Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  And so, for a movement that had moved far beyond polite critique, the book was most remarkable for its irrelevance. This in itself was a first in Susan’s work. But “there is no evidence,” one scholar wrote, “to suggest that AIDS and Its Metaphors was used in the AIDS- or gay-activist movements, in spite of this being the closest to a gay-rights book Sontag would produce.”33 The general reaction was a shrug.

  Chapter 32

  Taking Hostages

  Susan spent the fall of 1989 in Berlin, where she began writing The Volcano Lover, the novel she had long dreamed of, the first she would complete since Death Kit. But work was overwhelmed by world events. On November 9, she and Karla were at her friend Alf Bold’s cinema; Susan, Karla, and Alf walked out to find their eyes stinging from tear gas. While they were watching the film, the East German authorities had announced that the Berlin Wall would be opened. After twenty-eight years of enforcing the border with land mines and machine guns, the East German police were still confused. “Some people were looking a little too happy, so they lobbed some tear gas,” said Karla. “Susan thought it was loads of fun.”1 For those who dreamed of a wall-less world, that night seemed like a triumph.

  Susan would soon enjoy a triumph of her own in an area where she had never been successful before: money. Her windfall had three sources. The first was the eight-hundred-thousand-dollar contract with FSG. The second was a MacArthur Fellowship, a quarter of a million dollars as well as health insurance, dispensed over five years, starting in 1990. These fellowships had “no strings attached,” since their recipients were not required to do anything in exchange for the money. The same could not be said of the third and most opulent source of all: Annie Leibovitz.

  * * *

  Money allowed Susan, for the first time in her life, to buy an apartment. This had been a priority since the fire, and even before the MacArthur she had made up her mind to buy something. She had long hoped to be selected for the fellowship, and often talked about it—especially because she heard on several occasions that she had been considered, and passed over. Later, she learned why: she had been blackballed by a member of the board, Saul Bellow, who loathed Sontag personally and had a long record of opposing grants to women and “militant blacks.”2

  After visiting several apartments with Peter Perrone, Susan grew bored. “It’s like shopping for sour milk,” she told Karla. Peter continued the search without her and helped her narrow the choice to two. One was a gigantic loft in SoHo, the neighborhood where she had been living, five thousand square feet that would have given her ample space for her library. The other was a penthouse in London Terrace, a building that spanned an entire block in Chelsea, with broad views of the Hudson and the Empire State Building and marble fireplaces in tall rooms. The choice these two apartments offered was less between houses than between sensibilities, lives, as Susan instantly understood.

  “I don’t know which one to choose,” she told Perrone, “because the loft in SoHo is literally choosing the life of a monk or a scholar and the place in London Terrace is quite different.” The loft was not especially stylish. “It just had a ton of space,” Perrone said. “It was going to be about her books and her work and inner life and dedication. London Terrace was really quite glamorous, and conjured up a different persona.”3 The choice of masks, of selves, was never easy, but there was no doubt as to which she would elect.

  She would spend the rest of her life at London Terrace. A few months later, another penthouse in the same complex became available, and Annie moved in. London Terrace was not all glamour. Chelsea was still gentrifying, and the buildings were located near some rough public housing projects. The buildings were old, with weeds on the terraces and cracks in the paving tiles.4 But the arrival of Sontag and Leibovitz signaled the direction the neighborhood was headed, and the direction their relationship was headed. “I’m reading Against Interpretation—and I find myself smiling inside—that I can carry you with me—I can read you and feel you—you are so very special,” Annie wrote from a plane in June 1989. “How can I love you more. How can I love you better—”5

  * * *

  “I was never a child!” Susan had exclaimed in her journals, decades before. Now, with Annie, she seemed to be reverting to a childhood she never had. In so many of her “feudal” relationships, she had been looking for a parent more than for a lover. “She was just this charming, beautiful child inside,” said Annie. “She had such delight with life and everything.”6 The word “child” appears in many descriptions of Susan at this time. When Karla Eoff left on a weekend when Susan had stayed home working, she would be astonished, when she returned on Monday, by how unable Susan was to take basic care of herself. “She would have on the same clothes, and would not have bathed, brushed her teeth, anything, like a child.”7

  Annie seemed to be the perfect mother. By the end of the eighties, flush with millions from Vanity Fair and a series of high-profile advertising campaigns, she could offer a life unthinkable only a few years before, when Susan had been cowering beneath a plastic tarp on King Street. Annie was not only rich: she was lavishly, overwhelmingly generous. And she wanted to take care of Susan. “I wanted to make everything possible for her, whatever she needed. I felt like a person who is taking care of a great monument.”8

  She wanted to buy her time to work. “I loved Susan,” she said. “I thought she was a great artist, and it made me really happy to do those things for her.”9 Annie offered comforts Susan could never have possibly afforded. As what began with flowers blossomed into a subsidy of every aspect of Susan’s life, Annie’s largesse became the subject of amazed comment. There were the car services, and the first-class tickets, and the private chef Annie sent to Susan’s apartment, and the maid she paid to clean it—and the apartment itself, for which she was soon paying: first “just” the maintenance, thirty-five hundred dollars a month, and eventually the mortgage, too, and the studio she rented for Susan in the grand Police Building on Centre Street, an apartment with its own entrance and elevator, where Susan could work on her novel—“She did start to work on her fiction when she had some help and support,” said Annie, “and that was exciting”10—and then the office in the building on Vandam Street where Annie had her studio. These outposts would expand, over the years, to places that Annie owned but that were available to Susan: a house in the Hudson Valley and a dream of Susan’s, a splendid apartment on the banks of the Seine. There were magnificent vacations, an entirely new wardrobe, endless gifts.11

  And Annie was not only supporting Susan. Directly but more often indirectly, she was supporting everyone around Susan. She paid all of Susan’s assistants. And through Susan, quite a lot of Annie’s money found its way to David, “down to buying Susan’s Christmas present to him of Navajo bracelets every year.”12 Annie supported Nicole, impoverished following the death of her spendthrift father in 1984: “I would just call Annie and say, ‘Nicole needs some money,’ and she would send it,” Karla said.13 One duty of Susan’s next assistant, Greg Chandler, was depositing Annie’s checks. After the MacArthur ran out, these amounted to fifteen thousand dollars per week. Their accountant estimated that over the course of their relationship Annie gave Susan at least eight million dollars.14

  * * *

  If it is easy to understand the appeal of such generosity, their love affair—the longest of Susan’s life—would be expressed in a language that many watching from the outside found hard to decipher. From early on, Susan gave the impression of wanting to get away from the relationship, and her discomfort burst into full public view. She began to fire a rat-a-tat of invective at Annie, said Richmond Burton, “like a little machine gun.”15

  “It was this hectoring, condescending, mildly outraged superior voice,” said Stephen Koch. Richard Howard remembered a constant litany of attacks on Annie—“You’re so dumb, you’re so dumb”—that caused him to all but end a friendship of decades. The first time Karla heard Susan use the word “stupid”—Susan’s central accusation—“
tears just started flowing almost immediately. It was like a child and an abusive mother.”16 Joan Acocella, who wrote a profile of Susan for The New Yorker in 2000, had never seen anything like it.

  People couldn’t bear to be at dinner when she was with Annie because she was so sadistic, so insulting, so cruel. Of course, the person who came off looking bad was not Annie. Susan would say something about Artaud then she’d say to Annie, “Well, you wouldn’t understand who that is.” It was just unbelievable. It was just an absolutely unbelievable performance and it replayed itself every single time you saw them together.17

  “They were the worst couple I’ve ever seen in terms of unkindness, inability to be nice, held resentments,” said David, who was no friend of Annie’s. “I said to [Susan] more than once, ‘Look, either be nicer to her or leave her.’”18 He said to Michael Silverblatt, a close friend of Susan’s in the nineties: “This woman that you admire so highly and you love and adore—you countenance her behavior with Annie. She becomes vicious and loud and violent and vulgar.”19

  On the day Silverblatt met Annie, Susan told him that “she felt obliged to explain that Annie would be the stupidest person I’d ever met.” Just as often, she would trash her to her face. Annie was sitting right next to her when Susan said to Marilù Eustachio: “This one”—signaling Annie with a dismissive wave—“doesn’t understand a thing.”20 As Annie stood by, she would gush to another photographer: “You’re the only interesting photographer in America.”21

  “It might have been Susan’s birthday at L’Ami Louis,” Burton said, referring to a famously overpriced restaurant in Paris. “Susan’s abuse would really cast a pall. It was hard not to have the experience ruined.”22 The first Christmas in London Terrace, Annie threw a lavish dinner at the new apartment. Roger and Dorothea Straus came, and Peter Perrone, and David and his girlfriend, and Karla Eoff, and perhaps a half-dozen others. When the servers brought around the appetizer, Susan saw that it had shrimp in it, stood up, threw her napkin down, and shouted at Annie: “How stupid could you be? David is allergic to shellfish! How could you be so stupid?”

  Annie ran out. Karla found her sobbing on Susan’s bed. “What do I have to do?” she asked. “How am I supposed to read people’s minds? I didn’t know David was allergic to shellfish.” After a few minutes, she pulled herself together: “I’m going to call some other restaurant, and I’m going to go out myself and get David a fucking appetizer that won’t kill him.” She ordered her car and returned with a takeout box she set down in front of David. “I’m so terribly sorry that I almost made you ill,” she said. “It was not my intention.”23

  * * *

  When she was in charge, Annie herself could be tyrannical. As her prominence grew, so did her staff, and with it her notoriety. “She had a bad reputation among assistants, throwing magazines at them, screaming, embarrassing them in public, on the shoots,” said one assistant, Christian Witkin. “The intimidation, the signals she sent out: she’ll go for the throat.”24 Still, her employees were well paid, their roles defined, and they were free to leave.

  By all accounts Annie was kind to friends and family—and she was kind to Susan. Susan was the opposite. She was at her best with “casual intimacy,” whispering a confession to a starstruck young writer, visiting a museum with a friend she saw once a year. But when new friends crossed the line from acquaintanceship into intimacy, they often found themselves susceptible to bullying. Annie herself loved Susan enough to endure the sniping. “I would have done anything,” she said.25

  Annie behaved toward Susan exactly as Susan behaved toward any woman—Harriet, Irene, Carlotta—who loved her less than she did. The distinction between kindness and groveling, between generosity and appeasement, between letting bygones be bygones and masochism, was one Susan herself had always had trouble respecting. One friend, Vincent Virga, whose partner was a recovering alcoholic, saw Annie’s response as typical:

  She had this almost childish behavior—not childlike, childish—which addicts have. And Annie was Susan’s hostage. It reminded me of a line in Al-Anon: “We don’t have lovers. We take hostages.”26

  Soon after Greg Chandler started working for Susan, he was in a car, returning from an opening of Richmond Burton’s paintings. When, in the middle of an innocuous conversation about the evening, Annie made a tiny grammatical mistake, Susan exploded: “You know, maybe if you’d gone to college, you would know that that makes you sound like an utter fool!”

  A few days later, I went to Annie’s studio and saw how Annie was at work: just like Susan, very bossy, very in control, very demanding, very grumpy. All these people at her beck and call—and yet, with Susan, a child.27

  * * *

  “You’re good but you could be better,” Susan told Annie when they met. The appeal fell on attentive ears: “I wanted to do better things, take Photograph that matter.”28 Like Susan’s, her success came from insecurity transfigured into perfectionism. Both were tyrannical toward others, and more so toward themselves. Much of their success had been in finding the right teachers—masters—to help them improve. When Annie came to Vanity Fair, having outgrown the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll of Rolling Stone, she vowed to “shake this reputation as the girl who gets people to undress.”29 And when she met Susan, she hoped to take the next step, and—with the help of the great photography critic—move from the newsstand to the museum wall.

  She wanted Susan’s help in learning to take “Photograph that matter.” Susan offered that help, as she did to many others who entered her life in those years. For many, she was a guru: the professor who insisted you read more, the older sister who dragged you to foreign films, the sophisticated restaurant-goer who introduced you to exotic dishes. Her enthusiasm for culture, and her eagerness to share it, was genuine; but she was not always able to distinguish the relationship between teacher and student from the relationship between master and slave.

  When they first met, Annie expressed her eagerness to take the inferior position. She told Susan she was the smartest woman she knew, and that she was intimidated by her intellectual prowess.30 At first, as Susan had spurred Mildred to read Henry James, Susan insisted that Annie read. “She wanted her to read all these books,” said Virga. “She was trying to educate her.” Soon, she grew frustrated with the pace of Annie’s evolution, and began to condescend to this otherwise formidable woman: her ignorance of Balzac was often mentioned, loudly and in public. If Susan admired the unschooled intelligence of Irene Fornés and Paul Thek, she could not find the same admiration for Annie’s.

  She was still trying to shape the ideal companion for whom she had longed since childhood, and behaved toward Annie as she had toward her sister: “She thought I didn’t meet my potential,” Judith remembered, “and let me know it in spades.” She let Annie know it, too. Though their friends were sometimes appalled by Susan’s behavior, the one person who mattered—Annie herself—was not. “I needed to be more serious, period,” she said.31

  Susan thought she was being helpful, including in the area of feelings and emotions. Michael Silverblatt once asked Susan why she stayed with a person she constantly badmouthed. “You have to understand,” Susan told him. “Annie has slept with Mick Jagger. Annie has slept with just about every man she’s ever photographed when she was working for Rolling Stone.” She asked Silverblatt if he had heard the term “fuck buddies,” which she had learned from Annie. He was surprised she had never heard such a common term.

  “I had to teach Annie what emotions are. We’re not fuck buddies, and that’s something that Annie as far as I know stopped, but I couldn’t be with someone who has fuck buddies.” Susan saw her job as to teach Annie what Susan believed were the emotions, the human emotions.32

  Jamaica Kincaid had said that Susan wanted to be a good mother in the way one might want to be a great actress; Susan herself confessed that she had no talent for love; Steve Wasserman sensed “a little war among the many little wars that were going on simultaneously within h
er,” a war between two concepts of love. There was one she believed intellectually, and another she believed emotionally:

  One was a desire to be a loving person and to be generous, and the other was a person who had a very self-suffocating and constraining view of love, the opposite of the John Lennon view. The John Lennon view is the love you give is the love you get. Love is the expanding art. It’s not like you have only a finite amount of love and you give a little bit away and you have less for everybody else. That’s not the way it works. I think she thought it does work that way. That if I give you love, I have less for myself.33

  In The Mind of the Moralist, Susan described the sexuality that Freudian therapy strove to overcome. “Power is the father of love” in a connection that includes “the parental fact of domination.” For children, parental authority is essential. But if not purged in adulthood, this form of love can descend into sadomasochism. The mature person will therefore evolve beyond “the sadistic conception of coitus” to achieve “an ideal love purged of parental influences, an exchange of equals.” As a young woman, she clearly enunciated this goal. But as she entered the last phase of her life it eluded her still.

  * * *

  Susan was so wise in so many respects that her inability to understand her effect on others baffled those around her. At least since college, bewildered friends had argued about whether she was intentionally malicious, and many concluded that she was simply unable to see her effect on others. “It was not because she wanted to hurt people,” said her old friend Martie Edelheit, who had wondered at the phenomenon ever since Chicago. “It was that she simply was oblivious.”34