Focus

by Michael Gross

  Wolfe got it. “It’s not so much what people do, that’s such an old idea, what people do,” he wrote. “It’s what they are, it’s a revolution.”

  Except when it’s a soap opera. Bailey’s wife filed for divorce in 1963, blaming Shrimpton. Shrimpton, at twenty-one, started wondering if her association with Bailey wasn’t limiting her. Perhaps aware she was growing restless, or restless himself, Bailey encouraged her to work with other photographers and says he talked Vogue into letting Cecil Beaton shoot her. When Shrimpton and Bailey did still shoot together, their on-set fights could be epic. “She would be in hysterics,” said hairdresser Kenneth Battelle. But they’d get the job done. “They would pull their acts together finally.”

  Early in 1964, Shrimpton met the actor Terence Stamp, whom she’d recently posed with for Bailey, at a wedding she attended with Bailey, and felt an instant attraction. That spring, she came to New York alone, seeking work with other photographers. Her ambition was to pose for Avedon, whom she considered “the greatest fashion photographer in the world.” Sensing something was awry, Bailey called her daily, then followed, as planned, two weeks later to join her. When he landed, Shrimpton was too busy to see him, shooting with Mel Sokolsky.

  She found herself attracted to both Sokolsky and his business partner, Jordan Kalfus, who was then involved with Sokolsky’s stylist and girl Friday, Ali MacGraw, who would go on to become a model herself and then a movie star. Then Terence Stamp arrived in New York. Once he left, Shrimpton broke up with Bailey, and before long she started sleeping with Stamp—or at least in the version of the story she told in her autobiography.

  Making matters even more complicated, William Helburn claims that he, too, was sleeping with Shrimpton. He’d just been dumped by his mistress, actress Elsa Martinelli, met and proposed to the model who would become his second wife, the same Angela Howard who’d just been “made” by Bailey, and was finalizing his divorce from his first wife, another model, when Shrimpton appeared in his studio, he says, and he promptly fell in love.

  “I’m crying over Elsa, getting divorced, getting married, and cheating with Jean Shrimpton,” says Helburn. “It’s a potpourri. I picked up Angela at Mel’s studio one time, and Jean was there. What a crazy life!” A magazine writer was there and watched him pull Shrimpton onto his lap and kiss her neck over and over.

  “He embarrasses me,” Shrimpton protested. “Get him to stop.”

  Helburn says he knew Jean had the hots for Jordan Kalfus. “She calls Bailey and says, ‘David, I want to break up.’ ” Helburn also claims he set in motion the affair with Stamp that followed. Appropriately, this game of romantic musical chairs began when an Italian film producer decided to make a movie about a randy, model-chasing fashion photographer.

  The 1966 film Blow-Up, starring David Hemmings as Thomas, a Terrible-type photographer, gestated for quite some time. “It was [producer] Carlo Ponti’s idea before [its director, Michelangelo] Antonioni got involved to make a London photographer film,” Bailey says. “These two Italians came to see me in their suits at Vogue and started talking to me, saying we’re interested in you making a film. I thought they wanted me to direct. Then one of them said to me, ‘What about the way you dress?’ ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ ‘Well, if you’re going to play the part.’ I said, ‘Hang on.’ I’d started doing commercials then. ‘I’m dyslexic. I can’t remember your names let alone a fuckin’ phone number.’ ”

  Bailey was thinking of directing a movie of his own called The Assassination of Mick Jagger, to be financed in part by his friend the Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski, so he passed. Blow-Up’s subsequent success—and the general perception that he inspired it—may explain why Bailey calls the movie Blow-Job. Helburn says Ponti then approached Terence Stamp about playing Thomas. While Shrimpton was in New York, Stamp went to Helburn’s studio; the producers had told Stamp he ought to see what a hot photographer’s life was like. Really, the movie wasn’t based only on Bailey or the Terribles, as has been said, but on the whole generation on both sides of the Atlantic who’d given the profession a new image.

  The day Stamp went to visit Helburn, he was shooting Shrimpton in a “crazy sweater for McCall’s,” Helburn says, “and Terry wants to be in a picture, so he gets into a sweater and poses, and that was the end of Jean and me.” Helburn adds, “Bailey hired Angela and fucked Angela at the collections—I’m not married to her yet—and he says, ‘Tell that to Bill.’ I’m going with his girl. He lays my girl. Shrimpton meets Terry.” Shrimpton wouldn’t last long with Stamp, but another relationship she forged in New York, with Avedon, would last longer and be more fruitful.

  When Stamp returned to New York in the fall of 1964 to appear on Broadway, Shrimpton went with him and finally got her chance to work with Avedon. A month after his story with the Abascal twins in Ibiza, Avedon shot Shrimpton with actor Steve McQueen for the February 1965 issue of Harper’s Bazaar. Avedon and Shrimpton’s collaboration would last through her retirement at the end of the sixties and thrive even after Avedon began shooting a later girlfriend of David Bailey’s, a saucer-eyed society girl named Penelope Tree. Tree would be followed by Anjelica Huston, from the movie clan. She’d already modeled for Bailey (in a professional collaboration that would continue for years) and would shortly be the girlfriend of Bob Richardson, another of the new generation of shooters. Avedon was more than willing to follow the lead of younger photographers, at least when it came to the models of the moment. Thanks to their sex drive, they served as pointer dogs for the older photographer, who once declared, “You can’t fuck and photograph at the same time.”

  That didn’t stop models from falling in love with him. “He was always moving, dancing,” says Iris Bianchi, who would go on to style for him after the end of her posing career. “He was the most vivacious, energetic soul,” says Susan Forristal, who arrived in New York at the end of the decade. “You knew it was a big deal—and for him, too. He created an atmosphere that said what you were working on was special, unique. And once you worked for Dick, you were a top girl. The other models looked at you differently. I had a crush on him. I was in awe of him. I had dreams about him.”

  Even straight male models fell for Avedon’s charms. “My all-time favorite,” says Tony Spinelli. “The type of guy who’s interested in you and your personality. That was his way of knowing what you were capable of and getting more out of you.”

  Shrimpton already knew that Avedon was ruthless. “All photographers have their quirks,” she would recall years later. “All the models who worked for him knew perfectly well he would give them a different body if their own was not up to his exacting standards. I have seen my head on someone else’s body—he had doctored a photograph of me he took for Revlon. . . . He had photographed me with a teddy bear, but when I saw the advertisement, the hands holding the teddy were not mine. They were much better hands, with longer nails. It did not worry me. It was still a privilege working for him.”

  But Funny Face was a distant memory. This was the Blow-Up era. Claimants to the title of its inspiration were many, although Avedon wasn’t among them. Bert Stern, too, was convinced it was partly about him, and he had a photograph to prove it. He’d met Bailey and Shrimpton at Alex Liberman’s house on one of their first trips to America. Two years before the film was made, he shot Bailey lying on his back pointing a camera up at the great six-foot-one-inch-tall German-born model Veruschka, standing between his legs in a sleeveless pillar gown, looking for all the world as if she might kick him in the balls. “It was me,” Stern said of that photo. “It was the image of photographers in the sixties.” Bailey confirms it; Stern was in the driver’s seat that day: “It was Bert’s idea. He said, ‘Get on the floor.’ That’s how we became friends.”

  In Blow-Up, a scene based on that picture features the actor David Hemmings kneeling over Veruschka, straddling her as he snaps away, just as Bert Stern loved to do. In 1960, Stern claimed, he’d chased director Antonioni out of his stud
io while he photographed the star of his earlier film L’Avventura. “I wanted to be alone with Monica Vitti,” Stern said. He was willing to share the status of inspiration for the lead character in Blow-Up: “Somehow, I felt Antonioni blended David and me into one character. The sexual encounters were familiar.”

  Chapter 16

  * * *

  “MAGAZINED”

  After the scathing critical reaction to Richard Avedon’s Nothing Personal, the book ended up in bargain bins and “he had a nervous breakdown,” says Alex Chatelain, then his assistant. “He locked himself in a room for six months.” Simultaneously, Avedon’s second ten-year contract with Hearst was ending, and as much to reassert himself as to celebrate that milestone, he accepted an appointment as guest editor of the Bazaar’s April 1965 issue, photographing the entire thing, making it a celebration of the new pop society. “It was a distillation of everything going on in the sixties,” says Bazaar editor Ila Stanger. The cover featured Shrimpton with a blinking lenticular eye—a patch was pasted to each issue. The imagery within ranged over the space race, comic books, socialites, artists, Bob Dylan, and the requisite high fashion, some of it shot on China Machado, some on Avedon’s latest model discovery, Donyale Luna, an angular, elegant African-American from Detroit whom the photographer had reportedly signed to an exclusive one-year contract after a sketch of her appeared on Bazaar’s cover that January. (In March 1966, she would become the first black model to appear on the cover of an issue of Vogue, shot by David Bailey for the British edition.) Today, Avedon’s issue is a collector’s item, but at the time, like Nothing Personal, it sold badly and was condemned. Avedon couldn’t catch a break.

  “Advertisers objected,” Earl Steinbicker remembers. “They said there was too much photography and not enough clothes. This was not to the taste of Nancy White.” Hearst management made its displeasure known. Hearst “was so conservative, they couldn’t bear anything out of the ordinary,” says Ila Stanger. “They wouldn’t let him get away with anything outrageous after April.” Avedon’s mood went from bad to worse in August, when he went to Paris to photograph the collections in a brand-new Harper’s Bazaar studio. “The pictures were rather conservative,” says Steinbicker. “They just didn’t have the magic.” Steinbicker collapsed, was confined to bed, and “decided the time had come” to stop assisting and set out on his own. Avedon referred penurious potential clients to him—“jobs where they couldn’t afford Avedon,” Steinbicker says.

  That fall, Avedon’s contract had run out. “I was negotiating after twenty years to have some sort of health insurance, benefits, and a better financial relationship,” he recalled. “I was just fed up.” A Hearst executive who never went to studios “came to the studio with a contract” and offered a deal that was “a little better than before but not much,” said Avedon, and in exchange for a raise from $75 to $125 per page wanted the right to use photographs in British Bazaar for free. “I thought I’d blow up,” Avedon remembered. “I didn’t want to [sign] but I stuck my hand out and said okay. If he’d said one more word I would have lost my temper.”

  Vreeland knew Avedon’s deal was expiring (“Talk about your grapevine,” he said, laughing) and called that very night, begging him to talk to Condé Nast before re-signing. A few days later, on a Saturday, he met with Alex Liberman, who’d left seven phone messages for him at his home in the interim. Pat Patcévitch and Newhouse had already approved a record-setting $1 million deal. “It was terribly rough for me,” Avedon said. “I was going to a strange place with Diana, the most eccentric of the three” Bazaar editors he’d considered his adopted family.

  Even with Avedon aboard, Vreeland didn’t have it easy at Vogue. “Nancy White rose to the occasion,” says a former Hearst editor. Hiro, Bill King, and Bill Silano were still taking interesting photographs at the Bazaar. But under Vreeland, Vogue rose inexorably and “took first place,” Liberman later said. “To my regret, Hearst mysteriously let the Bazaar deteriorate.”

  Liberman was experienced at controlling photographers—and would only get better at it. He would soon ban both Norman Parkinson and Francesco Scavullo from Vogue’s pages, the latter after he impudently tore up a Vogue layout of his pictures and returned them to Liberman in a garbage bag. But the news of Avedon’s hiring caused a permanent rift between Liberman and Irving Penn. On the surface, nothing changed. “The big star of Vogue was always Penn,” says Sarah Slavin. “Penn was the abiding genius of Vogue. Dick was second or third. Dick was more a hired gun.”

  Years later, it would emerge that Penn considered Avedon was a gun aimed straight at him. “Penn felt as though he’d been kicked in the gut,” wrote Liberman’s biographers. Though Penn’s guarantee was raised to two hundred pages a year (double Bert Stern’s), he later called Avedon’s arrival a turning point, the moment he began putting his personal work above his job at Condé Nast. Penn likely also worried, and quite correctly so, that Vreeland would prefer Avedon’s theatrical approach to fashion photography. So Penn turned his attention to printing; by 1968, he’d hired a new assistant, Keith Trumbo, who was expert at making subtly beautiful platinum prints, the printing technique favored by photography’s earliest masters. Known for their tonal qualities and permanence, platinum prints were a key to Penn’s move from fashion to art photography.

  Penn’s experiments in printing were far more satisfying than sessions shooting girls in clothes, which continued, but had become routine. “How many dresses can you shoot?” asks Slavin. “He was possibly out of sync with the crazy stuff called fashion in the sixties. I can’t imagine he liked a lot of that crap.”

  Models would be readied by Babs Simpson or Polly Allen, who were rarely allowed on the set. “They would present them to Mr. Penn,” says Trumbo, “and he’d look and chew,” and once he was satisfied, “we’d march downstairs,” where Penn sat on a tripod stool while an assistant manned a spotlight, because, like the myopic Avedon, Penn “never trusted his eyesight.”

  Trumbo continues, “Everyone was always respectful. The models were never jumping around. He’d never get that excited. He’d seen so many dresses, but once he was there, he’d get into it.” Except when he didn’t. “He could fidget,” says Slavin. “He could walk in and look at a girl you thought was ready and say, ‘No,’ and you had to start over.” Penn would even walk out of a sitting if he didn’t like the girl, several editors say. “You needed to know your job to work with Penn,” Slavin continues. “Dick had more tricks. Penn didn’t use them. He could be intimidating. Dick made an effort to be friendly. Penn made an effort to be polite. Dick would look at passing air and pull something out of it he thought enticing and photograph it. Penn left a lot out because it didn’t have the timeless validity he was always looking for. Dick was trying to catch a moment and time that was passing faster and faster. I don’t think Penn cared.”

  Vreeland’s chief assistant, Grace Mirabella, had a harsher opinion of the differences between Vogue’s two stars. She found dealing with Avedon’s ego distasteful, “a constant hassle,” and hated that Avedon wouldn’t show Vogue his entire sittings, “only the two or three pictures that he thought should run. . . . Avedon was just a royal pain. . . . For Dick, a sheerly beautiful picture of a girl was too banal. His pictures had to be arch, fresh, blatantly sexual,” even if that meant they were “ugly and distasteful.” And she resented that it was her job to tell him so. “Irving Penn, on the other hand, was a dream . . . a seeker of truths,” uninterested in razzle-dazzle, though he, too, could be a pain when his perfectionism kicked in and he refused to click his shutter. Yet she found that more palatable than Avedon’s divalike protests “that his pictures couldn’t face Penn’s” or “that Penn was trampling on his turf.” One diva was enough for Vreeland’s number two.

  Trumbo says Penn worked seven days a week and estimates that half his time was spent shooting for Vogue, a fifth on advertising, and the rest on making art prints. “His heart was absolutely in the platinum printing,” Trumbo says. “Nothi
ng could compete.”

  Driven though he was, Penn also had a sense of humor—and at least once Vreeland was the butt of the joke. Penn loosened up when he was shooting collections on location. Lisa Fonssagrives, his wife, would often accompany him, and out of his element, “he’d get a little more excited, he’d feel a bit looser,” Trumbo says. “You’re working late at night, it’s a bit exhausting, but it shifted his centeredness so he was more willing to play.” Though shoots themselves were still deadly serious and succinct, off the set he’d laugh and joke and talk about art, music, and life.

  One year, in Paris, Penn had a gallstone attack, was sent to the American Hospital, and decided to have surgery in Lisa’s native Sweden. David Bailey was recruited to step in at the last minute and complete the shoot, using Penn’s team. “Diana Vreeland had stopped visiting studios,” says Trumbo, “but she came to thank Bailey.” Trumbo was taking light readings and, just as she walked in, accidentally plugged American lights into a 220-volt outlet. “Everything explodes,” Trumbo recalls, “and Vreeland immediately thought it was her greeting. I told Penn what happened and he just about split his sides laughing.”

  Like Liberman, Vreeland felt photographers were neither artists nor worthy of the same esteem she reserved for fashion designers, yet she, too, was capable of flattering, cajoling, and manipulating. After Avedon shot Nureyev the next year, she dashed off a note to Dick: “These are the best pictures you have ever taken in your life and that’s saying a hell of a lot.” Just six weeks later, she criticized a cover photo he’d taken of Jean Shrimpton, clearly softening him up to reshoot it, telling him the model’s hairpiece was “terrible . . . poverty-stricken and horrible. Lets watch this like mad [sic].”