Dick had a Kodak Brownie box camera as a boy. But he’d taken his first pictures without a camera. After his father taught him the principles of photography, he tried them out by taping a negative of his younger sister, Louise, to his shoulder and sitting in the sun as her image burned into his skin. Louise was also his first model. He took her to Central Park and posed her, copying photographs by Munkacsi and Frissell. Her later mental illness and death in a hospital at age forty-two are Avedon’s Rosebud, the source of his focus on the thin line between high style and deathly rictus. In Avedon’s photos there’s barely a difference between a laugh and a scream.
“Louise’s beauty was the event of our family and the destruction of her life,” he said in an interview with Egoïste, which published his work in the late 1980s. “She was the prototype of what I considered beautiful in my early years as a fashion photographer. All my first models … Dorian Leigh, Elise Daniels, Carmen … were all memories of my sister…. Beauty can be as isolating as genius, or deformity. I have always been aware of a relationship between madness and beauty.” Fifty years later his photograph of model Stephanie Seymour baring her carefully shaved pubic patch in a sheer dress evoked the same attractive madness.
After dropping out of high school, Avedon joined the Merchant Marine in 1942 and was assigned to the photo department. “I learned the techniques of photography,” he says. “I did hundreds and hundreds of ID photos.” Pictures he took for a service magazine caught Alexey Brodovitch’s attention. Brodovitch brought the young man after a year of study to Carmel Snow, who started him at Junior Bazaar, an ambitious new section that briefly turned into an influential magazine for teenagers. “He used to scout the streets looking for new models,” remembers photographer Lillian Bassman. “At the beginning he used teenage models. Then he got the chance to work on Harper’s Bazaar, and of course he had to use older models. They were crazy about him. He was a jazzy little character.”
“There were no young photographers before me,” Avedon says. “I was the first. Now there are only young photographers. I had to be hidden from Louise Dahl-Wolfe. When she saw my first two pictures, she lost her memory and was found stumbling down Fifth Avenue.”
But Avedon was actually stumbling until 1948, when he shot the couture collections in Paris with model Elise Daniels, who didn’t so much pose as act. The palpable anxiety she betrays in Avedon’s portrait of her wearing a tulle turban in a restaurant brought something new—subtext—to fashion photography. By 1949 Avedon was king at Harper’s Bazaar. That June Avedon asked Dorian Leigh to go with him to Paris. “I didn’t pay much attention to Dick until he asked me to go to Paris,” she says. Dorian’s daughter Young had been born that spring, and they’d moved to Bucks County, Pennsylvania. But she wanted to get back in harness and had started working with Milton Greene and Carmel Snow’s niece Nancy White, an editor at Good Housekeeping. Though her love affair with Irving Penn was over, she was working with him, too. In fact, they’d just completed a series for Vogue, of Dorian dressed in the fashions of different periods. When Penn heard that Dorian had been asked to Paris by Avedon, he “was furious, absolutely furious” and was convinced that Dorian had told Avedon about their recent session. Though they did become friends, Penn and Avedon were always also competitors.
“In that period, we could maintain a close working relationship with our models,” Avedon wrote in Portfolio, a brief-lived graphic arts quarterly Brodovitch designed in 1950. He and Penn “rarely encroached” on each other’s turf, Avedon added, “so that when Penn was working with Dorian Leigh for Vogue, I wouldn’t use her: there are no photographs of Jean Patchett or Lisa Fonssagrives by me and none of Dovima by Penn.” Avedon later compared his relationship with his models to that of a choreographer with his ballerinas. Sometimes the closeness turned comic. “Suzy Parker used to go through the top drawer of my desk, spying for messages, seeing if I was using anyone else,” the photographer revealed. “I knew that she did that, and I would leave chicken wings in the drawer for her. She loved chicken wings.”
Avedon had originally already booked another model, Mary Jane Russell, for the Paris trip. A Sarah Lawrence College graduate, Russell had worked for a photographer booking models until one day in 1948 an editor asked to book her. “I’ll be straight with you,” Eileen Ford said when Russell called to ask if the agency would represent her. “You’re too tiny. Nothing’s going to fit you.” Jerry Ford convinced his wife to take Russell on. Jerry sent her to Diana Vreeland, who sent her to Lillian Bassman, Dahl-Wolfe, Frissell, and Avedon. All four booked her immediately, and she started posing for Bazaar, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Vogue. She was among the first to break down the wall between the dueling magazines.
Early in 1949 Mary Jane had been asked to go to Paris with Avedon. “I got my passport, I got my ticket,” she says. But one day a letter from Avedon arrived by messenger. It said that he’d decided Russell’s small size would be too limiting. She quickly discovered he was going to take Dorian to Paris instead. “I think Dick had a crush on Dorian,” says Russell. “I thought my heart would break.”
Says Mary Jane’s husband, retired advertising executive Edward Russell: “She’d spent night after night working. She colored her hair because Dick wanted something different. The whole enterprise was a lust to do better. Then this letter arrives. Dorian, other than a bigger chest, was the same size as Mary Jane.”
Avedon met Dorian when her airplane landed in Paris. “We got in the taxi, and they sliced peaches into glasses and poured champagne on it, and when we got to the Hôtel San Régis,” where all the photographers and models stayed, “we had the suite at the right of the glass door, a sunken bathtub full of flowers. It was just marvelous,” Dorian says. On that trip she was smuggled through the streets swathed with sheets so no one could see what Bazaar was photographing.
Avedon took one of his best photographs on that trip, of Dorian, wearing a tiara and laughing hysterically, at Le Pré Catalan restaurant in the Bois du Boulogne. “When I saw that, I thought it was Princess Margaret bombed out of her mind; I didn’t know it was you!” Suzy told Dorian. Bazaar wouldn’t publish it, deeming it, quite rightly, unflattering. “It was in the Metropolitan Museum,” Dorian says proudly. “Still is.”
She was the first jet set model, cavorting with what would have been the Vanity Fair set had Vanity Fair still been in existence. “It was so marvelous,” she says, “everyone was young and we were all starting—Byron Janis, Lenny Bernstein, Adolph Green, Betty Comden—all of them were friends of Dick’s, and I was, to them, a prize, because here was this model who is talking to us and knows what she’s saying. They thought models were empty-headed.”
Dorian started working for everyone. One garment center client told her, “You’re the thing I admire most, a lady who looks like a whore.” When another potential client called her in the country and asked what she’d done lately, Dorian picked up the latest issue of Vogue and counted forty-nine pictures of herself. She soon began shooting Revlon’s first national ads with Richard Avedon, including images that are remembered to this day for the lipsticks and nail polishes called Cherries in the Snow, Ultraviolet, and Fire and Ice.
Although she was paid a mere $250 for her famous Fire and Ice ad, Dorian claims she was making $300,000 a year. “Everybody was making forty dollars, I was getting sixty dollars an hour,” she says. “I used to imagine the clients were behind the camera, whispering to the photographer, ‘A dollar a minute, a dollar a minute.’ I also did something that Eileen said would ruin me: lingerie. And then, of course, I got a hundred twenty dollars. I also went to Europe twice a year, and they paid me a lot of money to come and work freelance for them.”
Meanwhile, her sister, Suzy Parker, had married her high school boyfriend secretly, just before she graduated from high school at age seventeen, in 1950. “Mother came upstairs and found them in bed and had hysterics,” says Dorian. “Suzy said they were married, and they were.” Although her parents wanted her to stay in the
South and go to college, Suzy and her husband moved to Bucks County near Dorian and Roger Mehle. But Suzy’s marriage was already in trouble. As it deteriorated, she was becoming a top “editorial,” or magazine, model. Diana Vreeland called her “an intelligent American beauty who is interested in independence and making money.” Her income shot up to $100,000 a year.
When Avedon approached the Parker girls that spring to shoot the all-important fall collections with him in July, they jumped at the chance. Dorian went to Italy first with photographer Genevieve Naylor. She met designer Emilio Pucci on that trip. He and a friend took their clothes off, cornered her, and tried to rape her. Escaping to Paris, she hooked up with Suzy, and they fell in with the era’s gang of hot young Frenchmen, including the actor Christian Marquand, director Roger Vadim, magazine director Daniel Filippachi, and journalist Pierre “Pitou” De La Salle of Paris Match. Suzy fell for Pitou and almost immediately “retired” and moved to Paris. “She couldn’t afford to just be a model, because they didn’t pay enough money in Paris,” says Dorian. So Suzy got an MG sports car, an apartment on the Left Bank, a camera from her friends Sam Shaw and Robert Capa, and an “apprenticeship” with Henri Cartier-Bresson. She started taking pictures herself and eventually worked for Elle and French Vogue and signed up with the Magnum photo agency, although one of its members later admitted, “We never managed to sell a single picture of hers.” Suzy shot a portrait of the handsome expatriate and best-selling writer Irwin Shaw. Dorian had an affair with him before returning to New York.
It was a season of failing marriages. Dorian was about to leave Mehle. Suzy was off to Mexico for a divorce. Richard Avedon had split up with his first wife, too. Unlike Penn and the many photographers who followed them into fashion, Avedon was never known to pursue sexual relationships with models. Early on Avedon told Dorian Leigh that Suzy Parker intimidated him. “He was scared of me, too,” Dorian recalls. “One day he said, ‘It takes a lot of courage to photograph beautiful women.’” That’s why he used a nobody named Dorcas “Doe” Nowell as his model at first. He’d met her in 1945, and they married soon thereafter. “Doe had an androgynous look,” says Lillian Bassman. “Dick, like all of us, has always been fascinated by androgynous sex and theatricality. When they walked down the beach in dungarees, they looked like two little boys.” But in 1948, while Avedon was shooting Elise Daniels in Paris, “Doe was doing summer stock and she met somebody else,” says a friend of the couple’s.
“You can’t fuck and photograph at the same time,” Avedon told writer Anthony Haden-Guest in 1993. “Taking fashion pictures of models is not a matter of arousement. It’s hard work.” Asked for recollections of models he’s worked with, Avedon demurs. “I have no thoughts about models,” he says. “I have no interest in models. I’ve had great friends who were models—Suzy, Dorian, Penelope Tree, Anjelica Huston, China Machado, and now Stephanie Seymour—but these are interesting, feeling women, with good hearts, minds, and, only coincidentally, good bodies. I’d be interested in them no matter what they looked like.”
By 1950 he’d fallen in love with Evelyn Franklin, the nonmodel wife of photographer Milton Greene. They were introduced at one of Avedon’s regular Sunday get-togethers by Lillian Bassman and her husband, the photographer and artist Paul Himmel, who’d shared summer houses with Dick and Doe on Fire Island. “In the period when Evelyn was leaving Milton and going to Dick, she used to come to my apartment on Lexington Avenue,” Dorian Leigh remembers. Avedon married Evelyn in 1951, and although they live apart, they remain married today.
Dorian wasn’t so lucky. Appearing as a model in a Broadway play, she took a leave of absence and returned to Paris in 1953 to see Suzy. “She was living with Pitou,” Dorian says, “and writing very strange letters. I was worried about her, because I never liked Pitou, and I had heard too many stories.” While there, Dorian went to a nightclub, the White Elephant, with Robert Balkany, a wealthy playboy, but slipped off long enough to make a date with the Marquis de Portago, who was known as Fon. Although he was married (to the former Carroll McDaniel, now the very social widow of Milton Petrie), Portago began an affair with Dorian. He was a race car driver, handsome, rich, and very charming. When she appeared on the cover of Look magazine that June, he noticed a quote: “I’d rather have a baby than a mink coat.”
“I think I can take care of both,” said Fon, who soon impregnated her.
“I never stopped to think, never,” says Dorian, who aborted the pregnancy, but not the affair with Fon, who’d promised to get a divorce and marry her. Late in 1954 she won a Mexican divorce from Roger Mehle and then married Portago. Unfortunately he was still married. Fon, who promised to divorce Carroll, promptly got Dorian pregnant again and headed back to Paris. Worried about her sister, Suzy set up a lunch for Dorian with designer Coco Chanel, who’d become a close friend. “Chanel said I was throwing my life away on an idiot,” Dorian reports. “She told me to find a rich husband. But the millionaires were all my friends because I wasn’t interested in their money.”
Early in 1955 Dorian asked Eileen Ford to keep her busy with assignments while she waited for Fon’s return. He bounced in and out of her house in Bucks County but was mostly tied to his family’s purse strings. When Dorian heard that Carroll and Fon had reconciled, she headed back to Paris. “He was living in his flat in Avenue Foch, which was next to his mother’s flat, and he gave me a key to the garden,” Dorian says. “I had to sneak in, and I just suddenly thought, ‘I’m out of my mind. How can I ever make things right?’”
Pregnant again, she tried to kill herself. The doctor who pumped her stomach and sewed up her wrists offered to end this pregnancy, too, but she refused. Fon reappeared and stayed with her until the baby was born. They named him Kim. “Two days after the baby was born I flew to New York to do a series of photographs,” says Dorian.
Suzy met her plane. Suzy’s irresponsibility about money had caught up with her. The Internal Revenue Service was after her for back taxes, and she’d returned home to put her financial house in order. Before she left Paris, Pitou and Coco Chanel had both cynically urged her to marry a rich man, but she’d refused. Pitou had even tried to “sell” Suzy earlier that summer in the south of France when a playboy made him an indecent proposal. “He was a South American son-of-a with a yacht,” recalls Carmen. “He saw Suzy and Pitou and said, ‘How much for a weekend?’ The Cunt De La Salle named a price. That’s the kind of guy he was. He was very appealing, very sexual, but it was all very self-centered, uncaring, unloving, unconstructive.”
The designer Oleg Cassini knew Pitou De La Salle well. “I kept warning Suzy,” he says. “She told me he was Dostoyevsky in the making. He never worked a day in his life. He wrote the same chapter for years.” Nonetheless, that August Suzy married De La Salle, and they took up residence together in an East Fifty-seventh Street penthouse. At Pitou’s request, she kept their marriage secret. And despite the high profile the Parker sisters had assumed, news of Dorian’s suicide attempt and her out-of-wedlock child didn’t leak out, either.
Dorian’s on-again, off-again affair with Portago continued, although by now he was also seeing Linda Christian, the actress who’d been married to Tyrone Power. Fon told her his divorce from Carroll would soon be final. Dorian’s heart soared. Then he crashed his race car in Mexico in May 1957 and died. Eileen Ford, who’d become a masterful crisis manager for her models, helped the grieving Dorian gather her children and retreat to Paris, where she remained for the next twenty years.
Meanwhile, Suzy went to Hollywood. Her first film appearance was a cameo in Funny Face, a 1957 movie starring Audrey Hepburn, as an existentialist turned model, and Fred Astaire, in a role based on Avedon. Avedon, a consultant on the film, suggested Parker play a model in the fashion sequences. Many of the pictures Astaire “takes” in the film were first shot by Avedon of Suzy. By the time the film was released, Suzy was making another movie in California, with Cary Grant, at Audrey Hepburn’s suggestion. Unfortunately Suzy wa
s dreadful in it. “You saw on the screen a terrified girl who didn’t know the setup,” Avedon said. Horst, who hated working with her because she couldn’t hold a pose, said, “In the movie she stood still. It is exactly what I always wanted her to do for me.”
Dorian, meanwhile, was hiding out in Paris, trying to keep Fon’s child a secret and furious at her paramour for “marrying” her in Mexico even though he was still married to Carroll de Portago. Then Suzy revealed Kim’s existence in an interview with the Hollywood gossip Louella Parsons. “Suzy just didn’t approve of me,” Dorian says. “Cary Grant said to her, ‘You must not let yourself be associated with this scandal.’ So she gave an interview saying that we were ‘estranged,’ because she didn’t approve of my having a child out of wedlock. But anyway, that’s how Mother and Daddy found out about Kim. They read it in the newspaper.”
The next time the Parkers made the papers, it was far more serious. On June 6, 1958, Dorian, pregnant again, was in the American Hospital in Paris, trying not to have a miscarriage, when her doctor came in with the Paris Herald Tribune. A story on the front page said that her father had been killed when his car was hit by a train in Florida. Suzy, a passenger, had been thrown through the windshield and was in the hospital with two broken arms. That caused another scandal. Suzy had signed into the hospital as Mrs. Pierre De La Salle. “And he denied it!” Dorian recalls. “He thought it was embarrassing to be married.” Within months Pitou returned to Paris as Suzy, even more famous and determined to conquer Hollywood, headed west again.
Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women Page 13
