There’s only one photo that exists from Jeb Bush’s 1974 wedding to his wife, Columba, and it’s all because of Frank Zappa.
The former Florida governor posted a smiling pic of him and his blushing bride on Twitter on Monday to mark the couple’s 41st anniversary:
Happy anniversary to my beautiful wife of 41 years, Columba. pic.twitter.com/70yJ0riIhn
— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) February 23, 2015
But the potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate didn’t exactly have a trove of photos from his big day to choose from, after his brother suffered from a snapshot snafu.
Marvin Bush served as the official photographer for the ceremony. In an excerpt in Doro Bush Koch’s tome, “My Father, My President: A Personal Account of the Life of George H.W. Bush,” first highlighted by Time and penned by Marvin Bush, he writes he was processing the wedding pictures in a darkroom when he realized “I had rerolled previously used film that had been taken at a Frank Zappa concert… Every single photo of the Bush and Garnica families had either a photo of Frank Zappa and/or members of his band, the Mothers of Invention, superimposed onto their own images.”
Bush says that he remembers thinking that while a “Frank Sinatra photo may have been acceptable,” pics of the “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” singer…not so much.
The Zappa goof “marked the end” of Bush’s photography career, he writes. Fortunately, Bush’s mother managed to capture a sole photo of her son and his new wife with her Kodak pocket Instamatic camera that day.
And there was a slight silver lining for Marvin Bush too: “I submitted a picture of the bride and groom (yes, with Zappa) in an art show at school. I called the picture something clever like ‘Zappa’s Bride’ and won third prize in the photography category.”
