I was vaguely aware that these papers had been sitting in boxes for many decades and that they were private to LIFE magazine in exactly the way that our family papers are private to us. I couldn’t help but feel like I was getting away with something.

  For the next two days, I sat poring over the hundreds of pages, compulsively snapping photos of the documents even though Bill had made it clear to me that his office would provide copies of anything I wanted. Somehow it seemed hard to believe—like the papers might vanish if I let them out of my sight. As I read, I began to see the narrative of the film’s life at LIFE unfold: the early elation at having acquired it, the immediate problems of how to use it, the public responses to it, the growing frenzy to see it, and the internal pressure at LIFE to respond to that curiosity and still maintain the institutional values that defined the magazine.

  There were letters between my grandfather and LIFE’s director of photography, Dick Pollard, who had the primary responsibility of dealing with the film and whom I never met because he died many years before I began this work. Then came the documents about the bootleg copies, the articles about unauthorized use, the lawsuits, and the headaches. Some of the documents referred to larger historical events that I knew about—like the Josiah Thompson/Bernard Geis lawsuit, the 1967 Clay Shaw trial in New Orleans, and the first showing of the film on Geraldo’s program Good Night America in 1975.

  But in between, there was a deep connective tissue of memos and letters that formed a much more nuanced and complicated story of how the editors at LIFE had tried to deal with this object and the unprecedented problems it posed. This was what I wanted to know. After all, what LIFE did or didn’t do was a chapter in the story that lay between my grandfather’s experience over the weekend of the assassination and my father’s after 1975, when the film came back to our family. In the strange, disembodied way of such things with the Zapruder film, the documents told a story that was integral to ours, even though we had not controlled it, had little to do with it, and knew almost nothing about it.

  On the second afternoon, I was talking logistics with Bill. I was flagging the pages I wanted to have copied—essentially everything—and I was trying to figure out if I was being entirely unrealistic in my request. Also, I suspected that the LIFE records had been sealed until this
time, but I wasn’t entirely sure. Was I really the first outsider to gain access to them? In my most casual manner, I asked Bill if other researchers had gone through these records before. He looked at me quizzically for a moment. Then he said, “No.” I nodded and didn’t say anything. I remember it as a long moment, in which I understood that something big was happening but I didn’t understand why and I couldn’t bring myself to ask. On some level, I think I felt that if I called too much attention to it, the spell would be broken. When he left, I kept snapping photos. Just in case.

  One of the first things that becomes clear in the LIFE records is that while Abe was coping with the emotional aftermath of the assassination and his sudden exposure in the public eye, the practical burden of responsibility for the film had shifted to the executives and editors at LIFE magazine. The November 29 edition of LIFE covering the death of President Kennedy appeared on newsstands on Tuesday, November 26. The cover showed a somber black-bordered portrait of JFK, chin perched thoughtfully in one hand, his green-hazel eyes looking off into the distance, the slightest smile playing around his lips. The editors replaced the traditional red of the LIFE logo with black. The issue opens with a letter from George Hunt, managing editor of LIFE, and an editorial mourning the president’s shocking and untimely death. The assassination coverage is tucked between the regular pages of the magazine, which included an article about the comeback of the Tarzan series in paperback, the use of teepees in fighting fires, and the second article in a series titled “Negro in the North.” There are also ads touting the conveniences of the long-distance telephone (“Try it yourself and see”), the GE Mobile Maid dishwasher (“Give her more time with you and the family”) and Winston cigarettes (“Winston tastes good like a cigarette should!”). Just in case there was a temptation to read the coverage through twenty-first-century eyes, the ads and articles situate me back in a time when cigarettes didn’t kill and long-distance calls were a novelty and we still used the word “Negro.”

  The assassination segment begins with a full-page photo of radiant Jackie in her pink suit, her arms full of red roses, with the president beside her, just after disembarking from Air Force One at Love Field in Dallas. This is how they looked when my aunt saw them from behind the chain-link fence—what would turn out to be the last perfect moment. Turning the page, the reader encounters a series of small, somewhat grainy black-and-white photos. The images are hard to make out at first, but after a while the events come into focus and the story of the president’s death unfolds across the pages. Abe is not mentioned by name; instead, a text box titled SPLIT-SECOND SEQUENCE AS THE BULLETS STRUCK captions the events shown in the images. The editors had chosen to omit the gruesome sequence of the final shot to the president’s head. Nevertheless, it is clear that the president is alive in the first frames, then he is in distress, and by the time the eye reaches the last frames on the page, he is slumped over toward his wife. Turning the page again, the second spread shows Jackie crawling out of the back of the open car and on to the trunk, where, in a huge black-and-white image, she is clearly seen reaching forward as Secret Service agent Clint Hill leaps on to the back bumper. One can barely make out the lifeless body of the president in contrast to Jackie’s frantic and confusing scramble, which seems to capture not only the panic of the moment but also the collapse of all sense and order in the world.

  The assassination sequence is followed by the now famous photo of a woman in New York with her mouth open in horror as she absorbs the news, as well as pages showing the swearing-in of Lyndon Johnson aboard Air Force One with a stricken Jackie by his side, the president’s body being returned to the White House, and global reaction to the news of the assassination. The issue ends with a somber piece by Theodore White and an extraordinary series of photos of the young president and his family in happy times, ending with an almost unbearable image of his slender, youthful figure walking on the dunes, his back to the viewer.

  No one at LIFE or anywhere else could have been fully prepared for the public response to this issue of the magazine. On the first morning that the magazine hit newsstands, the sales office wrote to C. D. Jackson: “The situation here is incredible as far as sales have gone—they were sold the very first morning. We have been deluged by calls. Last night, a TV station spoke for about three minutes on the subject of LIFE’s coverage and the film strip.” The frenzy to get newsstand copies rose in the following days; internal memos from LIFE report copies being scalped for a dollar, and then within days, for ten dollars, and on December 2, a Los Angeles distributor of LIFE reported that “five dollar bids for the Kennedy issue are common as dirt, and now the $15 bids are coming in.” This for a magazine that normally sold for twenty-five cents.

  The following week’s issue covered the president’s funeral and included the now iconic images of Mrs. Kennedy, veiled in black, walking stoically down Pennsylvania Avenue between the president’s grieving brothers, and three-year-old John in his short coat saluting his father’s casket. Amid the onslaught of visual images that helped shape the public story of those days, the film took its place in the collective narrative of the assassination.

  The LIFE offices were flooded with letters requesting copies of the magazine and reprints of the cover photograph of the president, or offering heartfelt words of praise and gratitude for the magazine. One writer wrote: “Amongst all the posthumous tributes, dedications and memorials… you, gentlemen, have succeeded beyond expectations in creating a literary shrine of our times, in honor of our late President.” Of the hundreds of letters, almost none mentioned the film. This is an important reminder of a fact that is easily lost in retrospect: The film was but one small element in the vast, overwhelming coverage of the president’s death. In later years, as the grief for the president waned and questions remained about his death, the film would grow and change in significance until it would become almost one with the assassination itself. But that was a long way off. In the weeks immediately after the president’s death, coverage of the Zapruder film in LIFE was not privileged; to the contrary, its still frames simply took their place alongside the many confounding and emotionally bruising images to surface from the assassination, the aftermath, and the funeral.

  The colossal demand for the assassination and funeral editions of LIFE could not be met. The initial print run sold out instantly. People started calling the New York office in such large numbers that the sales office set up a telephone crew to answer the phones around the clock over the Thanksgiving weekend. They logged 4,500 calls. Subscribers complained that their copies were being stolen, while the prices for scalped copies continued to rise. Within days, editors and others at LIFE began talking about putting together a memorial edition of the magazine that would combine the assassination and funeral coverage and would include additional material. A memo from the Chicago office read: “We know the New York office is dragging. The Chicago bureau volunteers to come in overnight and feed you folks Benzedrine—or do something even more useful—on behalf of a JFK Memorial book. We’ll bring the turkey.” Richard Stolley weighed in two days later: “We would, I think, be doing a great service, not only in terms of our economics, but in this case, more importantly, in terms of preserving the image of a slain president. People want to know, read, see, feel right now… All have said they hope a book is done and that it is published fast for the preservation of memories of a fine man in themselves and even more poignantly in their children. I join them in urging: Let’s do it. And fast.”

  Work began on the memorial edition. In addition to combining the two previous issues, some of the coverage was to be expanded and some features added, but all advertisements were to be removed. In this context, the question arose of whether to print the film’s images in color and whether to include frame 313, later hideously and all too casually referred to as the “head shot.” I might not have known that there was an internal debate but for the fact that Bernard Quint, art director at LIFE, wrote an impassioned memo to George Hunt on November 26, jus
t after seeing the film for the first time. He began by noting that the black-and-white images in LIFE omitted the frames that showed the “shot which took away part of Kennedy’s head and left him a bloody mess, and also showed part of his head and brain flying through the air.” He had heard that the editors were considering using that sequence of images in color. The following paragraphs in his memo echo Abe’s fears and presage the later conflicts that would arise over the use of the film. “It seems to me that this must surely involve an element of propriety and good taste and the reputation of LIFE and its editors. I can’t see how revealing any of the morbid details in color could serve any scientific or educational purpose… If we have anything to add to police knowledge, then it is a matter for the police and not the public. I am firmly convinced that the momentary opportunism displayed in the use of these details in color will be to our everlasting discredit.” So strongly did Quint feel about this issue that he threatened to leave the magazine over it, stating: “I could not permit my name to remain associated in any way with LIFE magazine and I would be forced to resign and to state so publicly.”

  I don’t know who might have been on the other side of the debate and what their argument might have been, because there is nothing further in the LIFE files on the subject. In the end, the editors chose to publish nine frames in the memorial edition, each of which is large in scale and printed in rich, saturated color. They excluded the images that showed the bullet’s impact and the moment of the president’s death. Even without them, the images tell the shocking, devastating story in a way that the small black-and-white frames could not. In lieu of the most graphic frames, the editors chose a frame showing the first lady leaning toward her husband, clearly trying to help, and in the next frame, a part of his gray suit is just visible in front of her as she rises from her seat, turning toward the back of the limousine, her elbow braced against the backseat, her hair swinging over her face. The resolution is much higher than in the November 29 issue, revealing much more detail, and the composition is intensely compelling—the grassy green backdrop, the shiny black car reflecting the light, the pink of the first lady’s suit, Mrs. Connally’s bright yellow roses, and the small American flag fluttering helplessly in the wind. It is no wonder that the millions of people who saw these images absorbed them as their own personal memory of the assassination, and that so many later believed they had seen the film on television that weekend, and not just the color stills in LIFE.