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My friend Kathy Willens wasn't the type for shortcuts
Kathy Willens and I met on what might be called a playdate for grown-ups. New to Miami in the late ‘70s, we were introduced by the men we were dating who realized their girlfriends both worked in journalism and neither of us knew anyone.
When we met, Kathy’s job was as a lab assistant at the Miami News, but she had just heard of an opening in the Miami bureau of the Associated Press. As part of the application, she dropped a roll of film in the mail. That night she awakened to a vision of it traveling in a double trailer truck at breakneck speed, the only item on board, all the way to New York City and back. I don’t always like hearing about other people’s dreams, and rarely remember them, but I appreciate Kathy’s for two reasons. It is model of efficiency, and you don’t need to be Freud to figure it out. Kathy was a photojournalist, one of the best to ever do the job; she worked at the AP for nearly 45 years.
The stereotype of journalists is that they are pushy, elbowing their way through thick and thin. Kathy was the opposite. She knew how to assert herself if need be, but she often displayed a tentative quality, as if to gauge where she fit in. I have wondered if some of that hesitancy was instilled during her upbringing as a late-in-life bonus baby to parents who already had two boys, aged 12 and 13. Her father Lionel was a jeweler, her mother Gertrude a dental hygienist. Kathy told me they often made her a companion in their pursuits, which involved -— professionally and even recreationally — an ability to see the small picture within the big one and the big one within the small one and a mandate to be meticulous.
Kathy grew up in Detroit, studied art in San Francisco and landed in Miami during the mid-‘70s when the city was about to change from a sleepy retirement village into an epicenter of global news. Photography suited her. The built-in fraction of a second it takes to adjust the setting of a camera gave her the time she needed to grasp the best angle, the right light. She covered the big events, riots, refugees, the AIDS crisis. In the process, she traveled the world. We were once on a rutted dirt road on Martha’s Vineyard with ditches on either side. “This reminds so much,” she said, “of Africa.”
We became exercise partners, playing tennis on public courts with cracked surfaces and no fees. One time in 1977 she canceled on me because the AP was sending her to Fort Lauderdale to take a picture of Billie Jean King. (I always love a good excuse.) As it turns out, Billie Jean used Kathy’s photo as the cover for her autobiography “All In,” published in 2021.
Sometimes we would meet at my apartment in Coral Gables, jog two miles or so to the Venetian Pool, take a dip, and then jog back. Before we set forth on the return trip, she would take a moment to view the pool from a distance, enjoying the oddball sight, a replica of old-world canals in a suburban new-world neighborhood.
When I was married in 1980, I asked her to be our photographer, hoping she would cover the event like a feature story. I wanted her to plumb the sociology: “Think of the wedding scene in ‘Deer Hunter,’ only in Connecticut, without the Russian roulette.”
We had only one disagreement that I can recall. In the early ‘80s I invited friends for dinner and served Tandoori chicken. She could not fathom that I prepared it myself: Where was the clay oven? Where was the secret shelf with special spices? And what about the 24 hours it takes to cook? I was already receiving pushback from my husband, John, who did not believe our guests would want to eat chicken so colorful it looked radioactive. I explained to Kathy that I had gone to an Indian grocer, purchased a marinade and combined it with plain yogurt as directed. I assured John that our friends would walk in and say, “Goody, tandoori chicken,” which is exactly what they did.
Looking back now, I realize what troubled Kathy was that I had taken a shortcut. She simply was not the shortcut type.
I thought of Kathy as the most reflexively visual person I ever met, and she thought of me as the most reflexively verbal she ever met. When my son was born, concerned that I might give his optical development short shrift, she appointed herself his Visual Godmother, equipping him with his first mobile. In my favorite young-mom photo, I am holding him on my lap, and we are both facing Kathy while he gets to fiddle with one of her cameras. Her parents had taken a picture of her in a similar pose when she was a small child.
As her career advanced, the harshness of what she witnessed on various assignments led her to retreat a bit, into the world of sports. Here again, she was a pioneer, often the only woman on the field. One of the stories making the rounds after her death concerned a press conference early in her career with Don Shula of the Miami Dolphins. While he spoke, he could hear the click of her camera and called her out for creating a distraction. He asked her to stop taking pictures and she said she would be glad to, as soon as he asked all the print reporters to put away their notebooks and pens. Many years later, he sat next to her on a plane ride from Miami to Tampa and they chatted the entire way, so she assumed all was forgiven.
Late in life, Kathy took up birding and once again, this time thanks to binoculars, she saw the world through a lens. Like many ardent birders, she began to look like one herself, not bony or beaky so much as scampering, as if lighting from one branch to another. The light, within and without, dimmed on July 16 when she succumbed at the age of 74 to ovarian cancer, diagnosed within weeks of her retirement in 2021.
How I wish she could witness the flow of praise and love for her now. I am impressed by the expressions of admiration, including from younger male colleagues who thanked her for paving the way. There is a photo of her from nearly 50 years ago, covering spring training in Miami, with a notebook out, getting names for captions.
If we could speak now, I would tell her that of all the tributes, my favorite came from the New York Yankees, who flashed her image on the Jumbotron and asked fans to observe a moment of silence in her memory. I doubt she would believe me. I can almost hear her saying, “First tandoori chicken, and now this?”
