Catherine Oxenberg is Not Sharp.
A malfunctioning shutter lead to the worst screw up of my career
I’ve always had a thing for princesses, and I don’t mean the cool mid-century phones. There was my college girlfriend, Pauline. She was not actually a Princess, but her Lady-ness blew this provincial young American’s mind to the point where she might as well have been literal royalty. And I would have become a Viscount if I’d married her, hoo-rah.
Then there was Princess Stéphanie of Monaco, a genuine real, actual royal. Photographed her for Rolling Stone when she released a disco single. I movingly wrote about that experience here, if you can stand to relive it again.
My third princess was a TV star who had agreed to be photographed with her daughter for Working Mother magazine. I had photographed a number of moms and their infants for covers of this august rag, so was not surprised they called with another mother-daughter duo. Catherine Oxenberg, she of Dynasty fame, apparently living in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, while on set.
Ms. Oxenberg seemed a glamorous TV star, stone cold fox, and generally amiable media personality. Through her maternal grandmother, Catherine is a first cousin once removed of: Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, Princess Alexandra, The Honourable Lady Ogilvy and Prince Michael of Kent. Oxenberg is a second cousin once removed of Queen Sofía of Spain and Charles III of the United Kingdom, making Catherine a third cousin of Felipe VI of Spain and William, Prince of Wales. She is also a third cousin once removed of Margrethe II of Denmark and Harald V of Norway; and a fourth cousin to Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg and King Philippe of Belgium. You get all that? Yeah, me neither, I pasted it from Wikipedia. Needless to say, Oxenberg is about the closest I’ll ever get to blue blood, with a pedigree as long as your arm.
And befitting such regal bloodlines, Working Mother, generally a pretty frugal publication, pulled out all the stops and flew me and my assistant Jennifer to Mexico. Not just a sleepy mountain town in Mexico, no, they put us up at a brand new high-end resort, right in swinging Puerto Vallarta. I generally think of my rock-and-roll photo career as being anti-glamor. Seemed like the swankier and more fabulous the shots in front of the camera, the grodier the scene behind. Inexplicably, Working Mother ponied up the bucks and my assistant and I got to loll about smoking cigars and enjoying the pristine, fabulous, and gratis amenities for several days, waiting for our shoot window.
This glamorous photo shoot vibe continued right up to the shoot itself. Hopped in the stick shift VW van we’d rented (as I tell my daughters, “know how to ski, ride a horse, and drive a stick shift” and you’ll make out alright). We set up our lights (yes, I know, weird to think you need big giant lights just to shoot on a beach but, no, it’s true!), hunkered down and waited for our star. Not yet a parent, I didn’t understand that we were waiting on our star’s toddler offspring. Babies run on their own timetable, notwithstanding a glamorous magazine cover shoot with Mom.
Celebrity photo shoots are like that cliché about war: hours of utter boredom occasionally punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Include a toddler and ratchet that terror up several notches. One is totally aware that one’s schedule is not one’s own; the celebrity in question (and their kid) determine when and for how long. This is fine if it’s just you and your assistants doing crosswords to kill time while waiting. But it is most assuredly not fine if you are at the mercy of daylight: that big ol’ sun is fixing to set and you’re losing your light, whether your star and her toddler are ready or not. That situation induces stress, believe you me. You wait around, watching your beautiful golden light fade (to dusk or worse, mid-day unfiltered sunshine) with no sign of your subject. Finally, finally, they show up, and because of the star thing, the toddler thing, or the daylight thing, you shoot pictures like an absolute madman.
Oh sure, we pulled a few Polaroids, more to show to our subject than anything else. I let them cook (longest ninety seconds in show business!) while beginning to shoot real film. A quick glance at a Polaroid to make sure we were getting our shot: “Sure, looks pretty good…” Famous last words. Cue scary music and commence foreshadowing…
Contrary to her on-screen persona, Catherine Oxenberg proved to be a delightful subject. And why wouldn’t she? We were shooting on the beach outside her house in Mexico, she had an adorable little mini-me of a daughter, and life was good. We did our thing, got several changes of outfit on each of them, and just had a lovely afternoon making photos on la playa (that means on the beach, in Spanish, you know.)
Jen and I enjoyed another afternoon on the beach (why waste it?) before being tipped by our hotel concierge to the best meal I’ve ever eaten, sitting in a row, pointing at dishes, alongside the airport mechanics. No idea what we were eating, but man was it good! Some kind of deliciously fried meat and eye-wateringly fuego salsa in hand-made tortillas, washed down with Tecaté in cans. We then caught our flight back to New York, where I processed the film.
The clip tests gave me my first inkling something might be wrong. A couple of them showed evidence of shutter drag, where tack-sharp should have been the order of the day. I wasn’t too concerned, until I ran the rest of the film. Then my heart sank into my stomach. I grabbed the Polaroids and realized I had not been imagining it in the clips, they actually DID show evidence of my shutter malfunction. With the Mamiya RZ camera system I shot with, the shutter is in the lens, not the body of the camera. I had done this cover shoot with two lenses. The longer, the 180mm, had developed a shutter malfunction. I had failed to notice in the heat of the moment and it wasn’t even clear on the Polaroids, because I was sitting relatively still for the test shot then engaging in my usual peripatetic dance relying on the strobes and fast shutter to mask any palsy on my part.
Four decades later, that phone call to explain to my editor that I’d had a technical error and had ruined a lot of the shots still sears my soul. Of course, it mattered not that they did get a great cover out of it, had plenty of choices, and I saved the day. I was a goat for screwing it up, not noticing, and not kicking total ass in every way. It was like karmic justice for all the cigar-smoking, spa-visiting, pool-diving fun we had on the way to the shoot, I’m sure of it. There’s a Dylan line about how people who suffer together are closer than those who are most content. Why do I remember the shame of turning over the shoot, trying to explain how it could have happened, why I hadn’t noticed, far more vividly than the happy-go-lucky days of aquatic fun just prior? Dylan’s always right, of course. And so is the client. I never got so much as a Christmas card ever after from the ladies of Working Mother.
I remembered that though initially (and rightfully) bent out of shape, the client had eventually found a usable frame and gotten their cover. My basement and the internet would beg to differ. Maybe the psychic pain of screwing up was so great I imagined a farcical last second save. But I guess not. I’m uncharacteristically good at keeping old work. I found all my other Working Mother covers, but no Catherine Oxenberg. Seems I really did fully shit the bed on this erstwhile sweet gig.
Dr. Pepper and I used to talk a lot about shame. A gift, passed on to me by my own working mother. Of course, it’s intimately wrapped up in self-esteem issues. One of the hardest lessons for me to learn as a freelance photographer was never let ‘em see you sweat. And by sweat, I mean indicate anything other than total confidence and positivity. Negativity is for chumps. I found I had the habit of telling clients the terrible parts of the shoot, reasoning that it was neat that I’d persevered and come through after all. But all they remembered was the parts about the problems. Hell, I had to wait for my wife to come along to teach me that that shit applies when you talk about people too. Whatever bad thing you ascribe to someone else goes right into your subject’s consciousness attached to your name and face. Fake it till you make it may be a Twelve-Step motto, but it worked for commercial artists too.
I’d run into my friend, a fellow photographer on the street and he would invariably pull out a Polaroid and say, with all sincerity, “I just took the greatest picture in the history of photography this afternoon, look!” And people believed it. Dude was a million times more successful than me. Fake it ‘till you make it. While we’re here with Drs. Freud, Jung, and Pepper, let me plug a book, Quiet, by Susan Cain. This amazing little book taught me so much about my own introversion. More importantly, it teaches how to play an extrovert when you need to. This entire memoir project has required more sustained introversion than I’ve maybe ever done. I should have totally stolen a page from my ebullient photographer friend’s book and waved my latest pics around everywhere. And I wonder if I’d had the brass to just messenger 18 shots over to Working Mother with a note about how they’d better put me up someplace better next time if I could have fooled them. And if I hadn’t screwed up my opportunity to call up the Princess and offer to get together with her to show her the fabulous pictures I think I might have had a shot, no? No.
Eh, I’ve found that the worst moments make for great stories later!