Courting celebrity: becoming famous for showcasing the famous is a tricky business.

Portrait in Light and Shadow: The Life of Yousuf Karsh

Maria Tippett

Anansi

342 pages, hardcover

ISBN 9780887841989

Starring Brian Linehan

George Anthony

McClelland and Stewart

342 pages, hardcover

ISBN 9780771007576

At the end of December 1941, Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Great Britain, made his way to Canada to address the House of Commons in Ottawa. This would be the occasion for Churchill's famous "some chicken ... some neck" rallying cry in the darkest days of World War Two. It would also be the occasion for a 32-year-old Armenian immigrant named Yousuf Karsh to establish his international reputation as a portrait photographer. Karsh had come to Canada in the early 1920s, a refugee--via Syria--from the atrocities in Turkish Armenia. He started his own photography business in Ottawa in the early 1930s. Described by a friend as a man of "unfathomable shrewdness," Karsh understood, like Candide, the importance of cultivating one's garden.

The patronage of Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King led to the sitting with Churchill, although Churchill himself appears to have been unaware of this arrangement. By all accounts tired and cranky, Churchill stood glowering at this exotic-looking little man with the camera. When the exotic-looking little man had the audacity to come up and remove the trademark cigar from Churchill's mouth, the glower morphed into the most magnificent glare. The resulting image of Churchill-an iconic, definitive image later known as "The Roaring Lion"--put Karsh on the map, as did the photographer's own sense of showmanship. No slouch at self-promotion--the fedora, the black cape, the white camera would all enhance his image--Karsh ensured that the anecdote about Winston Churchill and the cigar received the widest circulation.

It is interesting to learn from Maria Tippett's Portrait in Light and Shadow: The Life of Yousuf Karsh that Karsh himself actually preferred another photograph of Churchill taken at the same sitting. In this one, the recalcitrant subject smiled. It is not nearly as strong an image but it is telling in a way that Karsh should have preferred it. The Karsh credo, after all, was "To tell the truth in terms of beauty" and it is a credo much in evidence in the 50,000 portraits that bore his signature in a career that spanned six decades. He became known as a "court photographer" and, while his assignments encompassed subjects of varying stripes, there is justice in that assessment. Fame needs its courtiers and Karsh, if not a born courtier, needed heroes to venerate; he certainly appreciated the career-enhancing possibilities in the courtier's deference. It was a time-honoured tradition. Portrait photography owed much to the work of the Old Masters like Rembrandt and Titian, artists who often sought to present the most attractive sides of their lofty subjects. In fact, Karsh became known as the "Rembrandt of Photography" because of his tendency to flatter, yes, but also because of his artistry: the heroic tension he contrived in the darkroom from the light and shadow falling across the planes of a face.

One of the joys of Tippett's splendidly readable account is the way in which a number of those celebrated Karsh portraits are interspersed throughout the narrative. If Karsh insisted on providing each of his portraits with an accompanying anecdote, Tippett returns the favour by seeding her text with vivid Karsh images of Churchill, Hemingway, Kruschev, Eleanor Roosevelt, Joan Crawford and Grey Owl in those places where they are mentioned.

While there evidently exists a vast store of Karsh papers in the National Archives in Ottawa, it does not appear to offer a trove of self-reflection. "He didn't analyze himself," says a friend of Karsh. The portrait that emerges in these pages is one of a man completely dedicated to his art and, by extension, his career. Considering his humble beginnings as an immigrant youth sent out to Canada to apprentice for a photographer uncle who had settled in Sherbrooke, that career took off rapidly. Following his stint in Quebec, Karsh apprenticed with a noted Boston photographer and fellow Armenian emigre, John Garo. He learned a lot from Garo, both in an understanding of his craft and in the importance of intelligent conversation and shmooze. (When Karsh returned to Sherbrooke, one of his first questions was "Where is the tennis crowd?") Ambition directed him to Ottawa. Ottawa was where the country's dignitaries tended to congregate and where visiting dignitaries were bound to pass through. It was never enough for "Joe" Karsh just to think nationally.

In his aspirations, he found his perfect helpmate in Solange Gauthier. Eight years his senior, she became his essential muse. More than this, she ran the business and cultivated the clients to sit for the maestro. Karsh met Gauthier in his role as official photographer for the Ottawa Drama League. Not incidentally, the Drama League was one of the pet projects of the Governor General, Lord Bessborough, an early Karsh patron. Over the years, Karsh and Gauthier developed an intense relationship, to the point where it became clear Gauthier had marriage on her mind. Apparently alarmed at that prospect, Karsh wrote her a letter explaining he could not offer the "unselfish" and "unbounded" love she deserved. Suggests Tippett: "It seems likely that Yousuf Karsh was simply too busy, too preoccupied, too introverted, and too sexually inhibited to share his life with someone who would most certainly make demands that he would be unable to fulfill." Yet in the next paragraph, we find them married four months later.

Tippett is scrupulous in her speculation. Perhaps Karsh's dependence on Gauthier overcame his worries. Perhaps "they simply came to some sort of understanding that accommodated their different expectations of marriage." In other matters Tippett treads warily as well. Why, for example, was Karsh so slow to bring out the rest of his family, then settled in Syria? (Two brothers had already arrived in Canada.) It was only when the uncle who sponsored his own immigration started the process to bring out his mother, father and brother that Karsh felt compelled to step in and take over the arrangements. Reading between the lines, the answer seems partly a function of the new immigrant's desire to make his own mark unencumbered by baggage. Certainly Karsh was territorial. A younger brother, Malak, would become a photographer as well--but of landscapes, not portraits. It was also made clear to him by his older brother that he could not use the name Karsh in his business. When another brother expressed a possible interest in photography, he was told to stick to his medical studies. There is at least one moment where Tippett's refusal to speculate seemed almost teasing; I wanted more backstory. That is, we are told that Karsh idolized the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, one of his portrait subjects, and even confided that he wanted Sibelius to adopt him as his son. But that's it. No more explanations. To her credit, I suppose, Tippett does not go all Freudian on us. Still. What was he thinking?

Karsh is one of the great immigrant success stories. His work can be found in portraits, in magazines, in commercial photography. Likewise, he published a number of volumes of his work and activated numerous exhibitions--too many, according to his biographer, who cites his inclination to keep recycling his greatest hits as a blemish on his artistic reputation. He suffered a terrible blow with the death, from cancer, of Gauthier in 1961. But he rebounded with a second marriage to Estrellita Nachbar, a medical researcher and writer in Chicago. (Somewhat typically, perhaps, he neglected to inform his family before the nuptials.) Karsh's business continued to flourish, but so did the criticism of his work. In the Toronto Telegram, Barry Callaghan noted "a sameness about all Karsh's work, a dreadful odor of piety and respectability" that came from "pursuing greatness as though it were a commodity ready to be picked from the faces of those who are great." "Edge" was never Karsh's ambition, but in the more competitive and celebrity-driven later years, edge meant cachet. To his chagrin, not everyone wanted to be "Karshed." Moreover, his affinity for, and access to, the British royals was now compromised by royal-connected whippersnappers with names like Snowden and Litchfield. Ironically, Churchill, the man who made him his international name, turned down the opportunity for a last photo session. The great man, it seems, had grown not a little put off by the mileage Karsh got on that cigar anecdote.

Karsh and Estrellita moved to Boston in 1997 and it was in Boston where he died in 2002 at the age of 93. In his later years, he was plagued with heart problems. Tippett offers this poignant image: Karsh, sitting up in his Boston hospital bed, his Order of Canada pin attached to the lapel of his pajamas.

Creating one's own celebrity by highlighting that of others is a challenging way to make your mark in life. Karsh was more successful than most, managing in the end to turn himself into almost as much of an icon as the iconic 20thcentury images he created. The task is trickier in the world of electronic media where commercial imperatives and fickle tastes conspire heavily against the survival of reputations. To those who would contemplate this arena, one can offer the words of Edward R. Murrow, that greatest of celebrity interviewers, who used to sign off with the salutation "Goodnight and good luck."

The celebrity interviewer is a special breed and in Canada during the mid 1970s through the '80s few were as distinctive as Brian Linehan. His television show, City Lights, was a product of Toronto's CityTV, the innovative and boastingly idiosyncratic little station that grew. At first a local program, and then later syndicated nationally and internationally, City Lights became a necessary way station for the stars of stage and screen when they arrived in Toronto to plug their latest ventures. They came because Linehan paid them the highest compliment: he took them seriously. Through meticulous research, he flattered and charmed--and occasionally flabbergasted --his celebrity guests. He was an unlikely seducer, this man with his snub nose and squashed features, the face of a well-tanned Beardsley imp. There was even at times an almost preening quality about that demeanor, those moues of self-satisfaction corresponding in direct proportion to the guest's astonishment at the arcana about his or her self that Linehan had managed to unearth.

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From most accounts, he was a guarded and difficult man to know. That guardedness is a central theme in Starring Brian Linehan written by his friend and colleague George Anthony, at one time an entertainment journalist at the Toronto Sun, currently consulting on special projects for CBC Television's Arts and Entertainment division. In fact, it was during a Toronto International Film Festival posthumous tribute to Linehan, who died in 2004 of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, that some members of his own family first discovered the true nature of his life partner's death. Zane Wagman had committed suicide two years earlier in Helsinki: scotch, pills, a plastic bag, no goodbyes, a wounding exit. Linehan had led his family to believe the cause of death had been a heart attack. It came as a shock for them to learn the truth during a tribute from Linehan's friend, the comedienne Joan Rivers.

Born in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1943, one of seven children in a steelworker's family, Linehan grew up in a turbulent household where his parents were always at war. Eventually, his mother moved on to a second, more stable, relationship. Excelling in school, young Brian wasted little time escaping his steeltown background for the brighter lights of Toronto--as an executive trainee at Odeon Theatres Ltd. at the age of 19. In a few short years, he had moved on to CityTV as a film programmer and ultimately as on-air interviewer. The transformation of blue collar kid into urbane sophisticate was, in a way, a tribute to the stars of stage and screen who had so bedazzled and influenced him in his youth.

Anthony mentions that he made use of Linehan's journals, although, disappointingly, there is scant information here about Linehan's work methods or reminiscences about the celebrated subjects who dropped by to chat. But then it is likely that Linehan's ingrained circumspection applied to his journals as well. As it is, at least in the book's earlier sections, it often seems The Brian and George Show, with too much attention devoted to the ways Brian and George exploited the largesse of the movie junket, copped themselves the best hotel rooms, befriended the right publicists. (The model for this sort of biography-cum-memoir remains Gavin Lambert's brilliant Mainly About Lindsay Anderson.) Anthony does not gloss over his subject's less appealing traits--the hypersensitivity, the diva behaviour--but it is only later that a fuller portrait of Linehan emerges, specifically after his cancer diagnosis in 2002 and Wagman's subsequent suicide. Perhaps this is why Anthony devotes one third of his book to the last two years--terrible, testing years--of Linehan's life. Finally, the tightly wound self-creation that was Brian Linehan had started to let down its guard.

In the years following his death, the changes in the media landscape-particularly as it concerns entertainment reporting-have accelerated ever more rapidly, and not for the better. The sound bite rules. Trivialization is king. Even among the more intelligent interviewers the effect tends to be one of post-modern irony, which is a fancy way of saying that none of it really matters. If the marketers and publicists have effectively neutered real conversation, they in turn are challenged by the internet and the centrifugal tug of the blogo-sphere where celebrity can be instantly created and instantly destroyed. It is a dumbed-down, indecorous world and Brian Linehan, quite rightly, would have been appalled.

John Lownsborough writes on social issues and personalities. He is a contributing editor of Toronto Life.