"Happy" & the Happy Faces

It seemed ridiculous for "Happy" French, a photographer, to keep on working for Hearst's Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He had found a way to make three times the money in one-tenth the time. Anyway, he was tired of being chased out on all sorts of assignments by "them stupid bastards on the city desk." Said he: "I should be shooting eight-foot hollyhocks." So he walked into Managing Editor Ed Stone's office and quit. P-I staffers threw a party for him, and the management gave him a wrist watch. Even "them stupid bastards" were sorry to see him go.

Bricks & Tricks. Art French, 49 (called Happy because he never looks it), had been shooting oversized hollyhocks, chasing fires and persuading divorcees to pull up their skirts for the camera for 23 years. He never did get much schooling, and was famed for malaprops: he always said "polo bears" and "Remember Pearl Island" and "neon stockings."

But, puttering around in the darkroom of a photographic studio, he learned the art of trick photography so well that in ater years he was able to produce better snowstorm photos than his rivals, simply by splattering ink on his negatives. He also did early composites, during a macabre era in which people liked to be photographed with shadowy pictures of their deceased spouses showing in the background. He tried to make money printing photographs on satin pillowcases (a fad of the times), went $1,500 in debt with his own studio, then joined the PI.

In a trade given to wackiness and jeering illiteracy, Art French more than held his own. Sir Thomas Beecham, then conducting the Seattle Symphony, tangled with him when French started clicking pictures from a front-row seat. Terrible-tempered Sir Thomas stopped the orchestra, turned on French. "You go home," he barked. French went; he had his picture. He sassed Rumania's Queen Marie when she asked him: "Don't you ever shave?" Retorted French: "Say, I been following you for the last coupla days at 60 miles an hour. When d'ja think I'd have time to shave?" Sent to photograph a prize canary, French whirled the bird around his head until it was groggy enough to hold still for a picture.

Moppets & Money. One day in December 1943, French looked out the P-I window, saw a long line of kids trying to get into a department store across the street to see Santa Claus. Says French: "I walked outa the joint and across the street. I looked at those kids' faces and saw how happy they were as they told Santa Claus what they wanted for Christmas. I thought I'd just like to sit somewhere and take pictures of those faces." The following Christmas he took a leave of absence from the PI, rigged his camera inside a box so that he could snap the children unseen, sold candid shots of moppets on Santa's knee, at $1 a print. Last year he had to hire 15 helpers to handle the business, and the line-up of parents and children blocked traffic. In all, he took pictures of 25,000 children.

Last month he sat on a hypo sack in th P-I darkroom figuring out his income tax. In just five weeks he had netted more than $10,000. He saw that he could work a few weeks each year, spend the rest of his time getting better acquainted with his own two youngsters, Loren, 9, and Sharon, 2. "What the hell," said Art French, "there is a Santa Claus." So he quit.

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