Seeing their good side

Bill Claxton’s still shooting. At 75, and fully recovered from a recent stroke, the photographer is standing in his glass-walled house cantilevered high atop a Beverly Hills canyon. He’s fielding calls from Milan, Italy, where his Steve McQueen photo exhibit is a smash hit -- and from Nylon magazine, for which he’ll do a fashion shoot in Santa Monica this week. Not to mention the interviewer in his living room, who wants to know how this marathon man maintains his currency in a world that so casually tosses out the old in favor of things new.

Claxton’s answer is easy. He’s always worked at what he loves to do, rather than what pays the most or offers the most ego gratification. As it happens, what he loves to do -- photography -- has provided enough of both commodities.

His new book “Photographic Memory” (Powerhouse Books) is ample proof. Aptly titled, it really is Claxton’s memory book, filled with faces and places that have, in various ways, been important in his life. They are the kind of images that cause people to stare intently at a particular page and ask each other: “Could that possibly be who I think it is ... ?”

The young Steve McQueen, Robert Mitchum, Andy Warhol, Bobby Short, Chet Baker, Rudolf Nureyev and about 150 other icons of pop and classical culture were his subjects starting in the late 1940s through the present. It is a fascinating trip through time and space, partly because Claxton’s camera illuminates the intensity, the naivete, the sunny wholesome optimism of many young people whom the world would later know as talented, and sometimes troubled, performers.

The book features some Claxton buddies who didn’t live long enough to fulfill their promise, along with those who were among the hip, the hot and the happening. It’s an oddly eclectic group, but somehow the shots of Isaac Hayes, Benicio Del Toro and Spike Lee seem perfectly in sync bound between covers along with Terry Southern, Ursula Andress, Shelley Winters and Fred Astaire.

And then there is the photo of Claxton’s good friend, Tom Pittman, a twentysomething actor who’d been pegged by movie moguls for a meteoric career. The year was 1957 and Pittman loved a young fashion model named Peggy Moffitt, who didn’t love him back. She’d fallen, instead, for the tall, handsome photographer, Claxton.

Pittman, deeply hurt, glared at his two good friends, angrily told them to go ahead and marry each other for all he cared, and then missed a curve as he roared down the winding canyon road in his Porsche, hurtling to his death. Claxton tells this story to a guest while his wife, the same Peggy Moffitt, takes a nap upstairs. They have been married for 42 years. “This book is about people who’ve been important to me -- and Pittman was one of them, so I included him,” he says.

Claxton’s somewhat of an icon himself.

To jazz aficionados and historians, he’s the one, the only photographic chronicler of the history of West Coast jazz -- and one of three giants of jazz photography worldwide. The other two, William Gottlieb and Herman Leonard, are each associated with a different place and time, as well as a different style. Their photos of the early great musicians are as dark as the smoky clubs in which they played. Claxton was born in Glendale. He loved the beach, the sun and good jazz, and many of his musician photographs are aglow with natural Southern California light. Starting in the late ‘40s he obsessively photographed all the people who made the great sounds he heard at the clubs he started sneaking into at age 14 -- Charlie Parker, Chet Baker, Billie Holiday, Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis, The Duke, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan.

He started a record label, Pacific Jazz, in the early ‘50s. Soon after, he and Moffitt wed at Winthrop Rockefeller’s house in New York, with a then-baby-faced Bobby Short singing and playing for their guests (the photographer and the pianist first met at a seedy piano bar in Glendale when Short was just starting out).

Claxton then branched out. He got assignments to shoot film stars, directors, writers, classical and pop composers and musicians from magazines and record companies of the day. And because Claxton was so elegant, intelligent and easy to take, the photographer found that many of those he was assigned to photograph were becoming his friends.

He has published seven books of photos, and exhibits of his work are shown worldwide. Claxton’s new book may be a recollection of those who’ve affected his life in the last 50 years, but it’s also another look at some who’ve affected American culture as well.