Re: Peggy: An Introduction
Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Sat, 22 Nov 1997 00:03:31 -0500
> > recently I -- ah -- sampled a bit of The Photo (the one and only
>picture we know and love)
>
> Am I to assume this implication means that this is the only pic in
>existence of JDS?
No, just that the young, good-looking, shiny-haired hopeful author in the
picture by Lotte Jacobi (which was on the back of the early versions of
Catcher) is the one that most often gets reproduced, and is sort of the
definitive picture, in the way the buck-tooth yearbook picture of Pynchon
is universally reprinted as HIS last official portrait.
> I noticed a pic of JDS I'd never seen before. It's a black and white shot
>of him in what I recall
> being a back yard or something, yet it doesn't look too candid....
It's probably from the Ernest Havemann piece that was in Life in the early
1960s. I think he appeared to be in a bathrobe, but all my archival stuff
is locked up at the moment and unavailable to me, so I can't verify that.
The actual article, unlike so many of the "stalker" articles that followed
through the years, was actually gentle and sympathetic and humane. I
recently wangled a brief chat with someone who was on the staff back then,
and he said he was reasonably proud of the job they had done, because it
wasn't sensationalistic, and it showed, he thought, a certain respect for
the subject -- something missing in many of the subsequent articles we've
seen.
--tim o'connor