Focus

by Michael Gross

  He was still tied to his father, sister, and an aunt, though no one was allowed to tell them he was ill, and Turner would later insist in a deposition that King wanted no part of them. “His family didn’t understand,” says Hsiang, who bought Christmas presents for his sister and “cooked all his Thanksgiving dinners,” she says. “I’d see them, the family. Not my kind of people. You know how snobbish [fashion people] are. They were totally embarrassing because they were very limited people. They couldn’t see his greatness. But you can’t blame them. They’re from a different world. The fashion world is so peculiar to real people. They’re intimidated by us.”

  Hsiang and Shining took care of King and watched him grow introspective. “One day he said, ‘Gee, if I wasn’t so nuts, maybe this wouldn’t have happened, maybe I’d have lived longer,’ ” Hsiang recalls. “I said, ‘If not for your insane half, you wouldn’t be Bill King.’ ”

  Hilmar Meyer-Bosse’s last sessions with King were from July 20 until August 2, 1987, in Paris. They shot ads for Enrico Coveri for several days, then spent a few more working for Paris Vogue with the models Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Famke Janssen, and Marpessa Hennink. Afterward, exhausted, King left for a spa, Évian-les-Bains, with Shining, “and I never saw him again,” Meyer-Bosse says. There, King had a seizure—he’d developed brain lesions—and was hospitalized in Paris before returning to Évian to recover. Meantime, the studio renovation stopped again due to lack of funds, and the IRS threatened to seize its accounts. King agreed to rent the space to others and to sell One Fifth, which quickly found a buyer. “He would have done anything to keep the studio,” said Turner.

  Late in August, King had another seizure and was again rushed to the hospital in Paris. He returned to America in September, but only after Hsiang and Shining convinced reluctant airline employees to let him board a plane. After a weekend at home, he again entered Beth Israel. Meantime, many suppliers were refusing to do business with his studio. In meetings with his longtime accountant and a new lawyer, Turner pleaded by phone with King to let his family in on his secret, but he refused. King did order the sale of his antiques to keep the studio alive. Midmonth, his team was at the studio when King’s aunt and father rang the bell. They’d heard he was in the hospital, but no one would tell them where. “They’d call and I’d hang up,” says Jane Hsiang.

  Refused entry, the relatives demanded John Turner come downstairs. He told them King was at his latest rented country house in Bedford, New York. A day later, King called his aunt from the hospital and repeated the lie. By October, the money had run out and King’s accountant had okayed a raid on Turner’s and Collin’s pension accounts to pay bills. That month, King’s studio landlord decided to apply the studio’s security deposit to overdue rent and cancel his lease.

  On November 19, 1987, Bill King died in Jane Hsiang’s arms. He left his personal clothing and effects to Stewart Shining, whom he considered his next of kin, as much a son at that point as a boyfriend, his property to Hugh Hardy, a British decorator, and five- and low-six-figure sums to his sister, an aunt, a niece, and a nephew. He willed his pictures to a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting his work and to nurturing photographic excellence. It was never formed. It’s unclear if King even had enough cash left to fund his $350,000 in direct bequests.

  King’s family soon charged that those closest to him—Hardy, Shining, Collin, and Turner—had taken financial advantage of him and stolen from the estate, and a battle followed in Surrogate’s Court. “They thought if we were lying about [King’s dying], we must also be taking his vast fortune,” says Collin, “but there was no fortune.” So the fight was mostly about the rights to King’s pictures—and John Turner says he forced a settlement. Cleaning out the studio, he’d found a few images that had fallen behind the shredder, “selfies of naked boys fucking him,” he says. “I copied them and faxed them to [the family’s] attorney and that was the end of that.”

  John Turner says Shining has the original transparencies of about two dozen of King’s finest photographs, “picked out by Bill and given to him for safekeeping.” The rest were turned over to his sister and effectively disappeared; they’ve never been seen since, leaving King’s reputation in limbo. Or, Janet King McClelland would have it, in tatters. She blames that on people speaking ill of her brother. “It’s very hurtful,” she says.

  William King Sr. “dogged me,” says Denise Collin, who twice met him in cafés. “He was just beside himself with grief. He wanted to know if Bill was really gay. I had to tell him yes.”

  No one knows for sure what happened to those other pictures, the ones that gave Bill King his risqué reputation. But Denise Collin acknowledges what King’s family implied in their court filings, that Stewart Shining took them when he emptied King’s safe-deposit box in a bank branch near the studio just before King’s death.I Shining then refused to say what had been in it, or in about seventy-five boxes he removed from the studio and King’s residences. When the family finally won the right to break into the safe-deposit box, it was empty.

  Jane Hsiang, who has remained close to Shining, isn’t surprised that he won’t revisit the Bill King story: “He doesn’t want to dig all that up.” And those pictures? “They’re gone, I’m positive.”

  Collin says she was in the bank with Shining and saw some of the missing photos of “a lot of people . . . in compromising positions. It’s one or two files. It’s orgies, absolutely, with notable people,” both gay and straight. “Bi. You name it. I can’t even begin. You know some of the people who were his friends. Assume many, not all, were in pictures they never wanted to go anywhere.” Where are they now? “They may not be where I think they are, but I know where they went. I doubt [Shining] disposed of them.” She considers them valuable documents—and good photographs, too: “What’s hurtful to some is beautiful to others.” She doesn’t believe anyone will ever be hurt by them, though, as she’s convinced they’ll never emerge. But she savors that King always “loved a good piece of drama,” and the open questions about those pictures will ensure his last one will play forever.

  * * *

  I. King had added Shining as a signatory four days after his last hospitalization.

  Chapter 39

  * * *

  “WHAT I WANT TO SAY”

  One way to rein in a feisty and creative photographer was to remind him (yes, alas, generally a him) he was expendable. Bruce Weber’s influence touched every corner of fashion but was most visible in the ad campaigns that launched Guess?, another jeans line. Wayne Maser’s photos for Guess? combined elements of Weber’s work for both Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. Klein would eventually hire Maser, to annoy Weber, Maser thinks. Alex Liberman used Maser in a similar fashion, giving him Vogue assignments “to punish everybody else,” he says. Tellingly, Maser’s photographs had a distinct Elle feel.

  Shortly after his first Guess? ads appeared, Maser was summoned by both Glamour and Vogue. He worked with Jade Hobson and Christy Turlington on his first Vogue shoot, which made it deceptively easy, he thinks, because “I looked through the lens and realized, they do it for you. She looked like a Vogue model.” Liberman promptly “offered me a studio,” Maser says. “I didn’t want one. But I got a contract within months.”

  Soon, Calvin Klein called and hired Maser to shoot ads with the models Josie Borain and Yasmin Le Bon. Borain didn’t get along with Bruce Weber, so hiring a different lensman to shoot her was a good idea. But Maser believes he was hired “to punish Bruce” after Weber had a fight with Klein. “Bruce would turn in three-hundred-thousand-dollar bills. I’d do it for one hundred thousand dollars,” Maser says. The same went for the late Gianni Versace, who “hired me to smack Avedon,” Maser thinks.

  Briefly, Maser was shooting “forty or fifty pages in some issues” of Vogue, between his editorial and advertising work, but he had a drinking problem. “I was too fucked-up, incredibly insecure, making too much cash, getting too much work, and not understanding how to ma
ke it work. Fashion photography is more about your relationships with people than the final product.”

  Maser also had an image problem, with people calling him a Bruce Weber copyist. “A bad copy,” the art director George Lois told Newsweek. Maser insists, “I was only copying Brigitte Bardot pictures,” but that sort of press didn’t help him stay on an even keel. A girlfriend, model Lara Harris, raised the drinking issue with him “and he dealt with it,” getting sober at the end of the decade, she says. “I saw him reinvent himself with sobriety.” Then, Maser teamed up with an art director who gave him a fresh outlook—and did the same for fashion photography.

  The son of a Parisian art director and graphic artist, Fabien Baron grew up surrounded by publications and was studying applied arts at age sixteen when he assisted a runway photographer at an Yves Saint Laurent fashion show. “Wow!” Baron remembers. “I was blown away. That’s what I wanted to do.”

  He began assisting his father on freelance design jobs and quit high school to work on a series of little publications, sometimes with his father or friends of his. After a brief trip to New York, Baron decided that in Paris he’d always be his father’s son, so he made a portfolio, crossed the Atlantic with $300 in his pocket, and started making the rounds. A friend won him entrée to Alex Liberman, “the big cheese,” he says. “This was my chance.” Liberman installed him first at Self, and then at GQ, as an associate art director, “the little guy, listening like crazy,” Baron says. “Everything Liberman said was right. He was very practical. If he didn’t like a picture, he’d cut a head off or tilt it.”

  When Baron announced he was going to a start-up, New York Woman, Liberman offered him a position at Vogue, “but I wanted my own thing,” he says. Vogue, in the waning days of the Mirabella regime, looked boring. He’d been watching several young editors in Europe taking liberties with fashion at magazines such as Jill, which published eleven issues in France between 1983 and 1985, and Lei and Per Lui, feisty products of Italian Condé Nast, then edited by Franca Sozzani, one of two chic, wealthy, and well-educated Italian sisters.

  Baron wanted to emulate them, “to do really forward fashion.” To be an art director, even at a new magazine, was “a calculated step up,” he says, as it let him hire “the European cool people,” photographers such as Peter Lindbergh, Max Vadukul, and Jean-Baptiste Mondino, give some of them their first American exposure, and gain notice for himself. Baron met Lara Harris when he put her on the cover of New York Woman. Around the same time, a Vogue Italia stylist, Sciascia Gambaccini, was on a shoot with another photographer when American Vogue called to say Maser needed her to release a hold on model Cindy Crawford so Maser could work with her. She thought, “Who the fuck is Wayne Maser?”

  Gambaccini’s new boss was Franca Sozzani, who’d become Vogue Italia’s editor in 1988 and hired Baron as its art director. Back in Milan, they told Gambaccini they’d just met Maser and wanted her to work with him. Maser and Baron, en route to their first shoot together in Deauville, compared notes on their respective divorces, the former’s just concluded, the latter’s just beginning. Gambaccini and Baron had recently got involved, and they all became close friends.

  In 1987, Bruce Weber spread his wings, releasing his first film, Broken Noses, about a young boxer he’d met four years earlier while scouting athletes for his Olympics photos. He put him on the cover of Per Lui’s all-Weber issue in 1985, then used him in Calvin Klein ads, including one that sandwiched a topless Josie Borain between him and another young man. Weber had already finished a second film, Let’s Get Lost, a documentary portrait of the jazz trumpeter and heroin addict Chet Baker, a very different sort of male icon. It would be nominated for an Academy Award in 1988. More films and monographs would follow, but like Richard Avedon, Weber stayed in fashion and used it to finance his sprawling operation.

  Weber’s relationships with his two most important fashion clients, Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, both wound down in the next few years. In the late eighties, Donald Sterzin joined Lauren’s ad agency, but after Sterzin’s 1992 death from AIDS at age forty-two, Weber had issues with the brand, chafing at the micromanagement of Lauren’s creative team. Some also wondered if Lauren chafed at how much credit Weber was given for defining Lauren’s visual image.

  Lauren acknowledged in a 1985 interview that they sometimes clashed: “I work with him and love what he does. He’s in love with everything he shot. I have to select my look as I see it. I want to know exactly what he loves and why, [but] I don’t just take those things. They may be great for what [Bruce wants] to say, but they’re not what I want to say.”

  Regardless, they not only continued collaborating, but kept innovating. In 1994, Weber introduced Lauren to Tyson Beckford, a stunning African-American male model, whom Lauren used to advertise a new line of performance sports clothing, rebooting his white-bread image with a single image. In March 1995, Beckford signed an exclusive contract with Polo Ralph Lauren.

  Weber disliked Lauren’s ad agency, which typically presented finished layouts filled with “swipes,” inspirational photos borrowed from earlier ad campaigns or from other brands or photographers, and he would typically nod and smile at the agency meetings and then shoot his own way, but the implied lack of trust nagged at him. When Lauren’s son David was put in charge of the brand’s advertising, marketing, and corporate communications in 2008, the creative partnership ended. “David wanted his own people,” says a Weber associate. “He wanted to put his stamp on the advertising,” and Weber stopped shooting Lauren’s clothing and image ads for years, though he continued to work for the designer’s licensed fragrance line. But the ties between the masters of Americana in fashion and photography proved durable. In 2014, Lauren again asked Weber to shoot images to launch Polo Fifth Avenue, a new flagship store.

  Weber’s relationship with Calvin Klein’s brand ended long before the designer sold his company to a garment conglomerate and stepped down from his role as its designer in 2003. Though their names were indelibly linked in the public’s mind due to the provocative potency of Weber’s Calvin Klein imagery in the mideighties—Weber’s photograph of Olympic pole-vaulter Tom Hintnaus in Klein’s tighty-whities against a whitewashed phallic pillar on the Greek island of Santorini, for example—the two rarely maintained the sort of exclusive relationship the photographer had long enjoyed with Lauren, as Klein’s Wayne Maser moment demonstrated. Klein always played the field, at least a little, so Weber had usually shared the work with the likes of Avedon and Penn.

  The first sign of trouble in the Klein-Weber relationship came after Klein signed model Christy Turlington to an exclusive contract in 1988. Weber, who wasn’t consulted, didn’t like Turlington. “If you don’t consult with the photographer, you don’t have a happy photographer,” says the Weber associate. Still, Weber and Klein raised the bar in fashion advertising one last time in fall 1991, producing a 116-page stand-alone magazine full of fashion pictures that was bundled with Vanity Fair and mailed to its subscribers at a cost of $1 million—but the consensus was that it didn’t sell clothes. The next year, Klein changed his image—and his photographer—using French Mobster Patrick Demarchelier to shoot the young model Kate Moss as a stand-in for a new generation of fashion consumers, and the younger Steven Meisel to shoot Lisa Taylor, who emerged from retirement to represent Klein’s expensive Collection line. But the cause of the break with Weber was another series of ads released just after Klein’s company, $62 million in debt from the repurchase of its jeans license, was rescued from its financial dilemma by Klein’s friend the music and film mogul David Geffen, who bought that debt in May 1992.

  Three months earlier, Weber had shot an entire issue of Interview that showed a young white hip-hop star, “Marky Mark” Wahlberg, on the cover and in a spread that included pictures of the future film star with his underwear waistline visible above his pants. That fall, Calvin Klein’s underwear ads featured Wahlberg in poses quite similar to those he’d struck for Weber, but the advertis
ing photos were taken by Herb Ritts, another photographer sometimes considered a Weber copyist, and one whose work also had a strong homoerotic flavor. Weber and Nan Bush believed, true or not, it was Geffen’s idea to copy Weber’s photographs.

  Those photos added fuel to Weber’s sense of grievance as, a year earlier, Ritts had won the job of making a television commercial for a Klein fragrance called Escape after Weber shot print ads for it. Weber had shot earlier commercials for Escape and a predecessor, Eternity, and Weber believed Klein had withheld praise for them until several friends, Geffen among them, said they approved. When Weber submitted his latest photos for Escape, Klein “wasn’t as responsive as he should have been,” says a member of the photographer’s inner circle, “and then he sent Herb Bruce’s pictures and Herb copied them. It turned Bruce off. He said, ‘I’ve had it,’ and they never worked together again.”