We said we did. It leads off Miss Baez’s 1967 Vanguard album (“Be not too hard, for life is short, and nothing is given to man…./ Be not too hard if he’s sold or bought, for he must manage as best he can./ Be not too hard when he blindly dies, fighting for things he does not own….”), and it reminded us to ask whether the neighbors were as hard on the Institute as the wire services had led us to think.
Miss Baez said, “No, the community is fine to us. At first, a few people imagined we were doing awful things—smoking pot, or making love—but we asked them to walk in and see. The worst trouble came from a lady across the street. She looked in and saw we were doing nothing—literally nothing, since it was meditation time—and that really got to her. She went into her house for a gun and fired it into the hillside. As you see, the kids here are mostly regular-looking college-age people. Flower children, thank God, aren’t interested. They’ve divorced themselves completely from reality. They’re so lost. I talked to one the other day who told me, ‘Man, that non-violence thing, that’s for me.’ So I asked, ‘Then how come you’re still pushing acid?’ The cyclists, too. I met a couple of the heads of Berkeley’s Hell’s Angels. They said they just loved my music. I looked down at their Iron Crosses. They simply don’t know what’s going on. Maybe Allen Ginsberg was helpful to them—getting them off skull-cracking and onto pot.”
Miss Baez smiled radiantly, and we asked if she was always so composed on the afternoon of a concert in hazard.
“Oh, no,” she said. “This just happens to be one of my good days.”
Early that evening, as our plane lifted off Monterey Airport bound for San Francisco and our connection to New York, we were gratified to see the rain clouds blowing away eastward, in plenty of time to insure that the concert would go on.
Thomas Whiteside
NOVEMBER 4, 1967 (FROM “A SUPER NEW THING”)
THE FOLLOWING DAY, Twiggy went for the first of her photographic sessions with Richard Avedon, for Vogue. The sessions went on day after day. Shortly after they started, I asked Twiggy how she liked working with Avedon. “It’s wonderful,” Twiggy said. “Avedon makes you feel beautiful.” I arranged to visit Avedon’s studio while Twiggy was posing for him. His studio is on the top floor of a building on East Fifty-eighth Street, and when I arrived, I learned that Twiggy was already on the scene, and was getting herself ready in a dressing room. Avedon came out to greet me in a reception area—a slight, intense, alert-looking man who was wearing large horn-rimmed glasses and, over his shirt, a brown sweater. He led me from the reception area, the walls of which were adorned with blowups of Avedon candid shots of Charlie Chaplin and Rudolf Nureyev, along a corridor that was lined with an array of Vogue’s paraphernalia—shoes, bangles, spangles, stockings, gloves, all jumbled together on tables as on the counter of a bargain store—and into an alcove containing a desk and some filing cabinets. We sat down and talked briefly.
“One thing you have to realize about Twiggy is that, relatively speaking, she has hardly been photographed,” Avedon said. “After all, Jean Shrimpton had considerable experience—she had been on perhaps fifty magazine covers before anyone took much notice of her. Twiggy has really only been modelling for less than a year. I didn’t know what to expect of her. But I found that the moment she was under the lights she performed as all the finest models do. For her to have developed that amount of control is extraordinary. At our first sitting, we spent three-quarters of the day making preparations—working with makeup, and so on, and I was trying to get used to her face—and then she went in front of the camera and it was as though we’d been working together for months. Lots of models come to the studio and do things they think the photographer wants. Twiggy presented herself quite honestly to the camera. Not that she doesn’t have some faults—the occasionally vacant stare, the dead eye. But she has a quality that is small and very special, in which it’s the slightest nuance that counts. The best pictures I’ve taken of Twiggy have been those in which she did the least. The less she did, the truer the pictures seemed to be—truer to herself, truer to my work. That’s representative of the period. Women move in certain ways that convey an air of the time they live in, and Twiggy, when she’s in front of lights, is bringing her generation in front of the camera. I think what’s involved is the stripping away of certain affectations about what is beautiful. Twiggy is made for that. As a photographer, I’m interested in young girls not because of knock-knees and tongues sticking out but because of what I can find about them that is beautiful. With Twiggy, I consider the shape of her head beautiful, and also the simplicity and gentleness of her gestures; even the narrowness of her leg is interesting.” Avedon reached out to a pile of black-and-white contact prints and showed me a number of pictures he had taken of Twiggy, several of which he had circled with a red grease pencil. Some of the representations seemed pretty lush to me, considering the subject. However, in what I thought were the best, Twiggy’s eyes had a more limpid and feminine quality than I had seen in any other pictures of her, and I noticed, too, that the excessive angularity I was used to in Twiggy’s poses was absent. I was particularly struck by one photograph, showing Twiggy in profile from behind, in which the fashion photographer had concentrated on the contours of her arm and back in such a way as to accentuate a special manner in which her hand and wrist hung loosely—“almost African,” Avedon called it.
From the dressing room I heard the sound of Twiggy’s laughter—the kind of two-syllable rising shriek that might be heard any morning over the wall of a northwest-London back yard. Avedon excused himself and walked off to see whether Twiggy was ready for the sitting. While he was away, I noticed on his desk a folded piece of paper bearing the words:
OFFICE MEMORANDUM
to: Mrs. Mellen from: Mrs. Vreeland
copy to: Mr. Avedon
RE: Twiggy
Having myself been in communication with Mrs. Vreeland on this subject a couple of days earlier, and having been impressed by her enthusiasm for Twiggy (“This little girl is not a Cockney phenomenon. For us at Vogue, she represents beauty, not Twiggery. We love her silky throat, her naturalness, her inner serenity”), I was interested in getting some more of her views on Twiggy, and when Avedon returned I asked him if I might have a look at the memorandum. Later, with Mrs. Vreeland’s permission, he let me do so. It read:
Do not forget Twiggy is dreadfully swaybacked….This form of weakness is easily righted by having her stand straight and sit up. She should be treated as a perfect flower with a straight stem and a bloom at the top and not like a half deformed teenager.
Also remember we do not want the hair to the side as it does nothing to bring out her beauty. Do remember her nose is beautiful and her hair back from her face straight-curved from forehead reveals this. Ask her to pull in her behind and shoot up her spine and you will have a glorious girl and not an ill fed adolescent.
Also she must smile with her eyes and be happy, as the “Elle” pix show her with sullen eyes and pouting lips and all this should not appear in Vogue. Let us handle her as a precious package….
Shortly after Avedon returned, Twiggy emerged from the dressing room and Avedon led her onto the set. This consisted of a white paper backdrop, perhaps twelve feet wide, that was hanging from a long roll, in the manner of a huge paper towel, and that also curved to extend across the floor of the studio for some distance, concealing the line between the wall and the floor. At its forward edge, the paper was fixed flat to the floor by pieces of masking tape. On the paper, to one side and near the edge, there stood a single strobe light in a silvery umbrellalike reflector; it was mounted about six feet above the floor, and was pointed down toward a high, plain black stool that stood on the paper. Facing the backdrop was a camera tripod, and behind the tripod was a small wooden cabinet on casters, its sides painted white and its top covered with some sort of shiny black plastic, on which three Rolleiflexes were lined up, their chrome metalwork reflected in the shiny material. Behind the Rolleiflexes,
perhaps a couple of dozen up-ended rolls of unused film were ranged, like columns. On the sides of the cabinet, various rolls of masking tape and cloth tape were neatly hung. Beside the left wall of the studio, there stood a phonograph. Twiggy had brought her own records for the session—numbers by the Supremes (A Bit of Liverpool), the Kinks (The Kinks’ Greatest Hits), Wilson Pickett (The Wicked Pickett), and Tim Hardin (Hang On to a Dream)—and now Avedon asked her what she wanted to hear while she worked. Twiggy chose the Kinks for a starter, and an assistant put the record on. Then, while another assistant mounted one of the Rolleiflexes on the empty tripod, Twiggy was asked by Avedon just to stand for a few moments so that he could look at her, and, when the few moments were up, took her place, at his request, on the plain black stool. Twiggy was wearing a simple black dress and black net stockings, and on her feet she had a pair of men’s lamb’s-wool slippers, belonging to Avedon, which he had lent her; they were going to be out of camera range. The strobe was switched on to what is known among photographers as a “viewing light”; that is, a steady, non-flashing light that enables the photographer to view his subject under lighting conditions comparable to the ones that his camera will record when the stroboscopic flash is activated by the camera shutter.
Avedon went to work. The process was quite unlike that of any other photographer I had seen at work with Twiggy. Whereas in other studios I had seen Twiggy in a “leading” role, with the photographer pretty much content to record this or that split-second phase of a large variety of poses she freely adopted, Avedon exercised meticulous control over his model, almost as though he were working from a blueprint. Nearly half an hour of the time Twiggy spent sitting on the stool was devoted to adjusting a band of silvery material around her hair. Polly Mellen, who was the Vogue editor assigned to the sitting, assisted with that, while Avedon knelt over his Rolleiflex, its tripod having been shortened for a low viewing angle, and gave instructions for minute changes in the position of the band. Twiggy responded to the instructions patiently and with interest. “All right, now, very straight,” Avedon would tell Twiggy, and she would sit up straight and gaze directly into the camera with very small variations of expression. Her face looked more elegant and more serious than I had seen it look in any other studio. Her lips were slightly parted, and that clarity of glance which I had noticed in the better pictures of her by other photographers seemed heightened. Detailed though Avedon’s instructions were on the poses that Twiggy should adopt, he did not give her any specific instructions about her expression. But neither did he leave that entirely to Twiggy. When her expression was one that he wasn’t interested in photographing, nothing would happen, but when a shift of pose or expression produced something that interested him, the strobe light would flash—with a peculiar dulled gonglike sound accompanying each high-voltage discharge—in a rapid series of three, four, five, six brilliant bursts. These bursts of strobe light seemed to serve as a sort of beat, so that photographer and model appeared to be in communication essentially through this wordless staccato rhythm. The expert fashion photographer smiles upon his model with bolts of synthetic lightning.
James Stevenson
JANUARY 27, 1968 (“REAGAN”)
GOVERNOR RONALD REAGAN made a quick trip to New York one day last week to address a banquet of the Economic Club, and late that afternoon we learned that photographers and television cameramen had been invited to photograph the Governor just before the dinner, so we put our Kodak Instamatic in our raincoat pocket and hurried over to the Waldorf.
In the Jade Room, on the third floor, a young man who seemed to know what was going on greeted us, offered us some coffee, and told us about the Economic Club while cameras were being set up at the far end of the room. “All the people who belong to this outfit are at least vice-presidents,” he said. “It’s not the P.-T.A. They have banquets four times a year, and they’ve had some goodies—Khrushchev, Prime Minister Wilson. Reagan was invited a year ago.”
We were early, so we strolled down the hall to the Grand Ballroom. It was a glittering, awesome sight. Waiters in red coats were hustling around among the tables (red tablecloths), dropping ice into glasses. A man in a dark suit was standing on the three-tiered dais and directing the waiters through a public-address system. “Gentlemen!” he implored, his voice filling the vast room. “I ask you again! Please have your ice and water in the water glasses before the program goes on!” Around him, men were piling white roses on the dais, and behind it a huge American flag was stretched across the wall, filling it completely. We sniffed a rose, and it was real; there were about three thousand roses, we estimated. A man from the florist’s, wearing a black ski jacket, was picking up leaves from the floor. We asked him what kind of leaves they were.
“We call ’em green,” he said.
We tried to elicit a political opinion from the man, asking him if he favored Reagan for President.
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” he said guardedly.
“Hey!” a waiter near us called to another waiter. “Who is it tonight?”
“Ronald Reagan,” came the reply.
The first waiter nodded sagely. “No wonder everyone’s so hotsy-totsy,” he commented.
We quickly turned to him and asked him about Reagan.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” he said. “I wouldn’t vote for him. He’s not so hot. He has a nice personality, but I wouldn’t go for the personality. I don’t like his platform. Let him come out straight.” He clasped his hands behind his back and ran through a critique of the other potential candidates—none of them were so hot, he felt—and then he branched out into international affairs. “Our State Department don’t say boo,” he was declaring, waving one finger angrily, when we realized that we might be late for the Governor’s arrival in the Jade Room. We excused ourself and hurried down the hall.
There were about twenty photographers in the Jade Room by now, and lots of lights, and suddenly Reagan was walking into the room, chatting with another man. Reagan was in a tuxedo. He seemed completely at ease, unassuming, well combed; his face was less lined than we’d expected, and he was a bit taller.
A reporter moved in, asked him a question, and said, on receiving a reply, “You’re just being modest, Governor.”
“I’ve got a lot to be modest about,” replied Reagan, with a twinkly smile.
Reagan then placed himself at the disposal of the photographers, and they asked him to stand behind a group of microphones and appear to be giving his speech. He did so, and they kept asking him to smile.
“If I keep on smiling, it looks like I have a very lighthearted speech,” Reagan said, but he smiled some more.
“Will you gesture, Governor?” someone asked.
“I don’t gesture very much when I talk,” Reagan said, but he made a few mild gestures anyway.
The cameras clicked on and on. “Now, you will get all these published?” Reagan said, grinning.
A TV man asked him to read some of his speech.
“Oh dear!” Reagan said, but he reached into his pocket and pulled out a stack of large white cards, held together by a rubber band. Removing the band, he glanced through them. The words were in half-inch type, with some underlined in red. He leafed through them. “My notes are sort of messed up,” he said. “Wait’ll I find the part…” Presently he was ready to begin, but one of the TV cameras was not. There was a pause. “Ready when you are, C.B.,” Reagan murmured patiently.
At last, he read some excerpts from his speech, in a quite formal and forceful manner: “The relentless inch-by-inch erosion…rights of the people…aims and credibility…divided people…sharp reduction in private American investment abroad…brought inflation back…” He paused. “Enough?” he asked.
Next, he agreed to answer questions, and was asked about Vietnam negotiations. He said that no one could speak with real authority from the outside, then added, “I think we should be very cautious…when we remember what happened in Korea….More Americans died during the negotiations t
han died before….The final solution has to be military….Convince them….Then they will come to the conference table simply because it hurts too much not to….The enemy [must know] once and for all not only that he cannot succeed but if he continues it will lead to a complete military defeat.” He quoted Dean Acheson, and then was asked about his choice for Republican Presidential candidate. “I’m in no position…” he began, and explained that he was a favorite son. “The purpose of a favorite son is for your delegation to use its strength at the right time to gain some mileage for your state.”
Reagan was asked about Rockefeller’s intentions.
“You’re asking the wrong non-candidate,” Reagan said. “Ask him.”
“The Gallup poll shows that your popularity as a potential candidate is slipping,” a reporter declared. “How do you explain that?”
“I regard that as a tribute to my efforts to convince people I’m not a candidate,” Reagan said easily.
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