Needle Park | Bill Eppridge

Tributes last week remembered him as the photographer who took the last photos of Robert F. Kennedy as the senator lay dying on the floor of a Californian hotel. But Bill Eppridge, who died on October 3rd, was a photographic icon long before that fateful night in 1968. Throughout the 60s, Eppridge documented for Life magazine the fast-changing America — he was there when the Beatles first came to New York; he photographed Barbara Streisand washing her clothes in a tub; he saw an emotional fraught funeral for a Civil Rights leader murdered by the Klan.

But for this author at least his most powerful work was the photoessay on heroin addicts in New York City which appeared in Life magazine in February 1965. Eppridge and James Mills, associate editor at Life who wrote the accompanying article, spent months trailing and living with two addicts who described themselves as “animals in a world no one knows.” That touching photo essay, gritty and raw well before the words became overused in photographic context, won the 1964 Headliner Award. That story later inspired the motion picture, ‘Panic in Needle Park’ starring Al Pacino and Kitty Winn as John and Karen, “two lives lost to heroin,” in LIFE’s powerful words.  [Further photos on Life website].

Here is Eppridge, remembering the assignment:

The writer, Jim Mills, and I started doing research on the heroin culture that had crossed over from subcultures and was quite seriously affecting the white middle classes. We spent three months learning everything we could about it. It took us that long to find a couple, after contacting every agency we could. When we found them, we had to persuade them to do it for free; we couldn’t have paid them – it would just support their habit. I went and lived with them for three months, and tried to be invisible. I’ve been skinny and gaunt all my life, so I fitted in with that society. It got to the point when they just ignored me and didn’t care whether I was there or not. As a matter of fact, I got stopped by the cops more than they did. They wanted to know where I got the cameras.

Often we would lead a story with a question rather than a statement. There is a statement here, but it asks a question… ‘We are animals in a world no one knows’: What is the world? How are the people like animals, they look like a normal couple, crossing the street? It brings the reader in. In the next spread you see who they are: heroin addicts. We did not show the needle very often; we had to be aware of our readership, so we didn’t want to show a lot of gore.

Karen came from a very fine family, on Long Island, but to make money to support her habit, she wasa prostitute. She was a beautiful woman. The police referred to her as the actress. She could change her looks at a whim, but when she did too many drugs, she started to look bad. John came from a very fine family in New Jersey, but to make money, he stole, boosted from cabs – he was a petty thief. Karen found that she couldn’t support her habit anymore, so she checked herself into a hospital, and was able to cut back to a habit that was affordable. I don’t think that’s possible today. I went in with them and photographed things as they happened. None of this was ever set up, I just lived with them and I waited until things happened.

They were on the street looking for a dealer; I looked over their shoulder and there was a gentleman standing there who looked like he didn’t belong. It was a cop, an undercover narc. He and his buddy came along, they spotted Karen and John were addicts, and they proceeded to search them. John was put in jail. I went to the judge and asked if we could photograph him in jail. I don’t know if it’s possible to have that access today. So, John’s in jail and Karen’s got to go and get drugs. She goes to see a dealer.

I was sitting in the lobby of the hotel, waiting for her to come down, and I got a phone call. It was Karen, she said, “You’d better come up here, we got a problem”. Her dealer had overdosed. The guy could have died. It was a big dilemma; should I call the police or should I photograph it? I asked Karen how she felt about it and she said she could bring him round. So I took her word for it and didn’t call 911. And she brought him around. I constantly faced situations that bordered on illegal. It was hard having to make these kinds of decisions, but I think I made the right ones most of the time.

One of the things we highlighted was that this was not a physical addiction as much as a psychological problem. We also said that it was difficult, if not perhaps impossible, to totally deal with this problem. Those addicts still exist in one form or another.

Bill Eppridge on RFK Assassination

I was supposed to publish this earlier this month but I was abroad. Also, I couldn’t find his contact sheet either (if you can send it to me). Here Bill Eppridge remembers the night of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination:

I called my office in New York and asked the director of photography what he wanted. He said, “First off, you have to shoot black and white, because the magazine’s closing tonight and we don’t have time to process colour. Second off, the editors of this magazine, Republican as they are, have decided that if Bobby wins and he takes that State of California, he will be the next President of the United States.”

That night, I saw him [Kennedy] in the hotel suite and told him what the editors felt and I said, “Look, they have told me they want me to stick as closely as possible”. He said, “Ok, Bill, you are in the immediate party, tell the bodyguard you’re with me.” When he went down to give the acceptance speech, I followed him.

We went through the kitchen; Bobby stopped and shook hands with the kitchen help and chatted a bit on the way out to the stage. I was directly behind him during the speech, photographing him looking out into the crowd. Just before the end, Bill Barry, the bodyguard, me, and Jimmy Wilson, a signal, went down into the crowd. We all formed a wedge then back-walked through the crowd so that the Senator would be in the centre of a V formation. He could move from left to right, shake hands, do whatever he wanted – he had the freedom to move.

Bobby came off the stage, found us, and Bill Barry said, “Senator, this way”. Bobby said, “No, Bill, I’m going back, I’m going this way.” Barry said to him in a very stern voice, “No Senator, this way”. He refused, and turned on his heel in the opposite direction, back towards the kitchen, because he had previously been criticised for not talking to the writing press enough. As he went, people filled in between him and us.

We scrambled to try and catch up.

I had just entered the kitchen when I heard the first shots – there were eight. I knew that it was an Iver Johnson revolver. I knew the caliber of the gun, because I was a hunter, I had been in Vietnam, and had been shot at many times. I was 12 feet behind him. People were going down in front of me. I thought they were diving for cover, they weren’t; they were being shot. The busboy, Juan Romero, was still holding the senator, and I took one frame, which was totally out of focus. The second frame, I made sure he was in focus, but Romero was looking down at him. I took the third as quickly as I could, and Romero looked up towards me with a look of “Help me” in his face.

I was devastated after Bob Kennedy was killed.

I went from the funeral train to the office, and my boss called me in, and said, “You have to get out of here. What do you want to do?” I said, “I want to go to the mountains.” Six hours later, he handed me a note from a writer named Don Jackson, saying there were wild horses in the Pryor Mountains. I asked when I should come back – “When you’ve got it.” They bought me a pickup truck; I drove it into the mountains and stayed for three months. I photographed the wild horses early in the morning and in the afternoon when the light was good. In the middle of the day I sat in the middle of this desert, sifting for bones and arrowheads. It was perfect. We ran 12 pages. Funnily enough, the guy that shot Bobby Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan, was featured in the same issue. 

Full set of Eppridge photos from the series can be seen here at Life Magazine. Juan Romero is still alive, and thinks if he hadn’t been so intent on shaking Kennedy’s hand he might have seen and stopped the assassin. He said he would have taken the bullet himself if Kennedy could have been spared.

Robert Kennedy Assassination

Bill Eppridge                                                                Boris Yaro

Boris Yaro

Shortly before midnight forty one years ago tonight, on June 5, 1968, in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, a man named Sirhan Sirhan fired eight .22-caliber shots towards Senator Robert F. Kennedy who had just won California’s primary election. One of the rounds hit Kennedy in the head.

In the confusion, scramble, and bedlam that followed, Life Photographer Bill Eppridge and Boris Yaro of the Los Angeles Times made one of the most famous photographs in American political history–that of the dying candidate cradled in the arms of hotel busboy Juan Ramero, who had been shaking the candidate’s hand when he went down. The loss seen on Ramero’s face symbolized a family’s, a nation’s and all the world’s loss. A woman with a camera around her neck sheiked, “Don’t take the pictures! Don’t take the pictures! I am a photographer and I am not taking any pictures!” Yaro replied, “Goddammit, lady, this is history!”

Kennedy asked Romero, “Is everybody safe, OK?” and Romero responded, “Yes, yes, everything is going to be OK”. Kennedy died later that night.