Sokolsky may have been the unlikeliest character ever to rise to the top in fashion photography. He was born in 1938 on New York’s Lower East Side and grew up in a four-room apartment that he shared with his grandparents, parents, and a brother. His father was an assistant at a lithography press; he brought home lush picture books and had a camera he let Melvin use to take family snaps when they visited their summer bungalow in Spring Valley, an inexpensive getaway for lower-class Jewish New Yorkers just north of the city.
Melvin couldn’t fully indulge his immediate passion for photography because no money could be spared for film and processing. So he contented himself with intent study of his father’s old snapshots. Wondering why they changed in look, quality, and level of detail from year to year, he started to learn about film and its chemistry. Photographers bought whatever film was available, and “the palettes changed based on what Kodak offered. I call it the emulsion of the day,” he says, laughing. Technical details from film to light would captivate him ever after.
One day when Melvin was just past fifteen, his father was thrown off a bus, allegedly for being drunk; it turned out he had multiple sclerosis. “Somebody had to get a job,” Sokolsky says, and he found one sweeping floors at a local barbell club, a gym for weight lifters, but it didn’t pay enough money to support the family, so he forged proof of age, making himself appear five years older to get temporary work at the post office.
But the gym was where the short, red-haired, and blue-eyed Sokolsky learned about life. A former circus employee “taught us bravery tasks,” he says, such as standing on a high bar and diving into someone’s arms. “It gave me confidence.” So did weight lifting. “When you can clean and jerk two hundred pounds? It’s not about I look great. I can take care of myself.”
He also developed entrepreneurial muscles. Bodybuilders wanted to be tan for their competitions. Sokolsky built a tanning machine. “I was suddenly making thirty dollars a day—in quarters!” Then a Mr. New York State contestant started griping that he couldn’t find attractive trunks to wear while lifting for the judges. Sokolsky bought panty girdles from a pushcart on nearby Orchard Street, had his mother sew in a crotch and seams “so it would look good,” and dyed them royal blue. He gave them to the contestant, who promptly stepped up to a posing mirror. “Everyone was, ‘Where’d you get those?’ ” Sokolsky recalls. “ ‘How much?’ ‘Four dollars and ninety-five cents.’ I bought batches and farmed out the sewing.” The bodybuilder and muscle-magazine publisher Joe Weider demanded a dozen—and offered Sokolsky a free ad in his magazine if he could “get ’em fast.” Next, he started a mail-order line of T-shirts called V-Man, accepting only cash or money orders. “In a year, I made thirty-four thousand dollars.” He kept the profits in a cigar box.
A lightbulb went off over the head of the budding businessman. His interest in photography hadn’t disappeared, it had just gone dormant. He recalls the day he met the Mexican photographer Edgar de Evia’s partner Robert Denning (later half of the interior-design firm Denning & Fourcade) at the gym and argued over a de Evia photograph of Jell-O pudding. Sokolsky didn’t like it, felt it was too sharply focused. “I don’t feel the movement of the chocolate,” he said.
“You don’t understand what it takes to do this,” Denning told him. “And do you know he got four thousand dollars for it?” Denning challenged Sokolsky to try it, “and I did and I realized I had a lot to learn,” says Sokolsky. He began to visit de Evia’s studio on the top floor of the Rhinelander Mansion (today, the flagship of the Ralph Lauren empire) and “understand the mechanics.”
He spent some of his T-shirt profits on wheelchairs for his parents and used what was left to buy Deardorff and Hasselblad cameras—top-of-the-line equipment. He took over a little photo studio off the gym, and when a bodybuilder named Mickey Hargitay walked in one day, Melvin shot him and his girlfriend—a budding starlet named Jayne Mansfield. Sokolsky then started shooting bodybuilders regularly—and selling the pictures, a dozen for $4.95. He named his business Toggaf Studios after his audience. “Spell it backwards,” he says. By the time he was twenty, he was ready to show his photos to advertising agencies. He rented a studio on East Thirty-Ninth Street, right near Bert Stern’s, “from a gay muscle guy,” he says.
Sokolsky was straight; he was already with Button, a beginning English model he’d met at William Helburn’s studio who would become and remain his wife until her death in 2016. But neither did he care what other people thought of him—as a visit he made to Alexey Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar that year demonstrated. It was the end of Brodovitch’s tenure at Hearst, when his drinking problem had become acute. When Sokolsky appeared, he hardly glanced at the photos the young man showed him.
“He grumbles,” Sokolsky remembers, “and walks me to the elevator. He treated me like a piece of shit. Why did I waste his time? He was the most arrogant trying-to-be-upper-class fool you could meet.” Eight years later, Sokolsky had a similar experience with Alexander Liberman, who at least bought him lunch and seemed “much brighter and friendlier than Brodovitch.” But their conversation never went much beyond the one question he recalls Liberman asking: “I love herring, do you?” Says Sokolsky, “These were pretentious men who showed no affinity for me. I was a peasant in jeans and a work shirt.” Like the oiks from England, he was a new breed.
Sokolsky did better in the rougher advertising world, where his first job, shooting watchbands, won him a two-page spread and an award from the Art Directors Club. “Once that comes out, you start getting calls,” he says. “I go up to Doyle Dane Bernbach,” then emerging as the hottest ad shop on Madison Avenue, and got a job to photograph a coat. He booked a top model, Anne St. Marie (“I was scared of her”), and cadged film from a William Helburn assistant. “He had five sheets of eight-by-ten film,” Sokolsky says. “If you’re a shooter, you use a thousand sheets a month. When you’re down to the last few, you don’t want to use them on an important job [because every batch of film was different]. It was junk to him, but to somebody else, it was valuable.” St. Marie seemed intrigued by the funky studio and “this kid,” says Sokolsky. “She knew how to pose. I knew how to light. Whatever she did made me look good. She was magic inside and knew how to project it. Every gesture was something.” The resulting ad ran in Harper’s Bazaar—and earned him $250.
People noticed. “All of a sudden, Penn’s wife shows up,” Sokolsky says. “If you want me, I’ll pose for you,” she said. Says Sokolsky, “I was so young. I had no idea. I was afraid.” Nonetheless, he asked Lisa Fonssagrives Penn to pose nude for him—and she did. “I was a kid they could show their wares to who wasn’t going to be pushy. It was trusting somebody for no reason,” he says, still boggled by the compliment her appearance implied.
Six months later, the phone rang. “Hellllooooo?” said a high, wavery voice with a vaguely Middle European accent. “Is this Melvin Sokolsky? My name is Henry Wolf and I’m the art director at Harper’s Bazaar.” Wolf liked Sokolsky’s ad and offered four pages in the magazine and possibly a cover, too. Melvin booked China Machado and Mary Jane Russell. A month later, Wolf called again: “The pictures are stronger than I thought. How would you like to become a permanent fixture here?” Sokolsky met with Diana Vreeland and a young fashion editor, Polly Allen, “and I was off and started,” he says. Everyone at the magazine called him “the kid,” except Vreeland, who referred to him as “my White Russian,” for reasons only she knew.
Jordan Kalfus, then Sokolsky’s agent and later his business partner, remembers that fateful meeting differently. He’d represented artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and the art director Bob Cato and took Sokolsky on as a client while he was still hanging around the barbell club. “I took him to see Henry Wolf, and in the room was Martin Munkácsi,” Kalfus says. “Munkácsi looked at the work and said he thought Melvin was talented, so Wolf gave us an assignment.”
They’d unknowingly invaded Richard Avedon’s turf. “Avedon was the pinnacle
,” says Kalfus. “He got the best assignments, the best editors, the best models. If Melvin wanted a model and Avedon had reserved her, you had to find somebody else. That was needling. We called him Dick Avery,” after Fred Astaire’s Funny Face character.
“You’re a kid,” Sokolsky says. “You don’t understand the politics. You have respect. Melvin from Ridge Street is gonna compare himself to Avedon? You do a bunch of pictures, they’re reviewed by the industry and other photographers. Very quickly, I got a rep for being special. Avedon was getting the most beautiful clothes. I got New York collection suits. But people would write in. ‘I love them. Who is this Sokolsky?’ I got advertising immediately and it kept me alive.” It lost him the friendship of Edgar de Evia, however. “I got a Jell-O ad,” Sokolsky says. “Two pages in Life. But it was Edgar’s account. Suddenly Edgar doesn’t want to see me anymore.”
Sokolsky still had Diana Vreeland. “She was magical,” he says, “a very smart lady who pontificated in a manner that was not understandable.” She was always “transmitting a thread the editorial staff was expected to weave into a napkin,” says Sarah Slavin. “You had to listen, go home, and think a day or so and then figure it out because so much was hyperbole.”
To Sokolsky, Vreeland communicated “between the lines.” Except when she communicated with a bluntness that shocked Sokolsky. Vreeland assigned Polly Allen to be his editor. A society girl from Hartford, Connecticut, Allen had been poached by Vreeland from Mademoiselle. In 1951, Allen had her first job with Avedon. “She was so noisy and I needed to concentrate,” he said, so he asked to never work with her again. Vreeland insisted on a second chance—on a shoot with the then-neophyte actress Audrey Hepburn—and warned Allen, who “never said a word” that time, inspiring Avedon to ask, “Are you all right?” and add, “From now on, speak up.” From that day forward, they became coconspirators.
Avedon “was just a dynamo,” she says, “with definite feelings and opinions, and he surrounded himself with the most interesting people, and things would rub off on him constantly. He went towards the off-ish.” She feels that was the key to his art. When he clicked his shutter at a model, “it wouldn’t be when she looked most beautiful, but when she was a little off.” Later, when editing, she saw what he’d learned from Brodovitch and Snow, “understanding that this picture was the outstanding one but didn’t work in the series, and you have to work within the story.” Allen considered her position by his side to be “a privilege,” but nonetheless left to get married and wouldn’t return to fashion for a decade. In 1961, Vreeland “wanted me back,” she says. “I wanted to do something else but she said, ‘You can’t. You were meant to be in fashion.’ So I went back to Harper’s Bazaar.” She worked with several photographers, including Sokolsky, but they didn’t get along the way she did with Avedon.
One day, Sokolsky was waiting outside Vreeland’s office for a meeting when Avedon showed up. Within moments, Vreeland’s voice drifted out the door. “Twelve pages of color for Sokolsky,” she ordered. “Sokolsky is so much better with color. Give the black-and-white to Avedon.” Avedon shot the younger photographer a look he describes as bitter. “I realized, schmuck, this is the big time,” Sokolsky says. “There ain’t no nice person.” He came to understand Avedon “saw me as a force against him.”
Sokolsky’s situation vis-à-vis Avedon worsened in May 1961 when his sponsor and mentor Henry Wolf abruptly left the Bazaar and was replaced by Marvin Israel, a painter, photographer, and art director who’d studied with Brodovitch. Israel was intense, moody, opinionated, alternately encouraging and abusive to the students he taught at the Parsons School of Design, and the photographers he worked with as art director of Seventeen in the 1950s. Like Avedon, he was raised in Manhattan, the child of women’s-fashion retailers. Like Brodovitch, he became something of a cult leader, gathering talent and attempting to mold it to his vision. To Avedon, he was a godsend. “It was as though we were two brothers who were opposites but of the same cloth,” Avedon told Jane Livingston. “Completely linked and always at war . . . We triggered the outlaw in each other. After Brodovitch, I felt that overnight my editorial work slipped. It wasn’t until Marvin that I got back on my feet. We were completely united in our goals.”
Israel was an avid promoter of many photographers, not just Avedon; Diane Arbus’s biographer Patricia Bosworth credits Israel with launching the photographer in magazines. When Israel took over the Bazaar, Arbus followed him there, but quickly ran into stiff headwinds from Israel’s boss, editor Nancy White. She wasn’t the only one who found White narrow, puritanical, and intransigent. “There was no aristocracy of thought there,” Avedon said. But generally, he was not only protected but pampered; he’d already been given ever-greater numbers of pages to fill in the magazine, the entire eighty-six-page editorial well in the September 1960 issue, for example. “He was a major influence and had more to do with the look of the magazine than anyone including me,” Henry Wolf declared. Avedon “did captions and layouts. They would sometimes change it but I learned how to be an editor,” Avedon would later say, even claiming that after Snow left “I was running the magazine.”
Whether or not that was true, “Dick really wanted to envision and produce his own features, not just photograph them,” says Bazaar editor Ila Stanger. Israel encouraged him to do more in his fashion pictures and to demand extra pages from Nancy White for his nonfashion work, portraits that were becoming ever more incisive (influenced, no doubt, by a growing friendship with Arbus, who often visited his studio and would sit on the phone with him for hours at night when he was kept awake by insomnia), and reportage that contrasted “upper-class apathy and corrupted sensuality” with the idealism of the political movements Avedon was increasingly drawn to document, beginning with the civil rights movement.
At that moment, with Bert Stern ensconced at Vogue and Avedon throwing his weight around at the Bazaar, the balance of power shifted within magazines. In the fifties, “the power was the editor,” said the hairdresser Kenneth Battelle, one of the first stylists to work regularly on fashion photography sets. “I saw the editor weaken and the photographers strengthen. They became the stars, really.” That process accelerated in the sixties as street fashion began to dominate magazines that had once focused on haute couture. “You had to have somebody who could take nothing and make it something,” Battelle observed.
Avedon’s coverage of the fall 1961 Paris collections, an in-depth portrayal of the controlled chaos behind the scenes at the shows, starring the models China Machado and Margot McKendry, presaged his move into a new kind of photography—which appeared in both his fashion work and his portraits—photos taken against a pure white seamless paper backdrop or a cyclorama wall that seemed to go on into infinity and removed his subjects from any context whatsoever other than the photographer’s gaze. That experiment would overtake Avedon’s oeuvre, especially after he began encouraging his subjects to leap about his set, a fascination with movement inspired, the writer Carol Squiers suggests, by portraits he shot that year of the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, who’d just defected from the Soviet Union to the West.
At age thirty-eight, Avedon was at the peak of his power as a fashion photographer when a new assistant, Alen MacWeeney, arrived in Paris to assist him at those collections. The work seemed endless. After shooting all day, MacWeeney often processed film until 3:00 a.m., so he could review contact sheets with Avedon the next morning at nine. “Everything was as soon as possible. Sooner in most cases. Three assignments a day, seven days a week. I didn’t know this wasn’t normal.”
MacWeeney found his new boss endlessly fascinating and, despite his prominence, socially insecure: “He was jealous of Cecil Beaton and John Rawlings for their social connections. Dick would mention Rawlings’s alligator shoes and handmade suits. It buoyed him up to be friends with people like Leonard Bernstein,” a frequent subject. “It was a social ambition.” But sometimes, Avedon also seemed to suffer from “delusions of grandeur.” He’d
fly home from Europe with half his film and send an assistant on a separate plane with the rest. “To think your work is that important when that magazine will wrap fries in a month?” MacWeeney asks. “To go to the trouble of having two planes bring your bloody film across the ocean” struck him as “the height of egocentricity.” Years later, MacWeeney would conclude that whereas Irving Penn was “deeply involved with photography,” Avedon was “deeply involved with his fame. I think he lived through his photographs.”
Yet Avedon also impressed him—and clients—with his commanding presence, dancing around the studio to the show tunes he played, “always snapping his fingers like showbiz, and it was show business,” says MacWeeney. “Nobody else did enthusiasm and movement in fashion with such enjoyment. It was pure theater and it was all his. No one else could do it.”
Chapter 14
* * *
“THE GESTURES OF THE TIME”
In spring 1961, Richard Avedon photographed a beautiful Italian-American heiress, Countess Christina Paolozzi, topless, but the photograph was pulled from the fall issue of the Bazaar in which it was initially scheduled to appear. Broadway columnist Earl Wilson reported that the countess’s mother had objected—but the photo did run a few months later, in January 1962, creating the expected scandal. The easily shocked Nancy White “evidently felt the need to justify the publication of this photograph by situating it within the history of art,” Carol Squiers wrote years later, noting a caption that compared it to nudes by Praxiteles and Matisse, and the poem that ran on the facing page. Both presumably inoculated the magazine with a dose of high culture.
Nancy White also objected to the paparazzi story Avedon shot the next year, but was again overruled. “Dick Avedon often felt like tearing out his hair after an editorial meeting with Nancy,” Bazaar editor Ila Stanger told Patricia Bosworth. He grew discouraged. Melvin Sokolsky felt much the same, but White was only one of his problems.
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