Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  * * *

  Susan would be back at the White House five months later, on October 26, when Hillary Clinton invited her for the launch of Women, a book of Annie Leibovitz’s images of women from all walks of life. The book was Susan’s idea, and her introduction recasts her obsessions with looking and being looked at. “A man is, first of all, seen,” she wrote. “Women are looked at.” She discusses how women are praised, and condemned, for their beauty: “A primary interest in having Photograph of well-known beauties to look at over the years is seeing just how well or badly they negotiate the shame of aging.”24 And she mentions the final shot of Queen Christina, and how the diva’s very emptiness is the source of her power:

  Garbo asked the director, Rouben Mamoulian, what she should be thinking during the take. Nothing, he famously replied. Don’t think of anything. Go blank. His instruction produced one of the most emotion-charged images in movie history: as the camera moves in and holds on a long close-up, the spectator has no choice but to read mounting despair on that incomparably beautiful, dry-eyed, vacant face. The face that is a mask on which one can project whatever is desired is the consummate perfection of the looked-at-ness of women.25

  The book concludes with a portrait of her with the short white hair that grew back following her cancer treatment, and the huge letters on the cover give Leibovitz and Sontag equal billing. The names, and the essay, revealed Annie’s success in two campaigns. The first was to “shake this reputation as the girl who gets people to undress.” The second was to establish herself as a serious artist—with Susan Sontag’s imprimatur. Susan had never shied from advising Annie. Sometimes her advice was superfluous, if not mildly insulting—as when she insistently nudged Annie, on their Nile cruise, to look at the pyramids. (“That was slightly embarrassing,” said Howard Hodgkin.) And sometimes she expressed amazement at Annie’s visual talents, as when she first visited her apartment. “She really has an eye!” she exclaimed.26

  What a tyrant I am, Maryna did sometimes think. But he doesn’t seem to mind. He’s so kind, so patient, so husbandly. That was the true liberty, the true satisfaction of marriage, wasn’t it? That you could ask someone, legitimately demand of someone, to see what you saw. Exactly what you saw.27

  Like Maryna’s husband, Annie did her best to see exactly what Susan saw.

  You would go into a museum with her and she would see something she liked and she’d make you stand exactly where she stood when she looked at it, so that you could see what she was seeing. You couldn’t stand a little to the left or a little to the right. You had to stand exactly where she had stood.28

  “She told me I was good, but I could be better,” Annie said. “Because of her, I diversified and broadened my goals. Because of her, I went to Rwanda, to Sarajevo, and started taking things much more seriously.”29

  She was very, very tough. She was very hard to please. Ever since I met her, I tried to please her, but it didn’t always work. She was always raising the bar. . . . She was a very tough critic, but also a great admirer, my biggest fan.30

  Susan delighted in intervening on Annie’s behalf, and one of her interventions resulted in one of the most unforgettable magazine covers of the decade. Annie was commissioned to photograph the actress Demi Moore for the August 1991 issue of Vanity Fair. Moore was seven months pregnant, and Leibovitz posed her in profile, perfectly made up, clad in chunky diamonds—and nothing else. “The girl who gets people to undress” was up to her old tricks. But Tina Brown was leery of the image at a time when pregnant women—particularly when naked, particularly when so heavily eroticized—did not appear on the covers of magazines. Susan picked up the phone and convinced Brown to run it, and an estimated one hundred million people saw the cover, the bestselling issue in the history of Vanity Fair.31

  * * *

  In the wake of Susan’s second cancer, their relationship improved. Annie could take care of Susan in her illness; Susan could nudge Annie toward the museum. Each could mother the other. “She always tried to do something really spectacular for Susan on her birthday,” said Peter Perrone. “Susan became a little girl: someone was really remembering her birthday, and taking care of her on her birthday.”32 Annie’s friend Lloyd Ziff remembered romantic evenings by the fireplace in Annie’s country house in Rhinebeck, as Susan read Virginia Woolf out loud to the guests.

  Susan could lend Annie a high-culture respectability, but Annie could make Susan cool. Her magazine covers were seen by a hundred million people, most of whom had never heard of, much less read, Susan Sontag. If Susan despised much about the modern celebrity culture, she was not blind to the benefits of such a large potential audience. She told a friend that she had learned from Nicole Stéphane, who let herself disappear following her car accident, that “if you separate from the public eye, you vanish to it.”33

  And Annie’s response to Susan was trying to prove—and improve—herself. “She tried so hard with Susan, and when she was told to do things, it was like watching Eliza Doolittle,” said Oliver Strand, one of Susan’s last assistants. Where some saw cruelty, Annie saw encouragement. On Susan’s sixtieth birthday, when Annie took her on a cruise down the Nile, they snuck up the Great Pyramid. In order to catch the sunrise, they started at two in the morning, clambering over the huge stone blocks. “It was windy, and you felt like you were going to be blown right off,” said Annie. Halfway up, she had enough. I don’t really have to do the whole thing, she thought. “I really felt very comfortable not going anywhere.” But then Susan came whizzing past: “See you at the top!” Annie dutifully followed. “That was it in a nutshell. If Susan’s going to do it, I’ve got to get up there.”

  Inspiration remained Annie’s overwhelming memory of their relationship. “She was tough, but it all balanced out,” she said. “The good things far outweigh the bad things. We had so many great experiences together.”34

  Chapter 39

  The Most Natural Thing in the World

  We have just signed a contract with W. W. Norton to write a biography of you,” Susan read in March 1996, in a letter sent by a married couple, Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock. They had briefly crossed paths with Sontag during her trip to Poland in 1980. “Since then,” they wrote, “Carl has published biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer, Pablo Picasso (for young adults), and Rebecca West.”1

  Susan was shocked, but waited to sound the alarm. In August, Rollyson and Paddock contacted Roger Straus. “I spoke to her yesterday,” Straus wrote Norton’s publisher, Starling Lawrence, about “this project which she abhors.”2 A few weeks later, an interview with Rollyson and Paddock appeared in the New York Times: IT’S A LONELY WAY TO PAY THE BILLS: FOR UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHERS, THE WORLD IS VERY HOSTILE. Rollyson seemed to have a hard time imagining himself in Susan’s position. “‘I’ve left instructions to everybody: Talk, talk, talk,’ he said, laughing. ‘I want it to be a good book, colorful stories. Everybody talk. I want to be famous.’” Paddock, on the other hand, seemed to have a better idea of why Susan—or anyone else—would not welcome such an unsolicited intrusion. “I wouldn’t like it at all,” she said. “It would make me very angry and upset.”3

  Susan had many acquaintances—not to mention enemies—from her forty years as a public figure, and by early 1997, she decided to make clear that those who collaborated were doing so against her will. “I wanted to let you know that you may be hearing from them,” she wrote as many people as she could think of. “I have had no contact with them, of course.”

  While any biography of me written during my lifetime strikes me as a futile or unserious enterprise, one whose authors saw no need to inform me of their intentions, or seek my approval or cooperation, before getting a contract for their book, promises something even less palatable.4

  The book was composed quickly, and at the end of 1999, the writers’ agent sent a letter to fifteen periodicals inviting them to publish an early extract. One reached the desk of the book editor of the Los Angeles
Times. This was none other than Susan’s old friend Steve Wasserman, who faxed it to Susan.5

  * * *

  The letter contained a reference to the subject’s “open love of women.” Incredibly, that “open love” had only once before spoken its name in a mainstream publication—seven years before, when Zoë Heller interviewed Susan in Berlin for the Independent. Her piece included the following half paragraph:

  As far as any of her friends can make out, all her romantic relationships since the break-up of her marriage to Rieff have been with women, but Sontag refuses to be categorised as a lesbian, or to confirm the status of her relationship with her long-term companion, the photographer Annie Leibovitz. “Of course I think it’s wonderful that a woman of 59 is assumed to have an active emotional life—which I have—but I don’t talk about my erotic life any more than I talk about my spiritual life. It is . . . too complex and it always ends up sounding so banal.”6

  When Susan read Heller’s interview, she panicked and called her own agent, Andrew Wylie, to deal with the “crisis.” Shortly thereafter, said Heller,

  David Rieff, whom I’d never met, rang me, absolutely out of the blue, and it was a very strange thing, and I never really understood what was going on. We met at the Independent offices, and we went for lunch, and I don’t remember much of what he said, except the phrase “You made her cry.”7

  The meeting baffled Heller, who never had the slightest intention of “outing” Susan: she thought she was referring to something everyone knew. She had, in fact, recently written in opposition to outing: “I interviewed Barry Manilow (!) around the same time and made no mention of his being gay.” The lunch was all the more bizarre because David did not explicitly say what had so upset his mother.

  Karla Eoff saw the toll this hiding took. “There came a point when Annie got frustrated and upset, because she was proud of the relationship,” she said. “She was in love with her, and they were public people. She didn’t want to take out an ad, but she didn’t feel like they had to pretend like it was something other than it was.” Susan’s reaction hurt Annie: “I’m getting more and more the feeling that you’re ashamed of me,” she told her, tearfully.8

  Karla asked Susan: “Why can’t you just be with who you’re with and not care who knows?” The answer stunned her:

  “Well, it’s not like you, Karla. You can be married to a man, but it’s not the same. We can’t be devoted. Two people of the same sex cannot be in the same relationship that people of the opposite sex are. And besides, I still like men.”

  I said, “So you’re bisexual. Own up to that. What does it hurt?” “What does it help? It’s no one’s business but mine.” I kept pushing her, and finally she just said, “I don’t think same-sex relationships are valid.” She came up with all of these things that you hear from these awful people who call themselves Christian: “The parts don’t fit.”

  * * *

  “Love in the sexual mode must be across the sexes in order to be true,” Philip Rieff wrote in one of his later works.9 And in The Benefactor, Sontag described homosexuality as “a playfulness with masks.” All these years later, she had not managed to take off that mask. She had covered it with another, the identity of the famous writer, a mask she once had explicitly described as intended to hide her sexuality: “I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me,” she wrote. “Being queer makes me feel more vulnerable. It increases my wish to hide, to be invisible.”

  If the culture had changed, Sontag had not. Until the very end of her life, homosexuality was, in Signorile’s words, “some scandalous secret.” In public and even in private, she vehemently repudiated any relationship with Leibovitz. “Contrary to what everyone assumes, we were not lovers,” she told the Argentine writer Luisa Valenzuela in 2002.10 The next year, the Italian journalist Alessandra Farkas walked into a buzz saw when she printed a mention of the relationship in the Corriere della Sera.

  “I was shocked and am indeed very angry that you chose, without any justification or relevance, to repeat as fact a long-standing rumor about my private life,” she thundered in an e-mail. “You know nothing about my private life. You did not ask me anything about my private life.”

  As it happens, this rumor is untrue. But even if it were true, it seems to me uncivilized and vulgar for you to repeat gossip in an interview devoted, I thought, to serious subjects.11

  Farkas’s polite response (“The mention of your friendship seemed like a natural, and truthful, inclusion. . . . For us and our readers, sexuality is not an issue”) only inflamed Susan further. “She was obsessed with ‘this Farkas woman,’” said a friend,12 and fired back an e-mail bristling with mocking quotation marks:

  There is nothing “natural” about your mentioning, in the context of a discussion of my work, that Annie Leibovitz is indeed a friend of mine. And it was not my impression that you were referring to a friendship. As it happens, I have quite a few friends. Several of them are photographers.

  And it is not “information.” The “research” to which you refer amounts to other references to this longstanding piece of gossip, gossip which—though of course it does me no “harm”—happens not to be true.13

  She would not always respond so aggressively. In 2003, a fact-checker from the New York Times inquired whether she was “Ms. Leibovitz’ former companion,” and received a reply. “I am of course aware of these rumors. No, the information is not correct.”14 She even lied to her sister.

  I would visit her in New York. . . . And then, after we’d gone out, gone somewhere, seen something, visited with someone, she’d say, “I have to go over to Annie’s. She’s having a lot of problems with her family.” She’d make up some big bullshit story, and then I would see her the next morning, and then it would be something else and then something else, and I just got used to it.

  As she learned of her cancer from the Hollywood Reporter, Judith only learned of the relationship from a friend in San Francisco, who mentioned it casually—as a fact everyone knew. Judith was stunned.15

  * * *

  At the same time that Susan got wind of the Rollysons’ determination to out her, she was being interviewed by Joan Acocella for The New Yorker. The profile was timed to appear with the publication of In America. “That series of interviews that I did with Susan was the most difficult interviewing job I ever did in my life,” Acocella said. “And that includes Nijinsky’s daughter, who was schizophrenic.”16

  The abuse she showered upon Acocella was odd, if only for reasons of self-interest. But interspersed with the bullying grandiosity was a person who struck Acocella as almost miraculously un-self-aware.

  She truly wanted me to say nice things about her. She truly wanted me as her friend quote-unquote: to be part of her circle, and to be one of “her people.” She was immensely proud and self-deceiving about who were her friends. She would say: Well, so and so is my very close friend. And I would have been on the phone with him the day before, and he’s saying: That fucking bitch.17

  Acocella quickly discovered the main lie. Susan confided that the first woman she slept with was Irene Fornés, for example, and only because Irene brought her a thousand white roses. But Acocella knew the Rollyson book was coming, and told Sontag she ought to act “before they come out and point a gun at you.” She offered to print something innocuous.

  “Head them off at the pass and use me for it. Use this article for it. Say you’re bisexual and that’s that.” Well, she was terrified. She was absolutely terrified, and she said to me, “I don’t know the words to use. I don’t know what words to use.” I said, “I’ll write them down on a piece of paper and you can look at them, and either you can say something else, or you can say these words. I’m going to sit in front of you and it’s going to be on the record and that tape recorder will be on.”

  The New Yorker’s rigorous fact-checkers would demand support for every quote, so Acocella needed it on tape.

  I came the next time. You wou
ldn’t believe: she sat in this huge high chair in the middle of the living room. I said, “Susan, I’m going to ask to come over there or you have to come here.” I was on a couch on the side. It was psychotic. She finally came over to the couch. I did sit, sort of, at her feet. I had the tape recorder on, but I was going to be damned if there would be any tape recorder problems. Anyway, with incredible halting difficulty, she said what is quoted in my piece.

  The line seems tossed off with the sophistication one expected of the author of “Notes on ‘Camp.’” “That I have had girlfriends as well as boyfriends is what? Is something I guess I never thought I was supposed to have to say, since it seems to me the most natural thing in the world.”18

  But if that sounded harmless on the page, it sounded very different when spoken.

  My transcriber, the guy who types the interviews, and who is gay, and a New York gay guy—in other words, a completely out gay guy—is typing along, and he has to type this. He hears not just the words, but the strangulated tone. And the transcriber said that he burst into tears. And I said, “So did I.” As she delivered it, I cried.19

  * * *

  The closet is not a place. It is a metaphor. Together with its associated metaphor, “coming out,” it reveals the imperfections of metaphor in general. However culturally or socially fraught “coming out of the closet” may be, the phrase makes it sound, practically or linguistically, like a simple, onetime operation—a decision to step out of one room and enter another.

  The metaphor did not appear before the 1960s in the gay movement, or in the language gay men and lesbians used about themselves.