Focus

by Michael Gross

  In the midsixties, just after he and his second wife had a son, Terry, Bob was hospitalized again. Manic, he’d gone to Jacobson for a shot and instead been given Thorazine, a tranquilizer. He wrecked his own studio and ended up in a straitjacket and a padded cell in the posh Payne Whitney psychiatric hospital.

  Drugs weren’t his only problem. He’d begun to hate the work. “When Marvin Israel was fired, it was all over,” he said, because he was sure Bea Feitler and Ruth Ansel “weren’t strong enough to cope with Nancy White.” Richardson hated her, and the feeling was likely mutual. “They would have a shot set up, and my dad would shoot himself up with speed in another room, have the rush, walk out, shoot half a roll of film, and then disappear again,” Terry was told. “He got into this whole star trip . . . did this whole performance. . . . That was his thing . . . doing a number on people.”

  “He was the most difficult human being,” says fashion editor Barbara Slifka, though she adds, “We did some gorgeous pictures.” They worked together until the day Richardson returned all the clothes Bazaar wanted him to shoot with a note to Nancy White. “He hated everyone, he hated us, he hated the work,” says Slifka, “and that was the end of Bob Richardson and us.”

  “I felt American editors were very rude and disrespectful,” Richardson explained. “I was changing the industry, and they fought me every step of the way. Diana Vreeland called me and said, ‘Move to Paris, darling. They’ll understand you.’ ” He did. Peter Knapp had left Elle, and Hélène Gordon-Lazareff asked Richardson if he’d become the magazine’s art director and take pictures, too. He said maybe and took an assignment that turned into “another scandal,” he said. Shooting in the Camargue, his editor got “drunk as a skunk on scotch, from six a.m. on, and I didn’t want to do what she wanted.” So he walked out and went to work for Paris Vogue.

  “The French put up with me,” he said. “They called me the Beau Monstre. They published everything I gave them, let me do my own layouts, and treated me with utmost respect.” He loved Paris, where the family lived in the sixteenth arrondissement, but after three years, a wrist-slashing suicide attempt, and yet another hospitalization, this time a sleeping cure for his drug addiction, they sailed home.

  Bob and Norma moved with Terry, then four, into a penthouse in Greenwich Village, but their marriage was doomed when they started swinging—“going to parties and bringing people home,” Bob wrote. Terry, who’d discovered his father after the Paris suicide try and for years had “visions of him in a room, all bloody,” was aware of his parents’ experiments. “My dad definitely was sleeping with models and . . . my mom had lovers,” Terry said. “Group sex. They were experimenting with all that stuff. I remember my dad saying that after he tried to kill himself and he was in the hospital, my mom was fucking his assistant. I ended up working with that guy twenty years later.”

  Then, Bob, who was forty-two, met the eighteen-year-old Anjelica Huston. Her first exposure to fashion photography had come when Richard Avedon shot her family and asked to test the coltish teenager, though the experience “wasn’t tremendously eventful,” she says. “Dick liked the way I looked and wanted to see how it translated to the camera.” It didn’t; he told her mother her shoulders were too big. Later, the teenager would shoot with Frank Horvat, and David Bailey. “He called me Missy,” Huston says. She found him funny but stolid and “didn’t like him much,” but she shot with him again. Despite Avedon’s opinion, she’d become a model.

  Just then, Huston’s mother was killed in a car crash at age thirty-nine, and in spring 1969, Anjelica fled London for New York, where she’d been offered an understudy role on Broadway. Her childhood friend Joan Juliet Buck, the stylist sidekick of the early French Mob expatriates, took her in. “I was a supremely confident twenty-year-old,” says Buck, “and I knew her inside out.” So when Huston told Buck Harper’s Bazaar wanted to shoot her, “I told them it had to be Bob Richardson,” she says. “They were both dreamy, intense, and poetic.” Buck told Huston the same thing, showing her Richardson photos from Paris Vogue that looked like “a beautiful, dangerous foreign movie,” Huston wrote in her first memoir.

  When Bazaar called, “I wanted to photograph personalities,” Richardson said, “so I figured I’d give them another shake. Anjelica walked through the door and it was love at first sight. I loved her. She had one of the most beautiful faces I’d ever seen.” He showed up at her theater in his red Fiat and drove her to Jones Beach. Compared to Buck’s friends in the French Mob, who “all wore Shetland sweaters and tight pants,” Richardson “was the rock-and-roll photographer,” Huston says. “Everyone else was . . . visually . . . I don’t want to say they were Herman’s Hermits, but Bob was Keith Richards, the dark prince.” Their encounter on the beach was “a heart-expanding moment. It was a very powerful thing to work with Bob. His gaze was incredibly penetrating. He’d wait for the moment just before you thought, ‘Whoa, dangerous,’ then he’d lift the camera. It was always a rhythm as precise as music.”

  She doesn’t remember when they became lovers, but soon “he implied that his life with Norma was over and not as a result of me.” They smoked a joint in front of a mirror before they first made love. She considered it “almost an out-of-body experience. I felt we were the same animal, the same breed.” He moved out of his penthouse, leaving Terry with Norma, and into a hotel, where Huston joined him after her play’s run ended in Boston that summer.

  “My mom pleaded with him not to leave, but he did anyway,” Terry has said. “It’s not that she was staying alone at home.” He recalls Jimi Hendrix visiting shortly before his death in 1970 (“She’d say, ‘Yeah, he was hung like this! Huge!’”) and “seeing my mom making out with Kris Kristofferson on the fire escape.” But Richardson’s departure “destroyed” her.

  Bob was in the room when Anjelica heard that Dick Avedon wanted to shoot her again—and over her lover’s objections, she agreed. Then Diana Vreeland asked Avedon to take Huston to Ireland for a Vogue shoot. “He was trying to do Bob Richardson photos with the girl who’d become my lover, and he didn’t know it,” Richardson said. He followed her to Europe, professions of desire alternating with accusations she wanted to destroy him.

  “He was very possessive and unbalanced,” she says. “It was him against the world. The black moods went on for days. I saw and experienced it, but I had no idea he was schizophrenic. They didn’t call it bipolar in those days and I didn’t know what it was. I was a fledgling waiting to be torn apart by cats, or picked up and nurtured, and when Bob was good, he could be enchanting, graceful, smart and funny. The camera was his eye. He taught me about being in front of them, how to move for them, how to establish a rhythm with a photographer, how to show yourself or clothes to the best advantage. But I lived in terror of him.”

  Back in their New York hotel room, she left for a television appearance without unpacking first, and he tore up her clothes and threw her jewelry out the window. She decided she’d hurt his feelings; she didn’t know he terrorized everyone around him: “He’d allude to doing a number on somebody, and having experienced a few myself, I pitied anyone who stood in the line. But I was inside the box with him. I heard his version of things. No one said, ‘Look, Bob is crazy.’ Bob said, ‘I’m not crazy. They’re the crazy ones. They’re the liars, not me.’

  “I was young and gullible and scared of him. Fear is as violent as anything. You don’t have to hit. Fear is where it starts. To live in fear is to be in a violent situation. Words, to me, can be violent.” He alternated loving and manipulating her. She felt responsible for his “episodes,” thought of him “as a wounded soul, and believed it was my mission to save him.” She was still too young to understand that “I had mistaken Bob’s need for dominance and control as love,” she would write more than forty years later.

  In 1970, Terry Richardson was five years old when his mother moved to Woodstock. Bob and Anjelica would take the bus so he could see his son, who describes himself as “a little rock-and-roll
kid.” His mother wanted to “be a hippie, grow out her armpit hair, get a job as a waitress in a health-food restaurant.” He added, though, “There was the same shit going on. Total excess. People having affairs, sleeping around, drinking and taking lots of drugs.” She took pictures of the rock musicians who lived nearby and, within a year, met a British guitarist and singer (and Bob Richardson look-alike) named Jackie Lomax. She married him and changed her name to Annie Lomax.

  Terry suffered from what he’s half joked were abandonment issues. Lomax and Terry’s mother would go out and leave him home alone, “screaming in the fucking house,” he recalled. “ ‘No! Don’t leave me! No! No!’ I would be fucking terrified. And this happened to me over and over again. I’d be hysterical, jumping at shadows, screaming and crying myself to sleep.”

  His father and Huston were often in Europe. “We started traveling,” Bob said, “to London for Vogue and Nova, to Paris for Vogue, to Italy to work with Anna Piaggi [at Arianna].” They were doing “some remarkable shoots,” Huston recalled, including one evoking the Nazi era and another, the Troubles in Ireland, but money was always tight and Huston wouldn’t ask her father for help; she knew he wouldn’t approve of Richardson and wanted her father to have no advantage over them. Making matters worse, all of Richardson’s Nikons were stolen. So late in 1971, they moved to London. Terry recalled spending a summer there and waking up at noon to the sounds of their having sex. “And at night sometimes they’d leave me alone,” he continued, “and I’d be shaking and staring at shadows. It was the same fucking thing that happened in Woodstock. I actually started shitting in my underwear.”

  Later, on a visit to Woodstock, Huston discussed that with his mother “right in front of me. Humiliated by two women. Emasculating little Terry. It was all pretty traumatic.” Huston thought him “a solemn little kid,” but also “a beautiful child.” Albeit one who threw regular tantrums, turned violent, and started stealing.

  Anjelica and Bob had moved back to New York, where she found her work had dried up. Only Avedon still booked her, infuriating Richardson. “Bob took it personally and that was a lot of his problem,” she says. “It wasn’t Dick booking the daughter of his friend. It was Dick intruding on Bob’s territory. Ohmigod, they were territorial.” Huston didn’t share Richardson’s concern about Avedon’s copying him: “I didn’t want to counter Bob on many things, but I didn’t necessarily agree with that. I liked the way I looked in Dick’s pictures. Bob was jealous. Dick, I’m sure, was trying to penetrate the secrets of Bob’s cameras. But that doesn’t have to be nasty competition. They were turned on to each other.”I But Avedon was possessive, too. “Dick had stopped me from working with anyone else. I couldn’t get a job. No one wanted to touch me. The only people who would work with me were Dick and Bob. Two extremes of the cream.”

  In the early seventies, Terry was moved to Sausalito, to England, back to Woodstock, and then, in 1974, to a Hollywood apartment. He had not one but two gypsy families. Torn between them, his violent behavior escalated, and his mother started sending him to a psychiatrist twice a week. Stability wasn’t an option. Then, in 1975, when Terry was nine, he was waiting for her to pick him up after a shrink session when she was rear-ended on a freeway and ended up in a coma. Six months later, she came home in diapers with permanent brain damage. “Where’s my mother?” Terry thought. She would recover, but only partly, and it took a long time. Meantime, Jackie Lomax lost his record deal, and the family went on welfare. Terry tried suicide by swallowing dozens of pills—it was his second attempt. His maternal grandmother took him in but couldn’t control him. “He was running wild,” Bob recalled.

  In 1973, the New York Times called Bob Richardson for a front-page exposé of Dr. Jake—and he gave them a candid interview. He was in good company; the story revealed that over the years, Jacobson’s patients had included the Kennedys, their family photographer Mark Shaw, Truman Capote, Emilio Pucci, and a pack of politicians, diplomats, and celebrities. The response to the story wasn’t what Richardson expected: “I was threatened. I got calls from Hollywood.” Huston got a call from her father, who flew to New York to meet Richardson for the first time. At the apartment he and Anjelica shared, John Huston invited them on a fishing trip to Cabo San Lucas. Anjelica worried it wasn’t such a great idea.

  As expected, the trip turned out badly. Richardson flung a bottle of tequila at Anjelica. He then harangued her all night before they flew to Los Angeles with her father and stepmother. At the luggage carousel, she informed Richardson she wouldn’t be returning to New York with him. They never saw each other again. But she doesn’t look on Richardson as a bad memory: “It’s part of life, maybe not the easiest, but textural. All men can’t be sugary. He had a lot of good in him, too. He was not an ordinary man.”

  Richardson went back to the Gramercy Park Hotel and back to work and still spent summers with his young son, including a location trip to Haiti where eleven-year-old Terry ended up in a shower with a model “with these big breasts and I remember having this really erotic experience with them.” But Bob’s demons were never far away. “He’d show up at four in the morning drunk, ranting and raving,” Terry recalled.

  Susan Forristal had met Richardson on her arrival in New York and had often modeled for him with Huston. “He was very concentrated,” she says, “like a saluki dog. Everything was slow and dramatic. He had a superior air, always. But with Bob, I’d always look great, be well paid, and Anjelica would be there. You’re with your girlfriend, making money.” What could be better than that? But after the breakup with Huston, he changed. Forristal lived around the corner and would often see him “with his long, strange face, gray skin, gray hair, smoking, always lurking, cheeks always held in, an odd man. Anjelica leaving took away his credibility as a man.”

  “It was getting almost impossible to work,” Richardson later wrote of the seventies. “My mind betrayed me. Dear God, what have I done? Please save me before it’s too late—it was already too late.” His career was on life support. “I went all the way up and all the way down. From working for everyone I went to working for no one because I’d become so short-tempered, you had to be very understanding and special to work with me.”

  The end of the seventies were a jumble for Richardson. He tried suicide again—slashing his wrists—and was put back on Thorazine after his parents brought him home to Rockville Centre to recover. One night he stripped naked in the street and started screaming. “It’s amazing that no one stopped me,” he wrote. He couldn’t see through his viewfinder, couldn’t focus his Nikon. “Looking at a contact sheet was tough.” He even stopped smoking pot; drinking cheap wine was easier than dealing with dealers. Then, one summer, “[Terry] called from LA and told me he didn’t want to come” for a visit, Bob later wrote. “What was left of me died.”

  Not long after that, walking down Fifth Avenue, broke and unable to look anyone in the eye, he took stock while fighting off the “constant electrical storm in my brain” and decided he had to flee again.II Borrowing $800 from his sister, he packed a Louis Vuitton suitcase with clothes, but left his cameras behind. His son thinks that like Brian Duffy he burned his photographic archive. “Finished as a photographer and finished as a man,” Richardson wrote, “a one-way ticket to LA seemed the only answer.” There, he pawned his last valuable possessions, drank away the proceeds, and ended up homeless, living on the beaches of Santa Monica and Venice. He remained there for several years, using survival skills he’d learned in Korea; panhandling to buy food, liquor, and drugs; getting arrested for ordering food in a coffee shop without the money to pay for it and for stealing a blanket when it got too cold to sleep outside. “Not once did I think about photography,” he recalled. But after reading up on schizophrenia in the local library, and gaining a better understanding of his plight, he applied for unemployment and got jobs sorting and filing, and delivering flowers and packages, earning enough to buy a bus ticket to San Francisco.

  In the mideighties, Annie Lom
ax was the only person who knew where Bob Richardson was—living in a single-room-occupancy hotel in that city’s Chinatown, working as a telephone solicitor for the San Francisco Chronicle to earn money to pay for the one-course meals he cooked on a hot plate, and the red wine he drank, “just enough to mellow me out.” Then, in late April 1989, Martin Harrison, a former assistant in Vogue’s London studio who’d become an art historian and was researching a coffee-table book on fashion photography, turned up at Richardson’s door.

  “I had been looking for him for literally years and had asked dozens of people,” Harrison recalls. “I had gone to LA because I had been told he’d been spotted there.” Somehow, he got Richardson’s phone number. “He never answered the phone, so I stalked the flophouse and asked a guy there to tell me which was Bob’s room. I knocked, and while I was being kept on the threshold, Bob lit a Newport, which gave me seven minutes’ cigarette time in which to talk my way in.”

  Richardson convinced himself that Dick Avedon was behind the visit. “Dick hardly needed to persuade me and couldn’t coerce me, so that must have been a fantasy of Bob’s,” Harrison says. But that visit coincided with Richardson’s recovery (“no more voices, no more hallucinations”) and his purchase of a tiny point-and-shoot Ricoh in a local Macy’s and may have helped restore his self-esteem. Regardless, the sleeping Beau Monstre stirred again and began shooting images of his adopted city’s foggy streets at dawn.

  Some 375 miles to the south, Terry Richardson had been busy not growing up in the “Wild fucking West,” he’s said. Riding his bike or skateboarding down Hollywood Boulevard, four blocks from the Lomax home, among “the runaways, the prostitutes, the drug dealers . . . cruising around at night, hanging out at head shops, playing pinball for hours and hours,” the effectively motherless child was still a violent teenager, “always getting into fights,” lighting fires, smashing things, and stealing, he told the fashion fanzine editor Olivier Zahm in a series of biographical interviews. He sneaked into the dirty movies that played on that seedy strip. “I was always really drawn to sex and violence. . . . I was a mess even before I started having sex! . . . I like emotional pain.”