Focus

by Michael Gross

  Yet Mazzola said, incredibly, “Ours is a very subtle approach. The great fashion magazines of the past had readers who had arrived. Everything was heavily priced, grand, unreachable. . . . We’re just trying to talk to the average girl, not trying to be superchic. There ain’t no more superchic.”

  Instead, he had formulas. “Tony loved them,” said the former Hearst editor. “Forty and Fabulous worked for him.” Over the years, more theme issues were added. “He thought it separated us from other magazines,” says a Bazaar fashion editor of that era. “The Ten Most Beautiful Americans always got publicity. But we called it The Ten Most Available. Who’s around? Who’ll actually do it? The people they wanted were never available.”

  Mazzola’s fashion-deaf attitude and the self-help tone of his magazine caused its fashion editors to flee, and his iteration of Bazaar had no fashion influence. The fashion staff of the time blamed Michele Morgan, who’d briefly stayed behind at Town & Country, but eventually became Mazzola’s wife and his partner running Bazaar. “Michele was so antifashion,” says a former Hearst editor. “She wore jeans to lunch with Valentino; they couldn’t believe it! She’s well educated, but she’s a very rich hick.”

  Mazzola may not have cultivated the fashion world, but like Liberman, he cultivated his bosses, starting at Town & Country, where he’d made social connections for them. Bazaar had its own rewards. “They were all unhappily married,” says the former editor. “Tony provided girls.” A Bazaar business executive from the eighties confirms, “He’d get Cindy Crawford to show up. He’d seat [a top Hearst executive] next to Cheryl Tiegs. They were dazzled.”

  Mazzola’s reign—and Bazaar’s decline—continued into the early nineties. Talented photographers such as Hiro, Silano, Sarah Moon, Phillip Dixon, and Jean-Baptiste Mondino still worked there, “but what was demanded of them was very straightforward,” says Stanger. Bazaar’s devolution into a product more suited to supermarkets than haute couture salons made their work seem less urgent, less important. “Nineteen years later, it still hasn’t turned around,” James Brady said in 1992, with a certain satisfaction.

  Chapter 26

  * * *

  “HOW CAN WE SUBVERT THIS?”

  Bazaar still had talent. The brightest was Bill King, a young American photographer who’d moved to London in the Blow-Up era and started shooting covers for Queen. Sold twice in two years, Queen had become part of Hearst and renamed Harpers & Queen. King shot for it and American Bazaar. An issue with a cover photo of Lauren Hutton by King was on the newsstands when Tony Mazzola arrived.

  Born in the Netherlands Antilles around 1940 and raised across the Hudson River from upper Manhattan, in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, King studied painting at Pratt Institute, took graduate courses at New York University, and began taking pictures while still a student. He considered his career an accident. His sister Janet worked in a photography studio in London. “He wanted me to show him around,” Janet McClelland says, “and he decided to stay.”

  “He did a photo on his own on some beach in France or Spain,” says Bazaar editor Betty Ann Grund. Back in London, King showed it to a beauty editor from Queen, “and she thought it was great and used it.” He got his first assignment in late 1965 and worked with Erica Crome, Queen’s new men’s fashion editor, who assumed he was a rich boy. With no visible means of support, he had a nice apartment on Flood Street in Chelsea and a studio in the Pheasantry, a nineteenth-century building on the King’s Road, home to artists and the musician Eric Clapton’s studio. “He could afford Turnbull and Asser shirts and made-to-measure suits,” says Crome. “He was not one of those impoverished photographers.” She recalls that King’s mother had a serious gambling addiction though, so the family’s fortunes fluctuated.

  King was gay, and his construction executive father didn’t approve. Bill had realized taking pictures might free him from financial dependence on his disapproving dad, “until I decided what to do,” he said.

  King’s first sitting with Crome was totally improvised. “We decided not to do the expected, a good-looking, broad-shouldered guy in a tailored jacket,” she says. So she had clothes custom-made from velvet and other fabrics associated with women’s wear, and when she and King agreed that male models of the time were too butch, they trawled King’s Road to find a boy with dark, curly hair. King admitted he’d never shot anyone full length and didn’t know how to do it, so they had the model sit on a white box and tucked his legs in beneath him because “I needed legs and feet,” Crome says. “We ended up with his crotch at the center of the picture. We treated men like sex objects. It was not the done thing.”

  Since Queen was a fortnightly magazine, the pictures went into layout and to the printer as soon as they were processed with no second-guessing. The photos were well received, and Crome and King became a team. “We had the freedom to run with an idea,” Crome says. “We were both, maybe not consciously, mode breakers. Men’s editors were all male and mostly gay, and I was a married young woman with a different view of what makes men attractive. Bill was gay. We were a perfect combination. The question was always, ‘How can we subvert this?’ You could be as brave as you liked at the Queen.”

  Crome remembers King as clean shaven, with a dimple in his chin, wearing a little tweed jacket and tortoiseshell-framed glasses. He was “bashful,” she says. “He didn’t appear confident, though I wouldn’t say he wasn’t.” King was a pot smoker and considered Crome’s taste for Campari and soda anachronistic. “Why can’t you smoke like everyone else?” he admonished her. “He tried very hard to teach me,” she says.

  King was hooked on photography. “On a trip back to New York, I went to the public library and took twenty years of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and . . . analyzed the pictures and the formulas,” he said. When he returned to London, he had “all kinds of ideas,” says Crome. He preferred shooting in the studio to location, but did both. And he was happy to churn out commercial work, making mundane pages for advertisers. He had a knack for adding the odd detail that made a picture special without “annoying the person paying for it,” Crome says. His editorial work then was “static, but glamorous and sexy. Someone would always be laughing or their eyes would be twinkling.”

  King himself was oddly static. He was the first photographer Kaffe Fassett posed for when he started modeling. “Since I was a novice, I was desperate to please and present myself like the professional I certainly wasn’t,” says Fassett. “He would peer at me and nod his head but issue no instructions. I’d try to discern what he wanted and contort my body, making different expressions, all the while feeling I wasn’t good enough. It was exhausting for me and I often felt I was letting him down. Yet he asked me back time and again. I always felt it was because I was cheaper than any of the other models.” Fassett fondly recalls a party King staged for a sitting with celebrities such as Twiggy and Paloma Picasso. “Bill was quiet and introverted, peering out from under his fleck of dishwater-blond hair and glasses, watching us relate to each other.”

  By 1966, King was a star in London and had begun to work with Bea Feitler at Harper’s Bazaar. “He had a strong relationship with Bea,” says Ruth Ansel, because both were closeted homosexuals with a taste for psychoactive substances. “They had a lot in common aside from being a great art director and a great photographer.”

  King was crossing the Atlantic regularly, working mostly as a beauty photographer, when he met the young hairdresser Harry King, no relation, on a midnight shoot in Covent Garden. The model was Marisa Berenson and the client, the Daily Telegraph newspaper. “Marisa sat on the floor and did her makeup,” says Harry. “Bill said, ‘That really looks old-fashioned. Make it clean and simple.’ He made her take it off, then walked out for two hours. He worked to build up a neurotic frenzy. She wanted to leave. She had to go to Paris the next day. He gave her half a pill. I don’t know what he gave her,” but they worked until 4:00 a.m. “All night long. ‘Here, baby, c’mon, baby.’ ”

  Two days later
Bill King came to the salon where Harry worked and invited the hairstylist to his “fabulous flat, to smoke pot,” says Harry. Bill had upgraded to a triplex with a private elevator on Ormonde Gate in swinging Chelsea. “And he jumped me and we ended up in bed.” Then came a weekend in Paris when “he gave me acid and didn’t tell me what it was,” but Harry didn’t mind. “He was a star. He had the best taste in the world.”

  King dosed Erica Crome, too, on a shoot on the Irish coast for the Wool Secretariat. “I’m an upbeat, energetic person,” says Crome, and she spent the first day of the sitting racing around, making sure everything was in order. On the second day, after she briefly put down and then retrieved a Coca-Cola she was sipping, she found herself almost paralyzed, unable to move for several hours. “Bill had put a tranquilizer in my Coke to slow me down. I daresay he wanted everyone at the same level he was—whatever that was. He always wanted to draw non-drug-takers into his web of drug taking. He would encourage you as strongly as he could to indulge. It was almost, if you’re not with me, you’re against me.” It made her think of his mother, the gambler. “Addiction is inherited but manifests itself in different ways.”

  Approaching age thirty, Bill was five years older than Harry King. “He was very elegant,” Harry says. “He was a bit neurotic. I didn’t know anyone like him. I was enthralled by him. It wasn’t love, I had lots of affairs in those days, but it turned my life around. He was very uptight about being gay, but all of us were. He had girlfriends. I had girlfriends.” Bill introduced Harry to one of them, Paula Mazure, whom Vanity Fair’s Stephen Fried later described as his “lady-in-waiting . . . at his disposal, ready to jet off to the islands for a vacation, assist on a sitting in Mexico, go to the movies, heterosexualize a business dinner, or mother him.”

  Bill was anything but heterosexual with Harry King. “He said, ‘You can be my boyfriend or you can work with me.’ I thought, ‘He’s much too neurotic to work with.’ We went on to have a romance” that only ended when Harry moved to New York in 1973. By then, “He was with Harper’s Bazaar,” says Harry, “and I was a Voguette.”

  King took a final star turn in London in September 1970, shooting much of what Queen called its “Great Men’s Wear Issue,” behind a cover shot of Michael J. Pollard, the actor, and Lauren Hutton, who’d costarred in a new film about motorcycle racers. King’s signature style was invented for that issue. Erica Crome thinks the ebullient jumping that would henceforth characterize King’s work was Bea Feitler’s idea.

  Crome had flown to New York for the sessions, often standing just off camera, jumping around herself to inspire the female models, who were mostly not professionals. “The idea was [to pair] male models with different kinds of American women,” Crome says, but the execution was looser. The “women” included the Andy Warhol superstars Jane Forth and Candy Darling, a drag queen; several women recruited off the street to represent the Black Power movement; a Puerto Rican transsexual who danced at the drag bar 82 Club (“I wasn’t quite ready to dress somebody with tits and a cock and balls,” says Crome); US Navy Waves in dress uniform whose officer later tried, unsuccessfully, to kill the photos; Playboy Bunnies (“One had a nipple showing,” says Crome, but it was airbrushed out of the published image); several lesbians (“We went to a dyke bar looking for women who were as butch as possible”); the Spanish model Naty Abascal; Elizabeth of Toro, a Ugandan princess who modeled while in exile from her homeland; some children; and “a rich old lady we found having tea at the Plaza Hotel,” Crome says.

  Some of those photographs showed the fruits of King’s study of old Vogues and Bazaars: the influence of Richard Avedon’s running and jumping pictures is evident. The influence of Irving Penn became clear when King rented a studio in the same beaux arts office building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and West Fifteenth Street in Manhattan where Penn then also worked in a studio rented for him by Condé Nast. As the years went by, King would adopt some of Penn’s more obsessive work habits, too, insisting on silence in the studio. “Every photographer played music,” marvels Betty Ann Grund. “But with Bill, never, ever, ever.” He’d bend only when someone such as Diana Ross appeared, and he would play her songs.

  King would take it much further than Penn, turning his shoots into quasireligious rites with areas of the studio marked off with tape, reserved for King and the subjects du jour. Zones were differentiated with colored tape marking where editors, stylists, and clients could stand. One assistant handled the cameras, another the lights, a third the wind machine King liked to use. Assistants were not allowed to speak or look his sitters in the eye. Ultimately, white lab coats became a mandatory uniform for King’s assistants. King favored uniforms himself: he wore khakis and white oxford-cloth Brooks Brothers shirts all day, every day.

  “He had a steely determination to control things,” says Adrian Panaro, who assisted him for three years. “He liked things just so. Cords had to be coiled. He was adamant about technique.” He overexposed his Kodachrome on purpose to “make beautifully sharp, contrasty slides.”

  King’s regimented days stood in stark contrast to his nights. He had a longtime boyfriend, David Hartman, who would eventually become a photographer himself, shooting often for Vogue Patterns. But King was a habitué of the furthest frontiers of New York’s sexually liberated scene. That was the black-leather-and-lube gay bar and party circuit where anything imaginable went, sexually and pharmaceutically, from bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism, and fisting to regular trips to “the trucks,” an outdoor parking strip in the city’s ironically named Meatpacking District, where gay men disappeared into unlocked, empty delivery trucks for anonymous sex. Nearby clubs called Anvil and Mine Shaft offered similar enticements indoors and became regular haunts of the fashion crowd, some participating, some only engaging in outré voyeurism. King was famous for days-long binges of anonymous and dangerous sex fueled by cocaine and brought back to earth with the hypnotic sedative Quaalude.

  Jane Hsiang was a model when she met King. They grew friendly, and he convinced Tony Mazzola at Harper’s Bazaar to try her out as a stylist. Her first picture, of Rene Russo, ended up on Bazaar’s cover in October 1976. They continued working together even though “he was always fucked-up,” Hsiang says. After a shoot on Fire Island, she continues, “he got so high on whatever, my boyfriend said, ‘Leave him there.’ I said no, he was so high he’d fall into poison ivy, so we put him in the backseat and took him home.”

  In the midseventies, King would call Robert Mapplethorpe, the art photographer who chronicled those scenes in his most controversial work, “really late at night,” says Paul Sinclaire, a fashion stylist who was close with Mapplethorpe, “and Robert would pack up and go.” Mapplethorpe would later show hard-core homoerotic photographs that caused Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art to cancel a planned retrospective. Sinclaire, who later styled for King, says Mapplethorpe recruited models for those photos “out of Bill King’s orgies.”

  “He was perfectly good fun in England, really happy with his success,” says Erica Crome. “He became a different, much less nice person in America. He developed a destructive streak.”

  King scored a coup in 1972 when he took on one of the most visible advertising jobs in fashion, shooting celebrated women in furs for Blackglama and its “What Becomes a Legend Most?” campaign. King took the job from Richard Avedon, who’d shot the portraits since 1968. Blackglama was a client of Trahey/Wolf, an advertising agency formed two years earlier, whose partners were Jane Trahey and Henry Wolf, the onetime Bazaar art director.

  Wolf had originally suggested Avedon shoot the ads because he was as famous as the women—Melina Mercouri, Lauren Bacall, Bette Davis, Barbra Streisand—they hoped would appear in them. “You needed as many famous names involved as possible” to launch the campaign, says Peter Rogers, an executive who would take over the agency. “He’d photographed all of them when he was very young, and they wanted to be photographed by Avedon. They were just washed-up broads to him at that po
int. He expected them to come to him. He knew his name would bring them.” Another inducement to the stars was a free mink; Avedon got $1,000 per portrait.

  Avedon and Rogers got along—well enough. “I worked out the poses,” says Rogers, but the stars were as much in charge as Avedon was. “They all knew every angle, everything about themselves in photography. To Avedon it was just another session. It wasn’t fun with Avedon.” So Rogers decided on a change and hired Bill King. “I had a real relationship with King. I directed every shot. I’d established myself as an art director, and my concepts were so strong I wanted them executed exactly as I saw them, so I hired photographers who could”—and would—“do it. Bill King could anticipate a move before it took place. He didn’t just click away. He knew exactly when to click. It was amazing to watch him.”

  Avedon called King a copyist; “Avedon hated him,” says Jane Hsiang. “Avedon disdained everyone!” Rogers snorts. “King was not a clone, not in any way. He captured a spirit and movement I didn’t see in anyone else at that time. He had every famous model wanting to shoot with him. He gave it more energy than Avedon did.”

  And all he did, says Betty Ann Grund, was “stand with his arms folded and let them move.”