Focus

by Michael Gross

  Just as famous, if not quite as controversial, was Avedon’s 1981 portrait of the young actress Nastassja Kinski lying naked on a cement floor wrapped in and being kissed by a huge snake. Avedon later described the shoot as “fashion hell,” despite the absence of any clothing whatsoever. “The snake kissed her with his tongue and Dick got the picture and I was crying,” stylist Polly Mellen recalled. “Nothing you planned could equal the random accident,” said Avedon. After its appearance in Vogue that October, Avedon made the image into a poster and sold 2 million copies.

  In 1988, Anna Wintour, newly installed as the latest editor of Vogue, rejected the photograph he’d taken for her first cover—replacing it with a photograph of a model wearing a couture jacket and Guess? jeans, taken outdoors for the inside of the magazine by the up-and-coming German shooter Peter Lindbergh. Tellingly, the editor on the sitting was Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, a flamboyant Frenchwoman who’d joined Vogue in 1985 after a decade at French Elle and was known for the sort of mash-ups of street and couture style that would have flummoxed the hat-and-glove-wearing fashion editors of the past. Wintour clearly relished her break-the-mold mission.

  Wintour wasn’t alone in thinking that Avedon had fallen out of fashion. “The magazines got tired [of his covers] and started rejecting them,” says Wynn Dan, then an art director at Mademoiselle. According to Vince Aletti’s semiofficial history, Avedon “cancelled his [Condé Nast] contract, collected the rest of the money due to him, and walked away.” In that 1992 interview, Avedon gave a more expansive version of what happened. Particulars about his deal with Condé Nast had become a topic of gossip and a point of contention inside the company. “Word went around what I was being paid,” he said. “And it was more than the editor of Mademoiselle was making.” The editor of Mademoiselle was married to the powerful editor of GQ, Art Cooper. “Things got really ugly with the Coopers,” Avedon said.

  Then, “Anna Wintour came in and I went right down, as I did with Grace, and said, ‘Welcome, tell me what you want.’ I had six or seven months left on my contract. I did some cover tries right away. I engraved one. It was changed at the last minute, which was okay. I began to . . .” Avedon paused and started again. “I was having . . .” He paused again. “She didn’t want that cover. I worked on other covers. She didn’t use them. Believe me, I didn’t need another cover of Vogue. I didn’t feel defined by Vogue covers.” They were shot according to a market-tested formula that then mandated big heads, eyes looking at the camera, a tight crop.

  Si Newhouse called Avedon and asked him to lunch at the Grill Room of the Four Seasons, Manhattan’s power lunchroom. “As I was leaving [home], I got a phone call from Jann Wenner [the founder and owner of Rolling Stone]. ‘I hear you’re kicked out of Vogue.’ I figured, that’s what Si wants. I called my lawyer. I’d never had a problem, so I didn’t know what was in my contract. The money was guaranteed.” At lunch, Avedon asked to get business out of the way first.

  Newhouse, who speaks softly and slowly, often seeming to stutter, started to say that some of his magazine editors were . . . “Si, they want other photographers,” Avedon interrupted. “He said, ‘Well, so to speak.’ I said, ‘Fine, if they want me, I’m there.’ I never heard from Anna Wintour again.” His studio had a telephone known as the Vogue phone, “a hotline to Alex,” says Julie Britt. “He took the Vogue phone out.”

  Avedon was likely relieved. “He saw the mass consumption of derivative work,” says Simone Colina, a stylist who worked with him in those years. “Beauty was starting to elude him. He was totally losing his passion for fashion. He’d never had a conundrum before Anna. It was never ‘I’m Richard Avedon.’ But suddenly it was ‘Huh? I invented this and now you’re telling me it’s over?’ He always looked abstractly, and things became less abstract. It was product.”

  Even the models were product. Forced to shoot supermodels for Versace, Avedon had his crew pour a bucket of water on Kate Moss “to separate her from her image,” Colina says. At another Versace shoot, an uppity supermodel tried to instruct him how to light her. After he balked at taking her directions, she scrawled “Asshole” on the dressing room mirror as she left his townhouse. No one had ever treated Avedon like that. Clearly, it was time for a change.

  That summer, Tina Brown, the editor of Vanity Fair and a bitter corporate rival of Wintour’s, was shifted to the top spot at the New Yorker, and in December 1992 she engineered Avedon’s triumphal return to Condé Nast as the magazine’s first staff photographer. Mostly, he did portraits, not fashion, but in 1995, he shot one of his favorite Versace models, Nadja Auermann, posing with a skeleton, in an elaborate macabre fairy-tale fashion portfolio, and the work played on his familiar themes: mortality and the thin line between beauty and darkness. “The fear of death has always been strong in me,” Avedon had said. “This is what’s underneath the beautiful skin in all of us.”

  According to a press release from the Gagosian Gallery, which would later represent his work, the New Yorker pictures “established new historical benchmarks” by “combining design, choreography, acute compositional awareness, and sheer verve.” At the time, they were perceived as a commentary on Avedon’s disillusionment with fashion. Beautiful on the surface, eerily evocative just beneath it, they also marked the last gasp of his career in fashion.

  Richard Avedon died with his boots on, of a cerebral hemorrhage at age eighty-one in 2004, while on an assignment in Texas for the New Yorker. He was working on another portfolio, tentatively entitled “Democracy,” about presidential-election-year politics. A brief New Yorker obituary described it as nothing less than “a survey of America.” He hadn’t lost his grand ambition.

  China Machado had seen Avedon just before his trip, and “he told me he was going to die,” she says. But that didn’t mean he was going to stop working or planning his next portrait session. “He called me that morning,” says the photographic impresario Lawrence Schiller, who’d met Avedon while mounting his Marilyn Monroe show. “The word was out that I knew Charles Manson. He asked about photographing him. That afternoon, I heard he’d died.”

  The New Yorker obituary continued, “He was getting ready to take one more portrait when life fled from him. If to know him was to feel in the presence of the sun, to look back on his life is to see that what we really experienced was the track of a comet: breaking barriers between spheres, shattering fixed orbits, bringing joy and amazement and portents of change to those looking on below, and coming to rest at last in earth, still fully alight.”

  Those words, penned by a close friend, reveal Avedon controlling his own narrative even in death. Which was hardly surprising given its complex, insecure, but acutely self-aware subject, one who’d once admitted, “The minute you pick up a camera you begin to lie—or to tell your own truth.”

  * * *

  I. Guy Bourdin had made a splash with a sexually charged 1976 Bloomie’s lingerie catalog called Sighs and Whispers. Mailed out free to store customers at the time, it now fetches hundreds of dollars a copy at auction.

  Chapter 35

  * * *

  IT GETS REPETITIVE

  In the wake of Elle’s tremendous success in the late eighties, its editors came and went. Though media watchers would continue to obsess over fashion magazine editors, Elle’s success was the first sign that their marketplace power was waning. Regis Pagniez and Gilles Bensimon, however, seemed to be omnipotent and forever. Editors only had sovereignty over the front of Elle; the central features section was off-limits. The first editor lasted one issue, the second, six months. Number three lasted two years. Her five successors lasted nine months, three years, two and a half, one and a half, and one and a half years, respectively. Elle’s text, such as it was, was scorned. “The look of the magazine was easy for me, but the text in English is not my thing, like you can heard,” Pagniez says.

  Pagniez brooked no arguments from women; at night, he was often seen with girls. Fashion editors came and went, too, sometimes dramatically. Up
on the departure of one, a gossip item blamed the “tyrannical” Pagniez and Bensimon. “Gilles runs the place,” an anonymous source said. Photographers sniped, too. Pagniez acknowledges what they said at the time: by the late eighties, Bensimon had become so integral to Elle that no one could compete with him. And when they tried, he pushed back. “Gilles, evil Gilles, got jealous and tried to get rid of him,” stylist Jane Hsiang says of Bill King.

  “I knew something was wrong,” Pagniez admits. “Gilles made too many pictures. But it was easier for me.” Bensimon’s pictures didn’t do it for the fashion set, but they made money on newsstands. Other photographers say Elle ran photos by Bensimon, credited to others, even dead people. Detractors say he did it for his ego, or his pocketbook. But it’s possible he was simply trying to give the impression that others shot for Elle, too. “People think we don’t want other photographers,” Bensimon would say in 2000. “We are starving for photographers.”

  In the early nineties, a recession set in, advertising revenues declined, and Elle’s fortunes fell with them. Ad pages, revenues, and profits tumbled. Filipacchi put David Pecker, a number cruncher, in charge. “Elle was an island,” Pecker says. “That’s the way Regis wanted it.” Pecker began pressing Pagniez to change Elle. Some think Pecker was also working on Bensimon. If Pagniez wouldn’t play nice with touchy advertisers, someone had to.

  Gilles stepped up to the plate. By 1992, Elle had not only recovered, but surpassed Tony Mazzola’s Harper’s Bazaar to become the number two American fashion magazine, and Bensimon was rewarded. Hachette rented him a downtown studio, helped finance a house in the Hamptons, and gave him the title of creative director. “So many large expenditures,” Pecker says, “all paid back. He built relationships. He stood by his word. He made a statement.” He was Pecker’s big, swinging dick.

  Meantime, Elle Macpherson was in demand—in February 1989, she appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s twenty-fifth anniversary swimsuit issue. Gilles was usually in the office, or else away on shoots. “We become hard to fit with each other,” he says. She says Elle was a cross she had to bear. “I couldn’t work for anybody else.”

  Then Gilles found another big, busty model, Rachel Williams, whom he repeatedly featured in Elle. Macpherson won’t comment on reports from the time that she called Bensimon’s hotel room on a location shoot—and left him after Williams answered the phone. “We were already split,” says Bensimon. “We had already decided to live a different life.”

  “He had a midlife crisis, what can I tell you?” Macpherson says of their 1990 separation. “Whatever happened after that is his business. I have fantastic memories. We’re not not friends.”

  And her ex’s equipment? “All I can say is, my memory is . . . clouded.”

  Rachel Williams dumped Bensimon in mid-1991. “Gilles was madly in love with Rachel,” says Mike Reinhardt. “When they broke up, he was just crushed.” For a year, Gilles wrote to Williams almost every day, imploring her to come back. She’d become a star, too, but he says she wasn’t happy: “It was complicated. Sometimes an instant success kills you because you expect it to continue, but it doesn’t. When she was not working, she was staying at home, not eating, not listening to music, not watching TV, naked with two cats in the dark. It broke my heart.”

  Then he met Kelly Killoren on a go-see. The big-boned Midwest blonde had been modeling from the time she was fifteen. Her agent told her to keep her distance, but she couldn’t. “I knew who he was dating by the covers,” she says. They spoke on the phone all the time, and he would take her for rides on his motorcycle in Paris and invite her skiing every Christmas. They dated for five years before they were married at the home of hairdresser Frédéric Fekkai. “With Kelly, I am more light, more myself,” Bensimon said while still married.

  She said, “I don’t want to get into details, but he was alluring. He’d endured while others fell by the wayside. He’s not a player. He’s stable, grounded, encouraging.” She didn’t worry about his reputation. “He loves women. Why do you think the dynamic works so well at Elle?” She recalled how he cooked for her every night while she studied for a degree at Columbia. “He says the only thing that’s important to him is his family.” And then she started to cry.

  The marriage seemed to be the end of Bensimon’s midlife model-go-round. “We’ve all done that,” says Reinhardt (whom model Bonnie Pfeifer memorably describes as “a turnstile”). “The models are great and all that, but once you’ve been around it thirty years, it gets repetitive.”

  Meantime, Regis Pagniez dropped from view. He took a leave of absence for treatment of prostate cancer, and in his absence Bensimon tasted life as Elle’s top frog. When Pagniez returned, “He wanted like it was in the past,” Bensimon says. “I took a low profile.” But David Pecker was impressed by what he’d seen, so after Pagniez inevitably clashed with editor in chief number ten, a former Vogue editor, and she was replaced in 1996, Bensimon’s star rose again. He’d taken up Pecker’s challenge to be more “connected to what was happening in fashion,” he says. He moved from freelancer to profit-sharing employee, became a regular at fashion shows, and began running meetings of the fashion staff. Tales of terrorized fashion girls soon leaked out. Bensimon insisted, “I keep my opinions to myself because I don’t wear dresses. I listen. I try to understand why they like that so much.”

  In 1997, Daniel Filipacchi sold his shares in Hachette, and Pagniez found himself “naked,” he says. Then something happened that upset him terribly. “I don’t know if he wanted to stay, but he quit,” Bensimon says. Pecker says nothing to allay the impression that he pitted protégé against mentor. “As Gilles took on more and more, Regis wanted to do less,” Pecker says. “People create something and then want it to fail when they’re not around anymore. I don’t think he expected Gilles to do as well as he did.”

  Friends said Pagniez was angry at his protégé—but he denied it. “I have nothing against him. I left him a very good tool. But this is past. I stop to think about magazine. I think it was a little too long for me. Now, I don’t care. I don’t look at magazines.”

  Bensimon was rewarded with Pagniez’s title, but not his power; editor in chief number eleven reported to a Pecker deputy. Then, less than a year later, Pecker quit, too. Bensimon still did as he liked. “The essential nature of Gilles Bensimon in the Elle DNA is not overlooked,” said Pecker’s replacement, Jack Kliger.

  Kelly Bensimon briefly left Gilles in 1999, but they reconciled and stayed together another seven years. After they split, Kelly appeared on The Real Housewives of New York City, though she was no longer a wife. Gilles was linked to several models, Pablo Picasso’s granddaughter Diana, and a Belgian countess. Bensimon was also divorced from Elle magazine and replaced two years after he and Kelly split. Robbie Myers finally ran her magazine. “I never asked to be director of a magazine,” Bensimon said at the time. “I was only photography director. The first day I got the position . . . I go, ‘Oh, my gosh, that’s a mistake.’ ” In 2011, he sued Elle to recover negatives he believed the magazine had lost, a dispute later settled confidentially. Thereafter, he stayed out of the news, although he still shoots glamorous, sexy pictures—and in spring 2016, even appeared in French Elle.

  Once something or someone becomes fashionable, fashion, inevitably, seeks the next fashion. Gilles Bensimon had fallen out of fashion, but he waved that away with Gallic froideur: “I can’t even remember why I stopped working with them. I think they just wanted something different.” He left just in time; the magazine business, already troubled, was about to be savaged by new realities.

  Part 5

  * * *

  DOMINATION

  I never spent my career thinking, “I’ve got to work for a fashion magazine.”

  —BRUCE WEBER

  Chapter 36

  * * *

  “When you’re young, you’re gold”

  In summer 1985, Bruce Weber, a thirty-nine-year-old photographer best known for homoerotic
fashion imagery, began a shoot for British Mohair, the marketing arm of a cooperative of Angora-goat breeders, at 7:00 a.m., on the grounds of his home in Bellport, New York. By ten, five nude bodies crawled over each other on a couch covered with the client’s fabric. Five nude babies, that is. Five mothers stood behind the sofa, distracting the crying infants with bottles and toys. Weber crouched before the babies, moving them in and out of the shot like a basketball manager.

  At one thirty, several vans headed to a second location. There, the setup featured a bare-chested seventeen-year-old male model, his hips and legs swaddled in mohair. Weber moved him from a barn to a tree and had the fabric soaked as he searched for his shot.

  Behind the photographer, Mohair’s British adman, Vernon Stratton, began to fret: “I’m very nervous on this shot. I can’t make up my mind about men identifying with this. He takes millions of pictures, and you just need one, so you have to keep quiet and wait to the end. One thing about Bruce Weber pictures, they’re always memorable. When the committee sees it . . .” Stratton raised his eyebrows. “At the moment, it’s completely wrong for what the fabric is. Mind you, I’m not looking down the camera.” Between frames, the model hung from a tree trunk, a mohair-clad Tarzan. Weber begged him to freeze and shot till the model literally dropped. Stratton was ecstatic. The copy for the ad, he explained, would be “ ‘Back to nature.’ This is fine, fantastic, superb,” he exulted. “That’s the thing about waiting.”

  “I’m on,” said Elisabetta Ramella, the model for the third shot at 4:00 p.m. as Weber’s team tromped out into a field. “Did you bring the bug spray?” someone asked as Ramella stripped behind a blanket. Wrapped in a sarong of fabric, she lay on the ground. By 5:00 p.m., the light was softening. Ramella’s eyelids were fluttering as she tired. Weber stood her up. She complained of bugs biting her bare feet. “We’ll do this quickly,” Weber promised, then let Didier Malige, his hairstylist, spend long minutes arranging three more bolts of fabric as towering turbans on the model’s head. As Weber’s stylist, Grace Coddington, on loan from her latest job as fashion director of British Vogue, pulled the sarong down to nearly uncover one of Ramella’s breasts, a blush crossed the model’s blue-veined, white skin. She clutched prickly branches to her bare décolleté.