In the Center of it All

Photos by I.C. Rapoport Chuck Rapoport’s photojournalistic career might have begun on the crowded shuttle train that runs from Times Square to Grand Central Station in New York City. That was where, as a timid but enthusiastic Ohio University graduate in 1958, he first spotted Paris-Match photographer Paul Fusco. Rapoport didn’t talk to Fusco on the train, but the encounter (and a nudge from his mother) encouraged Rapoport to call the magazine’s New York bureau, and he began apprenticing as a photojournalist under Fusco. But Rapoport would probably tell you that his career really began about six months later, in the summer of 1959, when Paris-Match sent him to cover the U.S.-Soviet Russia track meet at Philadelphia’s Franklin Field. Rapoport, who was just 22 at the time, remembers that it was ‘hot as hell’ when he arrived in Philly, and that he had to bribe his way into the bullpen area of the stadium because he couldn’t get a press pass. But as luck would have it, he happened to be standing just a few feet away from where USC’s Bob Soth collapsed on the 19th lap of the 10,000-meter run. He snapped dozens of photos and, when he got back to New York, the film was sent immediately to Paris. ‘Those photos were perfect for Paris-Match because they were all about sensationalism,’ Rapoport says about the French picture magazine known for its widespread use of paparazzi photographs. He was in the New York office when a message came through the teletype machine from Paris: ‘Qui est Rapoport?’ (‘Who is Rapoport?’). They ran six of his photos on a three-page spread. “I didn’t know why I wanted to be a magazine photographer,’ Rapoport recently recalled. ‘But I wanted to be places where important things were happening. And this [photojournalism] would be my entr’e. My camera would get me there. I wanted to be in the center of the action.” A native of the Bronx, Rapoport worked as a freelance photographer for Paris-Match’s New York bureau from 1959 through 1961, when he was drafted into the U.S. Army during the John F. Kennedy administration. Stationed in the Pentagon and White House as a military photographer, Rapoport photographed Special Warfare Center/Special Forces (Green Berets) as they were created. After his military service, he continued to work for Paris-Match, along with other magazines such as Life, Look, Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, New York magazine and the Saturday Evening Post. Among his many photographs are portraits of John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Francois Truffaut, Charles Aznavour, Robert Penn Warren, Samuel Beckett, Roger Maris and Fidel Castro. Rapoport and his wife Mary moved to California in 1977 and settled in Pacific Palisades, where they raised their two sons, Benjamin and Caleb. Rapoport snapped this photograph of Fidel Castro during the Cuban leader’s ‘unofficial’ visit to the United States in April 1959, three and a half months after the revolution, when Castro was still considered a hero by the majority of Americans for overthrowing dictator Fulgencio Bautista. Castro attended meetings at the United Nations and spoke with Vice President Nixon, then made a grand speech in New York’s Central Park. Afterwards, he retired to his room in the New Yorker Hotel, where Rapoport, on assignment for Paris-Match, captured this image of him ‘in thought,’ using a Zippo lighter to light his Havana during a small press conference. ‘They [the reporters] asked him all these questions and he was really charming,’ says Rapoport, who was sitting right in front of Castro. ‘He spoke in English, and he answered some pretty direct questions about what it was like to live in the Sierra Maestra [Cuban mountain range] and in the jungle. He talked about getting his law degree in the United States.’ Rapoport’s photos of Castro were never published’or seen by the public’until he created a Web site to showcase his photography (www.rapo.com). ‘By then, Castro had become a despot and nobody liked him,’ Rapoport says. ‘So even though it’s a really beautiful photograph, it’s not the kind of photograph people want to hang on their wall.’ Ironically, Rapoport got into a little trouble by hanging this photograph of the cigar-smoking dictator on the wall of his office in Culver City, when he was working as a writer-producer for the 1996 TV series ‘Profiler.’ ‘I filled the bare walls of my office with about 10 of my photographs,’ Rapoport says. ‘Not too long after I started working there, the executive producer of the show came into my office and closed the door. That’s always a bad sign. He said, ‘I don’t know how to put this, but our production manager is Cuban and he comes from a Cuban refugee camp. He walked by your office today and came back to me and said, ‘Who the #*@% is this guy? He’s got a picture of Fidel Castro on his wall!’ He wants you to take it down.” [To see the complete story and Rapoport’s photos, pick up a copy of the Palisadian-Post]