Focus

by Michael Gross

  Waldman describes Avedon’s shoots that summer as theater. Lewin uses the same word. “Was it true documentation or was it theater?” he asks. “There’s a blur of the borders between the two. He wanted to get the most memorable photographs. Life was a stage, and to be noticed, you had to make a bigger statement.” Those were no longer fashion statements, though Avedon would keep an oar in fashion’s waters for three more decades.

  Chapter 21

  * * *

  “THROWING A BOMB”

  In the early eighties, Bert Stern found a new agent, albeit one who also liked drugs; she would die of an overdose about fifteen years later. Before that, she helped Stern start shooting again, and he had talks with John Avildsen, the director of the film Rocky, about making a movie of his story, but nothing came of it. He was often “stoned out of his mind,” says Hanne Vorkapich, Eddie’s fourth wife and widow, who loaned Stern cameras when he could find work. “He was living hand to mouth. He seemed to be homeless. We gave him sweaters, money. He owed so much money to so many people. Very few people had anything good to say about him. Then he started to pick himself up a bit and made some money.”

  “He’d go to the precipice, but he never fell off again,” says Larry Schiller.

  Stern and Nancy Perl had grown close. In 1983, near her apartment, she spotted a beautiful girl about thirteen years old, roller-skating in Central Park, and told her she had a friend who had to photograph her. “She went home and looked him up and came to my apartment and said yes.” She also said, “He discovered Marilyn Monroe!” Her name was Shannah Laumeister, and Stern did photograph her and told her to call him when she got older. She reappeared about four years later, and they dated for a few years before she went to Los Angeles, “to become a star,” she says.

  By the time she returned, Stern was “starting to come back,” Laumeister says, shooting for Rolling Stone, Playboy, the Italian fashion magazine Amica, several foreign editions of Vogue, and doing a Pirelli calendar. “He was back on his feet,” Laumeister says, “but he was getting hired for what he’d done. How do you beat what he did in the fifties and the sixties?” He wouldn’t take just any job, she adds. He didn’t need the money. He could always sell more prints of Marilyn.

  At the start of the nineties, Stern asked his relative Jeff Sado to help him bring his archives back from Spain. Sado asked the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library, to pay the outstanding $50,000 storage bill and get the archives released in exchange for all the footage, including outtakes, from Jazz on a Summer’s Day, and Stern’s belongings were shipped home. Stern took an adjacent apartment and filled it with his archives. “He was totally paranoid,” says Laumeister. “He barely let anyone in.” Eventually, he acquired a second home in Sag Harbor on the east end of Long Island and some of the archives moved there. “He saved everything,” Laumeister says, though “he didn’t keep it organized.” His memory was closely guarded, too. “He remembered his schoolteachers’ names, but there were entire parts you could not get him to discuss.” Among those was his relationship with two twins, Lisa and Lynette Lavender, models who were by his side whenever he wasn’t with Laumeister.

  At the end, even after he gave up marijuana and cut back on his wine habit, old friends came away from encounters with Stern with the same reaction as Dorothy Tristan, who met him for a drink. She thought he was “very strange” and wondered if he had Alzheimer’s. Stern called Holly Forsman in about 2004 and they had lunch. “He didn’t look well,” she says. “He said he was living with twin sisters.” But he had the “depressed look he never lost after the drug episode. I bought him lunch. He’d bought me so many.”

  One of Stern’s last acts was to agree to appear in a documentary directed by Laumeister, telling some of his story. They started filming in 2006. In fall 2009, they were secretly married in Las Vegas. Barbara Slate hosted a second wedding at her home in Hudson, New York. In 2010, Stern replaced a will he’d written in 1997 in which his children were the primary beneficiaries with a new one, naming Laumeister his executor and giving her control of a trust he established at the same time that would inherit all his belongings, most notably his photographs.

  In 2011, Laumeister took her documentary, Bert Stern: Original Mad Man, out on the film festival circuit. Two years later, in May 2013, Stern called her in LA. He was sick and wouldn’t go to the doctor without her. She flew to New York and took him to the hospital, telling administrators she was his next of kin. “I didn’t want the crazy twins or his family telling me what to do or how to do it,” she says.

  But finally Laumeister told the twins that he was hospitalized and thinks they told Bert’s children, and a day later, they and Allegra all showed up and learned for the first time that Bert had married Laumeister. “You don’t realize you’re throwing a bomb,” she laments. “Threats followed. They hate me. What else would they do?” Bert’s children and the Lavender twins contested the 2010 will. Citing the court fight, which was ongoing as this book was completed, neither Stern’s children nor Allegra Kent will discuss him.

  Stern’s doctors said his problem was neurological, but as for a specific diagnosis, “they never figured it out,” Laumeister says. “He couldn’t walk. I knew we were days away.” She moved all of Stern’s negatives into storage before he was released from the hospital and sent home to die. “I thought he’d kill me,” she adds, “but you couldn’t move him back here with nurses twenty-four/seven. They steal.” He died two weeks later.

  “I felt sorry for him at the end,” says Barbara Slate. “He always had chaos, and maybe it sparked him. I don’t know. That’s the way he lived. It’s who he was. He always had a lot of pressure on him. He created it, but at the same time, it was very sad.”

  Speaking at his father’s funeral, Stern’s son, Bret, said some of his earliest memories of his father were in family court, where he was asked to make three wishes and he said he wanted toys. In retrospect, he said, he wished he’d asked for Bert Stern as his father for a day.

  Part 3

  * * *

  INDULGENCE

  The idea is to skewer as many of them as you can.

  —GUY LE BAUBE

  Chapter 22

  * * *

  “THE BIGGEST DICK IN THE BUSINESS”

  In September 2000, Elle, the American edition of France’s great weekly women’s magazine, celebrated its fifteenth anniversary with a party during New York Fashion Week. It had plenty to celebrate. Looking backward, it could have feted art director Regis Pagniez, who’d retired two years earlier after turning French Elle, with its five-decade legacy as a unique news-and-fashion magazine, into the world’s bestselling fashion magazine brand, which was then earning over a billion dollars a year. Looking forward, Elle could have used the occasion to introduce its brand-new editor in chief, Robbie Myers.

  Instead, the party became a celebration of the work of the magazine’s chief shutterbug, Gilles Bensimon. Though he’d shot pictures for Elle for thirty-three years, the choice was still surprising. Then fifty-six, Bensimon is an elfin, mumbling, not-quite-handsome Frenchman better known for having married a supermodel than for having sat atop Elle’s masthead—above even Myers—as its publication director. A force to be reckoned with, he was quite possibly the most published fashion photographer in the world, and the man responsible for Elle’s extraordinary rise to America’s number two fashion wish book. Within Elle and the Lagardère empire, which owned it (along with everything from television stations to an auto manufacturer to aerospace and defense contractors), he was worshipped. “In France, they think Gilles is God,” said an executive of Hachette Filipacchi, Elle’s publisher.

  It was all due to Elle’s legacy, which was defined by an insistence that style and beauty aren’t limited to wan six-foot-tall white women in their late teens and early twenties, a point pounded home by the floor-to-ceiling, room-circling grid of Bensimon photos that hung around the party at the Deitch Projects gallery. Loo
king down on the throng were the eclectic sorts who’d graced the magazine’s cover, running the gamut from the expected—supermodels Gisele Bündchen and Cindy Crawford—to sixtysomething singer Tina Turner, coal-black model Alek Wek, smoldering Latina Salma Hayek, and suburban pop princess Britney Spears. Elle had championed diversity long before Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar.

  Bensimon’s gospel said there was no bad style, no ugliness, only a failure of the eye to see beauty. “Most women in America are not skinny, blond, and six-two,” he said in an interview that year. “We show the clothes,” he boasted, “but also a woman who exists.”

  Given the magazine’s power, and its potent postfeminism, it seemed a bit strange how few notables turned up to kiss Bensimon’s ring. The only designers there were Nicole Miller and Tracy Feith, the only star, Sweetie, Elle’s “celebrity” canine columnist. But fashion was still a tight clique, and Elle and Bensimon were relative outsiders.

  That difference made a real difference. So at the turn of the millennium, when magazines still mattered, Gilles and Elle were admired but also feared. And they were talked about. Indeed, two durable rumors about Bensimon illustrated why friends, associates, and exes both loved and hated him, and why the gossip-loving fashion world was both intrigued by and terrified of him. Bensimon was said to have a prodigious penis. And he was said to be quite a big dick in business, too. Indeed, several people who’ve known him for years describe him as a killer.

  He steadfastly refused to comment on the first story.

  He was boggled by the second. “I am not a killer,” he insisted. “But I think sometimes I regret I am not.”

  Where Richard Avedon said he ran a magazine, Gilles Bensimon actually did. He’d taken over Elle two years earlier, and it was already miles ahead of its sisters in foreseeing and aligning itself with fashion’s new global attitude. Its crisp style, clear focus, and international reach (Bensimon’s photos were appearing in Elles in thirty-three countries) made it wildly popular with readers and all-important celebrities—Madonna chose Elle for her first cover appearance following the announcement of her marriage to director Guy Ritchie.

  “People criticize Elle saying it’s only Gilles, but Elle is Gilles,” Elaina Richardson, the magazine’s penultimate editor, said at the time. The identification was total. The curly-haired, blue-eyed Bensimon wasn’t known for a style of his own, but as the living embodiment, albeit a male one, of Elle style, neither haute nor humble, casual but intentional.

  Elle’s joie de vivre, its insouciant sexuality, its Paris-bred street cred, and its obsessively clean style scared the bejesus out of the competition. Anna Wintour would be hired to remake Condé Nast’s Vogue in 1988 and the late Elizabeth Tilberis installed as editor at Hearst’s Harper’s Bazaar in 1992 in response to the threat posed by the French invader.

  Tales of those two fashion divas were well known to the public. But Bensimon was as much a mystery as he was an anomalous fashion star—a heterosexual man running a women’s magazine, a Parisian who never wanted to come to America, a not highly regarded photographer who nonetheless ruled his roost. Only the keenest observers knew much about him.

  “I’ve heard the rumors, but I cannot testify,” said Myers, just after being named the twelfth editor of Elle. She’d certainly heard Bensimon was an editor killer; Elle was renowned for what its publisher, Jack Kliger, CEO of Hachette’s American subsidiary, called its “editor-of-the-month club.” As a longtime employee of Hachette, Myers likely also knew some thought Bensimon had gotten rid of Pagniez, until then his closest friend, whose fifty-year career in art direction ended ignominiously in 1998 when he was forced from his job.

  Bensimon cultivated his image problems by being a provocateur. A lifelong boxer, he whacked his studio assistants often enough that they joked about it. He was once knocked out in the ring by another French photographer of his generation, Alex Chatelain, in payback for some of the “playful” slugs Bensimon had given him over the years. Bensimon was even said to have gotten a bit too physical with an Elle employee—strangling her “jokingly,” as the New York Observer reported in 1999, inspiring her and the magazine’s art director to resign. When a writer for Talk magazine was working on a never-published story on him in 2000 that addressed the stories about his genitalia, Bensimon called him and barked, “How you know how big my dick is unless I shove it up your ass?” He telephoned again later to blame the first call on his then wife.

  Bensimon was also accused of riding to success on the backs of his wives (a writer at Elle and a supermodel) and girlfriends (a fashion editor and more models). One of his ex-agents compared him to the scorpion who hitches a ride across the river on the back of a turtle, only to drown midpassage because it’s unable to control its sting. “Only Gilles lets you take him to the other side,” the agent said. “Then he kills you.”

  “It’s always love-hate with him,” said Chatelain. “He has a lot of charm, he’s very artistic, very cultured, can be quite generous, but he can be Machiavellian. He was always into politics. He was an operator. He loves to control and manipulate. But there’s an expression in French, c’est de bonne guerre. It’s just business.” And that was before he took over Elle.

  Bensimon’s new power stirred up even more envy and dislike. Many conversations about him eventually turned to what a dick he could be. The rest usually got around to his endowment. By all accounts he was penis proud. “He likes to go around naked and show his dick,” said fellow photographer Oliviero Toscani. “The biggest dick in the business. I saw him naked.” Others said they’d seen him take it out and twirl it to imitate a helicopter—or turn it into an elephant with an assist from turned-out pants pockets. It’s supposedly tattooed with a shark, which supposedly grows into a great white when . . . well, you get the idea.

  Gilles Bensimon is no shrinking violet like Irving Penn.

  “I grew up in the world of image,” says Bensimon, but he was born in the world of war, in occupied France in 1944. The son of an advertising art director and a painter and fashion-plate mother, he had an early learning disability, which his mother addressed by giving him art lessons so he could express himself. As an adult, he carries a sketchbook in an old brown Fendi bag, and a bottle of encre de Chine is always within reach.

  Gilles was an insecure child. His parents separated after a move to Paris in 1945. His father didn’t get along with Gilles’s wealthy grandfather, Gaston, who co-owned Bensimon, the family’s tony antiquaire across the street from Maxim’s on the rue Royale. Though Gilles was descended from Algerian Jews, he attended a Catholic school, where he got into so many fights, his mother told him to keep rocks in his pockets. He escaped into the pages of American magazines and bought his first camera when he was twelve to take a picture of his brother. He’s said to have never used it again, but it’s also said he knew he wanted to be a photographer. His father was against it; the photographic stars of the era, the photojournalists of Paris Match, “were playboys in red sports cars,” thought Bensimon père. “He preferred I be a painter.”

  “To be a photographer of Paris Match at that time, you were a star,” affirms Just Jaeckin, who worked at Match as an art director in the early 1960s. “They lived, they traveled, they were close to war. To travel? It wasn’t even possible to dream.”

  Like Jaeckin, Bensimon served in the French military at the tail end of the Algerian War. He was incarcerated in military prison. “I didn’t kill anyone,” he said. “I did a lot of stuff. I go away all the time. I want to see the women.” In his early twenties, Bensimon worked at Club Med, teaching sailing in Agadir, Morocco. “They kicked me out for smoking pot,” he said. “At this time, I did a lot of drugs.” Back in Paris in 1965, he took a job as a photographer’s assistant. Not long afterward, he fell in love with a staffer in the beauty department of Elle magazine.

  A symbol of postwar France, Elle was founded as a newsweekly in 1945 by Hélène Gordon-Lazareff, the Russian-born wife of the owner and editor of the Parisian newspaper France
-Soir. In couture nation, Elle was the bible of street chic and came to hold a special place in the lives of French women. “It was the first magazine about women,” says Bensimon. It covered the Pill, abortion, and women’s rights and portrayed the woman who had it all: family, career, and style.

  Elle was an instant sensation in no small part because Lazareff had arranged for her first fifteen covers to be shot by Americans using color film, which wasn’t readily available in postwar Europe. Its look was “unexpected and charming,” wrote the art director Véronique Vienne, “not a look but an attitude. More dash than cash.” Where American fashion magazines and their European offshoots, rooted in high society and haute fashion, were aspirational, Elle was accessible.

  In its first decade, its fashion photography wasn’t particularly notable. Jaeckin would eventually move into film, but he started out a still-life and fashion photographer and saw the industry change within a few years. He began taking pictures in 1964 in Paris. “At that time there were only five photographers in each country,” he says, speaking of the few who mattered.

  “Jeanloup Sieff was between me and the old ones,” says Jaeckin. By the sixties, when Sieff lived in New York (and posed with Jean Shrimpton for Avedon), he’d be working for several Vogues and would in 1971 take his most famous advertising image, of a naked Yves Saint Laurent reclining against leather pillows.

  Also known for nudes was Helmut Newton (né Neustädter), born in 1920 to a wealthy German family. Newton had a more dramatic story than most of his fellow fashion photographers—and would eventually shoot pictures that mined his subconscious memories of a spoiled Jewish childhood in Nazi Germany.