In a neighborhood temple on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the service had been going well until the rabbi whispered something in the bar mitzvah boy’s ear. Suddenly, the wisp of a lad whipped off his thick black glasses with Coke-bottle lenses, stood back, and peered at the ponderous Goliath in heavy black robes. Little Dicky Avedon’s body was trembling with indignation.
Almost a half century later, Richard Avedon would recount that indelible moment, when he was thirteen years old, to Lauren Hutton, one of the most glamorous fashion models in the world. For weeks, he told her, months, he had been bursting with excitement in anticipation of his bar mitzvah. It was his day, and it was this moment in the ceremony when the rabbi was supposed to whisper the secret of life—the actual meaning of existence—into his ear. That’s what he had been led to expect and it was the only reason he agreed to go through with the torturous ordeal. In his young and ever-so-fecund imagination, the rabbi’s secret was supposed to propel him into an incontrovertible metamorphosis beyond the tyrannies of his gloomy little childhood. He expected a miraculous and immediate steely confidence to replace the quaking terror and deep shame that consumed him every day of his life, and to imbue him with the same kind of certitude with which his father barked orders, or the steady authority with which his teachers took command of their lessons, or the sure-footedness of his classmates when they reveled in pushing him around. He thought being told “the meaning of existence” would hurl him into a new realm of consciousness that only adults seemed to have access to, their heads floating higher in the ether and, therefore, closer to the ear of God.
For this reward alone, young Dicky Avedon, son of Jacob, had endured an entire year of tedious Hebrew lessons, boring Torah study, and noose-tightening panics while reading his speech aloud at home in front of his parents, his silent younger sister, Louise, and his opinionated cousin Margie in their claustrophobic apartment on East Eighty-Sixth Street: “Speak with more purpose,” demanded his father. “Don’t pause in the middle of that sentence,” counseled Margie. He was paralyzed by the weight of his dread as he imagined himself in front of the congregation, choking from terror about the unreliability of his changing voice. What an unbearable hazing for one life-altering moment. And, yet, instead of the apotheosis he anticipated, the rabbi made him feel like the victim of a tragic cosmic joke. Avedon told Hutton what the rabbi had whispered into his ear: “The truth is a fountain.” The great photographer and the glamorous model burst into uproarious laughter.
At the time Dick shared his bar mitzvah anecdote with Lauren Hutton, a dinner party joke was making the rounds in the city, a variation of the inveterate New Yorker cartoon in which a guru sits atop a mountain as a truth seeker clings to the ridge by his fingernails, announcing: “I’ve come to learn the meaning of life.” The guru responds: “Life is a fountain.” The truth seeker looks at him and counters, “No it’s not.” Perplexed, the guru says, “Oh, it’s not?”
It’s possible that Dick’s memory of the rabbi’s bromide was based on the punch line of the joke du jour. It was not uncommon for Dick to recount such moments in his life with a loose tether on the actual facts, the events adjusted, the details embellished for a good story or to create just the right image. Regardless, Dick’s bar mitzvah anecdote was intended to convey the pivotal moment in his life when he became a secular—as opposed to religious—Jew.
IN 1936, ON THE pulpit in the sanctuary of the neighborhood temple, in the flash cut of the rabbi’s betrayal, Dicky searched his parents’ faces in the first row. His father, stalwart and proud, meticulous in a three-piece suit and fine silk tie, sat with his prayer book in hand and allowed a smile to crack through the usual scowl of disapproval on his face. Jack Avedon was a stern disciplinarian who never stopped drawing on the dark lessons of his hardscrabble childhood in the tenements and orphanages on the Lower East Side: he set an oppressive tone in the modest Avedon apartment, quoting William Shakespeare and Teddy Roosevelt with a pomposity that underscored his perpetual drumbeat about self-reliance, earning him the disparaging household sobriquet “the Judge.” On this day, though, Dicky could see his father’s unassailable approval of the sacred tableau on the pulpit before him. Today, Jack was glowing with pride as he watched the rabbi talking some sense into his irrepressible son. It only made Dick loathe his father more.
Dick’s mother, Anna, by contrast, was a more effervescent presence. She looked up at Dicky knowingly, the tilt of her head a calming salve to cushion the sting of the rabbi’s betrayal. Anna Avedon knew how to present herself for an occasion—whether she could afford it or not—and Dicky found solace in the dark velvet collar of her smart tailored suit. Anna had come from better circumstances than her husband and held on to a set of expectations about living gracefully that ultimately eclipsed Jack’s ability to satisfy them. From Dick’s perspective, his mother was entirely more imaginative, more optimistic, and more fun than “the Judge.” It was into her arms that he couldn’t wait to flee from the pulpit to expose the fraudulence of the rabbi—in fact, to blast the entire schmear of Judaism. Never again, he vowed, would he set foot in a temple as long as he lived.
For Dick, the meaning of existence would remain unsolvable, an endless riddle about which the wise old rebbes merely stroke their beards in a collective shrug: “The meaning of life? Who knows?” In 1994, at the age of seventy-one, Dick would tell Helen Whitney, the documentary filmmaker: “I’m such a Jew, but at the same time completely agnostic.” For Richard Avedon, the eternal questions would be answered not by religion but in poetry, theater, dance, photography, the magic of art, our reflection in literature. Perhaps it was the meaninglessness of life that drove him to try to invent meaning in the originality of his work.
DICK’S FATHER, JACOB (JACK) Israel Avedon, was a Jewish immigrant, born to Israel and Mathilde (née Sater) Avedon on October 7, 1886, five years before they would emigrate to the United States from Lomzha, in the province of Grodno, on the borders of Lithuania and Poland in what today is called Belarus. Jack’s father, Israel, had been a tailor in Grodno, a civilized, centuries-old town in which the principal sources of income were from agriculture, timber, and crafts. More than half the factories, workshops, and real estate properties were owned by Jews. In 1881, when Alexander III of Russia ascended the throne, the systematic ethnic cleansing he imposed throughout the Russian Empire created the pogroms that drove the diaspora of eastern European Jews to the United States, South America, and South Africa.
Dick’s grandfather Israel arrived at Ellis Island alone in 1890, followed a year later by his wife, Mathilde, and their five children, including Jack. (To explain a devil logo he used on his stationery, Dick would tell of the family name being changed at Ellis Island from Abaddon, meaning “the angel of death” in Hebrew.) They would make their way to the heart of the Jewish ghetto on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where life in the New World commenced for them in an overcrowded tenement at 413 Grand Street. Israel soon abandoned the family, leaving them destitute in a foreign country. The logs of the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum document the admittances of Dick’s father, Jacob, along with his brothers, William and Samuel, on several occasions for periods varying from six months to three years in the last decade of the nineteenth century.
In What Makes Sammy Run?, Budd Schulberg offers an apt description of the Lower East Side in the era of Jack’s childhood: a “cradle of hate, malnutrition, prejudice, suspicions, amorality, the anarchy of the poor.” He describes Sammy Glick, his protagonist, who came out of the ghetto neighborhood of Jack’s childhood, as “a mangy little puppy in a dog-eat-dog world.” Schulberg’s conclusion about life in the Jewish ghetto in Lower Manhattan might well apply to the circumstances in which Jack Avedon had grown up, too: it wasn’t that he had been born into the world any more “selfish, ruthless, and cruel” than anybody else, but to survive in that scrappy social environment, like Sammy Glick, he had to become “the fittest, fiercest and the fastest.” In the intervals between Jack’s stays at the orphanage, he would return to his impoverished mother. Yet, despite the dog-eat-dog obstacles of his abject upbringing, the children of that Jewish orphanage received a reasonably good education. Indeed, Jack climbed his way out of the ghetto, finished high school, graduated from City College, and passed a state pedagogy exam in 1909. For a time, he was a substitute teacher, until he and his brother Samuel opened Avedon’s Blouse Shop on Broadway and 110th Street in 1913.
Jack and Sam did so well with their small shop on upper Broadway that they soon moved to Madison Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street. That shop, too, was successful enough to propel the ambitious and clever Avedon brothers to obtain a twenty-year lease on a parcel of land at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Ninth Street. In 1920, they commissioned a highly reputable Manhattan architect, and construction would begin on a six-story limestone building in the Italian Renaissance style. In early 1921, they opened Avedon on Fifth, a formidable retail women’s clothing emporium—evening gowns, tailored dress suits, coats, lingerie, millinery, blouses, shoes—along the posh Library section of Fifth Avenue. The walls of the main floor were finished with Carrara marble and trimmed with polished mahogany.
Out of the ghetto on the Lower East Side, Jacob Israel Avedon had become a prosperous man, as well as a suitable match for the well-brought-up Anna Polonsky, of 270 Riverside Drive. In the announcement of their engagement, published in the American Hebrew and Jewish Messenger on November 18, 1921, he was identified as “Allan Jack Avedon of this city.” This was the name he assumed for the rest of his life, whether to counteract the pernicious anti-Semitism that foisted untold obstacles in the way of professional advancement for Jews in America, or to erase from his own name that of his father, “Israel,” who had perpetrated the ultimate betrayal of family abandonment.
Anna was a first-generation American Jew. Her mother, the former Rebecca Schuchman, emigrated from Odessa before the turn of the twentieth century. Rebecca had come from a well-to-do family with high social standing; she held the equivalent of a high school diploma, an accomplishment in an era when the education of female children was not encouraged. Family lore has it that Rebecca’s brother, Julius, was a poet in the Russian court and composed verse that was often fifty pages long. Among other family tidbits handed down through the generations was the scandalous reputation of Rebecca’s sister Sonya, a bonne vivante, who had five husbands and many children. She loved the opera and was known to wear excessive amounts of jewelry.
Anna’s father, Jacob Polonsky, was successful enough as a manufacturer of suits and coats to afford an apartment on Riverside Drive, where a doorman stood at the entrance and the apartments had majestic views of the Hudson River. This is where Anna and her older sister, Sally, grew up. Jacob Polonsky was known to indulge in baronial luxuries, such as owning his own Lincoln and employing a full-time chauffeur to drive him around town in the 1920s and 1930s. According to a family tree drawn by his granddaughter, Marjorie Lederer Lee—Dick’s first cousin—Jacob also owned a horse. During Prohibition, he even made his own whiskey.
JACK AND ANNA AVEDON were living at 150 West Eighty-Seventh Street, a tidy block of solid limestone row houses and small apartment buildings between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, when, on May 15, 1923, Richard Charles Avedon was born.
Things were going well for Jack Avedon when Anna gave birth to their son. He had become a respectable man with a thriving business and likely benefitted from his father-in-law’s penchant for grand style. Anna, too, would benefit from her husband’s success in business. In a formal photographic portrait taken a year or so after Dick was born, she sits holding her infant son upright on her lap, her dark hair in a swank modern bob, her handsome features composed in an expression of willing amusement. She is draped in a fashionable silk lamé hostess gown, of the kind that would have been sold at Avedon on Fifth, one with a florentine neckline and a soft iridescent sheen on its luxurious fabric; over the dress is a sheer, floor-length wrap with loose kimono sleeves and a border of patterned silk that cascades like a liquid column across her lap and down to the floor. Dicky is standing on her knees in a white baby frock, steadied in her firm grip, his eyes open wide with an alert, penetrating stare, the dimple in his right cheek almost visible.
Richard Avedon was born the same year that Edward Steichen had been recruited by Condé Nast to work for Vogue and the newly inaugurated Vanity Fair at the highest salary yet paid to any photographer in the world. The photograph of Anna holding Dick as an infant was made around the same time that Steichen posed Marion Morehouse (Mrs. E. E. Cummings), his favorite model, in a lamé dress by Lucien Lelong that epitomizes the slender “flapper” column of the Jazz Age 1920s. Steichen captured the impeccable proportion of the dress—and the fashion of the era—in Morehouse’s stance, poise, and attitude. Arguably this is one of the finest fashion photographs in the history of photography. Anna Avedon was acutely aware of the fashions of her time and, in her portrait, she strikes a stylish equivalent to the Steichen photograph. While this might seem like nothing more than coincidence, it is only the first of many historic overlaps that might be thought of as foreshadowing hallmarks in the unfolding of Richard Avedon’s remarkable life.
On April 2, 1925, a year after the portrait of Anna with her young son was made, she gave birth to Dick’s sister, Louise. The family was growing as the store was expanding. In 1926, an article appeared in Printer’s Ink Monthly, an advertising industry newspaper, highlighting the Avedon brothers’ advertising strategy. It not only cited the architecture and location of Avedon on Fifth as a successful asset for drawing customers, but also acknowledged the elevated tone of the store itself: “In their every contact with the public they put their best foot foremost—they express distinction and refinement in their advertising, their packages, their delivery wagons, and their store.” Included in this article is a picture of several elegant Avedon hatboxes with the store’s trademark imprint of a Beardsley-like drawing of a woman in profile under fine deco graphics, epitomizing the high style of the store in the Roaring Twenties.
In fact, the store had gained a reputation among the younger debutante set, the kind of imprimatur that secured its stature in the hierarchy of women’s fashion in New York. An article in the Hartford Courant from the late 1920s reported “Avedon has built up a tremendous following at Smith, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke and other important schools. When these girls are in town, they come to Avedon on Fifth Avenue, for they like to buy their coats and more important frocks here. . . . The college contacts which have proved such an important item in the growth of this store began in the days when Avedon was at 34th and Madison Avenue and blouses were the specialty. Hardly a wardrobe trunk went back to college without a dozen or more crisp tailored blouses for school wear.”
ASPIRATION AND ASSIMILATION WERE interchangeable for the Avedons, whose families had arrived in America during the largest wave of Jewish immigration from eastern Europe, between 1881 and 1924. By 1918, the United States would have the largest Jewish population in the world. At Ellis Island, arriving immigrants were required to undergo health inspections that determined their eligibility to become US citizens, and the photographs made during these inspections revealed to American citizens the striking “otherness” of these refugees seeking asylum on their soil. The new immigrants were described as “different,” thus fueling, among a range of discriminatory attitudes and practices, the eugenics movement in the United States.
Not only was there a pervasive fear of contagious diseases brought to their shores, but Americans believed that the moral character of the immigrants could be discerned by their anatomical features: “According to 19th-century science, small hands indicated a pension for crime, and an attached earlobe or a widely separated big toe betrayed a tendency toward degenerative behavior, and a low forehead revealed feeblemindedness. Physiognomic findings of this kind served as grounds for deporting immigrants.”
At the turn of the twentieth century, Henry James, the great American author, represented an ethos of WASP breeding and refinement that felt itself to be in a state of siege against the influx of the Jews; he considered the immigrants to be “a class of people who exerted an un-attractive pressure upon the fondly remembered genteel New York of yore.” As American ruling-class anti-Semitism rose, the social, professional, and financial mobility for the Jewish arrivals was hampered at every turn. In this climate, then, it is a tribute to Jack Avedon and his brother Samuel to have understood the anatomy of the American class system enough to navigate the anti-Semitic tide and to have established their well-regarded retail shop on Fifth Avenue, one that appealed to Seven Sisters students and debutantes of New England, exemplars of WASP breeding and refinement—Isabel Archers, one and all.
In 1926, Allan Jack Avedon, his name permanently anglicized, moved his family to a cozy, two-story house with a front lawn and a backyard at 253 Villa Place, a leafy cul-de-sac in Cedarhurst, on the South Shore of Long Island. A mere ten-minute drive to the Atlantic Ocean, this tony suburban enclave was developed in the late nineteenth century as a resort community for the wealthy members of the Rockaway Hunt Club and their friends. The Hunt Club and the Beach Club and the Golf Club were all “restricted”; membership was not available to Jews or to Catholics. Yet once the Long Island Rail Road established its South Shore line, the daily commute to Manhattan became a comfortable reality and the area’s population grew considerably. There was a sizable Jewish community by the time the Avedons moved to Cedarhurst. The Inwood Country Club and the Woodmere Golf Club were not “restricted,” and Jack and Anna became members to take advantage of the amenities, playing tennis and golf, and dining with a circle of new acquaintances. In the 1930 Cedarhurst census log, the four Avedon family members were listed at the address of 253 Villa Place along with an additional resident, Viola Givens, who was identified as “servant”; she was twenty-seven years old and had been born in South Carolina.
Several specific memories of Dick’s early years in Cedarhurst surface repeatedly in the interviews he gave throughout the course of his life. One strikes a decidedly Proustian note, a sensory association that was meant to convey the love he felt for his mother. He would speak of her as adventuresome, saying, “She had a great sense of fun.” He described a moment not long after they moved into their “nice stucco house in Cedarhurst,” as he categorized it, when he remembered her “climbing over the wall of the big Singer estate nearby, stealing lilacs and singing all the way home.” The moment itself was seared into his memory, one he repeated on occasion, his very own petit madeleine. And then he would follow his description of that halcyon image by offering this syllogistic conclusion: “She always wanted me to become an artist.”
While his mother was intent on establishing a foundation of creative inspiration, Dick’s father had a different set of building blocks in mind. Jack’s own rags-to-riches odyssey gave him a clear-eyed sense of what it took to become a successful, upstanding citizen. In family portraits throughout Dick’s childhood, Jack projected himself as a proud man, prosperous and stylish, whose well-dressed family, proper home, and smart automobile would reflect appropriately on the integrity of his achievement. He had learned how to be respectable the hard way, and he was compelled to teach his son those lessons.
“The only way he knew how to show his love was to try to make me as strong as possible in this terrible world,” Avedon told a reporter at Newsweek magazine. Having endured the pitfalls and hardships of growing up in and out of an orphanage, Jack was unrelenting in his attempts to toughen up his often too sensitive son. In particular, he wanted to impress on Dick the value of money. Jack gave Dick a weekly allowance of five cents, payable on presentation of a budget to allocate every cent.
On Dick’s fourth birthday, Jack tried to teach him arithmetic. He picked his young son up and said: “Dicky, how old are you?” Dicky said, “Three.” Jack corrected him. “You’re four.” Dicky insisted he was three, and Jack raised his voice. “Four.” Dicky got so upset that he hit his father on the face. Jack hit him back, harder. Dicky hit him again, now crying, and his father hit him again, harder still. But Dicky would not give in. He held on to his position through his tears and anger until his father dropped the subject. This pattern of resistance to Jack was set early in Dick’s life. Often he refused to tell his father what he wanted to hear or to do what his father wanted him to do as a matter of course, with little regard for the repercussions. “He wanted me to be prepared for what he called ‘The Battle’ in the ways he felt one had to be prepared: through education, physical strength and money.”
Most important for Jack, however, was to be able to provide for his family, in contrast to his own father, who had abdicated that responsibility. This was Jack’s singular requirement for being a mensch, an ethic Dick embraced throughout his life, wholeheartedly, even though the bounty of luxury he showered on his own wife and son could be, at times, an insubstantial substitute for genuine emotional contact.
IN 1920, ANNA AVEDON’S older sister, Sally, wearing a gown embroidered in crystal beads over silver cloth, had married Sydney M. Lederer in the grand ballroom of the Astor Hotel. Over two hundred people were in attendance. Sally gave birth to a daughter, Marjorie, the following year. Soon after Margie’s birth, Sally’s husband, Sydney, abandoned her, and, when Margie was five, they were officially divorced. Sally would suffer a range of psychological and emotional disorders that required periodic institutional treatment for the rest of her life. Little Margie, while living with her mother in her grandparents’ apartment, now on West End Avenue, felt like something of an orphan, and shuttled back and forth between her grandparents’ apartment and the Avedons’. Margie—Dick’s cousin—would stay with his family for extended periods during the summer months, providing Dick a bonus sibling and a childhood best friend.
Margie, two years older, lorded the power of age—and a fiery will—over Dick with an influence that would be truly formative. “We were so close,” Dick told the writer Adam Gopnik. Whenever Margie returned to their grandparents’ apartment on West End Avenue after a stay at the Avedons’ in Cedarhurst, “we just had to phone each other.” In particular, during the Depression, telephone use was so expensive that they were not allowed to talk for more than three minutes. “I remember being dragged away from the phone, in hysterical laughter,” Dick recalled.
Margie (Marjorie Lederer Lee) would grow up to marry, raise five children, and publish three novels and umpteen pseudonymous self-help books. Her 1961 novel, The Eye of Summer, is a fictional evocation of her childhood relationship with Dick. Reviewed in the New York Times, it was described respectfully as “a curiously exotic relationship between two little lost Katzenjammers who attempt to prolong adolescent kinship into maturity. Connie, age 10, is the neglected child of a divorcee; Spence, age 8, is a favored but alienated only child—and the two have a desperate fondness for each other that smolders from summer to summer in their private Netherland, a Fire Islandish resort where they spend their holidays.” The Katzenjammer Kids had been a long-running popular syndicated comic strip about two defiant pranksters always getting into trouble, and the reference is not at all inaccurate.
It is impossible to read The Eye of Summer without regarding it as a literary proxy to the intimate entries of a personal journal. While the names and specific activities in the book might vary from a chronicle of actual events, the story is derived with the emotional tenor and psychological interplay that so firmly characterized the nature of Dick and Margie’s childhood relationship. “They were really like siblings,” Marjorie’s daughter, Alison Teal, said. “And, in the book, The Eye of Summer, you will feel the bond between them.”
Early in the novel, Marjorie Lederer Lee, the author, describes the arrival of her alter ego, Connie, to the beachside summer community:
From the very first day of Connie’s arrival they were filled with a wildness that lay dormant throughout their distant winters, and which seemed in each of them to be aroused only by the other. On that initial day of meeting, a strange light came over their faces: a recognition of some deep and secret tie between them which held them in wondering shyness for one second and then sent them shrieking into each other’s arms. And it was from that instant until the end of summer that they would be carried along, above and beyond the reach of their elders, two crazed creatures, free of the world, yet completely dependent upon each other, and, because of it, half hating, half in love.
“Spence! Oh, Spence!” Connie would scream as she met him on the warped wooden platform of the station. “I’m here, Spence! I’m here!”
“Connie!” he would squeal from the highest register of his little boy’s voice.
Connie is precocious, mischievous, and irascible, and she embroils Spence in antics spawned not only from her peripatetic imagination, but, equally, out of a bottomless well of need. As the ringleader, she often gets them both in trouble. In one chapter that epitomizes her demonic provocations and his naive acquiescence, they are on the beach not far from the house likely based on the Avedons’ house in Cedarhurst; they have just eaten the sandwiches packed by the maid for an afternoon picnic. Connie gathers the paper bag, the wax paper wrappings, uneaten bread crusts, and napkins into a little heap, and idly lights it with a match from a matchbook she has taken from the kitchen. In order to keep the fire going, she orders Spence to collect a few pieces of driftwood, followed by seaweed strewn along the beach, and, finally, clumps of seagrass from the dunes. He complies, happily lost in the adventure, placing the last batch of seagrass on the fire, when, suddenly, the wind changes and the flames flare up, singeing him and causing him to scream. Several adults come running and whisk him off to his mother at home, who calms him down, administers ointments, and leaves him to recover in his room for the rest of the afternoon. Connie is left to endure the silent judgment of her aunt (Anna) and uncle (Jack), and retreats to her room, disappointed and alone.
In the early evening, Spence is at her door holding a big glass jar filled with hard colored candies, a present he was given to make him feel better. He offers one to Connie while informing her that his parents are downstairs having cocktails with their friends. They tiptoe down the hallway and park themselves at the top of the stairs. While listening to the adults talk about things they don’t understand, they whisper and giggle and suck on their candies. Every so often, Connie playfully elbows the candy jar closer to the edge of the stairs, which Spence finds deliriously funny. He then echoes her gesture, further inching the jar with his finger to the point that it “jiggled once, fought for its balance, and pitched forward,” Lee writes. “And, huddled there in the darkness, entangled inseparably as ivy in each other’s limbs, Connie and Spence heard, among the shrieks from below, the gorgeous staccato clacking of a hundred candy ack-acks, aimed by two small snipers against an enemy world.”
“I was deeply in love with Margie from the age of 4 until I was 18,” Avedon, in his sixties, told Nicole Wisniak. “It was only with her that I could breathe freely. We were precocious from the start. When the Cocteau movie Les Enfants Terribles came out, we knew we were those children. We saw it over and over. Our feelings for each other were so intense, so forbidden, so conspiratorial.”
In 1928, Eva Le Gallienne, who founded the Civic Repertory Theatre in New York, put on an ambitious and now legendary production of Peter Pan, in which she starred as the young boy who won’t grow up. With elaborate sets and vibrant costumes, the show contained music, dancing, fencing—and flying. Le Gallienne thrilled audiences as the first Peter Pan onstage not only to fly through the window, but, as her grand finale, to fly over the entire audience, a feat of theatrical hijinks, canny jury-rigging, and, in 1928, as close to virtual reality as was possible. Avedon described this period of his childhood when busloads of children would fill the Saturday matinee audiences of Broadway productions. He and Margie, on their own, would sneak into second acts. “Margie and I went to the Eva Le Gallienne Peter Pan, and when Peter turned to the audience and asked if we wanted Tinkerbell to live, we shouted from the balcony, ‘No!’”
“The connection they had was extraordinary,” said Steven Lee, Marjorie’s second-born son. “Dick had this kind of amazingly energetic quality, a childlike quality, and the sense of holding on to that creative energy, and the two of them I guess played off of each other as kids. . . . Hence her novella, which was the story of their relationship.”
“I STARTED TAKING PHOTOGRAPHS at the age of nine with the Box Brownie,” Dick told Michel Guerrin during an interview for Le Monde in 1993, characterizing the Brownie camera in the early 1930s as a technological advancement that turned photography into a national hobby. “It was affordable. It cost a dollar and took six pictures, two and a quarter inches square. The same size as the Rolleiflex, which was my favorite camera and still is.”
Dick’s father had explained the principles of photography to him—the way in which light traveled through the lens and exposed the sensitive surface of the film—and Dick let his imagination roam. “I was nine years old when I realized that my skin was a sensitive surface,” he remembered. “I took a negative of my sister, and surgical tape, taped the negative on my shoulder. And then I went out in the sun. It was in the summer. After two days I peeled the negative off.” Her image had burned like a tattoo onto his arm. This investigation into the properties of photographic exposure, albeit primitive, was ingenious—ahead of its time. If the Montessori concept of education had been in wider practice when Dick was in school, he would have been congratulated on his curiosity and creativity. Yet his experiment might have been motivated less by his interest in the physics of photography than out of affection for his sister. Louise was something of a family enigma because of her inability to express herself. His mother used to tell her that she didn’t have to speak if she didn’t want to; it was enough that she had such beautiful eyes and gorgeous skin.
“Her beauty was the event in our house,” Dick often said. “Her shyness was never examined.” Dick often felt the instinctive need to protect her. As a teenager, Louise would be diagnosed with schizophrenia, something she had in common with her aunt Sally, Margie’s mother. Regardless, the sunburned image of Louise’s face on Dick’s skin constituted what he liked to call his “first photographic print.”
While the Avedons’ residence in Cedarhurst had brought with it a suburban version of modern prestige and an accumulation of new comforts, Anna was resolute about familiarizing her children with the fertile cultural life of the city. As often as she could, she brought Dick, Louise, and Margie into Manhattan and introduced them to “painting” in the museums, “the theater” on Broadway, and “music” in all variety of concerts. “My mother used to bring the three of us here on a route: the Met, the Frick, and Carnegie Hall, all in a row. We’d sit and talk about what we’d seen.”
Dick was particularly fond of Rembrandt’s Polish Rider, a 1655 painting that hung at the Frick Collection. He looked forward to seeing it whenever they visited the museum. In it, Rembrandt depicts a handsome, well-dressed young man on horseback with a bow over one shoulder and a set of arrows fanning out of a crafted leather case at his waist. He sits upright, proud and confident, looking out beyond the viewer into the mythical distance. An amber glow suffuses the entire canvas, and a bright golden outline on the rider’s shoulder illuminates a part of his face. The horseman is wearing red velvet pants, painted with vivid intensity under his fine, well-tailored coat. The vibrancy of his pants lends sizzle to his already commanding appearance.
Revisiting the museum in the 1990s, Dick recalled the strong impression the painting had made on him. “I was that young man, and I was in love with him—with myself, my idealized vision of myself, what I might be. I saw him as me, that possibility in life—everything lying ahead, and not yet knowing, not looking at the road, but out. It sounds grandiose, I know, when you say it, but the sense I had was so strong that someone else, Rembrandt, had felt everything I was feeling. I was so reassured by that picture.”
For the ten-year-old Dick, the Rembrandt—just as with theater or movies or music—was an early glimpse into the transformative nature of art. Each form provided a transcendent experience that offered the young Richard Avedon recognition of what might be possible, as well as an acquaintanceship with his own longing. Each genre offered a different portal out of the mundane and morose present into a utopian promise of life as he thought it should be experienced. It may have been The Polish Rider that, early on, allowed Dick to exercise his keen observational ability, even though it would take him half a century to explain what the painting had meant to him. Dick’s dark, intense eyes were wide open from the moment of his birth, and observation is what he thrived on. His eyes were a window through which he could nurture his intelligence and ignite his imagination, whether from the sheer lilac membrane petals in his mother’s hands or the Polish rider’s poised glamour at the Frick. Both had been seared into his sensory memory as archetypes of his childhood.
IN 1930, A YEAR after the stock market crash brought untold numbers of American businesses to an abrupt halt, Avedon on Fifth became another victim of the depressed economy. Jack and his brother were forced to file for bankruptcy and shutter permanently the store that they had worked so hard to build. Jack had taken great pride in the store; it gave him credibility as an upright citizen in his community and as a worthy role model for his children. How was he going to justify to himself—never mind to his son—its demise? How was he supposed to explain to his young son the most important life lesson of this historic cataclysm—that the vagaries of fate are at constant odds with the determination of one’s will?
The bankruptcy, while not due to a failure of stewardship by Jack or his brother, commenced a painful period for the Avedon family. Humiliated and nearly destitute, Jack took a job selling insurance for Connecticut Mutual. When Dick was barely nine, they had to sacrifice their comfortable home in Cedarhurst and move back to the city. In reduced circumstances, they took a small apartment at 16 East Ninety-Eighth Street. Tensions mounted between Jack, who shouldered the burden of supporting his family with the solemnity of his disgrace, and Anna, who felt the elegant wings of her spirit to be unceremoniously clipped. Soon enough Jack would take a new job as a buyer at the Tailored Woman, a retail store on West Fifty-Seventh Street, and Anna would continue to make the best of a tiny allowance. Ever resourceful, she continued her children’s cultural education by attending concerts at Carnegie Hall and plays on Broadway, dressing down intentionally to look as if they didn’t have money—which they didn’t—and tipping the ticket taker twenty-five cents to let them sneak into the theater without tickets.
The dining alcove served as Dick’s bedroom. “I was eleven years old. The walls beside my bed and the ceiling above were my domain, and I covered them with my chosen view: a gleaning of five years of Christmas Tuberculosis seals, three hundred Dixie Cup tops, and the photographs of Martin Munkacsi,” he would write in 1963 for an introduction to a book about Munkacsi’s work. “I cared nothing about photography and less about fashion, but the potentialities beyond 98th Street filled my waking dreams, and because my family subscribed to Harper’s Bazaar, it became my window and Munkacsi’s photographs my view.”
Now that he lived in Manhattan, Dick was able to spend more time with Margie. He would ride his bike across Central Park to his grandparents’ apartment on West End Avenue and West Eighty-Fourth Street. Sergey Rachmaninoff, the great Russian composer, lived in the apartment above the Polonskys—or, by then, the Posts, as they, too, anglicized their name—and Dick and Margie liked to listen to him tinkling out a set of high notes or banging out the deep chords of his Fourth Piano Concerto as he labored over the stormy melodies on the grand piano. “The minute he started practicing, my cousin Margie and I would go up the back stairs and sit on the garbage cans by the service elevator to listen to him play.” When the music stopped, the two Katzenjammers would run back downstairs and listen for his footsteps in the kitchen, where they could hear him open the refrigerator door and get something to eat. Then, again, when he headed back toward the piano, they ran back up the stairs and listened some more.
One day, Dick asked the doorman to let him know when the maestro called for his car. At the call, Dicky scurried down the stairs and waited for Rachmaninoff to emerge from the entrance. He remembered the countenance of a White Russian aristocrat: “very severe,” he said. “Rachmaninoff stopped and stood in front of a fire hydrant. I had my Box Brownie and click, and that was it.” Avedon would claim this to be “my first portrait” ever. Two weeks later, Anna took Dick to a Rachmaninoff concert at Carnegie Hall, which may have included works that Dick and Margie had listened to him rehearse. “I had my picture. I wanted to get him to autograph it, but for some reason we couldn’t get backstage; something went wrong, and it broke my heart.”
This might be an opportune moment to consider the veracity of Dick’s childhood anecdotes, the stories he would recount in interviews in his later life to offer a glimpse of his precocious, if alienated, youth. In 1989, Avedon published an essay entitled “Borrowed Dogs” in the fine literary journal Grand Street. The first paragraph is a beautifully crafted memory that serves as a fitting metaphor about his family’s deliberated construction of la façade, as the French call it, and their benign machinations to present themselves as a happier and more well-to-do family than reality bore out:
When I was a boy, my family took great care with our snapshots. We really planned them. We made compositions. We dressed up. We posed in front of expensive cars, homes that weren’t ours. We borrowed dogs. . . . Looking through our snapshots recently, I found eleven different dogs in one year of our family album. There we were in front of canopies and Packards with borrowed dogs, and always, forever, smiling. All of the photographs in our family album were built on some kind of lie about who we were . . . and revealed a truth about who we wanted to be.
Indeed, their maintenance of a certain image might have been tinged with residual bitterness at the more constrained conditions of their unintended lifestyle. Until the stock market crash and the bankruptcy of the store, Jack and Anna Avedon had become the very people of their own aspiration—stylish, dignified, and, to some extent, cultivated. They lived in a comfortable house in a smart, verdant suburb; they socialized over cocktails and dinner with friends at the club. The impulse to be recognized as a prosperous and affable American family gave them further immunity from the prejudice and judgment of anti-Semitism. They may have had their pretenses, but it was with instinctive self-protection that they aimed for a facade that was decidedly American.
While the family snapshots exist as proof that the Avedons posed with other people’s dogs, there is no evidence to corroborate Dick’s recollections of his “first photographic print”—which faded with the tan on his arm—or verifiable proof that his “first photographic portrait” was of Rachmaninoff, who did live above Dick’s grandparents on West End Avenue. Both stories are plausible, and yet they were recounted long after Dick had become “Richard Avedon,” each anecdote fashioned with a certain je ne sais quoi to suggest in retrospect the clever precocity and quiet derring-do of the nascent artist. Yet how many borrowed dogs did it take to come up with such fitting, if unassailable, tales about the great photographer’s “first portrait” and “first print”?
IN 1935, DICK SAW the movie Top Hat, which threw the lapidary Polish rider off his saddle, so to speak. In Fred Astaire, Dick was given an entirely new standard of adulation. Astaire plays Jerry Travers, a smooth and hopelessly urbane song-and-dance man, in the kind of cinematic spectacle that Hollywood produced to lift the spirits of moviegoing audiences during the Depression. While it may have been perverse to flaunt the excessive luxuries and frivolities of the very rich in front of penniless audiences, moviegoers flocked to the theaters. Dick saw Top Hat at Radio City Music Hall, itself a daunting spectacle of art deco high style, with celestial golden crescents emanating from the proscenium stage, and no fewer than six thousand seats, all of them filled for this charming celluloid bonbon—the biggest box office draw in 1935.
Top Hat is a sublime entertainment—sumptuous, sophisticated, and smooth, a comedy of mistaken identity and snappy patter that breezes through an array of beautiful rooms with sleek white furnishings, fluttering gossamer curtains, and gleaming marble floors on which Fred Astaire in his white tux and top hat and Ginger Rogers in her swirling silk gown with bouncing white feathers dance together so effortlessly and with such fluidity that we find ourselves in the dreamiest precincts of our collective imagination. The movie took the breath away from the twelve-year-old Richard Avedon, and his heart pounded from the unfathomable glamour and the magic of their dancing. “The first time I saw Fred Astaire making love to Ginger Rogers with his feet, I thought, ‘I get it. That’s a man a person could be proud to be,’” Avedon said, many years later. “I ran up the aisle of Radio City Music Hall kicking the seats, imitating him.”
Dicky’s exuberance would again be manifest when, the following summer, he took to the stage in a solo performance at summer camp. It was not a happy experience. In his father’s ongoing campaign to teach Dick to be resourceful and practical—and stay alert to the unspoken dictates of assimilation—he was sent to a YMCA survival camp. These intensive camps teach useful and potentially lifesaving outdoor skills in preparation for camping or hiking in natural surroundings or, perhaps, surviving alone in the wilderness: foraging for food; trapping and snaring animals; fishing; building fires from scratch; creating shelter in nature; rappelling down a waterfall. Jack was forever admonishing Dick to be more self-reliant and to learn to protect himself: “If you don’t watch out,” he would caution his son with one of his persistent and disparaging refrains, “you’re going to join the army of illiterates and end up as a taxi-driver.”
Norma Stevens, who served as Richard Avedon’s studio manager and all-around coconspirator for thirty years, recounts in her memoir a poignant conversation with Dick—at the time in his late fifties—following dinner in a world-renowned restaurant. He summoned the painful memory of that YMCA camp, bemoaning his “miserable father” for forcing him to run that gantlet. Dick had already suffered the humiliation of his inadequacies by the time he arrived at the camp, and his bunkmates made it worse: He was “too short, too skinny, too myopic,” and, on top of that, a terrible athlete. They taunted him for “throwing a ball like a girl.” Norma had heard the YMCA camp stories before, but, on this particular evening, he divulged to her something completely new, and important: he had had “stirrings” for a boy in his cabin named Patrick, whom he described as having “freckles and butterscotch hair.” In the context of his bunkmates’ bullying and ridicule, Patrick had showed him an unusual kindness one morning by telling Dick that he was going to pray for him. “My heart turned over,” Dick told Norma. His desperate need for acceptance was now compounded with the entirely new sensation—desire—and it compelled Dick to prove himself worthy of Patrick’s friendship. He convinced his drama counselor to let him do his Fred Astaire Top Hat routine during intermission at the upcoming camp play. “On the big night, after I finished, I took a deep bow, then blew a big fat kiss to the audience—only, without even thinking, I aimed it directly at my butterscotch boy,” Dick told Norma. “He stood up, looked straight at me on the stage, and—it still hurts to remember—mimicked throwing up.” Then he stormed out.
One can imagine Dick tap-dancing on the stage, lost in an abandon of pure joy. He may have been trying to prove something to his fellow campers but, naively and unwittingly, he had performed a pubescent mating dance. This unabashed display of affection turned his bunkmates’ all-too-familiar aversion toward him into bald revulsion. They would have burned the “pansy” at the stake had they been given the chance. Worse, Dick had marked the very object of his affection—whose kindness now hardened into contempt. Alone on the stage after his bow, Dick felt like a leper, naked and desperate for the safety of his own quarantine. Embarrassment didn’t begin to describe how he felt—stabbed in the heart and humiliated at the same time.
When Dick was seventy, he was asked in a public conversation at the Whitney Museum to describe despair: “I can only speak for myself,” he said. “It starts as being an isolated child, an isolated person, who wants to perform, wants to give to the family, the world, and can’t do it the way they want, or can’t enter the world in the way the world appears to be set up. So, you make your own world.”
Dick knew it would be too dangerous to return to his bunk that night; in a state of hysteria, he called his parents and complained that he had been the target of discrimination, referring to what he told them were anti-Semitic taunts—even though it was really nascent homophobia—and begged them, for his own safety, to come pick him up. His father drove two hours that night to get him.
Dick could not have known at the time that he was a victim of his own attributes. He suffered as a victim of his fragility, the prejudice endured as a Jew, his enthusiasms for things other than sports, and his bubbly excitability. The characteristics that made him unique, for which he was ostracized as a child, were the very qualities that would propel him toward his destiny. The tragic secret about the hierarchies of teenage life is that those who are the most desirable in high school often reach their social peak at seventeen and those who are fumbling around in adolescence, like Dick, have not yet gotten started but suffer the wounds of rejection nonetheless.
If his social milieu in adolescence had not been confusing and painful enough, the added burden of his parents’ expectations further complicated his sense of direction. “Somehow,” Avedon said, “I got the message that I had to be one kind of person to please my mother, another kind to please my father.”