The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

  ‘To Jess!’ the others cried, proclaiming his toast to the gallery filled with her works, her artistic works and her works of flesh and blood, remembering her, celebrating her, vowing, as D’Arcy was doing, to live and to love the way Jess had never been able to.

  Then Josh kissed her forehead and wrapped his arms around her. ‘After the exhibition,’ she said to him, the idea forming as she spoke, ‘let’s go back to the chateau and hang all her works there. Let’s open it to the public so that they can see it. Let’s make the world raise their glasses to her too. If that’s okay with both of you.’ She looked over at Dan and Victorine, who nodded.

  ‘You should run the Jessica May Foundation from there too,’ Dan added. ‘Make it yours. Make the chateau a place where women can have time and space to make their art. Let Jess’s legacy continue to grow, every day.’

  ‘Really?’ D’Arcy said, awestruck at the thought that a foundation to which she’d once looked to for support might now be something she could use to support other women artists like herself to achieve their dreams.

  ‘Really,’ Dan said.

  ‘I think you’ll find,’ Victorine said with a teary smile, ‘that you own Jess’s chateau. When she gave you to me, she told me that she would bequeath it to you upon her death.’

  ‘And you should also come to New York and meet James. Your father,’ Dan added.

  A father. Something D’Arcy never thought she’d have. She looked across at Victorine, who nodded, blinking hard.

  There were almost too many things happening for D’Arcy to grasp them as individual hurts and losses, as well as wonders and astonishments. She suddenly felt as if she understood Balzac’s belief that a person was made up of ghostly layers, layers that image-taking stripped away each time a photograph was taken. The photographs Jess had taken of D’Arcy had stripped away much of what D’Arcy thought she was, and everything she didn’t need. She hoped that her documentary about Jess had done the same, that it had torn off the layers Jess had wrapped herself in after the war so she now appeared as she really was: bold and strong and beautiful and so well loved.

  Then, as Victorine embraced Dan, Josh and D’Arcy turned to look at the images of Jessica May moving across the screen before them, smiling as if giving them her blessing. A blessing, D’Arcy realised now, Jess had bestowed on her when they’d embraced on the terrace of the chateau, an embrace D’Arcy could feel again now, reaching beyond death, bequeathing to Josh and D’Arcy the promise of a long and beautiful life. The long and beautiful life that Dan and Jess had never had, the long and beautiful life that D’Arcy had never imagined having, lay now, astonishingly, before her. She sealed the promise with a long and beautiful kiss on Josh’s lips.

  Author’s Note

  In some ways, this was the hardest book I’ve ever written. So many characters and storylines and time periods to bring together the way I imagined them in my head. In other ways, it was the easiest book I’ve ever written. Jess and Dan were two characters who came effortlessly to me; they were a true gift from the writing muse. But of course there were lots of reasons this happened, not the least because of all the amazing research material that couldn’t help but inspire me to write.

  I first became aware of Lee Miller when I was writing The Paris Seamstress. Her story was immediately captivating: a famous model and Man Ray’s lover, she wrote and photographed some extraordinary stories for Vogue during World War II, but her work was largely forgotten thereafter. Her son, Antony Penrose, knew very little of his mother’s remarkable past until after she’d died. It was his wife, when clearing out the attic at Farley Farm – Miller’s home – who came across Miller’s sixty thousand photographs and negatives, plus clippings, cameras and wartime souvenirs, stored haphazardly in cardboard boxes. Penrose resurrected her legacy and she is now widely regarded as one of the war’s preeminent photojournalists.

  How could anyone not be inspired by this woman?

  But I also knew that I couldn’t write her life story. Some terrible things happened to Lee Miller in her life, not the least of which was that a family friend raped her when she was just seven years old, infecting her with gonorrhoea. It was a tragedy that I wasn’t sure I was equipped to write about; what could I possibly know about how that affected Lee throughout her life? Also, I wanted to write another dual narrative like my previous book, The Paris Seamstress, and I couldn’t do that by sticking to the facts of a person’s life. So I decided to use Lee as the inspiration for the character of Jess.

  My story begins with Jess’s modelling career hitting a major hurdle when an image of her is sold to Kotex to use in an advertisement. This actually happened to Lee Miller, although at a slightly earlier time than I have used in the book. It’s hard for us to imagine how shocking appearing in a sanitary product advertisement was at the time and how it could possibly ruin someone’s career, but it was and it did. Miller gave up modelling after that as nobody wanted to see the ‘Kotex girl’ in photographs designed to show off evening gowns. Condé Nast did discover Lee Miller, as he discovers Jess in this book, and Miller was one of his favourite models; his influence was instrumental in her successful modelling career. The pictures Toni Frissell is taking of Jess in the opening scene are based on pictures Frisell took for the cover of Vogue in 1942.

  My descriptions of Italy when Jess arrives there in 1943 are based on Martha Gellhon’s piece, ‘Visit Italy’, published by Collier’s in February 1944, and Margaret Bourke-White’s pieces, ‘Salt of the Earth’ and ‘Fifth Army Field Hospital’, taken from They Called it Purple Heart Valley, published in 1944, and from her piece, ‘Evacuation Hospital’, published in Life in February 1944. The scene set during the Easter service in Italy is based on ‘Easter in Italy: Americans Pray Within Earshot of German Lines’ by correspondent Sonia Tomara, published in the New York Herald Tribune in April 1944.

  Martha Gellhorn tells Jess that a photograph of a naked woman painted in camouflage colours is used during lectures. This is true; Roland Penrose, a photographer and Miller’s lover – later husband – lectured in camouflage during the war and he used this image of Lee Miller as his ‘startle slide’ to make sure everyone was paying attention.

  The letter that Warren Stone reads to Jess about the ‘inherent difficulties’ of having women in the war is taken from The Woman War Correspondent, the US Military, and the Press by Carolyn M. Edy. The other letter Warren Stone quotes to Jess, from a major in the Surgeon General’s office, about the supposedly devastating effects on the ‘female apparatus’ from parachute training is taken from Never a Shot in Anger, the memoir of Public Relations Officer Colonel Barney Oldfield, as is the anecdote about Capa et al missing their parachute training school places because of a drunken party the night before.

  Martha Gellhorn did stow away in a hospital ship to become the first woman correspondent to land at Normandy. I used her piece ‘The Battle of the Bulge’, published in The Face of War, as the basis of the scenes set in Bastogne and the Ardennes. I have tried as much as possible to only put Martha in places that accord with her actual movements during the war, but obviously her relationship with Jess is a fiction.

  Many female correspondents wrote letters to SHAEF protesting the restrictions placed on them during the war, and thus the scene in which Jess writes a letter, supported by the other correspondents, is based on an amalgamation of those letters.

  Iris Carpenter’s visit to Omaha Beach and her subsequent court-martial is recorded in Carpenter’s memoir, No Woman’s World: From D-Day to Berlin, a Female Correspondent Covers World War II. I have also used Ernie Pyle’s June 1944 wire copy (he was correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspaper business) titled ‘Omaha Beach after D-Day’, published in Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938– 1946, as the basis for Jess’s descriptions of how Omaha Beach looked after D-Day.

  Lee Carson’s ability to avoid court-martial through the employment of her eyelashes is recorded in Oldfield’s memoir. Catherine Coyne, Lee Carson and Iris C
arpenter were all real people and I have tried to, once again, have their appearance in Jess’s life accord with their actual movements during the war. Both Iris Carpenter and Lee Carson were given permission to access all areas at around the same time as Jess is granted this permission in my book.

  The scene where a singer is brought into the Hotel Scribe to entertain the correspondents, as well as the sign propped on the piano, and the attempts at misogynist humour the following morning are all detailed in Oldfield’s memoir, which is, quite accidentally, an awful chronicle of the widespread sexual harassment of women throughout the war. Also recorded in this book is the incident about the German girl bearing a note from a US soldier, which she thought was a special pass, but which is in fact anything but. Oldfield notes, seemingly without censure, that the writer of the note must have ‘enjoyed himself and … had a sense of humour as well as generosity of spirit’. I have tried not to exaggerate the way women were treated during the war, but I know many of the incidents I’ve written about must seem unbelievable.

  I wanted to write about Ravensbrück concentration camp, the only concentration camp exclusively used to imprison women during the war, but this camp, because of its location, was liberated by the Russians, not the Americans. So the concentration camp that I have used in this book is an amalgamation of Ravensbrück, plus other camps like Buchenwald and Dachau, and I have drawn on Lee Miller’s and Iris Carpenter’s reporting of those camps. After Lee Miller photographed Dachau, because the photographs were among the first taken of any of the camps and the sights were so shocking, she sent a cable to her editor at Vogue that read: ‘I implore you to believe this is true.’ I have borrowed this wording for Jess.

  Many correspondents did not believe the concentration camps existed until after they came upon them, which Jess alludes to. General Collins did make the civilians in the town of Nordhausen bury the dead as punishment for turning a blind eye to the horror that existed right on their doorstep, and the practice of taking German civilians from nearby towns to the concentration camps to see what they had ignored is also noted in The Women Who Wrote the War: The Compelling Story of the Path-breaking Women Correspondents of World War II by Nancy Caldwell Sorel. Jess’s experience of coming upon the camp and having machine guns trained on her is based on what happened to Marguerite Higgins, correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, when she reached Dachau.

  The view attributed to General Patton about ‘fornication without fraternisation’ is detailed in Oldfield’s memoir.

  The description of Hitler’s apartment is based on Lee Miller’s piece, ‘Hitleriana’, published in Vogue in 1945. I have appropriated the infamous photograph of Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub and given this to Jess.

  Iris Carpenter was the reporter who came upon a US Army soldier raping a German girl in 1945. She never reported on this incident for the Boston Globe, but wrote about it in her later memoir, published in 1946. She records the reaction of the officer to whom she reported the incident – that the main problem with war was that there were women near it. Jess’s report, ‘I’ve Got A Pistol and There Ain’t Nobody Going to Stop Me Having Her’ is based on Iris’s recollections in her memoir.

  The story about the 371st Fighter Group and Yvette, the injured girl who became their mascot and good-luck charm, is true. At a field hospital in Italy, an orphaned Italian boy stayed for several weeks and he also became a kind of mascot for both the nurses and the nearby battalion. Fiction is all about what is possible and both of these examples made me believe that it was possible for Victorine to have been accommodated in a field hospital for a few months.

  Many other sources provided useful information to help me write this novel. For information about female correspondents during the war, as well as the sources listed above, I also used Women War Correspondents of World War II by Lilya Wagner; Women of the World by Julia Edwards; and Where the Action Was: Women War Correspondents in World War II by Penny Colman.

  To understand Lee Miller’s life, I read Lee Miller’s War, edited by Antony Penrose; Lee Miller: A Life by Carolyn Burke; and Lee Miller: A Woman’s War by Hilary Roberts. My description of the area around Carentan is based on ‘Unarmed Warriors’ by Lee Miller. Martha Gellhorn is another extraordinary woman and for details about her life, I referred to her collection of reportage published as The Face of War and Caroline Moorhead’s biography, Martha Gellhorn: A Life. I also read Gellhorn’s fiction to understand more about her turn of phrase.

  Les Faux de Verzy do exist in a forest near Reims.

  The division Dan belongs to is based on the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, although I have occasionally had to take a little license with their precise movements; it is likely he would have been called out of Italy earlier than Easter to prepare for the invasion, the division fought at Anzio rather than Cassino, and it went across to Berlin, rather than Munich.

  The intricacies of the battles of World War II and life in the US Army were drawn from Antony Beevor’s The Second World War, David Drake’s Paris at War and The Historical Atlas of World War II by Alexander Swanston and Malcolm Swanston. I also visited Utah and Omaha beaches as research for the novel as well as the Omaha Beach Memorial Museum, the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, and the Airborne Museum at Sainte-Mère-Église. I confess to this being the most difficult area of research for me as I knew nothing about army ranks and the difference between a platoon and a company and a battalion when I began; any errors to do with this are mine and, while I have tried my best, I am not an expert and hope I have it mostly correct.

  Susan Sontag’s On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others were useful in understanding the moral complexities of war photography.

  The inspiration for two of the images I describe as part of the photographer’s body of work comes from actual images: David Heath’s Vengeful Sister and Mark Cohen’s Group of Children.

  The final word should, of course, be Lee Miller’s. Something she wrote in a letter to Audrey Withers, her editor at Vogue, sat with me as I wrote this book and tried to imagine what it might have felt like to witness and then to record both the horror and the heroism of war: ‘Every word I write is as difficult as tears wrung from stone.’

  Acknowledgements

  As well as all the sources listed on the previous pages, there are many people I wish to thank. The most important of these is Rebecca Saunders at Hachette Australia who makes me believe I can actually write books and that they are worth reading. Rebecca’s faith in me, her support of me and her encouragement are unflagging and I know I wouldn’t be publishing my fourth historical novel if it wasn’t for her.

  Everyone at Hachette Australia is wonderful and I’m pretty sure I say in the back of each book how lucky I am to be published by them. But it’s true! Special thanks to Sophie Mayfield for her attention to detail and editorial assistance, and to Dan Pilkington for always galvanising the sales team behind my books.

  Thank you also to Celine Kelly for her astute structural editing and for helping me turn the book into the thing I hoped and imagined it could be. Alex Craig is the world’s best copyeditor and I am once again so fortunate to have had her working on this book.

  Leah Hultenschmidt at Grand Central in the US and Viola Hayden at Sphere in the UK are both amazing editors to work with, and I am hugely grateful for their support, and their belief in me.

  To all my writerly friends, too many to list, for laughs when things are good and tissues when things aren’t so good, a big thank you. Special thanks to Sara Foster who always reads through my manuscripts and provides wonderful advice and suggestions just when I most need it.

  David Scherman’s words, in the epigraph on page 1, and the quote from Lee Miller on page 121 are both reproduced from the book Lee Miller’s War: Beyond D-Day by kind permission of Palazzo Editions Limited and the Lee Miller Archive.

  My three children are the loves of my life and their excitement about my books – especially about the research trips to Europe that they g
et to accompany me on – is inspiring and makes me want to keep writing to make them proud. To my husband also, for never once doubting, thank you.

  As always, to my readers, the biggest thank you of all. Your emails and messages are the bright spots in my days, the sparks of encouragement whenever a book seems too tricky. I hope this book finds a place on your shelves too.

  If you enjoyed The French Photographer, you’ll love The Paris Seamstress. Read on for an extract.

  Chapter One

  2 JUNE 1940

  Estella Bissette unrolled a bolt of gold silk, watching it kick up its heels and cancan across the worktable. She ran her hand over it, feeling both softness and sensuality, like rose petals and naked skin. ‘What’s your story morning glory,’ she murmured in English.

  She heard her mother laugh. ‘Estella, you sound more American than the Americans do.’

  Estella smiled. Her English-language tutor had said the same thing to her when he ended her lessons the year before and joined the exodus out of Europe; that she had a better American accent than he did. She tucked the roll under one arm and draped the silk across her shoulder. Then she swung into a tango, heedless of the women’s cries of, ‘Attention!’, cries which only goaded her to add a song to her dance: Josephine Baker’s fast and frothy ‘I Love Dancing’ bubbling from her mouth between gasps of laughter.

  She dipped backwards, before soaring upright too fast. The roll of silk skimmed over the midinette’s worktable, just missing Nannette’s head but slapping Marie on the shoulder.

  ‘Estella! Mon Dieu,’ Marie scolded, holding her shoulder with overplayed anguish.

  Estella kissed Marie’s cheek. ‘But it deserves a tango at the very least.’ She gestured to the fabric, glowing like a summer moon amid the quotidian surroundings of the atelier, surely destined for a dress that wouldn’t just turn heads; it would spin them faster than Cole Porter’s fingers on the piano at the infamous Bricktop’s jazz club in Montmartre.