The Shadow Catcher

“Well, you’ve got the beginning years over here, the early life. Then there’s the middle bit where Curtis meets the woman who will change his life — Clara — marries her, has kids, establishes a studio in Seattle, Washington, as a society portraitist. Then, when he’s thirty-two, there’s another part: he meets the then Chief of Forestry by pure chance while climbing Mt. Rainier and the next thing you know this guy takes Curtis to the Southwest where he sees his first Plains Indian. Then, for nineteen years, from 1900 to 1919, all Edward does is photograph Indians. He’s away from home ninety percent of the time, but pretty nearly every time he comes back, his wife gets pregnant — until he just stops coming home at all. He doesn’t even meet his last child until she’s eighteen years old. Clara divorces him in 1919—bitter mess; real ugly. Edward is now fifty-one years old. He has a sister who’s sided with his wife in the divorce; a brother he hasn’t seen since he was six, another brother who’s denounced him as a charlatan and thief — he’s made his wife an enemy and he barely knows his children. And he’s perennially in debt. So he reinvents himself again and comes to Hollywood and lands a job with Cecil B. DeMille as the still photographer for The Ten Commandments. By the 1920s he’s in debt to Morgan, whose heirs force him to relinquish all his copyrights to American Indian, Inc. He sells off part of the Indian art and jewelry he’s acquired, borrows more money and opens two studios here in Hollywood, one in the Biltmore Hotel and one in Glendale, where he slogs away as an average studio photographer for another sixteen years. Then around 1937 he drops out of sight, wandering around Nevada and California, searching for gold. Down and out, eighty years old, he tries to get the U.S. government to pay him for his work as an ethnologist. Instead, he’s condemned by the Secretary of the Interior and denounced as a phony and a fake on the floor of Congress. On October 19, 1952, he drops dead in his daughter’s apartment from a heart attack and dies, in L.A. County.”

“Wow — he died in ’52…he lived that long. That’s, like, during Elvis,” Michelle blinks.

“Wait, I’ve got a scene,” Stacey says: “It’s 1952. We start in the daughter’s apartment,” she acts out. “California sunshine streaming through Venetian blinds. A TV plays in the corner. An OLD MAN, 84, lifts a slat of the Venetian blind to gaze at traffic on the street outside. A THUNDERBIRD goes by. (50’s right? those BIG FINS?) A CADILLAC. Followed by a PONTIAC. The names of Indians—THUNDERBIRD, CADILLAC, PONTIAC — turned into CARS! Seeing this, the OLD MAN grabs his chest, falls down, has a heart attack and dies. The OLD MAN is actually Edward Curtis! Then — FLASHBACK: YOUNG CURTIS (the handsome one) on horseback, his CAMERA on a packhorse, on THE PLAINS. TIPIS in the middle distance. He rides in. What do you think? It’s kind of Citizen Kane meets Dances with Wolves.”

“—Citizen Kane?” I repeat.

“—oh: hey: oh, my god: isn’t there even an Indian reservation that’s called ROSEBUD?”

I look at Jon. Jon looks at me. “I’m curious to know how you fell back in love with him enough to write the novel,” Jon asks.

“Because of this,” I say.

I draw out a Polaroid and lay it on the table.

“What is it?”

“Read the stone.”

“—oh my god it’s Curtis’s grave. You went there?”

“I went everywhere I could. I went up to Seattle to find the buildings he and Clara lived in — I went out to the reservations. I went to the Smithsonian, the Morgan Library. Then finally I drove to Forest Lawn one day. And sat down next to him.”

“—our Forest Lawn?” Alison asks.

“He’s buried in Glendale. You should go. Before you make your movie.”

“—why?”

“Because that’s where the story is.”

She tilts her head, looks at the photograph, then back at me: “I need more.”

“He was an absent husband and a disappearing father,” I explain. “A shit to everyone who loved him all his life.”

“Geniuses always are.”

“Well, you can believe that if you need to.”

“—don’t you?”

“For a long time, I couldn’t figure out if there was anything that Edward Curtis ever loved.”

“Why did he have to love something?”

“Because it makes a better story.”

“Well then — he loved taking photographs of Indians.”

“—then why did he stop?”

“You tell me.”

“I have. That’s what my book’s about.”