Focus

by Michael Gross

  He’d lost advertising accounts, too, such as Versace and Dior to Richard Avedon, reportedly because of a growing cocaine habit that saw him kicked to the curb even by the notoriously louche crew at Italian Bazaar. “There was not a lot of coke at first,” says Penner, “but after a year, he was doing it before jobs, doing it in the middle of jobs. It was very much part of his life. He was also a wine enthusiast, without a doubt an alcoholic, a bottle a day if not more.” Wangenheim stayed in control while working, “but after hours he got a little crazy,” Penner says.

  Then came a shift in the prevailing winds of fashion against his brand of kinky chic. Three years earlier, his handgun Dior ad was pulled from magazines after the Son of Sam mass murders. “Violence in fashion is over,” he told American Photo magazine. “At the time it seemed worthwhile to make a statement about it. Now, advertising is going through a very conservative period.”

  Like so many photographers before him, he decided it was time to publish a book. He summoned Marc Balet to his studio, where he had spread a hundred pictures on a table. “I saw a Polaroid of a girl I knew he was fucking in a tight dress with an amazing ass, walking away from the camera in an empty ballroom, slugging champagne,” says Balet. “And I looked and I looked and I swept all the other pictures on the floor. They scatter everywhere.” Wangenheim was horrified. Had Balet lost his mind?

  “They looked too Helmut-y,” says Balet. He wasn’t even interested in the famous Dior photos. “Chris had more to say than that. I wanted him to have his own image, to lose forever that image of him with Helmut.” Balet suggested a book that Wangenheim would have to shoot almost from scratch, called Women Alone. “Start here,” Balet said, pointing at the Polaroid. One day not long after that, Wangenheim told Balet he was going away on a job. In fact, “he went off on a tryst,” Balet says. Late in 1980, he’d spotted Marie-Christine Starfield at a SoHo gallery. She was in mourning for a husband who’d just died. “I wasn’t paying attention,” she says, but a mutual friend told her, “Chris flashed on you.” A week later, a whole gang went to the Mudd Club after a dinner party. Marie-Christine was upset, so Wangenheim took her outside to comfort her. Back in the club, she went to the bathroom “and ended up falling apart again,” she says. When she emerged, he was gone, but the bartender waved her over and handed her a note with his name, address, and phone number.

  A dinner followed. “At the end of the evening, Chris looked at me and signaled, ‘Come up with me,’ and that was the beginning of our relationship,” Starfield says. “I didn’t know who he was. He wanted to take pictures of me. I couldn’t care less. He mentioned to me, ‘You know, I’m really good at what I do.’ He was very humble and unpretentious. I knew famous artists. I’m not impressed with it. But he showed me a Playboy with [his photo of] Raquel Welch [on the cover], and I realized he had to be very good at what he does.”

  Marie-Christine shared everything with him—even S&M: “We went through using the paraphernalia in pictures and in life. He liked the leather. It’s fun. It’s fun to have role play. We were not hurting each other. The violence was a representation of something he found beautiful. He wasn’t sadistic. It’s the look of it.”

  In March 1981, he took her to Saint Martin. On their sixth day on the island, they had dinner and, while driving back to their hotel, crashed into a light pole. Six days later, Marie-Christine came out of a coma in a hospital. Chris had been declared dead on arrival there. Marie-Christine, who was incorrectly described in the local newspaper as his wife, had also suffered a broken leg. After a month in the hospital, she learned that his wife, Regine, in the meantime “took everything,” she says, speaking of Wangenheim’s archives and belongings. “I was not going to fight at that point. I didn’t want to scare [their daughter] Christine. I loved her.”

  For more than three decades, Wangenheim’s photographs and his legacy were in limbo. His not-quite-ex “never wanted to do anything,” thinks Marie-Christine. “I don’t know if it was about me. She didn’t like Chris.” But Regine was still his wife, and under the terms of his will she got $50,000 outright and half of the rest of his estate, which was valued at almost $325,000. Daughter Christine got the rest—and finally allowed a book of his photographs to be published in fall 2015. It includes an image of Marie-Christine, but ends with two pictures of daughter Christine at her mother’s feet.

  Chapter 33

  * * *

  EXPOSING HIMSELF

  Gilles Bensimon lived with the stylist Douce de Andia for eight years through the end of the seventies. Rich and happy-go-lucky, he was like the little brother of the other Frenchies. They sometimes even called him Little Ben. But finally, he started acting like a fashion photographer. It was as if he’d just discovered his sexuality and felt compelled to show it off. Another set of rumors started then; the worst have him regularly exposing himself to models. “You know, those are models talking,” says Uli Rose, “but I wouldn’t put it past him. Gilles comes up with the craziest shit.”

  Mike Reinhardt thinks the ill-endowed Pierre Houlès started the weenie-wagger rumors. “There was an incident. I think it happened in the Bahamas,” Reinhardt says. “But I don’t know if that’s true. I do not believe he was regularly exposing himself. But Pierre was always impressed with his endowment and was always talking about it.”

  Gilles wasn’t only showing it off. “He was cruising the girls a lot, but a lovely, simple guy,” says Stephane Lanson, then a model agent. “From some of my models I heard he was quite nice in bed. Very well equipped. And a fabulous photographer.”

  Bensimon doesn’t broadcast his conquests but acknowledges them when asked: “The girls liked me. I liked them, too.” A story went around Paris that he broke up with de Andia after he bedded the Southern beauty Rosemary McGrotha, who went on to play a female president in a famous series of Donna Karan ads.

  “That’s not true,” McGrotha says, almost shrieking. Though they worked together when she was nineteen and just starting out, he put her on an Elle cover that launched her career, and she admits, “I may have had a crush on him,” they were never lovers. But at that moment, Bensimon’s romantic focus abruptly turned to models.

  Just like Pascha, Douce de Andia betrays no bitterness and points out that she helped Bensimon a lot: “He began to be a great photographer with me. I worked a lot with him.” She knew he liked models. “A lot. It’s normal. But I was very happy with Gilles. At the end, it was not so good for many reasons. We finished our story together. I met another man. A happy end, you know? It’s important to say that.” Their breakup coincided with a new beginning for Bensimon, the launch of an American edition of Elle.

  Regis Pagniez was working in the art department of Marie Claire, a Paris fashion magazine, when he met Daniel Filipacchi, who was then a radio deejay. In 1960, he recruited Pagniez to help launch a pop magazine. Over the next two decades, Pagniez ran the ever-expanding, centralized art department of a growing Filipacchi empire, directing visual magazines such as Photo and Lui. At each, he tended to favor a single photographer. “Regis doesn’t like to speak to a lot of people,” says Anne-Marie Périer, once the editor of French Elle, whose brother Jean-Marie shot for Pagniez.

  In 1978, in partnership with Rolling Stone founder, Jann Wenner, Filipacchi and Pagniez moved to New York to relaunch the moribund Look, where Stanley Kubrick and Bert Stern once worked. “We had difficulties,” Pagniez admits. “I didn’t understand at that time how to do an American magazine. It was not a failure. We sold seven hundred thousand copies of the last two or three issues.” Nonetheless, Filipacchi decided to pull the plug after losing about $10 million. The experience rankled.

  In 1980, Jean-Luc Lagardère, whose Matra conglomerate manufactured everything from arms to automobiles and owned the radio station where Filipacchi had been a deejay, bought Hachette, the fading, family-owned French magazine company that published Elle. Lagardère asked Filipacchi to be his partner, running all their magazines. Elle “was in very bad shape,” says Pagniez
. “We had to put Elle on track. It took four year, but it start really quickly.” Now, along with Oliviero Toscani and Marc Hispard, Gilles became a member of the Elle inner circle gathered around Pagniez.

  In 1983, Bloomingdale’s was planning a promotion called Fête de France and asked Elle to produce an English-language magazine for the event. Hachette printed an extra one hundred thousand copies for newsstand sales. When it did well, two more biannual American issues were produced by the Elle team in France. Then, in partnership with Rupert Murdoch, Filipacchi sent Pagniez to New York to begin publishing Elle monthly.

  Pagniez had decided that it would be a purely visual, pure fashion magazine, without the news stories or lifestyle features that fill out its French parent. But he immediately faced a problem; after seeing the byline of Bill King, one of Vogue’s top photographers, in Elle’s first issues, executives at Condé Nast made it clear to its photographers that if they worked for Elle, they would no longer be in Vogue. That ban has continued for years.

  In 1984, Gilles went to Tahiti for French Elle to take pictures of a nineteen-year-old, six-foot-tall Australian named Elle Macpherson. She’d been forced on him by one of French Elle’s fashion editors, but something clicked and he followed her back to New York. “She was really cool and Douce drive me nuts at the same time,” he says. “I tried to fix it with Douce, but she was a nightmare, so I said, ‘Okay, I’ll go back to this thing in New York.’ ” Macpherson says the “little photographer from French Elle” romanced her for six months.

  “She was a great girl—always ready for anything,” Gilles says of Elle, the model. Like all his other women, she says he taught her a lot. She convinced him to stay in America “because she wanted her career in America,” says Pagniez. Bensimon decided to stay three years. Briefly, he switched to Condé Nast. “But the first story he do was a big flop,” Pagniez says, laughing. “I thought Gilles will call me, and Gilles called me.” He wanted to come home and be an Elle photographer again. “Like he was,” says Pagniez, “like he is.” He emerged as Elle’s chief photographer. “He was the only person I could call every day,” says Pagniez. “His thing was Elle. He was born with Elle. And at that point, it was very important for the magazine to have its own style.”

  Bensimon’s pictures cemented Macpherson’s fame. They got married. “People thought I owned the magazine,” Bensimon says. “That it was named after my wife. There were many, many, many stories.” Nobody knew the big one. It was Elle vs. Elle. Bensimon was spending more time with Pagniez than with his wife. The two Frenchmen shared the same tastes, lived in the same building in Greenwich Village, ate breakfast together every morning, rode to the office in the same car, and talked on the phone when they weren’t together. “We grew up in the same way, we have the same Catholic school, we even have the same teacher,” Bensimon says. “It was painful for Elle because I was always with Regis. I think we fell in love with each other.”

  Bensimon also fell in love with Elle, the magazine: “I got excited. Right away, I realize the possibilities. I’d always dreamed of being an art director, to have a magazine. Always, from the beginning, I was thinking, ‘I want to decide.’ ”

  By 1987, Elle’s circulation had hit 782,000 copies a month, an increase of 300 percent in three years. The magazine won two National Magazine Awards that year—for design and general excellence. Hachette’s June 1988 purchase of Diamandis Magazines for $712 million, and its buyout that September of Murdoch’s stake in Elle for $157 million, added a big debt burden. But the magazine was a juggernaut, with fifteen international editions by the end of 1989. Its unprecedented success also had an unintended consequence, toppling both the Queen of Fashion and the long-reigning King of Fashion Photography.

  Chapter 34

  * * *

  STOP AND STARE

  Richard Avedon’s last Vogue fashion portfolio—mostly studio shots of Paris couture—occupied twenty-two pages in the October 1984 issue. His concept was to pair sedate location pictures with minimal styling on pages facing color studio photos with extravagant clothing, hair, and makeup. At a lunch at Closerie de Lilas, Grace Mirabella and Polly Mellen worried the idea wouldn’t work, and Avedon, “in the nicest way possible, said, ‘Fine, I’ll pack and head back to New York,’” says J. P. Masclet, who’d been hired to assist him. “I don’t think he really cared. It was my way or the highway. They backed down completely and he shot it the way he wanted.”

  Still, Avedon’s fashion photography had suffered. Much of it was banal, such as the catalogs he shot for Bloomingdale’s.I Some was more memorable for its ubiquity (his print ad campaigns for the brash Italian designer Gianni Versace, which continued for years) or its cockeyed ambition (the series of playful TV and print ads he concocted with Doon Arbus in 1982 for the Christian Dior brand, which aped and mocked the popular evening soap operas Dallas and Dynasty, telling the story of a fictional Dior family). But Avedon could still blaze new paths.

  His most influential fashion accomplishments in those years were other television commercials. In the early seventies, just after the death of Coco Chanel, her company, which was privately owned by a Swiss family, hired Avedon to direct television commercials and print ads starring David Bailey’s wife, Catherine Deneuve, then barely known in America. She’d refused to even discuss posing for the brand until Avedon had a letter slipped under her hotel-room door, explaining that the company wanted her and her alone. Deneuve didn’t like that Chanel herself had cozied up to the Nazis in Paris during World War II, but neither had Avedon, who’d contrived to photograph Chanel in 1948 beneath a poster referring to Adolf Hitler. And Avedon promised Deneuve the campaign, written by Arbus, would be like no other. “She finally said yes, and it was his first successful commercial,” says Nick la Micela, who worked at Chanel’s agency.

  Avedon also directed and starred in a series of exquisitely silly ads, rarely seen in America, for Jun Ropé, a Japanese fashion brand, which featured models such as Veruschka, Anjelica Huston, Jean Shrimpton, and Lauren Hutton, and real fashion stylists, gently mocking their own world. He did something similar, but with far more impact, for the American designer Calvin Klein, beginning in 1980. His first Calvin ad, starring fifteen-year-old actress/model Brooke Shields, opens with the camera lovingly climbing one denim-clad leg, then revealing the rest of her, knees spread wide and crotch on display, as she whistles “Oh My Darling, Clementine.” Then, she looks up and intones the memorable lines “Want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”

  Klein had been doing significant advertising since 1978. A year earlier, he’d licensed his name to an apparel manufacturer for a jeans line. Though he’d made jeans before that, they were quite high priced, and he wanted to compete in the new category called status jeans. At first, Klein worked with an ad agency called Epstein Raboy, which bought a billboard in Times Square to announce the launch of the new Calvin Klein jeans; Charles Tracy’s photograph of model Patti Hansen on her hands and knees, flaunting her splendid rear end in skintight jeans and a silk blouse, caused a sensation. Sales of the jeans exploded, and Klein’s advertising budget did, too, growing from $4 million a year to $22 million in the mideighties.

  In 1979, Klein moved his business to the boutique ad agency Scali, McCabe, Sloves, a “hot shop” that produced a pool of television commercials for the jeans line that debuted on the Academy Awards show the following spring. But Klein didn’t like the ads, so late in 1980, he poached Scali’s account supervisor, and Rochelle Udell, the art director who’d worked at Vogue through most of the seventies, to start an in-house ad agency he named CRK, his initials. “He wanted breakthrough, out-of-the-box advertising,” says a Calvin Klein employee of that time. “He wanted controversial press-generating creative.” Klein also chose and worked one-on-one with Avedon and Arbus. Avedon had shot Shields for Vogue and suggested her as the model.

  The spots that resulted were ripe with sexual innuendo: “I’ve got seven Calvins in my closet, and if they could talk, I’
d be ruined,” Shields says in another. In a third, she says, “Reading is to the mind what Calvins are to the body.” Depending upon the source, Klein paid Shields between $500,000 and $800,000. It was also reported that he bought her an $80,000 horse. Arbus was reportedly paid $100,000. Avedon’s compensation went unrecorded. Klein and his jeans licensee reportedly bought more than $5 million of airtime. The CBS affiliate in Los Angeles banned four of the spots. Feminists were outraged. “Mission accomplished,” says the Calvin Klein executive. Klein emerged as the category leader, selling 2 million pairs of jeans a month.

  A second cycle of thirteen similarly silly yet provocative Avedon-Arbus-Calvin ads debuted on the 1983 Oscar broadcast. They starred young actresses and models including Martha Plimpton, Shari Belafonte, Lauren Helm, and Andie MacDowell, spouting seemingly spontaneous, solipsistic pseudo-profundities, ostensibly reflecting both the girls’ personalities and the lifestyle aspirations of their target audience, eighteen- to forty-nine-year-olds in urban markets who wanted more from life than a pair of Levi’s. As arresting as a car crash, the ads were milestones in the history of image marketing, selling a mood and an ideal. The products being sold, while seemingly secondary, were actually tools that let consumers feel part of a particular fantasy. Specifically, Avedon and Klein were telling viewers that if they bought a pair of the jeans, they, too, would be sexy and glamorous. Designed to provoke, with their emphasis on blatant teenage sexuality, they demanded you stop and stare and helped turn Calvin into a cultural icon, one unafraid to reflect the world as he saw it, even if the sights and sounds actually came from Avedon and Arbus.