The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

  Contents

  Title Page

  Also by Natasha Lester

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  PART TWO

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  PART THREE

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  PART FIVE

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  PART SIX

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  PART SEVEN

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  PART EIGHT

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  PART NINE

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  PART TEN

  Chapter Thirty

  PART ELEVEN

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  PART TWELVE

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  PART THIRTEEN

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  An Extract of The Paris Seamstress

  Hachette Australia

  About the Author

  Copyright

  ALSO BY NATASHA LESTER

  A Kiss from Mr Fitzgerald

  Her Mother’s Secret

  The Paris Seamstress

  To Rebecca Saunders, publisher extraordinaire, whose belief in me is the greatest gift any writer could have. Thank you.

  PART ONE

  Jess

  It is almost impossible today, almost fifty years later, to conceive how difficult it was for a woman correspondent to get beyond a rear-echelon military position, in other words to the front, where the action was.

  – David E. Scherman, LIFE magazine correspondent

  One

  NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 1942

  Jessica May turned on her famous smile and raised her arm aloft, her movements as repetitive as those of the riveters and welders and all the other jobs women were doing these days. Except that she wasn’t in a factory and she wasn’t wearing overalls.

  Instead, she stood on a white platform, backdropped by a brilliant autumnal sky, wearing a white silk dress, bridal in length. It was designed to cling to the front of her body – helped along by the fans blowing over her – and then billow behind her in the artificial breeze, goddess-like. A white cape tied at her neck rippled too, adding to the celestial effect. Two large American flags fluttered proudly beside her, and her outstretched arm made it appear as if she might declaim something important at any moment. But that was also part of the make-believe; since when did a model have anything momentous to say about patriotism and war?

  Once upon a time she’d marched passionately in the streets of Paris protesting against fascism, first as its vile ideology swept through Spain, then as it turned Italy and Germany into grotesqueries. Now Jessica May was simply the figurehead of a ship. Or Toni Frissell, the photographer, would make her into one after the photograph had been cropped and manipulated in just the right way for the cover of Vogue, a cover that would be as galvanising as everyone needed it to be in late 1942. Nobody would ever know that there was no ship, no water, no sea breeze, no goddess; just a few props in a field in upstate New York, beside a herd of cows with quizzical eyes chewing over the interruption to their ordinarily pastoral outlook.

  Toni asked her to rearrange her face. To look solemn. To respect the flag and the men and her country and the fighting. Jess did as she was asked.

  ‘Perfect,’ Toni said soon after. ‘I don’t need any more.’

  So Jess stepped off the platform, batting away the wardrobe assistant who wanted to help her down. She unhooked the cape and moved behind a screen where the assistant helped her change into the next outfit, a Claire McCardell bathing suit made of black wool jersey with a very low-cut v-neckline and a row of brass hook-and-eye closures down the front.

  This time, when Jess climbed onto the platform, she sat between the flags, pretending to dip her toes into the imaginary water that readers of Vogue would think lay just out of shot. She smiled and tipped her face up to the sun, leaning back on her elbows. A cow bellowed its approval and she laughed. Toni caught the shot at just the right moment.

  Then a car drew up in a hurry on the dirt road alongside the field. Belinda Bower, Vogue editor and Jess’s friend, stepped out and picked her way across the field in a pencil skirt and heels, wobbling, but clearly determined not to appear as out of place as a tuxedo at the seaside. Toni lowered the camera and Jess straightened. Bel never interfered with photo shoots. Something was up.

  Which Belinda confirmed moments later when she reached Jess and showed her a full-page Kotex advertisement in McCall’s. The words, It has women’s enthusiastic approval! were emblazoned across the top of the page. Underneath, Jessica May posed idly in an evening gown as if she hadn’t a care in the world, and especially not about the taboo subject of menstruation.

  ‘Goddammit!’ Jess said.

  ‘Goddammit,’ Bel agreed. ‘Shoot’s off,’ she called to the makeup artists, the hairstylists, Toni’s assistant, and Toni.

  Toni packed her camera away without asking any questions. But the eyes of everyone else remained fixed on Jess and Bel. There was no good reason to call off a shoot that everyone could see had been going exceptionally well. Unless Jessica May was in some kind of trouble. And that was both likely and a toothsome piece of gossip nobody wanted to miss.

  ‘It had to be Emile,’ Jess muttered as they walked across to the privacy of the cows. ‘He took that picture of me last year. He must have sold it to Kotex.’

  ‘I thought so,’ Bel replied. ‘I tried to get Condé to change his mind; hell, he wanted me to change his mind – you know he adores you – but we also know the advertisers would abandon us quicker than Joan Blondell can remove her clothes.’

  Despite everything, Jess grinned at the quip. Then she sighed. Bel was right. None of Vogue’s advertisers would want their products appearing in the magazine that had the Kotex girl on the cover. Because the Kotex girl was what she’d be known as from now on. Even living with Emile out of wedlock wasn’t as great a sin as menstruation. ‘How long will I be on the blacklist?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Belinda said honestly. ‘It depends how long Kotex run the ad for. Condé hopes we can have you back modelling for us next year, but …’

  ‘Until then, I should murder Emile and find some other way to pay the rent,’ Jess finished.

  ‘Condé still wants you at his party tonight. He won’t drop you for everything.’

  Just my livelihood, Jess thought grimly. At the age of twenty-two and after almost three years, hundreds of outfits, countless lipstick re-applications, innumerable images of Jessica May in the pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and Glamour and much fussing over her blonde hair, it was over. She would no longer perpetuate a fantasy that, despite the war, a world still existed in which a woman might buy a low-cut bathing suit and, on a trip to the seaside, meet a prince and fall in love.

  ‘Besides,’ Bel continued, pushing
the nose of a cow away from her Mainbocher jacket with the same force she used when disposing of hapless interns, ‘now you’ll have time to take more pictures for me. And to write for me.’

  ‘Will Condé agree to that?’

  Bel eyed Jess, who was still wearing the bathing suit in which her cleavage was displayed so winningly. ‘Your by-line won’t be anywhere near as intimidating to advertisers as a full-page of Jessica May in the flesh and not much else.’

  A peal of laughter rang from Jess’s mouth, so loudly that the team from the shoot all turned to look their way.

  ‘Think about it,’ Bel urged. ‘You know how much I loved the few pieces you’ve done for me.’

  ‘I will,’ Jess said. ‘But right now I need to change, go back to the city, and deal with Emile.’

  ‘What will you say to him?’ Bel asked as they walked over to the makeshift dressing room.

  Jess unhooked the bathing suit, unconcerned that Belinda was with her, so used to undressing in front of people that it now seemed strange when she was alone in the apartment taking her clothes off without an audience. ‘Something I would have said to him six months ago had he not returned from the training camp missing two fingers,’ she said bleakly.

  Hours later, Jess swept through the Stork Club, past the ostentatiously large flower displays and voluptuous velvet drapes, her eye fixed on a booth she regularly occupied. She was brought up short by two men who wouldn’t move aside to let her through and she dealt with them the same way she always dealt with men who thought the face and body of Jessica-May-the-model was theirs for the groping. ‘You’ve left them there,’ she said, indicating a spot on the floor.

  As both men looked down, she shouldered her way past and called back to them, ‘Your eyeballs, I mean.’

  Emile smiled at her when she reached the booth, a smile she’d once thought suave and sensual. As usual, he wore his hair slicked back, his suit just the right side of louche to allow him entry into the Stork Club. He pushed a Manhattan across to her as she slid into the seat opposite. She took the drink and, in return, pushed Bel’s copy of McCall’s over to him.

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’ His smile widened, as if he thought one of his signature grins was all it took to have her thank him for ruining her career.

  ‘You knew I wouldn’t be. Otherwise you’d have told me.’

  His smile stayed on. ‘You’re always saying I should start working again. I took your advice.’

  They both looked at his right hand; at the remaining two fingers and thumb. Once upon a time, the handsome Frenchman, Emile Robard, had been one of the darlings of fashion photography, peer to Man Ray and Cecil Beaton, first in France and then in New York City, where he’d decamped in 1939 when war was declared. To where he and Jess had both decamped, to be precise – Jess might have been an American but she’d lived more than half her life in France with her parents, which is where she’d met Emile.

  After arriving in New York, it took only a year for Emile Robard and Jessica May to become the darlings of both the scandal sheets and the social pages, the royalty of Greenwich Village artistes. A sought-after model and a French photographer, both, according to the press, blessed with enough beauty to lift any gathering to greatness.

  That she’d shockingly dared to live with Emile, to be his mistress, was both titillating and thrilling to most Manhattanites whose values were far more conservative than their cosmopolitan facades implied. What she hated most about it was the word – mistress – implying she lived off Emile’s largesse. But her modelling career meant she had more than enough money of her own. In fact, over the last few months, he’d been the one burning through her money like packs of Lucky Strikes. He’d taught her photography, the press said – another lie, although he had bettered her skills. He’d ensured she was the face most loved by the fashion magazines – another untruth; she was perfectly capable of finding her own work and hadn’t had to attend a go-see for two years.

  And then earlier in the year, having witnessed the glory surrounding photo graphers like Robert Capa and Edward Steichen who were taking pictures of war, Emile had decided he wanted some of that lustre for himself. He’d cast off models and magazines and got himself assigned to an army training camp in Texas. Jess had been glad to have some time apart from him; the six months prior had seen Emile throwing himself at parties with the same passion he used to save for photography, and consuming whiskey as if it were air. It wasn’t a lifestyle that Jess desired, given that late nights were incompatible with a magazine-worthy face, and nor did she want to be the vapid party-girl whose only concern was locating a suitable sofa to pass out on at three in the morning. She’d hoped that Emile’s sudden urge to shoot training manoeuvres would result in him finding inspiration in something other than late nights and drunkenness, but he got into an argument with a private at the camp and ended up being shot himself, losing two fingers in the process.

  When he returned with a bandaged hand, Emile told Jess he’d been defending her honour, that the private had made lewd comments about a photograph of her naked back in a magazine. It was her fault he’d lost his fingers and could no longer hold a camera properly. So she’d stayed with Emile even though she wasn’t sure that she still loved him.

  But now they were done. Jess could no longer go to work in the morning, leaving him in her apartment to drink whiskey all day, could no longer dance with him in the evenings with a model’s empty smile pasted on her face, could no longer help him home and to bed because he was too drunk to walk. Could not ignore the fact that he’d lined his pockets with Kotex money at her expense.

  Jess sent the martini glass the same way as the magazine. ‘I meant that you should go out and take photographs. Not sell old pictures of me to Kotex to use for an ad you know will make me persona non grata in the modelling world. The only reason you can’t hold a camera steady is because you drink too much. Your hand would be fine with just a little practice.’

  Emile finished his drink, then picked up hers and took a long swallow. ‘I did nothing wrong.’

  Jess sighed. She had to say it. It’s over. She had to forget looking up at a jazz club in Paris and seeing this man smile rakishly at her, had to forget dancing with him into the early hours of the morning, had to forget doing that most romantic of all things: walking hand in hand through the streets of Paris as the sun came up, stopping to buy espresso, stopping to kiss. Had to forget that what she’d had with him was a kind of love; hedonistic, exciting, suited to that time in her life when she’d thought she might go mad because both her parents had just died and she had nobody. Except Emile.

  ‘The New Yorker telephoned for you this morning,’ Emile said.

  Jess wished she could ask him at another time, when he was less drunk and more merciful, but she had to know. ‘What did they say?’

  ‘They said your idea didn’t interest them.’ Emile’s eyes roamed the room, settling on Gene Tierney, which was lucky; he wouldn’t see the sting of his words made manifest in the clench of her jaw.

  Being rejected at a go-see had never bothered her as much as a rejection by The New Yorker. She’d hoped her pitch might be a way to build on the handful of articles she’d written and photographed for Vogue, about the female artists from Parsons School of Design who were now painting camouflage on aeroplanes and designing propaganda posters instead of creating their own artworks. This time, Jess had wanted to write about what might happen to all those women when the war ended and the men returned and reclaimed their old jobs. What would the women do with all their new skills? Would there still be jobs for them?

  Jess had wanted to stand up high on a ladder and take photographs in the factories, pictures that showed how many women there were; not just one or two but an entire generation. She knew nobody could dismiss a photograph the same way they might consider words to be exaggerated. And she’d wanted to feel as if she was doing something that mattered; instead of screaming her outrage about fascism into the wind at the Place de la Concorde
as she’d done when she was younger, she could show that war reverberated in ways beyond bullets, that the ramifications could be found in the hands of a woman who’d once sculpted bronze and who now fashioned aircraft propellers.

  ‘They liked my idea,’ Emile went on, leaning back and lighting a cigarette.

  ‘Your idea?’

  ‘I told them I’d write a piece about the jobs women aren’t doing as well as the men who used to do them. I’d photograph the mistakes, expose the money it costs to make do with labour that isn’t suited to the job. You Americans have been asked to believe a story about how well everyone is getting on with the new way of things but perhaps it’s not true.’

  ‘You didn’t really.’ She stared at him, expecting he would laugh and tell her she was mad; as if he’d write a story like that.

  But he just stared back. ‘I did.’

  Her legs pushed her upright and the words came to her easily now that she no longer cared about kindness. ‘You know this is over. We’re holding on to something that happened a long time ago when I was young and didn’t know any better and when you were …’ How to finish that sentence? ‘A better man than you are now. And I’m not referring to your fingers.’

  ‘Nobody ever refers to my fingers,’ he retorted. ‘But everyone thinks about them. About poor Emile who used to have the models falling at his feet.’

  ‘That’s what you miss?’ she asked sadly. ‘I’m sure if you’re still able to stand by the end of the night, you’ll be able to get someone to fall at your feet. I’ll stay elsewhere for the next few days while you move your things out of the apartment.’

  ‘How will I find somewhere to live on such short notice?’ His voice was petulant, like a child’s.

  ‘I’ll get the bank to transfer you enough money to pay your rent for a month. After that, your articles,’ she couldn’t quite keep the anger from her voice, ‘will surely support you.’ Then she left before either of them could say any more hurtful things.

  The only thing to do after that was to go to a party. She arrived at midnight, which was late, but not impolitely so – the party never started at Condé Nast’s Park Avenue apartment until ten at the earliest. Condé kissed Jess’s cheeks and apologised for the stance he’d had to take with the Kotex ad.