Focus

by Michael Gross

  Newton bought his first box camera at age twelve. His interest in photography was encouraged by a film-cameraman cousin, and he would sometimes stalk Martin Munkácsi, then still working in Berlin. The passage of Nazi racial laws restricting the activities of Jews in Germany didn’t slow Newton’s visual education. He was sixteen when his mother arranged an apprenticeship with a photographer named Yva, who shot fashion and lingerie pictures and head shots of performers. One night a week, Newton was allowed to use her studio.

  Newton’s childhood ended with Kristallnacht, a two-night orgy of anti-Jewish violence, in 1938. His father was sent to a Nazi concentration camp. At the end of that year, his mother got Helmut a passport and booked him passage on a boat to China, one of the few countries Jews escaping Germany could enter. Newton disembarked in the British colony Singapore, where he got a job photographing society parties for a local newspaper. But as suddenly as his childhood had ended, so did his Singapore idyll when the British abruptly loaded the Queen Mary with Newton and others like him and shipped them all to an Australian internment camp.

  In 1942, Newton was given the choice of further internment or enlistment in the Australian army. He chose the latter. Discharged in 1946, he changed his name to Newton, “driven by the ambition to become a famous photographer,” and immediately opened a wedding-photo studio and married June Browne, an actress. Newton started taking fashion pictures in the fifties and was working for Vogue’s Australian supplement when he was offered a yearlong contract by its British parent. But its editors didn’t like his work, which “was terrible and got steadily worse,” so he quit and moved to Paris.

  There, in 1954, Hélène Lazareff hired Peter Knapp, a Swiss artist and graphic designer, to design a magazine she’d just taken over, called Le Nouveau Femina, and in 1959 moved him to Elle as its artistic director. Influenced by Brodovitch, he revamped the magazine. “She could tell that I was a fan of the opposite sex—that I looked at women more than at their clothes,” Knapp has said. “She wanted me to give her magazine the imprint of a straight man’s sensibility. In the rarefied fashion context of the time, this was a revolution.”

  Knapp, who dated Nicole de Lamargé, the top French model of the era,I attracted a team of straight male photographers who collaborated on the magazine’s “upbeat, friendly, youthful and seductive” look, wrote Véronique Vienne. “This strategy brought the weekly circulation of Elle from six hundred thousand in 1954 to 1 million in 1960. One French woman out of six was a regular Elle reader.” But Elle was a double-edged sword. “Knapp’s smart, cutting-edge design, while fostering a perception of avant-gardism, masked the subtle sexist subtext of the editorial message. How to attract and please a man was the driving force behind most of the articles.”

  Unfortunately, Helmut Newton did not attract or please Knapp when he came to show him and Fouli Elia, an Elle photographer, his portfolio. On his way out, he reported, “I was followed by their hollow laughter.” Knapp later damned him with faint praise, saying, “I was a pretty good technician,” Newton remembered.

  Newton learned fashion from the French, but in his autobiography spent as much or more time writing about Parisian prostitutes as fashion editors. “There is something about buying a woman that excites me,” he said. His wife, June, apparently understood his desires, including his lust for fame in fashion, and supported him when he chose to reject studio work and advertising.

  The Newtons returned to Australia. His contract with Australian Vogue made him a nice living and he shot for American Vogue, which had sent a young editor to Australia as an envoy to meet the staff of its local edition. “Usual Vogue, they said while you’re there, take some clothes, and Alex Liberman assigned the photographs to Helmut,” says Grace Mirabella, who found him to be a “nice man” who “had it all planned out.” But Helmut wasn’t happy and, in 1961, returned to Paris, where he went to work for British and Paris Vogue, as well as Queen in London, and advertising clients such as the trendy London shop Biba. Aside from a two-year hiatus when French Vogue broke ties and he briefly shot for Elle, he remained at Condé Nast’s French flagship for more than two decades. But not until the early seventies did Newton find his métier and become a superstar.

  * * *

  I. De Lamargé would later marry a Paris Match journalist and die in 1969, in a car crash in Morocco.

  Chapter 23

  * * *

  THE MOB

  Hélène Lazareff met Gilles Bensimon, then twenty-three, through his new wife, Pascha. He’d met Pascha in Just Jaeckin’s studio. Jaeckin had encountered Bensimon when he was a GO, or gentil organisateur, one of the employees whose job is to embody Club Med’s spirit at the holiday company’s resorts, and Bensimon followed the photographer home.

  Pascha bought Gilles his first Hasselblad, showed him his first Harper’s Bazaar, and helped him become a fashion photographer, booking untried models for test photos, doing their makeup, and styling his pictures. “At first we worked on weekends,” says Pascha, later the owner of a Paris ad agency. “I thought he was so talented. A special sense of style and elegance. After a few months, he started to work for Elle.” When Pascha moved to an ad agency, Bensimon began shooting ads, too. He spent time in New York and Germany, but always returned to Paris.

  “I was bad,” he’s said. “I had girlfriends. Sometimes I work for Elle, sometimes they kick me out. I don’t think Peter Knapp liked me very much. He probably didn’t care about me. But I was doing well.” Knapp had actually left Elle in 1966 but went back as art director in 1974, which may explain why, in Les Années Elle, a coffee-table book on the magazine’s history, no photographs by Bensimon taken before 1982 appear. Knapp’s own photos fill the pages on the sixties; he not only hired photographers such as Brian Duffy and Sieff, he was one himself.

  Bensimon fell in with a loose agglomeration of aggressively heterosexual fashion photographers who, though they hailed from all over, would become known as the French Mob, the French Connection, the French Mafia, or just the Frenchies. At its core were his countrymen Patrick Demarchelier, Alex Chatelain, and Pierre Houlès; Mike Reinhardt, the California-born grandson of the German film director Max; British-born John Stember; and a German, Uli Rose, whose father and grandfather had both been photographers. Rose had followed a girlfriend to Paris from Düsseldorf when she got a job as a model agent. On the Mob’s periphery were another American, Arthur Elgort, and Jacques Malignon.

  They were “the new wave,” Jaeckin says. “Malignon, Patrick, Bensimon, were my assistants.” Working out of doors with available light, 35 mm cameras, and telephoto lenses, they made fashion photos on the cheap. “They arrived and said, ‘I’ll do shots for two hundred dollars,’ ” says Jaeckin, who charged five times that amount. They were the generation attracted to fashion by Blow-Up. “I was terrified of them,” said model Marie Helvin, David Bailey’s third wife, whom he married in 1975 after splitting with Penelope Tree. “They were so outrageous. Whether it was true or not, the story was that they all had mattresses in the studio.”

  Demarchelier grew up in Normandy, near Le Havre, got his first camera when he was a teenager, and learned to print and retouch by working in a provincial camera shop. He moved to Paris and another photo lab in about 1963 and, within a year, became an assistant. “I didn’t want to be stuck in a shop all my life,” he says, so he started visiting modeling schools, and he got a job taking test photos for neophyte models in a little studio on the premises of a modeling agency, “thirty girls a month,” he says. “I had to do a book for each girl. Some could never be models. So that’s how I got involved with fashion.”

  That’s also how he met Jacques de Nointel, the son of an Arab-affairs educator who would become a notorious Parisian model scout and model chaser. De Nointel was putting together a stable of photographers and trying to be an agent. He vaguely represented a few French Mob shooters. They were disdained by members of the generation that preceded them, who disparaged the newcomers’ lack of studio skills. Meantim
e, the Mobsters picked off their pages.

  In 1970, de Nointel hooked up with John Casablancas, a child of wealthy Spaniards who’d become refugee jet-setters at the start of Spain’s Civil War. Casablancas, who had a model girlfriend, had just opened a small Paris modeling agency and thought he might represent photographers, too. De Nointel had played fast and loose with his photographers’ money. “It was a mess and the photographers caught up with it and decided to leave him, so that’s where I came in,” Casablancas said many years later. “I took over, adding a few people.”

  Mike Reinhardt first met Nointel at a competing modeling agency run by the former model Dorian Leigh. While attending law school in the south of France, he’d met and married a beautiful girl, who was discovered on the street by the agent Eileen Ford and started modeling in Munich, where Reinhardt was writing a doctoral thesis on international law. The money she made “was immediately astounding,” Reinhardt recalls. So they not only moved to Paris, he went to work for Leigh. “I saw all these incredible girls around me. I was a young guy. I was blown away. It destroyed the marriage” when he had an affair with a Helmut Newton model. “Then one day in walks one of the most beautiful girls ever, Gudrun, and behind her, a noisy guy in a leather jacket and aviator glasses, and it was Jacques. I was reluctant to become Jacques’s friend. He had an obnoxious edge that scared me. But he had a good side.”

  De Nointel “made Mike a photographer,” said Casablancas, but Reinhardt says, “I don’t think it would be correct to say that Jacques ‘made me.’ There might have been some occasions when he used his influence to help my career. My road to photography was mainly shaped and influenced by two things. The first was, of course, my fascination with beautiful women.” Working for Leigh, Reinhardt saw the Blow-Up effect in full blossom. “These guys were all off in Nassau with pretty girls. I thought, ‘I really want to take photos.’ ” Fortunately, he “had enough money to take time off and learn.” He was mentored by Louis Faurer, who’d been shooting fashion for years, but had recently given it up and moved to Paris.I “If anyone really ‘made me,’ it was Lou,” says Reinhardt. “He helped me develop a personal style and then encouraged me to take up photography as a professional.”

  Reinhardt simultaneously worked as a photo agent, representing John Stember, and started a design business, through which he met photographer Jean-Louis Guégan. Guégan’s then-assistant would become Reinhardt’s best friend and one of the most influential, if least known, figures in fashion photography in the seventies.

  Pierre Houlès grew up in Béziers, in the south of France, moved to Paris at thirteen, and at seventeen became a Studio Guégan assistant. In 1964, he joined the military for mandatory service, working in a cinematographic unit. There, he befriended Claude Guillaumin, an aspiring architect. In 1966, Guillaumin and Houlès returned to Paris. “He showed me the studio where he was an assistant.” There was a lingerie shoot going on. “I have to do this!” Guillaumin said. Briefly, both worked as assistants. Houlès, more advanced than Guillaumin, next worked for Guy Bourdin.

  Bourdin, already a shooting star, had been abandoned by his mother as an infant and was raised by his paternal grandfather, who owned land in Normandy and a Paris brasserie. Guy was a solitary child who liked drawing and became an aerial photographer in the air force. After serving, he took a job selling camera lenses at the Bon Marché store in Paris and started showing drawings and photographs. He was encouraged by Man Ray, who said he was “more than just a good photographer,” after the neophyte knocked on his door seven times before finally being allowed in.

  Bourdin caught the eye of an editor’s assistant at French Vogue with black-and-white photographs of the buttocks of nude men and women. He started shooting for the magazine in 1955; one of his first photos was of a model in gloves and a conical hat and veil beneath the decapitated heads of five slaughtered calves hanging from chains in a butcher shop window.

  Despite a negative reaction from readers and advertisers, Bourdin would become and remain a mainstay of French Vogue for the next three decades. When Houlès went to work for him, he was mostly shooting beauty photos, but was also experimenting with surrealism. His perverse humor was balanced by a refined sense of composition and his “hyperreal look created by using flash in a very harsh way,” says an assistant, J. P. Masclet, who admired his ability to create “incredibly clean images, despite content that was disturbing but not dirty.”

  In years to come, Bourdin and Helmut Newton would compete in pushing the outer limits of acceptable content in fashion photographs. Both insisted on artistic control of their pictures. Bourdin would often present French Vogue with a single image and destroy his outtakes by cutting them in half so they couldn’t be used. He was also a sexual bad boy, worse than the apparently faithful Newton. On a trip to New York, Bourdin began an affair with his twenty-year-old assistant and, when back in France, left his wife and young son for her. Two years later, he would leave that mistress for a model, and some time thereafter, his wife would die. Accounts differ on whether it was suicide or a heart attack. It would later be reported that he reconstructed her death scene in a photograph for a Charles Jourdan shoe ad.

  Bourdin was a loner. Houlès and the rest of the next generation of young Parisian photographers all bonded, often assisting each other. “They wanted each other to succeed in the beginning,” says model Bonnie Pfeifer, who became Elgort’s girlfriend. “They shared information. They were competitive, but they took that out on Ping-Pong tables.” Patrick helped Mike. Uli assisted Patrick and bonded with Elgort, who “had a tremendous influence on me,” Uli says. Patrick shot young models for Casablancas. Claude Guillaumin and Pierre Houlès went to New York City together. A similar spirit abided there, says Joan Juliet Buck, a young editor at Glamour. Buck fell in with a group of young Frenchmen she met through her first boyfriend in New York, Jean-Paul Goude, an illustrator who’d just been named the art editor of Esquire magazine. “My gang,” as Buck calls them, included Bourdin, Houlès, and Guillaumin.

  Houlès had announced to Guillaumin that “all the best photographers were in New York, his sister was married to an American, and we should go to New York, so we went,” Guillaumin says. That sister, Valerie Unger, found them an apartment, and they both went looking for work as assistants. Like David Bailey, Guillaumin would hock his camera when he needed money to live. Houlès went to work for Bill Silano, a Brodovitch protégé who had a studio nearby and worked mostly for Town & Country and Harper’s Bazaar. An art director at a Paris advertising agency where Guillaumin had worked arranged an introduction to Miki Denhof, the Austrian in charge of visuals at Glamour. For his first job, she hired Cheryl Tiegs, “one of her best models at that time,” Guillaumin marvels, “so for me it was really easy. Really fast.”

  He worked with Glamour for two years, and later, for Seventeen. “Bazaar wanted to use me, but I was so afraid, I didn’t call back. If I make a mistake for Harper’s Bazaar, it’s over!” Guillaumin also assisted Bourdin on his trips to New York. Soon, Guillaumin and Houlès moved into a studio in Carnegie Hall. Guillaumin stayed until the end of 1970. “When I started making money, I went back to Paris and worked for Elle.” Houlès was different. “He wasn’t interested in photography, he was more interested in girls,” thinks Guillaumin. “He had a lot of romances, I don’t know, hundreds.”

  “Pierre worked if he wanted to,” his sister Valerie says. “If he didn’t like you, if he didn’t like the project, if he didn’t like the girl, he didn’t do it. He was very independent. My husband offered him a studio. He said he had no wife, no kids, he wanted no responsibility. I never understood how he did it, but he was always in cashmere, the best shoes from John Lobb, using Hermès appointment books.” And then there were his women. “He was very chic and good-looking,” says his sister, “with blue eyes, dark hair. He always had a girlfriend and unfortunately, sometimes, two at a time.”

  Back in Paris, John Casablancas took eight or nine of his photographers’ portfolio
s—big, heavy wooden cases—to Germany in his Porsche Carrera in July 1970. “I went to see all the advertising agencies for four days and on the fourteenth of July,” Bastille Day, got back to Paris at 2:00 a.m. and decided to leave the heavy portfolios in his car overnight. “It was the stupidest thing,” he admitted. The next morning, the top of his car was slit open, and the portfolios were gone. He immediately sold the business to Gerald Dearing, an uncle of Patrick Demarchelier’s who’d been raised as his half brother, who’d been working for Casablancas. “John wasn’t that interested,” Dearing says. “He didn’t have the time or the eye for it.” Instead, Casablancas opened a new modeling agency called Elite.

  Dearing, Demarchelier, Uli Rose, Chatelain, and Bensimon pooled their funds, bought a large apartment on the rue du Mont Thabor, a block from the Tuileries Gardens, and created a photographic studio cooperative, Atelier de Tuileries. Arthur Elgort wasn’t a partner and preferred to work outside, but he would use the Atelier, too, when he came from New York and had a studio job. But mostly, the traffic was in the other direction; almost immediately, the French Mob discovered America. Their pied piper was a seventeen-year-old American, Bryan Bantry, who showed up in Paris in 1973, seeking to represent Chatelain.

  Bantry was the ambitious son of a fashion model, Soames Bantry, who was the girlfriend and muse of Saul Leiter. “I grew up in his studio, I went on location, I was on the cover of Queen when I was eight,” Bantry says. At thirteen, he started a dog-walking business. Three years later, bored with it, and with Leiter’s constant grumbling about his agent, “I said I’d do it and he let me.” At sixteen, he was naïve enough to think he could help the irascible Leiter, who’d been “so awful to so many,” Bantry says. “It doesn’t matter how talented you are if you’re unpleasant and argumentative. Clients don’t want to be around you. There’s always someone else, not as talented, perhaps, but good enough.” The French photo Mafia fit that description.