Focus

by Michael Gross

  The controversy her pictures generated propelled Turbeville into a position she’d maintain until her death in fall 2013. And almost all her work would bear the hallmarks of those pictures, which remained her best known: a hint of moody narrative; bleak, haunted settings; an atmosphere of chic decay; a certain self-consciousness; a sense of insecurity, embarrassment, isolation, loneliness, or alienation; an illusion of invaded privacy.

  Turbeville worked hard to achieve those effects. As with Newton, the picture came first, not the model’s comfort or her own. Sara Foley-Anderson, an assistant editor at Mademoiselle, did her first shoot with Turbeville at the landfill that is now Battery Park City in lower Manhattan, “not the most appetizing place,” she recalls. Makeup artist Sandy Linter compares a Turbeville shoot with “going on a journey.” They would pick up a location van in front of Condé Nast’s offices, then “wander all day long, looking for locations, old burnt-out buildings. It was exhausting. She was also very quiet but you knew when she liked something. Then she’d let you go at it full on, no rules. What I did with Debbie Turbeville was what all shoots should be.”

  Neither fairy tales nor nightmares, but something in between, Turbeville’s photos represented an intensely interior, resolutely female world, the polar opposite of the harsh colors and glossy perfection of Helmut Newton’s or Guy Bourdin’s. “I am totally different,” she said. “Their exciting and brilliant photographs put women down. They look pushed around in a hard way: totally vulnerable. For me, there is no sensitivity in that. It is the psychological tone and mood that I work for.” But they all shared a feeling of breakthrough, driving the commercial craft of the fashion photo—designed only to catch and stop a viewer’s gaze—steadily into the realm of artistic achievement.

  Chapter 31

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  “PANDEMONIUM, DAY AND NIGHT”

  Through the seventies, the international fashion machine was accelerating, feeding the ever-growing need in image-obsessed Western culture for self-expression through outward display. Inexorably, the we’re-all-in-this-together culture of the sixties gave way to the Me Decade’s obsession with self-image, and fashion, long an elite preoccupation, went mass market. That meant more fashion marketing, which meant more fashion magazines with more editorial and advertising pages and more photographers and models to fill them.

  Giuseppe Della Schiava, known as Peppone, ran a textile company that had been inherited by his wife, which sold fabrics to many French and Italian fashion houses. In 1974, he decided the newish Italian edition of Vogue (Condé Nast had bought and transformed a magazine named Arianna) was insufficiently appreciative of the huge sums he spent on ads, depriving him and the manufacturers who used his textiles of the editorial coverage they felt they deserved. He also liked the company of models, says Daniela Morera, a fashion editor. So he bought the right to publish an Italian edition of Harper’s Bazaar (and other magazines) from the Hearst Corporation.

  Two years later, he recruited a former model, Lizzette Kattan, as his fashion director. The black-haired, brown-eyed Honduran, though petite, had modeled for four years—and Kattan allows that Peppone had his eye on her, but she wasn’t interested. Four months later, Della Schiava’s wife, Patrizia, who was running Italian Cosmopolitan, asked Kattan to become her assistant. A year later, she started styling beauty shoots in Paris.

  “I had a lot of freedom as long as I came home with great shots,” she says. She’d modeled for Steve Hiett, Alex Chatelain, “and all those French guys, so I contacted all my friends in Paris.” She was soon named fashion director of both Italian Cosmo and Bazaar and opened an office in New York. After her first spread with Helmut Newton, she ended up running Bazaar’s French and Italian editions, the local Cosmopolitan, and a Bazaar for men, too. “All of a sudden, there I was with everything in my lap. I really had to perform, and I was twenty-four years old. Peppone had the money and the trust. My life was twenty-four/seven.” For the next fourteen years, she estimates, she produced and published thousands of pages of fashion per month. She was likely the biggest buyer of fashion photos in the world.

  Bryan Bantry introduced her to his client Patrick Demarchelier and to hair and makeup artist clients, and Italian Bazaar quickly became known as a hot magazine that treated talent well. “I couldn’t care less about fashion,” says Kattan. “I wanted amazing pictures, and we were lucky at that time that fashion wasn’t dictating the pages so we could do what we wanted. Photographers were so eager, they’d work day and night” despite pay as low as $50 a page plus expenses. “We gave them freedom,” says Kattan. Though she chose every dress that appeared in the pictures, “I was more interested in the context than the clothes. I knew who would like what, and if the photographers were uncomfortable, I’d change things to give them the security they needed to give me the right product.”

  For years to come, Della Schiava would rent rooms in bulk at hotels in Rome, Milan, and Paris during the seasonal fashion shows and fly in as many top photographers and models as he could to fill them and shoot for fifteen straight days.

  It was “pandemonium, day and night,” says Kattan. “Fifty models, eight photographers, ten stylists,” says photographer Patrice Casanova. “It was Club Med. We would shoot all day and party all night, knocking on doors at three a.m., waking up people, looking for girls. It was nasty laundry. If you brought a girl to Peppone, he wanted to have her. The game was you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. ‘Bring me a girl, I’ll present you to other girls.’ Every night a dinner and the protégé of the day would be moving around.” Kattan says Della Schiava was “having a lot of fun,” and that “a lot of the stories” told about him are true, but some are “inflated” and need to be taken “with a grain of salt. I remember because I wasn’t taking drugs, I wasn’t partying, I was working.”

  For models, Italy had always been the Wild West, a place to test their mettle, and prosper—if they survived their initial hazing. “I was so shocked,” says model Marie Helvin. “The drugs, the sex, everything was so free. And it was almost a given that if you worked with a photographer, you slept with him that night.” It could also get ugly around the randy French Mobsters and their friends. “None of them were friends,” says someone who was there. “They were all fucking each other, stealing each other’s girls, each other’s work, playing games. They’ll kill you in the back.”

  Into the early eighties, the fashion-picture demimonde was often fueled by drugs. Mike Reinhardt liked to smoke pot, but was once arrested in Milan for possession of cocaine while shooting for Peppone. Still, Reinhardt remembered those Bazaar shoots as “heaven on earth,” he says. “The food was great, and I took great pictures, too, because I was completely liberated. There were some pretty crazy evenings,” too. “Girls wouldn’t show up because they were coked out,” says Jacques Malignon. “Most survived but some went down. Some photographers went down, too.” Adds Alex Chatelain, “Everyone was excessive, everyone was hyper. When they were late, they were very late.” Bitten Knudsen, a model with a healthy appetite for drugs, “would come in four hours late, unwashed, dirty,” Chatelain continues. “At times it was really, really impossible. I’d throw her out. She had this attitude: ‘So, what?’ ”

  “I did all that,” confirmed Knudsen, a blue-eyed, blond Dane with fine features, and a smoldering attitude, who died in 2008. “Drugs was a real big part of fashion, especially fashion at the top. It got all-over crazy, all the time. With some photographers, it was the whole crew. With some, it was behind-the-scenes. With some, it was only after work.”

  But Knudsen didn’t like the scene around Peppone: “They were bossing all the girls around, trying to sleep with them at night. Doors would be opened at night and guys would be there. Girls would cry. They’d put you in a car and tell you, you were working with Demarchelier. It disturbed me, being sent around like cattle.”

  The photographers had free reign. Kattan loved German shooter Chris von Wangenheim, whose vision “was all sex and no clothes,”
she says, “and every issue needed that spark. I knew to get the best from Chris, he could only work at night, so we worked from five to five.” She also knew he was snorting cocaine. “Yeah, he had to get his inspiration going and it took a while to do it. It was a matter of understanding what it took to get them going.” Generally speaking, Lizzette Kattan saw no evil: “I never wanted to be involved with the girls. I made it clear I didn’t want to babysit. I didn’t want to know.” But there were nervous breakdowns “every day,” she admits. “Those girls were very, very young.”

  There were exceptions to the ruling insanity besides Elgort. Model Juli Foster worked in Rome for Bazaar with photographer Albert Watson, who insisted on “no drugs, no drinking, and he took most of my best photos,” she said. “He was very strict. You had to be in bed on time and look good.” But ten years after quitting a nine-year-long modeling career in 1985, Foster admitted, “It’s surprising I’m still alive. I fell into the drug culture. You’d go to work and there’d be a dish of cocaine there with most of the photographers I worked with. I’d go out dancing and go straight to work. Albert used to preach to me, ‘What are you doing with your life?’ ” Then she’d go back to work and do more cocaine.

  Chapter 32

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  SHOCK EFFECTS

  Drug and sex insanity wasn’t only a by-product of Italian fashion. And as Tina Bossidy demonstrated at Oui, fashion photographers didn’t only find homes in high-fashion magazines. Dark flowers also bloomed in a venue as unlikely as the sew-at-home magazine Vogue Patterns. In 1975, Marc Balet, an architecture student, scouted locations for Bossidy and Oui in Rome and worked as a translator on a Helmut Newton shoot in England with the Italian actress Dalila Di Lazzaro. “Wow, what’s this world about?” he remembers thinking after watching Newton, who had a toothache and was cranky, drive Di Lazzaro crazy. “She was lying on a board with her head down and her feet up, saying, ‘Could you ask him if I can get up? I’m going to faint.’ Helmut would not relent. I’d say, ‘He’s sorry,’ but of course he wasn’t sorry at all.” Balet was nonetheless enchanted by the “mix of fashion and a macabre sensibility” that Bossidy had engineered. “Helmut realized he could get that into mass magazines. Nobody turns away from that opportunity.”

  Shortly after his return to the States, Balet was hired as the art director of Vogue Patterns. (Though it carried Vogue’s name, the magazine, first sold to Butterick Patterns in 1961, was then owned by the American Can conglomerate.) “It was a catalog operation,” says Balet, “but with the best photographers and models in the world: Elgort, Watson, Demarchelier, Chatelain, Malignon, François Lamy.” Balet sent them all over the world and, back in New York, fed them “the best drugs in town,” he admits. “When I got the job, I had a big office with a studio next door. They said, ‘How do you like to work?’ ‘I work on glass.’ They got me a huge glass table. I did it so I could chop up the coke, snort, and jump on the phone with Bryan Bantry.”

  The photographers adored Balet. “Why not take a drugged-out holiday in Bali?” he says. “The clothes were good enough. I knew dealers. It was a huge party. Albert Watson did not indulge. Everybody else was in on it. We were banned by Pan Am,” which had flown his shoot teams around for free thanks to their tenuous Vogue connection, “because of the insanity on airplanes. It was fun times, man. But it was a business, too. They always brought back the pictures.”

  Balet was closest to Chris von Wangenheim, one of the photographers who fed cocaine to Juli Foster. Born in Germany in 1942, Wangenheim was from a minor German noble family, the son of a cavalry officer who’d won a gold medal riding in the 1936 Berlin Olympics; he was later taken prisoner on the Russian front while fighting for the Nazis and committed suicide in 1953 while still in captivity. Horses and equestrian gear would later figure in his son’s work.

  Chris started taking pictures after his father died and came to America at twenty-three to be a photographer, assisting Bazaar’s Jimmy Moore before opening his own studio. In 1969, he went to Italy and started working for its Bazaar. “I worked with shock effects, which do not have any photographic value, but extended my visual boundaries,” he said. In the seventies, he started shooting for the various Vogues and married a model. They had a daughter five years later.

  Chris’s father had been a Freiherr, or baron, and Wangenheim used the title himself, but he was really more “a martinet,” says fashion editor Ila Stanger. “He could drive you crazy. You never knew how he’d treat people.” That had been the case since he was eleven and shot a photograph of his mother over her strenuous objections. “I realized that getting my picture was more important to me than the discomfort of someone not understanding,” he said.

  He began taking advertising pictures for Christian Dior: images of beautiful women shooting a .38 caliber handgun, riding an inflatable shark, or being bitten by a Doberman, accompanied by copy lines such as “Explosive is your Dior,” “Fairplay is your Dior,” and “Fetching is your Dior.” They reflected the hedonistic mood of his adopted hometown, New York, in the seventies. “The violence is in our culture, so why shouldn’t it be in our pictures?” he asked.

  He was often compared to Helmut Newton, whom he’d met and befriended. “He was infatuated with Newton,” says hairstylist-turned-photographer Hamid Bechiri, who worked with them both, “but he didn’t have the talent. Helmut was a fucking star, a god. Chris was just a photographer.” His adoration of Newton was “obvious,” says Jade Hobson, “but Chris put his own spin on it,” adding menace to Newton’s eroticism. And unlike Newton, who seems to have been a pure voyeur, Wangenheim participated in the lifestyle he portrayed in his photographs. Early in his career, his day job had yet to be overshadowed by night games. But at the end of the seventies, Wangenheim pushed the limits, burning the candle at both ends. “He used to make us do shots for Vogue at night on a treadmill in high heels with a wind machine in our faces. He was crazy,” says Juli Foster. “He was so loaded.”

  Though she’d been warned he was difficult, Sara Foley-Anderson worshipped Wangenheim from the moment she met him, a few years after joining Vogue in 1973. By 1976, she was working on shoots, mostly propping, finding whatever was needed to realize a photographer’s visions. When Wangenheim wanted a photo of an elegant leg in high heels, kicking in a TV screen, “I was throwing the glass, thank you,” Foley says.

  One night at 1:00 a.m., “we’d done Christie Brinkley naked on a horse”—a photograph shot in the service elevator at 100 Fifth where Wangenheim, too, had a studio—“and then we start a shoe picture with a Doberman,” Foley says. The dog on the set was a performer who’d been taught to “talk” by flapping its jaws. But it looked mean. Wangenheim considered the Doberman “a very erotic dog.” The model was wearing a Geoffrey Beene dress, straight off the runway. The dog was coaxed with bits of steak to wrap his mouth around the model’s ankle. “He doesn’t look angry enough,” Wangenheim told the trainer, who wrapped a towel around his hand and got the creature riled up, “and everyone is saying, ‘Beautiful,’ and all of a sudden the dog grabs the dress and literally rips it off,” Foley recalls. “I freaked. I was supposed to bring the dress back.”

  In those years decadent Manhattan came to a head, too, and Wangenheim was an eager and willing participant in its rites and rituals. “Chris was really into S and M and bondage,” says his assistant Rob Penner. “He had a secret love of that world.” Only it wasn’t so secret. “He would talk about it a lot. He went to underground clubs. He’d do tests with girls tied up, in leather, with boots up to their crotches.”

  Penner saw Wangenheim as a groundbreaking photographer, a Helmut Newton protégé whose work, though derivative, had “a unique interpretation. It was the time of Studio 54, cross-dressing, gay sex clubs, experimentation. People were pushing to the edge, and Chris was showing it in a very creative, compositional, gestural way.”

  Penner recalls conflicts with editors who hired Wangenheim precisely because his work pushed the limits, then worried when
they got what they wished for. “He loved to shock,” says Penner. “He always wanted to get a girl to show her breasts. The quicker he could get her clothes off, the better. It wasn’t about clothing. He wants two girls making love and the clothes on a hanger to the side. Like Bourdin, the clothes were a prop. It was about the ambience and the aesthetic.”

  Wangenheim would search for locations with a dedication equal to Turbeville’s, but with a very different goal in mind. “He found unusual places all the time,” says Penner, recalling a fur shoot in the cold room NASA used to test space suits. “It didn’t matter if it made sense. It was shocking and unique. He wanted to be different from everyone else. Vogue pretty much let him do what he wanted to do. The magazines were competing, so they wanted pages that made the magazines jump off the shelves.”

  Sara Foley found the chain-link fence and the AstroTurf that appear in Wangenheim’s famous 1978 nude photographs of the drug-addicted bisexual model Gia Carangi, which were taken after a winter-coat session for Vogue was completed. By 3:00 a.m., Carangi’s hands were bleeding from “climbing up and down the fence,” Foley says. Then, the beautiful makeup artist Sandy Linter took off her clothes and faced Carangi through the fence, and Wangenheim, in heaven, snapped away. Gia later admitted she “fell crazy in love” with Linter that night, and rumors of a lesbian affair ran like wildfire through the gossipy world of fashion. Wangenheim was the one who’d scored, though: not a single shred of clothing was in the resulting pictures, only body heat.

  Foley was excited by those photos, too—and proud to have played a part in them: “I wouldn’t say it was twisted as much as of the time.”

  As the eighties began, Chris von Wangenheim’s star went into eclipse, though he was only thirty-eight years old. He and his wife, Regine, broke up and were fighting an “ugly divorce,” says his nephew Burkhardt von Wangenheim. She’d always “had her own life,” says Penner. And “it was no secret he had a number of mistresses. He was a photographer.”