Remembering Karl Bissinger, photographer, peace activist, friend

BY PHYLLIS ECKHAUS | Greenwich Villager extraordinaire Karl Bissinger, a once-famed portrait photographer turned fervent anti-war activist, was my best friend during the last 10 of his 94 years.

Deviously intelligent, funny and endearing, Karl was a complicated pal. At one point he amused himself by telling me, repeatedly, what a masochist I was. The only way I got him to stop was to ask, “Are you saying I’m a masochist because you think you’re a sadist?” I’d touched a nerve.

One of the reasons I loved Karl was because he was so much like my mom, who enjoyed nothing better than to pull the rug out from under folks, then watch them struggle to stay upright. (Karl and my mother were each the sexual prey of relatives when they were tiny tots; destabilizing others was surely a coping tactic as well as rich entertainment.)

Karl and my mom hated each other.

For about a dozen years after his partner Dick Hanley’s death, Karl had sentimentally continued to keep the songbirds Dick had loved, cooped up in exquisite antique cages in their Westbeth penthouse apartment. When Karl first met my mother, he told us over lunch he had just released the last bird to freedom.

“Well, that bird is dead,” my mother cheerfully remarked, savoring Karl’s discomfort.

It makes me laugh to recall this incident because I am convinced Karl would have pulled exactly the same twist-the-knife, supposedly truth-telling stunt on my mom if the tables had been turned. They were both provocateurs, compulsive disruptors before disruption was a thing.

But Karl was also, as he described himself, a romantic. I think he was in love with love. And perhaps because he was so much less damaged than my mom, his vulnerability was closer to the surface.

There is a photograph of Karl with his dear friend, the writer and Greenwich Villager Grace Paley, taken in 1978 after the two of them had been on trial as part of a War Resisters League group unfurling a peace banner on the White House lawn.

Karl would have been 64 and Grace 58. She is standing in front of him and beaming at the world. He is behind her, his hands reaching out to touch her, his expression as he looks at her tender, loving and, yes, vulnerable.

The two of them had been so close, companions-in-arms against arms, leading the Greenwich Village Peace Center. I can imagine their transgressive thrill when in 1967 they came up with the “Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority.” Addressed to women and men who were themselves not subject to the draft, the call urged them to support draft resisters by pledging to put themselves at risk of arrest and prison.

There’s a passage in a memoir by Robert Roth, who came upon Karl and Grace some years later, just as the two were poised to disrupt an Armed Forces Day Parade marching through a Midtown thoroughfare. Roth describes Grace looking madly glorious and Karl looking anxious as the pair, “small, white-haired comets,” suddenly streaked into the street to sit in the midst of the parade path, bringing the whole enterprise to a halt. Karl’s expression, he says, then shifted to “a profound, almost meditative calm.”

“I felt I was sharing an intimacy with them that I had not been invited to share,” Roth remarks, “as if I was spying on them through a peephole.”

Over time, Grace decamped from Karl’s life in multiple ways. She moved to Vermont, she took up with the women’s movement, and she embarked on her relationship with Bob Nichols, whom Karl described as kind, eccentric and financially solvent.

When I interviewed Grace in 2002, she observed that Karl was perhaps the only man in her political circle who wasn’t angry with her for embracing the women’s movement.

That interview came about because Karl — almost surely using me to reach out to Grace — became convinced I should write a history of the Greenwich Village Peace Center. During the Vietnam War, in addition to counseling draft resisters, Karl had overseen the Center’s stealth efforts to help soldiers escape to Sweden or Canada. Casually, he would alert Center volunteers typing fake IDs that they should not leave fingerprints.

Karl said Grace had the Center’s archive in her Vermont attic. Snagging her attention was a monumental challenge but the three of us did eventually meet Downtown, at the Housing Works Cafe on Crosby Street.

Karl was sitting next to me and Grace did not hear him as he muttered under his breath that he had always loved her.

Afterwards, Karl did not remember — I had to remind him — Grace putting her hand on his arm, urging him to call her whenever he remembered something about the Peace Center.

At her end, as Grace was dying from cancer in Vermont in 2007 (Karl would pass the next year), she left Karl a message asking him to call her, which I repeatedly begged him to do, throughout Grace’s last weeks.

He couldn’t.

First, he told me she didn’t leave a return number.

Then he told me there would be a million people around her and he’d never get through to her.

At some point he noted that in her message Grace had said something about how maybe he was angry at her.

The last time he mentioned her message, he described it simply as her calling to say goodbye.

When Grace died, her family put Karl in charge of calling all their peace movement friends. I had feared Grace’s death would crush Karl. Instead Karl was animated — even cheered — by that last assignment, which briefly renewed his proximity to Grace.