The success of the pill books caused constant arguments between Chilnick and Stern. At one point, they stopped paying the pharmacist who consulted with them, and in 1986, Bantam bought them each out for a mid-six-figure sum. “I advised against it,” says Secunda. “I said it would never slow down. But neither one of them had a buck.” The Pill Book remained in print for years, ending only with its current, fifteenth edition. Stern “understood how to make money,” says Schiller. “A lot of great photographers never understood that. But he was always a short-term thinker.”
Certainly, his behavior toward Allegra Kent was not a product of long-term thinking. On his return from Spain, Stern befriended a cartoonist, Barbara Slate, who recalls Stern trying to reconnect with his ex-wife and Kent eventually seeking an order of protection against him. “I was just trying to talk to her,” Stern told Slate. But Slate says Stern “had something behind his back” when he did that, and “she thought it was a gun.”
His cavalier treatment of his most precious remaining asset—the original negatives from the 1962 Marilyn shoot—was another indication that Stern wasn’t fully functional. He gave many away to a loan shark as collateral and left others behind in Milton Greene’s studio. In 1980, when his seven-year contract with Lawrence Schiller was expiring, he made a deal to put together a book of Marilyn pictures. “I didn’t know him, didn’t know who he was,” says Ned Leavitt, then a junior agent at William Morris. Stern simply appeared there one day, looking for a book deal, carrying some old Marilyn pictures. “I wouldn’t have paid any attention if it wasn’t for the photos,” says Leavitt. “I was blown away.”
Leavitt noted “a sense of desperation—yet he had an amazing story and he said he hadn’t told anybody. The key question everyone asked was, had he slept with her? He dodged and weaved,” but ultimately admitted he hadn’t. Leavitt found a writer, and though Stern was “not easy to work with,” a book was produced and earned him enough money to finance his move back to Manhattan. During the move, an envelope full of Marilyn pictures—21 color prints and 172 transparencies—was stolen, or so he said when he contacted several newspapers, offering a reward for their return and winning some press about his latest comeback.
The Last Sitting came out in 1982 in both a slender American edition and a fat German one that contained every image he still had in his possession from the Marilyn sessions. Briefly, the book’s publication seemed to mark a new beginning for him. Vogue ran an excerpt in its all-important September issue, finally using the nudes it had refused to publish twenty years earlier. Monique Knowlton did another show at her gallery. And Allegra Kent showed up, describing herself to a reporter as “Mr. Stern’s divorced wife.” The Monroe revival rebooted Stern’s relationship with Condé Nast; he would shoot covers for Mademoiselle, Brides, Vanity Fair, and Condé Nast Traveler into the nineties, but his career gained no traction and his work never again appeared on the cover of Vogue.
“When I met Bert, he was struggling to get it back together,” says Kay Saatchi, then a Condé Nast publishing executive. She accompanied him on a trip to Paris to photograph the couture collections for French Vogue. “His dream had gone wrong and he longed for a chance to right it. He edged into telling me some of the crazy things he had done. I was a bit of an innocent and I think he liked Lolita types, women who were uncorrupted and weren’t on the make. I can’t say he wasn’t sometimes a little loopy, but I adored him and he me. I would spend hours looking through his piles of negatives and proof sheets. I found his reliance on the Marilyn pictures a little sad. Yes, there was money attached to them, but it was not his best work.”
Bert Stern had the eight to ten good years Alexey Brodovitch’s dictum allowed him before his crack-up. David Bailey’s active career in fashion lasted longer than that. But finally, in the eighties, he, too, burned out. “One year I did like eight hundred pages for Condé Nast, which was fucking unbelievable,” he says. “I thought, shit, I can’t look at another dress, and all those hysterical fashion editors, lots of ’em are great, but lots of ’em have no taste at all. You’d think, ‘Why am I listening to this woman?’ All they ever want to see are the shoes. I said I’ve done enough. I can’t bear to see another frock. I just decided to do more reportage and more portraits.”
Bailey consciously resists looking back: “I hate nostalgia, it’s boring. I got fed up with the sixties. Everything was fuckin’ sixties. You couldn’t get out of it. It’s like fuckin’ Michelangelo must’ve said, ‘Don’t ask me to do another fuckin’ ceilin’.’ Can you do it? Yes, but I’m not going to.”
After quitting Vogue, Jerry Schatzberg continued shooting fashion but was better known for his celebrity portraits. He shot the Rolling Stones in drag and Bob Dylan for the cover of his Blonde on Blonde album in 1966. Around that time, Esquire sent Schatzberg to shoot a starlet named Faye Dunaway, who’d just appeared in her first film. A year later, after she became a star in the gangster film Bonnie and Clyde, Dunaway called Schatzberg to ask for more pictures, and they became involved. Schatzberg hoped to make a film based on the life of his friend the model Anne St. Marie, who’d had a nervous breakdown. “I quit photography two years into the development of the script,” he says. Puzzle of a Downfall Child, starring Dunaway, was finally released in 1970.
“In the back of my mind, I thought I could always get a space and start taking pictures again,” he says. But then he directed The Panic in Needle Park, starring Al Pacino, and had a new career. “All people do their best work at the beginning,” he says. “Then, they’re copying themselves. I was fortunate enough to go into film. I left photography, and when I picked it up again, I went to the streets, my farm, and other things. That doesn’t mean I can’t take a good fashion photograph again, but maybe I’m not hungry enough to have nothing to lose.”
Melvin Sokolsky stayed in fashion into the early seventies. At first, “you were able to move at your own rate” at the Bazaar, he recalled. “They respected your vision. But as time went on, the editors felt, these guys just push the button and editors were the creators, like directors who hired cameramen. It watered down the singular vision.” By 1967, he was being used less and less and moved briefly to Vogue. That led to his last tussle with Richard Avedon—and brought down the curtain on his fashion career.
Sokolsky met a model named Uschi Obermaier at a party, felt “an immediate chemistry,” he says, and called Grace Mirabella, who’d succeeded Diana Vreeland as Vogue’s editor, to say he wanted to shoot her. Then he got a letter from Mirabella that said, a year earlier, Avedon had reserved the right to use Obermaier exclusively, and Vogue had to honor that commitment. Sokolsky quit. “Two days later, Uschi went to see Dick, and he never took a picture of her,” Sokolsky says.I
Sokolsky and his partner Kalfus followed Bert Stern’s lead and went into producing television commercials, thinking they might one day make movies. That never happened, but the commercial business turned into a multimillion-dollar operation. They broke up after their bookkeeper embezzled about $2 million from their business between 1987 and 1992. She “got convicted and put away,” Kalfus says, “but we were left in a very bad situation and decided we had to go our own ways.”
Like Schatzberg, Sokolsky now tends to his archives and waxes philosophical about his fashion career. “I worked eight a.m. to four a.m. for years,” he says, “and you can’t say no. But there’s a point of exhaustion when you really need space for yourself.” Nonetheless, years later, he would shoot for the Bazaar again, even reviving his famous bubble for a cover photograph of the actress Jennifer Aniston. But he insists he isn’t taking fashion photos: “There is no such thing as fashion. They’re just photographs of people. That’s what fashion is. We depict a given time.”
* * *
I. Asked about his exclusive on Obermaier, Avedon said, “That was how it worked.” He also said that he did photograph her for Vogue. “There was resentment. I was powerful.”
Chapter 20
* * *
“MOVEMENT
AND FREEDOM AND LETTING GO”
Sometimes, it seemed the only person who would never stop shooting fashion was Richard Avedon. Two decades after his first photographs, he was still going strong in the late sixties. Gideon Lewin was hired to work in the studio at $65 a week just before Avedon’s move to Vogue. Shortly after, Earl Steinbicker quit, and “Dick turned to me and said, ‘You’re taking over,’ ” Lewin recalls. He would run Avedon’s operation for the next fifteen years.
Lewin assisted Avedon on his last trip to Paris for the Bazaar and invented there the lighting style that the photographer would use for fashion shoots forever after. Lewin put a strobe on a long pole with an umbrella behind it, “and I started to move with Jean Shrimpton, this way and that way and redefined the light as I saw fit to make it more dramatic, give it more dimension. It was about lighting the face; faces are uneven and light can even them out.” Lewin’s innovation helped nudge Avedon toward “taking away background and simplifying his canvas so [his photographs would be] about personality without distraction. That was his idea.”
Lewin compares the studio to a film set with Avedon as director, and everyone else contributing. “We worked with teams. It was always a joint project. We edited together. But Dick got the last word.” Lewin admired his boss. “He was up-to-date about everything. He had a curious mind. Politics, poetry, art, theater, and he loved youth.”
Like Alen MacWeeney, Lewin did scut work, but perhaps more happily. They would process film right after a shoot, look at the contacts, “decide we can do better, let’s reshoot and stay until it’s done, at maybe two a.m. Nobody got paid overtime. That was the culture, the way of life.”
Avedon’s life clearly “was in transition,” Lewin says. “Dick and Diana Vreeland were a great team, and she really wanted him at Vogue.” Lewin joined Avedon, Polly Mellen, Veruschka, and hairdresser Ara Gallant on that long trip to shoot furs in Japan, where they picked up a sumo wrestler to play Veruschka’s lover in pictures based on one of Vreeland’s favorite books, The Tale of Genji. “On location there was always a story that gave him a road map to what he would do.” But Lewin mostly remembers chasing snow. “Wherever we went, the snow had just melted so we had a great tour and ended up in Hokkaido, where we reshot most of what we’d done.”
Lewin saw Avedon take his greatest delight in finding models. Sometimes his interest was sparked immediately. With Lauren Hutton, it took some time. He’d rejected Hutton three times before Vreeland insisted Avedon use her in 1966. “She wanted [something] more all-American” than the Vogue-ugly girls, says Lewin. “I was at Dick’s the next morning,” Hutton says. He asked about her story, and she told him about her childhood in Florida. Next thing she knew, she was “leaping in the air, running, jumping” and ended up with an eight-page Vogue spread.
“What Dick did was really find out about the girls to see their strong points and how far he could push them,” says Lewin. “They didn’t just go to the dressing room. He wanted to know about their lives, and it gave him inside information. It was never openly sexual with Dick. It was sensual. He built chemistry, but in an intellectual way, and he got sexuality by directing them. He realized what he could do and then he stretched it. How can we make it bizarre looking? How can we make a big statement?
“He worked on it. It didn’t come by itself. Dick had a way of extending them beyond their limits; that’s what made the photographs extraordinary. He loved movement and freedom and letting go. He tried to have as little restriction as possible. He was up-to-date on everything. He’d have an idea and get obsessed and research it. He followed through diligently.”
Avedon would later cite Hutton’s rise as another sign of the “fall” of fashion imagery “from aristocratic beauty to the girl next door who moved away. It was the beginning of a sort of democratizing pandering to mass appeal that ends with Madonna on the cover of Vogue.” But in the late sixties, he didn’t voice that bitterness. If he felt it, he kept it private, as he did his life with Evelyn, which was never a topic of conversation in the studio. Asked about Avedon’s private life, Lewin shrugs. “He didn’t really have one. Life was about work. He never felt he had enough time to finish what he wanted to do.”
But Avedon couldn’t hide his frustration from the man who worked with him every day. “It was wonderful doing extravagant, wonderful projects with Vreeland,” Lewin says. “But she and Alex Liberman were total opposites,” and “a power war” between the art director and the photographer never let up. “Liberman was very controlling,” says Lewin, and when Avedon moved to Vogue he lost a lot of the power he’d accumulated and the creative freedom he’d enjoyed at the Bazaar. “It wasn’t exactly what he anticipated. All of a sudden he was not the star. He was one of several very prominent photographers, and Liberman pitted one against the other.”
Avedon may have felt his world was shrinking, but Peter Waldman felt the world was opening up to him when he joined the Avedon studio in the summer of 1967. Waldman was a photographer’s assistant in London looking for a new job when he heard Avedon was coming for a few days and needed some help. Waldman went to see David Puttnam, Avedon’s British agent, “thinking there would be a queue, but it was just me,” and after a two-minute chat, Puttnam said, “ ‘Turn up tomorrow,’ and it began.”
Waldman worked with Avedon and Lewin on two advertising shoots, loading cameras and numbering rolls of film, then assisted Avedon again when he came back to town that August to shoot the Beatles for Look magazine and was “gobsmacked” by the experience, he says, so when Avedon asked if he’d ever thought of going to America, Waldman leaped at the opportunity, arriving in New York at the end of the year. He started out in the darkroom, running Avedon’s color-processing machine, and learning some of the photographer’s tricks. He’d done shots of each Beatle separately and pieced group shots together in the darkroom. And “if a dress didn’t quite say the right thing, the shape could be changed,” Waldman says. “All the pictures were heavily retouched.”
Once he got to work on Avedon’s set six months later, carrying Lewin’s light-on-a-stick, he learned how dedicated the photographer was to realizing his visual ideas. Shooting Penelope Tree in a silver mask, Avedon moved his camera at the second his flash fired to create a reflected blur on the metal surface. “It was creating, not accepting,” Waldman says, “using his vast knowledge to do something quite different. He treated each assignment quite seriously, making something different of each one rather than sitting on his ass turning out something acceptable. You were very focused on what he wanted. He’d say, ‘Yes, that’s it,’ and you’d know the kind of light he’d like on that person. A second camera was always ready to go. There were six to eight cameras, always loaded. It was a very slick routine.”
Over time, Waldman, too, became aware of growing friction with Vogue. “I got the sense he wasn’t happy. The magic was going. Fashion was becoming more of a commercial item.” Waldman also saw Avedon’s growing interest in portrait work subsume his fashion pictures. “The eight-by-ten camera gives a completely different image,” Waldman says. “You can see every square inch of somebody; the detail is phenomenal. It’s a very different challenge. The camera has no depth of field, so you constantly have to check focus. I’d be loading the back of the camera” with reversible plates that held one image on each side, “and Dick would be in front cocking and releasing the shutter.” Focusing required the film to be removed, and the photographer to duck beneath a cloth so he could see what the camera saw, only upside down, and frame and focus the image he wanted. “You’re lucky to do one photo a minute” with an eight-by-ten camera, Waldman continues. “They haven’t got the speed. They don’t disappear into the woodwork or take pictures just to warm a situation up,” the way a Rollei or a 35 mm camera could. “You have to choose your moment much more selectively.” The equipment, combined with his interior sensibility and the external pressures on him, encouraged Avedon to change his work’s focus.
When Waldman arrived, fashion was
still “the bulk of the work,” but over the next four years, “it went to seventy to ninety percent portraits.” In fall 1969, Waldman assisted on Avedon’s first two group portrait shoots, respectively featuring the cast of characters of Andy Warhol’s Factory and the defendants in the political show trial of the anti–Vietnam War activists known as the Chicago Seven. Those shoots, which led to many more group portraits over the years, were “very much planned,” says Gideon Lewin. They were also products of darkroom magic, pieced together like the Look magazine Beatles pictures from separate images. “He was experimenting with composition and continuity,” Lewin says. The murals were each made from several separate photographs, with the placement of the figures within each frame carefully planned. In some cases, Avedon even sketched them in advance.
Those shoots were part of the run-up to his second museum show, a retrospective of his portraits at the Minneapolis Institute of Art that ran through the summer of 1970 and marked a momentous shift in how he thought of himself and presented himself to the world. “There’s a whole transformation,” says Gideon Lewin. “He runs around the country photographing revolutionaries,” continuing even after the Minneapolis show closed.
“Fashion was a different track,” says Lewin. “It paid the bills and he loved doing all that. It got his imagination going. But deep inside, it was about real life, interesting people, changing the world, and the powers that brought about change, and he needed to document and be part of it. There was a split personality there. Fashion was glamour and fantasy, and then we’d have these revolutionaries smuggled into the studio, so to speak. I was not into American politics. Some of it was distasteful to me. It didn’t sit well. I didn’t get the point. I think he went too far—at least to my taste. He was not really a revolutionary. He capitalized on them to get photographs.”
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