Now I'll move on to the personal intro of the book, but these photos are not in it.
This is a self-portrait of my dad in the New York City subway at Penn Station, taken in the 1950s before I was born. He was a photographer and TV editor then; later he went on to edit and direct movies. But around the time he took this photo he was shooting pictures of great jazz musicians, whom my Uncle George Avakian, the legendary jazz producer, was working with. Dad had already graduated from Yale, been an officer in the U.S. Navy, studied at the Sorbonne and lived in Paris. He was an existentialist.
My mother, Dorothy Tristan, was a Ford model back in the 1950s. This photo is of her, taken by my Dad for a Life magazine story about them and their movie End of the Road, in 1969. By that time she was an accomplished, classically trained actress in the theatre. She also did movies and TV. She is still an actress, as well as a screenplay writer, and she is working on a novel.
She was the stunning blond in Klute. My stepfather is the distinguished movie and theater director John D. Hancock. The film Bang the Drum Slowly might ring a bell. I had an exciting upbringing in California, New York, and London, among other places.
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