Reporting: The Invisible Observer

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This self-effacement accompanies her on her professional rounds. Her reportorial technique is that of the sound camera, neutrally and exhaustively recording the scene. In any Ross article, the author does her best to become totally invisible; the reader takes her place as observer. "The Hemingway profile was a Rorschach test for people," says Reporter Ross. "People found in it what they were looking for." "She was so unobtrusive on The Red Badge of Courage set that you could feel it," says Bill Mauldin, who had a bit part in the picture. "John Huston and a lot of the other guys fancied themselves as raconteurs and were always telling jokes. Lillian would tag along every time, practically in lock step, filling up her notebook, and when the point came, she'd say, 'I don't get it. Please explain.' After a little of that, all joke telling stopped."

Curious Restriction. By choice, Reporter Ross declines assignments that do not interest her; she avoids subjects who show the least resistance to holding still. And even where the landscape is expansive, she applies a curiously restrictive principle. "In my work I don't make judgments of people," she says. "I think you should let them be the way they are."

Whether they are what they are is what brings on the argument. For what they are is how they were observed, and therefore judged, by Lillian Ross.