Bert Stern started at the very height of fashion—a dangerous place to be.
In 1959, less than a decade after he took his first professional photograph, Alex Liberman drafted Stern, then a hotshot advertising photographer known for a vodka campaign, to shoot for Vogue. A year later, he bagged his first cover, a head shot of the model Deborah Dixon giving a hot, come-hither look, lips parted in sultry invitation. With photographs like that, Stern instantly joined the fashion pantheon; over the next decade, he would shoot forty-one covers of Vogue. With Irving Penn increasingly reluctant to sell frocks, Stern became Liberman’s primary weapon against Richard Avedon and the suddenly destabilized Harper’s Bazaar. “Penn stood at the top,” says Sarah Slavin, then a Vogue sittings editor. “Stern, in a way, came next.”
Two years later, Vogue gave Stern what would turn out to be the most important, memorable, and insanely lucrative assignment of his life. It would overshadow everything else he did in a long and distinguished career and, ironically—as he owed it to a fashion magazine—render his decade atop fashion’s heap a footnote.
In 1962, Stern flew to Los Angeles and rented a suite at the secluded Hotel Bel-Air to use as the set for a photo session for Vogue with the troubled but still mesmerizing sex symbol and movie star Marilyn Monroe. The shoot lasted several days, fueled by a case of 1953 Dom Pérignon champagne, Monroe’s favorite, Château Lafite Rothschild, and vodka. Most of it was conducted with Monroe in the nude—for the first time since the Playboy centerfold that first propelled her to stardom.
“Of all the girls I had known or seen in movies or on stage, that one girl who truly intrigued me whom I had never met or photographed was M.M.,” Stern wrote afterward. He hoped to take a portrait of her as iconic as Edward Steichen’s great photograph of another, chillier movie blonde, Greta Garbo. “I thought it was a photo opportunity, and also I liked her, and I wanted to get close to her,” Stern recalled thinking. “If I couldn’t get close to her personally, at least I could get a photo.” Like the young autograph hound Avedon, Stern craved a totem of her fame.
The first day’s shooting lasted through the night and yielded hundreds of images of a slowly disrobing Monroe. “I didn’t say, ‘Pose nude,’ ” he later recalled. “It was more one thing leading to another. You take clothes off and off and off and off and off,” ending up with a topless Monroe, flirting with Stern through veils of diaphanous scarves, costume jewelry, and chiffon flowers. “Her beautiful body shone through the harlequin scarf in a tantalizing, abstract hide-and-seek,” Stern wrote. “Until she dropped it. And I shot it. Just for myself. One glimpse. One stolen frame.”
Stern was exultant; he’d got everything he wanted—and the photographs were evocative enough that forever after others wondered just how far he’d gone with the sexy star. But back in New York, Liberman, Vogue’s editor, Jessica Daves, and Diana Vreeland (who’d arrived at Vogue just before the Monroe shoot) weren’t so sure. Daves thought the photos were too risqué and asked for a reshoot, which was conducted in a second session with fashion editor Babs Simpson, and several dresses, coats, including a lush chinchilla, and all the other clothes and accessories that were Vogue’s raison d’être. The eight-page spread that resulted appeared in Vogue’s edition of September 1, 1962, and included only fully clothed photographs of the icon.
The issue was on press when Monroe died, a suicide, that August 5.
Later, Stern, who styled himself a ladies’ man, would claim he was convinced Monroe was trying to seduce him. “How’s this for thirty-six?” he said she’d asked him while revealing her famous milky-skinned breasts. They’d ended up in the suite’s bedroom, her naked in bed, “vulnerable and drunk and tender and inviting and exciting.” Then she passed out and he took one last photograph of her sleeping. “I saw what I wanted, I pressed the button, and she was mine,” he later wrote. His words were certainly quite consciously chosen. In his mind, he’d scored the ultimate sexual conquest with his camera, in that context a farcically obvious phallic symbol. “Making love and making photographs were closely connected in my mind,” he’d later say.
Ten years later, Bert Stern was ruined, a drug addict who’d been in jail and mental hospitals, lost his wife and three children and, many thought, his mind. But for the rest of his life, as most of his accomplishments were forgotten, those images of Monroe at the end of her rope would prove to be Bert Stern’s lifeline. Starting in 1968, when Stern first sold pillows and scarves decorated with his Monroe images, he would print and reprint, recycle and republish them to sustain himself, pay his bills, and, at least sporadically, remind the world of his name and reputation.
Those images of Monroe live on, timeless, immortal, often accompanied by Bert Stern’s version of those nights at the Hotel Bel-Air, when, a photography curator would have it, he asserted his control over the legendary Monroe, dominating her “for the sake of an image.” So it’s more than a little curious, as that curator Robert A. Sobieszek wrote in his introduction to Adventures, the only major book of Stern’s photography, that his name would be “lost to history” before the twentieth century ended. “The artist who had helped establish the commercial photographer as a celebrity, a figure of great wealth and unbridled lust, had simply disappeared.”
Bert Stern felt he came out of nowhere: “My life was nothing. I had no story, no beginning, no middle, no end.” He was born in Brooklyn in 1929, the son of a baby photographer, “an angry wreck” who “slit his wrists in a bathtub and survived” during the Depression. Raised in a basement apartment, Stern dropped out of high school, worked in a clothing store and at a soda fountain, unsuccessfully peddled jokes to comedians and newspaper columnists, and dreamed of being a cartoonist. “Superman was my only reality of the time,” he said. At another menial job, sorting mail in a Manhattan bank, his boss told him he was overqualified, yet he ended up in another mail room, albeit at Look, a photocentric national magazine that competed with Henry Luce’s Life. “And my life began.”
Stern’s mentor was Henry Bramson, the magazine’s promotional art director, who took the young clerk under his wing, encouraged him to study art, taught him the fundamentals of design, and brought him into Look’s art department as an assistant. From Bramson, Stern learned that most good design is based on geometry, and that the most compelling pages contained triangles; they became his signature visual motif. He befriended Stanley Kubrick, who would become a renowned film director but was then a young Look photographer. (Years later, Kubrick would hire Stern to photograph promotional materials for his film Lolita. The resulting photos of starlet Sue Lyon wearing heart-shaped glasses and sucking a lollipop would be among Stern’s most famous images.) Through Kubrick, Stern met his future first wife, a model who at first spurned him. A more important encounter was his first with an Irving Penn photograph, a still life that “got me interested in photography,” he said. “It was divine, spiritual.” On first impression, he immediately understood, he continued, that “the photographer had so much power, he ran the show.”
Pushed out of the Look nest by Bramson, Stern took a job as art director at a small fashion magazine, where a commercial photographer nudged him to buy his first camera, a 35 mm Contax. He returned to work with Bramson when the older man moved to Flair, an innovative but brief-lived arts and culture magazine created by publisher Mike Cowles’s wife, Fleur; Stern became its “pseudo art director,” as he put it, after Bramson had a heart attack. He felt he’d found his direction in life, but Flair went belly-up, and then Stern was drafted into the army and sent to Japan, where he would head to the PX twice a month to leaf through new issues of Vogue, “the only magazine I liked, because of Penn.”
Out of the service in 1953, Stern still thought he’d be an art director. “Photographer was the last thing I wanted to be.” So he got a job for another little fashion magazine and reconnected with Bramson, by then working for an ad agency, who asked him to execute freelance layouts for one of his accounts, Smirnoff, then a minor vodka brand seeking
to dislodge gin as the favored alcohol of martini drinkers. The company had a slogan, “Driest of the dry,” and Stern came up with a campaign idea: still lifes photographed in the desert. “Who should shoot it?” Stern recalled asking. “I said Penn, of course.” Though Penn had taken groundbreaking images of Jell-O pudding and pie filling for ads that very year, Stern continued, he “said [the Smirnoff idea] couldn’t be done with photography.” When Erwin Blumenfeld also said no, Stern said, “I guess I could do it.”
Bramson advanced him the funds to buy a car and drive to White Sands, New Mexico. He hired Teddy Ayer, the model he’d met through Kubrick and hadn’t forgotten, as his assistant, and they came back with an image that set the ad business buzzing, a man wearing a hat and a tuxedo perched on a chair in the desert distance in the blinding light of dawn with a lemon between him and a Smirnoff bottle and a martini in the foreground.
Instantaneously, Stern’s Smirnoff campaign (which later included an even more famous image of the pyramid at Giza, outside Cairo, rendered upside down in a martini glass) became the talk of Madison Avenue, and Stern, the boy wonder of commercial photography. “I think Penn was right,” he would later admit, “the shot was impossible. But I got lucky.”
He and Teddy Ayer got married. “I didn’t want to get married,” he later said. “I just wanted to make out.” But she had virtues beyond her sexual attraction, among them finding him a studio overlooking Bryant Park and the New York Public Library in the same building where Steichen had once worked and Irving Penn still did. It had a skylight and Stern would shoot using only daylight for the next four years because “I didn’t know how to use a light meter.”
His first marriage lasted less than those four years but quite a bit longer than a brief flirtation with Brodovitch’s Design Laboratory. Stern left after a single session; he felt he didn’t need it. His work in advertising was already as influential as that of Brodovitch and Avedon’s was in magazines. That mattered most to him. “I didn’t think of money,” he said. “I was very frugal. Making wonderful pictures was the goal. I could take impossible pictures for Smirnoff and they’d appear in Life magazine and I’d be on a plane and everyone would have a copy and they’d stop people. That was the goal.”
His life became as chaotic as his career trajectory was meteoric. Before he even started shooting fashion, he left Teddy Ayer for another model, Dorothy Tristan, who was “very dangerous . . . too beautiful and she drank,” he said. They met when she was eighteen and just back from Europe, where she’d modeled in Paris and was living with a photographer in Rome. She promptly broke up with her boyfriend “because Bert was so much fun,” she says. She isn’t sure of when they met. “I must have had a job with him,” and she’s sure it was on location, “which is always dangerous. I was young and selfish and absolutely ruthless and I didn’t think about anybody else’s feelings.”
Tristan knew Stern was still married to “a cute thing, adorable, I forget her name.” Tristan came to sympathize with Teddy because after Stern cheated on his wife with her, “he was extensively unfaithful, which made me angry and caused a lot of trouble.” She adds, “He was not a great lover at all. He was after everyone and in everyone’s pants, but he didn’t know what to do when he got there.” Sometimes, it was over in an instant. Sometimes he had trouble ejaculating. “I don’t know what his sexual problem was. Maybe he was unused to intimacy. But he was great fun,” she hastens to add. “He was naughty.” Even while working. “You’d lie down and he’d get right on top of you, right in your face, straddling you, and music was playing, mostly classical, because I liked it.” Working for De Beers diamonds, “we went to the desert and shot in the moonlight. He was a wonderful artist, very exciting, very sexual.”
They never lived together. “I don’t think he could live with anybody,” Tristan says. “He was very generous but very selfish. Screwing around is the height of selfishness. We were off and on for years.” Somehow, they even survived the night she threatened him with a knife. “He was carrying on as usual.” Another time, at a party in his studio, “I looked over the balcony and he was with a model, so I put my fist through a loudspeaker. He was shocked. And we kept on going.”
He cheated a lot, not always with models. “Models were just things that happened,” Stern said. “God created women. Let’s face it. Best thing he’s done. I was crazy about girls. Women were everything to me. You did anything to get over them or under them. All guys are interested in women and photography was a way to meet women. I wasn’t booking models to sleep with them. But I did find women the best thing there was. What else was there? Movies, women, photography, success, women.”
Chapter 11
* * *
“YOU COULD SEE HER TONGUE”
The next woman Bert Stern fell for, New York City ballet dancer Allegra Kent, was the love of his life. The then nineteen-year-old virgin was upside down when he first saw her, hanging from a fire escape onstage in a Broadway musical in spring 1957. Over the next two years he grew obsessed with her, watching her in performances choreographed by George Balanchine, inviting her to his studio (she came three times before he felt he could photograph her), and then courting her assiduously. “She’d been kept as a vestal virgin by Balanchine,” says Peter Israelson, a longtime assistant of Stern’s. “Bert was enamored; she was a particularly beautiful hothouse tomato.”
Stern was the first man Kent ever dated. He reminded her of her father, who’d deserted her family and was also “a womanizer,” says Israelson. In summer 1958, Stern took Dorothy Tristan with him to Newport, Rhode Island, where he and a neophyte filmmaker named Aram Avakian made the first music-festival documentary, Jazz on a Summer’s Day, at the Newport Jazz Festival.I Back in New York, Kent confronted Stern and he admitted he’d been seeing Tristan. Only when Kent declared their relationship over did he seem interested in her again. “I couldn’t depend on him,” she later wrote in an autobiography, Once a Dancer . . .
But that was hindsight. Stern and Kent married a few months later in February 1959. Their first night of marriage “was not particularly wonderful,” she wrote years later. “Bert was annoyed that I was completely inexperienced.” And he was likely not a patient tutor. But “Bert saw marriage to me as the joining of two celebrities,” she wrote. Others were fascinated. At the same time that they were married, an art director named “Miki Denhof called and offered me work at Glamour,” Stern remembered. Denhof, an Italian raised in Austria, a protégée of Alex Liberman’s, had come into her own as a mentor to many émigré photographers.
Glamour had been Condé Nast’s last magazine launch, introduced in 1939 as a competitor to Mademoiselle, which had been published for twenty-four years by a rival outfit, Street & Smith. Street & Smith and Condé Nast, which had been losing money, were both acquired by a new owner in 1959. That March, Samuel Irving Newhouse and his wife, Mitzi, proprietors of a coast-to-coast chain of fourteen American newspapers, bought Condé Nast Publications. Newhouse, then sixty-four and a child of Russian immigrant parents, added Street & Smith in August. He promised hands-off management by his executive team, mostly family, including his brother and two sons, S.I. Jr., known as Si, thirty-one, and Donald, twenty-nine.
Over their many years together, Mitzi Newhouse had convinced her workaholic husband to indulge her taste for life’s pleasures. They lived in an apartment at 730 Park Avenue, the Jewish analogue to its chic, exclusive neighbors 720 and 740 Park, and had a country house in New Jersey. The petite, attractive Mitzi wore couture clothing, and Sam famously joked that one day she’d asked him to run downstairs and buy her a fashion magazine.So he gave her Vogue as a thirty-fifth anniversary present.
Alex Liberman had long been frustrated by the “stodgy and pedestrian” Vogue’s lack of “snap and dazzle.” Its latest editor, Jessica Daves, had balked at his attempts to modernize the magazine’s look with the more suggestive and intimate pictures that he was coaxing from female photographers such as Frances McLaughlin and Karen Radkai. Vogue�
��s editors also disdained Irving Penn’s fashion pictures, complaining to Liberman that they “burned on the page.” That criticism was one of the reasons Penn refocused on portraits and still-life work. Liberman tried encouraging the American-in-Paris William Klein, a snapshot-style photographer in the Avedon mold, but with his own quirky, winking style. But Liberman’s biographers note, “Alex was careful to surround [Klein] with pages and pages of less jarring work.” If such compromises bothered Liberman, he didn’t let it show; he got his creative jollies painting on weekends, generally abstract variations on a geometric theme—just like those Stern learned from Bramson, only Liberman favored circles.II
Now, Liberman had new patrons to cultivate, the Newhouse family. He joined Pat Patcévitch, Condé Nast’s president, at his first dinner with the new bosses, and Liberman and his wife, Tatiana, rapidly cemented a relationship. “I became in a way Newhouse’s confidant,” Alex said. “I think Newhouse felt more comfortable with me than he ever did with Pat. He really listened to me, and he learned a lot about how the magazines operated as a result.” If Liberman’s friendship with Patcévitch suffered as a consequence, he felt it was a necessary but acceptable loss. “I had to exist.”
Actually, Liberman thrived. “Alex instantly jumped into the lap of anyone who enabled him to increase his power,” said Rosamond Bernier, a longtime Vogue editor. In October 1962, Alex was promoted to editorial director of Condé Nast, his name just below Patcévitch’s on the mastheads of all the magazines. The promotion followed the third and last bleeding-ulcer crisis of Liberman’s life; finally, his problem had a surgical cure. A diseased portion of his stomach was removed; he made a full recovery and continued to invest in his future with the Newhouse family.
Condé Nast magazines were young Si’s favorite outpost of the empire, and he dedicated himself to learning the business, starting at Glamour, where art director Miki Denhof walked him through issues of Vogue and the Bazaar, explaining why the latter was more stylish, and convinced him to steal the competition’s two best assets, Vreeland and Avedon. At the same time he poached the former, Newhouse moved to overseeing Vogue (he would be named its publisher two years later).
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