The Woman in the Photograph

by Dana Gynther

  “And here’s Juliet,” said Man. “Darling, I’d like for you to meet some old friends from the Paris days. This is Roland Penrose, an English Surrealist, if you believe in such things. And Lee Miller. You’ve heard of her, of course. She used to be my assistant and model. You might recognize her from some of my earlier work.”

  “Pleased to meet you both.” Juliet gave them a dazzling smile.

  “And you.” Lee smiled stiffly, wondering why she felt so awkward. “Man, I can’t believe you’re in Hollywood. Are you working for the pictures?”

  “Hell, no,” he said with a chuckle. “I’m doing what I’ve always done. You know, when I came here in 1940, I only planned to stay a week. I was off to Tahiti! I wanted to be as far from the war as I could get. But on my first day in town, I met Juliet.” He took her by the hand and gazed at her dotingly. “That decided it for me. We’ve been together ever since.”

  Pleased, Juliet looked down, demure and docile. Lee raised her eyebrows. Man’s new muse was nothing like her or Kiki. Maybe this was the kind of woman he could hold on to and grow old with.

  “Can I get anyone some coffee?” Juliet asked, smiling around the group. “Or tea?”

  “I wouldn’t mind something a bit stronger,” Lee said. “Isn’t it about cocktail hour?”

  In mild distress, Juliet looked over at Man. “Cocktails? I don’t think we have anything. Of course, I could run to the market and get something. What would you like?”

  “I don’t want to be any trouble,” said Lee.

  “No, you’re right,” said Man. “We should celebrate with something more exciting than coffee. Champagne? Or vodka and orange juice? That’s very California.”

  “With lots of ice?” asked Lee. After years in England and the Continent, she’d been overly warm since they arrived to the American southwest. “Sounds like heaven.”

  “I’ll be back in a little bit,” Juliet said, picking up her purse.

  “I’ll go with you,” said Roland. “We can leave these two to reminisce. That way, they won’t bore us with their old stories when we get back.”

  As Man and Lee settled on the couch, they both sought tobacco. Man lit her cigarette, then puffed on his pipe.

  “How long have you been in the States?” Man asked, preferring safe questions to talk of old times.

  “We arrived in May. We visited friends in New York—I saw my family in Poughkeepsie, too—then we went to Arizona to see Max Ernst. He’s doing great work.” She put on a happy face.

  Although she’d been taking lots of photographs—mainly portraits of artists—she hadn’t felt passionate about working since the war. Their friends’ artwork, shows, and lives all seemed so inspired, so fulfilled. Compared to them, she didn’t feel talented or driven. Lee was just going through the motions.

  “So are you thinking about coming back to the States?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I’ve been away so long, it doesn’t feel like home anymore.”

  “I think of Paris every day. Now that the war’s over, I’m dying to get back. Not only do I want to live there again—Lord knows, there’s nothing interesting about being an américain in America—but I want to see if my work survived. I only brought two suitcases with me. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to pack when you think you might never return. I filled one valise just with artwork, but my big canvases, archives, and readymades are still in France. That is, if they didn’t get destroyed.”

  “I was there at the liberation of Paris,” Lee said, wistful. “It was such a beautiful thing. I saw Picasso, Louis Aragon, Cocteau . . . Everyone was thin but well—and so happy to have done with the Nazis. Picasso told me that you’d left France.”

  He took a quick puff on his pipe. “Although I’d lived there for nearly twenty years, once the Germans stomped into Paris, I couldn’t take it. The Resistance hadn’t been organized yet, my friends were out of town, I couldn’t work. Finally, I made the decision to leave.”

  “Probably for the best.”

  “Could have saved my life.” He looked over at Lee. “Six weeks after I left, the Vichy government passed a law allowing foreign Jews to be interned—and we all know what that means. I’m not a religious man, but I don’t think the Nazis would have cared.”

  Lee’s mind suddenly began swimming with images from the death camps. An abandoned cart piled high with bodies; the overwhelming smell of uncontrolled bowels and rotting flesh; her combat boots covered in white ash: “Fucking hell!” she turned to a green-faced soldier as she tried to wipe it off, “this isn’t from the ovens, is it?” Her eyes darted back to the pile. She stood up and stared down into her Rolleiflex camera, just a foot from the cart. She began taking photos to make the men real: the clutched hands, making baby fists; the open eyes, some blue, some blank; mouths wide as if in song; the extraordinary thinness, bones that had made bodies move. Zooming in on one face, her cold terror. There was a dark-haired man with dramatic eyebrows and a hawk nose. No, impossible. Picasso had assured her that Man had left—“on the same steamer as that idiot, Dalí”—but this cadaver looked so familiar, she’d wanted to touch it. Her former lover, mentor, companion.

  Lee reached out for Man’s soft, warm hand; in slight surprise, he gave hers a quick pat.

  “When I went to get my traveling papers,” Man continued, “the Nazi officer recognized my name. He said that I could be their photographer, that I would be well-paid. So perhaps I could have saved my skin by being a toady. Though I would have jumped off the Eiffel Tower first.”

  “But they gave you the papers?”

  “Yeah, they let me go. I locked up my place on Campagne Première, and before I left, I took a long stroll around the old neighborhood. Past the cafés and bars and even the places that didn’t exist anymore—where ol’ Rosalie dished up spaghetti when I first got to town, the Jockey Club, your studio in front of the cemetery—”

  “That’s funny. Last time I was in Paris I must have taken that very same tour. I had quite a lump in my throat by the end.” She took the last drag off her cigarette, then stomped it out.

  He relit his cold pipe. “But you! When Juliet showed me one of your stories in Vogue—was it about a siege?—I couldn’t believe it was the same Lee Miller I used to know. It was only when I saw the photo of you—in a helmet, no less—that I was finally convinced.”

  “Now I can hardly believe it myself.”

  “And the frontline reports! The field hospitals, the Siegfried Line, the head-shaven collaborators, then on into Krautland! I was bowled over by the writing. The three years we were together, I never saw you write anything more than a letter.”

  “My dispatches were sort of like that, I suppose. Long letters to strangers.”

  “True.” Man nodded. “That personal tone.”

  “And, Man? What did you make of the photos?” Lee asked shyly. Her former teacher’s opinion still mattered to her, after all those years.

  “Well, I knew you were a great photographer. That didn’t surprise me.” He gave her a wink. “Seriously, bearing in mind the conditions—the photos were excellent. They put you right in the scene. I could hear the bombing and smell the smoke. An old studio-bug like me never could have taken such shots.”

  “Thanks, Man.” She blinked back tears, then struggled to smile. She’d been so sensitive lately, not herself at all. She lit another cigarette and looked at the door. Although she was enjoying their conversation—one-on-one for the first time in years, she finally felt comfortable with him again—Lee was ready for that drink. More than ever before, she’d gotten in the habit of having a drink nearby, to calm her nerves, to chase the blue jitters away.

  “So, tell me,” he said with a tinge of irony, “how have you been passing the time since Hitler killed himself?”

  “After a year of riding around in jeeps, muddy and flea bitten, listening to soldier-talk and avoiding artillery fire, I found I missed it. Can you believe it? I didn’t really know what to do in postwar London. What k
ind of journalist I should be. Would Vogue want hats, recipes, sewing tips?”

  “That’s a laugh,” Man said. “I used to sew your buttons on.”

  She smiled at him, remembering those happy-go-lucky Montparnasse days. Since then, Lee had owned an upscale Manhattan photography studio and been an upper-class Egyptian housewife. A Surrealist and fashion expert. But her life as a wartime photojournalist had been the most fulfilling one yet. Her pretty young self—so cocky and self-absorbed—would have had a difficult time imagining her roughing it with soldiers—not in their beds, but by their sides, a comrade, a friend—and taking honest photos of destruction and death.

  “Even though the war in Europe had ended, I wasn’t ready to call it quits,” she said. “By August, I was already back at the Press HQ—the Scribe Hotel, you know the place—trying to map out a trip to the east. Truth was, I could barely organize my room.” She tried for a lighthearted chuckle, but it came out as a cough. “But I had Vogue’s blessing, a few letters of introduction, and an old Chevy, so I packed some clothes and my cameras, got my jerry cans and took off.”

  She didn’t mention that her medicine bag had also become a vital part of her kit. In the morning, with a black coffee chaser, she often took Benzedrine to get herself going; in the evening, along with a few stiff drinks, she calmed down with sleeping pills. Since Dachau, she’d gotten into a secretive pharmaceutical routine. But that was not material for carefree reunion chats.

  “I was on the road for five or six months—Austria, Hungary, Romania—taking photos, interviewing people, shooting the breeze with the other leftover correspondents still hanging around. In Budapest, I even got arrested. A Soviet soldier took me in for taking pictures without the proper papers. That story made it into the New York Times!”

  Lee was trying to tell her tales with élan, like she had on other occasions, but was having a hard time pulling it off. Truth was, she didn’t really know how to describe those travels. After the fighting stopped, she’d taken a handful of prize photos, but most of her days were just frittered away.

  “I went back home in February.” She shrugged. “I suppose it was finally time for my war to end.”

  “Sounds like that would be a good thing. I saw those pictures you took at the concentration camps.” Man shook his head and whistled. “Not everyone could have taken those.”

  “We felt like our cameras were weapons; that with a few good shots, we could change the way people thought, maybe even end the war,” she said. “That sounds awfully noble. But now, I think of those pictures.” She looked him in the eye, her speech became low and halting. “And realize that, when I was there, I was just making compositions, framing, checking light and shadow. I almost never thought of them as bodies, as real human beings.”

  “They are powerful pictures, Lee. You did what you could to make others react to them. Even if, at the time, you were unable to. It was all too overwhelming. I think I understand that.”

  “One thing I haven’t forgotten, though, is that smell. Sometimes, when I’m walking in a city street—or just sitting in my living room—I catch a whiff of bodies.”

  Lee swallowed, half-nauseated at the thought. At the Dachau camp, trying to get the best shots, she’d gone into railway cars, half-filled with corpses, the cramped bunkers, where men lay rotting, the ovens, which had run out of fuel to burn the piles of wasted cadavers outside. In every corner, she was constantly attacked with the stench of shit, body odor, putrefaction, and death.

  “Maybe it’s garbage, sewage, I don’t know. But it fills me with panic. I think I might scream.”

  She bit her lip. The horrific daytime smells. At night, nightmares intermingled with insomnia.

  “Lee.” This time, he reached out to touch her hand. “You’ve seen more of the world than most of us. Than most of us would ever want to see.”

  “The crazy thing is that now, with the war over, my work has no focus. Without an enemy and a front, I feel lost.” She lit another cigarette, but it just made her thirstier. “I’ve come to realize that the war was my muse. The noise, the danger, the movement, the cast of thousands. Even the horror and death. It gave my work meaning—made it come alive.”

  She stared at Man. To feel inspired, he only needed a beautiful woman—all the better if she loved him and slept in his bed—whereas she’d needed a theater of destruction, madness, the possibility of death. Even after the war had ended, she had gone looking for it, unable to stop. He was squeezing her hand when they heard the door. Bottles jangled inside a paper bag. Lee sat back with the anticipation of relief. Before they walked into the room, Man leaned over and whispered in her ear.

  “A great muse is like a fast-moving train. Don’t let anybody tell you different.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Woman in the Photograph is a work of fiction inspired by the lives of real people. Lee Miller was a complex woman, not entirely of her time. Although the feelings, thoughts, dialogues, and many details in the novel are entirely of my invention, most of the events are based on published biographical information about Lee, from the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction chance meetings she had with Condé Nast and Man Ray to her photographing the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp in World War II (though in some instances, in the interest of narrative flow, the order of events has been altered). At times, when only a bare-bones account of an event has survived—for example, in the case of her childhood rape—I have tried to imagine a more detailed story. As for her relationship with Man Ray, I have tried to create a plausible version of their romance, based on the information available.

  The photographs and films described in the novel are based on Lee Miller’s and Man Ray’s work from the time, with the notable exception of the photographs of Coco Chanel’s jewelry collection. Although those photos do exist, there is no indication they were Lee’s work, although to my mind they were very “her.”

  In writing this book, I perused countless sources regarding Lee Miller, her contemporaries, and their times. For anyone interested in learning more, the following sources would provide an excellent starting point: Lee Miller: On Both Sides of the Camera by Carolyn Burke; The Lives of Lee Miller by Antony Penrose; Self Portrait by Man Ray; Man Ray: American Artist by Neil Baldwin; Kiki’s Paris: Artists and Lovers 1900–1930 by Billy Klüver and Julie Martin; Bohemian Paris by Dan Franck; Jean Cocteau (Critical Lives) by James S. Williams; Paris Was Yesterday 1925–1939, by Janet Flanner, Julien Levy: Memoir of an Art Gallery by Julien Levy and Ingrid Schaffner; and Memoirs of Montparnasse by John Glassco (which included the anecdote that inspired Lee’s excursion to the transvestite club in Montmartre).

  On a personal note, I would like to thank my agent, Michelle Brower; my hawkeyed editor, Kate Dresser; our lovely publisher, Jennifer Bergstrom; and the entire Gallery team. Special thanks also go out to Alex Lewis and Kathy Sagan. Lucky for me, I’ve also had the help of many talented friends during the course of this novel. My utmost gratitude goes out to the photographer Elise Smith, the artist James King, and the web designer Colleen Tully, as well as my amazing reader friends: Mary Dansak, Frannie James, Judith Nunn, Peggy Stelpflug, and, most of all, my sister, Lynn Gynther. As always, kisses go out to my entire family, especially to my husband, Carlos, my girls, Claudia and Lulu, and my mother and biggest supporter, Ruth.

  This novel is not affiliated with or authorized by the Lee Miller Archives, the Man Ray Trust, or the heirs of either Lee Miller or Man Ray.

  GALLERY READERS GROUP GUIDE

  * * *

  The Woman

  in the

  Photograph

  DANA GYNTHER

  INTRODUCTION

  Model and woman-about-town Lee Miller moves to Paris determined to make herself known amid the giddy circle of celebrated artists, authors, and photographers currently holding court in the city. She seeks out the charming, charismatic artist Man Ray to become his assistant but soon becomes much more than that: his model, h
is lover, his muse.

  Coming into her own more fully every day, Lee models, begins working on her own projects, and even stars in a film, provoking the jealousy of the older and possessive Man Ray. Drinking and carousing is the order of the day, but while hobnobbing with the likes of Picasso and Charlie Chaplin, she also falls in love with the art of photography and finds that her own vision can no longer come second to her mentor’s. The Woman in the Photograph is the richly drawn, tempestuous novel about a talented and fearless young woman caught up in one of the most fascinating times of the twentieth century.

  QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. Early in their affair, Lee notes that “from the outside” she and Man “looked like opposites: old and young, short and tall, dark and light, serious and gay.” While these are superficial differences based on Lee’s first impressions of the other artist, discuss the deeper chasms that separate Man and Lee. Do you think that they were a mismatch from the beginning, or is there truth in the saying that opposites attract?

  2. Man and Lee’s love for each other and their love for art are entwined from the beginning, while modern workplace romances are often frowned upon. Do you think they would have been smarter to disconnect their work from their affair after their initial meeting?

  3. Though she leaves New York in search of a less conventional life, one of the things Lee says that she loves about French Vogue, or Frogue, is that “relationships there were simple,” while her time in the studio with Man is anything but. What keeps Lee tied to her complicated life with Man? Can you relate to her reasons?