Focus

by Michael Gross

  One model, Margrit Ramme, a German like Newton, but with blue eyes and blond hair, came to the set with a black eye and broken nose, and Newton and Bossidy had to cover her bruises with makeup and sunglasses. Newton decided there was “some S-and-M stuff going on” with her and her boyfriend, she says. “He thought I spent my nights having wild sex, which was not the case. Actually, I was mugged in Manhattan, but he didn’t believe me. That was Newton’s fantasy. He had this obsession with Nordic, German faces. You’d think he wouldn’t like that look.” Ramme saw a big change in Newton’s interests from the many shoots she’d done with him in the past for “the Vogues and Queen,” she says. “They were harmless compared to what he did after [his heart attack].”

  In 1976, he’d celebrate (and gave new fashion luster to) Hermès, a stuffy Parisian equestrian and leather-goods emporium, as an unknowing S&M gear purveyor, shooting a model wielding a riding crop and another on all fours in jodhpurs and riding boots with a saddle tied to her back and the expectant look of a steed about to be mounted. In years to come, he’d advance on these S&M themes, shooting nudes in surgical braces and casts.

  Clearly, his experiences as a child in the hedonistic Berlin of the late Weimar years, a Jewish teenager in Nazi Germany before World War II, and a sex-obsessed young man in exile during the war lingered in and fed his imagination. “My favorite photos are often those which evoke a strong feeling of ‘I have been here before,’ ” he wrote in a different context. His talent and sense of humor were such that, his detractors notwithstanding, he was able to turn his memories and associated fantasies into commercial images that first sold frocks and other fashion accoutrements, and then stood the test of time as fine art.

  Newton wasn’t only interested in Aryan blondes. On that Florida shoot, his fondest wish wasn’t to visit whorehouses, but the Hotel Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, where he was riveted by the nouveau riche, overdressed, mostly Jewish guests. His taste for tawdry, trashy, extravagant display would never leave him. Neither exhibitionism nor Newton’s voyeurism was limited to sexuality.

  Newton and Bossidy would return to the flashing theme, taking pictures along the Seine and at the Hotel George V bar in Paris. After a 3:00 a.m. shoot of a model wearing a boa constrictor “and nothing else,” in the shuttered bar, a bartender somehow got hold of one of Newton’s Polaroids, and when the team woke up the next day, “all hell broke loose,” says Bossidy. Newton got a police summons, a batch of fur coats were confiscated, and Bossidy and her hair-and-makeup man had to sneak out of the hotel to try to recover them and then get out of France. Bossidy eventually got the furs back, but somehow the authorities or the hotel ensured that the photos never ran. She never found out what happened to them.

  Another Oui portfolio would gain renown when images from it were used to portray the work of a fictional photographer whose oeuvre linked sexuality and violence in the 1978 film Eyes of Laura Mars, starring Faye Dunaway as the title character, a photographer. “I wanted to do murder pictures,” says Bossidy, and she researched the theme by visiting morgues and collecting murder-scene photographs, “and of course Helmut took them. I could do what I wanted, and if Helmut liked it, we’d go to town. But Helmut, and this is the major point, was very pure. The sexuality was clean and out there, nothing was hidden or weird.” There was also always overt humor, as when Bossidy took a shoot crew to a drive-in burger joint in Palm Beach and Newton photographed a nude with a burger in her crotch.

  “Helmut would do S and M, but in a different way,” Bossidy says, recalling a shoot in Las Vegas with model Jerry Hall, who was photographed licking the cowboy boots of a male model riding a horse. “I’ll never forget her licking the boot,” Bossidy says. “That was Helmut’s idea of heaven. Most photographers love that sort of thing. They’re controlling a model. There are sexual connotations of subservience. Penn would do the same thing, but just not as sexual.” Bossidy did a wear-when-wet accessories story with Penn that required a model to sit still while pails of water were tossed in her face. “We sat and waited for the film to be processed, then he did it again. There was a lot of that. All of them do it—probably whenever they can. They’re naughty, those guys.”

  Some of the images Newton shot for Oui were reproduced in his 1976 book, White Women, which propelled him into the pantheon and certified the genre known as porno chic. At the time, though, it was greeted as a curiosity, “one of the more bizarre photography books of the season,” according to the New York Times Book Review. It described his photographs as “lurid, even sado-masochistic” and reported his book was selling well that holiday season, albeit only to “women and gays.” “Oui gave him a platform he hadn’t had before to start to play,” says Bossidy. “Pre-AIDS, it really didn’t matter. It was kind of an amazing time.”

  Models, however, found Newton demanding and difficult to work with. “I’d say, ‘What are you thinking?’ ” recalls hairstylist Hamid Bechiri. “She’s naked, it’s under twenty degrees, and he says he can’t shoot because she has goose bumps. And the girl would stop shivering. They knew who he was. He could make your career.”

  “Models used to say they needed a week off after a couple days with Helmut,” Jade Hobson agrees. “He saw the pictures in his mind” and put the models into the pose he envisioned. Then he’d take a break and “two minutes later say, ‘Get back into that position.’ He’d remember where their little finger was, and that’s hard on models. It was very controlled.”

  Yet Newton could improvise when necessary. Once, working on location in Montecatini, Italy, Newton spotted an indentation in a hedge where it was apparent a statue had once stood. “Helmut’s mind starts working,” says Hobson. “I’d really like to do a nude there as a statue,” he said. “Can we get a pedestal?” Both models on the shoot declined to disrobe, but Newton refused to be stymied. “Who would do it?” Hobson continues. “Brigitte Nielsen was nearby, in Germany, and said, ‘Of course,’ and she came and we did a couple more shots. That’s the way he was, so spontaneous and all-seeing.”

  “As time went on,” says Grace Mirabella, Newton “perfected the kind of sitting he wanted to be doing,” and they made him a brand-name photographer for the rest of his days, an icon of kinky modernity. “A little perverted,” says Hamid Bechiri. “A woman who’s not fuckable but would go fuck a truck driver.” But to magazines, Newton’s work—thereafter shot with books and exhibits, not the demands of fashion commerce, in mind—wasn’t quite as sacred as Avedon’s and Penn’s. “There was a moment when finally he went too far, too too too extreme,” says Mirabella, who saw the fruits of another sitting in Paris and declared unusable the photos of a girl in fur and lingerie standing on a curb with a pimplike man lurking behind her. “Alex wanted to disagree,” she says, “but he knew. It was a hooker on a street corner in great lingerie. French Vogue bought one picture. It was really not worth a whole sitting.”

  Liberman’s “typically European disdain for what he called American Puritanism” didn’t impress Mirabella, who thought his newfound emphasis on sex wasn’t “particularly inspiring.” But she rationalized it by telling herself that at least the photos that resulted put women on top in sexual encounters. In hindsight, she allowed that Vogue “moved out of the past in fits and starts.”

  Certainly, “The Story of Ohhh” was a giant leap forward. “The idea was a story on fragrance,” says Polly Mellen, “and Alex and Grace think Helmut should do it. We’ve spoken to him and he’s very interested. A day goes by and he calls and says, ‘Only if it’s Lisa Taylor,’ who he was entranced with, and she loved a little bit of danger in the picture, erotica, sex. You try like hell to get something special. With some photographers, you can push, and with others you can’t. Behind the scenes is where it all happened. Grace might have an idea and Alex would ponder it overnight and take it into the bizarre. Then it’s Newton’s mind and mine feeding his and his feeding mine, and it went way beyond the original thought.”

  Curiously, no one thought that Deborah Turbev
ille’s portfolio in that same issue was at all controversial when it was photographed, laid out, or sent to press. Judged by her résumé, Turbeville was an insider, a former fashion editor trained by Diana Vreeland, Alexey Brodovitch, and Richard Avedon. But she was also an outsider by inclination, and not just because she was one of the rare women to crash a field so long dominated by gay men and, then, the heterosexual males who sometimes made it hard to differentiate women’s from men’s magazine pages.

  * * *

  I. It was evidence of Richard Avedon’s increasing irrelevance that a cinematic sitting he shot with Polly Mellen at Philip Johnson’s Fort Worth Water Gardens that December, portraying models Rene Russo and Tony Spinelli as a couple “going through all the emotions of a relationship over twelve pages,” as Spinelli puts it, including a photo in which Spinelli appears to slap Russo, also drew protests but has since been mostly forgotten.

  II. That same year, Fashion 1900–1939, a broader exhibit that featured fashion photographs, followed at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

  III. In Them, her memoir of her parents, Liberman’s stepdaughter, Francine du Plessix Gray, reported that in the eighties Liberman and his wife would spend weekend nights at their country home watching pornographic movies.

  Chapter 30

  * * *

  “A LITTLE OFF”

  Deborah Turbeville was born in 1932 and raised outside Boston by nonconformist parents who taught her to appreciate culture and value individual style. They spent summers in coastal Maine, whose bleak, barren landscapes she loved. Though she would never describe her childhood as lonely or isolated, neither did she recall time spent with friends or the joys of a playful, exterior life.

  After dropping out of the University of Georgia during her freshman year, the gangly redhead moved to New York, where she worked at the Stork Club, dated its owner, Sherman Billingsley, and became a fit model for and an assistant to designer Claire McCardell, one of the pioneers of easy American fashion. McCardell introduced her to Diana Vreeland, who lured her to Harper’s Bazaar in 1963 to become a fashion editor at the tail end of the Snow-Brodovitch era.

  Turbeville hated the job. “I’d get a note from some senior fashion editor saying, ‘We find your arrival half an hour late for Bill Blass appalling,’ ” she recalled. “I just stopped going. I’ll tell you one reason I hate those things now. It’s seeing all those people who you’ve seen for years, who’ve spent fifty years of their lives just looking at clothes. I mean, I’ve got nothing against them. It’s not really a feminist point; it’s just that I don’t want to be there.”

  What she loved was working with photographers such as Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, and Bob Richardson. She and the equally tall, lean, and intense Richardson shot Bazaar’s biannual children’s fashion portfolios and strove to be controversial. Often, their shoots were inspired by films. “He always worked like it was a scenario in a film,” Turbeville said. “He would give me the script.” But sometimes, things went off script, as when the two went to photograph the Kleberg family, owners of the 825,000-acre King Ranch in Texas, and friends of their children. The shoot team stayed with the family, but the first night, at an alcohol-fueled dinner, the talk turned to horse racing, and Turbeville upset the Klebergs when she said she thought the sport dishonest, according to a young assistant who saw the angry reaction and kicked an oblivious Turbeville under the table in a vain attempt to shut her up.

  In Turbeville’s telling, it was Richardson who “insulted the host and hostess and we were asked to leave in the middle of the night.” Like Bert Stern, Richardson was an amphetamine addict, and capable of explosive, irrational behavior, but the assistant says they stayed two or three more days in a guesthouse before finally decamping to a hotel in San Antonio.

  The next morning, Turbeville and Richardson left early to scout locations, while the assistant stayed in the hotel and was rescheduling the child models when she got a panicked phone call from Richardson. “He was just terrified,” she says. He and Turbeville had been arrested for trespassing in a small Texas town and thrown in jail, and they needed the assistant to go to their hotel rooms, fetch identification, and come get them out. While looking for Richardson’s passport, the assistant came upon “a ton of stuff in a satchel,” including syringes, hypodermic needles, and bottles. “This must be drugs,” the assistant decided, before rushing to her photographer and editor and confronting a “sheriff with his feet up on a desk and a rifle over his legs. I said, ‘Do you know who they are?’ And he said, ‘I know who they say they are.’ He was loving every minute of it.”

  Finally, the sheriff set the pair free. “It was out of a movie,” says the assistant, though not the one that inspired the shoot. Turbeville never gave a full or coherent account of what happened next, except to say that on her return “I was asked to leave the magazine” because Nancy White thought she was “just too much.” She bolted to Ladies’ Home Journal, and Richardson made French Vogue his principal outlet. It’s hardly a stretch to suspect that somehow Nancy White found out some of what had gone on in Texas.

  Turbeville was already on thin ice at Bazaar. Late in 1963, she and Richardson had shot the children of a socialite in sexually suggestive situations at the Costa del Sol home of a Spanish duchess, a shoot that ended with the duchess on her terrace screaming imprecations as Richardson and Turbeville departed, says her close friend Paul Sinclaire, a fashion editor and executive. On another occasion, she and Richardson concocted an aristocratic lineage for a penniless woman they shot for Bazaar’s Fashion Independent feature, and White was furious when she learned the truth. “There were many situations,” Sinclaire says. Taken together, they propelled Turbeville into shooting pictures of her own.

  In 1966, Turbeville joined the Diplomat, a magazine owned by Igor Cassini, a former society columnist and playboy. Unable to get its photographers to shoot stories as she envisioned them, she herself did a fashion shoot in Yugoslavia. “I went into a store, bought a camera, and the man loaded it for me,” she said. “I took a long lens and everything was out of focus—but the magazine liked them. I learned what I had to when I needed it. Too much technical knowledge can hamper you.” Richard Avedon reportedly saw those photos, saw his own early efforts reflected in them, and invited her to join the Brodovitch Design Workshop classes he taught with Marvin Israel.

  “If it hadn’t been for the two of them, I wouldn’t have taken my photography seriously,” Turbeville said, “because it was so out of focus and terrible. The first evening in class, they held up pictures. They said, ‘It isn’t important to have technique, but you must have an idea or inspiration, and we feel the only one who has it is this person who’s never taken a photograph before.’ I became very unpopular in the class.” She was so intimidated she said she stopped taking pictures for months. But after the Diplomat went out of business, Turbeville went back to taking test photographs.

  Her next stop was Condé Nast’s Mademoiselle, where she became a fashion editor in 1967. “I was able to ask them if ever I could do a sitting of my own and take the pictures,” she’s said. “That’s how I built my portfolio. . . . I didn’t have to earn a living being a photographer at first. . . . Had I been out on my own, I might have had to compromise my work.” Instead, she developed an individual style. “Her models loll about in powdered morning light, glide through opiate afternoon and collapse, neurasthenic, to the hissing of summer lawns,” the critic Brian Dillon wrote of her first exhibit in the UK. “Soft focus functions as a fog of longing, regret and debilitating privilege.”

  By 1975, Turbeville was shooting for Vogue. Soon, Alexander Liberman summoned her to his planning room and assigned her ten pages of bathing suits, “but to do five girls across a double-page spread,” she recalled. “Do something remarkable, dear,” he said. “I’m expecting it.” She’d always been “drawn to bathhouses,” she later wrote, especially old, dilapidated ones. A friend found an abandoned one on East Twenty-Third Street in Manhattan, the Asser Levy
Public Baths, built for New York’s immigrant population at the turn of the twentieth century.

  Its atmosphere, Turbeville wrote, “began to dictate the pictures,” which “became increasingly surreal, bizarre, Marquis-de-Sade in feeling. . . . It all seemed a little sinister, like the women were somehow trapped, isolated . . . lost in their own world. . . . For me, it was just a problem of fitting five girls across a double-page spread.” In another context, she would say the pictures were “done in complete innocence.”

  Clearly, though, the bathhouse photos were something more than a solution to a spatial challenge. Turbeville and the fashion editors Polly Mellen and Frances Patiky Stein made a series of choices beginning with the location, but going against the grain of the typical bathing suit photograph, which emphasized breasts and backsides and healthy, glowing tans. They chose to work with models so thin, they appeared to flirt with anorexia, their hip and pubic bones jutting, and their faces painted with stark white makeup. Whatever their intention (“And I’ve done some controversial stories,” Turbeville allowed), it wasn’t to meet the programmed expectations of the typical fashion-magazine reader. “She was never showing the clothes, and the girls never smiled,” says her longtime agent Marek Milewicz. “She didn’t like beautiful models. She liked models who were a little off.”