Weegee

From a $17-a-month room across the street from police headquarters, Arthur Fellig keeps a peeping eye on crowded, raucous, uncaring Manhattan. An untidy little man with a bulging stomach and moist brown eyes, he sleeps in his clothes, spends most of his nights cruising about, photographing the city. Newspaper readers see his pictures over the credit line Weegee (phonetic for Ouija--because he plays hunches on news and pictures).

This week, 228 Weegee photographs and 9,000 Weegee words appear in a book, Naked City (Essential Books, $4), that O. Henry might have done if he had worked with a Speed Graphic. There is the same puckish humor, the same teary sentimentality. The book gives a first-rate reporter's picture of Manhattan.

Fires & Faces. Weegee does a better than ordinary job with the run-of-the-mine stuff--bodies crumpled on the pavement, flames licking a tenement roof, skirts swirling in the wind--but people and faces are what he is after. Heads popping out of windows to see tragedy in the street below, the nervous crowd around the body of a murdered man, a man eating a hot dog, these are the pictures that make the book.

While window dressers wash down the mannequins in the department stores, Weegee shows the city asleep--in gutters, on fire escapes and park benches, six in a parked car. He photographs the dreamy abstracted faces watching the ambulance doctors at work. He catches the mayor off-guard, a Negro mother and daughter watching a fire from which another daughter and her baby cannot escape, Bowery barflies taking their ease, a shabby woman staring at operagoing finery (see cuts).

Some of his competitors complain that occasionally Weegee's pictures are posed. Weegee vigorously denies it, with a story of how he learned a lesson: photographing a shoeshine boy one day, he asked a passerby to put a foot on the stand; after developing the picture, he discovered that the man had rubbers on. Says Weegee: ''That ends posing pictures, I says to myself."

Places & Habits. Weegee, whose rabbi father brought him to the U.S. from Austria when he was ten, went to work early, spent 15 years pent up in Acme's darkrooms, developing pictures that other men took. He broke away to free lance six years ago, began to get places when Marshall Field's PM hired him and gave his pictures a big play.

Weegee now makes about $4,000 a year, and that more than keeps him in cigars. He has no other expensive habits. He sees an occasional movie, likes to drop into Sammy's bar on the Bowery once in a while. Otherwise, the money just accumulates, and Weegee stuffs it away here & there. Recently a couple of photographers searched his car, found $1,500. They bought him some war bonds.

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