In the early spring of 1971, The Process held a celebration because it was finally out of debt. When it began in 1963, Robert borrowed a thousand pounds from his father as seed capital, and from that point till eight years later the organisation was never entirely debt-free.


The festivity in Chicago was held at the Inside Processeans' rented house, south of Hyde Park. We Messengers came down by cab, suitably awed to be invited to this inner sanctum, and Mother Mercedes welcomed us at the door. And as we entered, that was when I first saw Mary-Ann's picture, on the wall in a 4x6 inch frame, next to a much more familiar one of Robert. Apart from a bad profile shot in a newspaper, no-one outside The Process had ever seen her
likeness, and that included us Messengers.


Nobody else even mentioned it, but I did chat with Mercedes about it for a while, she remarking on how MA's face was changeable, like her moods.


I didn't see the photo again until I moved into the Toronto chapter later that year. It seemed so small, so enigmatic, and usually it reflected my own moods, which around that time began to get blacker. I could gaze at Robert's face in a Process magazine and enter in a silent colloquy with him. MA was opaque to me.


I didn't see the photo again until a Processean reunion in 1988, when it was a star attraction amid a wall display of old portraits. And that was it. I tried to obtain a copy twice before, but only yesterday did I finally obtain a scan.


I had two thoughts at first glance. One was that time's ravaging was erasing our visual heritage, and the other was that she was lovely back then. Perhaps more to the point, she was just plain young. I was 17 when I first heard her name, half her age at the time of the photo. She was always older, a true adult, possessed of great wisdom, or so I thought. Here she's still youthful.


The face is not classically proportioned, but there's a delicacy that belies her dreadful upbringing and turbulent youth. Yet she was not a woman that could be ignored.


There seems to be no protest in her face, which is not what I recall. It always seemed, in memory, to hold a fierce challenge, but that was as much me seeing myself in her as anything. Our old leaders were viewed as beings above the common run of things, and we projected onto them different parts of ourselves at different times. Here, I see confidence, but also a gentleness. Was this the woman, I wonder, of whom someone once said "My God, the things she'd say to people. She really had a mouth on her" ?


Yes, it was. Those knowing, feminine eyes above that delicately shaped nose belonged to a Queen bitch who chewed people into pulp at times. A couple of senior Processeans came to hate her, and virtually everyone feared her.


I knew a woman once who looked - looks - quite similar to MA. She became a close friend for a time, and in a bad patch after a relationship break-up I turned to her for a sympathetic ear. For whatever reasons, and they never were clear to me, she turned on me and threw the full force of her scorn and fury at me. The effect, because of my general state at the time, lasted a long time. As I tried to escape from that particular web, I wondered about such women as her and MA. I still do. But at least the incident clarified how MA herself impacted people. I was furious, but felt powerless to react.


At that reunion in 1988, one of the old hands attending stared at MA's picture. In the end, he remarked, "You know, what really bothers me is that she could walk in right now and probably do it to me all over again." She likely couldn't have, we later decided, but it was a moot point. She could read people like newspapers, turning their pages at will.


It was extremely hard to find this picture and get a scan, and it took me 40 minutes of futzing through error messages to get it up on this site in the Photos section. So she still has her power, I think, even though this photo must be 37 or 38 years old by now. And clearly, she still wants her privacy. Let her have it - she can't look much like this in 2005, so her secrecy isn't violated.


But her charisma endures. Or is it just my own nostalgia for a time when I believed in charisma, and a wisdom that others could confer on me? Whatever. I have a glass of wine to hand as I write this - here's to you, old gal, down all the days. You looked good.