Focus

by Michael Gross

  Though he worked in relative isolation compared to Schatzberg and the Terribles, Sokolsky felt himself part of the same image revolution and was acutely aware that the roost at the Bazaar was ruled by Avedon, who was then still comparatively old-school, taking pictures of women in couture poses, while Sokolsky favored girls with legs akimbo. “I was doing the gestures of the time,” he says. He considered his photos commentaries on class.

  When he pushed those ideas, Nancy White balked, and felt free to object even more loudly after Vreeland departed for Vogue in March 1962. Sokolsky vividly recalls White’s reaction to a shoot with a six-months-pregnant China Machado, whom he photographed seemingly floating off the floor; she was perched on a bicycle seat cleverly inserted through the no-seam paper behind her to create the weightless illusion.

  “They told me how it was done,” White announced. “I keep seeing the seat,” even though no one else could. Her objection? “A pregnant woman shouldn’t be touched by a bicycle seat in that way,” Sokolsky recalls. The photos were rejected. “Henry Wolf allowed me to be personal; he and Israel were overjoyed when I came up with something. Then people tried to impose themselves. I saw the freedom being taken away by retards, by monkeys.”

  Ironically, Polly Allen, the stylist he didn’t get along with, agreed with Sokolsky. Working with White and her then fashion editor, Gwen Randolph, “was a joke,” Allen says. “You were dealing with another level of taste, another level of quality, and a very strong business sense was coming into the picture. Before, we were protected from advertising and salesmen.” But that was no longer true. She recalls being required to shoot “a disgusting dress and I turned it inside out,” which Vreeland would have applauded, “and I was told, ‘We don’t do things like that.’ Another thing that was thwarting was Nancy White’s vision of women and her strict Catholicism and you didn’t do certain things.” White once killed a photograph of Suzy Parker simply because she’d slipped her hand into the pocket of the raincoat she was modeling. White worried that Parker was touching herself. White was that oppressively, if imaginatively, puritanical.

  White would shortly replace Gwen Randolph as fashion editor with Machado—and she would become Richard Avedon’s primary collaborator—but they couldn’t stem the tide. A changing of the guard was in motion—and the balance of power between Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue shifted even further toward the more commercially oriented Condé Nast title. Marvin Israel wouldn’t last much longer at the Bazaar.

  The January 1963 cover featured an Avedon photograph of a strong-jawed model named Danielle Weil wearing a snoodlike red, white, and blue scarf. She had a cigarette holder protruding at a jaunty angle from her mouth and held her arm in an affected manner that Avedon later described as “a typical Vreeland pose.” Weil, like Vreeland, was jolie laide, a woman of untraditional appearance who was nonetheless striking. But it’s commonly thought among Bazaaris of the era that Nancy White decided the model resembled (or perhaps, as one gossip column reportedly alleged, was) a transvestite. It was likely bad enough that a clear tribute had been paid to the departed Vreeland. Israel was fired. “Dick should’ve gotten the heat—not Marvin,” says Melvin Sokolsky. “Marvin didn’t have ideas. Dick was always full of ideas.” Avedon remained under contract.

  A pair of twentysomething assistants in Israel’s art department, Ruth Ansel and Bea Feitler, were promoted to replace him. Israel and Avedon “hated Nancy [White],” Ansel says. “They were naughty boys and she wasn’t Vreeland or Carmel Snow, so they played tricks on her.” As far as Ansel knew, they’d plotted the January 1963 cover to look like Vreeland “to stick it to Nancy.” But Israel also defended White, who would “say novenas when she had to decide whether to run a nude picture,” says Ansel, “and then ran the pictures. She was completely schizoid. But Marvin said we should be grateful we had an editor who allowed us to do things even though she was totally conflicted.”

  Melvin Sokolsky wasn’t sorry to see Israel go. “An unattractive man who didn’t like himself and saw himself as an artist, but didn’t make it,” the photographer says. “He aligned himself with Avedon. I was secondary. He was extremely political and he knew the Sokolsky camp ain’t taking him where Avedon would.” Yet one of Israel’s last acts as art director was handing Sokolsky the plum job of shooting the Paris collections for the first time in 1963.

  It was a huge break, and while considering how to make the most of it, Sokolsky harkened back to a fever dream he’d had when he was nine years old. On his sickbed, he’d imagined soaring above the earth in a transparent bubble like the one in Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Almost two decades later, he decided to photograph a French model, Simone d’Aillencourt, in a clear plastic sphere floating over the streets and sights of Paris, “hanging out over the friggin’ Seine in the dead of winter,” as Jordan Kalfus puts it.

  A skeptical Richard Avedon pronounced, “It will never fly.” It did. Shooting over the Pont Alexandre III, the most elaborate bridge across the river, on their frigid last night of shooting, d’Aillencourt recalled, “It was so cold the camera stopped working” and was heated up with a hair dryer. “I was in another world,” she continued, “and I’m not talking about the bubble itself—I was transported by something else, in another dimension where cold couldn’t touch me.”

  The crane that lofted the contraption at each location was carefully retouched out of the final images. The arrest of Sokolsky and crew by French police that night on the Pont Alexandre III (the one time their well-connected French fixer failed to show up) was never mentioned; when one of Sokolsky’s assistants saw the police closing in, the former Avedon assistant Frank Finocchio grabbed the two rolls Sokolsky had already shot, pulled a third out of the back of the camera, and whispered to the photographer, “Put these in your pocket, get in that taxi, and go to the hotel.” Everyone else spent the night in a police station. The photos ran in the March Bazaar. Ansel and Feitler first appeared as co–art directors of the Bazaar two months later on the May 1963 issue’s masthead.

  Sokolsky’s star was burning bright. “We started to get press,” Kalfus recalls. “We were the young Turks. Our studio had a burnt-out upper story, and Melvin used it as a set. It was startling, with peeling walls and beautiful feathery dresses on gorgeous ladies. It was the antithesis of glamour.” So was Sokolsky, the weight lifter in work shirts and jeans. “Melvin brought to it the way a man feels about a woman, flesh and blood, sexual and sensual. He was not a model chaser, but he was a man. It worked. It was a breakthrough. We were quite the talk of the town.”

  Avedon, unhappy working for Nancy White, likely upset that Israel was gone, and seeing a new generation rising in his wake and adding sex to what had been a sexless equation, appears to have taken some time off at that very moment to work on his first one-man museum exhibit, at the Smithsonian Institution (it ran for six weeks at the end of 1962), and then to take a series of trips (including his visit to the East Louisiana State Hospital, a mental institution, in February 1963) to shoot pictures for his second book of photographs, the highly political Nothing Personal.

  Though they’d crossed paths before, Sokolsky and Avedon’s first conversation took place on the latter’s return. Avedon appeared in the Bazaar’s art department, where Sokolsky was working with Feitler and Ansel. “He came flitting in and said, ‘Bea, Ruth, you’ve got to see my new book.’ He didn’t realize there was another character in the room—me. I’d done a couple covers, I was getting a shot, but this was the master.” Avedon showed the trio his layouts. “I was stuffed with nice things to say,” says Sokolsky. But Avedon hardly gave him a chance.

  “Did you think, all these months, I was sitting back doing nothing and letting you do all the covers?” Avedon snapped at him. Sokolsky was taken aback. “I didn’t know you owned this magazine,” Sokolsky claims he said, as he realized that “Dick thought he micromanaged my career at Harper’s Bazaar without my knowing.” Sokolsky was appalled. “He was one o
f the great contributors to fashion, but he had no space for anybody but himself. If anyone else took a picture, he couldn’t give it credit.”

  Despite Avedon’s apparent animus, Sokolsky continued to make his mark on the Bazaar. Though he’d started out working with established models, one of his greatest skills turned out to be discovering new ones. “I picked models people thought were odd,” Sokolsky says. “They were way more than props. I drew from who they were. Everyone came from a house where they gestured and ate a certain way. It was as if I lived with them, ate with them, slept with them. I understood who they were. They were willing to give because you understood. I never said, ‘Do this’ or ‘Do that.’ I would maybe move my shoulder. I had no comprehension of what I was doing. It wasn’t planned. It was pure instinct.”

  Around the same time he first met Avedon, Sokolsky booked Donna Mitchell among a half dozen models in a group posing for a fiber ad. “I put a 150 mm lens on and started to pan, watching this incredible Madonna face with inner intelligence, clocking everything around her, and I said to myself, ‘If I’m really smart, I’ll take her to the collections.’ ”

  Mitchell was sixteen at the time, and though she was wearing a tatty raccoon coat closed with a safety pin, he sent her to an editor at the Bazaar. “She said, ‘Get out of here, you’re putting me on. She’s so poor.’ ‘We’ll put rich clothes on her. She has a great face.’ ” Sokolsky tested her. “Behind my back, they sent her to Dick, who didn’t think much of her. But Donna could turn the gestures of the street into the highest form of elegance. She had knowledge of the world in that little face.” In 1965, she went with Sokolsky and another favorite, Dorothea McGowan, to Paris to shoot the collections. McGowan, a Vogue model, was given dispensation to shoot for the Bazaar only because of Vreeland’s affection for her White Russian. That time, Sokolsky dispensed with the bubble and simply showed his models flying through rooms such as the elegant Café de Paris restaurant.

  Donna Mitchell thought of herself as a break from the mannered models of the Avedon/Penn era. Though most models still carried suitcases full of makeup, hairpieces, and accessories with them whenever they went on shoots, she refused. “Hairpieces were grotesque,” she remembers. “Underwear, I didn’t wear. Carting this all around? I’d rather stay in bed. Bailey, Duffy, and Donovan allowed someone like me to exist at that moment. I was incredibly lazy, but I loved to work. I really was the transition. The first model with straight hair and funny makeup. I remember my first sitting with Melvin. Nancy White came and said, ‘Our own Eliza Doolittle.’ It rankled me a bit.”

  Mitchell and Sokolsky were both enamored of shoots that had big ideas behind them. “I liked to develop ideas as opposed to being someone who jobbed in,” Mitchell says. “I looked at old magazines. I knew who Horst and Munkácsi were. I met Antonio Lopez [a fashion illustrator] and [his partner] Juan Ramos when I was sixteen and they educated me. We’d spend days talking about photographs and what made them good. I learned as I went along. I had to project something. Take what they wanted, filter it through my sensibility, and give it back.”

  She was eighteen by the time Sokolsky took her to Paris. But despite his pride in discovering her, it’s McGowan in all his flying pictures. “I wouldn’t do it,” Mitchell reveals, “I’m afraid of heights. I can feel it now, my stomach went to my feet, I started to sweat, I lost my breath. I was in some of those pictures—but in the backgrounds.”

  McGowan, on the other hand, was totally game to fly in a custom-made harness. “I would start dancing in the air and creating shapes that were beautiful shapes that would stand in the six-by-six format Melvin was using, just doing my thing,” she recalled. “There is no such thing as impossible for Melvin when he has an idea.”

  Back in New York, Mitchell would shortly start working with Richard Avedon and China Machado. Avedon couldn’t have helped but notice that the fashion in fashion photography had taken a startling turn. “He realized fashion as we knew it was over; all of a sudden, Dick didn’t want to do the usual fashion pictures,” says Sokolsky, whom Bruce Jay Friedman, writing in Esquire, would shortly declare “the new Avedon.”

  Having already pioneered by forcing the multiracial China Machado into magazines, Avedon began actively looking for more models of color. And he began shooting different sorts of pictures. Suddenly Avedons began to resemble what the Terribles were doing in England and what Sokolsky and other younger photographers such as Bob Richardson had begun to do in the United States—attempting to portray real women with real emotions. “Dick spoke of Richardson with great envy,” says Ruth Ansel. “He was obsessed with what Bob was doing, opening a door to women’s psyches that was part of the sixties. He wasn’t doing that until he saw Bob’s pictures. They scared him.” He even asked to work with Deborah Turbeville, Richardson’s Bazaar editor, telling her, “You and Bob are doing the most interesting stuff out there.”

  In 1964, Avedon shot two identical Spanish twins, Naty and Ana-Maria Abascal, with a handsome Brazilian diplomat, in a series of improvised yet sexually charged situations on the Spanish island of Ibiza. The story was designed “to celebrate the cynicism, narcissism and boredom of the people who are adored by fashion magazines,” he said. The implied ménage à trois (“Everyone read something different into the pictures,” Avedon said soon afterward. “Most of what they read, I intended to be there”) made it explicit that twenty years after he’d started taking pictures, the old Avedon was renewing himself and was still on the cutting edge of culture, perfectly aware that manners and mores were changing as fast as fashion always had. He had no intention of being left behind.

  Chapter 15

  * * *

  “A TABLEAU OF . . . US”

  Jerry Schatzberg didn’t last at Vogue. Otto Storch, another Brodovitch-trained art director, had revamped a women’s magazine called McCall’s and asked Schatzberg to work there. “I talked to Alex Liberman,” Schatzberg says. “I’m not your psychiatrist,” he remembers Liberman saying. “If you want space, it’s there, but you have to be exclusive.” Schatzberg considered Liberman “the old sophisticate” and Brodovitch “a bohemian” and “a drunk.” Like his British friends, he was less than enamored with authority. “So I had to quit Vogue,” he says, admitting that later he regretted it. He still worked for Glamour, though, and in 1962 it sent him to Paris to shoot the collections and allowed him to shoot a separate behind-the-scenes feature for Esquire on Yves Saint Laurent’s debut as a couturier.

  “Bailey and Duffy and Donovan were all there,” says Schatzberg, and they all went to a party at Régine’s, a nightclub, together. Though Schatzberg thought Bailey a bit territorial about Shrimpton—“He wanted to possess this thing and not let anyone else photograph her or have her”—the four photographers ended up close friends. They didn’t play by the old rules and they all loved to play.

  “I’d go to England and stay with Donovan, and Donovan and Bailey would stay with me in New York,” Schatzberg says. “I went to London to photograph the Beatles and I was absolutely astounded; all these men with long hair in the airport. As a fashion photographer, I knew that was a change and I was riveted. I went to London eleven times that year, let my hair grow, people called me a faggot.”

  Later, Bailey would tell Schatzberg about a new band, the Rolling Stones. “I was having breakfast in a friend’s yard and Mick Jagger came,” Schatzberg remembers. Jagger was dating Jean Shrimpton’s sister Chrissie. “He didn’t look particularly clean; he had long nails and drowsy eyes and I very naively asked him silly questions.” The Stones were playing that night an hour’s drive out of London, and despite Schatzberg’s interrogation, Jagger arranged tickets for him and the Terribles, and they all piled into cars and went together. When their caravan hit the venue, “hundreds of screaming kids” rushed the car. Jagger dashed for a door and was grabbed, his sweater torn. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” says Schatzberg. The other acts were all in stage clothes and he expected the Stones to follow suit. “But h
e came out in his ripped sweater and they were sensational.”

  One day in the snow on Schatzberg’s New York roof, Bailey posed in the nude while Donovan, “dressed to the nines,” waved a little British flag. They were young and having fun, just like Bert Stern. And the Terribles’ fame rubbed off on Schatzberg. In October 1964, the Stones came to America for their second tour, and Schatzberg and a former Vogue editor named Nicky Haslam, then working at Show with Henry Wolf, hosted a party for the band in Schatzberg’s studio or, rather, merged it with one for Andy Warhol acolyte Baby Jane Holzer’s twenty-fourth birthday. The theme was Mods and Rockers, named for two competing British style cults, the décor S&M, complete with leather boys, and an all-girl band dressed in gold lamé played until 5:00 a.m.

  Tom Wolfe covered the affair for the New York Herald Tribune’s Sunday supplement, New York, edited by Pamela Tiffin’s then-husband, Clay Felker. “Schatzberg says the photographers are the modern-day equivalents of the Impressionists in Paris around 1910,” Wolfe wrote, “the men with a sense of New Art, the excitement of the salon, the excitement of the artistic style of life.” He found them isolated from the rest of the party in the inner sanctum of “Schatzberg’s . . . pad . . . his lavish apartment” above the studio, where the cook brought a cake and Baby Jane blew out candles. “This is like the Upper Room or something,” Wolfe continued. “Downstairs, they’re all coming in for the party, all those people one sees at parties, everybody who goes to parties in New York, but up here it is like a tableau, like a tableau of . . . Us.” Meaning Jean or “Shrimp,” as Wolfe called her, “with her glorious pout and her textured white stockings” and Schatzberg “with his hair flowing back in curls.” Bailey was “off in Egypt or something,” but was a presence anyway; Holzer was talking about him and the summer of 1963. “Bailey created four girls that summer,” she told Wolfe. “He created Jean Shrimpton, he created me, he created Angela Howard and Susan Murray. There’s no photographer like that in America. Avedon hasn’t done that for a girl, Penn hasn’t.”