Conversations in the Raw

by Rex Reed

  “I was making $30,000 a year as a model,” she says, “but a model’s life is a short one. Most of them are good only for about three years, then they quit and get married. They used to have a career span until they were in their thirties, but times have changed. Now the photographers devour models until magazines are sick and tired of them. They discover a new face and do 20 pages of the same girl. Then new styles in faces come in and their careers are finished. We’re taking them at 15 now, and making them look 25. Jane Hitchcock is the big new look right now. She’s only 15. They make $60 an hour up to as much as $120 for certain products like cosmetics, then they save their money if they are smart and retire. When I was the highest paid model in Europe, I made a lot of money and life cost me very little, so I saved it. There were no taxes, no agencies, no unions. Now it is very expensive to be a model.”

  Since China has come to Bazaar, the magazine has been visually overhauled. She was the first editor to photograph models of other countries. She speaks seven languages, so she could interpret for working models everywhere from Spain to Brazil. She is the first editor to ever photograph a Negro. She discovered Donyale Luna, who is now a Hollywood personality. “When she walked into my office three years ago, she was a skinny pickaninny who couldn’t even make up her own eyes. I took her to Richard Avedon and we combed her hair for months before we could do anything with it. But she had a certain bizarre look that was perfect. Now she has been to Paris and she doesn’t even speak English any more, even though she is from Detroit. Incredible girl!”

  SCENE THREE: The following Wednesday. A creaky freight elevator carries me up to the fourth floor of a dirty old warehouse at 110 East 58th Street. Then I walk up another flight of stairs and I’m in Hiro’s studio. Dave Brubeck music is piped through the walls. Several models with their hair in curlers are reading paperbacks while they buff their nails. Hiro is lining up his three cameras at once, to show what a dress will look like from the front, back and profile at the same given moment in time. China sits at a tiny wooden desk. For a high priestess of fashion, her own outspoken attitudes toward the subject are considerably controversial, often showing up in the pages of Bazaar. She opened the door for miniskirts, vinyl, plastic and high boots, and her famous “prediction issue,” with a girl on the cover in a Pucci space helmet copied from a Braniff uniform, was so popular it sold out across the world in three days. “Malraux wrote for a copy, the heads of Paris Match wrote for copies, you couldn’t find one. It was called outrageous, but if you don’t exaggerate things in photographs they don’t come across. What I’ve tried to do is bring every kind of woman into her own fashion scene. I’ve tried to teach women that fashion is a feeling, it does not make a woman fashionable to own a Paris original. Paris died three years ago anyway. Now the American designers have come into their own. I see wealthy women look like schmucks in a $1,000 dress and others look great in a $120 dress. The individual look is in. You can wear crazy things only if you have a marvelous body and a strong look. If not, you can’t carry it. It depends on how amusing you are. If you have no personality, you can fake it with fake hair and thousands of rings. I want women to have a freer attitude toward everything and I try to reflect that in Bazaar. Four years ago, the models all wore these pointed things under their bras. Now they won’t even wear bras. Girdle manufacturers are almost going out of business. We started the trend toward health in fashion. Now even the older women are on diets, taking yoga classes, going to gyms. Before, you could only buy dietetic foods if you were sick with diabetes. Now you can buy everything at the A & P. I’ve tried to wake women up to the joy of the body. I have so much nervous energy I have no weight problem. I eat like a horse. I used to take liver injections, I was so thin. My one de luxe in life is breakfast in bed.

  “I’m always late for everything and doing a thousand things at once and I don’t have time to fool around with myself. I have couturier originals, because many of the European designers do special things for me for nothing. I can’t afford to buy them, but when I was a model I never charged some of them, I always asked to be paid in clothes, so now they give me things to hang around in. But I’m just as happy in bell-bottom bluejeans. I only wear black, white, wine, brown and purple, then I color my outfit with a necklace or a scarf by Bill Blass or Cardin. I don’t let fashion rule my life. I always tell the magazine to expect me when they see me and after five o’clock I tell everyone to forget about me until the next day. I never see a single fashion person out of my office and after work I don’t really give a damn what I have on my back.”

  Her favorite designers in Europe are Ungaro and St. Laurent in Paris, Valentino and Federico Forquet and Pucci and Simonetta and Capucci in Rome. “But my greatest peeve in fashion is American unions. They have made it impossible for the great designers like Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta and Pauline Trigere to produce inexpensive fashions. Bill Blass employs people who are on such high scales in their sewing unions that he has to charge $150 for a dress when Stanley Mort of “Mr. Mort” can put out the same dress for $20 and charge $39 for it because his union scales are not so high and he can turn out large quantities of the same design. The unions are ruining everything.”

  A Donald Brooks original arrives, made overnight from one of China’s own sketches—white crepe hostess pajamas with red and black sections sewn into the legs. Hiro sits on the floor cutting black and white paper dolls out of large pieces of cardboard while the lights are being set up for the shooting. China orders lunch and devours hot chicken soup, roast beef, Russian dressing and tomato on a hard buttered roll. “I feel sorry for the models who sit around all day waiting to be photographed. You have endless fitting sessions all day for showroom modeling, but for photography we don’t have fittings. In most of the fashion photos you see in magazines, everything is pinned up with straight pins and safety pins. The worst part of modeling is the unbelievable contortionist positions you are placed in. I used to get cramps in my body and couldn’t move because it would spoil the photograph.”

  By 4 p.m. Hiro is ready. He has built a cocoon for the girls to stand in, constructed from four rolls of white no-seam paper which line the ceiling and floor. Three cameras are placed at a triangle inside the cocoon. Hiro squats on the floor, near a switch control, peering through tiny squares in the paper. When he presses a button, all three cameras flash together, as a beautiful model inside the cocoon runs, leaps, and dances barefoot in midair in white crepe Donald Brooks pajamas. “I told you if we can’t find the right clothes, we design them ourselves,” reminds China, pointing to the pajamas she sketched herself the night before. She smokes filter-tip cigarettes and drinks cold coffee. Hair flying. No makeup. “You have to have patience for this job,” she yawns.

  A nearby table bulges with plastic op-art jewelry—dominoes, clock watches, sundial bracelets, big glass square rings. China selects a bracelet made of white plastic with ball bearings rolling around inside a glass clock. “It looks like a barometer,” I remark. “You see,” says China, putting it on her arm so the dial points toward the ceiling, “if we show this, people will call it ‘far-out.’ Of course it’s far-out. But look what a work of art it is. Graphic fashion. We’re out to startle people, have fun. Who is going to show it if we don’t? Seventeen? Of course not. We have to be the magazine to do it. For each sitting, I tell the accessories editor what I want-—black and white, color, etc. Then she brings things in she wants me to see and we keep them in the wardrobe room. During a fashion sitting, everything is typed up for credit for the advertisers. After the final photo, the editors check all accessories and list them in the magazine. One sitting may be repeated many times until all the earrings and gloves are perfect.”

  Another model comes out in a belted yellow silk dress by John Moore. After three pairs of shoes, China decides on strap pumps. Hiro shouts instructions while the girl leaps. Her earrings keep falling off. Hiro: “China, we need something wild! What does Gernreich have new? If only we had a topless!” China: “A topless! Th
at’s old-fashioned.” Hiro: “Well, even something transparent.” China: “We’ve got Rudi’s new pajamas coming tomorrow, but Nancy White doesn’t want them because they don’t go with the other fashions.” Hiro: “But it’s the photography I’m worried about—the photography! I don’t care about the clothes!”

  The first girl returns in a white cape culotte suit by Modelia with an enormous Mr. John hat. Hiro shoots like crazy. It all has to be reshot because China doesn’t like the shoes. She crawls under a makeup table on her hands and knees, searching in the half-light through a suitcase full of shoes. Once a girl is in front of the camera, China’s job is usually over. The photographer’s ego takes over. Those distorted views you see of models looking like rubber gazelles are usually the photographer’s idea, not the fashion editor’s. “You have to use photographers you trust,” says China, “or they’ll ruin your pages.”

  Both models stand back to back now in white Garbo cloches and capes. Hiro shouts as he flashes his camera: “Pia, you hold Biddy’s left hand with your right hand.” They get tangled up like they are going to fly out the window. “No, no, that doesn’t work—you look like two Lesbians. Bend your arm down—down more—don’t smile —too long—you’re grinning like an idiot—you’re supposed to look sophisticated—move your legs…

  It’s after dark as I wave goodbye to China, her hair flapping about her head in the soft rain, on her way uptown to meet some writer and painter chums for dinner at Elaine’s up on Second Avenue. “I hate posh places. I never see fashion people socially and I haven’t been to El Morocco in three years. We’ll finish this up in a few days and then I’m off to Capri, Japan, Hong Kong, Nepal, Africa and Europe for a month’s vacation.” She waves for a taxi and heads uptown. And on the way home, I’m thinking about fashion: “Let’s see … maybe for fall raincoats, they could use the Berlin Wall as a backdrop, with Russian guards aiming machine guns at the new Balenciagas …” And remembering Hiro’s last words: “Don’t forget, fashion is a feeling. Next time I’m going to shoot all the girls in tattoos.”

  Tennessee Williams Took His Name Off It

  January, 1966

  SCENE: Seven a.m. in the heart of the old French Quarter, where a film crew is setting up cameras for This Property Is Condemned. Black marsh rain beats down on store windows. Along the street, signs advertise Dr. Pepper at a nickel a bottle, gasoline at 12 cents a gallon, eggs at 10 cents a dozen, and the main feature on the marquee at the Delta Brilliant Theater is One-Way Passage starring William Powell and Kay Francis. The crew has worked hard to achieve the ambience of the depressed Thirties.

  Suddenly white klieg lights cut through the rain and fog. Someone yells “action” and Hollywood golden girl Natalie Wood darts from a stone courtyard, looking like a rich man’s Dixie Dugan, with 1930 ankle strap pumps, low-cut blouse, straight black skirt, mesh stockings and a beaded bag. As she hurries along, 300,000 gallons of water are sprayed on her head from a hose on the back of a moving truck. When she reaches the corner, five assistants rush to cover her with a yellow bathrobe. Onlookers cheer from under their umbrellas.

  Sipping a hot buttered rum, Miss Wood dries her hair and collapses in the portable dressing room in her trailer. “Great way to grow old, shlepping around in the rain at 7 o’clock in the morning. I’ll bet the local yokels think we’re nuts. As if the rain’s not bad enough, James Wong Howe, who’s photographing this clambake, has to pour more water on me. He says real rain doesn’t photograph unless it’s back-lit with Hollywood lights or painted silver. My co-star, Robert Redford, is in bed with fever, the director is coming down with pneumonia. I ask you, is this a helluva way to make a living?”

  Two weeks of New Orleans rain was the least of the 77-man company’s problems. Back at the studio, six people had already written and rewritten the script, about a girl named Alva Starr who grows up in a world of daydreams and gauze butterflies in a dull little Mississippi railroad town during the Depression. Then Tennessee Williams, whose original one-act play provided the source for the two-and-one-half-hour film, took one look at the completed script and refused to allow his name to be connected with the picture, either on or off the screen.

  In Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, where the cast spent five weeks shooting scenes in Alva’s boarding house, a petition was filed by a local newspaper publisher to deny the company access to the public roads, and the local mayor used his influence (unsuccessfully) to try to drive the group out of town. In New Orleans for background scenes in which Alva runs away from home and falls into a life of prostitution, the company had another misadventure. One local citizen pushed a cameraman off the sidewalk in front of her French Quarter apartment, shouting, “I’m clean living and I’ll have no part of a dirty Tennessee Williams movie around my property.”

  Plagued by endless miseries which would be thorns in the sturdiest of sides, 33-year-old director Sidney Pollack was taking it like a man. Sitting half-hidden behind the sanctuary of a banana tree, he looked very much like a young Arthur Miller—eager smile, set jaw, black horn-rimmed glasses, Ivy-League corduroy trench coat. “When I was a director on ‘Ben Casey,’ we never had problems like these. But I still prefer working on location. My only previous film, The Slender Thread, was shot in Seattle and my trademark in future films will always be locations. It’s costly because you work slower. On a sound stage you can get five takes in ten minutes, but here you’re lucky to get five in an hour. But this New Orleans, this crazy broken-down city—you could never duplicate it in Hollywood. Everywhere you look you see history.” He pointed up, above the street, to the side of a sagging old building which, untouched by any movie crew, still read: “Uneeda—National Biscuit Co.—5 cents a package.”

  “Look at that sign, it’s pop art!”

  Across the street, an animal trainer turned loose a carton of pigeons for the next scene. They hobbled along sadly, wings clipped, pecking at grain mixed with tranquilizers. “Poor little dopes. But we can’t let them fly up in Natalie’s face and ruin the scene,” said snow-haired James Wong Howe, who, according to the crew, had threatened to walk off the picture twice since the company had arrived in New Orleans.

  “He’s a testy little bastard,” said Pollack, “but he knows his business. He’s one of the world’s greatest cameramen, a member of the old school, used to calling the shots himself. We’ve had a few blowups. I’m very progressive. To him I’m a ‘hipster,’ and it’s hard for him to take orders. But I think he’s pleased with the results. The main problem is making the story more contemporary than its Thirties setting. It could’ve been just another out-of-style Summer and Smoke. I’m not sure I can get away with it, but I’m changing styles in the middle of the film. The New Orleans scenes are done with a liquid dreamlike flow because they show Natalie’s downfall. I’ve cut out all the soap opera Camille stuff, where she dies of a lung disease, and jazzed up some of the shots. The end, for instance, just kills me—it was shot on the railroad tracks from a hand car with a helicopter which takes off from the hand car and photographs the whole town and countryside. Then there’s a five-page dialogue scene between Natalie and Redford that will be shot in six different locations without stopping the dialogue, right through eye-level sunsets in Pirate’s Alley and light filtering through magnolia trees. Pretty Truffaut-ish, but that’s the miracle of film. Everything comes out different.”

  Inside her trailer, Natalie Wood got the word that it was raining too hard to shoot any more that day. “Come on up to the hotel with the gang,” she said, “where things make sense.” Later, around dusk, she sat on the floor of her suite at the top of the Royal Orleans Hotel, dressed in a leopard-skin nightgown, her all-American face scrubbed and shining, heartily attacking an order of eggs Benedict on the coffee table. Surrounding her was her entourage: Mart Crowley, an ex-secretary (male) who was passing through town from Jackson, Mississippi; photographer William Claxton, who occasionally takes a picture Natalie will eventually have to approve before it can be published; a male hairdresser named
B.J., who works on all of her films; and a maid named Blanche who, Natalie claims, “has worked for them all, even Jean Harlow.”

  Somebody phoned from Hollywood to read the reviews of her last picture, Inside Daisy Clover. She squealed with glee, repeating portions of the conversation to the gang in a Shirley Temple voice. “Best film ever made about Hollywood—oooo—instant identification—ooo—grabs them where they live, eh?” The entourage danced around singing “Curtain up, light the lights, we got nothin’ to hit but the heights . . .”

  “Actresses!” Miss Wood grumbled, flopping on the floor again. “We work our tails off and the best scenes get cut and we’re the last ones to know. That’s why I never go to the daily rushes any more. I can’t tell what’s good and what isn’t. They pay me a lotta money, I go everywhere for location shooting, but it doesn’t have any relation to anything. You can’t get thrown by the glamour part. I went on my first location when I was 6 years old, with Orson Welles in Tomorrow Is Forever. I was in New York, and I remember I fell madly in love with Louie, the headwaiter at the Carlton. I was in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, and I had chicken salad for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s been like that ever since. This is the hardest role I’ve ever done—it’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to playing Blanche DuBois, so I’d better make the most of it.