PHOTO HERO

"Is photography art?"

"If you have to ask, you're too damn dumb to understand the answer," Slone said curtly.

Thomas Adderly-Phillips III sank back into his large leather executive chair with a confused look on his face.

Most people didn't have the nerve to be abrupt with Thomas Adderly-Phillips III; the usual responses were "Yes, Sir" and "No, Sir." Anthony Slone, he knew, was an exception.

Phillips leaned forward again across his large mahogany desk.

"What did you think of the book 'On Photography'?"

Slone adjusted himself in his chair, took another puff on his cigar and tried to figure out what the hell was going on.

"I think it set Stieglitz spinning in his grave. Now, you didn't call me here for chitchat on contemporary photography. What the hell is on your mind?"

"Photography," Adderly-Phillips answered slowly. "Just photography."

"Okay, what or whom do you want photographed, and when? It will be at least a month before I can work on an assignment."

"It's more unusual than your normal assignments," Adderly-Phillips said.

"I've been shooting jobs for Phillips Industries almost twenty years, and I doubt you can find anything more unusual than your father did."

"This doesn't exactly involve the company. It's more of a personal thing I need."

"Your late father once had me shoot nude pictures of some very active lady friends in a moving van lined with ermine."

Phillips eyebrows shot up, and settled near the hairline.

"He what!"

"It's a long story, and I don't have much time. So what's this unusual assignment that you have for me?"

"This isn't easy for me, so let me finish before you say anything. Here's a check for ten thousand dollars just for listening."

He slid the check across the desk. For one of the few times in his life, Slone was almost at a loss for words.

Hell, he thought, for ten grand I'll listen to Richard Nixon talk about innocence.

"I have a rare blood disease that will kill me within a year to eighteen months. When I die, I'll leave behind a fortune with my father's name, my name in the family Bible and that's about it. My ex-wife even changed her name back to her maiden name after the divorce. It will be like I never existed, and that bothers me."

"My father wanted me to go to Harvard, and so I went to Harvard. Then he wanted me to go to Harvard Business School, and I went there too. His ultimate selection was Harvard Law School, where I dutifully went and also married the pretty Radcliffe socialite he chose for me. God what a disaster that was." He paused. "You never, by chance, took a nude picture of a small blonde with a beauty mark right here, did you?" He paused again. "No, please forget I asked. Father wasn't that bad. At least I don't think so. Anyway, the point is, I will leave nothing behind when I'm gone."

Slone couldn't believe it. He had never seen the young man so unglued. The cold, efficient Adderly-Phillips manner had almost given way to a human like quality similar to emotion. Slone fondled his check and kept quiet.

"I want to leave something behind, something so people will remember me," he heard the young man saying. And, while Adderly-Phillips, one of the world's richest men, continued to bemoan his lack of immortality, Slone's mind raced back over the odd chain of events that had brought him here.

At the age of twenty, he had made his first sell to a major magazine. By twenty-five, he was considered one of the top photojournalists in the world. He had photographed most of the world's famous faces and places. It wasn't merely the demise of the great picture magazines that lead to Slone's decline, but a combination of events and Slone's own nature.

Photo editors and art directors didn't necessarily want to see good pictures; they wanted to select what they considered good pictures from contact sheets. Suddenly they wanted volume. When Slone saw a good picture, he shot it. He was good enough not to have to shoot a hundred frames of the same shot. Soon, younger photographers were getting the choice assignments.

"Quality doesn't count anymore," Slone once told a colleague. "These kids just aim and shoot. Volume is all they know. They even have someone else do their darkroom work. They have to shoot everything to get anything."

His natural bent toward sarcasm increased as his popularity and income decreased. Bitterly, he swallowed his pride and began freelancing as an annual report photographer for a number of industrial clients, including Phillips Industries.

Thomas Adderly-Phillips II was Slone's idea of a typical Victorian gentleman---visibly high morals with no real ones. The elder Phillips had taken the family's half dozen enterprises and, with a combination of unscrupulous business tactics and World War II, increased his wealth a Thousand fold.

The money from shooting annual reports was good, but Slone missed what he considered the real world.

"Who gives a damn about the portrait of a man who either stole his money or inherited it," he once said. The latter reference was to Thomas Adderly-Phillips III when he was elected to the Board of Phillips Industries at the age of twenty-one.

As Slone became more obsessed with the rapidly-changing world of photography, he noticed less of Molly and his son. He never took his anger or frustration out on them; he simply stopped being a husband and father. Years later, he would remark that he didn't remember talking to the boy after he was ten years old.

Slone was not totally forgotten during these years. At least twice a year, some college would invite him to lecture on the "Good Old Days of Photography," while he really wanted to lecture on the "Screwed Up Present Days" of the medium. These periodic visits to campus photography departments seemed only to increase his disgust with the changing world of photography by reaffirming his observations. A paperback version of his 1950 hardback book was printed, but sales were few. Molly had hoped "Faces of Fame" would help Slone, but its failure seemed to make him even more remote.

Molly's sudden death in a car accident stunned Slone. After the funeral, he sat in the same chair for three days and cried. Within a week, his son told friends, it was impossible to know if he was mourning or just brooding as usual.

Slone would have spent the rest of his life brooding and alone had it not been for the guilt-ridden conscience of a former Nazi general who was dying. Like so many people born and raised in the Catholic church, the general hadn't found it necessary to believe in God until he was certain he was about to meet Him.