Dealing with Lawrence Schiller—improbable, inescapable, impossible to define—can be exhausting, as can writing about him. Depleted one night by unending battling and bargaining while profiling him for Vanity Fair in 1996 following the O. J. Simpson trial, in which he’d played a crucial behind-the-scenes role, I sought refuge in cable TV, watching Muhammad Ali refight Joe Frazier in the notorious “Thrilla in Manila” from 21 years earlier. And there at ringside, his good eye peering through his Rolleiflex, was Schiller. When the memoir of Schiller’s I worked on—possible titles included “The Original Zelig” and “The Lies I Told to Get the Truth”—failed to sell, I was disappointed, but also relieved. I still think, though, that passing on the project constituted myopia, if not malpractice, on the part of book publishing.
For no one had ever lived a life like Schiller, who, as a photographer, book packager, filmmaker, and indefatigable operator, leapfrogged from celebrity to celebrity, saga to saga, scandal to scandal, attaching himself to everyone from Lee Harvey Oswald to Marilyn Monroe to Charles Manson to Patty Hearst to Norman Mailer, with whom he had—“enjoyed” wouldn’t be quite right—the most bizarre and productive literary collaboration ever.
Lawrence Schiller was born on December 28, 1936, in Brooklyn, where Mailer, 13 at the time, had lived since he was 5. Schiller was about that age when he looked up the dumbwaiter in his apartment building the moment a neighbor threw an umbrella down; it cost him his left eye.
In 1942 the Schillers moved to San Diego, where Schiller’s father ran a camera store. It was there that Schiller got his first lessons in photography and salesmanship. But in school, for reasons no one understood at the time, he couldn’t read, spell, or learn like everyone else. He took pictures instead, earning pocket money monitoring the police radio, then bicycling to accident scenes and photographing the skid marks insurance companies used to get off the hook.
An early Schiller self-portrait.
In late 1953, when Schiller was 16, Jacob Deschin, the influential photography columnist, spotted the blend of talent, instinct, eagerness, ambition, and anxiety that propelled him. “Larry’s fortune is his earnestness, his willingness to tackle each assignment for the best, his interest in the world around him, and his love for what he is doing,” Deschin wrote in The New York Times. But Schiller also talked to the people he photographed, and listened; the education he missed in school he picked up from them. Sometimes the conversations mattered more to him than the pictures.
Something about him—his innocence, his ungainliness, his doggedness—brought out the protectiveness in others; he was taken under lots of wings. William Holden tutored him on how to eat octopus. Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon showed him how to bet at the track. Joanne Woodward taught him needlepoint. Sitting on the steps of her house in Bel Air, Bette Davis counseled him on sex (“You’ll find out, Larry, that the tips of your fingers are more important than your cock,” she told him) and divorce, which would come in handy at the end of his first four marriages. When Schiller shot the filming of Anatomy of a Murder for The New York Times Magazine in 1959, its director, Otto Preminger, offered some more valuable advice. “If you’re going to be successful, Larry, learn to surround yourself with people who are more successful than you,” he said. And he did.
Schiller photographed Bette Davis in 1962.
Schiller photographed movie stars at the La Jolla Playhouse and tennis stars at the Beach & Tennis Club. At Pepperdine, which let him in despite his poor grades, he surreptitiously took portraits of Playboy Bunnies in the basement studio he’d set up in the university president’s home. There soon came assignments from The Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Sport. Athletes became a sub-specialty: among those he photographed were Bill Russell, Pancho Gonzalez, Sandy Koufax, and the Olympic long-jumper-gold-medalist-to-be Ralph Boston.
Over the next 15 years or so, it felt as if the indefatigable Schiller—one reporter called him “possibly the least still photographer of all time”—shot just about everybody: Robert Blake, Buster Keaton, Sophia Loren, Konrad Adenauer, Princess Margaret, Martin Luther King Jr. And Diana Ross, Paul Newman, and Robert Redford: it was he who took the stills in Lady Sings the Blues and the sepia-toned montages in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. His images in the latter greatly impressed everyone but the film’s director, George Roy Hill, who felt circumvented and upstaged by Schiller’s creation. “If I knew I’d have lost my fingers,” Hill told him, “I’d have never shaken your hand.”
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