The Shadow Catcher

All three of the wedding group look pissy, as if Curtis had been holding them since dawn against their wills while all the champagne in Washington was flowing freely in an adjacent room.

And where’s the LOVE?

Is there any visible LOVE among them?

Granted, it was 1906 and not the convention of the day to wear one’s heart in public on one’s sleeve, but as far as wedding pictures go, this one is a straightforward piece of stylized propaganda, not the least romantic (unless your passion is for French organza). It’s not mythmaking in the way that other Curtis pictures are. It does not address our need to believe in any of these people, believe in their involvement with each other, their LOVE for one another, nor for their future as a loving couple and a loving family.

Perhaps LOVE doesn’t photograph, but I believe it does, I believe something damn near approximating it does, a human-ness that isn’t on display for us in this wedding picture. You can almost hear Curtis saying, Lean a little to the left, Mr. President, and although T.R. readily complies in a compositional gesture meant to offset the bridal couple, leaning away from his oldest child was a stance to which T.R. was well accustomed. He had been leaning away from Alice since her mother died when she was two days old. Alice Lee, Roosevelt’s first wife, died in the same room where she had given birth to their infant daughter on the third floor of the Roosevelt house at 6 West 57th Street in New York City, and eight hours later, Teddy’s mother died of typhoid in a bedroom on the floor above. After their funerals, Teddy left the infant Alice in the care of a fond aunt and traveled to what he called the OLD WEST to ride rough, eschew the company of women and shoot animals.

It has been said that his experience out West changed Roosevelt forever, and if it’s true that the OLD WEST changed T.R., then it’s also true that T.R. returned the favor in his subsequent commitment to the preservation of its beauty. The energy some men squander chasing women, T.R. expended romancing the West and all its myths. And although he remarried when Alice was three and rapidly had five more children, he was never his most natural self in the feminized domestic world “He wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral and the baby at every christening,” Alice told the press about her famous father.

In other words, he wanted to be the center of attention.

And perhaps he is leaning away in the wedding photograph not on Curtis’s instruction, but on his own Presidential instinct, not to draw attention to the bride, but from her. And maybe the future of the wedding couple can be seen in the image Curtis made — Nicky Longworth would have affairs and Alice would have affairs and they would eventually divorce — and maybe that destiny was manifest, even on their wedding day, and all Curtis had to do was hold the shutter open and let that light record itself.

Curtis was thirty-eight years old the February morning that he made this wedding picture, and it was soon after this that T.R. wrote his letter to J.P. Morgan commending Curtis as an outstanding photographer of that soon-to-be-depleted asset of the OLD WEST, the great American NATIVE.

Meeting Morgan would change Curtis’s life, but meeting Morgan had depended on meeting Teddy first—no Roosevelt, no Morgan—and Curtis had impressed him in ways that were bound up in a distinctive brand of mythic masculinity that the two men shared.

Both Teddy and Curtis cut a kind of cowboy figure, with or without a horse. Both enjoyed the rakish slant of cowboy hats, the feel of boots and the psychic boost of self-promotion.

Both preferred the company of men to women.

Both were men who disappeared into their pursuits and left their families in the exclusive care of wives and nannies for long periods of time.

If I were to make odds on which of the two was the more attentive father — more demonstrative, more forgiving — I’d have to go with Teddy.

We can imagine hugging Teddy.

We can imagine Teddy hugging back, even if his bear hug nearly killed us.

I can even imagine Teddy as the character of Zorba, like Anthony Quinn in this poster on the wall, a mad Greek, dancing solo on an Aegean shore beneath the stars.

I can imagine Teddy heartbroken, mad with grief at the death of his young wife, blustering his way out of that despair and into new-found LOVE.

I have a harder time imagining that impulse-toward-happiness in Curtis, not because I haven’t tried, heaven knows I’ve tried, but because the evidence that he was ever comfortable or happy is too thin.