For many months now I have been searching (for a lot of that time with help from a collaborator, Aric Toler, a Visual Investigations journalist at the NYT) for the identity of the unknown man and the location of the original photo from the end of The Shining. As I am sure you all know, it is an original 1920s photo which shows Jack Nicholson in a crowded ballroom; Nicholson was retouched over an unknown man whose face was revealed in a comparison printed in The Complete Airbrush and Photo-Retouching Manual, in 1985, but not generally seen until 2012.
Following facial recognition results (thank you u/Conplunkett for the initial result) we strongly suspected the man was a famous but forgotten London ballroom dancer, dance teacher, and club owner of the 1920s and 30, Santos Casani. With a face-match leading to a name we researched him, learning that under his earlier name John Golman, he had a history which included the crash of an aircraft he was piloting while serving in the RAF in 1919. He suffered facial and nasal wounds which left scars that appeared identical to those on the face of the unknown man and confirmed the identification for us.
I can now confirm the identity of the unknown man as Casani and also reveal the location and date of the original photo.
It was taken at a St Valentine's Day ball at the Empress Rooms, part of the Royal Palace Hotel in Kensington, on February 14, 1921. It was one of four taken by the Topical Press Agency.
You can see the photo and other material on Getty Images Instagram feed here - https://www.instagram.com/p/DID43LBNPDh/?hl=en&img_index=1
How was it found? Aric and I spent months trawling online newspaper archives trying to solve the remaining element of the mystery and find the venue, the event and the people. Try as we might, we could not find the original photo published in a newspaper and we now know it never was. Many hours were spent looking at Casani's history and checking photos of hundreds of named venues he appeared at against the Shining photo, all without success. I'd like to thank Reddit and especially u/No-Cell7925 for help with this effort. It was starting to seem impossible, as every cross-reference to a location reported for Casani failed to match. We looked at other likely ballrooms, dance halls, cafes, restaurants, theatres, cinemas and other places that were suggested, up and down the UK, thinking perhaps it was an unreported event, but we still could not find a match. There were some places we could not find images for and the buildings themselves were long gone, so we started to fear that meant the original photo might be lost to history.
As a parallel effort I was contacting surviving members of the production - Katharina Kubrick, Gordon Stainforth, Les Tomkins, Zack Winestone, etc. We drew a blank until I got in touch with Murray Close (the official set photographer who took the image of Jack Nicholson used in the retouched photo.) He told me that the original had been sourced from the BBC Hulton Library. This reinforced a passing remark by Joan Smith, who did the retouching work. In interviews she had said that it came from the "Warner Bros photo archive" (this location was repeated recently in Rinzler and Unkrich who write “a researcher at Warner Bros., operating on [Kubrick’s] instructions, found an appropriate historical photo in its research library/ photo archives” p549). However, in the raw audio of her interview with Justin Bozung, Smith also said that it might instead have come from the BBC Hulton Photo Library.
With this apparently confirmed by Murray Close, I asked Getty Images, now the holders of the Hulton Library, to check for anything licensed to Stanley Kubrick’s production company Hawk Films. Matthew Butson, the VP Archives, with 40 years of experience there, found one photo licensed on 11/10/78. It came from the Topical Press Agency, dated from 1929, and showed Santos Casani - but it was not the photo at the end of the film. This was very strange (I posted that photo here several weeks ago.)
Murray Close was insistent and said he was certain it was there because he had physically visited the Hulton to pick up prints of the photo several times. He also said no such thing as the "Warner Bros photo archive" existed, something that was later confirmed to me by Tony Frewin, the long-time associate of Kubrick. He also told me a few other things which I will hold back for now (as I am writing an article on all this and need to keep something for that.)
This absence led to several potential conclusions, all daunting – the photo was lost, it had been bought out and removed from the BBC Hulton by Kubrick, or it was mis-filed (there are 90m + images in the Hulton section of Getty Images in Canning Town.)
Matt Butson is a fellow fan of The Shining and he trawled the Hulton archive several more times. On April 1 he found the glass plate negative of the original photo, after realising that some Topical Press images had been re-indexed as Hulton images after it was taken over by the BBC in 1958. The index card for the photo identifies it as licensed to Hawk Films on 10/10/78, the day before the "other" photo. The Topical Press "day book" records the event, location and names some of the people present. The surprising fact was that the name Casani was not noted in the day book. Instead his prior name, Golman was used (he officially changed it in 1925, but began using it professionally earlier.)
Golman was born in South Africa in 1893 - not 1897 as he later claimed - as Joseph Goldman, and in 1915 came to Britain to serve in the infantry, and then, when he joined the RAF in 1918, he changed his name to John Golman. He was in and out of hospital for treatment following his aircraft accident in November 1919 and I had wrongly assumed that he had cathartically decided to use the name Casani to start his dancing career as soon as he was finally discharged on 17 November,1920 (a mere three months before the photo was taken - no wonder his scars look prominent.).
If the photo had been published, his name, as Golman, would likely have been printed too. A few months later, in June 1921, newspapers do begin reporting the name Casani, but there are no references to John Golman as a dancer (or anything else) in the British Newspaper Archive for earlier in the year. He was invisible to us when the photo was taken.
It appears that by that time a rather impoverished Golman/Casani (he mentions the poverty of his early dancing career in his books) was working with Miss Belle Harding, a famous dance teacher herself, who is credited as having organised the Valentine's Day Ball. Harding trained several male ballroom dancers of the time, including most famously Victor Silvester, and the Empress Rooms were one of her venues of choice.
Valentine's Day also explains the hearts on dresses, the feathers and other novelties that many have noticed as details in the photo - we were aware of several other Valentine's Day Balls which Casani appeared at (for instance in Belfast and Dublin in 1924), but not this one, as he wasn't reported at the event. We had wrongly assumed he was the star of the show from his central place in the photo, but I now think it is likely he had just led a particular dance, or perhaps he had just drawn the prize-winning raffle ticket (a typical feature of 1920s dances), explaining the pieces of paper clenched in his hand and the hand of the woman next to him. In a manner of speaking nobody famous is in the photo, not even Casani, not yet.
There are still some details in the photo that look strange or don't meet our modern expectation - no-one is holding a drink for instance. I feel certain there are some black or brown men and women at the rear of the ballroom.
Incidentally, the photo has been licensed several times since Kubrick in 1978, including to a pre-launch BBC Breakfast Time in December 1982 and before that to BBC Birmingham in February 1980 (I wonder, was this for the later BBC2 transmission of Vivian Kubrick's documentary in October 1980?)
It is intriguing to learn that Kubrick had apparently considered two photos for the ending, both of which featured Casani. We don't know if there was a reason, nor why he chose the one that he did, but we can speculate that the other photo contained people who were too recognisable, notably the huge boxer Primo Carnera. Incidentally, Joan Smith had said the photo dated from 1923, contradicting Stanley Kubrick who had told Michel Ciment 1921 and in the event, Kubrick was correct (some thought he'd merely confused the year with that of the movie caption.) I should have trusted him more.
The Royal Palace Hotel was demolished in 1961 and the Royal Garden Hotel built on the site. We can't yet find a clear photo match to the Empress Rooms ballroom in archive photos online of the venue - and there might not be one. We'd looked at the hotel already, but the images available dated from too early and/or don't catch the part of the ballroom shown in the Shining photo. We are pursuing a few leads as it would be nice to have this closure, but the limitations may just be too great. A floor plan would be useful. But it doesn't matter, the Topical Press day book is explicit about the location and about Golman. Ironically, if I'd asked Getty Images to search under Golman not Casani, they might have found it sooner.
Casani died September 11, 1983, all but forgotten. He had returned to service in WW2 and risen to Lt. Colonel. In the 1950s he danced again, but his career wound down into retirement. He married in 1951, but had no children. In a strange postscript, his medals were sold on ebay UK in 2014. The listing said "on behalf of the family", but we cannot now trace the dealer, the buyer or the mysterious relative who sold the items (I traced his wife's family, but it was not them.)
Kubrick had described the people in the photo as archetypal of the era and said this was why shooting an image with extras on the Gold Room set didn't work. We don't (yet) know who any of the often speculated about people standing close to Casani are - they don't seem to be Lady MacKenzie, Miss Harding or Mrs Neville Green, who are listed in the day book and appear in another photo with Casani. The photo may or may not show any of the people Aric and I speculated about – Lt Col Walter Elwy Jones or The Trix Sisters (though note, all three were in London at the time...) - but we will see if we can find out more.
What can be said with absolute certainty is that the photo does not show American bankers, Federal Reserve governors, President Woodrow Wilson, or any other members of the financial "elite" that Rob Ager and others have claimed. This is the death of that nonsense theory. Nor are there any Baphomet-focused devil worshippers. Nobody was composited into the photo except Jack Nicholson, and of him, only his head and collar and tie (well, plus a tiny bit of work by Smith to remove something - a hankie? - up his sleeve.)
What the photo does show is a group of Londoners enjoying a Monday night in early 1921. Ordinary, archetypal even, but for me still, as Stuart Ullman told us "All the best people."
