He thought he was invincible. “He started believing his own press,” says Peter Israelson. “He saw himself as an icon, and that’s fatal.” Israelson’s diagnosis boiled down to pharmacological delusion “coupled with megalomania.” Stern felt he could get away with anything. “We make a wonderful fantasy world,” says editor Sarah Slavin, “but woe betide those who actually believe in it.”
He’d leave Allegra at 7:00 a.m., return at midnight, and then stay up for hours. “Sleep and rest were elusive, and euphoric fantasies replaced logic,” she remembered. “He became my tormentor . . . and our family life, always precarious, started to suffer even more.” Once, when he came home at 3:00 a.m., having been “with a woman, I was certain . . . I took a hammer and smashed his Tom Wesselmann watercolor,” then scrawled “You are a destroyer” on it with a Magic Marker and left it at the foot of the stairs. “Bert, of course, was furious.”
He’d been in the condo in the St. Tropez; it was “his lair,” says Holly Forsman. They mostly hooked up at her nearby apartment, though: “A woman likes to be near her bathroom.” They dined at Maxwell’s Plum, a famous singles bar, also nearby. When he went to an interesting location, Forsman went with him, working as a grip. “I loved watching him work,” she says. “Often, he’d look at the light and at me and take a picture and sell it.”
She knew the relationship was going nowhere, so she also had a boyfriend, and they were “engaged to be engaged,” she says. “Bert didn’t like this.” Then “something bad happened.” Stern booked her for a commercial and she didn’t show up after staying out late and partying too hard. “TV wants you at the crack of dawn and then doesn’t use you for three hours,” she gripes. Stern had someone wake her and take her to the doctor. “And within half an hour, I was gorgeous and lively and I slid halfway down a fireman’s pole, said a line, and then continued sliding, but I thought, ‘What the hell was that shot?’ Bert said vitamin B12. That’s when Allegra called me.”
It was spring 1966, and Kent was pregnant again when her mother called to say she’d spotted Bert on the street with Forsman. Allegra confronted her. “I know you’re seeing Bert,” she said. “Stop. I can make trouble. You’re young. You can find someone else. And I’m pregnant.”
“I just listened,” Forsman says. “And then I said I was sorry and not another word. And that was it. I told Bert I wasn’t seeing him anymore. I also said, ‘Stop using drugs.’ I saw a difference. He had wonderment and curiosity and joy and that started to vanish and I didn’t want to be with this other person.” Forsman got married. Bert and Allegra’s son, Bret, their third and last child, was born at the end of that year.
Forsman was right about Bert. But not everyone noticed or wanted to see what was happening. Or else they thought it was just great. “We marveled at his energy,” says Len Lipson.
Even while shooting, Stern was always alert for new possibilities. “He was a mogul,” says Peter Israelson. “He was always on, making deals.” In 1966, Stern spotted a photo in the Daily News of Twiggy—the hottest new model to emerge since Shrimpton—around the same time Diana Vreeland saw her in French Elle. They shot Twiggy, a scrawny cockney whose elfin hairstyle was being copied by teens all over England, at the next Paris collections, where “people kept knocking on the door from the newspapers,” Stern said. “I could see it right away, this was going to be a riot. She was Cinderella.” Aware she would shortly be coming to America for several months,
Stern secured an exclusive from her Svengali boyfriend—a Vidal Sassoon hairdresser who’d assumed the name Justin de Villeneuve—and then called Barry Diller, an ABC-TV executive, and proposed a documentary.
“Barry said, ‘Let’s do three films,’ ” Peter Israelson recalls, “and suddenly Bert had a deal” worth $250,000 to make one hour-long and two half-hour shows, Twiggy in New York, Twiggy in Hollywood, and Twiggy, why? “Bert was the center of the pop storm at that point,” says Israelson. Avedon shot Twiggy, too, but only after Stern. Avedon’s loss of primacy first bewildered and then embittered him. He would see that moment as the end of haute fashion, when “the world switched and fashion magazines switched” from exalting “a beauty representative of higher values” to chasing “a stewardess’s dream.” High on his shots and himself, Bert Stern knew how to pilot that plane.
Back in New York, Stern reveled in his new celebrity, which had now surpassed his wife’s. “He hobnobbed with everyone,” says Israelson, with “lavish dinners with Balanchine” and “a salon with artists and writers.” The hottest pop stars came to his parties. “All his competitors showed up at the court of the king.” Irving Penn shot Stern’s portrait. Avedon visited the studio and called the music Stern played junk. “Avedon was playing Sinatra,” Stern responded with disdain.
With Forsman out of the picture, Bert found a new blonde—and this time, she insists, it wasn’t about sex; it was pure obsession. Today, Dian Parkinson is probably best known as the former hostess of television’s The Price Is Right. In 1966, she was finishing a year’s run as Miss World USA when she came to New York to model and soon found herself locked in Bert Stern’s embrace as “his protégée—his muse,” she says.
Parkinson (née Dianna Lynn Batts) was a Mormon, “naïve,” she says, but pretty and curvy, when Vreeland sent her to Stern’s studio on a go-see. She sat around for an hour and a half with three other, more typical models. Finally, the receptionist announced, “Mr. Stern isn’t seeing anybody today.” They all got up to leave, but the woman behind the window stopped Parkinson: “Except you. He’ll see you.” She was sent around the corner to his condo.
Stern declared her the “next Marilyn Monroe” and invited her back that evening, when he tried to get her to pose topless with a scarf around her. After shooting a few rolls of film, Stern urged her to take all her clothes off. Parkinson refused—she was married—and said no again when he murmured, “Do you want to play?” He sent her away. But the next day, Stern summoned her back to his studio and they became inseparable. He’d found something he’d been looking for, “the American Dream Girl.” Parkinson shot exclusively with Stern for years afterward. “Dian Parkinson didn’t exist until I found out what she looks like,” Stern said.
“You could be pulled in,” she says. “I couldn’t be pulled in as far as he wanted, but he had a huge hold on me. I loved Bert in my own way. I spent years trying to figure it out. Did I really know him? I was mesmerized. I wasn’t in love. But whatever it was we had was probably stronger than what I had with my husband. I had a husband who was very busy. Bert respected the fact that I was true to my husband. But he would sit and talk with me. He gave me something I was missing. It could have been more powerful than sex. It was easy to fall into this.” He kept trying to seduce her, “but he knew there were boundaries and he didn’t want to push me too far because he might lose me.” They worked together for Blackglama furs and Cosmopolitan magazine, both clients with an appreciation for full-figured models.
Bert had learned an important lesson: he didn’t flaunt Parkinson on the streets or in restaurants and nightclubs. “We were only in his world,” she says. He offered her a contract as a salaried model. “I think he was afraid I’d go someplace else,” Parkinson says. “I don’t remember it being a huge amount. It was just Bert’s way of holding on to me and making it look more professional. It made me feel secure. He was always building me up.”
Later, as he grew older and had similar relationships with other much younger women, some around him would speculate that Stern had become like the fictional Lolita’s lover Humbert Humbert, obsessed with innocent nymphets. Parkinson’s memories fit that theory: “Obsession wasn’t a word I knew. I was younger than my years, and something about that intrigued him. Or maybe he just wanted me all to himself. In a lot of ways, Bert’s a mystery. But sometimes an emotional bond can be worse than sleeping with someone. Good Lord, I wasn’t interested in that at all!”
Chapter 18
* * *
“YOU WON’T TAKE ME
ALIVE”
In 1968, Bert Stern Inc. was still in expansion mode. With more than three dozen employees and an operating overhead of $10,000 a week, Stern was stretched thin, though he was reportedly grossing twice that amount. On a visit to the studio in 1970, Irving Penn reportedly said, “My God, man, what are you doing? What happens if you get a bellyache? Who supports this cast?” “There’s never enough money,” Stern told a reporter. That July 1968, one of his companies, K N Equities, borrowed more money—$64,950 this time—from Fred Hill, the real estate man who’d sold him the Walt Whitman School. Stern named Ed Feldman president of K N Equities. A financial consultant who was married to an ex-model and often served as a factor, buying receivables from modeling agencies to fund their ongoing operations, Feldman once sent an agency owner who was late with repayments to the hospital—by beating him with a mallet. He described himself as “a bullshit businessman,” says his son. He was “a wheeler-dealer,” says his widow, Kathleen. “I really didn’t know what the hell he was up to.”
Then, Stern rented a First Avenue storefront near his studio, where, in September, he opened On First, a gallery and boutique selling artist-designed products, some mass market, such as paper plates and wrapping paper designed by Roy Lichtenstein, some in limited editions, such as Day-Glo colorized and solarized serigraphic prints of his nude images of Marilyn Monroe. Unlike the pictures published in Vogue six years earlier, some of these had been marked with X’s by the actress when Stern offered her the chance to edit the sitting. Though she’d hoped to keep those images from ever being seen, Stern realized their value and would henceforth market them at every turn, as if Monroe had collaborated with him to turn them into art. He made Monroe silk scarves and wallpaper, too—the latter sold for $35 a roll. On First also sold some of Stern’s odd inventions, such as stools mounted with bicycle seats. He compared them to Marcel Duchamp’s found objects.
The store cost $200,000, lost money from the start, and closed in less than a year. It didn’t help that the so-called Go-Go economy of the midsixties had stalled. Stocks fell, interest rates and unemployment rose, and the dollar swooned. The simultaneous demise of the economy and On First coincided with a spike in Stern’s drug use. Dian Parkinson knew something was amiss: “I could tell this wasn’t normal, but I was too dang naïve to realize he was going over the edge.”
Stern became “cantankerous, volatile, imperious,” says Peter Israelson, who left the studio in 1969. “It was a classic unraveling.” Stern began vanishing. “He’d disappear and not be available when we needed him,” says Lin Bolen, later a television executive, but then a producer and salesperson at Stern’s fledgling TV commercial company. Sometimes, Dr. Freymann would make house calls to the St. Tropez to inject him. Israelson saw the doctor “all the time,” he says. “Then Bert would be revved up for another ten hours.” Sometimes he wouldn’t bother going around the corner. “He did drugs in the studio,” says Bolen. “He’d go in his office and do it. We all knew he took amphetamines.” And that wasn’t all. Bolen says he was also “snorting coke or taking a pill or downing some booze—he drank pretty good, too.”
He was insulated by an inner circle of acolytes. Maggie Condon, daughter of Eddie Condon, the jazz musician and nightclub namesake, joined the Bert Stern Studio as a production assistant in 1968. Condon and a tall, slim, blond California-hippie type named Larry Brown, ostensibly a writer, became Stern’s closest confidants. They were assumed to be drug buddies. “They never left his side,” says Judith van Ameringe, who printed silk screens in the basement of the studio. “They were really fucked-up most of the time. They’d come in the middle of the night and destroy things. I loved Bert, but my mouth was open all the time.”
In September 1969, Allegra Kent called Robert Freymann and told him Stern was getting drugs from other doctors—John Bishop and Max Jacobson, also well known to Manhattan celebrities and underground scenesters. Savvy customers, Stern among them, would visit them all and max out on their “vitamin” shots. Kent thought Stern was somehow getting speed from his dentist, too. “Bert was headed toward a point of no return,” she recalled, “and I was helpless to prevent it.”
That summer, he became delusional. Then, he unexpectedly invited Allegra along on a location shoot in Saint-Tropez for Coca-Cola. “The clients were going with him on the shoot, and perhaps he wanted a certain look of respectability,” she speculated. “Maybe he was just between girlfriends.” She decided to be optimistic. But then, she found a cache of filled syringes tucked behind a fruit platter in their hotel minibar. “Bert said they were just in case, but their number decreased.”
One month later, K N Equities borrowed another $50,000, consolidating five previous mortgages on the studio, and left Stern $300,000 in debt (about $1.9 million today). In the same deal, K N granted the debt holder, a real estate man, the right of first refusal in the event K N sold the property. Ed Feldman was listed as president of K N Equities on some of the documents; Bert’s name was on others. Either Feldman had bolted or Stern simply couldn’t keep track. Word began to spread that Stern was in trouble.
Dwight Carter joined Stern’s studio early in 1970. He’d begun his career as the lowest assistant at Avedon’s Fifty-Eighth Street studio in 1967, “cleaning the floors and the bathrooms,” he says, but eventually helped create Avedon’s psychedelic posters of the Beatles. But as a black man in a white world, and somewhat diffident, he was always “nervous as hell.” Carter didn’t gel with coworkers and was let go a year later, replaced by Claude Picasso, the painter’s son. Facing the draft, Carter volunteered to join the army and served in Vietnam. On his return, he got a job managing Stern’s studio and darkroom, where a walk-in safe held Stern’s archives. They were totally disorganized.
“It was the beginning of the end, but of course, I didn’t know that,” Carter says. On one of his first location trips early in 1970, he joined Stern, Dian Parkinson, Maggie Condon, and Larry Brown in an RV equipped with a color television set and stereo system. Stern took it across the country when he was commissioned to photograph a promotional book for Levi Strauss, the jeans company. But Carter kept to himself, so he wasn’t privy to all that happened when the RV reached San Francisco.
A hotel room was wrecked, Parkinson recalls. “They started getting weird. Obviously, stuff was going on.” Brown was “always getting in trouble,” she continues, and Bert was “scattered, never pulled together.” The shoot team abruptly returned to New York, where Stern “was in trouble with the people with Vogue. I could sense they put up with a lot.” How much? “I remember very late sittings,” says sittings editor Sarah Slavin. “You never knew how long he’d be able to stand up.”
Vreeland would recall having to fight her way past receptionists and assistants to get to Stern. “Bloody well tell Mr. Stern I am here and I’m waiting,” she’d say. “No, he will not call me back. I am busy but I am waiting.” When he took her call, she snapped, “You’re in a dream, Bert. Now listen to what I’m saying.” He’d lost interest in fashion, says Maggie Condon. “He was shooting for Vogue constantly, but he was more interested in other stuff.” Such as shooting speed, which he now had “delivered in blue Tiffany boxes,” Condon says, so he could inject himself. “All he did was get stoned all the time.”
Carter worked on a couple of Vogue shoots, but Stern’s relationship with Condé Nast was tailing off by the time he arrived. Stern’s last cover ran in October 1970. Around that time, Vreeland made one of her rare visits to his studio, where she was reduced to shouting his name in a dimly lit hallway. “Stern!” she cried. “Bert Stern! Where are you, Stern?” He finally appeared, “dressed for the third straight day in a pink flowered cowboy shirt and rumpled khakis,” Jim Cornfield wrote a few years later. “Greeting Vreeland with an arm around her waist, he parried her rebukes for the wait and guided her into his domain.” Stern continued shooting interior pages for Vogue through 1972; a bathing suit spread that November would be his last work for Condé Nast for a decade.
Though his first cross-country trip for Levi Strauss bore no fruit, he succeeded on his second try and, in 1970, produced a folio of nine images (including studio photos of model Marisa Berenson doing a partial striptease) extolling blue jeans. He’d manipulated and collaged the images and printed the results on his photo-offset equipment. First shown in February 1971 at a menswear convention, the folios were sold by Levi’s retailers the next summer; individual prints cost a few dollars, boxed editions went for $150, and a signed art portfolio carried a $350 price tag. But the Levi’s campaign was Stern’s last gasp. From the chaos caused by Stern’s drug addiction and the collapse of his business, it’s difficult to reconstruct a precise timetable of what happened, but the accounts of those around him paint a clear picture of utter disintegration. Dian Parkinson left without saying good-bye. She discovered her husband was cheating on her and “ran away from it all,” she says, moving to Los Angeles. “I probably hurt Bert. Leaving as abruptly as I did might’ve been painful, but it was time to leave Dodge.” She never heard from him again. “Kind of sad, isn’t it?”
Sometime in 1971, Dr. Freymann gave Stern a bad shot on purpose; Allegra Kent speculates he was punishing Stern for seeing other doctors and perhaps trying to scare him straight. On another occasion, Stern abandoned daughter Trista, then ten, in the lobby of a Broadway theater when he saw portents of doom in a poster advertising the musical Follies.
He was “bullfighting with shadows,” Kent wrote. “Like a toreador, he’d edge away from them and let them slip past him.” Then he started “seeing dangerous penumbras, shadows from his future—from another hemisphere—that threatened his family, not just him.” He was sometimes violent. Maggie Condon saw the same symptoms: “He believed he had another reality. He thought consciousness was layered and he was on the fourth layer.” Condon and Peter Israelson did their best to cover for him. “Assistants were snapping the pictures” when Stern “vanished,” says Jeff Sado, a distant relative he later befriended and in whom he confided.
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