Chapter 7: Famous Abroad!


 


“Supposing a certain time selected is assured, suppose it is even necessary,
suppose no other extract is permitted and no more handling is need,
suppose the rest of the message is mixed with a very long slender needle…”

                                                                                    Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons





     
In 1965 the Museum of Modern Art held a Robert Motherwell retrospective.

Meneeley lined up with other admirers at the reception to shake hands with the featured artist. Recognizing Ed, Motherwell stepped out of line and pulled him aside.

"You know,” Bob said, “they won’t let me photograph my own show.” 
     
Ed nodded.  He was aware of the exclusive contract MoMA signed with Sandac, the company that bought out his former employer, Contemporary Slides.
      
“Well,” Ed mused, “Is it traveling?”
“Yes,” Motherwell replied, smiling.
“Where’s it going?”
"Whitechapel in London.”
“Send me two tickets,” Meneeley smiled back, “and I’ll shoot it for you.”
      
Both grinning now, the two men shook hands and Meneeley moved on as Motherwell turned back to greet the line of patrons and well-wishers.
      
Within weeks, a pair of tickets arrived, one from Motherwell himself, and the other from his wife, Helen Frankenthaler.  Before long, in the spring of 1966, Meneeley and Vanderburg boarded a plane for England.  Despite Ed’s military experiences in two wars, this was his first ever flight.


“Flying at the time was pretty outrageous,” he recalled, “The wings of the plane were flexible, so the whole experience felt a lot like a ship at sea. In those days, passengers were much more aware they were flying.” 
      
High on Scotch whiskey by the time they landed, Ed and Al slept off the time difference (and booze) at the cozy home of a potential agent for Portable Gallery who picked them up at London Airport (now Heathrow). Once adjusted and fed a proper English breakfast, Meneeley hauled his equipment to east London and spent the day photographing Motherwell’s work.
      
Staff at the gallery seemed surprised by how quickly he documented the entire show.  “They later asked what I was doing,” Meneeley admits, “Normally with Kodachrome, you’d bracket the exposures, or alter each shot in order to be true to the color, which means you take a lot more photos and each one takes time to set up and adjust the light. They didn’t realize I shot color negatives,” interrupting himself with laughter, “And I could make any adjustments later to the prints.” 
      
To return the favor for the tickets, Meneeley gifted Motherwell a sculpture of his own resembling a jack-in-the-box with stripes of color running its lengths. He called it Little Spanish Prison Break as a playful homage to Motherwell’s ongoing series of works Elegies to the Spanish Republic
      
Well known as the man who coined the phrase New York School, Motherwell’s status as a pioneer of abstract-expressionism went beyond the work he produced. An outspoken proponent of the avante garde of his day, he lectured extensively throughout the United States, articulating to the general public just what he and his friends—Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston and others—were actually doing.
      
Without Motherwell’s tireless devotion to communication (in addition to his prolific painting), well-known abstract-expressionists like Mark Rothko, who was reportedly very shy and rarely left his studio, might not have made it into the public eye.
      
Meneeley understood his own position as a relative late-comer to the scene, fulfilling his role by documenting what he understood to be history in the making, all the while happily accepting the small accolades he received for his own work. Nevertheless, after incubating in New York for over a decade, the timing of Meneeley’s introduction on the English art scene was spot on for his career to flourish. 
     
“During this first visit,” he reports, “I made friends with many painters and sculptors who respected my efforts in the documentation program.  I found I was known to them for my photographic efforts of Jasper Johns and for my own electro-static prints.  Between 1966 and 1969 I returned to England many times, and several London artists visited me in New York and became familiar with my 12th Avenue studio and works.”
      
Fertilized by the enthusiasm of his encounters abroad, Meneeley’s career gained fresh traction.  In New York, Ed looked on as the art world, in his words, “had all broken down and became less of a community and more about status in which snooping and stealing of ideas became commonplace.” 
      
He continued, “In the 1950s artists preferred studio visits where they could talk and enjoy looking at each other’s work.  Most everyone was poor and encouraging.  By the 1960s artists’ interests narrowed to clients, dealers, and social opportunities; the inevitable result under pressure of success.”
      
Trustee Bill Agee lobbied for inclusion of Meneeley’s first prototype of zigzag, free-standing paintings into the Whitney Annual, but without success.  This setback was amplified further when months later he noticed simulations of the same concept exhibited uptown. 
      
“The machinery for our building’s elevator was on my floor, which meant my space was not secure from anyone who had access to the building’s elevator,” Ed explained. “Larry Rivers had the top floor. John Chamberlain and Claus Oldenburg were below but also in same building.  And I often came home to discover strangers looking around my studio.”            
      
Despite the drawbacks, Meneeley would persevere, and, in the end, enjoy the privileges of an insider.  Much of the New York art world was greatly receptive to his efforts, both as an artist (contributing finally after a cold spell to a group exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1968, the Whitney Museum in 1969, and the Museum of Modern Art in 1970) and with the Portable Gallery archive.  But in Britain he sensed he could be a star.
      
Two prestigious institutions—the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum—purchased complete sets of Portable Gallery’s entire documentation catalogue and had been mailed on ahead of his first trip.  After photographing the Motherwell show, he and Vanderburg collected their earnings. Suddenly flush with cash, Ed bought a pink suit and the pair rented a car, boarded a “hovercraft” to cross the English Channel, and drove to Paris where they drank whiskey straight from the pint and shopped like celebrities. After a couple of days they went on to Hamburg to watch an American friend, Ralph Edwards, perform with a German dance company that had recruited him from New York.
      
Extravagantly dressed, Ed and Albert had the German people on the street convinced they were rock stars, a façade they enjoyed perpetuating.  They began referring to themselves as Also Ran, and continued living the parts, even receiving a free upgrade to first class on the return flight home, where they would eventually serve as jurors on band competitions, all the while rubbing elbows with the likes of singer John Wonderling, though no one would ever hear neither Ed nor Albert perform.
     
“What an amazing adventure!” Meneeley recalled. “Give me a couple of bucks and I’ll get completely arrogant.”









                        2



Writing for Arts magazine in December 1980, Barbara Cavaliere traces Meneeley’s career paying special attention to the role historical precedent plays in the formation of an artist.  She wrote, “It is the climate as well as personal biography, temperament and individual position in context which shapes the artist’s production. Ed Meneeley came to New York City in 1955, encountering the New York art world during perhaps what was the most difficult period for entrance in many decades.”
      
Biding his time, Meneeley found his way into the scene by cultivating his documentation skills, becoming a much-sought-after photographer.  During this time he painted “dark, expressionistic figures” such as Green Thought in a Green Shade (1956), and “slashing, highly coloristic abstractions on unprimed canvas” such as Variations on a Story by Michael Katz (1958). 
      
By the time Meneeley moved to New York in 1955, in many respects the breakthrough role of Manhattan as the center of the art world had already happened. He was like many other little fish caught in the wake of the huge generation before them. Jackson Pollock would crash his car and die drunk out in the Hamptons before Meneeley heard about the Cedar Tavern.
      
Outside of the arts, history was happening everywhere.  Schools desegregated, Alaska and Hawaii became part of the union, and NASA completed its first manned space flight. By 1958, frustrated by the circumstances of his context, Meneeley stopped painting. For the next two years, after his marriage was annulled and as his photographic career took off, he studied drawing with Jack Tworkov, repeating the same still life over and over again.
      
Cavaliere sums up Meneeley’s early painting career in these excerpts:


      Meneeley’s method of research involves first getting to know theories of color and geometry, and then putting them aside to work intuitively; main object, direct emotional communication rather than philosophical truth. 


      He was simultaneously in analysis with a Jungian psychiatrist and also pursuing an important dialogue about intuition and chance with Linda Cavallon, wife of Giorgio, the painter. 


      In 1960 he returned to painting with a series of color exercises inspired by Monet’s late lily ponds and began experimenting with new processes, dripping color on linen canvases by use of a machine, producing soft-edged vertical, ribbon-like dissections of multiple hues which, although they appear hand-made and improvisational, are, in fact, mechanically produced and controlled.  



By the mid-late 1960s Meneeley had spent over a decade of intentional practice on his artistry. Coincidentally, this same amount of time Malcolm Gladwell found to be consistent of many highly successful persons in Outliers.  Finally, for the small town descendant of coal crackers, Meneeley’s hard work started to pay off.
      
In 1969 the Whitney Museum of American Art included Meneeley’s groundbreaking Electrostatic prints in its New Acquisitions exhibition. The following year, the Museum of Modern Art followed suit, including the same folios in a group show aptly billed Machine Art.
      
By now African-Americans had been finally granted the right to vote, demonstrations mounted in the streets against the US bombings of North Vietnam, and race riots had broken out in Los Angeles. Not to mention Neil Armstrong’s epic footprint on the moon. 
      
At this point in his career, Meneeley was taking frequent excursions abroad whenever an opportunity arose to photograph a major show.  Flights were cheap and with the American dollar going further against the pound, Ed was not only available at his own expense, but he had extra funds to support the artists he met by purchasing their work. Fed up with the mediocre response received at home, he decided it was time for a fresh challenge:
             
          I had been making work in New York for years without a prospect in sight. By the late 60s I knew that in New York I was chasing my tail, but now I had Londoners looking at me and thinking: who is this guy clicking this camera? Why is he clicking it? Will he do a lecture for us? How about a show at the ICA? How about an exhibition at the Prince Albert Museum? Whitechapel Gallery? Where am I getting that in the States? And where is the grant money to produce it? ILondon!  


Both Meneeley and his partner grew so enraptured with life abroad they decided to make a deal.  On their honor one would stay in New York to keep the business going and subsidize the other as he lived and traveled. Securing cross-Atlantic connections would not only improve the reach of their business but also their individual painting careers. 
      
Agreeing to subsidize Vanderburg first, Ed stayed in New York, but after a while the pull of the Gulf Stream became too great. Subcontracting Wayne Adams and Warren Sealy to take care of the practical workings of the Portable Gallery—cutting negatives and mounting them in cardboard—Ed continued to explore his options abroad every available opportunity.
      
“I was treated as a thing of curiosity,” Meneeley recalls, elucidating on a particular evening when he and Adams traveled together to attend the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden.
      
Meneeley and Adams took a cab directly to the Royal Opera House from the airport with small time to spare.  Ed decided to hit up the bar while Wayne found their seats.  In those days, guests ordered and paid for their drinks for intermission in advance. As the unfamiliar process began to sink in, he turned to find himself standing next to Rudolph Nureyev.  The famous Soviet dancer, renowned for his exploration of expressive areas of the dance and infusing a new role to the male ballet dancer who previously served only as support, was chatting with another fellow just a few inches away.
      
But before he could say anything, another man understood what Ed must have been thinking and stepped in to introduce himself.  The man’s name was Christopher D’Marigney, and during their initial exchange, both spoke about how they admired Nureyev.  Smiling, Christopher admitted he knew the Russian well and invited Ed to join him for dinner afterwards at Le Artiste Affame (The Famished Artist), where he knew the other dancers would go. 
      
Happily accepting the invitation, for dinner after the show Ed and Wayne enjoyed baked filet mignon sautéed in herbs and finished off at the table where it was held above flaming fennel faggots, searing in a subtle anise flavor.  Across the room, Nureyev and others ate equally amazing food.  
      
“The night could not have been better,” Ed recalled. “To my surprise, during dinner, I kept feeling someone’s foot rubbing up against my leg under the table.”
      
Later, returning to their hotel, they crossed through Hyde Park, where they encountered a gang of taunting skin-heads. As they approached, one pulled Ed’s jacket up over his head and kicked him forward from behind.  Arms and legs flailing in defense, Ed’s left fist landed on the jaw of his attacker, silencing the thick accented curses.
      
“If it weren’t for the cab driver screeching on the scene,” Ed recalls, “the outcome could have been a lot worse.” 
     
Listening to Meneeely some forty years later, his tone gives away the most memorable event of the evening: his relationship with Christopher that followed.  As the cab delivered them to their hotel for the evening, Ed explained to Wayne he wasn’t going in just yet, as it became clear D’Marigney was interested in a relationship.
      
Upon returning to New York, the pair exchanged a barrage of phone calls.  On his subsequent trips abroad, Ed stayed at Christopher’s flat and eventually began to connect with others in London he knew from back in the states. Here is Meneeley's account of what transpired:

            I was aware Irving Sandler, who I knew from the Artist Club, and his wife, Lucy, would sometimes sublet flats in London or swap their New York apartment with British artists. Since they had been frequent visitors to my studio and dinner   guests, I knew Lucy was keen on my cooking and interested in advancing her own skills. She fully appreciated the ability to stimulate and influence people via a well-run dinner table and grew pretty well entrenched in the British scene.

            When I arrived in London, we had the chance to reconnect.  I knew Stamos would be arriving in December and his birthday was New Year’s Eve, so I contacted the Sandlers, who also knew him, and together we made a guest list. The party was a great social success and provided me the opportunity to meet seven or eight of Britain’s leading artists, one of whom was Patrick Heron. 

            Heron was one of the first British artists to look to New York for inspiration. He had traveled to the states and exhibited with the Bertha Schaefer Gallery.  He also functioned under Hilton Kramer, then editor of Arts Magazine, and had written one of the early critiques of contemporary art which had become required reading in most universities for many years, a fact
which escaped him until I apprised him of it many years later.


            Through his new connections, before long Meneeley was invited to speak as a guest lecturer at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.  His first ever public speaking appearance, he remembers being visibly uncomfortable at the podium. Calling upon the same confidence he used as a child actor, he pulled himself together. Here is the artist's own recollection:

             The audience could see me shaking, so they thought they could take advantage.  Some began heckling me about America’s role in Vietnam. Deciding to diffuse the tension with laughter, I yelled back, Okay, I’ll talk about whatever you want about Vietnam, but you’re going to have to tell me about Northern Ireland!  That shut them up.







        
                           3




Before long, Meneeley moved in with D’Marigney and began hosting more frequent dinner parties.  Visiting Americans and British were all invited as Ed and Chris did their best to connect the trans-Atlantic art communities. At the same time, Meneeley’s personal relationship with Vanderburg seized as his new found friend consumed most of his attention.
         
"Christopher later admitted to seeing me as a rough piece of coal, in which he, with his aristocratic refinement, would polish into a diamond."

Before long Ed discovered Christopher actually hailed from a noble blood line.  In fact, his namesake, the Hotel de Marigney, remains the official residence for state visitors in Paris, located on Avenue Marigney.  The Frenchman’s ingrained polish became more evident as the pair embarked on a summer excursion throughout Europe, in which Ed recalled the impression he was traveling with a prince intent on smartening him up for society. 
           
             We decided to travel around a certain theme, relying heavily on the Michelin guide for where to eat, where to see ancient cave paintings, etc.  In one instance we had to knock on the door of a certain farm lady who would meet us with a lantern and lead us into the caves.  It was incredible, the Cathedrals, the museums, Louvre, Champs-Elysees, and the wine. We rented cheap cars, one time the gear shift was a cane and it felt like it could run 1000 miles on a teacup of gas. 
           
            I had the artwork, exhibitions and money to fund things. Christopher had the cultural background and sense of adventure. One instance, driving through the Swiss Alps, there was a break in the  forest overlooking some water.  After we pulled over to have a look, Christopher remarked the view looked like the set for Swan Lake.  Driving a little further, there was another clearing, this time with ample parking and a sign detailing how this overlook was in fact what inspired Tchaikovsky 

            For our dinner parties we decided we would be known for our house specialty of Chenin Blanc from Vouvray, all the while taking pictures so we would have the visual references to pull it off. So we endured a lot of wine tastings and would always buy a couple of bottles before moving on to the next town. 
           
            At one point, we made a wrong turn and had to spin around.  On the sides of the road were deep, muddy ditches full of manure, and there wasn’t enough room to get the car around, so I got out, wearing bell bottoms and very elaborate sandals to tried to lift the car out. Christopher, who normally doesn’t drive, is sitting at the wheel and I told him to gun it, and as I’m lifting it, I sunk down into the muck. 

            My sandals were starting to dissolve when a group of French farmers came out to see what was going on. Christopher, who speaks gorgeous French, had everyone impressed by his royalty.  Pointing to myself, I said, ‘New York.’
           
            They all started laughing, and later a man brought out a garden hose to wash me off.  Four of them picked up the car and put it back on the road.  As I was opening my wallet, Christopher quickly stopped me.  They didn’t do it for money. That would have insulted them.  So instead we gave them some wine. 


The dinner parties did eventually pay off, and Ed continued to woo with Herman Cherry’s Jerusalem artichoke recipe and the many bottles of subtly sweet Vouvray.  After his first year, he met art historian Monika Kinley who also served as guest curator for the British Arts Council.  Intrigued with Meneeley’s Electrostatic Prints, she introduced them to her contacts at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
      
Publicly funded with many prominent British artists on its advisory panel, Meneeley referred to the ICA as “the most radical exhibition center in London at the time.”  After the ICA debuted his Electrostatic prints in April 1971, his career snowballed. Robert Thomas’s review in Art and Artists described the show:

The first group are a series of illustrations for excerpts from “Tender Buttons” of Gertrude Stein; restricting himself to using actual buttons, together with needles and related objects, Meneeley has created images of stark formalism, and yet their apparent simplicity allows for an extraordinary subtlety of nuance to visually reflect the abstract lyricism of the written work.

The IBM Drawings use the same process but are printed on to silk-screened color paper; the imagery here is fittingly obscure, incorporating the hieroglyphic detritus of computer processing within formal patterns, and setting it off against a random text drawn from cut-up IBM training manuals, headed dauntingly ‘The Estimation of Non-Linear Econometric Forms’ and containing all manner of incomprehensible diagram and such gloriously overtoned technical expressions as ‘Transformation of co-ordinates of the Stiffness Matrix of the Member.’

In the last group, PORTRAITS: People and objects, Meneeley shows the medium at its most flexible by extemporaneous creation directly on the glass; these are essentially collage build-ups, possessing a fugitive but haunting power which belies their size.


Patrick Heron, who also had connections at the ICA, was impressed with the Xerox prints and brought them to the attention of the curator of prints at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Impressed by the raw variety of the works, the curator bought all three sets. Meneeley explained:

No living artist is ever exhibited at the Victoria Albert Museum, except for in a small foyer leading into the cafeteria where my electrostatic prints went on display. Everyday some of the most brilliant minds in the English art scene walked past my work on their way to lunch, and because of the graphic nature of some, they caused quite a stir.




Visiting the V&A in 2010, I was struck by the lack of visual art, though astounded by the sheer size of the institution and variety of holdings.  Ancient obelisks, medieval well-heads, Michelangelo’s David, Persian carpets and jeweled scimitars, all the way to gowns worn by Morocco’s former Queen Grace Kelly.  While the room Ed described leading into the cafeteria no longer exists and the café has been moved across the courtyard to its original location centuries prior, I was struck by the apparent juxtaposition his works would have served among the artifacts of imperial plunder. Nonetheless, they were included in an exhibition titled Three Americans from July 21 to August 8th, 1971. Robert Melville, writing in New Statesman summed up the exhibition in these September issue remarks:

Judd makes 15 variations on a striped parallelogram. Graham draws a skein of different colours across repeats of an empty room, and Meneeley illustrates Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons with sheets of circles, but can be suddenly and surprisingly vulgar. One of his prints is called Bottoms Up. A Rear Portrait, and, believe it or not, it’s an image of a hairy pair of buttocks.


By the early 1970s Meneeley was becoming notorious in Britain.  Anyone dining at the Victoria & Albert Museum walked past his poetic Tender Buttons prints, innovative IBM Drawings and often shocking Portraits, including the “hairy pair of buttocks,” on their way to the cafeteria.

         R.C. Kenedy, keeper of the museum’s research library where American scholars such as Irving Sandler spent their summers writing books, was particularly intrigued. Anytime Kenedy wanted to take a break for tea during the duration of the show, he walked past the Electro-static prints.  One afternoon, Kenedy took the opportunity to invite Sandler, whom he knew from previous summer projects, and during the course of their break, the Electrostatic prints became the subject of discussion. Meneeley recalled the story as told to him later by Kenedy:

            Before leaving New York, I had met with Sandler in my studio, which was about 5,000 square feet. The space enabled us to arrange my existing paintings in chronological order and to discuss the evolution of the work, so he was probably the most knowledgeable person on my development and knew the prints well.

            During the tea, Kenedy got Sandler to tell him everything he knew about me and my work. Shortly afterward, Kenedy sent me a formal invitation to meet him at a local pub for lunch. He arranged to have a member of his staff meet me beforehand and provide the introduction to “Mr. Kenedy,” whereupon the staff member was dismissed and lunch continued with just the two of us.
        
            Kenedy was a wonderful wit, had a fast intellectual mind and talked about art in a manner that was not unlike the way some people play tennis.


Sufficiently impressed, Kennedy decided to bring Ed to a wider audience. Writing
for Art International in October 1971, Kenedy wrote:

During the course of a very long summer, [Meneeley] provided the only example of genuine artistic achievement…the vertical stripe is his badge and his symmetries are laterally balanced statements of dissonance. His pigments reproduce hues halfway between primary oppositions and the complementary’s optical illusions. They are refined and pure but they shun the path of scoring easy victories…the performance has a consummate virtuosity.
           

Such press helped materialize invitations for Ed to lecture on the importance of documenting, allowing him the opportunity to travel to ScotlandWales, Wimbledon, and Winchester before the Central School of Art and Design in London finally hired him full-time.  R.C. Kenedy would later become a regular at dinner parties hosted at D’Marigney’s flat where Meneeley continued to show off one of his publicly lesser known artistic talents, le arte de cuisine.  Such encounters, I came to realize, were carefully cultivated, much in the same way Meneeley’s home-made marinades and the boutique bottles of wine they collected were carefully crafted.  Struck by the notion that this element of nurturing and entertaining the voices—writers—of his day, I couldn’t help but conclude: the art of the dinner party may not be taught in Art School, but perhaps it should be?
           








                        4






Meneeley’s experiences abroad brought him a new level of recognition both as an artist and educator, yet there was a downside, most visibly in his deteriorating personal and professional relationship with his Portable Gallery business partner, Albert Vanderburg.  Instead of fulfilling his year of returning to New York to take care of Portable Gallery, Vanderburg got caught up in an entirely new revolutionary scene. His new adopted mantra included three short imperatives: “Tune in. Turn on.  Drop out.”
      
Ed and Al’s mutual friend, B.H. Friedman, known to his friends as Bob, first met Timothy Leary in 1961 at jazz musician Maynard Ferguson’s home in RiverdaleNew York.  Leary, a Harvard professor of psychology, was conducting research on the hallucinogenic “sacred” mushroom from Mexico, genus Psilocybe, and later with LSD or Lysergic acid, which, according to Freidman’s memoir Tripping, was thought “to save the world and free our spirits.”
      
Without a doubt, tripping was influential on society in many ways unspoken of in our history.  Friedman continued:

            [LSD] promised instant consciousness-raising and consciousness-expanding, a new mental and mystical awareness as visionary as E=mc(squared), as explosive as the bomb, and as large as its mushroom cloud.
           
            Experimentation with psychedelic drugs influenced many teachers, writers, and artists including Dr. Leary’s fellow psychologists, Beat writers Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs, as well as established authors Aldous Huxley, Arthur Koestler, Robert Lowell, and many others…
           
            Some saw [Leary’s] dream, now theirs, turn into a nightmare. Others, like me, gained clearer understanding of their identities.



By the end of 1971, Meneeley was spending most of his time teaching, producing new work and exhibiting that revenues from Portable Gallery began to bottom out.  Vanderburg, who, according to Meneeley, by this time began experimenting heavily with LSD, had all but lost interest in the company. 
      
Back in the States, diminishing work prompted Wayne Adams to pursue other ventures, including the production of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris as a touring show throughout America.  Researching the London production of the show, one afternoon Adams called New York to check his messages and later revealed a few cryptic lines to Ed he had received from Vanderburg.  Meneeley immediately understood.
      
Quickly considering the time difference, Ed realized there was still a window of opportunity.  Without explanation, Ed left Wayne still holding the phone with a puzzled look on his face, and hopped into a cab outside for Cromwell Road to Vanderburg’s flat finding the door bolted shut.
      
Desperate, Meneeley was close to breaking down on the sidewalk outside when he spied a police officer walking his beat.  After explaining the situation, the cop quickly bypassed the lock to discover Albert unconscious on the bed.


After rushing him to the hospital, where doctors pumped his stomach, Ed held his sick friend’s hand as he slowly came around.  When Vanderburg realized he was not in heaven, according to Meneeley, he screamed, “You son of a bitch, you have no right to interfere with my personal life!”


Startled, Meneeley slowly left.


As soon as possible, he flew back to New York to dissolve the Portable Gallery archive.  “I did what I needed to do to protect the whole venture,” Ed said. “It wasn’t just about making a couple of bucks in the art world.  Luckily I had the negatives stored in a lab in Connecticut.  I got the negatives back from Albert and we parted civilly.” 


Needing a new name for his venture, Ed chose ESM Documentations, for Edward Sterling Meneeley, on the spot.  His new life, sealed with a judge’s approval and a notary’s stamp, officially began.

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