by Whitney Otto
She plucked a rose from among those that landed on the deck and said good-bye.
The Girl in Paris, 1929
“Ideally you would apprentice with a famous photographer whose name begins with St,” said Eder with a smile. “You know, Steichen, Stieglitz, Steiner, Strand. But failing that, here’s someone interesting and, I believe, right up your alley, as they say.”
The studio of the Paris-famous Surrealist photographer Tin Type was located on the rue Campagne-Première, next to the Hôtel Istria, where she had taken a room. The room was barely bigger than a closet, though the child-size bathroom still had a bidet and a toilet and a shower. The view was nothing much, just a mirror-image hotel (multistoried, narrow mansard roof) across the street, but Lenny was happier than she had been in years. She felt it in every relaxed breath.
She had barely settled in when she slicked her hair and lined her eyes with kohl and bruised blue shadow, increasing their usual heavy-lidded drama. Her lips were painted deep red. Her makeup was almost exaggeratedly feminine, because she wore a fitted man’s cotton shirt and men’s cut trousers, enjoying the play of the eyeliner and lipstick with her masculine attire. Then she went next door.
Armed with her letter of introduction from Eder, Lenny stood at Tin Type’s studio door, reading the sign, I do not photograph nature. I photograph my visions, before ringing the bell.
She waited. She listened. Then rang again. This time she thought she heard someone inside.
• • •
If someone was there, he certainly didn’t care to answer the door. As reluctant as she was to walk away, that is what she did, wandering until she came to the tall gates of the Luxembourg Garden. The day wasn’t terribly warm, but it was sunny, and mild enough to wear a sweater. Lenny strolled the broad gravel paths, lined by pristine lawns of new grass. Later she left the paths to thread through the area of widely spaced trees, the grass replaced by dirt; Lenny had never seen anything like this strange grove in any American park.
As the sun heated up the day, Lenny noticed a grouping of little tables and slated chairs, with a refreshment stand nearby. As she went to buy a drink and consider her next step, she noticed two men, playing chess. One of the players, a rather compact man with thick dark hair, said something in French to his opponent, as he shook his hand, then leaned to kiss his cheek. The other man kissed him in kind, as they parted, the dark-haired man pausing to stretch.
In the midst of reaching his arms straight above his head, he caught Lenny watching him. He had the most intense, intelligent eyes as he watched her get up and walk toward him. She told him her name, as she handed him Eder’s letter.
“I don’t take students,” said Tin Type. “And I’m leaving on holiday.”
Lenny smiled. “I’m already packed.”
The first picture was of Lenny naked, except for a velvet ribbon choker. She stood behind a printing press, the palms of her hands and the undersides of her forearms smudged with ink.
In another, she was half-naked, a corset folded down on her hips, her head cropped out of the frame.
In another, she was again naked, with shadows slashing the light that striped her as it came through the window blinds.
He painted a picture of her lips the length of the sky, above an empty landscape, the trees dwarfed below. He called it Observatory Time—The Lovers.
For three years, she was his muse, his mistress, his assistant, his apprentice.
He taught her how to carefully photograph silver objects, “because you think a silver object is very bright when it actually isn’t, it’s just reflecting what’s in the room.”
She assisted him when he photographed a black-and-white ball where all the guests had words projected on them as they spun around the dance floor.
Together they discovered solarization. He made a profile picture of Lenny so beautiful and breathtaking that she looked like the shocking angel she always believed herself to be. This Surrealist darling, this eighteen-karat muse. Everyone marveled at the small, dark celebrity photographer with a modernist eye, living with his shining girl who stood many inches taller than he, and their almost theatrical manner of dress, including strolling down the boulevard tethered by a thin gold chain, which had the effect of binding him to her rather than her to him.
Tin Type photographed Lenny kissing another woman, then cropped it so that all that remained in the frame was the kiss. He made sketches of the cropped kiss, then scribbled over the pictures, Ellen, Ellen, Ellen.
• • •
In another picture she was powdered white, naked from the waist up and posed as the Louvre’s Venus de Milo. While he was arranging the shot, he confessed that as a teen, he tried, once or twice, to sleep with American girls so young they were barely out of childhood. “But that was back home,” he said as he tied her hands behind her back to mimic the absence of the goddess’s arms, “when I was someone else.”
Through Lenny Van Pelt, Tin Type learned what it meant to be “hopelessly in love.” Equal emphasis on the lack of hope and the abundance of love.
Paris was full of Surrealist girls, eccentric and inspiring and creative. For example, one showed up at tea dressed in a cardinal’s red robe saying, “I wanted to dress in clothing never meant for a woman, worn by a man who’s never meant to have a woman.” Another peed in someone’s hat on a café terrace in fit of pique. There were balls where everyone was naked from the chest to the knees, clad in costumes of winged sandals, thigh-high leather boots, and feathered headdresses, spikes and chains of silver. Someone fled Paris with someone else’s lover, clad in a fur coat with nothing underneath. Someone else made a cup and saucer of fur. Someone wore a dress of “mother-of-pearl buttons engraved with tiny human footprints.”
For the first time, Tin knew pitch-black jealousy, unable to live with Lenny’s sexual impulses. She tried to explain that love and sex were separate countries in her personal atlas. He countered with possessiveness, fury, threats of violence to her, to himself. He made an assemblage of a photograph of Lenny’s seductive, heavy-lidded eye affixed to a metronome accompanied by a hammer and called it Object of Destruction. A self-portrait had him seated with a noose around his neck, a gun to his head, and a bottle of poison on the table before him.
And still their love stumbled on.
“What is it?” Tin said as he gripped the groceries that he’d been carrying. “What’s happened?”
Lenny was on the floor, holding a telegram now tearstained. “My father will be here on Thursday,” she said. “On his way to Zurich. He’ll want me to join him.”
“Well,” said Tin, relaxing his hold on the packages, then setting them down, “you will tell him no. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.” When she didn’t respond, he said, “I’ll talk to him if you like.”
“There’s no need.”
“I don’t mind.”
“What I’m saying is that I mean to go.”
He was mystified by this girl, almost fifteen years his junior. He was as much in love with her face as he was with her intelligence, her laugh, her tireless desire to learn everything about photography, and her happiness in the darkroom (“I grew up spending time in a photographer’s darkroom,” she said).
“I got all your favorites at the shops,” he said, easing away from something he couldn’t quite sort out. “I’ll collage you a lunch,” he said.
Alexander Van Pelt was quite tall and angular, and the gray in his hair, his English-made suit, and rounded spectacles made for an imposing man. Someone who looked like a success and knew it.
“So this is what a real Parisian artist’s studio looks like,” Mr. Van Pelt said, shaking Tin’s hand, smiling in the direction of Lenny. “Hello, darling.”
“Daddy,” she said, smiling.
“Here,” said Tin, taking Alexander’s suitcase, raincoat, briefcase, and camera bag. “Please sit. I’ll get us something to drink.”
Tin had turned his back for a moment to grab the glasses and Pe
rnod, and when he again faced their company, he witnessed Lenny, in her uncharacteristically traditional dress with the little white flowers on a dark blue background, curled up on her father’s lap, the dark color of his suit matching the dark color of her dress. She leaned her head against his chest, her eyes closed. He looked so large, and Lenny, a child on his lap. A kind of Surrealist pietà.
Tin set down the glasses and liquor, picked up his camera, and, as if by agreement, the only movement was Alexander looking into the lens as he folded his hands on Lenny’s hip.
The last thing that Tin thought before he snapped the photo was that she did not look unhappy.
In Tin’s photograph Larmes, a woman cries; her face is so closely cropped that all that really remain are her eyes, gazing upward ecstatically; the inky eyelashes are tipped with perfect, tiny orbs of mascara, while the tears that fall down her face are half circles of glass. The meaning of the tears, the emotion in the picture, is ambiguous.
Alexander Van Pelt, amateur photographer, loved Tin’s pictures, and Tin loved that Mr. Van Pelt loved them in the way he wished them to be loved, which is really every artist’s dream when he thinks about an audience. They had a great deal in common, not the least of which was Lenny.
The sole memento of that Swiss trip was a photograph taken from above: Lenny pressing her body, knees bent, into one end of the hotel bathtub. When Tin saw it, he stopped himself from asking if this bathtub was located in Lenny’s room or her father’s room, or if there was any difference between the two.
It wasn’t any one thing that brought the end; no one fell in love with anyone else. They could not even agree on what “being in love” looked like, and this caused Tin’s worst self to emerge, colliding with Lenny’s boredom. Nothing was duller than jealousy.
It was like a dream, Lenny would say of their years together, an extended game of pretend. The solarized pictures, the photographs of mannequins socializing at parties, reclining on divans, climbing fancy staircases. There were eyelids painted like eyes, and models with their features outlined in black paint. Heads appeared captured under bell jars casually placed on tables; white women wore African ivory bangles up to their elbows; a woman was painted like a violin with sound holes at her back, the picture title reflecting the idea of a woman as a hobby.
From Tin, Lenny learned to take pictures, use lights, touch up, develop; her vision, so in tune with the modernisme of the age, lined up perfectly with Surrealism. Is it the depiction of a dream, or is it the unedited subconscious made manifest? What did it mean when Lenny made a picture of a woman’s hand (clearly a woman of wealth, evidenced by the size of the diamond in her ring) reaching out to open the glass door of an exclusive Paris jeweler, the extraordinary stone scratching the glass as so many other diamonds on the hands of so many other wealthy women had previously done? All those diamonds marking the glass so that, when the woman’s hand was on the door, all those scratches gave the impression of her hand exploding?
The Girl in London, 1935
When Kristof Nash was invited to a small gallery showing of Lenny Van Pelt’s pictures, he went thinking he would see her there. His new wife, Claire, had been Lenny’s friend in New York. Though the young women had not stayed particularly close, they were still in touch from time to time, or they heard news of one another through the grapevine. Which was how Nash knew that Lenny was living in London, which was why he ended up looking her up when he came through the city to meet with the staff of British BelleFille.
Which was when, after basking in Nash’s appreciation of her still considerable beauty, Lenny asked him to recommend her photography services to British BelleFille.
“I’m already in London,” she said, “on my own steam, so it isn’t like transferring someone here. I worked with Tin Type for three years, and I’ve been freelancing on my own for two. And”—she lowered her voice and leaned toward him across the table, with a hint of a smile, her gaze direct—“you and I both know that I can do this.”
He appreciated the slight seduction in her approach, and, if he were a man given to seeing the humor in all things, he would’ve matched her smile, maybe said something flirtatious. But he wasn’t, so he didn’t, though he did give her the name of the primary photographer at BelleFille, saying, “It’s up to Georges St. Georges.”
“My God, you are like a beautiful golden goat boy of the Appian Way. Just like Mauritz and, frankly, just like me. Of course, we must work together and everything together.”
Lenny had no idea who Mauritz was, but standing before Georges St. Georges was disconcerting, since it was very much like standing before a mirror, seeing her androgynous self in another person. That Georges St. Georges was fairly close in age to Lenny (in their late twenties, that sunset of youth) made the resemblance even more uncanny; that he was a man and a photographer made her feel twinned.
“I’m a photographer. I’ve recently worked with Tin Type and—”
“Then sometime we’ll let you take pictures. What else can you do?” Georges St. Georges was very close, with both hands smoothing her hair away from her face. “I can see it, the angel and the vamp. The boy and the girl.” Abruptly, he dropped his hands and walked over to his bag to retrieve a very thin brown cigarette, which he lit with a lighter of pure silver. “I shall talk to Mauritz.”
“Should I be talking to Mauritz?” asked Lenny.
Georges St. Georges whirled around. “Is he here?”
“I don’t think so,” said Lenny, hesitant and looking over her shoulder toward the wide double doors leading into the cavernous studio space.
He held out a cigarette to Lenny, but she declined. “Do you know Mauritz?”
“No.”
“Then—and I’m somewhat in the dark—why would you want to talk to him?”
“You said something about talking to Mauritz—”
“Yes.”
“So, I thought—” She took a deep breath as Georges St. Georges calmly watched her, smoking his cigarette. “I want to work, and if this Mauritz is the person to talk to, then I want to talk to Mauritz.”
Georges St. Georges pulled a small silver disk from his pocket. At first, Lenny thought it was a compact. In New York she had known a few men who powdered their noses, moistened their lips with lipstick, and accentuated their lashes with mascara. It had nothing to do with anything as far as she was concerned. But instead of powder, there were ashes. He then stubbed out his cigarette, dropped it inside, snapped the disk shut, and returned it to his pocket. “Did you think that I worked for Mauritz?”
Lenny said nothing.
“The day a photographer works for a model will be the apocalypse. Come around tomorrow at eleven.”
When Lenny later thought about the moment she entered Georges St. Georges’s studio, she thought about how much Tin Type would’ve appreciated its cavernous quality. Tin and all the other Surrealists, whom she suddenly missed very much (with the exception of Breton, the founding father of the movement, who could not have misunderstood women more if he tried), feeling especially soft toward Tin and glancing at her watch wondering what he was doing now—knowing his habits as she did—picturing him shopping and making her one of his assembled meals since, as he always said, “I cannot cook, but I can assemble.” The English, she discovered, had not caught on to the dream-driven aesthetic as readily as the French.
If standing near Georges St. Georges was like standing in front of a mirror, then seeing Georges talking close and low to someone who was the mirror image of him, and therefore the mirror image of her, was akin to watching herself from herself. It was strange and surreal and familiar, given that she was already her brother’s twin.
“Miss Van Pelt, please.” Georges gestured for her to join him and the other young man. She moved toward them as if in a trance.
The other young man studied her, nodded, then said to Georges, “You’re right. Again.” Then to Lenny, “I’m Mauritz.”
She almost wanted to say, “I’m Mauritz,” they so
resembled each other and, she believed, were even closer in age than she and Georges. “I assist Georges.”
Georges had been showing Mauritz some sort of clothing when Lenny had walked into the studio, and now he gave one garment to Mauritz and the other to Lenny, saying, “If you want to go down the hall to change, there is a washroom on the left, or I can turn my back.”
“Is this new modesty for the benefit of Miss Van Pelt?” Mauritz held Georges’s glance just long enough for Lenny to understand the men. She wanted to protest that she was here not as a model but as an assistant photographer, but since Mauritz was also being asked to don the clothing and model, she said nothing.
“Perhaps we can locate a dressing room screen for our Miss Van Pelt,” said Mauritz, watching her as he leaned into Georges so that their arms lightly touched. Georges seemed less aware of Mauritz than he was of her; she had enough experience with the territoriality that is a consequence of jealousy to know that the condescension in Mauritz’s voice was a way of locking her out.
She pulled her shirt over her head, exposing her small breasts to the appreciative eyes of Georges and the less than pleased Mauritz—her shifting femininity was going to give him problems, she thought—before kicking off her shoes and stepping out of her trousers and undergarments. Pretending to examine the front and back of the bathing suit that dangled from her fingers, she casually stood before the men, completely comfortable in her nakedness. They had no idea where she was from when it came to her body. Object? Subject? She could turn it all off at will.
It was Georges who broke the silence, saying, “Mauritz, we don’t have all day.”
The resulting photograph, used to advertise a summer fragrance, was so successful than it ended up running for six months in BelleFille. The pair sat on the near the end of a dock so narrow it resembled a diving board, bleached white by the sun and seeming to be located on some deserted, pristine East Coast beach, with nothing before them but an endless expanse of the ocean. Though Mauritz sat closer to the end of the dock than did Lenny (she was closer to the camera lens), each with legs bent to the side, they appeared to be touching; their bodies were almost in profile and wearing identical one-piece swimsuits; their skin identically, wonderfully sun-kissed; their hair in the same careless, boyish style, golden and glossy.