Focus

by Michael Gross

  Chapter 27

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  “HE SEES IT ALL VERY CLEARLY”

  The new decade was an awkward turning point for Richard Avedon. Like Penn, he’d tired of the fashion-go-round. “The last time I saw really great clothes was in the 1960s,” he’d later say. By 1970, he was more interested in attending antiwar demonstrations, and he went to Vietnam in 1971, taking pictures of America’s military leaders in Saigon, Vietnamese civilians disfigured by war, and soldiers in the field with his eight-by-ten Deardorff camera for a new book. He was candid in admitting he was there for selfish reasons. “Every American is in some way using the Vietnamese for themselves,” he told Gloria Emerson of the New York Times, “to build a reputation, to advance a career, to satisfy a need, for something.” Demonstrating his own confusion about a war that had confounded most of his countrymen, he included the American soldiers he met, but said he also disdained them. “I feel only rage toward young men who allow themselves to be put in that position without any idea of what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. This is the punishment for mindlessness. And the punishment can be their lives.”

  Avedon returned to America that May and went to Sarasota, Florida, in the middle of the month to see his father, with whom he’d reconciled in the sixties, after Avedon decided, “It was just criminal of me not to make the effort.” They’d made a real estate investment together, buying a small low-rise apartment complex in northern Florida. “We finally had something to talk about,” he said. He’d recently written his father a letter and asked if Jacob would sit for a portrait. “I’ve learned your business now,” he wrote. “I hope you’ll learn mine. After all, I’m a really good photographer and I hate giving the best that’s in me to strangers.” Over a weekend, Avedon conducted the first of about fifty sittings that produced a harrowing series of portraits, chronicling his father’s slow decline as he died of liver cancer.

  Grace Mirabella preferred Penn’s photographs to Avedon’s. “Penn was stronger,” she says. But woe betide an editor who brought him a girl he didn’t like. “He wouldn’t take a picture,” Jade Hobson says. Not even for Mirabella and a Parisian hairdresser flown to New York for one day. “We were very keen to have him,” Mirabella recalls, “and Penn would not take a picture, and [the hair] had to be washed, redone, and rearranged, and it went on like that, and finally, I said to Penn, ‘Can’t you take one picture?’ ‘No!’ ‘Something for the girl?’ ‘No.’ So we went home without a picture.”

  Mirabella also preferred Penn as a man. Where Penn would write elaborate thank-you notes to everyone involved in a sitting, Avedon “considered me Vreeland’s pencil-pusher and treated me with all the disdain due someone in that position,” Mirabella wrote. She was skeptical of his “divine insight into the supremely marvelous.” And she was intolerant of Avedon’s protests “that his pictures couldn’t face Penn’s” in the magazine, and of his claims “that Penn was trampling on his turf.” Avedon’s “emergence as a power broker” in their world was a development she found troubling. When he summoned her to his studio “to interview me about his prospects at the new Vogue,” she was annoyed, but also pleased he was “sitting up and taking notice” that Vogue “was about to profoundly change.” It’s telling that after recounting that summons, Mirabella never mentions Avedon again in her memoirs.

  The photographer’s relationship with Vogue deteriorated markedly. “There was resentment,” he said. “I was powerful.” Avedon had previously considered his Condé Nast contract a necessary compromise based on his financial needs. Post-Mirabella, he decided it diminished him. “Grace was brought in to do this thing,” he said, to be “more conscientious toward the reader and her concerns.” In Avedon Fashion, a product of the Richard Avedon Foundation after the death of its namesake, the curator-critic Vince Aletti wrote, “The narratives were far fewer and less lavishly produced and gradually, very gradually, he lost interest. Liberman, free to air his irritations, began taking more liberties with Avedon’s photographs, cropping and running type across them.” And worse, “his work had begun to look conventional. . . . He was an old-school classicist. . . . He had become the Establishment.”

  Perhaps to prove he wasn’t, Avedon attended a march on the Capitol in Washington, DC, on May 21, 1972, to protest the bombing of North Vietnam and the mining of its harbors—and was among 178 people arrested. That same month, he took a well-known photograph of Veruschka twisted like a pretzel in a yoga pose.

  Early in 1973, another of Avedon’s models, the gap-toothed Lauren Hutton, decided to try to get a modeling contract with a big cosmetics company. She concluded her best chance lay with Revlon and its photographer, Avedon. “He thought it was a great idea and became a great coconspirator,” she says. “It was Dick’s idea to make it exclusive and buy out all my business so I’d only work for Revlon in the US and I’d get more money.” They shot tests for a new line called Ultima II and showed them to Revlon’s owner, Charles Revson.

  “I really got that contract with Revlon for Lauren,” Avedon said. “Revson didn’t like her teeth. I went to Revson and said, ‘I’ll experiment. If you like it, I want more money.’ We did a couple of tests.” Revson went for the deal and offered Hutton a three-year $100,000-a-year contract, and Avedon a higher rate than he was normally paid. “Except Dick [insisted on] working with a lot of other people,” Hutton says, so “Revson went ape” and vowed revenge. He only gave Avedon a one-year contract, and when it expired, Revson told Hutton she would henceforth be working with other photographers. Her contract specified she could approve photographers. “But I want to work with Dick,” Hutton said.

  “I’m not going to have it,” Revson roared.

  Says Hutton, “He was the kind of guy who you cross in a business way and he’ll make an unbusinesslike decision and burn everybody to the ground. He didn’t renew Dick, and I think it was quite a while before they started using him again. Dick was very, very hurt.”

  Simultaneously, Avedon was in a tense spot at Vogue. “Dick and Alex did not get along,” says Polly Mellen. “Alex had a way of being very condescending. It was almost insulting. I think it was jealousy.” Hutton, who’d started making movies and was often in Hollywood, disconnected from the fashion grapevine, was unaware of the tensions behind the scenes.

  Shortly after her Revlon deal was announced in June 1973, Hutton was summoned to Alex Liberman’s office, where an issue of Andy Warhol’s Interview with her on the cover sat on his otherwise bare desk. She’d been photographed for the magazine by Francesco Scavullo. Liberman wanted to know if she liked working with him. “I said, ‘Sure, he’s fine,’ ” Hutton recalls, and Liberman asked if she would work with him again. “I said, ‘Fine.’ ” Only years later did Hutton realize she’d been used.

  Scavullo returned to Vogue as Liberman’s weapon against Avedon. “I had been working only with Dick and Penn for some time,” Hutton continues, “and I literally wasn’t smart enough to figure it out, [but] Francesco had changed his lighting. It was very similar to Dick’s. So you have someone who’s been trained by Dick, me, using positions that [I] learned [from Dick], and Scavullo was taking pictures very similar to Dick’s. What I didn’t know was, it was to show Dick that they didn’t need him. I should have figured it out because I had never been called into Vogue before.”

  Not only that, Liberman’s office called Avedon’s studio, where he and Hutton were shooting for Revlon, to remind her of the job with Scavullo, “and Dick heard me talking to them, and he said, ‘Don’t do it.’ If he had explained everything to me, I wouldn’t have done it. Dick had been so instrumental to me in my life, in my career, and Dick was mad at me.”

  Indeed he was. He also despised Revson, despite having profitably worked for him for years. “Avedon called [the contract] the stupidest mistake of his life,” says Nick la Micela, an art director at Revlon’s ad agency. “He said, ‘Now that Revson owns me, he can shit on me. I sold my soul. Before that I was the connoisseur of beauty. Now, he doesn�
��t respect me.” In fact, Revson had set a trap, and “at the end of the year, he kept Lauren and dumped me,” Avedon said. “Lauren didn’t go to bat for me at all. I was so pissed.” He added, “If she worked with Scavullo, I wouldn’t use her again. We worked exclusively with models, then moved on, but she simply disappeared.”

  Scavullo thought Hutton arranged their 1973 shoot for Vogue. “She loved me, she pushed me, she went to Liberman and told him,” Scavullo said. “That’s when I got a contract.” At their first Vogue sitting, Hutton’s eyes were all red. “Apparently, Avedon threatened they’d never work together again if she worked for Scavullo,” he continued. “Nothing bothered me. Nobody pushed me except me. Not Brodovitch, not Liberman. I was tough as nails.” But Scavullo would “kiss ass for a beautiful picture. I want everyone happy. Make ’em happy and you get great pictures.”

  As he and Hutton started to shoot, the phone rang—it was Avedon, calling to wish him luck. “I said, ‘Thank you,’ ” Scavullo remembered. “I wanted to say, ‘Fuck you.’ He’s talented, but he’s vicious and as shrewd as they come.”

  In December 1970, Richard Avedon moved his studio one last time, to a house on East Seventy-Fifth Street between First and York Avenues he bought from Reid Miles, a photographer and graphic designer best known for modernist LP record jackets for Blue Note, the jazz label. Miles had built a ground-floor studio in the house. “It was a photographer’s place,” says Avedon’s studio manager, Gideon Lewin, who loved its curved cyclorama wall that obviated the need for seamless paper backdrops. Avedon could paint it any color he wanted. Lewin added a basement darkroom and upstairs, living quarters.

  Says Lewin, “He decided to simplify his life completely and live like a Spartan. He wanted to just be creative and do his work without interference.” Lewin had a policy not to pry into his boss’s private life and says, “Something was happening, but I didn’t know what. I built him a platform bed upstairs. A short time later, he showed up with suitcases.”

  The troubled marriage of Dick and Evie had come to an end. She would henceforth live alone in an apartment Dick had recently bought at 870 United Nations Plaza, one of twin modernist towers just north of the United Nations, the last great luxury cooperative apartment houses built in Manhattan, and later home to both Si Newhouse and Alexander Liberman.

  The Avedons would never divorce, but would never live together again. “They see each other often,” the former fashion editor D. D. Ryan would say in the nineties. “He’s looked after her. They go to the theater. He’s involved with the romance of photography, the romance of friendship. After seventy years of therapy, he sees it all very clearly.”

  Avedon’s professional colleagues felt certain he never had another sexual relationship in his lifetime, though he had close relationships with several women and there was a certain curiosity about them. The novelist and essayist Renata Adler, whom Avedon photographed in 1969, was the first. Another was Doon Arbus—one of the two daughters of Diane’s—who was Avedon’s longtime in-house copywriter and editor. Years later, he was also said to be involved—somehow—with Nicole Wisniak, a Parisian married to a French magazine editor, who became a fixture on the city’s artistic-social scene in the early 1970s. She started publishing Egoïste, her own magazine, funded by her parents, in 1977, met Avedon when she interviewed him in 1984, and collaborated with him for twenty years.

  The back-to-back moves into United Nations Plaza and the new studio were followed by the fifty-year-old Avedon’s collapse and hospitalization in spring 1974. He blamed it on pericarditis, a minor heart condition that can feel like a heart attack. “I got a call,” says Gideon Lewin, “he’d had an emergency and he was hospitalized.” He wasn’t a good patient. “He would not stay in the hospital. He left before he was supposed to.”I But he was hobbled, he later said, and unable to work for nearly a year.

  Avedon had reached a moment of truth. “Something serious happened to me,” he said in previously unpublished portions of an interview he gave in 1992. For the first time in his adult life he couldn’t work—and thus couldn’t speak as far as he was concerned. And it turned his life around. “I wanted to concentrate on another side of my work. It was time to use editorial and advertising to support the studio. There are only so many hours in the week. So I said no more editorial fashion.”

  What serious thing, exactly, happened? It’s unclear what was cause and what effect. He’d left his wife and home. His first ten-year contract with Condé Nast was running out; Liberman was manipulating him; Mirabella disdained him; Lauren Hutton deserted him; Scavullo was the latest mosquito buzzing past his ear; and never, ever mentioned was another burden, this one financial. “Dick paid for everything,” says someone close to his son, John.

  Avedon not only had an expensive studio to run, he supported both his now-adult son and his wife, whose behavior “was increasingly extreme,” says John’s intimate. “She was falling apart. She was a shell of a human being.”

  “I’d been told Evie was crazy,” says Renata Adler, “but I thought she was not any crazier than the rest of us.” Then, though, Evie decided Dick was having an affair with Lee Radziwill, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s younger sister. To prove otherwise, Adler showed Evie a photo of Radziwill with the photographer Peter Beard, whom she was dating. “She thought I’d conspired to put that picture in Women’s Wear Daily.” A few months later, Evie called Adler to say she was having electroshock therapy.

  Avedon’s sense of responsibility for his family was strong. His father’s lessons had stuck with him; advertising supported his family, he said, and taking care of them was “the definition of being a man.” So to make ends meet, he cut a new deal with the devils of commerce, Newhouse and Liberman. Afterward, he made it all sound like a model in his studio: impeccable, faultless. “He knew how to present himself in the way he wanted to be seen,” observes Jim Varriale, who joined the studio as an assistant in the midseventies.

  “My covers were selling terrifically,” Avedon said in that same interview. “I’d never worked for Mademoiselle or GQ and Liberman wanted me to do four covers a month for a very good fee. He said, ‘Dear Dick, why are you punishing Mademoiselle?’ That would keep me connected to Condé Nast. And Newhouse was terrific, completely supportive. At Hearst, there was never any lunch money. If I wanted to photograph Sophia Loren, I paid my carfare to Rome.” While Condé Nast didn’t nickel-and-dime, neither did it give ten-year contracts anymore. He got four-year deals. “Everything was changing,” he said. “They were changing editors everywhere and I think the feeling they had was, I was a stable, known entity. It was something I could do creatively and well. Immediately, the sales of every magazine went up. Everything was okay.”

  Avedon spent 1975 preparing for another exhibition, the first-ever show of photography at the prestigious Marlborough Gallery and Avedon’s first gallery show, accompanied by a book, devoted to his portraits. By the time it opened that fall, he’d found a new venue for his editorial photography at Rolling Stone, which agreed to give him an entire issue, edited by Renata Adler. The magazine’s editors asked him to chronicle the 1976 presidential campaign, “the candidates and the conventions,” they wrote, “from beginning to end.” Avedon expanded his brief to “the political leadership of America.” It was released that October as The Family 1976.

  His protests notwithstanding, Avedon also continued shooting the crème de la crème of fashion. His latest stylist, Julie Britt, who was “entranced by his vision,” she says. “I’d tell him what was going on. He wanted to be involved,” without actually going places, such as the disco of the moment, Studio 54. Britt found Avedon “Proustian” and “an isolator.” She says, “He wasn’t adventurous. He wouldn’t go out with groups. He liked his studio, where he was in control. He preferred that insanity to sitting next to Anne Bass at dinner.” But great as they were, the models of the moment—Kelly LeBrock, Rene Russo, Janice Dickinson, Rosie Vela, and Patti Hansen—couldn’t compete with the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, which mounted a retrospective of his fashion photography, again accompanied by a book, in September 1978. It represented “a kind of closure to his most important work in fashion,” according to one of his official histories.

  Fashion just wasn’t his focus anymore. Over the next six years, inspired by his part-ownership of a ranch in Montana, he pursued a book and exhibition he called The Western Project, a set of portraits of working, down-and-out Americans shot in 189 separate locales in seventeen states. “It was a grand treasure hunt out West for faces that interested him,” says Jim Varriale. It was partly funded by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, which showed the results in September 1985. After its opening, Avedon described his thirty-year effort to create “a group portrait of America. You can’t say you’re doing that until you’ve almost done it; it sounds like such a grand ambition. . . . I knew it could never be complete until I photographed—I hate the word working class—ordinary, hardworking people.”

  Meantime, Avedon signed another contract to shoot covers for Condé Nast and still did the odd fashion spread. “He was a dynamo,” says Varriale. “He had more energy than any three people I ever met.” His new isolation inspired and invigorated him.

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  I. Avedon’s book Evidence has a photo of him in a hospital bed, working on a Bloomingdale’s catalog in his studio with model Rosie Vela and Gideon Lewin, taken in 1974 according to the caption. In fact, that photo was taken three years later, when Avedon was suffering from hepatitis, says Adrian Panaro, the studio assistant who shot it. According to American Photographer magazine, Avedon turned the photo into a postcard and mailed it to friends.

  Chapter 28