Focus

by Michael Gross

  So photographers were more likely to hate Liberman, whose power at Condé Nast was unprecedented and, mostly, unquestioned. Peter Beard, an heir to American tobacco and railroad fortunes, shot for Vogue for a few years in the early sixties, until he realized he hated the milieu. “Magazines have ruined people,” he says. Richard Avedon was “wrecked, magazined. Vogue destroyed him. I was there and I saw it happen. Vogue had all the money and all the boredom and one of the most manipulative and mediocre parasites of all time in Liberman. They had a very, very confused social-climbing collection of people and no art director and café society and the horrible elements of New York who were ruining the creative process. The commercial things took precedence. Vogue bought Avedon for money and they fucked him and ruined him and he became a total phony.”

  Avedon had, in fact, seen the writing on the wall at his very first lunch with Liberman. He asked the art director “what particular qualities in his editorial work they wanted to emphasize at Vogue,” wrote Liberman’s stepdaughter, Francine du Plessix Gray, who became a close friend of the photographer’s. “Alex said, ‘Dear friend, your Du Pont ads. You and Jean Shrimpton. There is no one who can make a woman look as beautiful as you can,’ ” Avedon told Gray. He was “appalled” by that, she continues. “It was immediately evident to him that Vogue would have no interest in” pictures that explored “the underside and artifice of fashion,” the very thing that drove him. “His disillusionment deepened when Vogue gave him his first major assignment,” to photograph in Japan with the newly married Polly [Allen] Mellen and Veruschka, instead of his choice of model, Donyale Luna. Liberman and Vreeland agreed to a compromise; he could take both models. But when he landed in Paris en route to Japan, he was told Vogue had canceled Luna after all because the magazine was afraid of losing advertisers. “It was too late for me to cancel the trip,” he said. “That’s pretty rough pool.”

  Avedon would ultimately deem Liberman “pretentious.” But Vreeland’s photographer-management techniques balanced out Liberman’s and brought Avedon around; not only was she his last remaining link to his Bazaar past, she also liked the sort of thing he’d done in its April 1965 issue and urged him to dive deeper into pop culture. Eventually, he realized that he had to think of Vogue as another client, like Revlon or Clairol. “I’m loyal to the company that hires me,” he said. “This is business. I’m a company man. You serve their purposes.” And thanks to Vreeland, Vogue would serve his as well for two more decades.

  In November 1966, Vreeland, Avedon, and Cecil Beaton all spotted a young society girl named Penelope Tree at Truman Capote’s epochal Black and White Ball at New York’s Plaza Hotel. That was the moment she was formally discovered, though she’d been shot by Diane Arbus four years before. Vreeland called the next day, announcing, “We’d loooooove to photograph you,” Tree remembered. Avedon shot her immediately. “She’s perfect,” he said. “Don’t touch her.” She epitomized the look that fashion insiders would call “Vogue-ugly,” not pretty, but striking and angular and of the moment all combined and therefore absolutely riveting. Vogue-ugly girls such as Tree, Veruschka, Loulou de la Falaise, and Marisa Berenson would be a regular presence in the jolie laide Vreeland’s Vogue. “I could still do my kind of photographs,” Avedon realized, thanks to “eccentric women” such as Vreeland and the models she favored.

  David Bailey got along with Vreeland, too, and has no bad words to say about Liberman. Bailey’s relationships with them lasted far longer than those he had with his many girlfriends through the sixties. The longest may have been with Penelope Tree. In a reversal of the Shrimpton story, he met, shot, and lived with Tree only after Avedon made her a model.

  Breaking up with Shrimpton was “the worst,” Bailey says. “It was like losin’ my cameras. She’d been my muse for about three years. And then I had to work with other girls and I found it really difficult. I liked to stick to the same girl.” Shrimpton was followed in his affections by another British model, Sue Murray. “Sue was like an angel,” he says. “I forget how I met her. I was just looking for girls. Sue was around for ages. I got married to somebody else, but I still saw Sue.”

  That somebody else was the actress Catherine Deneuve, whom he met through his friend Roman Polanski, who’d cast her as the lead in his film Repulsion, then convinced her to pose nude for Playboy and Bailey. Polanski “kept saying you’re going to fall in love with this girl,” Bailey recalls. “I said no, she’s too short. He said, no, you’re made for each other. Roman is very forceful. He kept on and on about this girl, and in the end, we got together.” It’s been reported that their 1965 marriage only happened because Brian Duffy bet Bailey she’d say no if he asked. “Not really true,” Bailey reports. “He said she won’t marry you, no fucking way, and I said I bet she would, but that’s not why I asked her to marry me. I never thought marriage was anything other than a bit of paper. It was a hangover, a thing people did.”

  They separated in 1968 and divorced four years later. “She’s making films in Normandy and I’m fuckin’ shooting in Fiji, and once we were in New York staying in different hotels. One day, she phoned me in Paris, I was shooting French Vogue, and she said, ‘Bailey.’ ‘Oy, Catherine, I haven’t see you in ages.’ ‘We got divorced today. It’s great, because now we can be lovers.’ ”

  Long before that, early in 1967, Deneuve had seen Avedon’s photos of Tree and told Bailey, “ ‘You’re going to be with this girl,’ ” he says. “I hadn’t met her then.” Then British Vogue’s editor, Beatrix Miller, who’d previously run Queen, called Bailey. “She said, ‘You’re photographing this girl; she’s high society and I don’t want any of your hanky-panky,’ ” Bailey recalls. “So she set it up in a way ’cause once she said don’t go near this girl, it made me interested more.”

  The following year, Bailey was in New York doing a shoot for American Vogue and saw Tree, then eighteen, in a nightclub. “And then she came to London and then I met her in Paris—it must’ve been ’68 because the bombs were going off in Paris the night I seduced her.” Just another night in the life of a sixties lensman.

  Chapter 17

  * * *

  “I’D BECOME A THING”

  Michelangelo Antonioni wasn’t alone in finding Bert Stern inspiring. A fashion editor newly arrived at Vogue from the Bazaar had begged to work with him. Polly Allen had got married again early in 1965 and become Polly Mellen. “When Dick told me he was going to Vogue, I said, ‘Don’t leave me here. Don’t forget me,’ ” Mellen recalls. “The camaraderie of Diana Vreeland and Dick Avedon was very strong. Where else would he go?”

  A year later, Mellen followed after Vreeland called and asked, “Is your passport ready?” Mellen was not only being summoned to Vogue, but her first trip was planned. Vreeland wanted her to go to Japan with Avedon, Veruschka, and fifteen trunks of clothes for five weeks for “the most expensive shoot Vogue ever did,” Mellen says. She was three months pregnant—and when she got off the phone, her still-new husband, Henry, asked if she’d told that to Mrs. Vreeland. “No, I didn’t,” she replied briskly.

  “People at Vogue, their noses were out of joint and I don’t blame them,” Polly says. “Ice is all I can tell you. It was really hard for me.” She told Vreeland she was worried. “ ‘Who needs friends, Polly?’ Vreeland said. ‘Just do the right shoots for you. And it’s what Dick wants as well.’ I remember Mrs. Vreeland saying Dick had asked that I just work with him. I said I was flattered but I also want to work with Bert Stern. Most of all, Bert Stern. I wanted to learn more, see more, extend myself.”

  She knew Avedon’s reputation; he was so possessive that if a model he liked worked with someone else, he would “never work with them again,” Polly says. “There were moments I thought he was beyond cruel.” But she must also have suspected that Avedon wouldn’t be able to throw his weight around Vogue the way he had at the Bazaar.

  “Bert had a very interesting eye,” Mellen says. “He was very flip. It fascinated me. His pictures
were different.” She remembered a Vogue shoot he’d done in 1961 with Monique Chevalier, standing on a no-seam in a black, floor-length dress with six naked infants at her feet. “I wasn’t at Vogue yet,” Mellen says. “I wished I’d done that shoot. Fantastic!”

  Never mind that it took all day and that actually a dozen babies were grabbing at Chevalier and the clothes, “because you had to have spares,” the model says, and they were swapped in and out of the set because “there was always a child crying and there was always a child peeing, so every fifteen minutes the no-seam paper had to be changed.”

  Stern’s was still a cottage business when that photo was taken. What Mellen found when she finally worked with the photographer was quite a bit different. By 1966, he’d undergone a transformation, moved his studio uptown, and was running a multimedia empire.

  Toward the end of 1963, Allegra Kent had got pregnant again, and Stern, whose business was doing quite well—he was grossing perhaps $600,000 a year, a tenfold increase in volume in just four years—decided to buy a town house. “Somehow,” Kent wrote later, “Bert thought of himself as cementing the strength of the family through property.” If he created the appearance of stability, perhaps the reality would follow. Stern bought a brownstone at 243 East Sixty-First Street with a $20,000 down payment and put it in the name of his business, even though Kent had contributed $1,000 more than he had.

  Susannah, their second daughter, was born in June 1964. That fall, they moved into the top two floors of the four-story building; below was empty space, and the whole place was curiously underfurnished. Allegra complained that Bert’s better stuff—antiques and the paintings he’d begun to collect (he’d own a Picasso, a Cy Twombly, a Tom Wesselmann, a Duchamp)—were in his office. One of the few things the couple still shared was a therapist, even though he’d started out as Bert’s and Allegra didn’t like him. But she exercised almost no control over her own life. At work, she belonged to George Balanchine. When she got home, she handed her paychecks to Bert, who did whatever he pleased—with the money and in general.

  Meantime, Stern was getting grand and was still getting around. One night in Paris, model Linda Morand was taken to dinner at Castel, a restaurant nightclub, by her agents, Eileen and Jerry Ford, to introduce her to Stern, who’d booked her for a Vogue shoot the next day. “I’m this naïve little thing,” Morand says. “Eileen said, ‘Dance with Bert.’ This ancient old man? He looked like a truck driver. I was into handsome young men. There was no chemistry. Something in me was afraid of him.” But they danced, and meantime the Fords “left without saying good-bye. I was stuck alone with Bert so I said I wanted to go home.” When they reached her hotel, he asked to come upstairs. “I have to be with you,” he said. They had “a scuffle in the doorway,” Morand says. “He was very put off.” In the morning, her phone rang and she picked it up to hear Eileen Ford screaming. The Vogue booking had been canceled. Her consolation prize was a shoot with David Bailey. “I would have gone out with Bailey, he was cute,” says Morand. But Catherine Deneuve was in the studio, “watching him like a hawk,” because Jean Shrimpton was there, too. Stern got his revenge. “He told Vogue I wasn’t Vogue material,” Morand says. “It put a big damper on my career.”

  That same summer, Allegra Kent’s mother called to say she’d read Stern’s name in a newspaper; he was being seen around town with a model, likely Holly Forsman. When Kent confronted Bert, he said he was thinking of leaving the marriage. She resolved to hang on.

  With his television-commercial business growing, Stern needed still more space, and in September 1965, he bought two buildings on First Avenue and Sixty-Fourth Street, borrowing $44,000 from the seller. Previously a school named for the poet Walt Whitman, Stern’s new studio was a short walk from his brownstone. He eventually installed a darkroom, film-editing equipment, a silk-screen press, expensive offset-printing equipment and a carpenter’s shop to build sets, a studio for Vogue shoots in what had been the auditorium, offices on the floor above that, and a television soundstage on the top floor in what had been the gymnasium. At the same time, he bought a three-bedroom apartment in Manhattan’s first condominium, the St. Tropez, a block north of the studio. It would be his private clubhouse.

  Peter Israelson started working for Stern that fall. He had a master’s degree in literature from Oxford University and was working at Random House when they met through Holly Forsman. “She dated me to make him jealous,” Israelson says. “We all ended up in homes on Fire Island. Bert and I would be pleading our cases outside her window. ‘Both of you, go away.’ ‘Let’s grab a cup of coffee.’ I needed a job and wanted to get into photography, so he hired me.”

  Israelson was in awe of Stern: “Bert was a lot smarter than everyone, street-smart, inherently creative. He made something out of nothing. He was the icon with all the original ideas, instructive, intuitive, personable, charming, a great gift of gab. The camera sort of disappeared and then suddenly it came out. He wouldn’t fret like Bailey. He was always on. I sat there gaga.”

  On advertising shoots for clients such as Arpège perfume and Vanity Fair lingerie, Stern charged as much as $20,000 a day, “for doing nothing!” Israelson crows. “We did shoots all over the world: India, Japan, Vegas, South America.” On a location shoot in Rio de Janeiro in 1966, he says, “the procession of hookers through our rooms was unbelievable. Six months before, I’d been studying Chaucer, and here was someone with a banana you know where! I’d died and gone to heaven.” Stern approached work with an insouciance that was as impressive as his excesses. “He’d take a billion pictures and eventually something would work,” says Israelson. “He’d turn something that went wrong into a virtue.”

  Stern paid no attention to a job until it was his, then he’d drive his Jaguar to whatever agency had hired him and put on a show. “There was no agony,” says Len Lipson, who first hired Stern to direct a Lipton tea ad in 1964 and became his agent for television commercials. Stern would meet the writer, art director, and agency producer, ask to see the storyboard of the proposed commercial (usually for the first time, though the client wouldn’t know that), and then say, “I’ve given this a lot of thought,” Lipson says. “Then he’d do forty-five minutes off the top of his head. He was a quick thinker.”

  He was even more nonchalant about photography jobs, showing up on location—even for major shoots—with just a small Nikon and a Hasselblad with a Polaroid back to check contrast and f-stop. Through-the-lens light meters were becoming common, but Stern didn’t use them. “He understood light instinctually,” says Israelson. “Everyone was in awe of him.” Certainly Holly Forsman was. She believed Stern really cared “about beauty and making a beautiful picture and making it different. He’d look at a model’s face and the way light played on it and he’d talk and let them talk and find out about them and click without making a big deal about it.”

  In December 1966, Georgina Howell, writing in England’s Guardian, declared Stern one of the legends of fashion photography, right alongside Avedon, Penn, Beaton, and Horst.

  As time went by, though, it became harder for Stern to juggle the women and his wife and children and Vreeland and Vogue and all the advertising clients. So he got some help. “When I started, there were no drugs,” Stern said. “Nothing. I’d never heard of marijuana or cocaine. In the midsixties, things began to happen. I was very programmed by the American dream. I was married to dreams. But I woke up one morning and Allegra said, ‘You didn’t tell me you had no money.’ I called my agent and asked, ‘Isn’t there simpler work I can do to make money?’ So I started to make more money, and I guess that led to trouble. With money came the desire for town houses and penthouses and big studios, which led to the need for an empire, which led to a need for more energy—and of course, I was invincible.” He’d actually started taking drugs years before, but hadn’t given it much thought when a doctor wrote his first speed prescription around 1957; he would just pop the pep pills when he needed a little boost.

  By th
e midsixties, a little boost wasn’t enough. Late in 1965, Stern’s secretary, who “had so much energy,” he remembered, told him about a doctor, Robert Freymann, who injected his patients with a special mix of vitamins that gave them unlimited vigor and optimism. “There were a lot of vitamins in those shots,” Stern said. “A lot of good stuff. But I began to figure out that there was something that made you feel good—and it wasn’t vitamins.” It was amphetamine. “I never looked at it as drugs. I looked at it as the doctor.” The Leipzig-born Freymann had already been found guilty of unprofessional conduct for giving drugs to addicts and would lose his license for six months in 1968 as punishment for performing abortions. But he was the go-to guy for sixties celebrities. “I have a clientele that is remarkable from every sphere of life,” he boasted. Though he declined to name names, he added, “I could tell you in ten minutes probably one hundred famous names who come here.”

  The more energy Stern had, the more work he took on. The more he took on, the more speed he needed. The upgrade to injectables turned the action up a notch. He bought a jukebox and two huge speakers for the studio. “I’d put twenty-five cents in and play a record for each dress, three minutes per dress,” he said. “The rhythm of the music and the girls and the clothes came together for me.” And that, too, fed the “desire for a bigger lifestyle,” way beyond what his wife wanted. “Blow-Up was a simple photographer,” he later lamented. “I’d become a thing.”