Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
He had spent the previous few years building his reputation as the most prominent newspaper photographer in New York.
The well-dressed man turned out to be a British diplomat with the irresistible name of Bertram Cecil Eskell.
How are you, my good fellow?
Eskell had asked the other music lover, whose name went unrecorded.
(Its still a bar, although the current leaseholder, a fancy brewpub, recently shut down.)
There, they knew, they could get help from a female pal of Weegees.
On the opening-night program was MussorgskysBoris Godunov,chosen to celebrate American-Soviet cooperation on the European fronts.
The fall weather was just cool enough that plenty of mink had come out of storage.
(There was the same old smell of camphor hovering over the fancy furs, wrote one reporter.)
With emerald earrings and a diamond and emerald necklace, her bugle-beaded white chiffon provided a perfect setting.
That could only have been Marie Muller Kavanaugh, customarily referred to in print as Mrs. George Washington Kavanaugh.
Her friends occasionally referred to her as Tiffanys front window.
The diamond earrings she wore on this night weighed 20 carats each.
Weegee probably didnt know her name.
(I didnt know Society, he once joked.
Id never arrested them before.)
The standing-room-only line, on which people had been waiting since 4:30 a.m., snaked down 39th Street.
He went back out into the chill.
Anyway, he had a scene to set.
Weegee stood a few steps away on the sidewalk, his camera set up for a 15-foot shot.
Mrs. Kavanaugh (no subway for her) exited her chauffeured car.
She was with her friend Elizabeth Wharton Drexel.
Judging by the photograph, she is reeling, barely able to stand.
No different from shooting outside police headquarters any day of the week.
The two ladies in fur are almost pure white, nearly blown out by his flash.
They both face the camera square on.
Because her clothes are darker, she doesnt pick up the flash as the bejeweled ladies do.
Her coat reads dishwater gray, her hair lank, her scowl dark, her eyes rolling.
She seems shorter, too.
Weegee wanted a contrast; he got more than he could have asked for.
He never saw the disheveled woman, he said, until he was in the darkroom.
None of these statements is true.
But he certainly may have been surprised at just how entertaining a scene hed built.
The next morning, he brought the photo toPM.
They didnt want it.
ButPMwas steeped in war coverage just then and aspired to an occasionally pointy-headed good citizenship.
After months of blackouts and scrap drives, the editors flinched at the sight of Mrs. Kavanaughs diamonds.
Rather than seeing a chance to make a statement at her expense, they simply rejected the photo.
Lifes editors liked Weegees photograph more thanPMs had, and ran it the next week.
Most bejeweled were Mrs. George W. Kavanaugh and Lady Decies whose entry was viewed with distaste by spectator.
It was an extravaganza called Art in Progress, marking the Moderns 15th anniversary.
For the first time, every department in the museum would be showing simultaneously, blurring boundaries among media.
Photography appeared on the first floor.
The show was up for four months, starting in May.
Very quickly, it became obvious that something magical was happening in front of that Weegee photograph.
People laughed, pointed, reacted.
The opera shot got the most laughs, Weegee reports.
Weegee called it the photograph that changed his life.
With this picture, he said, I matured as a photographer and human being.
Mrs. Kavanaugh, for her part, seems not to have minded.
She didnt stop posing at the opera, and Weegee and she chatted amiably at the next years opening.
Weegee later said that shed told him she found the photograph too divine.
Today, there is, according to her great-granddaughter, an enormous amount of family lore about that picture.
Even more extraordinary was the story that Mrs. Kavanaughs grandson Charles Warner told.
One of them read YANKEE YOU DIE FOR THIS?
and displayed that picture.
(Even that may be a stretching of the truth: No such flyer has ever surfaced.)
He sat toward the back, looking for his moment.
As the casket was brought down to the side exit of St. Patricks, he followed, watching.
Across 51st Street, there was a burger joint, its awning reading HAMBURG HEAVEN.
On the prints he made, he retouched the awning to sharpen up the letters.
One more darkroom tweak to throw reality into extra-high relief.
*Adapted fromFlash: The Making of Weegee The Famous(Henry Holt; June 5).
2018 by Christopher Bonanos.
