Photos of Billy Beck, Le Vieux Clown Elégant.

This is a collection of photos
all taken on the same day
in November, 2006,
of the legendary
Billy Beck.

In the Forties he was a clown
at the celebrated
Cirque Medrano
in Paris
and shared the stage
with Buster Keaton,
among others.
Born in 1920
in Philadelphia,
he was an artist
and cartoonist,
and started sketching
the sad clown epitomized by
Emmett Kelly when he was just a
kid. He went with the army to France
during WWII and stayed there, becoming
a clown first on the street before
he graduated
to the stage.

He moved to Hollywood in 1960,
got a little house in Silverlake, and
became a TV and film actor. He was in
"Irma LaDouce" and on many, many TV shows.

I first met him
thanks to my dear friend Amy O'Neill,
who invited me to a Moose Lodge event
in which Billy showed slides and did a little
vaudeville routine. I had hoped he would wear
his clown makeup
on that night,
and was a little sad he
didn't.
So I took advantage
of one moment when
he was alone, after
his little performance
and asked him to
do a photo shoot, and thanks to
both Amy and God and other angels
who might be working on my
behalf, he said yes.

I met him at his little home,
which was filled to the brim
with thousands of books,
paintings, photographs,
videos, DVDs, maps
and more.

It is
up a long steep hill
on Robinson Street
in Silverlake, just east of Hollywood. He kindly
consented to put on his tramp make-up and
costume for me;
this was the first time
he's become the
tramp in about 46 years.

We took photos inside his house-
after looking
at some of the photographs he shot -
some beautiful nudes -
and outside
in his yard and down on the street. This is
a prop violin in many
of these shots that
he bought
at a Paris pawnshop,
and which has a little
hinge that opens to the body, out of which
he'd pull sheet music as a gag.

"After telling you I would do this," he
told me in his overgrown backyard
today after we'd been
shooting for almost an hour,
and I had about 300 shots of
him in my camera, "I kind of regretted it --
I thought about how long it takes to put
on the make-up and take it off after -
but, you know, I've really enjoyed this.
This has been fun. More fun than
acting."

He speaks French,
and so allow me:

Dieu bénissent
le bac de teinture
de Billy Beck.
La force est un saint.