KEY POINTS:
Have I shaken the hand of the man who has shaken the hand of Charles Manson?"
"Yes, you have," says Neil Leifer, the famous photographer who is a fast-talking New Yorker, with jeans up to his armpits and a body shaped like a block-shaped edifice designed for hanging cameras on. I'm about as tall as most people's armpits but he made me feel tall.
And he has a great, wide smile which takes up most of his face. He could talk the birds from the trees, or Charlie Manson into having his picture taken. In any other circumstances he would be the world's worst name dropper but that is a natural consequence of his life, which has been taking pictures of famous people. And the names are partly my fault because by the time you've got through a small part of the list: Reagan, Travolta, Redford, George Bush, Tyson , Don King and Ali - who "made me a hero" - you realise that you've talked about Leifer's quite amazing life only from the perspective of what he saw through his lens. It's difficult to keep your focus on him.
He is most famous for the Ali shots, the reason he is in Auckland. Muhammad Ali, by Neil Leifer: Pound for Pound the Best Photographer in the World, opened yesterday at SkyCity. We took him to the observation deck to have his picture taken. We thought it might be interesting to observe him being observed through somebody else's lens and he was very calm and obliging. He is not at all concerned about what he looks like in a photograph, except for joking that he'd like to photograph tall and thin. He likes photographers and the minute I walked a step ahead of Leifer and our photographer they started on in that arcane photographers' talk which involves much technical twitter.
But he was very nice about answering questions that had nothing to do with shutter speeds, or much to do with sport beyond: Who understands American football?
"Ha, ha! Try and explain rugby to me."
I wanted to meet him as soon as I saw the two portraits in his latest book, The Best of Leifer, of Charles Manson. One is black and white, of Manson in his cell at the California Medical Facility, Vacaville, taken in July 1982. He's half lying on his bunk, not looking at the camera, changing channels on his TV with what looks like a pool cue. There are socks drying on a makeshift washing line, a straw hat on the wall. It is an unposed portrait of a small man in a small room. The portrait on the next page is in colour. Manson is playing it up for the camera. He has a swastika tattoo on his forehead, a diamond in a front tooth, a big ring on his forefinger. It's a picture of a man trying to look like big and bad.
"Among other things," says Leifer, "I happen to be Jewish, so I don't have to tell you I don't find a whole lot of humour or warmth in a man who has a swastika on his forehead. However, the swastika really interested me. I had met him about a month before I photographed him. He wanted to meet before he agreed to let me do this, and that day the swastika was barely visible, it was like a fading scar. "It was different when I came to photograph him. He had clearly coloured it in with a pen. He wanted to show it off in a scowl designed to make you think he's frightening. [But] I saw him the first time, you might say, without make-up. This is a posed picture. This isn't what he really looks like. This is what he wanted to show. The picture in the cell is. That's what I went to do." There are other pictures, what Leifer calls "the showing off" pictures. "He did a lot of posing with his cronies, playing guru nutcase."
Great pics. But why am I so, well, what exactly? Thrilled? Fascinated by the idea of shaking the hand of the man who? "Because everyone is," says Leifer. "Obviously half the mystique and the reason I went after this in the first place is because these inmates, whose names we know, they become household words. Everyone knows who Manson is, yet the day the judge bangs the gavel down and sends them away, they cease to exist. We never see them; we never hear them. Here's a man who's probably as well known as any celebrity in America and yet no one sees him and no one has ever seen how he lives."
To get his pictures, Leifer had to make a pact with this particular devil, although he may not have realised it at the time: Manson had to like him. At first he wanted money and walked out when told there would be none. Then Leifer got a strange call saying that Manson had decided he liked him and that he'd agreed to be photographed. You might (I did) wonder what it felt like to be liked by a madman. Leifer just shrugs. "You know, I couldn't care less. I knew when I left the prison I would never see Charles Manson again and that I would talk about it forever." Was he, by the way, mad as a meat axe?
"Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, I was corresponding with him, it took a while to get permission to do this and his letters made no sense."
These are anecdotes about pictures, but they do tell you quite a lot about the engaging Leifer. He is foremost a sports photographer (or was; he makes films now) and they are, surely, a pushy breed.
"I think most sports photographers are pretty aggressive, I would use the word tenacious, but I'd like to think I've always been a gentleman. I'll tell you why I say that. Sharp elbows are a good tool to have in your camera bag but I can't think of a single successful picture that I got by elbowing somebody out of the way. You've got there by being quicker, smarter."
Tenacious seems right. He got his first sports pics as a teenager by getting into games by volunteering to help wheelchair-bound veterans into stadiums, then he'd bribe the security guards with coffee. You can see that he was cheeky. He grew up on the lower east side of Manhattan, in a poor, immigrant neighbourhood - "the streets of America were supposed to be paved with gold" - the child of a postal worker American father and a Polish mother.
It was, he says, a great childhood, with good public schools and after-school programmes designed to keep kids off the street - which is where he learned about photography. He never intended to become a photographer, it was a hobby. Like most children of poor, hard-working parents who have big dreams for their children, he was supposed to become a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, an engineer.
What he really wanted to do was be a navy pilot. "I wanted to be Top Gun!"
Well, he ended up being a top gun, in this accidental career which has given him such an extraordinary life taking pictures for Life, Time, Sports Illustrated, and given him access to all those names. Here he was at those great moments in sporting history; the wedding of Charles and Diana; inside the Oval Office during Reagan's term, taking pictures from the viewpoint of a potted ivy plant. He'd been out at dinner with Ray Cave, then managing editor of Time magazine. Cave had noticed that presidents came and went but the plant remained, always in the same spot, in the Oval Office. "What if it could talk?" he said. The result was a photo essay about the life of the plant. Leifer had 10 minutes in the office to photograph a bemused Reagan, who said: "Is this what the editor of Time spends his time thinking about?"
It was a mad and brilliant idea but you have to ask: Were you both drunk?
"We were both probably. Hey, we'd had a couple of drinks."
His are very American portraits of, often, the American dream, of the winners: they are big, bright, bursting with that indefinable thing - charisma.
People think, he says, that it's the beautiful people who make the best pictures, but it's not always true. His second favourite subject after Ali is Ed Koch, a former mayor of New York. Here he is in the book. "Look! This is Ed! He's bald, he's a little slumped over, he's got a little bit of a hunchback, he could never be described as a handsome man. And you can't take a bad picture of this guy."
I couldn't get a clear look at the back of the camera on the day. I hadn't packed my elbows. But if the camera doesn't lie, if it can show charisma, the picture of Leifer ought to be a beauty.
