In 1992, Elizabeth Taylor's daughter
Liza Todd Tivey gave a curious package to her friend
Arne Svenson, a TriBeCa photographer with a taste
for photographic arcana. The small box held several
dozen snapshots a fan had sent to Ms. Taylor sometime
back in the 1970's. The accompanying letter had been
lost, the fan's name long forgotten.
Enriching the mystery were the photographs
themselves: bizarre shots of parrots and cockatoos
dressed in tiny people costumes, staged in miniature
theater sets with handmade props. In one, a pair of
parrots on little motorcycles recreated an iconic
image from "Easy Rider." In another, a cockatoo
in a gold jacket posed with what was literally a baby
grand piano, evoking Liberace. There were parrots
playing baseball, parrots boxing, parrots portraying
Bonnie and Clyde and Sonny and Cher. Parrots dressed
up as Patton, Custer, Madame Butterfly and, in a strange
act of cross-species cross-dressing, a parrot Mickey
Mouse.
Despite the amateur quality of the sets,
costumes and snapshots, it was clear someone had invested
a lot of time and humor in this homemade vaudeville
act. The only clues were a few photographs of a striking,
dark-haired woman with an open smile and a quirky
gleam in her eye.
It was the sort of identity puzzle Mr.
Svenson enjoys working out. He once found a box of
antique glass negatives that were evidently mug shots
of 19th-century criminals. Through years of poring
over old prison records and musty newspapers he was
able to identify many of them and reconstruct their
wayward lives.
The resulting book, "Prisoners,"
published in 1997, was a fascinating work of photographic
sleuthing.
He is currently working with forensic
sculptors, Frank Bender and Gloria Nusse, who rebuild
the features of the decomposed remains of John and
Jane Doe murder victims. Mr. Svenson's haunting portraits
of the sculptured heads will be displayed at a Southern
California art gallery, Western Project, in September.
Solving the riddle of the "bird
lady" proved to be lighter going, more along
the lines of Mr. Svenson's 2003 book, "Sock Monkeys,"
with 200 whimsical portraits of the eponymous creatures.
An Internet search led him to Woody
Allen's "Broadway Danny Rose," in which
that dark-haired woman and a few of her parrots appeared
fleetingly among Rose's novelty acts. The credits
gave her name: Alba Ballard.
It turned out that wasn't her only brush
with fame. Mrs. Ballard and her feathered troupe were
return guests on David Letterman's television show
in the mid-1980's. Before that, in an early "Saturday
Night Live" skit, Bill Murray played an NBC executive
crowing about the network's new season, with the motto,
"We're more fun than the other guys." As
proof, he showed brief clips of shows, all featuring
Mrs. Ballard's costumed parrots and cockatoos in scenes
from films like "Lawrence of Arabia" and
invented sitcoms like "The Pizza Guys."
Then there was an early 90's appearance
on a Long Island cable show, "The Family Pet."
Through that show's host, Mr. Svenson reached Mrs.
Ballard's husband, Marvin, in Huntington. He learned
that Mrs. Ballard had died in 1994, and that aside
from the scraps he had gathered, scant evidence remained
of her charmingly offbeat art.
From "Mrs. Ballard's Parrots"
by Arne Svenson (Harry N. Abrams)
One of Alba Ballard's parrots takes a memo |
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Mr. Svenson's new book,
"Mrs. Ballard's Parrots," being
published this month by Harry N. Abrams,
is intended to restore some luster to
her flickering star. Along with reproducing
those wacky snapshots, it tells her story.
Her early years sound like Fellini's "La
Strada." She was born Alba Spinetto
near Venice in 1928, the sixth child of
a variety-theater family that sang, danced
and clowned as Compagnia Spinetto.
Even as a girl she showed an aptitude
for training animal acts, including a
baby wolf she named Bobi. Surviving years
of hardship during World War II and afterward,
she met Marvin Ballard, an American engineer,
in Vicenza, where they married and had
a son, Claudio, in 1958. They moved to
the United States in 1963 and settled
in Huntington, in the house where her
husband and son still live.
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Never having lost her taste
for show business, Mrs. Ballard began acquiring
and training birds in the mid-60's. Soon she
was fashioning little costumes of felt and fabric
scraps, complete with tiny hands and feet. Her
husband and son were enlisted to build sets
and props; Marvin shot the photos and some 16-millimeter
filmstrips. It was his film of an elaborately
staged moon landing, with a parrot astronaut,
that attracted "Saturday Night Live."
Before long, her menagerie had
taken over the household; at its peak, her son
recalled in a recent interview, they had to
build two extensions and a backyard aviary to
hold some 200 birds. He said the neighbors never
minded: "People used to come over all the
time. It was like going to a zoo without having
to go to the Bronx."
After meeting his mother on the
set of "Broadway Danny Rose," he said,
"Mia Farrow would come to the house and
bring her kids. It was pretty cool."
While Mrs. Ballard and her birds
achieved only minor celebrity in television
and on film, they were long-standing favorites
with Long Island hospitals and children's charities,
where they cheered up patients with impressions
of famous figures from Little Red Riding Hood
to Madonna. Her son, who often acted as her
assistant, proudly recalls one autistic adult
who amazed his doctors when he burst into laughter
during the show.
Sadly, after Mrs. Ballard's death,
"it was too much trauma for my dad to keep
it all around," he said. The birds were
sold or given away to friends; the sets, costumes
and film tossed out in the trash.
Had that little box of snapshots
not intrigued Mr. Svenson, Claudio readily admits,
his mother's legacy might have been lost for
good.
Mr. Svenson characterizes the
book as a kind of forensic reconstruction of
an eccentric woman's idiosyncratic quest for
stardom. "To me this is much more than
just a bunch of silly snapshots," he said
in a recent interview. "Alba wanted to
be famous and respected as an entertainer. I
want to make Alba known for this work. It's
marvelous - but marvelously difficult to accept
as art."
He argues that Mrs. Ballard created
more than just a neo-vaudeville novelty act,
that she was an accidental Cindy Sherman, "playing
dress-up and staging reality as an art form,
even though it was her birds she was dressing
up, not herself."
Ms. Sherman evidently agrees.
In a blurb for the book, she declares, "When
I'm really old and can't use myself anymore,
this is what I'll be doing."
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