She bought them tickets to Key West and offered him a week’s vacation. But when they got there, he disappeared. “I didn’t realize that for him Key West was the equivalent of a sweetie factory for a child. He was out of his head on coke. The hotel complained about noise. They couldn’t get into his room.” Thirty-five years later, Crome can’t recall how she contacted King’s father, but he arranged to send a plane to an air base near Miami to “fly him out and put him in rehab,” she says. Neither can she recall how she convinced a woman “whose husband Bill had seduced” to help get him there. Crome never saw King again.
Some friends felt that King’s increasing drug use was a reaction to the loss of people close to him. The first to die was his mother, the only member of his family who he felt supported him, says Jane Hsiang, “which is rather classic in a homosexual artist’s life. He spoke quite a bit about how his mother was moved by talent. He tried to buy her a wig when she had cancer,” and she died shortly before Hsiang met King in 1976.
Then, in 1982, Bea Feitler died of cancer, too. Around that time, John Turner quit his job. He’d seen a lot in a few years. Early in his tenure, King was booked to shoot Jaclyn Smith of TV’s Charlie’s Angels for a Max Factor cosmetics ad, but he failed to show up. Turner found him at home, in his bedroom with a supermodel who later married a rock star. “She came out, completely nude in a pillbox hat,” Turner remembers. “Want some lines?” she asked him. He looked past her. King was naked, on his back in bed, with his legs over his head. Turner insists he saw King’s “sphincter reaching out and chewing coke. That’s how he liked it, not dust, rocks. He’d stick rocks up his ass. His eyes were black saucers. I went back to the studio. I said he’d hurt his hand and couldn’t shoot for a couple days. Jaclyn was lovely. It was never discussed again. Everything was cool.” Turner learned to predict when King would go off on a binge, but “there was nothing I could do.” So Turner had a necklace made for King engraved with Turner’s name and phone number and began carrying a beeper and hundreds of dollars in cash—all in case of emergency. He was regularly summoned to get King out of fixes he’d got into and sometimes stayed at One Fifth to try “to make sure he didn’t leave the apartment, if I could, until he got over it.”
King’s behavior was also troubling on location trips. “He was really going over the edge,” says Betty Ann Grund, who realized the debilitated photographer needed more help than the one assistant he’d brought to Paris on a shoot could give and called upon an experienced one. Chuck Zuretti, who’d assisted Guy Le Baube and Rico Puhlmann, was in Paris. King offered Zuretti a Concorde flight home if he would stay in Paris a few days to help.
“Bill was using quite a bit of stuff,” Zuretti says. “He was incapable, freaking out. He couldn’t look through the camera. I ended up shooting it for him.” Zuretti’s pictures appeared with a Bill King credit. But a few months later, after a few less dramatic trips and King’s switch to Vogue, it happened again on a shoot for L’Uomo Vogue in Rio de Janeiro during Carnival. On the Sunday before the trip, Zuretti went to 100 Fifth to pick up King’s cameras, and another assistant handed him a bottle of Advil, saying King was suffering headaches. Zuretti looked inside and discovered it was full of quaaludes. It was the first thing King asked for when Zuretti arrived in Brazil, and he threw the bottle at King. “Don’t you ever make me your mule again,” he screamed.
Then, King “scored a lot of drugs” and, one night, woke Zuretti at 3:00 a.m., demanding he bring him some film. “I put on a robe and knocked on his door.” King answered it, nude, with an erection aided by a cock ring. “There were two guys doing acrobatics on the bed,” Zuretti says. “He wanted to take pictures.”
King’s editor was horrified when King disappeared for the next two days, “locking the door in the hotel and going crazy on drugs. I was banging on the door, almost crying. ‘Just tell me. Five hours? Tomorrow? Tell me something.’ ” Finally, after many hours, King opened the door, “half-naked and completely bizarre,” she continues. “He was alone. He wanted more drugs. He had them but he didn’t want to snort them. He asked me to blow it into an opening you have in your body with a straw.”
Once again, Zuretti says, he took the pictures and, that time, got credit for them, too. Meantime, King got beaten up and his cameras were stolen. En route home, Zuretti dragged him into an airport bathroom and demanded he empty his pockets. Several bags of coke went down the toilet. The editor is both philosophical and forgiving about the experience: “It’s important that you have the right to live the way you want.” Photographers like King “have to be admired, they have special antennae. They are the history of the moment.”
After King sneaked an eighth of an ounce of cocaine into a suitcase before Turner carried it across a border, he quit his job. They didn’t speak again for years. King finally called him in 1983, the year after Bea Feitler died, waking him at 3:00 a.m. “I knew when Bill was on coke,” Turner says. “He was coming down. He said he couldn’t get to his coke.” Turner took a cab to 100 Fifth, unlocked the door with a key he’d kept, and found King and the fashion designer Clovis Ruffin naked, tied up on the floor, covered in melted candle wax. A trick they’d picked up was passed out near them. King had managed to free a hand to make a call for help.
“It was as if I’d been there yesterday,” Turner says. He woke up the trick, helped him off the floor, gave him $100, took him downstairs, and poured his limp form into a taxi. “Don’t tell him where he came from,” Turner ordered the driver, “but take him wherever he wants.”
Two weeks later, Turner got a $10,000 check in the mail from King, with a note begging him to come back to work. It was August and King was leaving for his annual vacation in the south of France. While he was gone, Turner cleaned house at the studio. It, at least, was still running well. Even when King wasn’t there, clients were put at ease by the scale and professionalism of the operation. King was another story. He’d become ever more obsessive, and his night games had driven boyfriend David Hartman to despair. “Bill wouldn’t return his calls,” says Turner. “I’d say, ‘Bill loves you. He asked me to call. They’re just tricks.’ ”
In the mideighties, Turner decided he needed to hire “a companion, someone to take care of Bill on a personal level.” He went to Ben Fernandez, who taught photography at Parsons, and “asked for an effeminate blond boy with wispy blond hair who looked like a character in the gay hard-core sex films directed by William Higgins,” a pioneer of what was known as California-look pornography, says a King studio staffer. That was King’s favorite look.
“I saw Stewart Shining and he was perfect,” says Turner, whose interview with the young South Dakota–raised photography student was interrupted by a phone call from King, who was watching from his office next door. “You have to hire him,” King whispered. Shining accepted a salaried position and an offer of lessons in being an assistant. “It had nothing to do with photography,” insists the staffer. “Bill fell madly in love.” Several studio employees were struck by Shining’s beauty. David Hartman was still King’s boyfriend, but Bill’s adoration of Shining became obvious as time went on, and “David tolerated the situation,” says a friend who asks to be anonymous. “It was a little tricky,” John Turner adds.I
King wouldn’t let Shining in the studio for a year, but they went to parties and movies together, which was good news for John Turner. “He wasn’t on my back anymore,” Turner says. “It was nice to see him happy.” After a year, Shining insisted that he either be allowed to work in the studio or get a raise. King chose a raise, but Turner insisted, “You have to teach him.” King was nervous the first day Shining entered the studio, but allowed Turner to position him on the big old fan he used to make wind. But the fan was leaking oil, and when Shining tried to correct the problem, the motor started spewing smoke, right into the face of the subject du jour, Lee Radziwill. “She was not happy,” says Turner.
Nonetheless, Shining got a second chance. But the fan still wasn’t working right, an
d King turned to grab it, accidentally stuck his middle finger into the blades, and almost chopped it off. Turner sprang into action, wrapped King’s hand, stuck it into a bowl of ice, and rushed him to the emergency room. When King reacted badly to the first doctor who appeared, Turner says he found another, rushed King to his office, offered every patient in the waiting room a color television if they’d let King jump the queue, and somehow got “his finger glued back on.” It was the end of July, so Turner sent King to Cannes to recuperate, shipping his favorite mattress ahead of him, and “hired two hookers he used as beards to fly over with him” to cook for him and Shining. A month later, King was healed and shooting for a new client, the luxury clothing and equestrian brand, Hermès.
By then, King’s behavior had got even more dangerous, his risk taking fueled by a gusher of money. He was shooting covers for Vanity Fair, which had been revived by Si Newhouse and transformed by Tina Brown into the hottest general-interest monthly magazine in the land. King was making $500,000 a year, charging $40,000 for an advertising job.
In 1984, King hired Jane Hsiang as a freelance advertising stylist. There was rarely a dull moment. “When the models got tired, he’d say, ‘Jane, go to the fan,’ and I’d spritz cold water,” she says. Once, he built a pool in his studio so a model in a bathing suit made of Du Pont fiber could swim with sea lions. Hsiang was charged with finding a pair. When they arrived, King was aghast. “Ohmigod, they’re the wrong color,” he told her. “They’re brown, I wanted gray.” Hsiang burst into tears. King admitted he was kidding. “Who else could get seals but you?” They grew close, and along with Shining, Hsiang crossed over into King’s personal life. He let his family think she was his girlfriend. But she knew where to draw a line: “I drink, I take coke, but come midnight, I go home.”
King’s studio “was a machine,” says Hilmar Meyer-Bosse, an assistant for two years in the mideighties, with shoots every day and editing on Saturdays. Clients “knew they’d get technically perfect shots,” Meyer-Bosse continues. “He was competing with Avedon and Penn. He was second or third.” Turner adds, “It was easy for him.” Which made it all the more vital that he create obstacles for himself. The frequency of his binges increased. “Every other month,” Turner reports, King would disappear for a week or two.
King was in his studio late one night, at the tail end of a ten-day cocaine binge, when he called a rehab hotline, begging for help. The counselor who volunteered, a former club habitué who asks for anonymity, arrived alone and found King with “the largest bowl of coke I’ve ever seen in my life.” Though the counselor wanted to help, he was terrified. “The coke-sex energy was unbelievably wild. It overwhelmed me. It was sex, sex, sex. I was nearly clean. I called my sponsor and she said, ‘Get out!’ I said, ‘I have to help him,’ and she said, ‘No, you don’t. Get out!’ I learned a lesson: don’t go alone. By the way, he was not unattractive.”
King’s behavior could be extreme at work, too. All concerned say an oft-told tale about a baby’s being dropped by his favorite model, Ashley Richardson, at a shoot for the children’s clothing line Petit Bateau was untrue and propagated by a makeup artist King had fired. “You know how our business is,” says Hsiang. “He wasn’t that nice, but he didn’t do those horrible things.” But cameras were thrown regularly. “When the camera was empty, he’d throw it in the air,” says his assistant Chuck Zuretti. “It was like the outfield in baseball. You had to catch the camera. One time I let it bounce and quietly walked over and said, ‘If you don’t respect the equipment, you don’t respect the job. Stop the bullshit.’ He liked it. Maybe I was the first assistant to talk back to him.”
But sometimes, he wasn’t just playing. “He smashed a lot of Hasselblads,” says Betty Ann Grund. “He’d throw them at me,” says John Turner. “I’d duck. He took his frustration out on me? Fine.” They could always buy another one. That was far better than when he traded cameras for drugs.
* * *
I. Shining, now a working beauty photographer, the president of ACRIA, and a trustee of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, declined numerous requests for an interview.
Chapter 38
* * *
THE GRIM SPECTER
In 1985, Robert Mapplethorpe photographed Bill King wearing aviator glasses, a black leather jacket, and a hoodie. Shot in profile, eyes hooded, he seems beautiful and serene. But that image, the one most people have seen, was cropped, says Turner. In the original, King had a bouquet of dildos in his lap. He was also “stoned out of his mind.” By then, he had another reason to obliterate his capacity to reason. That spring his boyfriend, David Hartman, had fallen ill and was in and out of the hospital in succeeding months with pneumonia. He would die of AIDS the following July. “Bill would photograph his progress as he got iller and iller,” says Hilmar Meyer-Bosse.
AIDS was then still new. But the disease had already taken a tragic toll and would continue to devastate the fashion industry. Over a quarter century, it would take photographers Robert Mapplethorpe, David Seidner, Barry McKinley, and Herb Ritts; GQ’s Jack Haber and Donald Sterzin; the designers Chester Weinberg, Patrick Kelly, Angel Estrada, Clovis Ruffin, Willi Smith, Tommy Nutter, and Halston; Perry Ellis and two presidents of his label, Laughlin Barker and Robert McDonald; Giorgio Armani’s business partner Sergio Galeotti; illustrator Antonio Lopez and his partner Juan Ramos; the fashion icon Tina Chow; countless hair and makeup artists, including Way Bandy; models Joe Macdonald and Gia Carangi; and Kezia Keeble’s fourth husband, the fashion publicist John Duka. In many cases, the cause of death was concealed.
Until 1986, the grim specter of AIDS was rarely even discussed. “Nobody wanted to talk about it,” remembers stylist Julie Britt. “Girls refused to work with people. You had to get okays for hair and makeup. Before that, we were all one big family. The loss of talent changed the industry.” For years, merely saying AIDS aloud was taboo, which kept many from understanding what the disease was and how it was transmitted, and some, like King, from changing behavior that had once been seen as liberating or merely licentious. By 1987, King’s nighttime habits would generally be considered high risk and potentially deadly. By then, it was too late for him.
Shortly after David Hartman’s diagnosis, King asked John Turner to join him when he went to get a blood test that counted T cells, then the most effective screening for AIDS. “He wouldn’t go unless we had tests together,” Turner says. Afterward, a worried King kept interrupting shoots to ask if Turner had got results. Finally a call came. “I was fine,” Turner says, but the doctor asked to speak to King personally. When he heard that, “Bill turned white,” Turner says; he knew what it meant. Bill’s T-cell count was low, making it quite likely he was infected. For a while, King was in denial and kept playing; he bought a special rectal antibacterial cream in Europe and “used it all the time on his rear,” says Turner, who found it and threw it away.
Reality dawned slowly. In July 1985, just a few days after he learned of his low T-cell count, King and John Turner hired Denise Collin as the studio’s new bookkeeper. King’s appearance at her interview was a clear warning. “I was looking at two of the largest coke rings crusted around that man’s nostrils,” she says. “It was shocking. His eyes were completely dilated. He was visibly stoned.” Collin’s first day at work, Ashley Richardson wandered topless into the small room where Collin sat and “squished” her “humongous breasts” against a glass window that looked into King’s lair as he laughed hysterically. The next day, Polly Mellen made an assistant cry when a hat got crumpled.
Collin’s first job was to “devise ways to meet his expectations” so King could continue to fly to Paris on the supersonic Concorde, buy expensive antiques, and pay studio rent that had gone from $11,000 to $18,000 a month. “He’d take personal money out of the company,” she says. “I got him to stop just writing checks for cash. He was trying to blow the smoke away and see [with] some clarity. He was scared.”
He dialed back on his bingeing, “tried t
o boost his immune system” by going on a macrobiotic diet, and, wrote the journalist Stephen Fried, sought out “herbalists, spiritualists, hypnotists, [and] ecstasy therapists,” all to no avail. The disease was relentless. But it was never discussed outside the tight circle of his closest associates. Hilmar Meyer-Bosse thought “he was old-fashioned and would never admit openly the obvious,” that he was gay. So confessing that he’d contracted AIDS was out of the question. “He was ashamed,” says Hsiang, “which was sad, but that was the times.” Fairly soon, though, he “cleaned up his act,” Meyer-Bosse thought, and became “very focused on his work.”
Collin was the last to join the tight circle around the ailing King. “He talked to each of us separately as to our loyalties, and we all kept our word,” she says. Their first job, keeping his illness secret, was relatively easy. King never showed any symptoms. “I never saw Bill sick, even at the end,” says Meyer-Bosse.
In July 1986, King signed his last will, but remained in denial. The next month, he was in England, working with an architect to remodel his studio, a job that began that fall. He didn’t have enough money to pay for it, so he took out a loan. The makeover stalled in early 1987 until Jane Hsiang lent the corporation $50,000. “He didn’t want to admit what was going to happen,” says Denise Collin. “He wanted to keep face.”
In a deposition given after King’s death, John Turner revealed that King had continued to take cocaine after his diagnosis, until early in 1987, when he gave it up, but then found a new drug of choice, codeine; he told Turner he was addicted to it. That March, King came down with pneumonia and was in Beth Israel Hospital for three weeks. Recuperating afterward in Florida, he discussed his finances with his team and considered selling his apartment and declaring bankruptcy, but delayed a decision. Back at work by May, he did shoots in Bermuda for Paris Vogue and Mademoiselle and several advertising jobs. In June, he shot furs for American Vogue with Polly Mellen on Martha’s Vineyard, but felt weak and came down with chicken pox, which landed him back in the hospital and then required twenty-four-hour private-duty nurses back at One Fifth to administer IV drugs. After he was back on his feet, he continued shooting, even making a TV commercial for Lancôme, though he scheduled rest days in between jobs. Denise Collin would don rubber gloves and wipe pus from his eyes so he could focus his cameras. “It was the saddest thing,” she says. “He really, really, really wanted to just go on, so instead of compartmentalizing, he had to ask for help. He had to be more human.”
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