The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

· · ·

  Not surprisingly, the loyalty and admiration that Avedon extends to whoever is “his” model at any given time has led some of his associates to speculate on the nature of the relationship. The situation is complicated by the fact that early in his career on Harper’s Bazaar he was married to a model—Dorcas Nowell, a beautiful young thing known professionally as Doe Avedon. Nothing pleased him more than to dress her up to the nines and show her off in public. The couple were divorced after five years, however. In retrospect, some of Avedon’s friends are inclined to believe that he thought of her mainly as a lovely creation of his camera eye. Later, after consulting a psychiatrist, Avedon was quoted as saying, “I have to be a little bit in love with my models”—doubtless a true statement if “love” is taken to mean, in large measure, an emotion induced by professional delight at successfully recording the personality and charm of the woman in question on film. Pressed, not long ago, for an explanation of where he stands in this matter, Avedon thought sombrely for a while and then replied, “It’s like the feeling you have for kittens or puppies.” In any case, the issue is believed never to have ruffled the placidity of Avedon’s life with his second wife, Evvie, a highly intelligent woman, totally dissociated from the fashion world, whom he married in 1951. Avedon himself has described models in general as “a group of underdeveloped, frightened, insecure women, most of whom have been thought ugly as children—too tall and too skinny. They are all subject to trauma where their looks are concerned. You have to make them feel beautiful.” After the breakup of his first marriage, Avedon went through a long course of psychoanalysis, following which both his art and his relation to women seemed to change. Before, as a friend has remarked, he had a tendency to confuse women in general with elegant, idealized images of the species—a confusion that was evident in his early fashion photographs. Afterward, a preoccupation with the human being underneath the dress and makeup began to manifest itself immediately. Miss Parker recently expressed her admiration for him as an individual by stating simply, “He’s the most wonderful man in the business, because he realizes that models are not just coat hangers.”

  Avedon’s first widely celebrated model was Dorian Leigh, a woman of somewhat subtle beauty, who became the most famous model of her time. Of all the pictures Avedon took of her, the best known was undoubtedly the one used by the Revlon nail-polish people for their Fire and Ice ad, in which she was shown standing majestically in a jewelled gown and a red cape with the fingers of one hand splayed before her face. Miss Leigh was Avedon’s reigning model from 1948 to 1951, and he wistfully remembers her as the loveliest and most versatile subject he has ever had before his camera. In the end, however, she fell in love with a wealthy, car-racing Spanish nobleman, gave up modelling, and later went into business for herself, as head of a model agency in Paris. Miss Leigh was followed by a dark-haired, formidably exotic-looking Irish-American girl named Dorothy Horan, who assumed for professional purposes the name Dovima—“Do” for “Dorothy,” “vi” for “victory,” and “ma” for her ma, to whom she was attached. Dovima, who worked for Avedon from 1951 to 1955, was a devout Catholic and—in rather startling contrast to her aspect in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, which strongly hinted that she was in the same league with Cleopatra and Salammbô—a homebody. On her trips with Avedon to make photographs on location, she was generally accompanied by a husband and invariably by an armful of comic books. Under Avedon’s supervision, she became a face and figure known throughout the world of fashion and advertising, and an image capable of disturbing masculine dreams as well as selling clothes and lipstick. She was, like all Avedon models, an instinctive actress, and entered into the business of building up a fictitious public personality as a femme fatale with a fervor that was both disarming and wholly at odds with her extremely conventional notions of conduct. To dramatize Dovima, Avedon photographed her posing in the midst of a herd of wild-eyed elephants; he took her—and her husband and a trunkload of comic books—to Paris, where she impersonated the ultimate in sophisticated elegance for his camera; noting that she bore a resemblance to the famous bust of the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, he carted her to Egypt, where she posed for him in front of the Sphinx. Dovima was so overcome by the grandeur of her Egyptian role that she underwent a mystical experience.

  “He is speaking to me,” she said softly, pointing to the Sphinx. “He is saying, ‘Dovima…’ ”

  “How interesting that he should know your name,” remarked Avedon, trying, as always, to sound vitally attentive and inspiriting.

  “He is saying, ‘Dovima, you belong here,’ ” concluded Dovima, with an air of slight annoyance at the interruption.

  When she returned to the United States, a friend inquired how she had liked Africa.

  “I didn’t get to Africa,” she said. “But I was in Egypt.”

  “But Egypt is in Africa,” the friend pointed out.

  “It is?” Dovima said. “Good Lord, if I’d known I was going to Africa, I’d have charged double.”

  Dovima was succeeded by Sunny Harnett, a rather racy-looking blonde who “resembled the ideal of the luxury-drenched woman of the world, with money to throw away,” as Mrs. Vreeland has described her, adding, “She wore chinchilla and diamonds as carelessly as if they really belonged to her, and Dick had a way of making her believe that they did.” Avedon saw Miss Harnett as the epitome of sophistication; among the many dramas in which she played the leading lady, perhaps the most triumphant was set in the Casino at Le Touquet, where Avedon photographed her draped with reckless dignity over the gaming tables, looking stunningly world-weary and dangerous. After a year, Miss Harnett was, in turn, succeeded by Dorian Leigh’s younger sister, Suzy Parker, a lanky, high-spirited model whose spectacular looks and sparkling manner, besides earning her the opportunity to adorn fashion pictures and ads for Pabst beer, have recently made her a Hollywood movie star. “There is nothing to modelling,” Miss Parker has been quoted as saying. “All you do is shut off your mind and go to work.” Actually, Miss Parker does nothing of the sort. An intelligent girl and an amateur photographer herself, she is quick to visualize the dramatic ideas that Avedon works out for her, and often makes valuable suggestions of her own. Certainly no one has ever held a glass of beer aloft with more instinctive grace or with an expression of more intellectual appreciation than Miss Parker, who continually awes and delights Avedon by the endless variety of moods and movements, most of them ranging from the playful to the hilarious, that her face and body present to his camera. She recalls one instance when Avedon took a rather peremptory attitude toward her (she had protested that she looked awful that day, and he said, “It doesn’t matter how you look—it is I who make you beautiful”) but on the whole their relationship seems to be as cozy as that of a devoted brother and sister. It is conceivable that Miss Parker will shortly give up modelling to concentrate on her movie career. But so far, in spite of her Hollywood commitments, she has managed to keep working at the profession that gave her her start and in which, as the unequalled diva of the moment, she earns a hundred and twenty dollars an hour (and double that after five o’clock).

  · · ·

  Avedon has lately had more than his accustomed share of public attention, owing to a movie called Funny Face, which was supposedly based on his life as a fashion photographer, and to a Bachrach advertisement that shows a camera portrait of him, wearing an immaculate business suit and looking every inch the executive, together with the message “When Richard Avedon, great fashion photographer, wants portraits for his personal use he comes to Bachrach.” Both these tributes are to some extent misleading. Funny Face, a musical starring Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, deals with a love affair between a fashion photographer and his model, and contains many photographic devices and techniques drawn from Avedon’s work—blurs, blank white backgrounds, and so on, including Dovima, Miss Harnett, and Miss Parker—but it is far afield when it comes to questions of fact. The film was made in Hollywood and Paris, and Avedon
himself went both places, at a fee of ten thousand dollars, to serve as “visual consultant.” The Bachrach ad is misleading simply because, in real life, Avedon has hardly ever been seen in anything more formal than shirtsleeves, and has certainly never been taken for any sort of tycoon.

  Formality is, in fact, just about the last quality that comes to mind in connection with Avedon. He may be, as many people suspect, fundamentally shrewd and calculating in his professional life, but, whether he is working or not, his manner is that of an eager youth, intensely preoccupied with those offhand, intimate forms of human communication that have been of such value to him in lulling his models into a mood of relaxed spontaneity. “I am always stimulated by people,” he says. “Almost never by ideas.” His candor about himself is so great, and so unabashedly exhibitionistic, that once, after being interviewed by a young lady from a newspaper, he sent her around to talk with his psychiatrist, to make sure that she had the whole story. He leads what might be called a functional existence, in that he chooses the way of maximum ease, casting aside the useless baggage of display by which many men seek to impress others. Until the recent growth of his studio into what shows promise of becoming a major industrial enterprise, Avedon, unlike most successful magazine photographers, always insisted on doing his own developing and printing, since some of the effects he has made his name on involve the laboratory as crucially as the lens. He has now turned the laboratory work over to a technician named Frank Finocchio, who has worked with him so long and so closely that, once he has been shown what is desired, his eye can be trusted to react like a replica of Avedon’s own.

  In Paris, where Avedon and Louise Dahl-Wolfe take turns at the frantic job of photographing the semiannual collections of the big dressmaking houses for Harper’s Bazaar, he relies on a minimum, or a maximum, of equipment—at times using a Rolleiflex for an entire collection, and at other times renting generator trucks to illuminate Paris for blocks, and police to hold back the crowds. He is noted for his tireless industry on these expeditions, rising long before dawn and keeping at it until late at night, either laboring over actual pictures or experimenting with new schemes to give a novel twist to what, owing to the coverage by the daily press, will be a familiar story by the time his photographs appear. Over the years, there have been many tales about his troubles with capricious models in Paris (they made up a good deal of the plot of Funny Face), and most of them are true. Models do get lost and have to be tracked down through the mazes of boulevard night life; they do occasionally fall into the Seine; they do sometimes elope with wealthy playboys; and Dovima did nearly topple from the Eiffel Tower in an access of dramatic fervor. But for Avedon, crises of this kind are a desirable part of the theatrical background that he considers vital to his work. His leading lady must always be involved in a drama of some sort, and if fate fails to provide a real one, Avedon thinks one up. He often creates in his mind an entire scenario suggested by a model’s appearance. She may be a waif lost in a big and sinful city, or a titled lady pursued in Hispano-Suizas by gentlemen flourishing emeralds, or an inconsolably bored woman of the world whose heart can no longer be touched—and so on. Avedon models play scene after scene from these scripts, and sometimes help out by actually living an extra scene or two. The result is extraordinary for its realism—not the kind of realism found in most photography but the kind found in the theatre.

  · · ·

  It might be imagined that Avedon’s surroundings, which shift from the haut monde of Paris to the no less haut world of the well-dressed American woman, would have made him into a wide-ranging man-about-town. But this is not the case. While he knows his way around the cocktail-party circuit, he has little use for the milieu except professionally, and the scenes of life there as revealed in his photographs are, to a large extent, the product of his imagination. He abhors night clubs, and attends large social functions seldom and reluctantly. In addition to his pictorial reporting on fashions for Harper’s Bazaar, he supplies the magazine with a steady stream of portraits of well-known people. On one side of his work, he is always meeting people whose names keep popping up in the gossip columns; on the other side, people whose names appear in the news and society columns. But his intimate friends are comparatively few, consisting generally of old cronies whose friendship he values even though no newspaper desk has ever heard of them. A man who rarely drinks and never smokes, Avedon lives quietly with his wife and their five-year-old son, Johnny, in a six-room apartment on Park Avenue, less than a five-minute taxi ride from his studio—quietly, that is, when Johnny, who attends the Dalton School, is not romping with a large, floppy dog named Bunky. There is nothing self-consciously aesthetic, or even especially distinctive, about the décor of the apartment, a comfortably furnished one decorated by Mrs. Avedon in conventional competition with the usual hi-fi and television sets. Mrs. Avedon, a native of Springfield, Massachusetts, is an attractive blonde, though by no means a spectacular glamour girl in the Avedon photographic tradition. (She has never permitted her husband to take a picture of her.) While even the authorities at Harper’s Bazaar have praised her instinctive taste in dress on formal occasions, she cares nothing about fashion, and loves to wander about the house without shoes or stockings and to dispense, rather pointedly, with the artificial glamour that plays such a conspicuous role in Avedon’s professional life. Like her husband, she is difficult to pry away from domestic privacy for big social functions; she enjoys talking seriously with persons who interest her—but preferably a few at a time—and she is quite content to spend entire evenings at home alone or with her husband. “My wife dislikes all our friends equally,” Avedon once remarked, softening the exaggeration with a smile.

  Mrs. Avedon is very canny at sizing up people, and has good taste in books, music, and photography, including her husband’s, which she is perfectly ready to comment on, favorably or not, to him or to others. She is very proud of his standing in his field, goes along unobtrusively on all his Paris expeditions, and talks over each new project with him before he sets to work on it. Friends of the couple also credit her with having given the Avedon ménage much of its stability by providing a tranquil refuge for her husband, one of those dedicated men whose work is the principal—almost the exclusive—end of existence. Often working late into the night or getting up before dawn to hop in a taxi and hurry to his studio, Avedon spends nearly all his waking hours planning photographs or taking photographs or worrying about photographs. He is a distinctly urban type, to whom the thought of living in the country is appalling—as it is to his wife. Asked not long ago if he had ever considered buying a country place, he looked startled and said, “What on earth would I do with one? It would take me hours to get to my studio, and I would probably never see my wife.” The Avedons don’t own a car, because it would be a nuisance in the city and they have no desire to drive anywhere else. To both of them, the countryside—meaning the rural areas of the Temperate Zone northeast—is a bore, and they prefer to look at it, if at all, from the veranda of a hotel. They are not so critical, however, about the landscape in Jamaica, where they go every winter for a vacation; apparently, they find the tropical vistas, while not precisely urban, a little easier to take.

  Though Avedon is far from desultory in bargaining with his advertising clients, he claims that his interest in money is not worldly but based solely on his concept of it as a tribute to his prestige. He appears to view his fairly princely income with some surprise. “Why, you know, I sometimes get almost as much as Picasso for a picture,” he mused recently—and this comparison of his financial success with that of an artist, rather than, say, that of a banker or an industrialist, is highly typical of his way of thinking. Like most men with a generous surplus of cash, Avedon invests in various stocks and bonds, and for advice about them he often calls on his friend Cleveland Amory, who is not only a writer but a methodical student of the market. Amory, however, is likely to be dismayed by the use that Avedon makes of his advice. Not long ago, he advised Avedon to
take a cautious flyer in a certain oil stock. Avedon bought the stock, all right, and it went up even beyond Amory’s expectations, but when they next met, Avedon had forgotten all about Amory’s advice. “I just knew it would go up,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought of buying any until I consulted an astrologer, and he said that my horoscope predicted good luck in oil.”

  · · ·

  Shortly after Avedon went to work for Harper’s Bazaar, the editors of Life asked him to do a series of pictures of New York. Avedon accepted the assignment eagerly, since it seemed to promise another sudden rise in prestige, but he soon discovered that the project involved work of a kind he was not instinctively fitted for, and he never completed it. “The trouble was that when I got out into the street, I just couldn’t do it,” he says. “I didn’t like invading the privacy of perfect strangers. It seemed such an aggressive thing to do. Also, I have to control what I shoot, and I found that I couldn’t control Times Square.” The place where he could control what he wanted to shoot was, of course, his studio. “I began trying to create an out-of-focus world—a heightened reality, better than real, that suggests, rather than tells you,” he has explained. “Maybe the fact that I’m myopic had something to do with it. When I take off my glasses, especially on rainy nights, I get a far more beautiful view of the world than twenty-twenty people get. I wanted to reproduce this more poetic image that I was privately enjoying.” During Avedon’s first five years as a commercial photographer, many potential advertising clients shied away from him, because they were afraid he would portray their products bathed in an impenetrable mass of fog. But Harper’s Bazaar had steadfast faith in him. “They even ran a picture I took of the Hope Diamond in which you couldn’t see the facets,” he recalls. “What you got was the illusion of the diamond—the feeling a woman would have while wearing it.” Some Avedon admirers date the turning point in his style from a celebrated photograph he made for Harper’s Bazaar in 1950, in which Dorian Leigh was shown bursting into laughter while throwing her arms around the winner of a French bicycle race. The picture created a sensation in the profession, since embracing sports heroes and laughing had not previously been thought suitable activities for fashion models, and the extent of its influence soon became clear as models began to appear everywhere embracing bicycle riders, matadors, coachmen, and Lord knows what else, in a state of hilarity. Next, Avedon, again a good jump ahead of the pack, started photographing models with handsome young men posing as their husbands, and then—most revolutionary of all—models wheeling children in perambulators or, to make the family scene complete, dangling them in baskets gaily held by the father, too. The theme of domesticity also caught on, and has since been furthered in the philosophy of “togetherness” so relentlessly propagated by the editors of McCall’s. Avedon, though, restless as ever, already regards this accent on love and the home as an outworn fad, and is casting about for something to supersede it. “Everyone in the ads is loving everyone else,” he says dourly. “Perhaps it’s time for a shift to privacy.”