Nelson, on the other hand, found Houlès in full. “The things he’d say about people!” she marvels. “He treated women like garbage.” He called the latest girlfriend of Gilles Bensimon a “pinhead,” and fashion editor Grace Coddington a “two-faced bitch”—a particularly nasty swipe as Coddington had had facial-reconstruction surgery after a car crash. Even his photographer friends got the Houlès treatment. “Everyone thought they were his best friend,” Nelson says. “‘Ugh, Patrick’s coming over. . . .’ He was their leader because he didn’t care.”
By 1986, Houlès had bigger problems than his conflicts about the world he inhabited. “Something’s not right,” he told Nelson one day. “I don’t feel well. I can feel my body rotting.” That August, he was in Paris and went out for a run; he was training for the New York City Marathon. “He was supposed to go to the airport to pick up our father,” says his sister. “He didn’t show up.” His body was found in the Bois de Boulogne, where he’d fallen, dead at thirty-nine.
Gerald Dearing bailed out of the Atelier de Tuileries and went to Los Angeles to try to make movies after Uli Rose sold his share of the studio to another photographer, André Carrara, using Bensimon’s lawyer. Rose made a bad deal and felt cheated. “There was a big disagreement,” but it’s “water under the bridge,” says Rose, who later worked for Bensimon at Elle. “I have no animosity. But you know what? You get four fashion photographers in a room, you have problems.” Dearing had had enough, though, and still hasn’t forgiven Bensimon. “Gilles had fights everywhere,” he notes. “If there’s a fire, he lit the match.”
Later, one of Gilles’s brothers lived in the former Atelier—“a divine apartment about a block from the Tuileries,” Bensimon says with faraway eyes. “I do so many bad things in this studio.” Then he laughs sharply. “I don’t remember!”
Despite his boasting, Louise Despointes thinks Bensimon cared more about power than women or photography: “Gilles saw where his niche would be—to use women. He went out with editors and plugged into Elle. He is part of the degeneration of this business. He brought mediocrity because he couldn’t compete with genius, but luck turned his way.”
Dearing wasn’t impressed with Bensimon’s photographic skills, either: “He was not better or worse than the others, but he was driven.” That set up a wall between Bensimon and his fellow Frenchies. He also lived a different life. “I was very bourgeois,” he claims. When the others were off with models (“The idea is to skewer as many of them as you can,” a peripheral mobster, Guy Le Baube, once said), Bensimon would head home to Pascha, their baby daughter, and their apartment on the Place de Bourbon, across the street from French Vogue, or a fifteenth-century castle they’d bought in the country, where he would cook dinners for friends. “Everything had to be perfect,” says Dearing, “underdone, but in a European way, so the wire to the lamp had to be twisted just so.”
Appearances deceive. Just before Alex Chatelain left Paris for New York in 1976, he and Bensimon took a trip with a stylist for Depeche Mode, Douce de Andia. “She was quite beautiful,” Chatelain remembers, “with beautiful, huge breasts.” He and Bensimon dared her to bare them in a stuffy provincial restaurant as they were heading back to Paris. “She did it,” says Chatelain. “The waiters didn’t know what to do. I think that’s where she and Gilles started.”
Bensimon says he and Pascha had drifted apart. Pascha remembers it differently: “We separated because of Douce. He told her he was free and he was not. I asked him to go away.” But any hard feelings have long since departed. “I brought him a lot, but he brought me a lot,” says Pascha. “I had a fantastic time with him.”
Chapter 25
* * *
“EVERYTHING IS A FASHION PHOTO”
Paris had two schools of photographers in the midseventies. The Mobsters couldn’t have been more different from the flash-style photographers such as Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton, whose images were stolen moments from dangerous artistic, individual fantasy narratives that happened to include fashion. To create his, Bourdin collaborated with his models—or at least those who could pass the tests he set for them, “keeping them working under tricky conditions, of light, position, and body language,” says his assistant J. P. Masclet. First among them was Louise Despointes.
Bourdin was her teacher, her mentor. “Every night to his house,” she says. “Guy had the most ideas and was the least constrained. He was the most instinctive. The others—Horvat, Sieff, Newton—were intellectual. Guy laughed. It was emotion. His mind would go. Guy was not mediocre. Guy was not crazy. He would send me to museums. He would make me paint. He would make me have opinions. He had ideas that were out of this world.”
One night, he stormed BHV, the grandest hardware store in Paris, at 2:00 a.m. so he could build a wall with a window in it in the Vogue studio for a single shot the next day. He stationed Uli Rose, who was assisting, behind the window and ordered him to throw out paper airplanes, one after another. Bourdin was testing Rose and he failed. “That was Guy’s spirit. He felt Uli didn’t have it in his belly to be an assistant,” says Despointes.
“He was right!” says Rose, who’d turned down a job assisting Horvat when he first arrived in Paris. “He showed me a coal cellar and said paint it white and learn French in three weeks,” Rose recalls. “I declined.” That day with Bourdin, which stretched into the next night, “what broke the camel’s back,” Rose says, was Bourdin’s insistence on playing and replaying the side of Isaac Hayes’s 1969 LP, Hot Buttered Soul, that included the song “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” “again and again and again,” says Rose. “The whole night. It was taking hours. I turned the record over and he flipped out.” The memory inspires others. “He was really bad. He never paid. Did you know he didn’t pay his taxes and they confiscated his cameras? He told them, ‘You can’t take Beethoven’s piano away!’ But he was a genius in his way. And I learned from Guy. He said, ‘Everything is a fashion photo.’ ”
Bourdin and Despointes were well suited. “He liked perfection,” she says, and she learned to do his bidding, no matter how difficult or dangerous his ideas seemed. “You could think he was a sadist, but he wasn’t. People say it was misogyny, but it wasn’t. He was not nasty to people he cared for, but there were very few. He would make me walk through glass, but I understood that was his work, his vision.”
Bourdin cut her off, however, after she dared work with Helmut Newton.
Newton’s relationship with his wife, June, fascinated Despointes. “Helmut thinks, he constructs,” Despointes says, “and his wife is the drive behind him; he doesn’t move without her. She used to paint what became his shots. She painted his fantasies. You could be crazy with Guy.” But not with Newton. “Only in his pictures, not in his private life at all.”
Despointes’s longtime boyfriend Steve Hiett, a British rock musician inspired by Bourdin and Newton to become a Parisian photographer, felt the same: Newton “never got involved,” Hiett says. “His whole thing was, he didn’t want to know the model because it would interfere with his fantasy. The whole thing happened while he was taking the picture. He got his rocks off and it was over. It was voyeurism at its highest level.”
Newton and Bourdin stood at one end of the Parisian spectrum. At the other were the daylight photographers Dearing represented, who made grainy pictures with their long lenses of adorable blondes. Despointes drew a line between the deep, dark, well-marinated concepts of Hiett, Newton, and Bourdin and the apparently thoughtless happy snaps of the new crew in town. “Creativity was leaving and a new era was starting,” she thinks.
Back in America, Diana Vreeland’s fabulous but expensive extravagance had abruptly fallen out of fashion at the same time the French Mob was forming. “It was like trying to catch up with a wild horse,” said Alexander Liberman, who’d belatedly seen the wisdom in Carmel Snow’s doubts about Vreeland. “Everything was extravagance and luxury and excess. She was given too much power; she took too much power. I was the editorial director
,” he lamented, but he was impotent in the center of the storm of the free-spending Vreeland and “her court of admirers.” Avedon’s trip to Japan with Polly Mellen and Veruschka was said to have cost $100,000. Another time, Vreeland sent Bailey to India to shoot white tigers and never ran the resulting photos. As the bills mounted and income shrank, the businessmen at Condé Nast saw red—and not only on the walls of Vreeland’s office. “I know how to handle those men,” Vreeland assured an underling. “When they get this way, you just give it to them back.” But “Liberman didn’t trust Vreeland with anything anymore,” her assistant Grace Mirabella thought.
In May 1971, Vreeland was summoned to the office of Condé Nast’s latest president and abruptly demoted to a consultancy, but really fired as editor of Vogue. At a meeting with Si Newhouse, they stared at each other “for what seemed like a very long time,” Newhouse recalled. Vreeland held silent. Newhouse apologized that things hadn’t worked out. The encounter was chilly but polite. But that night, Newhouse later admitted, “I had a very bad dream about it, a wild nightmare.”
Vreeland’s replacement, Mirabella, who’d come to the magazine in 1951 from jobs at Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue, had almost left when Vreeland arrived. But then, “I thought, I don’t want to miss this. She wanted me as an anchor and I was. I had to sell the stories to the advertising department and I straightened things out when people were upset.” Which was often. Designers—and even her editors—found Vreeland’s lack of interest in commerce appalling.
By 1971, Si Newhouse was appalled, too, and decided Vogue needed the anchor. The magazine had been buffeted by the declining American economy, but that wasn’t its only problem. “A profound change in society” had occurred, Liberman said. Feminism had gone mass market at the intersection of women’s liberation and self-actualization. The extravagance and authoritarian single-mindedness Vreeland had executed with such verve fell out of fashion. No longer would editors issue dictates like the character in the film Funny Face who cried, “Think pink!”
“Alex would come into her office and say, ‘Diana, we can’t keep doing all these remarkable clothes. Can’t we find less expensive clothes?’ ” Mirabella recalls. “And she did. But I remember they weren’t very good.”
Just a year earlier, Women’s Wear Daily, the fashion industry trade newspaper that had made dictates its calling card, announced the death of the sexiest fashion of the sixties, the miniskirt, declaring that women must cover their knees with what it called the longuette, and the rest of the world soon disparaged as the midi skirt. But fashion designers and retailers followed Women’s Wear’s lead, and the Boston Globe reported “the $8 billion American fashion industry—the country’s fourth largest—suffered untold financial disaster. . . . The truth is that women have had their say.”
“Women weren’t buying fashion magazines, either,” says Mirabella. Circulation was “just plummeting. Vogue had nothing to do with what was going on in the world, zero. It was all icing and no content.” And Vreeland hadn’t seen the writing on the wall, so busy was she being Vreeland.
“Change happens,” said Si Newhouse. “You don’t have three months to prepare. It’s always traumatic. It may appear abrupt to people outside, but it was not a sudden decision.” It was a surprise to Grace Mirabella, who was summoned home on the red-eye from a shoot in California with photographer Arthur Elgort. Her promotion took her by surprise—sort of. She was already working comfortably with Liberman. “I was the one who was around,” she says. “I guess he got the feeling of how I sounded.” Confronting Vreeland wasn’t easy. “I was embarrassed,” says Mirabella. “She had the style to make me feel okay. I was a fan and a pal of hers, but I didn’t have the character to keep that going, so I lost the connection. I let it go.”
Condé Nast was actually quite generous with Vreeland, keeping her on the payroll—and in another office painted red—for months afterward so she could qualify for full retirement benefits. Those included severance and a $20,000-a-year pension, which, after a later negotiation, was doubled; she also got hefty consulting fees until her death, a clothing allowance, and contributions toward her rent.
Mirabella knew full well who would rule the new regime at Vogue: “I suppose Alex looked around and said to himself, ‘Who is likely to think the way I do?’ And there I was. We rarely disagree on anything.” Together, they would reinvent Vogue, turning it into an unprecedented force in both the fashion and magazine businesses. “When I came on, Alex played a big role. He realized my beginning was a very new take. The magazine I wanted to have was one for women who were working and capable and more interesting. We worked together to make this happen. My Vogue was a bit more accessible. Women aren’t inanimate objects you hang clothes on.”
Liberman would never be as influential and admired as Alexey Brodovitch, but now, backed by his boss-protégé Newhouse, he’d won power beyond anything Brodovitch had ever known and set out to wield it. “Alex took over and began supervising all the magazines,” says Roger Schoening, then Vogue’s art director. “If he made a suggestion, you followed it.” Some felt his rule was less than benign. “He’s the villain,” Rachel “Ray” Crespin, then a fashion editor at Vogue, told Leo Lerman, a Mademoiselle editor. “At last, he’s the czar of the fashion magazine world. He’s power crazy.” Lerman, who’d soon become Vogue’s features editor, judged Liberman “monstrous . . . hard, hollow, cold, shrewd, and the enemy.”
Mirabella made Jade Hobson, Vogue’s accessories editor under Vreeland, a fashion editor. Hobson says Liberman had nothing to do with the clothes—probably fortunately, as he wore identical outfits to work every day: severe gray suits, pale blue shirts, and hand-knit navy-blue silk ties. Hobson thought Liberman “was brilliant, a little sexy. He never raised his voice. He would call you darling. He had a button under his desk that closed his door. I was just fascinated.” Mirabella ran the magazine and Alex its look. “You knew he was very, very strong. Alex had staying power. It was calculated, having a plan, a path, a future, and going after it.” Hobson also saw his Machiavellian side: “Certainly, with Vreeland. She was Vogue and then—poof!”
Hearst wasn’t sleeping while Vogue was adapting, though the company’s executives set Bazaar on a very different—and quite bizarre—course in July 1971, when they hired James Brady to be editorial director and publisher, and Nancy White’s boss. That was a mere week after the New York Times reported that both Bazaar and Vogue were changing to meet the new challenges of the seventies. Unfortunately for White, her response to Mirabella was the introduction of sew-at-home patterns, hardly a modern idea.
On his first day at Bazaar, Brady handed out visors like those old-fashioned newspaper desk editors wore and informed the Bazaar staff, “You’re all reporters now.” White declined a new contract to work for Brady and quit in December 1971. Fortunately for her, she’d left the building before the January 1972 issue’s release; it featured a look-alike posing as President Richard M. Nixon on the cover, announcing a politically themed package. Brady started calling Bazaar “the thinking woman’s fashion magazine.” Charles Revson, founder of Revlon, the magazine’s biggest advertiser, warned him, “Don’t ever ascribe thought to your readers—it’s dangerous.”
Six months in, Brady fired Bea Feitler because she and Ruth Ansel “hated one another,” he wrote, and he felt two art directors were “a structural abortion.” “A month or so later, I was fired, too,” says Ansel. “I really remember hating Brady. He had no sense of design or style. He destroyed every aspect of [Bazaar’s] elegance and fashion leadership and made it ordinary.” Brady hired Rochelle Udell, an assistant to the art directors Milton Glaser and Walter Bernard at New York magazine, to replace Ansel and Feitler in mid-1972. “Three months in,” Udell recalls, “thirty-five people were fired.” Brady was the first to go.
The next occupant of Carmel Snow’s chair was Anthony T. Mazzola, who’d joined Town & Country straight out of design school as art director in 1948 and become editor in chief in 196
5. William Randolph Hearst had bought the geriatric society magazine in 1925 to make friends for himself and his mistress, the actress Marion Davies. Mazzola had a long history of publishing great photographers; he’d worked with Dahl-Wolfe, Avedon, Schatzberg, Milton Greene, and the magazine’s star, Slim Aarons. Bazaar “still had a certain look,” says a fashion editor hired by Nancy White, who remained into Mazzola’s tenure. “It was still Hiro and Bill King and Bill Silano.” But fashion wasn’t Mazzola’s strong suit. He sacked China Machado the day he got the job and replaced her with Carrie Donovan, a Vreeland acolyte disgusted by Grace Mirabella’s hiring at Vogue. “I came to solve a problem,” Mazzola said two decades later. “It was not an orderly transition.”
Mazzola “edited with an eye towards Fifty-Seventh Street,” where Hearst’s managers had their offices. “He’d say he had a reputation,” recalls a former Hearst publisher. “ ‘I save money.’ He always wanted to come in under budget.” He also had an eye for pretty girls in the office, making a play for a secretary, Michele Morgan, heiress to an Indiana canning and food-processing company fortune. Mazzola didn’t have an eye for fashion photography, though, says Betty Ann Grund, a Bazaar sittings editor. Grund fought with him “all the time,” she says. “He didn’t have taste. I’d have meetings with corporate to say, ‘We’re not in the game. We can’t get top models.’ I don’t know how that went on.”
Like Liberman and Mirabella at Vogue, Mazzola turned away from the outré, but instead of upholding Bazaar’s elegant DNA, he turned away from fashion, too. “Fashion is out of style,” his boss, Hearst publishing director William Fine, told the Boston Globe. “The clothes featured in Harper’s will relate to living rather than living-in-fantasy. . . . The world is no longer enraptured by youth.” So the August 1973 cover of Bazaar featured the forty-nine-year-old actress and socialite Dina Merrill, photographed by Neal Barr, a former Irving Penn assistant and Bazaar mainstay since 1966, next to the headlines “How You Can Feel and Look Sensational in Your Forties,” “Sex Begins at Forty,” “Childbirth after 40,” and “Good News about Menopause.” “The one thing we did,” says fashion editor Ila Stanger, “we were the first fashion magazine to utter the word forty. That was really ahead of its time.”
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