Filmmaker Roy Boulting’s daughter, Ingrid, left her broken home at sixteen for London and became a reluctant model with English Boy. She was rediscovered by Polly Mellen just after her arrival at Vogue. Boulting was visiting the magazine with Marisa Berenson’s sister, Berry, a photographer, when Mellen saw her and screamed down a corridor, “You!” The next day Boulting was shooting pre-Raphaelite photographs with Richard Avedon.
“It was so bizarre,” she says. “Those shots had such impact that everyone wanted to work with me.” She escaped to Belgium to act in a play, but Eileen Ford followed and begged her to come back. She posed for several years more, but her heart wasn’t in it. “I’d sit there and stare at these beautiful girls and think, What am I doing here?” she says. “I made a commitment to Ford to be available more, but I could only take so much. My heart wasn’t in it. I wasn’t money-oriented. Eileen would have parties, and there’d be producers. I went to a couple, but they were lonely experiences. There was no intimacy. And I had the feeling I was invited for reasons other than my presence.” Finally Boulting quit and returned to her first love, acting.
The daughter of Ronald Tree, a British multimillionaire, and Marietta Peabody, the daughter of an Episcopal bishop, Penelope Tree was bred for great things. Her mother was a patrician activist who became the first woman delegate to the United Nations. Her half sister, Frances FitzGerald, became a Pulitzer Prize—winning author for reporting on the war in Vietnam. A lank-haired five-foot-ten exotic with wide, painted eyes, Penelope first modeled at age thirteen for Diane Arbus. Her father told Arbus he’d sue her if she ever published the picture. At fifteen she was shot again by Guy Bourdin. This time Ronald Tree let the picture run in Mademoiselle.
At seventeen in 1967 Tree was “discovered” again by Diana Vreeland, who sent her to Richard Avedon. “She was gawky, hunched over, with stringy hair, absolutely not a beauty at all,” said Polly Mellen. “She looked like a gangly little urchin” in a black bell-bottomed outfit. Mellen was ready to toss her out of the studio, but Avedon saw something. “She’s perfect,” he said. “Don’t touch her.”
Back in London, Bailey was ready for a new adventure. He thought Tree looked like “an Egyptian Jiminy Cricket.” She soon moved into his house on Primrose Hill, where she entertained her lover by painting one room black and another purple, installing a UFO detector, and bringing home Black Panthers and a Tibetan monk. Their life between location trips was a nonstop party. “The house was full of hippies, looking at the ceiling and saying ‘Great!’” Bailey later recalled. “I’d be getting into my Rolls and there would be three of them in the back smoking joints that I had paid for and calling me a capitalist pig!”
The new decade was dark for Bailey. The floors of his house were covered with the droppings of his many dogs, and his sixty parrots gave him a disease called psittacosis. A homeless party guest moved in and lived there for two weeks before anyone noticed. Bailey spent his time watching television, eating apples, and drinking cans of Coke, tossing the empties over his shoulder onto the carpet. He and Tree broke up after seven years, in 1974. She dropped out of fashion and eventually made her way to Sydney, Australia, where she still lives. Bailey later said that although he found her fantastic, he “never quite came to terms with photographing her because Avedon got to her first.”
Avedon was by this time disenchanted with the superficial world of fashion. “The necessities of fashion magazines were no longer mine, no longer interesting,” he said. “The sixties saved me, in a sense, for a while. I was able to do something not completely embarrassing, sometimes quite successful…. Vreeland and I developed together an image of a new kind of woman. The sixties was like the twenties in its flamboyance, and in its extraordinary clothing.”
That flamboyance flowered in the new disco culture. In 1961 Oleg and Igor Cassini were among a group of swells who founded Le Club, a private restaurant and discotheque. “The Stork and El Morocco disappeared,” says Oleg. “Playboys disappeared. That time passed. The models became celebrities. Model agents and photographers became the important guys. Going out with them was more important than dancing all night long with some schmuck. Le Club was the link between the world that existed and the galloping future.”
Like the Terrible Trio in London, American photographers were riding the new waves of fashion. A native of Forest Hills, Queens, Jerry Schatzberg started his career in his family’s fur business, but after a brief stint as a baby photographer he got a job as an assistant to fashion photographer Bill Helburn in 1954.
Helburn was a rake, “a great charmer,” Schatzberg says. “He had a lot of women. If we went on locations trips with three or four models, Bill would have one and I’d be with the others, talking, sometimes flirting.” Sunny Griffin remembers Helburn’s romantic approach well. “He’d walk into the dressing room, pat you on the back, and get your bra undone,” she says. “I never knew how he did it. When front-close bras came in,” she adds, laughing, “he was undone!”
In 1956 Schatzberg moved into Manhattan, started working for Glamour, and rented a studio on Park Avenue South. In 1958 Alexander Liberman moved him to Vogue. He liked to work with model Anne Saint Marie. She was a sensitive, artistic California girl, separated from her first husband. Schatzberg fell in love with her but kept his distance. “I was in awe,” he says. “If we had an affair, it was through the camera. Anytime I needed a favor, Anne worked for me. When I worked for Vogue, I’d save the worst clothes for her because she’d make them look like the best.”
Even if Schatzberg had wanted more, that soon became impossible. Saint Marie got involved with another photographer named Tom Palumbo. Born in Italy, Palumbo had come to America after the war, studied art, and then become assistant to Bazaar photographer James Abbey, Jr. Palumbo started shooting and brought his work to Edward Steichen, who’d ended up as the curator of photography at Museum of Modern Art. Steichen sent Palumbo to Alexey Brodovitch, who put him to work for Bazaar.
When he met Saint Marie, she was fresh to New York, still living in Eileen and Jerry Ford’s town house. When Palumbo got an assignment to shoot California fashion, she was one of the models. A romance started on that trip, although “it wasn’t consummated because she was in the middle of a divorce and I was married also, to a model named Kate Johnson,” Palumbo says.
By 1960 they were both free, and they got married. Saint Marie had become a top model by then. After the couple had a son, Saint Marie tried to quit but found she couldn’t. She started seeing a psychiatrist, who prescribed a barbiturate to put her to sleep at night and amphetamines to wake her up in the morning. She also drank. And she and Palumbo fought enough that people throughout their little world knew it. “He was totally unfaithful to her, chasing the likes of me,” says model Nancy Berg.
Anne Saint Marie photographed by Jerry Schatzberg in 1958
Anne Saint Marie by Jerry Schatzberg, courtesy Staley-Wise Gallery, New York
While he doesn’t deny that his eye might have roved (“Nancy Berg was there, too,” he says), Palumbo insists that he and Saint Marie were very much in love. “We used to fight like hell and love like hell,” he says. “We were two immature kids. The marriage got strained.” And the strain showed. “He’d go and come back; she’d go and come back,” remembers Dorian Leigh. “He was dreadful to her. If a woman did it, it would be called ball-breaking. He criticized her in front of people. He’d say, ‘Here’s the great beauty!’ She was hysterical, in a Streetcar Named Desire kind of way. Everyone wanted to protect her.”
“She was crazy,” says photographer Roger Prigent. “She lived in a world of fantasy, completely dedicated to work, centered on modeling. She would beg to retake photographs. All those girls started to drink because of the pressure. It was too much too soon. They should have been salesgirls at Woolworth’s, and they made in one hour what the average girl made in a week.”
Finally, in 1961, at Eileen Ford’s suggestion Palumbo and Saint Marie saw a marriage counselor, who suggested t
hey separate. Palumbo moved into his studio and didn’t see his wife again for three years. “Every now and then I got a call,” he says. “I didn’t always know where she was. She had my son. All I know is that she wound up in the hospital.”
In Palumbo’s absence, Jerry Schatzberg became Saint Marie’s confidant. “Tom was a prick,” Schatzberg says. But Palumbo wasn’t her only problem. She was getting older and couldn’t bear it. “It became an obsession to her,” according to Schatzberg. “When you’re on top, you’re a queen. Then they don’t need you anymore. She was taking pills, having a constant nervous breakdown. She’d say Seventeen magazine was going to use her. She was an absolute mess.”
Finally, broke and broken, Saint Marie was hospitalized. Photographer Karen Radkai took up a collection to pay her bills. Her recovery was slow. In 1964 Saint Marie and Palumbo got back together. Rumors flew that she had died, and neither of them tried to stop them. “She had died,” Palumbo says. “She died as their invention. She died as model. But we created another life for sixteen years. It was a pact we had.” Saint Marie finally did die—of lung cancer—in 1986.
Meanwhile, Jerry Schatzberg’s career had taken off. He fell in with London’s Terrible Trio when he went to Europe for Glamour and Esquire and photographed the Beatles in London. “I was absolutely astounded,” he says. “There were all these men in the airport with long hair. Duffy took me to the Ad Lib. Bailey told me about the Rolling Stones. I introduced him to Catherine Deneuve.”
Back in New York, Schatzberg hosted the Terribles whenever they came to town, throwing parties in his studio, where Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, and Baby Jane Holzer mixed with models and photographers, glorying in their status as the new pop aristocracy. Schatzberg also frequented Le Club, growing friendly with its manager, Olivier Coquelin. Coquelin invited him to invest in a new club called Ondine. Within six months Richard Burton’s ex-wife, Sybil, and her boyfriend, Jordan Christopher, opened Arthur. Francesco Scavullo backed a club called Daisy. A photographer named Steve Horn was involved with another, the Sanctuary. New York’s first disco age was in full swing.
“They were wild times,” says booker Jane Halleran. “The models were very much a part of it. They were stars. But we were all so stoned it’s hard to think of stories. It was so heady. It was one big dance. We would go to Le Club and Arthur, and then to the airport and Paris and Castel, and then to the airport and London and the Ad Lib, and then back to New York.”
Constance Stumin, a teenager from Ohio, joined Ford in 1966 and found herself in the deep end of modeling’s pool. On one of her first go-sees an advertising man invited her out for dinner and then back to his apartment. “He came out of his bedroom in red satin underwear and popped an amy [an amyl nitrate Spansule] under my nose,” she recalls. “He put Lord of the Flies on the TV and asked me to lie on the bed. I didn’t know how to behave. Finally I asked him for money for a cab. He threw my shoes over the balcony.” Dressing quickly as the executive sniffed more poppers, Stumin grabbed a pair of his ruby cuff links and bolted. “I sold the cuff links and paid the rent,” she says. A year later she was tossed out of the Ford agency “for lewd dancing at Le Club,” she says. “Eileen was furious and said I’d never work in this town again.”
As the fashion and music worlds blended, the drugs of the sixties infiltrated fashion. The alcohol and pills that did in Anne Saint Marie gave way to even more dangerous highs, and models, young outriders on the cutting edge, tried them all. In October 1969, in upstate New York, a model named Eva Gshopf fell out of a tree and died. “There’s no question she was on everything,” Eileen Ford says. Then, in February 1971, a German model named Agneta Frieberg, apparently high on LSD, jumped out a hotel window in Paris and died as well. French authorities asked Ford if the girl could have been involved with a revolutionary group. “I don’t think she ever thought that deeply,” Ford replied.
Drug taking wasn’t limited to models. “I was taking lots of uppers, staying up most of the night,” Schatzberg says. “I didn’t know pills were a drug. They kept you functioning.” In 1969 Schatzberg made his first film, based on the life of Anne Saint Marie. Faye Dunaway, whom he dated, starred as a model named Lou in Puzzle of a Downfall Child. “I really always loved that character,” Dunaway later said. “She spent all her life trying to get to the place where it would be wonderful, and she got to that place and she hates it. It was the underbelly of the American dream … all the beauty and the glamour.”
Schatzberg dropped out of fashion in one piece. Others weren’t so lucky. Bert Stern, inspired by Irving Penn, started taking pictures in 1953. By 1959 he was shooting for Glamour, Condé Nast’s farm team for future Vogue photographers. Bob Richardson, a Long Island native, graduated from art school around the same time and became a window designer for Bloomingdale’s. Then he started taking pictures and eventually became assistant to Carmen Dell’Orefice’s husband, Richard Heimann. Early on Richardson photographed a model named Nena von Schlebrugge (who was briefly married to LSD guru Timothy Leary and later had a daughter, actress Uma Thurman), lying on a couch crying while talking on the phone to her psychiatrist. The photos that resulted led to better work.
Both Stern and Richardson were girl-crazy. “Women were everything to me,” Stern says. “You did anything to get over them or under them and get the picture. I wasn’t booking models to sleep with them, but I did find women the best thing there was. And let’s be honest, everything went in the sixties.” Richardson felt the same way. “I hated fashion,” he says, “but I liked photographing women.”
The two were driven and ambitious. For ten years Stern lived his dreams and photographed them. He was shooting the best models, earning as much as $500,000 a year, and spending it all. “Blow-Up was a simple photographer,” Stern says. “I became a thing.” He owned a town house, an eleven-room condominium with a swimming pool, a schoolhouse he converted into a studio where thirty-eight employees toiled, and a second, secret studio where he could hide from them. “Work was fun,” he says. “Fun was work. I’d rent a yacht and go off and shoot pictures.”
Richardson chose a different, confrontational path. “I only had time for ideas,” he says. “I became too involved in creating a style. My trouble was, I didn’t want to be famous. Anyone can become famous. I wanted to be great.” That led to constant arguments with the editors he worked for and a reputation that scared off advertising clients. “I always cause a scandal wherever I go,” he says boastfully. “My photographs were so weird. I fought with all the editors I worked with. They were so old-fashioned and out of step.” Then he met a kindred spirit.
Donna Mitchell grew up in northern Manhattan and began modeling when she was fifteen. When she expressed the desire to do photo work, she was sent to Eileen Ford, who told her she was too short, needed a nose job, and should probably have her back teeth extracted in order to emphasize her jawline. “We’re talking fifteen and a half!” Mitchell remembers. “I fled in tears.”
By 1964 Mitchell had appeared in Brides and Ladies’ Home Journal. A year later she met Melvin Sokolsky. “I picked models people thought were odd,” Sokolsky says. “I saw this incredible face at a shoot with six girls, and I put a one hundred-fifty millimeter lens on my camera and started to pan, watching her. She had a Madonna’s face with inner intelligence, and she was clocking everything around her.” Sokolsky sent her to editor Gwen Randolph at Bazaar, where she showed up in a ratty raccoon coat held closed with a safety pin. “You’re putting me on,” Randolph told the photographer. But he insisted, and soon they went to Paris to shoot the collections. “Donna could take the gestures of the street and turn them into the highest form of elegance,” Sokolsky raves. “She had the knowledge of the world in her little face.”
Sokolsky, too, had a vision, and Mitchell played right into it. “My models were more than props,” he says. “I drew from who they were, how they gestured, what they feared.” He wanted to chronicle his times. “I was systematically breaking down the social decorum of g
esture,” he says, “from women who sat on the couch with their purses to women who sat on the floor. It was about class. Poor people live six to a bedroom. That brings an intimacy to the fore that rich people are afraid to address.” Sokolsky consciously played against the then-prevailing stiff couture style in Bazaar. He shot Mitchell sitting with her legs spread. “It was the gesture of the time,” he says. “Louise Dahl-Wolfe called me a vulgarian.” Bazaar’s editor Nancy White accused him of “saying ‘fuck you’ in sign language,” he adds.
By the early seventies Sokolsky had had enough. “I was so busy making money I trapped myself. Some photographers can keep taking the same picture over and over, but if you’re shooting people flying over Paris in bubbles or in burnt-out buildings, like I was, it gets harder and harder to come up with something new. Finally I was sick and tired of being told how to take pictures, and I just backed away. I saw what was coming. I saw the freedom being taken away by retards and monkeys. I didn’t want to face it.” He retired from fashion photography and with his partner, Jordan Kalfus, Jean Shrimpton’s ex, formed a company to make TV commercials.
Donna Mitchell photographed by Bob Richardson in the late 1960s
Donna Mitchell by Bob Richardson, courtesy Staley-Wise Gallery, New York
Donna Mitchell moved on, too. “I made it clear I wanted to work for photographers, not magazines,” she said. “I’d turn down a booking unless it was with a photographer I wanted to work for. It wasn’t about just having my photograph taken. I liked to develop ideas, as opposed to being someone who jobbed in. That was my greatest pleasure. My ambition was to do the best photograph with each photographer.” She began a long collaboration with Bob Richardson, whose ambitions and ideas coincided with hers.
Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women Page 26
