Chasing Amelia … and Hollywood

In a 56-year career, the late Albert L. Bresnik took photographs of celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin, John Wayne and Shirley Temple, but he was most known for his iconic portraits of the famed aviator, Amelia Earhart.   ’He loved Amelia,’ his widow Gabrielle Bresnik said during a recent interview at their home on Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades. ‘He called her his big sister.’   As a student at Manual Arts High School, Bresnik would visit local airports on the weekends to take photographs of the pilots with their airplanes, his son Randy Bresnik explained. He would then develop the photos and sell them to the pilots.   Randy imagines this is how Earhart’s husband, George P. Putman, met his father. Putman hired Bresnik to take photos of Earhart at public events and to help her with a book. He served as Earhart’s personal photographer from 1932 until her disappearance over the Pacific Ocean near Howland Island in 1937.   '[Earhart] liked him because he made her relaxed,’ Gabrielle said. ‘He didn’t push her around and would wait until she was ready to have her photo taken.’   For his part, Bresnik described Earhart as down-to-earth. ‘He would say that she was beautiful inside and out,’ said Gabrielle, who was married to Bresnik for five years before he died of a heart attack at age 79 in 1993. Bresnik, who grew up in Boyle Heights, lived in Pacific Palisades from 1948.   Around the same time that Bresnik was hired to take photographs of Earhart, Columbia Pictures employed him as a publicity photographer. He took photos of the studio’s actors and actresses on the set, which were then displayed on the ticket booths outside the theaters to advertise the movie, said Randy, who lives in Santa Monica. Over the years, he took photos of actors and actresses at premieres as well as their portraits. The family now has quite a collection of Bresnik’s work, including photos of Charlie Chaplin at the 1936 opening of his movie, ‘Modern Times,’ at the Mann Criterion in Santa Monica; portraits of Mary Martin, before she gained fame with the song ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’ in the 1940 movie ‘Love Thy Neighbor;’ and an autographed photograph of Earhart with contestants Ruth Nichols and Louise Thaden at the 1929 Powder Puff Derby, a cross-country airplane race from Santa Monica to Cleveland. Bresnik, who opened his first studio on Highland Avenue across from Hollywood High School in 1936, took the last photos of Earhart. Several months before her disappearance, he began photographing her for a book she had planned to write about her attempt to circumnavigate the equator, called ‘World Flight.’   Earhart asked Albert to accompany her and her navigator, Fred Noonan, on her Lockheed Electra 10E, so he could document her historic trip.   However, ‘she needed the weight in fuel more than she needed a photographer,’ Randy said. ‘That was lucky for me.’ His father had just married his mother, Mary, in January 1937, and they would have four children: Randy, Diane, Edwin Joseph and Harold Roger. After Mary died in 1987, he married Gabrielle the following year.   ’The day before Earhart was reported missing, the strangest thing happened,’ Gabrielle said, recalling the story Bresnik told her. A man came into Bresnik’s Hollywood studio, and as he took a look at the black- and-white photograph of Earhart hanging on the wall, he said that ‘the lightforce in the picture is gone. She’s crashed and drowned.’ Bresnik thought he might be crazy, but called Earhart’s husband, who reported that he had spoken to her and that she was fine. Bresnik later read in the newspaper that her plane was missing. ‘He went to the darkroom and started crying,’ Gabrielle said. Earhart’s husband decided to continue with her book, which he renamed ‘Last Flight.’ He wrote the book based on information he received from Earhart via telephone, letters, and from her logbook. Many of Bresnik’s farewell images were published in the book later that year.   Saddened, Bresnik ‘took all the negatives he had taken of her and wrapped them in black paper. He wrote on it, ‘To be opened in 50 years,” Gabrielle said, adding that he didn’t want to believe the news was true. He figured if Earhart had not been found in 50 years, she was truly gone.   He went on with his life, buying a couple of lots on Sunset Boulevard near his mother and moving his family from Beverly Hills to Pacific Palisades. At his home, he hosted movie nights. He had acquired hundreds of movie reels from the stars he photographed, Randy recounted. Bresnik continued his photography, relocating his studio to 29th and Wilshire in Santa Monica in 1954 and then to 14th and Wilshire. In 1967, he opened Bresnik Cameras on Swarthmore Avenue. The year before he decided to retire in 1988, 50 years had passed since Earhart had disappeared. ‘He remembered the package, and the negatives were in perfect condition,’ Gabrielle said. Bresnik began selling the photos and speaking around the country about his work with Earhart. In 1992, he and Gabrielle flew with friends on a Lockheed Electra 12A to the Experimental Aviation Association annual event in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, so he could give a speech about Earhart. On the way, they stopped in Earhart’s birthplace in Atchison, Kansas. Since Bresnik’s death, his legacy continues. Artist Anne Marie Karlsen used his photos of Earhart as inspiration for a mural, completed in 2000, at the North Hollywood Metro subway station. The mural, done on tiles and containing mirror images of Earhart and her Lockheed Electra 10E, features Bresnik’s signature. More recently, his grandson Randy Bresnik, Jr. (Randy’s son) was one of six NASA astronauts who traveled to the International Space Station last month as part of the STS-129 mission. To pay tribute to his grandfather, Randy Jr. took a photo of Bresnik and Earhart’s lucky scarf with him on the space mission. Gabrielle, who attended the launch, said she couldn’t stop thinking of Bresnik that day, noting he would have been so proud of his grandson. She added that the five years she spent with Bresnik were filled with fun and adventure. ‘I always describe him as a gentleman,’ Gabrielle said, smiling. ‘He was a person who could make everyone feel at ease.’