Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  Not everyone was so lucky. For Annie, the turning point came in the summer of 1975, when she accompanied the Rolling Stones on their Tour of the Americas.

  The band was rehearsing at Andy Warhol’s place in Montauk, at the end of Long Island, and I went out there for a month or so, and then there was a break, and then the tour started in June. I was very naïve. . . . At the time, I thought that the way to get the best work was to become a chameleon. . . . I did everything you’re supposed to do when you go on tour with the Rolling Stones. It was the first time in my life that something took me over.27

  She came back a different person. If everybody did drugs, everybody agreed that there was something different about the Stones, said Lazin:

  The Grateful Dead did tons of drugs, so many drugs they couldn’t tour Europe. But the Stones, there’s something more evil—I mean really evil—about that whole scene. People died. Hanging out with those people for an extended period of time just fucked her up. It wasn’t just the drugs, it was sex, and drugs, and deviltry, and evilness, and horribleness. I don’t know what she was subjected to, but when she came back she was a different person. She just got weirder and weirder the more drugs she did, and by that first year in New York, ’77, ’78, she was completely fucked up.28

  In seduction mode, she did what she needed to please. “In the beginning,” said Karen, “she would do fucking anything to get the picture. Sometimes it was very demeaning. She’d take whatever shit they wanted to deal out.” This was the Faustian bargain that made Annie successful. “The problem,” Karen told her, “is that you deal in casual intimacy, and you’re brilliant at it. But there’s a price, because what you’ve seen is so horrible.”

  * * *

  Like Susan, Annie was publicly unflappable. Those who knew her were not fooled.

  “Annie was extremely fragile,” said Black, “and she was always afraid that she wouldn’t be able to put herself together again. Hysterical fits in the office, throwing things, not being aware of what was going on.” These were years of feverish work. “I don’t know how much more frenzied it can get,” she said in 1973. “But the speed at which I operate, I put on myself.”29 She had the same need to prove herself that Susan did, “wanting to take the next great picture,” said Eccles.

  She felt an intense responsibility to take the greatest picture of this person that can be taken. Certain doctors probably work that way. Like if there were a saving-someone’s-life version of a photograph.30

  Her relentless drive was exploited by her boss, Jann Wenner, whom Black called “a very shrewd and evil judge of character.” Annie, Jann, and his wife, Jane, formed a triangle. “It was very, very intense and impregnable,” said Black. “There was no way you could enter that triangle.” Annie became their child: “It was a family in which she was the only child,” said Mullarkey. “That was part of it, plus the drugs. They were so available. You could do anything you want. There was no judgment call.” In later years, Annie never referred to Jann and Jane by name: she called them “them.”31

  Jann saw Annie’s insecurity as a key to controlling her. “He’d play on the fact that ‘Without me you wouldn’t have gone anywhere,’” said Mullarkey. “‘Without me you wouldn’t have happened.’” The manipulation was all the more effective because it came with encouragement and opportunity. “You’re going to be the greatest photographer in the world,” he would say. And it came with a stunning amount of space. On the cover of the tenth anniversary issue, only two names appeared: Hunter S. Thompson and Annie Leibovitz. She was given fifty full pages, a retrospective of a decade of work. “No writer has appeared in Rolling Stone as often,” Black wrote.32 By then, she had shot an astounding fifty-eight covers.

  * * *

  In 1977, the year of the tenth anniversary, Rolling Stone moved to New York, and Bea Feitler came in to design Annie’s fifty-page portfolio. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1938, only two years after her Jewish parents arrived as refugees from Frankfurt, Bea came to New York to study at Parsons. She returned to Brazil after her studies, where she made a name at the epochal magazine Senhor, including designing covers for the issues that first published Clarice Lispector’s stories.33 But she returned to New York in 1961, eventually becoming art director of Harper’s Bazaar. A decade later, she became one of the founders of the feminist magazine Ms.

  “Annie was always looking for a strong female person in her life who would be her work mother,” said Mullarkey. Like Jann before and Susan later, Bea offered the possibility of self-improvement:

  Bea was gorgeous, and very exotic, and blond hair, and was full of life, and had a great design sense, and could give her constructive criticism, and help mold her eye, how she saw what things would look like. She had a wonderful apartment on Central Park South, a fabulous apartment, scads of art books. She would take stuff out to show you, things she designed, books she had done, great photographers she’d worked with. Here was an opportunity.

  She had worked closely with Diane Arbus, and was a natural teacher. The Brazilian photographer Otto Stupakoff said that “she was the only art director I’ve known—and I’ve worked with hundreds—who felt a pedagogical responsibility toward her photographers.”34 Bea could speak to Annie with calm authority, Mullarkey said.

  She was firm and smart. That was something that gave comfort to Annie because she would yell at people to try to browbeat them. Bea didn’t need to yell. Annie was drawn to that because it was safety. It was a good reliable mother.35

  Their amorous relationship was brief, but it meant the end of Annie’s involvement with Jane, and a certain stability. Her drug use, however, continued, her behavior becoming increasingly notorious, even as she continued to produce work of the highest order. If, as a young person, she had claimed to want reality, she, like Susan, preferred the world seen at a remove, through her camera. “The substance of this business is what seems rather than what is,” she said. It was a phrase Susan might have quoted, with a cocked eyebrow, in On Photography. “I encourage people to take my vision for reality.”36

  As with Susan, the confusion of image with reality led her places from which more sensible people would have recoiled. Black remembered a shoot in 1978:

  Patti Smith had been doing a show in New Orleans. So Annie rented a warehouse. She wanted the wall of fire. She had read that the way they did it in movies was to weave a net of rope, heavy rope, and soak it in kerosene, and light it. It would be a solid wall of fire. She gets this built, and she puts Patti Smith in front of it, and then she lights it. Evidently Hollywood people have a much tighter weave on these ropes than she understood, and it all burned up in this enormous fire and Patti Smith was, like, first-degree burns on her backside—really, really hot, and she started sweating badly, and Annie was screaming: “Perfect! Perfect!”37

  * * *

  One of her great pictures, taken in 1981, shows a friend, the comedian John Belushi, standing beside a road. The image is formally perfect, its blues and greens as rich as on a Limoges enamel; but it is the expression on the bloated actor’s face, his defeated posture, and the lights of onrushing traffic that make it so grimly prophetic: he would overdose a few months later.

  Belushi was killed by a speedball, a mixture of cocaine and heroin; and by the time he died, Annie had been using that same combination for several years. The two often did drugs together. Twice, she nearly died; both times, her dealers dropped her off in front of a hospital. The first time, the doctors saved her; the second time, the same doctor managed to save her again, but warned her: “If they drop you off a third time, I’m not going to bring you back.”38

  In Annie’s apartment in the Dakota, the building on Central Park West where she photographed John Lennon and Yoko Ono hours before his murder, Mullarkey happened upon a horrifying tableau: “blood on the wall, an arc of blood on the wall.” She sat in the living room for fifteen minutes trying to muster the courage to go into the other room and see if Annie was dead; when, at last, she did, and found Annie still ali
ve, Mullarkey called her father. “I don’t totally bust her, but I tell Sam: ‘She’s got this terrible cold. I am afraid it’s pneumonia. She just won’t go see the doctor. Could you come up? It’s really important.’”

  At last, Annie checked into rehab. When the first twenty-eight days were up, she signed up for another twenty-eight.

  * * *

  Annie needed her health for a new job. Vanity Fair had ceased publication in 1936, though had never entirely been left for dead: the masthead of Vogue, also published by Condé Nast, still read “Incorporating Vanity Fair.” Condé Nast’s owner, Si Newhouse, decided to revive Vanity Fair as a new kind of magazine: literary and political but with the glossy production values and the attention to fashion and society that might be at home in Vogue.

  Bea was brought in as art director, and she, in turn, brought in Annie. But Bea had been diagnosed with a rare cancer in 1979. Though rapid intervention seemed to save her, the cancer metastasized. In September 1981, a month after her second operation, she began working on Vanity Fair, to be launched in March 1983. She finished the prototype and then returned to Rio, where, on April 8, 1982, she died in her mother’s bed. For Annie, it was a terrible loss, and when her book Photograph was published in 1983, it was dedicated to Bea.

  Bea was also a loss for Vanity Fair, which, despite all the publicity that accompanied its rebirth, struggled under its first two editors, Richard Locke and Leo Lerman. Without Bea’s leadership, the graphic design was muddled, stories stopping and starting with no sense of order. “There was too much time to overdesign it, and redesign it, and tear it up and redesign it again,” said Annie’s friend Lloyd Ziff; and its concept was criticized for being too highbrow for its intended readership: “sort of like The New York Review of Books becoming a magazine,” said Michael Shnayerson.39 Its eighth cover, in October 1983, featured Susan Sontag.

  That issue came out precisely as Tina Brown was being brought in from London as the new editor. Not yet thirty, Brown had earned her reputation by saving the dying Tatler, and was tasked with doing the same for Vanity Fair. “The upside was that she brought this British sense of class,” said Sid Holt, who joined Rolling Stone the year Brown came to Vanity Fair. “The downside was that she brought this British sense of class.”40

  “Tina had a phrase,” said Shnayerson. “‘We want to be hot, hot, hot’—not just one hot but three. She was an equal opportunity celebrator of power and money and glamour”—the very Warholian ideal that made her magazine a symbol, if only in retrospect, of the Reagan years. Her first lieutenant, Annie Leibovitz, portrayed the most famous people in the world, but she did not simply show the already famous. She created celebrities. The Leibovitz portrait—far more than the Sontag blurb—conferred a status no other photograph could.

  Chapter 31

  This “Susan Sontag” Thing

  In March 1987, a little more than a year before she met Annie, a fire ravaged Susan’s apartment. In the summer of 1985, she had left Seventeenth Street and moved to an upper duplex at 36 King Street, in SoHo, where her fireplace shared a chimney with the next-door neighbors. The ancient fireplaces were intended to be simply ornamental—until new tenants pressed them into service, filling Susan’s bedroom with black smoke in the middle of the night: “Thank God I woke up,” she said. “Another five minutes . . .”1

  Susan’s library was safe, but the firefighters had to chop through the ceiling; and after the immediate danger had passed, she found herself roofless, sheltered by little more than a tarp, horrified to realize that she didn’t have enough money for a decent hotel. “I realized how unprotected I was,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t be so carefree about these things,” she thought. “You don’t discover you’re undefended until a brick falls on your head.”2

  The roof was repaired and the smoke damage scrubbed away. But the fire had other consequences, including ushering several people into—and out of—Susan’s life. Her friend Sharon DeLano, an editor at Vanity Fair who had long helped Susan with all sorts of practical matters, enlisted a young man named Peter Perrone to catalog her library so that it could be properly insured.

  “It was love at first sight,” he said, “and you’re suddenly in the tribe.” Peter would remain close to Susan until the end of her life. At the same time, Richmond Burton, a young painter from Alabama, joined the tribe, too, unpacking the books that had been saved from the fire. The first day he came to her house was the day of Andy Warhol’s funeral, and he found a memorial issue of Art in America on her kitchen counter. “What a horrible person he was,” she said as she looked at the cover. “Of course I’m not going to the funeral.”

  “I agree,” Burton said. “I’ve never liked his work. What do people see in it?”

  “Well . . . most people are stupid,” we practically said simultaneously.

  We were off and running.3

  But tribal membership was conditional even for stalwarts. The fire damage included her relationship with Roger Straus, one that had outlasted all her other close friendships. The break was not immediate and it was not complete, but anxiety about money led her to a literary agent for the first time. Andrew Wylie was highbrow enough for Susan: someone who could contend intellectually, and was compatible in other ways, too. Robert Silvers saw Susan as a series of poses; Annie Leibovitz described herself as a chameleon; Wylie described himself in the same way:

  I don’t have a very stable character of my own. I have a series of sort of borrowed personalities. So I think the reason why I can frequently represent someone successfully is, I am literally able not only to see the world from their perspective but actually to become them. So I know pretty accurately what they want because I have abandoned my former personality and climbed inside theirs. So if I spend a day and a half with Susan Sontag and you catch me at the end of the day, you’ll swear it’s Susan Sontag.4

  Wylie had a reputation for turning unprofitable but respectable literary writers into frontlist moneymakers. David had introduced them: at Wylie’s urging, David had left FSG. “It is because of his belief in me—stronger than my own at the time—that I became a writer,” David said.5 Belief in her son’s brilliance was always a sure way to earn Susan’s affection, but becoming a writer brought him even deeper onto Susan’s own terrain, and they both felt the rivalry, she wrote a friend in 1990:

  David is well, finally reconciled to being a writer, too, after all. He feels a little sorry for himself, very proud of himself, and more than a little competitive with me. Our relationship is, inevitably, a difficult one, and he will always be the love of my life.6

  In the year of the fire, he published Going to Miami: Tourists, Exiles, and Refugees in the New America. “Miami suffered from an inferiority complex,” said the bookseller Mitchell Kaplan, who met David at this time. “It was never really taken seriously. David got it right in so many different ways that the book is still in print.”7 He followed it with a series of books that had in common his interest in war.

  * * *

  When Susan met Wylie, she explicitly asked for help with Sontag-as-metaphor: “You have to help me stop being Susan Sontag,” she said. She needed, in other words, to delegate the demands of her public role in order to concentrate on her writing. She was “bursting” to work on a novel, “but I can’t because of this ‘Susan Sontag’ thing.”8

  Wylie would shield her from the ceaseless solicitations, and help her gain the financial security to ensure that she would never again sleep beneath a plastic tarp. In principle, there was no reason that her relationship with an agent needed to bring conflict with Roger. Roger, after all, loved Susan: more, according to Peggy Miller, than any other author. He had himself suggested that she get an agent, since the Farrar, Straus offices were not equipped to handle the volume of requests she received and made.9 Roger understood that the interests of publishers and authors were not always in perfect harmony: there was nothing novel about an author’s wanting to be paid more, and a publisher’s wanting to pay less.

&nb
sp; “By virtue of the way the relationship is structured,” said Wylie, “every writer has that feeling of gratitude declining into resentment.” The “paternalistic-publisher model” did indeed involve an imbalance of power.10 But in her comments about her relationship with Straus, it is hard not to conclude that it was not paternalism but its perceived lack that led to the conflict. “I’ve found a system of safe harbors, of feudal relationships, to ward off terror—to resist, to survive,” she had earlier written; and their relationship had been feudal in the extreme. For decades, he had supported her, directly or indirectly. He had published all her books. He had repeatedly given her advances for books that did not materialize. He had kept her books in print at home, and sold them widely abroad. He had paid her gas and light bills; he and Peggy had taken care of David when she was traveling; he gave David a prestigious job, and employed him for more than a decade.

  Yet in Susan and David’s telling, they were being exploited. After the fire, David said, “Roger was simply unresponsive. He could have given her some money. He never gave her a dime, and he underpaid her for her work.”11 But it is not clear what work she was being underpaid for. Eight long years had elapsed between Under the Sign of Saturn and AIDS and Its Metaphors, a book less than a hundred pages long. Despite her prestigious name, her books had never sold more than respectably. But Susan’s own expectations were revealing. “I’d had more than thirty years of work,” she told the Washington Post a few years later. “It’s not so much to own an apartment and have all your books out of storage and have time to write. These are not unreasonable demands; they’re not corrupt.”12