Focus

by Michael Gross

  Vreeland’s promotion to editor in chief was announced about two months after Liberman’s ascension, but she knew who the real boss was—Si—and played nice with the “wonderful boy,” as Vreeland addressed him in a note of congratulations. For his part, Liberman “took [Si] under his wing,” said Peter Diamandis, a Condé Nast editor, and became Si’s “surrogate father,” mentor, and cultural guide. “Si was rough, a snob, a poker player,” Richard Avedon said after his departure from Condé Nast. “Alex cleaned him up.”

  Alex had not yet received his new title when he first received Bert Stern, who wanted to work for Vogue: “I had a meeting with Alex and I said the same thing [he’d told Miki Denhof]; I said I didn’t have a real feeling for Glamour,” but would agree to take pictures for the magazine if he could also shoot for Vogue. He began at Glamour (“I didn’t shoot pros,” he said, “I used regular girls”) and “finally Alex Liberman called with a jewelry job for Vogue. I got very excited, and of course, I booked Suzy Parker, and also Debby Dixon.” Liberman turned a photo of the latter—taken for the jewelry portfolio contained within the issue—into Stern’s first cover.

  “You could see her tongue,” Stern recalled, and readers were shocked. “They got letters about it. Alex called me in and said, ‘Don’t work for Glamour anymore; work for Vogue.’ ” He gave Stern a contract for one hundred editorial pages a year that also allotted him an annual portfolio to fill however he chose; the Marilyn Monroe portfolio would be his idea. While Vogue retained ownership of the copyright and negatives for most of his work, he got to keep the film and rights to those portfolios.

  Why Stern? Liberman prided himself on his knowledge of high culture; he was impressed with Stern’s wife. “She’d modeled for Dick—six pages in Bazaar—before I met her,” Stern said. Liberman told him those connections made him “particularly suited for Vogue.” But he also seemed suited to the sixties. “He kind of personified it,” says fashion editor Sarah Slavin. “Bert understood the modern vulgarity, the people of the moment. Penn never pretended to be of the moment.” And Stern’s experience in advertising—where high-handed diva behavior is anathema and the ability to produce on order paramount—made him easy to deal with.

  “He was enthusiastic about work, period,” says Nancy Perl, who’d worked for Avedon and Penn before joining Stern’s studio and attended his meetings with Vreeland. “He was very centered, very involved.” But also very self-involved. “He was a creative artist so he was mostly involved with his own work. He lived in the moment he happened to be in and he was very much interested in Bert.”

  Another longtime assistant, Vicky Stackliff, met Stern through Perl’s husband, Arnold, a television writer who’d helped with Jazz on a Summer’s Day. In 1962, Stackliff went to Stern’s studio—or more precisely, studios, as he’d bought two more nearby buildings after branching out into making television commercials in the late fifties. He’d partnered with a friend he’d made in Korea, Eddie Vorkapich, who’d grown up in Hollywood as the son of a Croatian film director. The McCann Erickson agency hired them to make their first commercials for Coca-Cola and reportedly paid them $1 million.

  Stern “worked very hard, it had to be perfect,” Stackliff says. “Bert was the idea man, and the editors got it together.”

  Stackliff remembers the studio as an image factory, albeit one with huge hanging speakers blasting whatever pop music the models asked for. “First, the clothes would come, racks of clothes, boxes of accessories, and it all went downstairs to the dressing rooms. Then the ladies. They were always somebodies with some connection to society. They weren’t very friendly. They were very chic. Then the girls [i.e., the models] would come and [hairdressers] Kenneth [Battelle, aka Mr. Kenneth] or Marc Sinclaire, and makeup. It took a long time. Hairdos were very complicated then, there were hairpieces that were all braided and twined around. Bert would watch and make suggestions. Then he’d shoot on no-seam paper with music in the background.”

  Monique Knowlton, then Monique Chevalier, a German Swiss beauty, had started modeling in Paris at eighteen in 1958 and “just sort of caught on,” she says. Four years later, Monique was booked for a shoot with Stern that showed her seated, in a feather-sleeved dress, improbably reading a stock market ticker while having her elaborate hairdo teased out by Kenneth.

  Penn was Knowlton’s favorite. “One always looked like a lady with Penn,” she recalls. “He had the most serene studio. He wasn’t like Avedon. You didn’t have to jump over a camel or wear a snake around your neck.” But she kept shooting with Stern for Glamour. “Stern doesn’t come close to Penn,” she insists, but adds, “Bert was very, very talented. Bert was also the only one who made passes at everyone. I threw him out. I only made love with someone I was in love with.” But that aside, “it was easy to work for Bert. It was more difficult with Penn; you had to concentrate and breathe out. Bert always had the Everly Brothers on, that helped, it made you relax. And once he was sure he wouldn’t get anyplace, it made it easier to work with him.”

  Perl says Stern would often change his mind and rethink a shoot entirely. “He was always looking for better things.” Knowlton concurs: “He was the opposite of Babs Simpson. She was an extremely organized lady. Avedon and Penn seemed very organized. Bert would make changes in the middle and try to do things differently and tied himself in knots. I never had the feeling that he knew what he was doing. It was what he wanted, when and how. If he could have had slaves, he would have had nothing but slaves. He was always all over the place, disorganized, inconsiderate.” Yet adaptable. Shooting Sophia Loren in furs for Vogue in 1962, he decided to pose her with cats and stocked his studio with a tiger cub, a panther, a bobcat, a lion cub, a leopard, and several ocelots. Loren refused, fearing they’d scratch her face. Stern convinced her to pose with the leopard by giving it a tranquilizer.

  By 1965, when Bert was thirty-five years old, he employed twenty-one people, and a conservative estimate put his billings at $500,000 a year, most of it from advertising at $2,500 a page. That helped pay for his over-the-top ideas. “Nothing was too elaborate,” says Knowlton. “Nothing was too expensive.” And a model’s comfort had nothing to do with it. “If he decided a beautiful snowy day was perfect for a white organdy dress with white embroidery, never mind if the girl was dying of the cold. Bert felt the more you suffered, the more interesting it would look. I think he liked the excitement of creativity, of music and a camera and you can get people to move. Clothes were never his main interest. Everyone else has clothes in mind and he didn’t. I don’t think he had any interest in fashion.”

  No matter how much a picture might change, his focus never did. It was about images and women, women and images. “I’m trying to get at the way women are,” he said. “I am interested in the woman as a woman. When I click the camera, she has to be alive at that moment. Technique isn’t really important. What I want is a believable moment.” Sometimes, those moments became quite real, indeed. “He didn’t run off with every model in town,” says Perl. “He was involved with a couple.”

  From Allegra Kent’s perspective, he was always involved with someone else. In spring 1960, she learned she was pregnant shortly after she had reunited with Stern after an eight-month separation. She’d left him—after just a few weeks of marriage—for being unkind to her, because she felt they had nothing in common, and because she believed that her marriage had caused not only unhappiness but a career slump. She returned because her mother convinced her she’d never find sexual happiness otherwise, and “unfortunately, I listened to Mother,” she wrote.

  That June, Stern rented a new apartment on East Sixty-Fifth Street, and they started fresh, though “I knew my marriage to Bert was just a temporary measure.” He admitted he didn’t want a child; she fled again and gave birth to their first daughter, Trista, in Los Angeles. Meantime, Stern had spotted a brunette model on a bus and decided he had to shoot her, but she disembarked before he could get her name. All he knew was she’d been carrying an envelope add
ressed to Pamela. He combed through model composites for girls with that name until he found her. Pamela Tiffin was already modeling for Vogue.

  Stern asked her to pose for a lingerie ad, and initially she refused, even though underwear paid double the normal hourly rate. But she finally gave in, on condition that only one photograph would run, not the several originally planned. Her eyes half-closed, wearing only a shimmering white slip, Tiffin appeared in the nylon-yarn ad that Thanksgiving weekend in the New York Times Sunday magazine. And she got involved with Bert Stern. “She liked older men,” her biographer, Tom Lisanti, notes. The director Billy Wilder was so taken with the photo, he said, “Get me that girl,” and cast her in his 1961 film, One, Two, Three. She became a starlet.

  Tiffin gone, Bert visited Allegra in California after Trista was born and “became a serious man, a handsome photographer with a great eye, and the father of our baby,” Allegra thought. He agreed that if she returned to him in New York, he would enter marriage counseling, but by early 1962, she’d decided “our life together was not better.” He thought that yet another apartment would help her “leave past unpleasantries and disappointments behind,” and they moved again. But by summer ’63, he was back to playing the field. “There were certain unmistakable signs,” Allegra wrote. “His hours at work increased and he wasn’t always where he said he would be.” Throwing common sense to the winds, and with no expectation it would fix her marriage (“I had grown up without a father”), Allegra got pregnant again that Halloween, “without consulting Bert.”

  Bert meantime had taken up with Holly Forsman, a wholesome, petite, and pert-nosed blond junior model who worked for Seventeen and posed for ads for tampons, poodle socks, Coca-Cola, and Clearasil. “I was like his second wife,” Forsman says.

  Just back from a year modeling in Paris, Forsman was married to an older man she wanted to dump. But because he wanted to save their marriage, every weekend they went to Fire Island, where his family owned a beach property and the Sterns rented a summer house. “My husband had a nose for celebrities, and he met Bert,” Forsman says. “Bert invited us all on a boat he’d rented,” and they went to the Pines, another gay community adjacent to Cherry Grove, to go dancing. “I went to discos every night. Bert loved the way I danced the frug, the wild, swinging hair. Allegra, seeing that, did a dance for him.” After his wife’s assertion of territoriality, Forsman didn’t see him again, until he booked her for a job.

  “By then, I had my own apartment,” Forsman remembers. Other girls and a client were on the set, “but after everyone left, he showed me the Marilyn Monroe pictures. Then he called and asked me out, and we really clicked and began to see a lot of each other. He said his marriage was very loose. He loved and admired Allegra to death and was a really good father.” In years to come, she adds, she would sometimes come along when Bert took his daughters to lunch. “Allegra was very dedicated to her career. She was always in class or rehearsal. He had a lot of time and he was surrounded by young, pretty women. He had little things with quite a few people but not while we were together. He’d talk about how beautiful girls were. I didn’t care; I’m not the jealous type. We liked to have a good time. We’d go to clubs and drink champagne.”

  Fashion didn’t care how Bert Stern conducted himself. The more girls he had around him, the better. His overt heterosexuality was still a novelty. It made his pictures fresh at a moment—world war in the rearview, prosperity spreading from America to a recovering Europe—when the hunger for something palpably different was gathering. Fashion was becoming a mass-market product. The stylish elite were being elbowed aside by people such as Stern: nobodies from nowhere going somewhere.

  * * *

  I. Avakian would later have relationships with both Tristan, whom he married, and Allegra Kent, who was his companion when he died in 1987.

  II. “Over the years, Alex had developed a kind of self-protective contempt for his work at Condé Nast,” wrote Francine du Plessix Gray. “He felt that the financial security brought by his job also liberated his art (or so he rationalized it) from marketplace constraints, from the whims of critics and art collectors.”

  Chapter 12

  * * *

  “STROPPY BLOKES”

  Visionary—and straight—men invaded fashion in what-are-they-putting-in-the-water numbers as the sixties gathered steam. Jerry Schatzberg, Melvin Sokolsky, and David Bailey all got started in the late fifties, saw their reputations soar by the middle sixties, and retained their influence long afterward, even though they, too, labored in the shadow of Richard Avedon.

  Schatzberg, like Avedon, came from a fashion family; his father and three uncles ran a wholesale fur business and sold their wares at Russeks, a retail store begun by the family of another photographer, Diane Arbus, who briefly worked in fashion photography, but became known for photos of eccentrics and people, then called freaks, who were far from fashionable.

  Schatzberg was two years older than Stern but got off to a later start. He failed early on as a fashion salesman—“I couldn’t sell anything,” he says—spent the years 1945 to 1947 in the army, lost another year to college, got married, had a child, and went back to work for his family and “hated it,” he says. “I hated business.” His interest in photography was vague, at best. “I looked at magazines in the showroom,” he says, but he wasn’t particularly interested in fashion pictures. The only photo credit he recalls noticing was Milton Greene’s. Schatzberg would take two-hour lunches just to spite his father, whom he’d never got along with, and regularly wandered through a camera store a few blocks from the showroom. “I don’t know why,” he says. “I was just attracted. It was different and I was curious.” He finally bought himself a Speed Graphic camera. What motivated the purchase? “I just wanted out.”

  He saw a want ad for a photographer’s assistant. “I had no idea what that was,” but he went to see Lillian Bassman, who’d become a photographer after Junior Bazaar folded in 1948. She mentioned Alexey Brodovitch. “I didn’t know who they were,” Schatzberg says, and though he loved the glamorous feeling of Bassman and Paul Himmel’s studio, he couldn’t afford to accept her offer of a mere $25 a week to assist Himmel. Schatzberg had a second child on the way, so he kept trying but failing to get assistant positions. Finally, an uncle who was a baby-photo salesman like Bert Stern’s father got him work shooting children at $2 a sitting, six days a week. “But I could do ten sittings a day, and in those days, 120 dollars a week was a lot of money.”

  Finally, after six or seven interviews, he was offered a job at advertising and fashion photographer William Helburn’s penthouse studio on Twenty-Fifth Street and Park Avenue South. “I was the assistant on the camera: I loaded it, set the lens, pulled the slides, put up the backgrounds, cleaned the toilet, whatever he wanted.” Schatzberg learned to dodge the cameras and light meters Helburn would sometimes throw at him and started falling in love with his new profession. By 1954, he was on his way.

  Helburn’s darkroom assistant taught Schatzberg to develop and print; Helburn “let me watch and learn as much as I wanted and gave us the use of the darkroom and studio, which is a very big thing when you’re young,” Schatzberg says. He started testing inexperienced models from minor agencies. “I didn’t realize, if you got good pictures out of those people, you were doing really good,” he says. Eileen Ford of Ford Models saw some of his tests “and wanted her girls to test with me.”

  Still living with his wife in the suburbs, Schatzberg started coming home at midnight, getting only three hours of sleep. “We did location trips, and if we went with three or four girls and Bill had one, I’d be with the others, talking, learning, sometimes flirting. At that point, my marriage was basically finished.”

  Schatzberg befriended Bob Cato, a onetime student of, and assistant to, Alexey Brodovitch. Having worked at Junior Bazaar and Glamour, “he knew everyone,” Schatzberg says, “taught me a lot, socially and artistically,” introducing him to artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rau
schenberg, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage. When Cato gave Schatzberg an assignment, he decided to rent a studio of his own in an empty building near Helburn’s studio that had once housed Tiffany & Co.’s silversmiths. “I took three spaces, cut out the walls between them, and made a studio. My wife didn’t like my total dedication, but I just had to do it.” Later, after his marriage ended, he moved into a tiny room in the studio, using a toilet in the hall (“I don’t remember how I showered”), and then later took another space above and built himself a bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom.

  Cato got fired before Schatzberg gained traction at Glamour, and he had to do “anything I could” to survive and pay his rent, “small ad jobs, store windows, anything.” At first, he copied the lighting system Helburn had used, huge banks of incandescent lights with spun glass in front of them. They were too hot so he redesigned them with cooler fluorescents, but couldn’t afford to build them. When he got his first job for Vogue, the magazine “built the lights for me.”

  He says, “I sent my portfolio to Liberman. He saw something I didn’t see. My first assignment was a simple little fashion thing on gray paper with a secondary editor. Clothes for average people. He liked them and gave me more assignments, and of course, as a young photographer, I tried to copy the best I could, Penn. I spent thousands trying to duplicate his lighting, his cameras, his film, his lenses, his chemicals, his light, his attitude.” At a lunch with Liberman, Schatzberg confessed that copying worried him, and Liberman replied, “If you copy good people and do it well, eventually you find your own personality.” By 1958, Schatzberg’s photos were appearing in Vogue regularly, and he was publishing pictures of the models Anne St. Marie in the Fulton Fish Market and Betsy Pickering running through the canyons of Wall Street that would become classics of the genre. He was thirty-one years old and “I started to travel, my work got better, and I got known.”