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Molly Malone Cook | |
|---|---|
 Photo: Barbara S. Cheresh | |
| Born | January 5, 1925 |
| Died | August 25, 2005 (aged 80) |
| Occupation | Photographer |
| Partner | Mary Oliver |
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Molly Malone Cook (January 5, 1925 – August 25, 2005) was an American photographer.[1] Despite being employed professionally as a photographer for only a short time,[1] Cook left behind an extensive collection of printed photographs and negatives, taken throughout her adult life.[2] Cook worked with and photographed dozens of iconic artists and famous faces such as Lorraine Hansberry, Norman Mailer, Eleanor Roosevelt and John Waters.
Career
Cook's interest in photography began while she was working for the US government in Europe. Upon returning to the United States she was employed as one of the first photographers for The Village Voice.[3] The Village Voice was an alternative weekly publication, which acted as a platform for creatives in New York City, beginning circulation in 1955 and ending in 2018.[citation needed] While creating content for the publication, Cook photographed poet Jean Cocteau, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Motherwell, writer Norman Mailer, and many other famous artists, writers and icons of the time period.[1]
After moving to Provincetown, Massachusetts, with her partner Mary Oliver in the 1960s, Cook opened the first photographic gallery on the east coast; the VII Photographers studio.[1] The studio represented many successful photographers such as Bernice Abbott, Eugene Atget, and Edward Steichen.[4] The studio notably sold prints by Ansel Adams for $35.[1] At that time, photography was considered an art form by relatively few people; although patrons were frequent, the studio could not be sustained financially, and Cook closed her doors only a few years after opening.[3]
Cook moved on to open the East End Bookshop, where she selectively stocked the shelves based on her personal judgment of quality of the literature.[3] In 1966 Cook hired the soon-to-be famous American filmmaker John Waters, with whom she would maintain a relationship for nearly the next 40 years.[citation needed] When her health began showing signs of decline in 1969, Cook closed the bookshop.[1]
In the 1970s, Cook worked as a literary agent for Oliver, among other writers, as well as an assistant to Norman Mailer.[3] During her time working as Oliver's agent, at any time that the couple received a telephone call for Oliver, Cook would pretend to be her, and many editors would play along.[5]
Personal life
Cook and Mary Oliver lived together in Provincetown, Massachusetts, after first meeting at the former home of poet Edna St Vincent Millay in the late 1950s.[3] Oliver dedicated many works to Cook, and while accepting the National Book Award in 1992 she publicly thanked Cook, saying "Molly Malone Cook, the best reader anyone could have. She is the light of my life".[3] After Cook's death in 2005, Oliver published Our World; a compilation of Cook's journal entries and photography, accompanied by memories, prose and poetry written by Oliver.[5]
Throughout her profession, Cook developed friendships with American artists such as playwright Lorraine Hansberry, writer Norman Mailer and director John Waters.[3] Waters is said to have brought magazines and newspapers to Cook's home every day towards the end of her illness.[3]
After being put up for adoption as an infant, Cook spent her adulthood interested in discovering her own ancestry.[1][4] Cook and Oliver visited Virginia several times with the intent of doing so. Among her discoveries, Cook found that she was related to Judith Jefferson, the aunt of Thomas Jefferson.[3] Cook was eventually able to meet her birth parents.[1]
References
- Roush, Jason (2008). "Epitaph to a Photographer". Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide. 15 (4): 50 – via Gale Database.
- Reynolds, Susan Salter (January 6, 2008). "A time for us". Los Angeles Times. ISSN 0458-3035. Retrieved November 20, 2018.
- Stone, Martha E. (January–February 2006). "Passages 2005". Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide. 13 (1): 10.
- "Molly Malone Cook". The Independent. September 7, 2005. Retrieved November 20, 2018.
- Kossman, Patricia A. (December 10, 2007). "Deck the shelves with books aplenty". America Magazine.
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Molly Malone Cook | The Independent | The Independent
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Molly Malone Cook
Photographer, gallerist and literary agent
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Molly Malone Cook was a great Bohemian American. An accomplished photographer in her own right, she set up the first photographic gallery on the East Coast, was sometime assistant to the writer Norman Mailer, and lived with Mary Oliver, perhaps America's best-loved living poet. Even in the last decade of her life she remained - perhaps more than ever - a fearless spirit of immaculate taste and fierce opinions, stocky of build, with a shock of white hair. "She could be acerbic, but underneath it, she was the warmest woman I've ever met," as her friend the publisher Helene Atwan observed.
Cook lived with Oliver in the Bohemian enclave of Provincetown, at the end of Cape Cod's outstretched arm; a place historically home to artists, writers and, latterly, tourists and gays. Its Commercial Street runs the gamut of American life: from sandy windswept beaches to the west, through a town centre thronged with transvestites and day-trippers with baby-buggies, to the East End, aestival home to Waspy families on vacation. It was here, in the quieter end of town, that Cook and Oliver made their year-round seaside home. The pair kept a boat, captained by Cook (with help from their young friend Josiah Mayo) like some salty sea-dog. After clam pasta, the pair would sail their friends out into the bay, lulled by the waves, keeping the conversation moving along with their dry double act.
Molly Malone Cook was born in San Francisco, and grew up idolising Frank Sinatra and Perry Como. She spent her early twenties travelling in Europe, where she worked for the US government in Heidelberg and began to be interested in photography. In New York, she worked as a photographer for the newly established Village Voice, but soon followed a well-worn path to Provincetown - then the summer home of writers such as Norman Mailer, and painters such as Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko. There she set up her ground-breaking photographic gallery. The VII Photographers' Studio represented the work of Edward Steichen, Berenice Abbott and Eugene Atget, among others, but it was an era when photography was yet to be rated as an art in itself. Indeed, when Cook asked Steichen to join her roster, he said, "Are you rich or crazy?" Her reply was typical of her laconic wit: "I'm not rich."
The gallery was well patronised, but it did not pay the rent. Cook diversified with her idiosyncratic East End Bookshop, purveying what she deemed "good literature"; a rep who tried to sell her Jacqueline Susann's The Valley of the Dolls was sent away with a flea in her ear. None the less, in 1966 Cook had the acumen to hire a six-foot-one, skinny speed-freak with long hair and a pencil moustache. It was the beginning of a 40-year friendship with John Waters, who was about to shock the movie world with such counter-cultural landmarks as Pink Flamingoes (1972) and Female Trouble (1974). In his book Shock Value (1981), Waters wrote,
I really wanted to work in the bookstore owned by Molly Malone Cook, a wonderfully gruff woman who allowed her help to be rude to obnoxious tourist customers. I nagged her for a job until she finally gave in and let me work "when it rained" to take care of all the tourists who flocked in from the beach.
Waters adds,
She was beautiful and grumpy and smart in both senses of the word - brainy and fashionable at the same time. She was my Bohemian mother and father in a way.
Cook continued to work as a professional photographer, making portraits of such luminaries as Eleanor Roosevelt, Walker Evans, Robert Motherwell and Adlai Stevenson, but her career was cut short by the breathing problems which were later to curtail her life: her lungs were unable to cope with the chemicals of the darkroom. Meanwhile, her relationship with the playwright Lorraine Hansberry - author of To Be Young, Gifted and Black and A Raisin in the Sun, the first drama by a black woman to be produced on Broadway (in 1959) - ended with Hansberry's early death from cancer, aged 34, in 1965.
Cook had met Mary Oliver in 1958, at the former home of the poet Edna St Vincent Millay in upstate New York - the two women having come to visit Millay's sister Norma. Six years later Cook and Oliver moved into a Provincetown boathouse owned by one of the port's Portuguese families, the Seguras. They travelled together on Oliver's trips to give readings or classes, and spent several years visiting Virginia in search of Cook's Southern roots - she was delighted to discover that her ancestry stretched back to Judith Jefferson, aunt of President Thomas Jefferson.
In the 1970s, Cook worked as assistant to another friend and near neighbour. Norman Mailer had summered in Provincetown since the 1950s, memorably describing it to Jacqueline Kennedy as "the Wild West of the East". The famously irascible writer's relationship with Cook was colourful, to say the least: both were strong-willed personalities, with deeply entrenched opinions of their own. Their friendship ended on a down note, yet both still spoke of each other with affection.
Cook went on to establish her own literary agency, representing Mary Oliver and other writers; "I know I wouldn't want to have to negotiate with her," says Waters. Cook was duly proud when Oliver - who dedicated many of her exquisite works to her partner - won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1984 collection, American Primitive. In 1992, when Oliver won the National Book Award for her New and Selected Poems, she turned her acceptance speech into a tribute to "Molly Malone Cook, the best reader anybody could ever have. She is the light of my life, and I'd like to thank her publicly."
Molly and Mary were at their best in Provincetown. Their house seemed to have grown around them. Its windows looked out from grey-shingled walls on to the limpid light of Cape Cod Bay and past the harbour breakwater, where schools of dolphins swam. At night they watched the blinking green light of Long Point lighthouse. Their rooms were filled with light, books, people and animals, all seemingly spilling in from the beach that ran outside their back door. The walls were equally filled, with an extraordinary array of art; from Molly's own photographs, to a rare screenprint advertising an appearance by Andy Warhol and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable in Provincetown.
And here, even as she was increasingly disabled by illness, Molly Malone Cook sat in splendour, drinking in all the local gossip while scanning the piles of magazines and papers John Waters brought her each day. When I last saw her, in July, sitting up in bed, she was as thirsty for news as ever, as she watched the boats sail past her window.
Philip Hoare
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A time for us - Los Angeles Times
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A time for us
USED to be, if you telephoned the poet Mary Oliver, her partner Molly Cook would invariably answer. She’d ask you to hold on a moment, feign footsteps and return to the phone as Oliver, making no pretense at a different voice (editors across the country routinely played along). Cook was, for many years, Oliver’s agent. Oliver, everyone understood, was a bit of a recluse. She needed nature and solitude to create her poems. “Writers must . . . take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems,” she wrote in “A Poetry Handbook.” Cook, who died in 2005 of lung cancer, at 80, was the sociable one.
These days the phone goes pretty much unanswered. “From the complications of loving you,” Oliver wrote in “A Pretty Song,” “I think there is no end or return. / No answer, no coming out of it. / Which is the only way to love, isn’t it?”
Molly Malone Cook was a photographer, but she was far more comfortable promoting the work of others (Edward Steichen, Berenice Abbott, Minor White, Harry Callahan and Ansel Adams, to name a few) in her Provincetown gallery than with the idea of making her own work public. Cook wouldn’t put her photographs into a book, no matter how often people, including Oliver, asked. After she died, Oliver decided to do it. She went through thousands of negatives, many never printed, and boxes and boxes of photographs.
Oliver notes, in her accompanying text, that her own work often prompts readers and reviewers to comment on the keen quality of her attention. But watching Cook take her photographs and work in the darkroom, she writes, “and no less watching the intensity and openness with which she dealt with friends, and strangers too, taught me what real attention is about. Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness -- an empathy -- was necessary if the attention was to matter. Such openness and empathy M. had in abundance, and gave away freely.”
The photographs Oliver has chosen reflect Cook’s intuitive relationship with her subjects (even inanimate objects). The little girl on the stoop in New York City looks directly at the photographer, as does a kindly Robert Motherwell and a fierce, almost intimidating Walker Evans. Even though most of the photographs are dominated by a central person or object, there is a lot to look at in the margins, all part of the story. The stance of her subjects -- reading a book, looking through a telescope -- is always distinctive, creating the mood of the entire composition. The two photos of Oliver could have been taken only by someone who knew the subject well.
Several paragraphs on how the couple ate (simply, and often things that Oliver found on walks near their home, in Provincetown, Mass. -- blackberries, bolete mushrooms, orach, clams, mussels) are a fond recollection of a time when there was not much money but plenty of love and creativity and determination. “In all our time together we were rarely separated,” Oliver writes. “Three or four times I went away to teach, but usually M. would come with me, and we simply made our home, temporarily, somewhere else. And, while I always loved the stillness I found in the fields and the woods, our house was a different thing, and I loved that too. We were talkers -- about our work, our pasts, our friends, our ideas ordinary and far-fetched. We would often wake before there was light in the sky and make coffee and let our minds rattle our tongues. We would end in exhaustion and elation. Not many nights or early mornings later, we would do the same. It was a forty-year conversation.”
Cook taught the poet “to see,” Oliver writes, “with searching compassion.”
AND so, to look at these beautiful, artful, simple, photographs feels strangely intimate. As it does to meet the poet -- still raw, two years after Cook’s death -- in their house overlooking Cape Cod Bay. On this fall day, the water a bright expanse of broken glass, she has agreed to be interviewed, only for the sake of the photographs. She sits curled on the sofa in a black sweat shirt and blue jeans, with a broken wrist from a tussle on the beach with Percy, her dog, and a bad case of bronchitis. “Wasn’t it Emerson who said ‘My life is for itself and not for a spectacle’?” she remarks. “I have a happy, full, good life because I hold it private.”
Through the windows behind Oliver, one can see gannets diving into the water. A friend comes to take Percy for a walk. The house, which was once her office, is full of animals. Apologies for shabbiness. There’s a huge Audubon lithograph of a barn owl in the hall. Upstairs are shells, necklaces and talismans. Over the bed are three of Cook’s photos. In the corner, with the finest view of the water, is a bed for Percy. Oliver gets up early, at 5, and goes to bed early, except during the baseball season.
Oliver grew up in Ohio. She began writing poetry when she was 13. Writing and walking in the woods were both avenues of escape, but the poet doesn’t believe in writing as therapy, or even, really, in talking about her past. “I grew up in a confused house; too much unwanted attention or none at all,” she says, and adds, quoting Rainer Maria Rilke, “ ‘You must change your life.’ This is another thing death teaches you. Everything vanishes; not a thing matters.”
In 1953, when she was 17, Oliver paid her first visit to the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay, in upstate New York; later, she would move in and help Millay’s sister organize the poet’s papers. Millay, who died in 1950, was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Oliver remembers this period with a combination of reverence for Millay and gratitude that she had the good sense to leave Millay’s world before getting too mired in someone else’s life and work. But it was there, in 1958, that she met Molly Cook. Six years later, the two women moved into the house by the bay. Cook had opened the VII Photographer’s Studio in Provincetown in 1960 (before photography was fully respected as an art form) and shortly after that the East End Bookshop. In 1966, Cook hired an assistant, countercultural filmmaker John Waters, who later described her as “a wonderfully gruff woman who allowed her help to be rude to obnoxious tourist customers.”
In the 1970s, Oliver and Cook worked as amanuenses for Norman Mailer, who summered for decades in Provincetown, in (Oliver notes with some amusement) the only brick house on Commercial Street. Mailer referred to his relationship with the two of them, she tells me, as “his best marriage.” (For a recluse, Oliver is inordinately fond of the literary anecdote. About a third of our conversation is gleefully “off the record.”)
The poet and the photographer were full of respect for each other’s creativity. “I never showed my poems to anyone but Molly,” Oliver says, sipping a glass of white wine. “She rarely said ‘good.’ She often said, ‘You don’t need that word,’ or, ‘Kill the adjectives.’ Molly wrote a few poems herself” -- Oliver smiles, a little wickedly -- “but they were quite awful.”
Oliver won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1983 collection, “American Primitive,” and a National Book Award in 1992 for “New and Selected Poems.” In her acceptance speech for the latter, she acknowledged Molly Cook as “the best reader anybody could ever have. She is the light of my life, and I’d like to thank her publicly.”
Oliver is an ecstatic poet, in the tradition of Shelley, Keats, Hopkins, Yeats and Whitman. She believes in beauty and in the responsibility of the poet to elevate the soul. She thinks she has sometimes come perilously close to a kind of rapture in nature -- the Stendhal Syndrome (most famously attributed to Van Gogh), in which the viewer achieves a kind of ecstasy, literally crazy over beauty. “The natural world is full of small and large miracles,” she says. In “Blue Pastures,” a collection of essays about writing, she referred to nature as an “antidote to confusion” and language as a “tool of consciousness.”
“I’d rather write about polar bears than people,” she tells me. “The natural world for me is safe and beautiful and leads to sublime thoughts. Beauty leads to virtue. Poetry speaks to that natural world.”
She is also a poet of sounds (mutes, liquids and aspirates), playful with language, though she has written in “A Poetry Handbook,” and elsewhere, about the formal structure of the poetic line.
IT is astonishing that she has been able to maintain such distance from her readers. Just weeks before our interview, the editorial page editor of the Boston Globe named Oliver one of the seven wonders of Massachusetts (along with MIT, the Big Dig and the Great Salt Marsh). It’s a quiet cult but widespread and fervid: Her poems pop up at many of life’s turning points, including death. Readers go to her for solace, regeneration and inspiration. Her name is passed between generations, with a knowing look. After a few hours in her quiet, exuberant presence, one feels as though the raw sunlight in the room, the brightness of the water, the white wood and flashing wings outside the window are bleaching unimportant details from the day.
“A consonant cannot be perfectly uttered till joined to a vowel,” Oliver declaimed in “A Poetry Handbook.” The last photographs in “Our World” are of Oliver, lean in the arms and ankles but with a lushness about the mouth. There’s an endless youthfulness in them -- something summery and wind-swept. “A Pretty Song” continues:
This isn’t a playground, this is
earth, our heaven, for a while.
Therefore I have given precedence
to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods
that hold you in the center of my world.
And I say to my body: grow thinner still.
And I say to my fingers, type me a pretty song.
And I say to my heart: rave on. *
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