Sybille’s death was the start of a decade-long decline that saw Bourdin cut off relations with family and friends and suffer professional setbacks. He was repeating himself, and so was Vogue Paris, his primary editorial outlet, which, by the mideighties, was derided in avant-garde fashion circles as Vogue Putain, a magazine for prostitutes and women who dressed like them. “He slowed down a magazine,” the photographer Wayne Maser observed. “Your eyeballs would hurt.”
Bourdin seemed determined to erase himself, too, “adamantly” refusing to give interviews or publish books, says Masclet, to sell prints to collectors or, in one notable case in 1985, accept the Grand Prix National de la Photographie, a prize (accompanied by $9,000) previously awarded to such eminences as Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész, and Robert Doisneau. “I think Guy liked doing the work, liked that it was disposable, and didn’t feel it was great art,” says Masclet.
In 1988, Bourdin developed debilitating stomach pains that were diagnosed the next year as cancer. He died two years later at sixty-two, leaving behind a big tax bill, an archive stuffed in bags and cardboard boxes, and an estate dispute pitting his son against his common-law wife. Another ten years passed before his son was able to publish a book of his father’s work.
In 1981, at age sixty-one, Helmut Newton moved from Paris to a condominium in Monte Carlo. It was an unlikely home for an icon of fashion, “the fucking dodgiest apartment you’ve ever seen,” says Paul Sinclaire, who had it photographed for House & Garden magazine. “A brown Naugahyde sofa, doilies and maple furniture, a big TV with a vase on top with plastic mums, but behind it, one of his Charlotte Rampling portraits. It was like visiting somebody’s aunt in Coney Island.”
Junie and Helmie, as the Newtons called each other, spent winters at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood. Both their adopted hometowns were places where he could indulge his tastes for near-plastic beauty and upper-class decadence. “It’s a world I know well and I feel at home in, so why bother to search further?” Newton asked Peter Adam, a German-born biographer and documentarian, who considered him “deliciously vulgar, earthy and elegant.” Thanks to the success of White Women and succeeding books, Newton was a living legend, “the top Teutonic,” says Masclet, who also assisted him. Unlike Bourdin, he accepted prestigious awards, exploited his archives by publishing often, regularly mounted gallery shows and massive retrospective exhibitions, and continued to shoot for magazines and for himself. “He was a complex man, but very straightforward,” says Masclet. “He knew exactly what he wanted.” Where Bruce Weber would shoot hundreds of rolls of film, “Helmut hated editing and shot a half a roll, a roll, max,” says Masclet. “His reputation was such that subjects put themselves in a Helmut frame of mind, so they were primed to be Newton photographs.”
Clients liked him, too. “Helmut was a crazy man,” says art director Nick la Micela. “He was hard to control, but he liked money. He’d shoot anywhere if the money was right. He’d always try to sneak something exotic in, though, and I had to bring him back. They’re like wild horses and it was my ass if it didn’t work.” But la Micela appreciated Newton’s sense of humor, which “you’d never expect from a German. He once called me and said he was going to a sex-toy shop. ‘Can I bring you a blowup doll?’ He’d dress as a nun and his wife would shoot him. He’d dress in drag in World War One outfits. I saw humor in the most exotic, erotic pictures he shot.”
Newton kept going, laughing all the way, until the day he died early in 2004 after crashing his Cadillac into a wall outside the Chateau Marmont garage. Friends believed he’d had another heart attack. His last story for American Vogue, published posthumously that March, opened with a two-page spread of the bathing-suit-clad model Daria Werbowy resting not quite peacefully on a bed of nails.
Chris von Wangenheim died by misadventure, Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton of natural causes. Tall, blond, and lately bearded, with his quiet demeanor, Bill King would symbolize his era—unwillingly—as the most famous fashion photographer to die of AIDS. His work has since been almost forgotten, his closest friends believe, because his heirs couldn’t accept his lifestyle and challenged his will, taking his most significant asset, his pictures, away from the only people who cared about their maker and his visual legacy despite his myriad character flaws.
Many photographers compartmentalize their lives. King made compartmentalization his second art form. For years, he’d lived two lives. “It may have always been there, but it became evident in the late seventies,” says fashion editor Betty Ann Grund. “He’d go to the Anvil and they’d have to carry him home.” Or, he’d be found high on coke, crawling through the aisles of a gay porno movie theater or tied up in Central Park.
By day, he had his pristine studio and his white-coated assistants, his wind machine, squirt guns, and white seamless paper, and he attracted models who could act and celebrities who glittered and took pictures of them gesturing, jumping, laughing, and screaming and generally seeming as happy, excited, and beautiful as anyone else on earth. Bill King’s pictures were a party you longed to join.
King’s nights seemed the same. After its opening in April 1977, he was a fixture at the disco Studio 54, where his favorite models, girls such as Janice Dickinson and Ashley Richardson, were superstars, and a closeted gay man could let loose among like-minded friends. “The mouthwatering, handsome, narcissistic people were chasing one sensation after another, living in a permanent adolescence,” wrote the BBC’s Peter Adam, another promiscuous gay man, who met and befriended King. “There was sex everywhere, in the seats, in the aisles, in the lavatory . . . anonymous wild sex. . . . It was not only the homosexual community that had gone crazy, drunk with a desire to live wildly. . . . It was like an enormous comedy of manners being acted out in public. . . . Everybody was a part of the ‘famous for one night’ generation.”
Adam and King shared private jets and expensive meals with the “brazen, stylish, sometimes vulgar” fashion set, Adam wrote in a memoir. “Bill basically despised this world of insubstantial and shifting characters, jetsam and flotsam of a trendy tide, but he was fascinated by it.” Adam gained access to King’s private studio office, “shared only with a few friends” who were allowed to see the nudes he shot on his own time, “pictures of rare strength and singular vision,” and agreed to help him author a book including his photos and life story, but King could never focus on it.
“His fortune and success were often overshadowed by melancholia and doubts, which he drowned in an excess of temptations,” Adam wrote. “Underneath the unassuming exterior lay many passions and curiosities. Bill loved danger and used to say: ‘I work hard and I play hard.’ He was the entrance to a darker life, to evenings with Robert Mapplethorpe, visits to apartments filled with strange characters selling drugs and sex. If I know much about the horrors of drugs and the destruction they do, I know it through him, watching him ‘crashing’ at my doorstep.” Only later would Adam decide that King was engaged in a “mad dance of death.”
In 1980, King had been lured to Vogue, where he became more than ever the go-to photographer for models seeking exciting pictures. “He was wild,” said the model Bitten Knudsen. “He was obviously gay, but he had relationships with certain models because he’d get turned on to them. He was one of the best photographers ever. It was all about energy. He never hired anybody who wasn’t great. He wanted models who would go a step further.”
That his pictures resembled Avedons, but without subtext or depth, was a plus in the Mirabella years. So celebrities were among King’s greatest acolytes; his kinetic images (he’d started shooting covers for Rolling Stone in 1975) glorified theirs, making them glow with magnetic force. Bill King’s career was a party you wanted to join, too.
His assistants had a different view. “He was definitely on fire,” says Kevin Hatt, who joined the studio in the mideighties and lasted six months, “which seemed like a year. Every day was a twelve-hour day for fifty dollars a day. Once you burned out, you got kicke
d out.” But before that, Hatt got an education, doing three or four jobs a day. “It was not a relaxed place to work. It was very particular, very tense, and Bill created that. The set was always quiet. You’d be standing around waiting for him.” His first assistant would shoot tests and bring him Polaroids until he approved of the lighting. Then, with a nod, he’d set things in motion, the studio lights would snap off, the fans would come on, and with “motions, gestures, nervousness, tension,” Hatt says, King and the camera assistant behind him, handing him cameras and checking settings, would “try to find and capture chaos.” Behind King’s back, the assistants called his studio the Wild Kingdom.
“He got a real kick out of those pictures of people going wild,” says the model Shelley Smith. “Every picture was wildly energetic, and he got his kicks almost out of exhausting you. It wasn’t the picture; it was watching you get exhausted. It had some strange undertones. It’s pretty wild that he had that much control. There was some pathology there with women, but I have to say, he was always wonderful with me. He played with those who would play with him.”
After hours, King’s binges grew wilder and longer and his games even more dangerous as his star rose in fashion’s insecure firmament. “It was a lot of things,” says editor Betty Ann Grund. “Money. Success. Why not?” King felt abandoned by his family and found a new one in the night scene, where gays were not only out of the closet and accepted but, suddenly, leading the pack. Grund saw parallels between his two lives: “The whole thing was obsessive whether it was one behavior or the other.” By day, “he’d order white button-downs and boxers by the dozen out of Brooks Brothers and put all the boys [in his studio] in them.” Off-hours, he’d shovel drugs into himself with equal immoderation. King and Grund shared a house in the Hamptons one summer; he had both ice cream and drugs delivered and “we’d stay up two nights” and consume them all, she says. Once, he gave Grund’s daughter quaaludes. “She’d bury them in the sand,” says Grund. “She wanted to make sure he didn’t get hurt.”
King sometimes seemed to be wishing for that, with his compulsive participation in S&M scenes. His boyfriend David Hartman “got very upset by it,” but King didn’t care. “The drugs let Bill not care about his neuroses,” says Grund. “But he thought he could reach the heights and it would be marvelous.” He was as insecure as he was successful. “He questioned his talent. He’d say always, ‘Is it good enough? Will they call me again?’ ”
Many of King’s nights ended in “personal” photo sessions. Some were comparatively chaste, often black-and-white nudes, shot for that book King never published. He kept the nudes stacked on shelves in his private studio room. But he had other, ruder photos, too, such as those he is reported to have taken one night in the disco Hurrah of one of the era’s top faces, a blond poster girl for wholesome California pulchritude. Those pictures have been whispered about for years and called the tip of an iceberg of homemade porn, albeit shot by a professional. It’s unclear how many such pictures King actually took. But multiple sources report the existence of this one set of sex-session images.
Betty Ann Grund describes being at the scene, even though “I tried not to be around,” she says. “I hadn’t planned to be there.” The session began in Hurrah’s bathroom and continued in a limousine, and among the male participants was an owner of the club, who was gay, one of King’s cocaine dealers, and would later die of AIDS. “There was a lot of coke,” says Grund. “They probably took other things, too. [The model] didn’t know what she was doing, she was so out of it. Bill was egging them on. She was doing a lot of advertising then, and I thought, ‘If anyone ever sees these, she’s finished.’ But there was no getting her out of the situation. I didn’t want to get in the middle of it. And I don’t think it was the only time.” Grund went home that night before the picture taking ended. “I saw enough. I wasn’t interested.”
While King’s “personal” photos were an open secret among his intimates, these pictures were the best known, because at least one of them was stolen by an assistant. “We got Roy Cohn,” the pit-bull attorney who was also a closeted gay and a Studio 54 habitué, and “the guy brought it back immediately,” says John Turner, who’d joined King’s operation as an assistant a few years earlier and saw the stolen picture when it was recovered. “She’s sitting on two sinks with dicks in both hands. It was so beautiful.” As to the others, “Who is in those pictures?” asks his close friend the stylist Jane Hsiang. “Everyone and no one. Strangers, somebody famous, hustlers, someone trying to hustle the hustler. It was the times. We all did that. We’ve all done worse.” On one occasion, Turner stumbled into an orgy at King’s big, early-American-antiques-filled one-bedroom apartment at One Fifth Avenue. “A lot of beautiful male models,” he says, “most of them straight, so fucked-up, everyone eating each other and all being videotaped. Several days later, one of them came to the studio and wanted the tape. He threatened Bill. I had him wait outside. Bill didn’t want to destroy it. I said to him, ‘This isn’t important to you, but it’s his career.’ ” With King’s reluctant consent, Turner took the tape, pulled it from its cassette, and cut it up as the model watched.
King loved to take photos of escorts and boys he met prowling bars and clubs. “He’d go on a binge,” Turner says, and bring them back to the studio, where they’d have sex and he’d take Polaroids. He’d also shoot Kodachrome photos and send the film out for processing, bundled with his daytime work. When the transparencies came back the next morning, “he wouldn’t look at them,” Turner says. “He’d have me or an assistant cut them with scissors. He just wanted to shoot it.” Finally, Turner insisted King buy a shredder. It came in handy. “Models would call, men, women, didn’t matter,” says Turner, “and want to know” about pictures they’d allowed to be taken. “Honey, they’re shredded,” he would assure them. Today, he adds that usually the private porno wasn’t high quality: “He shot stoned all the time. They were drug-fueled” photos of people “having fun naked. I wasn’t impressed. They weren’t amazing.”
King’s motive was unclear. British fashion editor Erica Crome has said she believed he did it for blackmail. “It means I have one over on them,” King told her, referring specifically to his bathroom session with that one model. No matter how big she got—and she was plenty big already—she’d be available to him, he explained. Studio assistant Chuck Zuretti agrees: “It was a power thing. He had the goods. He had those kind of thoughts sometimes.” But that doesn’t explain the photos of random pickups and hustlers. Betty Ann Grund feels the “personal” photos were just an extreme expression of a trait common to many photographers’ characters: “Part of his life was voyeurism. It gave him a kick and a thrill.” To Jane Hsiang, it “was his nature.”
John Turner had started his career as an assistant to Francesco Scavullo and Irving Penn. He’d won Penn’s affection, he says, when the Vogue master was shooting a still life of a lobster that wouldn’t hold still, even after being coated in mortician’s wax. Turner melted the wax off with a hair dryer and “stuck a hanger up its ass,” he says. “Mr. Penn seemed very pleased.” Turner went on to work on Penn’s Clinique shoots. “They were so simple,” Turner says, recalling the time Penn shot a still life of a toothbrush in a glass against a Formica background. The idea was to make the cosmetics look like medical products without making medical claims for their efficacy. Penn’s pristine vision was the perfect medium for that message. “I pushed the toothbrush a little,” Turner says. “Click. He got it. And he got paid ten thousand dollars. I saw the invoice.”
Turner really wanted to work for Bill King, whom he considered the most important fashion shooter. But he didn’t recognize King the day he rode the elevator to Penn’s studio at 100 Fifth with “a shaggy-ass guy with an earring and a bicycle,” he says. Once King ascertained he was an assistant, he asked Turner to help out on a shoot for Esquire. But on the appointed day, King made himself scarce, and when one of his subjects threatened to leave, Turner found King in his
office “catatonic, facing a wall, staring.”
“Bill?” Turner said. “Snap out of it.” When King didn’t, Turner took King’s glasses off and “slapped him really hard. He came out of it and never mentioned it again.” After the day’s shoot, he asked Turner to run his studio for him. “It was ragamuffin at first,” says Turner, who painted the place, and is one of several King employees who claim to have come up with the idea of having everyone but King dressed in lab coats.
In the early eighties, the intensity of King’s quest for kicks and thrills increased geometrically. At the end of 1980, Erica Crome came to New York on a visit and stayed at his apartment at One Fifth, even though someone at his studio had tried to head her off, saying King had the flu. “I didn’t know it was code,” she says. On her second day there, King bought her an escort and couldn’t understand when she spurned his gift. King’s housekeeper complained to her about serving dinner parties where naked young men crouched under the table.
King’s father appeared one day. “He was a tall, very good-looking man,” Crome says. “Well-groomed. An American archetype. He was clearly disappointed with Bill’s lifestyle. He told me I was Bill’s only decent friend and asked if we might get married, which was borderline hilarious.” In the midseventies, when King’s beloved mother had died, his father had discarded ten years’ worth of photographs stored in their house and reportedly confessed to a studio staffer that he’d hated their “homoerotic content.” Yet he still loaned his son money. They would never reconcile, but neither would they cut each other off.
King “wasn’t the same person” he’d been in the sixties, Crome says. “I had no idea he’d become this other person . . . obsessed with drugs.” He gave her a bag of cocaine “to mind,” she says. “I put it in a perfume box.” Later, he went looking for it when she wasn’t there. “He destroyed furniture, shredded it.” On her return, she poured the coke down the toilet. “Which might not have been the most sensible thing to do.” King’s angry reaction convinced her he needed “to be away from bad influences. I know! The seaside!”
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