Avedon deserves much of the credit for making Suzy Parker a supermodel. She’s said he was the only photographer she enjoyed working with, and the only one who adequately captured her personality. But it was her sister Dorian (who’d opened a modeling agency that represented Suzy when she first came to New York, then took Suzy with her when she joined Ford Models) who “really and truly crammed me down their throats, particularly the first trip to Paris with Carmel Snow,” Suzy said. “Dorian said she wouldn’t go unless Avedon brought her, too.”
That trip to Paris was one of the inspirations for Stanley Donen’s 1957 film, Funny Face, which incorporated songs from an old Broadway musical by Ira and George Gershwin. In the film, Fred Astaire, one of Avedon’s childhood idols, plays Dick Avery, a fashion photographer based on Avedon, who served as special visual consultant on the movie and designed the title sequence. Audrey Hepburn plays Jo Stockton, a bohemian bookstore clerk whom Avery “discovers” in the background of a Parisian photo session and transforms into a model. Though some of her subsequent experiences were inspired by Suzy Parker (“A lot of things I did or said to Dick, he incorporated into Funny Face,” she said), the character was based on Doe Avedon by screenwriter Leonard Gershe, whom Dick had met in the merchant marines, was part of Dick and Doe’s Cherry Grove set, and had a decade earlier first thought of turning them into characters in a Broadway show.
Not long after Doe and Dan Matthews were married, they drove to Hollywood seeking film work but, en route, were in a car crash in Colorado. Dan was decapitated and Doe was stuck in the wreck for three hours. Afterward, Gershe “sent [Doe] overseas to recover,” says her daughter Anney Siegel-Wamsat, and then “wrote Funny Face as a catharsis,” to help her move on with her life. Dovima, another of Avedon’s favored models (who was called Doe in childhood); Sunny Harnett, centerpiece of a famous photo he’d shot in 1954 in the casino at Le Touquet, France; and Parker all had cameos in the movie. An art director character is named Dovitch. Kay Thompson, creator of the Plaza Hotel’s mascot, Eloise, portrays a fashion editor based on Diana Vreeland, who reportedly hated the way she was lampooned. Gershe’s screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.III Parker would continue shooting with Avedon into the early 1960s.
They “kind of grew up together,” she said. “Richard was a director. I would sometimes look and feel awful and I would say, ‘Oh, God, we can’t work today.’ And he would say, ‘I’ll tell you how you look. I can make you look any way I want you.’ He kind of invented me. He gave me my style. It was always, like, let’s pretend, let’s get dressed up and be that person who would wear those clothes.” He also used her to get others to do his bidding, as happened late in 1960, when he brought Parker with him when he photographed America’s first three astronauts, Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, and John Glenn. Parker charmed them into putting on their space suits for the photo. She was “the center of attention,” observed Earl Steinbicker, Avedon’s assistant on that shoot. At least until a thunderstorm blew in and knocked out the electricity just as Avedon’s strobe lights were turned on. Shepard gallantly came to the rescue, tapping into an emergency circuit, allowing the session to proceed.
The mid-to-late 1950s in Paris represented Avedon’s apotheosis as a fashion photographer. Though Irving Penn’s 1950 daylight studio photographs of Lisa Fonssagrives in Paris couture were among his greatest fashion pictures—and Avedon would later follow him, ripping the coverings off the skylights in the Bazaar’s Paris studio and letting the magical light of Paris pour in—Avedon had taken the lead.
Avedon’s style was a hybrid of street photography that sought to capture reality and the elegant remove of past fashion images. His flirtation with documentary photography for Life had shown him his limitations: he didn’t like photographing people on the sly. “Also, I have to control what I shoot, and I found I couldn’t control Times Square,” he said, so he sought “to create an out-of-focus world—a heightened reality, better than real, that suggests, rather than tells you.”
To achieve that, in those early Paris photos, he did intensive research, reading up on possible locations, making sketches, and taking test photos. “Maybe the Marquis had raised a guillotine in a courtyard where I assembled a troupe of acrobats, scattered a bale of hay, and posed a model in a New Look suit,” he said. One photo curator found that comment a head-scratcher. “He may be assigning to the Marais courtyard [where he took that picture] the history of the Place de la Concorde, the location of the guillotine that killed Louis XVI, where Avedon photographed more than once,” wrote Katherine A. Bussard. But factual accuracy wasn’t the point; implied narrative and emotional resonance was.
Research and planning concluded, Avedon would work just as hard with his models, demonstrating how he wanted them to pose, leaping about if that was called for, chattering at them, joking with them, telling them the stories of the photo narratives he was creating, encouraging them to express themselves and present something other than the affectless faces traditionally worn by fashion mannequins. Even if the ultimate audience, the magazine readers, couldn’t afford the clothes the model was wearing, they might be able to relate to her. Thus, aspirational fashion imagery was born. And in creating his movies-on-the-page, Avedon emerged as Brodovitch’s ideal photographer.
In 1955, working with an eight-by-ten-format camera, which he’d only begun to master after years of shooting with his easier-to-handle Rolleiflex, Avedon took his most famous single image of Dovima, with several elephants, at the Cirque d’Hiver, an idea of Joe Eula’s. In 1956, he shot Dorian and Suzy again in the Bazaar’s Paris studio, and Suzy and another model, Barbara Mullen, cavorting in Paris bistros and nightclubs with Gardner McKay, a college dropout who was working as a sculptor (and would later become an actor) and Robin Tattersall, a male model who would later become the official government surgeon on the British Virgin Islands. “Dick picked them both because they were tall enough to be with me,” Parker said.
Avedon later told Art Buchwald, the columnist, that he’d spent a year developing the shoot, with the theme An American Woman in Love in Paris, only to get there and find that Parker wouldn’t play along. She didn’t like McKay and “she only wanted to be kissed by someone she loved,” he said. “It was quite a blow to his pride when Suzy wouldn’t let him kiss her.”
In 1957, he shot Tattersall and Parker and another model protégé of Dorian Leigh’s, Carmen Dell’Orefice. And in 1959, the cast of characters at Avedon’s epic August shoot in Paris expanded to include Buster Keaton, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Audrey Hepburn and her husband, Mel Ferrer, Buchwald, a Portuguese Chinese model named China Machado (whose photos Avedon would have to force Harper’s Bazaar to publish by threatening to leave the magazine), the social figure Frederick Eberstadt, and Reginald Kernan, a sportswriter who’d become a doctor working at the American Hospital in Paris, until he had a fight with its board of directors and made an unexpected career change, becoming a male model at Dorian Leigh’s latest agency; she’d been one of his patients.
The writer Judith Thurman once compared Avedon and his models—Dorian, Suzy, China, Carmen, Dovima, and the others—to a small repertory company. “Our rapport was built from sitting to sitting and from season to season,” Avedon told her. And it was unique to their group and their moment. “When you were working with Dick, more was not enough,” Machado recalled. “I’d do the most incredible things with my body for him in front of the camera. But when I tried to do them at home in front of the mirror, I couldn’t.”
Avedon’s best-known work with Parker was shot in summer 1962 in Paris, before she retired from modeling. In a story called “Mike and Suzy Rock Europe,” she and Mike Nichols, then half of the stand-up comedy team Nichols and May, portrayed characters based on Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who were then having a scandalous affair on the Italian set of their film Cleopatra, and being pursued by a new breed of photographers called paparazzi, who stalked and photographed celebrities. Avedon rarely used a 35 mm camera—he found it too small a
nd hard to focus because of his glasses—but he did for some of the photos in that sequence, adding a telephoto lens to lend the portfolio authenticity. It worked: many were fooled into thinking the story was about a real affair. Nichols not only modeled for the portfolio, he also wrote captions for what was conceived as a satire. “In this project Avedon synthesizes every genre within which he has worked: fashion photography, portraiture, serial narrative, satire, and ‘reportage,’ ” Jane Livingston observed. Some onlookers took the whole thing so seriously, they started rocking a car Suzy and Mike were in, while Dick snapped away, yelling, “Push harder!”
Strangely, then, Avedon would later compare himself, in those years, to a deaf-mute he’d seen stranded in an empty Montmartre strip club he’d gone to with Doe in the late 1940s, “looking lost, even trapped, [who] wandered over to the deserted orchestra pit, picked up a horn, and blew a sound on it—a strange, raucous, terrible sound that resembled his expression.” But during the same interview he would call his Paris pictures “the last time the sensibility of my fashion work wasn’t commercially driven.” He explained that just when he felt he’d come to master his art, the context in which it was made changed forever. “The feeling wasn’t in it, there was too much narcissism and disenchantment. I kept at it, but it became a craft—a means of support for my studio, my family, and my art, which turned to portraiture.”
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I. It was later shown in the Metropolitan Museum and is one of Avedon’s best-known images.
II. Leigh often understated her age, too; by some accounts, she was then thirty-two.
III. Doe Avedon had meantime worked as a screen and television actress and married Don Siegel, a film director, but retired the year Funny Face was released to raise their four adopted children. She died in 2011 at eighty-six.
Chapter 7
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“LIVING THE GOOD LIFE”
In the spring of 1952, a seventeen-year-old high school student from Allentown, Pennsylvania, who’d been taking and developing his own photos for five years, wrote to ten New York–based photographers, seeking a job as an assistant, “offering to work hard and cheaply and emphasizing my experience with large cameras and darkroom work.” Only three responded, one of whom was Richard Avedon, who suggested Earl Steinbicker come to Manhattan a few weekends later for a meeting in Avedon’s skylit studio in a two-story, block-long building at 640 Madison Avenue. Avedon immediately offered him a job. “I believe it was because I enclosed a picture of myself,” Steinbicker says. “I was a really good-looking kid back then. I think from the beginning, he was attracted to me. I’m sure you know he was bisexual. I have no hard evidence, but he obviously had something with James Baldwin back in high school.”
Clearly, Avedon’s relationship with Baldwin was complex. In the archives of Bea Feitler, an art director he worked with briefly at the Bazaar in the 1960s, an evocative series of photo-booth picture strips shows Avedon holding a torn image of half of James Baldwin’s face up next to his own. Steinbicker says that during the preparation of Avedon’s second book, which had a text by Baldwin, the photographer flew into “a screaming rage” when Baldwin disappeared to Helsinki with a boyfriend instead of meeting his deadline for the text for the book. “He said, ‘That fucking nigger,’ ” Steinbicker recalls. “Those were his exact words, and I’d never heard him use that word before. ‘Get me a flight to Helsinki tonight.’ And he came back with a manuscript. It wasn’t very good.”
Steinbicker did more than assist in the studio. At the time, Dick and wife Evie leased the bottom three floors of a town house on a tree-shaded, secluded street called Beekman Place, just off the East River. Avedon asked if Steinbicker could repair their “very expensive hi-fi” system, which didn’t work, and he told them they’d bought junk and replaced it instead. “He was not a poor man,” so he could afford it, says Steinbicker, who recalls the home’s ground-floor kitchen, formal dining room, and garden decorated with an Etruscan-inspired statue of a dancing nude. Up a spiral stair, the parlor-floor living room held works by Picasso and Braque. The bedrooms were on the third floor. The Avedons had a cook and a maid but no car. Dick was a bad driver. “He couldn’t pay attention,” says Steinbicker. “He’d turn and talk to people in the backseat. It was scary to drive with him,” so Steinbicker became a chauffeur as well, ferrying the family to Connecticut, where, in summer 1953, the Avedons spent weekends.
Though he returned to Fire Island in summer 1954, Avedon had cooled on the barrier beach and would henceforth spend summers on the east end of Long Island, in the Hamptons. By that time, his friendship with Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel had also cooled. “The bohemian years of carefree summers in Cherry Grove were over,” says their son Eric Himmel. “Dick was growing and his world was expanding at a mile a minute. He was developing associations in the worlds of writing and art and Hollywood”—through his celebrity portraits for Bazaar in many cases—“that were way beyond the Himmels’ experience. I doubt he even had time to invest in the friendship after 1951.”
By the time Steinbicker arrived, Avedon was running a large operation. On his first day at work, Steinbicker met the crew: a studio manager, a first assistant, and an office manager who was the departed Doe Avedon’s aunt. Steinbicker then worked on an ad for Maidenform brassieres. Propped against the wall was the background for one of Avedon’s most famous ads, for Revlon’s Fire & Ice nail polish, which starred Dorian Leigh. Steinbicker learned that his compensation included use of the studio and darkroom in off-hours, and leftover film, because most photographers would only use film from the same batch to ensure consistency. Avedon would later give his assistant a Rolleiflex, too.
Steinbicker’s initial jobs ranged from cleaning and darkroom work to putting masking tape on models’ shoes so they wouldn’t mark the white paper on the floor. His pay was minuscule until he mastered loading and unloading the massive wood Deardorff eight-by-ten camera used on most fashion and advertising work. But he recalls making extra money posing as a male prop in ads, such as one where he dressed as a bullfighter, and another in which he wore a gorilla suit and carried a model. Unlike Irving Penn, who always insisted on being addressed as Mr. Penn, Steinbicker was encouraged to call his boss Dick.
In Steinbicker’s first year with him, Avedon shot more than 150 ads (for Revlon, Helena Rubinstein, Du Pont, Tareyton cigarettes, Cartier, Warner-Lambert, Pontiac and Cadillac cars, Alcoa aluminum, Schweppes, Owens-Illinois glass, Douglas Aircraft, and Hertz—sometimes shooting for as many as four clients a day), 100 editorial fashion jobs, and several dozen celebrity portraits. Steinbicker learned some of his boss’s tricks, such as smearing Vaseline on his lens to achieve soft focus, and using tissue paper in the darkroom to make some areas of a photo print soft while others stayed sharp. “He had no compunctions against darkroom cropping and image manipulation, nor against heavy airbrush retouching,” Steinbicker later wrote. Avedon also edited his film brutally and only showed a few of the hundreds of images he took on a job to his editors or clients. Steinbicker recalls Diana Vreeland invading the darkroom and rummaging through the trash to find a photo Avedon had rejected that she preferred. Avedon, Steinbicker reports, acceded to her desire to print a rejected image. “Everyone was terrified of her,” he says.
About two years after Steinbicker joined the team, Dick learned his studio would have to close and move when the building owner decided to demolish it. Avedon found a new studio on the corner of Forty-Ninth Street and Third Avenue, then still in the shadows of an elevated railway. It was on the second floor of a building that then, as now, was mostly occupied by a steak house. Larger than the Madison Avenue studio, the new place also had a skylight for daylight photography, as well as space for the growing staff, and a second studio where various associates—the most famous was Hiro Wakabayashi, known simply as Hiro—worked under Avedon’s aegis.
The photographer and his assistant became good friends. When Steinbicker was in the army from late 1956 to 1959 (and was repl
aced by Hiro), Avedon would write him with encouragement and news. The assistant would later joke that he knew his boss was in good hands when he got a letter informing him, “Suzy is still running the studio,” referring to Suzy Parker.
While Steinbicker was in the service, the Avedon studio moved again, to even larger and more elaborate quarters on East Fifty-Eighth Street (containing, among other things, the first Color Automat processing machine in America, and an Eames chair on loan from Mike Nichols). The Avedons, along with their poodle, Piffles, moved to 625 Park Avenue, a luxurious limestone-clad apartment house at East Sixty-Fifth Street. He could afford it. Advertising clients such as Revlon and CBS Records were paying him as much as $100,000 a year.
Alen MacWeeney, a twenty-year-old Irish photographer, joined Avedon’s studio as an assistant just after the moves and would edit contacts with him in the apartment in the morning. It was decorated “in very expected, successful New York taste,” MacWeeney said. “A decorator had obviously done it. It could have been a banker’s apartment. It was more flashy than profound. I don’t think he had any taste in design at all.”
A few years later, the Avedons would move again, to a luxurious town house decorated by the interior designer Billy Baldwin at No. 5 Riverview Terrace, a gated private street just off posh Sutton Place, facing the East River with direct views of the famous Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge from all of its front windows. “It had a studio look but very, very expensive stuff,” says art director Ruth Ansel, who worked with Avedon at the time. “It was the artist living the good life.” Steinbicker thinks that Evelyn Avedon cherished that lifestyle. “She was interested in shopping and dinner with the right people,” he says. But all of that would shortly cease to satisfy her husband.
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