Avedon: Something Personal PDF
Preview Avedon: Something Personal
Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Epigraph Chapter 1: Overture Chapter 2: Curtain Raisers Chapter 3: His Show of Shows Chapter 4: Featured Players Chapter 5: The House of Pain Chapter 6: Finding Life Through a Lens Chapter 7: All Hell Breaking Loose Chapter 8: East Meets West Chapter 9: Fresh Affiliations Chapter 10: Forbidden Affinities Chapter 11: Darkroom Rivalry Chapter 12: Assisted Living Chapter 13: First Serving Chapter 14: Assorted Nuts Chapter 15: Second Helping Chapter 16: The Calvin Campaigns Chapter 17: Veni, Vidi…Versace! Chapter 18: Back in (Editorial) Fashion Chapter 19: Believe It or Not Chapter 20: The Cash Cow Chapter 21: Unsullied Legacy Chapter 22: The Last Picture Show Chapter 23: The Living End Chapter 24: Parting Words Dedication Acknowledgments Photo Credits About the Authors Star-Quality: it can shine, on peacock days, like a plume of luck above your genius. —WALTER SICKERT New Year’s Eve 1975. My husband and I were having a few friends over for a champagne toast. Martin was the worldwide creative director of Revlon at the time and had invited to drop by—should he have nothing better to do—his go-to photographer for big splashy four-color “lips and matching fingertips” ad campaigns (“Fire and Ice,” “Persian Melon,” “Cherries in the Snow,” “Stormy Pink,” “Wine with Everything”…). A little before midnight Richard Avedon— the ne-plus-ultra arbiter of feminine grace and beauty, the ambassador of glamour, the epitome of chic—burst through our front door bearing a dozen American Beauty roses, which he presented to me with romantic-comedy panache, fanning them out as if he were showing his hand in a card game. “You shouldn’t have,” I said, “but now I think I’d be disappointed if you hadn’t.” It was an entrance—a performance—worthy of Fred Astaire. And why not, I thought, since Astaire’s character in the film Funny Face had been modeled on him. I remember what he had on that night: lavender silk shirt, skinny black knitted tie, dove-gray double-breasted suit fitted to his wiry frame. And behind the horn-rimmed glasses, those black mile-a-minute pinwheel eyes! And then the crowning glory—his untamed mane of silvery hair. After I’d introduced him to our other guests, he pulled me aside and said, “I’ve got to talk to you. Where can we go?” — I HAD MET RICHARD AVEDON for the first time in the late 1960s when I was a Mad Woman—the creative director of a small advertising agency. I worked on girlie accounts like Coty, Charles of the Ritz, and Monsanto—cosmetics, fibers, and fabrics—while aching to cut my teeth on bigger-budget stuff like cars and booze. One of my clients, Almay, was about to launch a hypoallergenic line to compete with Estée Lauder’s Clinique, for which Irving Penn had produced a series of pristine still lifes that spoke to the product’s immaculate conception. There was only one photographer who could give Penn a run for his money, and that was Richard Avedon. I contacted his longtime rep, Laura Kanelous, who asked right off the bat, “What’s in the budget?” When I told her, she said, “Forget it. He won’t work for that.” I doubled the money. She said, “Keep going!” I said, “That’s it.” She said, “Okay, but you only get six months’ usage,” and she put me through to Avedon. “What’s up?” he barked. I was hearing that unmistakably New York voice for the first time. In my New York voice I told him how I saw the ad: clean, white, pure, nun-like. He said “I got it” and hung up. The morning of the sitting I dressed expressly for him—cream silk shirt, crisp blue blazer with gold buttons, designer shoes. I walked the few blocks from my office to the Avedon studio on East Fifty-eighth Street eager to meet the legend, and I’m not embarrassed to admit that when he charged into the reception area to greet me I felt the electricity. Over coffee he fired off a volley of personal questions—where had I gone to college, what was I reading, what did I like to eat?—but before I could get two words out he was directing my attention to one of his celebrated portraits of Marilyn Monroe that was propped against a wall. And before I knew it he was telling me how she had reached out to him from a phone booth in Beverly Hills just a couple of days before she “committed sui” because she needed him to know that he was the only photographer she implicitly trusted and that more people complimented her on the pictures he had taken of her than on the pictures —the movies—she’d made. “She confided in me an awful lot,” he said. “She even gave me the phone number she said no one else had.” SAM SHAW DICK AND MARILYN, 1959. HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL. At that point the stylist appeared and said, “We’re ready,” and the model, a Swedish beauty, emerged from the dressing room. Avedon approved her hair and makeup, and then back she went, to be dressed. But when she reappeared, she was swathed not in white organdy like the virgin I’d envisioned but embalmed head to toe in rolls of Saran Wrap. He said to me, “Don’t you love this!” I did—I recognized it as something that had never been done before. No surprise there: Avedon was the photographer of so many firsts—the first portrait of the First Family, JFK and Jackie; the first belly button in an American high-fashion mag, Suzy Parker’s; the first bared breasts, Contessa Christina Paolozzi’s; the first ménage à trois; the first fashion-mag cover boy, Steve McQueen; the first haute- couture black beauty, Donyale Luna; the first to shoot outdoors in Paris after the Occupation…So why not, now, the first hypoallergenic mummy? He led the model onto the set, turned up the music (Ella Fitzgerald), and
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