Focus

by Michael Gross

  Subterfuge was required to get Avedon to Paris, as Dahl-Wolfe assumed that plum would be hers alone, as always. Snow decided to take Dick along secretly, arriving a week after Dahl-Wolfe did. Snow and Dick stayed together at the Hôtel San Régis, just up the street from the Bazaar’s photo studio and the Christian Dior couture atelier, where on one occasion, Avedon and Snow hid together in a dressing room to avoid Dahl-Wolfe.

  Avedon would return to Paris the next year and would never again hide his presence. “After that first ‘secret’ trip, I always sat beside Carmel at the collections,” he said. “Her lips barely moved as she talked to me, telling me about everyone in the room. ‘You see that woman on your left? . . . ménage à trois . . . That mannequin’s been kept for years by . . .’ She took me into a world I couldn’t have understood without her.”

  Those first times in Paris, Avedon’s charge from Snow was “to help the French economy by bringing back the glamour of pre-war Paris.” Since he “had no idea what people who dressed like that looked like,” he said, “I made it all up out of my own imagination.” The pictures are joyous, but also the product of hard work. “There was no sleeping,” Avedon said. “You worked around the clock and then you went out dancing. After the dancing was over, I’d walk all night, worrying about the next pictures.”

  Avedon returned to Paris in 1948 to shoot the couture with his latest favorite model, Elise Daniels, who portrayed, he claimed years later, “the first anxious woman in any fashion photo ever.” He went on to call that shoot, with his models acting instead of posing, “the source of my style.”

  Irving Penn had returned to Vogue after the war and begun shooting fashion, still lifes, and portraits in 1946. Fashion was the least interesting job for him. “Penn stubbornly resisted” it, wrote Alexander Liberman’s biographers. “He insisted that he knew little about fashion and couldn’t possibly do it.” Nonetheless, in 1948, he accepted an assignment to go to Lima, Peru, with model Jean Patchett, where he caught a few unguarded moments—it was rumored that the pair were lovers on that trip—and produced fashion photos that matched Avedon’s in their power and modernity.

  Penn had met Dorian Leigh before that, when he was just back at Vogue and she was already an experienced model, having begun her career with a cover shoot with Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Diana Vreeland. That led to work with Vogue’s John Rawlings and the young Richard Avedon, still in uniform and shooting on spec for Bonwit Teller, at the same time he shot Bijou Barrington, who was Leigh’s roommate. Leigh then had a lunch with Cecil Beaton and Edna Chase that led her to Irving Penn. “He seemed to me [a] rosy-cheeked, young photographer, and he took pictures, hat pictures, in a car, in front of the synagogue on Park Avenue, and I kept telling him, thinking he’s a young know-nothing, the best angles and the light and everything, and he thought that was so sweet, because he had just started.”

  They became lovers, and Penn photographed Leigh often, including her in his famous 1947 group portrait of the dozen most photographed models of the moment. Leigh’s younger sister, Suzy Parker, had followed her to New York and begun modeling, too (Penn shot some of her first test photos—and would publish them years later as covers of Vogue). Parker considered Dorian and Penn “sort of semi-engaged.” She recalled him coming to a Sunday family dinner “and my mother just couldn’t stand him,” Parker said. “He spoke very badly about his mother and his family.” Suzy remembers an “up-and-down relationship” marked by “terrible battles.” In Vogue’s studio, Penn’s staff “would lock the two of them in and go away because of the fights,” she says.

  Their affair didn’t end well. Though Leigh treasured the many photographs he gave her, her memories of Penn were mostly etched in acid. She described him as neurotic in bed and alternately insecure and sadistic in the studio. “He used to cry on my shoulder and tell me about his [ex-]wife and how unsuccessful his marriage was and how she threw his paintings out of the windows in Mexico when he was trying to be a serious painter.” In 1949, Penn photographed Leigh for a portfolio of styles of the past. But at one point he froze. “Penn just stood there and said to the assistants, ‘Perhaps it’s the light,’ ” she remembered. “For some of those photographs, he took nine hundred exposures. Every single one of them the same. He acted as though we should be posing for him for the pure joy of being tortured.”

  Patchett’s experience was quite the opposite. Avedon “felt that we were just chunks of protoplasm and had no brains, we had to do what he wanted,” she recalled. He made her nervous. “Having been groomed by [Penn], I didn’t understand how Dick worked. I couldn’t switch that fast, I suppose.”

  Penn’s pictures of Patchett notwithstanding, Leigh felt he had no interest in other people. “That famous series he did of celebrities [beginning in 1948], where he would put them in a corner and turn them into an object?” she asked rhetorically. “He was a still-life photographer, and that’s how he wanted people to be.” Ultimately, she judged him “terribly self-involved. He was terribly, terribly important to himself, so pretentious.” But this sentiment may have come from Penn’s dropping her, both as a lover and as a model, after she agreed to go to Paris with Avedon in 1949. Penn hadn’t minded when she shot with Dahl-Wolfe. “He didn’t feel she was any competition.” Avedon was a different story. Dorian was subsequently soiled in Penn’s eyes and he would soon marry model Lisa Fonssagrives, another of the famous dozen of 1947, right after she, too, divorced.

  Penn would also cause another divorce—the rupture between Erwin Blumenfeld and Vogue. Initially, Blumenfeld had respect for Alex Liberman, even as he ignored the suggestions of Penn and Vogue’s fashion editors. “Liberman recognized his genius and wanted to utilize it,” says son Yorick Blumenfeld.

  Vogue was important to Blumenfeld: thanks to his exposure in its pages, by 1950 he’d become one of the most successful and highly paid advertising photographers in the world. But in 1955, he and Liberman had a disagreement. He’d grown tired of being told how to take pictures by the people he sometimes called “arsedirectors.” Then “Penn did a retake of a Blumenfeld sitting” for Vogue, says Blumenfeld’s granddaughter Nadia Charbit. “He didn’t like Penn.”

  Yorick Blumenfeld thinks the end of his father’s relationship with Vogue was more complicated, a slow but inexorable unraveling. “Liberman competed with his photographers. I think he felt competitive with Blumenfeld. . . . He felt ill at ease with Liberman always. Penn was much more amenable.” In his later years Blumenfeld would express regret. “I spent so much of my life as a prostitute,” he told his son. Yorick says, “The point of view of an artist was very strong in him. He felt the world of fashion was not one of art.” In that, at least he agreed with Liberman.

  In years to come, Penn’s photographs would appear more and more often on the cover of Vogue (he would eventually shoot 164 covers), and while he clearly had a style of his own, more than a few elements of it appear inspired by Blumenfeld’s innovative work before him. Meantime, Blumenfeld continued to shoot for advertisers, began experimenting with film, wrote his autobiography, broke up with a mistress after a seven-year affair (she went on to marry one of his sons), and then took up with a much-younger assistant, though he remained married to his wife. Worried by prostate problems and fearful of a prolonged decline, he killed himself at seventy-three in Rome in 1969 by deliberately skipping his heart medication and repeatedly running up and down the city’s famous Spanish Steps.

  Chapter 6

  * * *

  FUNNY FACE

  Twenty-two years earlier, Richard Avedon hadn’t killed off Louise Dahl-Wolfe, but he had put an end to her reign as the top photographer at Harper’s Bazaar. She continued to work there for another nine years and shot the all-important Paris collections alongside Avedon, but, she would feel—and be—overshadowed and seethe with resentment.

  Seething seemed to follow Avedon in those early years. In 1949, he’d booked another model, Mary Jane Russell, who was married to Edward Russell, a war hero turned advertising e
xecutive, to shoot with him in Paris. Then, just before their planned departure, Avedon canceled her in favor of Dorian Leigh, sending Russell a letter instead of telling her to her face. Forty-five years later, the wound was still raw for both the Russells.

  Avedon still booked her and she still posed for him. “Dick [was] the supreme master of manipulation,” she said, “making the person in front of him responsive. He had no peer. Dick [could] do it with anybody. Dick [could] make a stone respond. It’s enthusiasm. Penn, a great, great photographer also, was much more difficult to work with. He was intense, serious on overload, not enthusiastic. It was debilitating working for him. Penn would say to me, ‘If I ask Jean to be a princess, she can be a princess. Why can’t you?’ But Penn was totally honest and Dick was totally dishonest.”

  Years later, when a magazine published an Avedon photo of Russell, but identified her as another model, Dovima, all the old resentment poured out. Russell’s husband, who was also a photographer, wrote a letter to the magazine asking to see the contact sheet for the pictures, which inspired an angry call to Mary Jane from Avedon. “I want these letters to stop!” he yelled. “Tell your nitwit husband, the photo is not you, it’s Dovima!” And he slammed down the phone.

  “Dick is wrong,” Mary Jane Russell said, “but you see, Dick cannot be wrong.” Years later, at a photo show opening, Avedon came over to her and announced, “I’ve figured it out. I looked at the contacts. I redid the sitting with Dovima.”

  “I just let it go,” Russell said. But her husband couldn’t. “I had a heartbroken, devastated wife on my hands. It’s something you never forget.” He mentioned a famous photo Avedon took of Leigh on that 1949 trip to Paris. “Dorian in a tiara, laughing, showing her little, tiny teeth. It is the most unpleasant photograph,” Ed Russell said—and indeed, the Bazaar refused to run it.I “Why would he do that? There’s a cruelty there. There’s a revenge against everything that made him.”

  Then Ed Russell went for the jugular. “Dorian had a marvelous sexual encounter with Dick. Have Dorian describe their activity. She has with me because I don’t like him.”

  But when asked about that, Dorian Leigh just laughed: “He wouldn’t have touched me with a ten-foot pole. He was scared of me. One day he said, ‘It takes a lot of courage to photograph beautiful women.’ ”

  And something else that happened in 1949 shows how unlikely Ed Russell’s story was. Lillian Bassman’s careful remark about Avedon’s fascination with androgyny hinted at the events that summer. Doe Avedon had decided to change careers and become an actress and, in October 1948, made her Broadway debut in a play directed by Harold Clurman. Dick’s career was taking off, he was traveling constantly, and after that, Doe started moving from one play to another. She met and fell head over heels for an actor named Dan Matthews. She would later tell several of the children she adopted with a third husband, the director Don Siegel, that her and Matthews’s love was an emotion vastly different from what she felt for Dick Avedon. They hadn’t landed in gay Cherry Grove for no reason.

  “Richard Avedon was gay,” says Nowell Siegel, Doe’s oldest child. “It was not a secret between them. I don’t think she had any doubt about his sexual preferences from the get-go. At the time, it wasn’t okay to be with the same sex. You wanted to be married. He started taking pictures of my mom and he used her to launch his career, and she saw in him a great connection. They did have quite a love affair. I can’t tell you if they made love, but I’m sure they did. They had a wonderful relationship through the screen, through the pictures. She was his first love, whether it was sexual or not. She left Dick and it broke his heart. His preferences aside, until the end of his days, he thought of Mom as the love of his life.” Dan Matthews was that for Doe, however, says Nowell. “Her true love. He was the only one.”

  Avedon’s sexual preferences would remain a matter of speculation for the rest of his life. He never addressed the subject directly, but seemed to do so obliquely in a PBS documentary: “I do photograph what I was afraid of, things I couldn’t deal with without the camera . . . madness, and when I was young, women. I didn’t understand. It gave me a sort of control over the situation. It got out of my system and onto the page.”

  Most public reports of their split say Doe and Dick were divorced in 1949. But Doe’s children—and one brief report in a New York tabloid a few years later—say the marriage was actually annulled. “Dan [Matthews] was Catholic, and that was the only way they could marry,” says daughter Anney. They were wed in spring 1951 while appearing together in Mae West’s review Diamond Lil. That same year, Dick’s father, Jack, had a heart attack, left his wife, and moved to Florida.

  That summer of 1949, Avedon preceded Leigh to Paris to scout locations with Joe Eula, an illustrator, stylist, and gregarious court jester, who often worked for the Bazaar. From the sophistication of the photos that resulted, it’s easy to forget that Avedon was only twenty-six years old. Leigh recalled sitting on a bench one day during a shoot with him, and he was “telling me his dreams. He said, ‘What am I telling you this for? You’ve lived a whole life.’ I was twenty-nine!”II

  Not long after returning to New York, Avedon met his next wife. Lillian Bassman and Dorian Leigh both took credit for introducing him to Evelyn Franklin, who was then married to another fashion photographer, Milton Greene, but Greene’s second wife, Amy, says it was really her husband’s doing. Greene (born Milton Greengold a year before Avedon) had assisted Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Life photographer Eliot Elisofon before setting out on his own.

  Amy Franco had met Avedon long before she met Greene, and as with Doe, he made her a model. She was fifteen and a half, dressed in jeans, penny loafers, and a sweater with a braid down her back, walking with her father in Manhattan, when a shy young man with a “wonderful face” under glasses approached her, said, “I’d like to photograph you,” and handed her a business card.

  “The man was Richard Avedon,” she continues. “Somehow, a bell went off. Junior Bazaar had just started and it was in my head or I would have said, ‘Give me a break.’ ” He asked to see her the next day at ten. She said noon, to have time to get her hair done. “Big mistake,” she says. “He liked the braid. He pulled his hair out.” He took her photo anyway and, the next day, sent Amy to a modeling agent with his contact sheets. “By five p.m., I had a contract.”

  Three times she went to meet Milton Greene. Three times she was sent away “because he was busy with other guys having a good time,” she says. She did a couple of jobs with Avedon, “but he didn’t want to do Junior Bazaar. He wanted big Bazaar. I’m a midget.”

  Amy would subsequently marry Greene, but only after he foisted his wife off on Avedon. “Evelyn was off her rocker,” says someone close to the Greenes. “She wanted to stay in bed all day, without working, cooking, anything. She was a pain in the ass. Milton was a working artist and he had no time for bullshit.” Milton wanted out of the marriage, but didn’t know what to do. Because Dick was devastated after Doe left him, says Amy Greene, who thought Avedon was heterosexual, “Milton introduced Evelyn to Dick and she got him on the rebound. What Dick saw in her, I had no idea. But all the emotions he had for Doe were transferred to Evelyn.” Doe Avedon approved. “Mom said Evelyn was good for Dick,” says one of Doe’s children, because though Evelyn had mental issues, they weren’t as bad as his sister’s, and “he could connect with her more than with Louise.”

  Dick and Evelyn got married on January 29, 1951, at his apartment on East Seventy-Third Street, and left immediately for a honeymoon in Egypt and Paris, where he also shot Dovima for the Bazaar. Evelyn seemed to thrive in what was also her second marriage. “She became one of the most elegant women in New York,” says Amy Greene. She wore clothes by “Mainbocher [once the editor of French Vogue, who’d become a couturier], Norell, you name it. She went to Paris with him and got clothes wholesale. She spent money like it was going out of style.”

  The Avedons would have their only child in 1952. “He wanted a child,
a son,” says Greene, “so she had John and then her position was strong and she could do what she wanted because she’d given him what he wanted.” Their interests would soon diverge. “Dick was very political,” says Greene, “and Evelyn didn’t know who the president was. They drifted apart and she went back to being a recluse.”

  Shortly before Dick and Evelyn Avedon were wed, a woman who was just as important to him, Dorian’s little sister Suzy Parker, had joined Avedon’s troupe. Dick had first met Suzy at sixteen in 1948, two years after Dorian induced her to start modeling on school vacations. “In came this girl,” he said, “who looked utterly unlike the usual model type, wearing one of the most rebellious expressions I’ve ever seen on anybody. She positively glowered.” To Dorian, Avedon confessed his real fear: “I don’t know if I can work with someone so beautiful. There may not be enough I can do to create something of my own.” His anxiety seemed justified after their first few photographs together, “in hats,” Suzy recalled. “I think I looked awful in them.” But then, he took her to Paris in 1950 to shoot the fall collections. “Everything that happened to Suzy, happened after that,” Avedon recalled. He would later say that his secret of model selection was to make them “look like real women,” and that even if they appeared undernourished, his target audience, women, “seldom resent a truly wholesome face.” Parker epitomized that balancing act.