In her autobiography, Kent says Stern had lost everything by the time she took the children and left him in September 1971, but it appears that the business limped on for some time afterward, bleeding money, the staff shrinking along with Stern’s funds. “People started leaving,” Dwight Carter says. “The carpenter, the accountant. We pretty much knew it was over.” Some of the departed helped themselves to pictures, including unsigned Marilyn Monroe prints that ended up in galleries across the country.
Dwight Carter stayed until the bitter end, when the payroll was due but there was no money. Stern ordered someone to his town house to take a Picasso from a closet and sell it. A few days later at the studio, “in walk two guys in suits we didn’t know.” They approached one of the remaining employees and said, “ ‘We’re marshals and we’re locking the doors. You have ten minutes to get your shit and get out,’ ” Carter recalls. “We all ran and grabbed our possessions and they put a chain on the door.” Two days later the chain was removed—Carter doesn’t know how—and everyone was summoned back to work.
The chain was likely removed thanks to Joseph Rubenfeld, a real estate man from Queens who had a taste for culture. He’d ventured to Manhattan in 1968, opening an art gallery on West Fifty-Seventh Street. About a year later, Stern’s sidekick Larry Brown appeared in Rubenfeld’s office. “A rich hippie type in love beads,” says Howard Edelstein, Rubenfeld’s nephew. After Brown left, Rubenfeld announced he was going to see a property that belonged to Bert Stern, “and next thing, Joe says he’s going to get involved with him. We’re moving there. He takes the top floor.” He put Edelstein in charge of leasing spaces in the building and brought in filmmakers and magazines who could use Stern’s photo studio and soundstage. Edelstein thought he’d died and gone to heaven. “Photographers and makeup men are all gay and I’m eighteen and these gorgeous models are walking around stark naked,” he says. “This is a dream job.”
It’s documented that in 1971, Rubenfeld loaned K N Equities $200,000. Edelstein says that over the years, Rubenfeld loaned closer to $400,000. “In cash!” he marvels. “I said, ‘Joe, are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ Larry Brown had a problem.” Edelstein thought he was on heroin. Finally, Rubenfeld brought in a garment-center accountant “to try and run it as a business,” Edelstein says. That lasted until the money really ran out. “ ‘Where’s my paycheck?’ ‘Where’s Bert?’ ” Edelstein remembers. “He could have been on Mars.”
“Bert was not there a lot,” Dwight Carter allows, “but we had to be. Eventually, it reached the point of, this place is going to close.” Stern summoned Carter to his town house. “Do I owe you any money?” he asked. He didn’t. Stern asked the same question about other employees and suppliers, and Carter assured him all were square. Carter handed Stern the keys to the studio and left.
Though Stern was, by any reasonable measure, insolvent, he never declared bankruptcy, Edelstein says. “He just handed [Rubenfeld] the keys” to the studio. “The Bert Stern Studio collapsed.” Rubenfeld auctioned off Stern’s equipment and put the building up for sale, finally unloading it in 1975 to a religious cult called Foundation Church of the Millennium. “He did not get his four hundred thousand dollars back,” Edelstein concludes.I
While losing his real estate, his studio, his clients, and his reputation, Stern still sought to win back his wife and kids. “I wasn’t going to stay on the high-wire without her,” he said. “It was all done for her in a sense.” Allegra still seemed to care. “She told me, ‘You’re going to kill yourself,’ ” he remembered. But he didn’t—or couldn’t—stop taking drugs, and his attempts to reconcile only scared her further.
Allegra and the children moved out that fall, despite a plate-smashing attempt by Stern to stop them. A few months later, Stern talked his way backstage at the New York State Theater, where Kent danced, and raced around looking for her. He was out of control. When one of his speed doctors cut him off, he broke into the doctor’s office and stole drugs, then “had the nerve to go back a few days later,” says Jeff Sado. But Stern still had his lucid moments. By the time Lawrence Schiller, a photographer, author, and deal maker, met with him about an exhibit Schiller was planning to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death, Stern had even moved all his negatives from the basement safe in the schoolhouse to the town house, which wasn’t his anymore. He’d returned the deed to the real estate man who sold it to him.
“The idea was to bring together all the Marilyn Monroe photographers,” Schiller recalls. “He said he didn’t know where the Marilyn pictures were, maybe in the bathroom in a box by the toilet.” But Stern knew what he wanted. “How much money will you guarantee me?” he asked. Schiller said all the photographers would be paid the same. “Stern asked, ‘Who are they?’ I said, ‘Avedon, Beaton.’ He said, ‘Okay,’ and gave me a box of transparencies. ‘Take what you want and return it.’ ”
Larry Schiller expected a couple of hundred people to turn out when the show of 176 Marilyn photographs by sixteen photographers opened in August 1972 in Los Angeles, but lines went around the block. He convinced Norman Mailer to write a text about Monroe and went back to each photographer to negotiate for a book. Stern asked for an advance and Schiller offered $2,000.
“When?” Stern replied.
“He was desperate,” Schiller says. But the money kept coming after Mailer’s Marilyn was published in May 1973, and Schiller put together more Marilyn products such as date books and calendars. “I didn’t know I put him back on his feet,” Schiller says now.
How far had Stern fallen? In March 1972 Bert’s brother, Shelly, and their brother-in-law Monroe Schlanger went searching for him after Allegra called Shelly and begged for help. “Shelly and I drove in from Long Island to look for him,” Schlanger says. The police accompanied them to the town house, but Stern wasn’t there, so Schlanger and Shelly walked around the neighborhood. Just as Schlanger called his wife, Bert’s sister, to say they couldn’t find him, Bert turned a corner and dashed into the house. “We got the police back and he was committed” to Gracie Square Hospital, a posh psychiatric facility.
Kent says Robert Freymann helped Stern escape, and he returned to the town house and started stalking his daughter, Trista, following her to Allegra’s apartment. Allegra opened the door on a chain to confront her thin, unshaven, hollow-eyed husband. She let him in and fed him a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. After a week, she talked him back into treatment and had him locked up in a mental health ward at Metropolitan Hospital. While he was there, she visited the brownstone and saw the evidence of his dissolution. His “voices” had told him to paint the place black and red. He’d built seeming shrines with cockeyed candles and broken mirrors and scrawled white crosses on the doors. Feeling safe with Bert behind locked doors, Kent joined the New York City Ballet for an engagement in Munich, Germany. While she was away, Bert escaped again.
There are several versions of how he did that. Kent wrote that he fled while being taken to the dentist. Jeff Sado heard he’d gone for a psychiatric evaluation, where he told a doctor, “I’ve been yes’ed to death for twenty years. If I wanted to go to the Taj Mahal, they’d give me a million dollars. I have to get grounded. I need to eat in diners and take walks.” He was allowed out, accompanied by a male nurse, and leaped to freedom through a bathroom window. His sister and brother-in-law think he slipped away between doctor appointments and walked out the hospital’s back door.
Regardless, Bert was free and again knocking on Allegra’s apartment door, scaring the children. She returned to New York and summoned police to the brownstone. In Kent’s version of what happened next, Bert suddenly appeared, saw the plainclothes police, and ran up a flight of stairs to the roof of the brownstone. Chasing him through the house, they passed destruction everywhere, burned photographs of dancers, torn clothes of Allegra’s. She knew a gun was in the house, and when she heard a shot, she feared the worst, but suddenly a handcuffed Stern came down the stairs with a plai
nclothes cop behind, pushing. Kent wrote that Bert had fired a starter pistol—not a real gun. But Jeff Sado’s mother told him Stern was chased across rooftops while waving a water pistol and shouting, “You won’t take me alive.”
Stern was taken to the Nineteenth Precinct station house on East Sixty-Seventh Street and remanded to the Tombs, the city’s municipal jail. In Kent’s telling, a friend bailed him out, but he somehow ended up back at Metropolitan Hospital, where an admitting psychiatrist immediately released him.
“It was really sad,” says Holly Forsman, who saw Bert again fresh out of the hospital. “He was hearing voices from Mars.” Later, Allegra Kent called her—again. “I don’t know how she found me,” Forsman says. “She said, ‘Bert is a lot of work and I think you should help me with him.’ Maybe she thought I could connect. She meant well. It wasn’t ugly, but I’d moved on.” So, inevitably, would Bert. According to Kent’s account, he got tossed out of his house about a month after his arrest.II
Broke and homeless, he hit bottom.
* * *
I. Stern also lost his St. Tropez condo. “The building had a right of first refusal and bought it and resold it at a profit,” says a former head of the condominium’s board of directors.
II. Years later, the house would pass to Camille Cosby, wife of the comedian Bill Cosby, and was alleged to be the site of some of his alleged sexual assaults on women.
Chapter 19
* * *
“ANOTHER FUCKIN’ CEILIN’ ”
Bert Stern was not abandoned. He had a girlfriend who got him clothes and money, says Jeff Sado. “He stayed with me afterwards,” says Maggie Condon. Then, his old friend Eddie Vorkapich threw him a line. In the late sixties, Vorkapich had built a television-commercial studio in Mijas, a town on Spain’s Costa del Sol. Afraid of bankruptcy and Allegra’s wrath, Stern called him, “frantic,” says Vorkapich’s widow, Hanne, and Vorkapich loaned him $10,000 to ship all the negatives, contact sheets, color slides, and pictures he’d salvaged from the schoolhouse to Spain to protect his legacy from both divorce court and creditors. Jeff Sado says Bert’s brother, Shelly, “packed everything up” and sent it all on a boat. At Vorkapich’s invitation, Stern came to Mijas, too.
Vorkapich had set up his studio while married to his second wife, a former secretary of Stern’s. Vorkapich had realized that in economically troubled times, ad agencies and international advertisers would appreciate a low-cost alternative to making expensive TV ads in America. Third wife Lynn and Eddie got married in 1972. When Stern arrived, the compound was “like a country club,” says Lynn, who lived in luxury, attended by servants. Stern’s first stay, in fall 1973, was brief. He returned and stayed longer in mid-decade. It was his self-prescribed rehabilitation.
Peter Müller, a Swiss photographer, arrived in Mijas as an assistant just before Stern did. “One day, Eddie said a dear friend is coming with containers, containers, containers.” Soon, a seventy-square-meter room in the studio was filled with Stern’s stuff. Müller thinks the boxes contained “old clothes, old shoes, everything! Even a car. Was this man carrying around elephants? He didn’t have a penny. Eddie paid for everything. Eddie gave him the chance to put it back together.”
“He was a basket case,” says Lynn Vorkapich. “He slept half the day. He’d go to the pool in his pajamas. He had no personality. It was hard to believe he’d been so successful. He was devastated by his ongoing divorce. It was pathetic. I felt sorry for him.” Eventually, Vorkapich helped him find an apartment nearby, and slowly he went back to work. Müller became his assistant. “Bert was a mess,” Müller says. “He would smoke his joints, take an upper, a downer. Obviously, he would drink. He’d forget everything. If you gave him a car, he’d put in gas instead of diesel. He wasn’t drugged. He was a mess. He’d walk out of a restaurant without his jacket. It’s the form of life he’d had, like a rock artist. He wasn’t a normal person.
“At the beginning, he couldn’t adapt,” Müller continues. Just as in the old days, he’d get up at dawn, look at the light, and, if it struck him wrong, just go back to bed. “We told him, ‘Here, this doesn’t work. We’re using expensive models, flying them in from New York.’ People weren’t used to that.”
Over time, Stern got some of his mojo back. “He didn’t need any paraphernalia,” says Müller. “He’d work with basic materials, a reflector and an old Hasselblad. He was very, very meticulous about styling and makeup. He did fantastic work.” He even started shooting for magazines again, albeit for Playboy, not Vogue.
Bert Stern and Milton Greene had met through Larry Schiller, and when Stern felt well enough to return to New York late in 1973, Greene offered to let him use his studio (previously used by Vogue’s John Rawlings) near Sutton Place. Stern was newly methodical. “Everything was pre-tested,” says Milton’s son Joshua Greene. “He’d come in, say what he wanted, we’d do color tests, lighting tests. Then the next day, he’d shoot. He’d shoot his way into the shoot. He’d shoot constantly. He’d shoot twenty rolls of film, where Milton would use five, with two or three cameras. He was a strange bird. He didn’t speak much. But he had the chops.”
He still had issues. “We used to go to Elaine’s,” a New York bar and restaurant popular with media types, says Schiller, “and he would nod out at the table. Eventually, we’d sit in the back so no one would see.” Still, in 1974, Stern got a studio of his own and hired an assistant, Ken Gilberg, who found him flaky at best. “He was trying to be like Warhol,” Gilberg says. “He printed [bed] sheets with the [Marilyn Monroe] pictures so people could say they were sleeping with her.” But he also started disappearing again—and seeing a Dr. Feelgood. “He’d get shot up with speed. Supposedly, it was just vitamins. It was wearying to watch a guy be so irresponsible. I remember calling that doctor and saying, ‘Why are you giving him speed?’ ”
He was living with a girlfriend on the West Side, but Gilberg recalls Stern pining for Allegra and his children, whom he only saw in court. Kent remembered a spring 1975 court date when Bert, representing himself, appeared before a judge ten minutes late, in jeans and barefoot, saying he’d walked that way eighty blocks downtown because he didn’t have enough money for a subway token.
“‘She ruined my life,’” Allegra quoted Bert saying. “‘She didn’t care about me. Only her career. And now, I have no money.’” He was “smirking with happiness,” she wrote, “delivering his punch lines, and waiting for their reception.” She was granted a divorce. It would take another year to work out child support. “Bert congratulated me on the divorce and went to Spain,” wrote Kent, who dropped his last name.
Bert Stern would attempt comebacks for the rest of his life. The first came in December 1976 when Monique Knowlton, formerly the model Monique Chevalier, was running an art gallery, needed a fall show, and “it occurred to me to call Bert,” she says. She asked $1,000 for eight-by-ten Marilyn images, but nobody bought the pictures, she thinks, because Stern refused to number them. “He was always extremely difficult,” she says with a tight smile.
Shortly after that, Stern formed a production company with a new friend named Larry Chilnick, a onetime journalist who worked for an organ-transplant clearinghouse. Chilnick’s wife, Janet, suspects Stern and Chilnick bonded over a shared taste for drugs. Chilnick, who liked cocaine and marijuana, introduced Stern to Barry Secunda, who worked in the music business. He thinks it possible Stern and Chilnick shared a cocaine dealer. “In that period, cocaine was rife,” Secunda says, “but for a guy with Bert’s personality, it didn’t help. He was already high-strung and paranoid.” Yet drugs proved to be a salvation of sorts. At the time, many drug users owned a fat reference book called the Physicians’ Desk Reference or PDR, a guide to prescription drugs. But it was “unintelligible,” says Janet Chilnick. Chilnick’s family was full of doctors—and Secunda suspects that’s how he came up with the idea of creating a PDR for laymen, called The Pill Book, and revising it every eighteen months so it would always be accurate.
“How do we sell it?” Chilnick asked Secunda, who came up with the notion of having every pill on the market lovingly photographed by the great Bert Stern and volunteered to serve as agent for the project, which he sold to Bantam Books for a $50,000 advance against royalties. “I did the indexing,” says Janet Chilnick, “Larry did the writing with two pharmacists, and Bert did all the photography. He lived at my house. He had no money.” They also went to Mijas together to “archive all his art,” she says. “He’d shipped it there so Allegra couldn’t get it, but he was always thinking of ways to get her back.”
Unfortunately, Stern was also often high. “He did a lot of drugs,” Janet Chilnick says. “He did drugs until the day he died.” Which may explain assistant Ken Gilberg’s claim to have shot all the pill pictures. “And I never got paid,” Gilberg says. The first edition of The Pill Book was published in spring 1979 and was an instantaneous sensation. Stern would claim he did the book because he wouldn’t have abused drugs had he known more about them. But he was also titillated by the irony. “How many of these do you think I took in my life?” he asked Lawrence Schiller while showing him the layouts. “How many have you taken?”
Stern made enough money from The Pill Book that he was able to move to an apartment of his own, albeit one on Roosevelt Island, reachable by tram from the East Side of Manhattan. The book would sell four hundred thousand copies a year for the next fifteen years and, in 1983, inspired a spin-off Stern likely appreciated, The Little Black Pill Book, a guide to the most abused prescription drugs, for which he and Chilnick each received an advance of $150,000. By then, he’d moved again, into a high-rise in the Murray Hill neighborhood back in Manhattan, where he’d remain the rest of his life.
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