San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Early Rolling Stone photographer
In booth 21 at the back of John’s Grill on Ellis Street in San Francisco, the 1960s are always on topic.
Some of the best stories came from photographer Robert Altman, who published a book in 2007 called “The Sixties: Photographs” based largely on his brief but influential stint shooting concerts and cover portraits for Rolling Stone magazine. He was 76.
Altman never dissuaded anyone who confused him with the famous filmmaker of the same name, and his tales could run from lunch through the cocktail hour and into the evening, when the group of political, entertainment and media regulars would have to relinquish booth 21 to the dinner crowd.
But he stopped coming to John’s for Friday lunch without explanation. On Sept. 24, the John’s regulars found out why. He had been suffering in silence from treatment for esophageal cancer. Though in remission, he was found deceased by police who responded to a wellness call at his apartment on Howard Street, South of Market.
His death was confirmed by the executor of his estate, Felicia McRee of Houston.
Cause of death is pending a coroner’s report. But John’s Grill publicist Lee Houskeeper said radiation treatment had left Altman unable to drink Manhattans and eat chops, Sam Spade’s lunch. It would have been slow torture for Altman to sit in booth 21 without these pleasures, unable to speak loudly enough to be heard, Houskeeper said.
“The stories that Robert could tell about the adventures he had with people he met and photographed were epic,” said Eric Christensen, a TV arts and entertainment producer who was part of the lunch group that included sex columnist Eugene “Dr. Hip” Schoenfeld and, before his death, 1960s concert promoter Chet Helms. Houskeeper was host and always signed for the bill before presenting it to restaurant owner John Konstin.
“Robert would mention a name like Tim Leary, and we could riff off that with our own stories,” Houskeeper said.
Altman lived alone for years with 30,000 35mm negatives and 2,000 prints dating mostly from 1967 to 1975. But three years ago, his life’s work was acquired by UC Berkeley to form the Robert Altman Photograph Archive in the Bancroft Library. It is intended to become a source of primary research on the American West at the library. “Robert Altman was very drawn to the burgeoning counterculture movement and became its visual poet as he photographed the Be-Ins, Love-Ins and other Happenings in San Francisco, Berkeley and beyond,” said Christine Hult-Lewis, interim pictorial curator at the Bancroft. “Though his photographs were often taken at large events, Altman had a special knack for capturing the decisive moment in his portraits of the flower children, hippies, musicians, protesters, revolutionaries and artists that came before his lens.” Robert Mark Altman was born Oct. 10, 1944, in New York and grew up adjacent to the Mosholu Parkway in the Bronx. After graduating from Clinton DeWitt High School, he attended Hunter College in the Bronx, where he began carrying a camera as a conversation piece, according to his college buddy Hank Berman, a San Francisco psychotherapist.
“He was not shy in using it for so
cial purposes, to meet girls,” Berman said. “A camera slung around your neck makes you interesting, and he had a certain charisma.”
After graduating from Hunter College with a B.A. in psychology and anthropology, he moved to the East Village in Manhattan, where he became a follower of Yogi Swami Satchidananda, founder of the Integral Yoga Institute. Altman was working at a psychedelic shop called Electric Lotus and began posting his pictures on the bulletin board. Customers took notice and this gave Altman the confidence to grab his Pentax Spotmatic and head to San Francisco with a friend in August 1968. It was just intended to be a road trip, but Altman was offered a cheap apartment near Bernal Hill and took it on a whim.
His first images, of the hippie scene on a Sunday in Golden Gate Park, were published in an underground rag called Good Times.
“They gave me the front page and the full back cover and an inside spread,” he later told rock journalist Ben Fong-Torres, who wrote the introduction to “The Sixties.” “I was up all night waiting for the paper to come out.”
A picture he took of Peter Fonda, in the glow of “Easy Rider,” caught the eye of the art director for Rolling Stone, and during an 18-month flurry, Altman shot the rock scene as it happened, from the Avalon Ballroom to Altamont. As his work circulated, his name became known, giving him access to otherwise prickly subjects such as Jim Morrison, plus Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, whom Altman photographed during the Rolling Stones’ “Let it Bleed” recording sessions.
Altman’s tenure at Rolling Stone lasted less than two years, 1969-71, but he was one of the Fab Four photographers who included Baron Wolman, Jim Marshall and Annie Leibovitz.
“I’ll always think of Robert as the flip side of rock and ’60s photography,” said Fong-Torres, who worked with Altman at Rolling Stone. “There were some wild and crazy characters out there, capturing the scene and sometimes being part of it. Robert was a sweet, gentle, altruistic artist. You can detect that from his work . ... He always got his shot.”
After leaving Rolling Stone, Altman was involved in the launch of a hip general interest magazine called Flash founded by former Rolling Stone editors John Burks and Jon Carroll, later a Chronicle columnist. Altman was the staff photographer.
Their big coup was landing an interview with Groucho Marx for its premiere issue. Altman took the cover photo. But Flash was truly a flash, lasting just one issue.
“Robert was a very enthusiastic guy and fun to work with,” Carroll said. “He was part of a wonderful doomed experiment, which was the idea that a bunch of creative people could put out a magazine using imaginary money.”
After that, Altman turned to fashion photography and married Holly Ann Zetterberg, a model who owned an agency. Their marriage ended in divorce and he never remarried, though he had chances.
“Robert never met a stranger,” said McRee, who is proof. Altman befriended her on an upstate New York bus in 1996. He took her picture and got her phone number, and that started a 25-year relationship where McRee served as muse, model and executor of his estate, which consisted of his images.
The deal with the Bancroft paid him enough to retire, and the archive was moved in stages over several years. When the last box was picked up in May 2019, Altman left a voice message for McRee, who had long since moved to Houston.
“It’s done,” he said. “The nest is empty. I don’t know how I’ll fill it.”
He had no survivors.