Fame, it was once suggested, is having a salad named after you in a restaurant where your parents go to eat. A close second might be having an exhibition of your photographs mounted in the front hall of your favorite private club.
“By Jove, that’s darn good,” a portly mogul exclaimed the other day in the Tavern Club, high atop 333 N. Michigan Ave., as he leaned forward and squinted at a photograph of a misty Croatian harbor, signed by club member M. A. Bilandic.
Could that be the same chap who once was an alderman from the 11th Ward? Was once the mayor of Chicago? Is now chief justice of the Illinois Supreme Court? The same one lunching at the corner table by the window as, behind him, a heavy snow fell from the misted sky like dropped balls of cotton?
In a word, Yes.
Mike Bilandic, always adept at turning disadvantages to assets, has taken up photography. It’s just a hobby, he was quick to point out, “but if they boot me out of my present job, I can always become a starving artist.”
That’s an unlikely prospect.
First off, Bilandic’s one electoral disaster was, even his critics agree, weather-related: a mishandling of the Great Snows of ’79 (82.3 inches) which chilled his campaign and snowballed Jane Byrne into the mayor’s office. His current assignment, most agree, is little affected by outdoor climate.
Second, Bilandic’s photographs are pretty good. Indeed, it’s not beyond reason to suggest that someday he might even sell one or two.
Already, his precise reportings of images, many of them ironically having to do with snow and ice, have been good enough to show at several small art emporia, including Gallery 401 in the River North area.
“He brought his latest set of prints home the other day. I think they’re the best he’s ever done,” his wife, Heather, said later in a phone interview. “The starkness of ice formations. The bare branches of trees. A kite flying far in the distance. He’s become aware of settings, of the beauty of nature.”
Nor, as an artist, is Bilandic standing still. When he took up photography six years ago, Walgreen’s was his developer of choice. Later, he moved on to specialty labs, looking for a wider range of effects. Now he’s looking for a place where he can do his own enlarging and play around with tones.
So, in a kind of latter-day version of James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” Bilandic traced his development, starting on Christmas Day in 1987, when he got a Yashica camera.
It was not tops on his wish list. In fact, he confessed, “I was kind of upset. `Who asked you for that?’ I wondered, but only to myself. When Heather gives me something, of course I can’t take it back.” So, he started snapping away, very badly, at family gatherings.
“I screwed everything up. I was the butt of jokes,” he recalled. “Somebody said, `Oh, Mike’s taking the pictures. You’re safe. They never come out.’ “
Getting some guidance
Eventually, Bilandic got irked at his ineptness-and turned for help to a jogging companion, Dell Hermann, a photographer who had done considerable work for Heather’s father, Graham Morgan, then board chairman of U.S. Gypsum.
Hermann and Bilandic often ran from their Near North Side homes to Evanston and back, leaving considerable time for huffy-puffy chit-chat. Soon, Bilandic said, “I starting ordering a second set of prints.” After runs, “Dell would look them over and say, `This is what you did well. This is what you did wrong.’ Then we’d talk about composition, focusing, cropping and printing.”
Slowly, Bilandic shaped his own way of seeing through a lens.
“He’s got a natural eye,” Hermann said later in an interview. “I’d look at his pictures and I’d say, `More sky here.’ Or `crop this.’ Or `watch the backlighting.’ Now, he’s very selective. People are surprised at how good he is. They don’t expect this from a politician or a judge.”
A familiar topic
Many of Bilandic’s pictures on the Tavern Club wall have to do with the affects of nature. One zeros in on a frosted jogger stopping to drink from an ice-covered fountain on the annual Chinese New Year’s group jogging run through Lincoln Park. Another shows wintering masts of yachts huddled together at Belmont Harbor.
One of the most dramatic photos is a shot of Moses, on the side of the old Chez Paree building on North Fairbanks Court. “I was coming out of the sports center at McClurg Court, after working out,” Bilandic recalled, “when I was struck by this trompe l’oeil,” an eye-fooling reproduction of Michelangelo’s famed painting that climbs towards the heavens, which that day were roiling with stern clouds.
“The sunlight was just right,” he said, and he grabbed the image.
Some of his photos offer wry humor, such as a nicely framed picture of a sign Bilandic saw in Springfield before a local election: “CROOK: A NAME YOU CAN TRUST!”
He also likes a gnarled tree near his apartment which, over the years, has been hit by cars, buffeted by winds, wet by dogs, kicked by kids and survived. “I’m building a collection of `My Tree’ pictures,” he said.
The First Couple
In 1977, when Bilandic, then 53 and the somewhat-reclusive mayor of Chicago, thrust into office after the sudden death of his political mentor, Richard J. Daley, married Heather Morgan, 34, some considered them an odd pairing. That included, insiders said, her father, though he later mellowed and told a duck-hunting companion, “Mike is not a bad guy. And he is a lawyer.”
Yet, those who debriefed close friends at the time found that the city’s First Couple shared more viewpoints than outsiders suspected. They had met in the outer offices of Mayor Daley, which both regularly visited, Mike as 11th Ward alderman and Heather as a staffer in the aviation department.
Their first date started with a political outing, to a Puerto Rican Day parade and reception, followed by more private pleasures, dinner and dancing at one of Heather’s neighborhood spots, the Drake Hotel.
“They work together as a team,” Connie Bischof, matron of honor at their wedding, later noted, “and they seem genuinely happy.” One matron on the Gold Coast approvingly noted that Bilandic, who joined a law firm after his defeat as mayor, was one of the few men in the area who still went to work wearing a hat.
For after-hours hobbies, it was Mike-the-athlete, running marathons up to 50 miles, playing games involving rackets. For Heather-the-artist, it was working on her oils, sitting in the shade, wearing a large hat to protect her delicate complexion. Slowly, over the years, their interests crossed paths.
These days, she works out; he’s into the arts. “I was the artist and Mike was the athlete. Now, I’m also an athlete and he’s also an artist,” Heather Bilandic said, picking her words carefully to indicate that Mike Bilandic, at 70, is still in pretty good shape. Nor is son, Michael, now 15, any slouch.
“A year ago, Heather and I made one of the most difficult decisions of our life,” Bilandic said. “We said `yes’ when our son asked for an electric guitar for Christmas.” And, he adds, “it turned out very well.”
As for himself, Bilandic said as a Tavern Club waiter poured a cup of rich coffee, “I can’t run, play tennis or handball, or swim the way I could. So I’m dedicating the rest of my life to improving my mind.”
An artistic life
Besides photography, Bilandic is taking charcoal drawing lessons and has been seen in the corridors of the School of the Art Institute, on his way to art classes. “I’ve been going to the Art Institute for years,” he chuckled. “I never dreamed that, when I was over the hill, I’d be there as a student.”
With his trusty Yashica, he often goes out to shoot on Sunday mornings, before catching an afternoon plane to Springfield to attend to the judging. Often, this frigid winter, he goes early, in the dawn light, to check out the ice formations off the curving pier of the North Avenue beach.
“Once, I was walking with my son, Michael, when I saw a guy standing in the water in jogging shorts, with a fishing pole. I thought, `That looks good.’ Further on, we went across the overpass over Lake Shore Drive. I took shots of traffic.” Recently, he found a squirrel with possibilities, but decided not to photograph it. “I didn’t have anything to feed him,” Bilandic explained. “I would have felt like a heel if I’d asked him to pose.”
Family photos
One of his favorite pictures, of misty fisher-folk by boats at Makarska, a town which Bilandic said was often called “the Palm Beach of Croatia,” was taken on a family trip to Europe, to explore roots.
The Bilandics have made several such journeys. Bilandic’s mother was born on the island of Brac, off the Croatian coast; his father, in the mountains behind Split. Another time they went to Wales, where Morgan ancestors include Captain Henry Morgan, a buccaneer associated with rum whose good side, Bilandic quickly noted, included helping to save England by picking off ships of the Spanish Armada and serving two terms as a governor of Jamaica.
What lit up Bilandic’s eyes the most, however, was a picture printed, through some photo-lab magic of his mentor Dell Hermann, in a style known as pointilism. A technique which shows off each dot of color, it turns photos into near-paintings, catching delicate rhythms of surfaces, lines and values.
“This is Heather,” Bilandic said, pointing out a summer scene on a Gold Coast side street. “I saw her standing there, by the garden,” he added, with considerable affection. “She wasn’t looking. I just happened to capture her.”
The interview almost over, he was asked if he had tips for others starting out. “Keep at it,” he urged. “The more you do, the more aware you get.”
