The first issue of the ambitious quarterly Portfolio, published by Alexey Brodovitch in January 1950, included six bound-in samples of gift wrap paper; a tipped-in Bodoni-type specimen sheet; and a lengthy feature entitled “Photography in Fashion: Fashion in Photography,” highlighting two young photographers—Richard Avedon at Harper’s Bazaar and Irving Penn at Vogue. This public comparison between Avedon and Penn was only the first, but it would follow them throughout their lives. The publication introduced Avedon to the world outside fashion with a telling description: “A clever, excitable young man with the sharp, darting movements of a terrier, Avedon at twenty-six is a top fashion photographer on Harper’s Bazaar, and holds an editorship on Theatre Arts magazine.”
There has always been assumption about a professional rivalry between Avedon and Penn that accorded rumors of a lifelong bitter antipathy between them. In fact, throughout the second half of the twentieth century, both men would hover in the same rarefied atmosphere at the pinnacle of their profession and maintain an amicable regard for one another. They consulted one another from time to time on professional matters; they led workshops together; and they had been known to socialize on occasion. Many an armchair critic has called for the hierarchical supremacy of one over the other in terms of historical significance, and, to be sure, a comparison between Avedon and Penn is analogous in arts and letters to that of other twentieth-century giants: Picasso versus Matisse; Pollock versus de Kooning; Roth versus Updike. At that level, though, trying to rank such magnitude of accomplishment comes down to nothing more than an exercise in futility.
As a quarterly of design and the visual arts, Portfolio aimed to be a one-of-a-kind objet as much as a traditional magazine, yet because of its high production value and Brodovitch’s uncompromising refusal to break up the visual flow and editorial purity with advertising, it survived only three issues. Its feature on Avedon and Penn placed the two photographers at opposite poles, contrasting Penn’s evident exploration of form and design—“Precise, exacting, intellectual”—with Avedon’s “emotionally inspired” fascination with “life in motion.” Each of them was asked to provide a list of elements that characterized his respective artistic personality. While Penn’s list includes his “comfort in looking at a baseball diamond” (ever the formalist) and his interest in “the metaphysical relationship of an object to its situation” in the work of de Chirico, Avedon cannily cites his “need for glasses at the age of six,” which gave him an acute awareness of “the difference between sharp and fuzzy, in focus and out of focus.” He also writes with surprising personal insight about the role of psychoanalysis in relation to his work: “Without Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis I doubt there would have been any progression in my work at all. Photography for me has always been a sort of double-sided mirror. The one side reflecting my subject, the other reflecting myself.”
The Portfolio feature was a notable public endorsement of Avedon, one that capped off a year of soul-searching in which he had been contemplating his options outside the world of fashion. At just twenty-five, Dick found himself ensconced in a professional community of commercial and fashion photographers who worked in the vicinity of his own studio. Some had studios in the Grand Central Palace building at 480 Lexington Avenue at Forty-Sixth Street: among them was his contemporary Milton Greene (née Milton Greengold), who had also started out as a schlepper, in Yiddish parlance, in his case for Eliot Elisofon, and as an assistant to Louise Dahl-Wolfe at the Bazaar. In the late 1940s, Greene would start doing catalog work for Macy’s and other retailers before going to work for Life magazine. Paul Himmel worked as an assistant to Jerry Plucer-Sarna, who started out illustrating fashion at the couturier shows for the Bazaar before becoming a studio photographer for the magazine. The Elliot brothers—Dick’s first mentors—established a television production company in that building as well, called Elliot, Unger and Elliot, that would become very successful producing commercials. Karl Bissinger, the housemate of Dick and Doe and the Bassman-Himmels in Cherry Grove, was at first a stylist in the Condé Nast Studios; with Dick’s help, he pursued photography and went to work for Junior Bazaar and then, later, Flair magazine.
On one occasion, in early 1949, Dick threw a bon voyage party for Lillian Bassman at his studio. As Junior Bazaar was slowly losing steam, Lily’s position as a designer was in jeopardy. Brodovitch, encouraging her to pursue her interest in photography, convinced Mrs. Snow to give her a chance in Paris. Now it was her turn as the backup photographer to Dahl-Wolfe and, regardless of how Dick must have felt about not being the one to go to Paris, he gave his dear friend Lillian a send-off party with his best intentions.
At the party, Paul Himmel introduced Dick to Evelyn (Franklin) Greene, who was in the throes of a separation from her husband, Milton. Evelyn and Milton Greene had been together since they first met at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, marrying upon her graduation, in 1942, when Evelyn was eighteen and Milton was twenty. As Milton’s career took off, Evelyn was increasingly debilitated, spending entire days in bed, either reading or sleeping, less and less able to function. Whether she was depressed because of the marriage or had emotional problems to begin with, the relationship had become unsustainable. Evelyn and Dick shared “divorcee” status in a kind of solidarity that established their immediate rapport.
Not only was Evelyn intelligent, she also was an avid reader, someone Dick was able to talk to about books and ideas—as he had with Margie, as he had with Doe. While she was elusive and shy, it did not escape him that Evelyn was the soon-to-be ex–Mrs. Milton Greene, which may have further predisposed him to her. Dick liked Milton, with whom he shared not only a physical resemblance but also a similar strain of professional ambition. Amy Richards—the professional name used by Edilia Franco, of “the pigtail,” whom Dick had discovered sitting on a bench with her father when she was just fifteen—would, in 1953, become the second Mrs. Milton Greene. She acknowledged that Dick and Milton had similar physical characteristics, although Milton was slightly taller. “It’s that black, or Russian, melancholia that surrounds people like Milton and Dick, which is fascinating to women, of course,” she said.
While Dick was becoming acquainted with Evelyn, Doe was starring in her second Broadway play, My Name Is Aquilon, which opened in February 1949. Dick wrote a very chatty letter to Lillian in Paris later that month in which he recounted the opening night, complaining that Doe waited until the last minute to tell him she had forgotten to reserve tickets for him and Paul (Himmel): “Natch,” he wrote, as if this was typical of Doe, thus precipitating their scramble for tickets at black market prices. Reporting that Doe received good notices in the papers, he then launched into a critique of her performance, calling it “cringe-worthy—sort of like being caught naked a block from Times Square.” Dick was by now alert to the need for monitoring his own professional reputation and fearful of any potential blemish to his name. Despite the decent notices, Doe remained the still-not-yet-divorced Mrs. Richard Avedon. Her less-than-brilliant performance exposed him by association—as if he were the one left naked a block from Times Square.
Dick’s letter was full of double messages. He told Lillian, for example, that Paul was doing quite well without her—as if the news of her husband seeing “a great many people” and having “fabulous dinner parties” and “living a chic life, like never before” would be welcome information. In the final paragraph of the letter, Dick reports on the rapid progress of his new relationship with Evelyn: “My problem is a thing of the past,” he writes to Lily, expressing his happiness and profound relief.
The “problem” to which he was referring is anyone’s guess. “It could have been impotence,” Eric Himmel suggested, or “some sexual wound that Doe left him with because of rejection. The ‘problem’ could have been an attraction to men. It’s impossible to know.” Dick had already been in psychoanalysis for several years, but not long after he wrote to Lillian about the resolution of his “problem,” he began seeing a new analyst, Edmund Bergler, who came to be known in the 1950s as an “expert” on homosexuality, positing the hypothesis that the “condition” could be cured. This was before the term conversion therapy entered the public lexicon. Of course, myriad clinical findings have long since debunked the legitimacy of such a therapeutic outcome, but not before untold numbers of people such as Dick suffered the indignity of added shame in search of this holy grail. “Freud himself, after all, saw homosexuals as regrettably arrested in the anal-aggressive stage or something,” writes Edmund White in a characterization of his own torturous coming-of-age as a homosexual in the 1950s: “One psychoanalyst recommended to my mother that I be institutionalized and the key thrown away—‘unsalvageable,’ he said. I was just thirteen.”
When Dick started seeing Bergler, the psychiatrist was already known to refute the findings of the newly published 1948 Kinsey report, which concluded that the scale between heterosexuality and homosexuality in the American male was more fluid than had been commonly understood. In a fervent public editorial debate, many of the arguments against the Kinsey report focused on the inadequate guidelines of the study itself, while only a few writers bothered to engage a more philosophical dialogue about the multiplicity of variations in nature. Dick started seeing Bergler with a specific goal in mind. “[Bergler] explained that my photography was just a form of infantile peeping, thanks a lot,” Dick told Norma Stevens. “I hadn’t gone to him to hear that. He was known for his 90% cure rate for homosexuality.”
To be sure, Dick’s torment about his sexuality was exacerbated by the cultural attitudes of the time. The realm of romantic desire stood for him in direct conflict with the presiding beliefs about how to construct a proper existence in twentieth-century America—marriage, home, family, schools, church, society. Uncounted gay men and lesbians across the country were forced to live in the closet, painfully isolated in their shame and obsessively protective of their own secret—a revelation, if exposed, that would almost certainly ruin their careers and destroy their lives. The stigma of same-sex attraction was a tyranny that homosexuals either endured with a great deal of psychic anguish or eschewed in blithe defiance of convention.
While the closet may have been a roomy place in the upper precincts of urban cultural chic, for Dick the proximity—and audacity—of openly gay people like George Platt Lynes, say, or Truman Capote had to be discomfiting. Lynes and Capote lived in relative dismissal of the cultural prejudice about “their kind,” proceeding more or less unscathed by dint of their talent, style, charm, and not a little hauteur. Capote, who was short, effeminate, and obdurately flamboyant, endured against all odds. When his debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, came out in 1948, he was, at twenty-four, already a public prodigy, and the book became an instant New York Times bestseller. Reviews were good, but he was eviscerated for the homosexual theme: “The book is immature and seems calculated to make the flesh crawl,” said Time magazine. “The distasteful trappings of its homosexuality overhang it like Spanish moss.”
Gore Vidal, too, another writer in their midst, was derided for his third novel, The City and the Pillar, also published in 1948, a coming-out story about a handsome and athletic young Virginian who slowly discovers he is homosexual. The book caused a scandal, and Vidal was equally eviscerated. The New York Times accused him of being, ultimately, corrupt and pornographic; Vidal would later in his life claim that the homosexual-themed book sealed his fate with the literary and critical establishment. He had so much trouble getting subsequent novels reviewed that he started writing mysteries under the pseudonym Edgar Box.
There were other contemporaries of Dick’s, like Leonard Bernstein, whose “bisexuality” was an open secret, or Leonard Gershe, who neither flaunted his homosexuality nor concealed it, men who were unique in their ability to let their talent guide their ambition without damage to their expectations of high accomplishment—or to the foundations of their self-esteem. In 1950, Leonard Gershe would write a play called “Wedding Day,” based on the failed marriage of his friend Dick Avedon, who tried to turn his wife, Doe, into an object of beauty to be regarded by the entire world against her will; simultaneously, Leonard Bernstein would write Trouble in Tahiti, an intimate opera about the difficulty that all husbands and wives endure in trying to reconcile their differences in any middle-class marriage in America. Both, perhaps, were indictments of the cultural pressure to marry.
Dick’s friends and colleagues were addressing the subject of homosexuality ever more visibly in their work, and their fame was growing, both because of and in spite of it. They were the exceptions. At the time, for any homosexual, the mere mention of the word was enough to strike terror of exposure. Dick must have been quaking every time Truman Capote opened his mouth in public. Or when his high school friend James Baldwin, who was also unapologetic about his homosexuality, published his first short story, titled “Previous Condition,” in Commentary. Baldwin would not publish Giovanni’s Room, about a tormented homosexual relationship, for another eight years, but the painful truth of the homosexual in mid-twentieth-century America finds its veiled way into “Previous Condition” in this description of what it feels like not to belong:
There are times and places when a Negro can use his color like a shield. He can trade on the subterranean Anglo-Saxon guilt and get what he wants that way; or some of what he wants. He can trade on his nuisance value, his value as forbidden fruit; he can use it like a knife, he can twist it and get his vengeance that way. I knew these things long before I realized that I knew them and in the beginning, I used them, not knowing what I was doing. Then when I began to see it, I felt betrayed. I felt beaten as a person. I had no honest place to stand.
Dick’s career was ascendant. He was becoming known in influential circles that could propel his notoriety beyond his field. Yet his talent, his winning personality, and his high-minded professional ambition could not mitigate debilitating insecurities that made him feel like Gregor Samsa—a cockroach, a beetle, or, in a more accurate translation of Kafka’s native German, a “monstrous vermin.” It was a daily struggle for him to feel, simply, normal—finding, in Baldwin’s words, “an honest place to stand.” More than anything, he wanted to be rid of his distracting and painfully consuming desires for men and the attendant ickiness of his shame—an obstacle he had to overcome before he could marry again and have a family. The light at the end of the tunnel would be relief: to feel normal; to no longer fear being found out; to gain ultimate respectability without faking it; to garner self-respect, at last; and, no doubt, in the deepest recesses of his profound unconscious discomfort, despite his mother’s unconditional adoration, to gain the respect of his father.
IN THE LATE 1940S, after their respective books were published, Truman Capote told Gore Vidal that he was working on his next novel, about a beautiful New York debutante. “What on earth do you know about debutantes?” Vidal said. “Everything,” Capote countered. “After all, I am one.” Vidal wrote about this exchange in his introduction to a book of photographs by Karl Bissinger, in which appear respective portraits of Dick, Doe, Lillian Bassman, and Truman Capote. Vidal describes Capote as having “picked up a mannerism reminiscent not so much of debutantes as of the great models and other beauties, a total blankness of expression.” Elinor Marcus, soon to become the Baroness de la Bouillerie, was a debutante of that era and one of Truman Capote’s earliest “best pals” in New York. On several occasions she went with him to visit a woman she described as the “actual inspiration for Holly Golightly,” an unconventional blond who lived in a small studio in a brownstone near Capote’s apartment on Lexington Avenue in the East Nineties. Elinor’s older sister, Carol Grace, told people that she was the inspiration for Holly Golightly. After late evenings of rehearsal followed by wee-hour drinking in a private nightclub on West Fifty-Fifth Street, she and Capote would end up having coffee together in front of Tiffany’s in the silvery light of dawn. “Every morning about 7:00, we left the Gold Key Club and walked to Fifth Avenue, where there was a man with doughnuts and coffee,” she wrote in her memoir. “We’d buy some and continue to Tiffany’s, where we would look in the windows and fantasize. The same guard was always there and sometimes we would bring him a doughnut and coffee, too.”
Dorian Leigh, one of Dick’s best models, believed herself to be the inspiration for Holly Golightly. She, like the fictional Holly, had left her husband behind and her children in the care of her parents in search of a glamorous, carefree life as a model in New York. She lived in Capote’s neighborhood on upper Lexington Avenue, too, and picked up her telephone messages at the candy store across the street—whether from her modeling agency or “gentleman callers”—a ritual Truman often observed while buying his cigarettes. She claimed that being a model made her more attractive to the right kind of men. “It was far too easy for me to say yes to an invitation and almost impossible to say no,” she writes in her memoir, as if channeling her fictional doppelgänger. “Consequently, I was always making dates that I couldn’t keep, which meant that I had to be very inventive with reasons why I didn’t show up. I got to the point where I couldn’t bear to hear the phone ring, knowing I would have to lie to an angry man who demanded an explanation.” Capote himself started calling her “Happy Go Lucky” in the 1950s.
Ann Woodward, a model and fashionable showgirl in the 1940s, who married the very wealthy and socially prominent William Woodward Jr., a scion of a banking fortune, is cited as “another of the many Holly Golightly figures who make their appearances throughout Truman’s oeuvre—beautiful, social-climbing waifs from the rural South who move to New York and re-invent themselves, not unlike Truman’s own personal journey,” as Sam Kashner wrote in a 2012 article about Capote’s self-destructive act of publishing “La Côte Basque, 1965.”
Capote always said that Holly Golightly was a composite of the many women he knew and observed in New York in this period, some of whom would come and go in Avedon’s studio. In fact, the “idea” of Holly Golightly can be spotted throughout Avedon’s work: Natálie Nickerson, who appeared in Dick’s first cover for the Bazaar, stands as if a prototype of Holly Golightly in her orange short-shorts, legs akimbo and bare feet planted firmly on the studio floor. She arrived in New York from Phoenix and lived in virtual poverty in her first year in the city, until Eileen Ford took her on and made her a top fashion model almost overnight. She would eventually have her own personal stationery, first name only, “stylishly engraved without any capital letters: ‘natálie, the barbizon, 140 east 63rd street, new york 21.’” Avedon would reinvent what a beautiful woman is, and the visualization of that idea, over and over and over again in his photographs, whether with Natálie Nickerson, Dorian Leigh, or, later, Dovima, no doubt influencing Capote in his own formulation of Holly Golightly in the decade to come.
The idea of Holly Golightly is relevant to a definition of Dick’s sensibility. Manhattan in the late 1940s was a petri dish in which the cultural matter of the second half of the twentieth century was germinating—in art, literature, music, dance, and theater. Dick was not only picking up on the spectacular newness of the ideas and attitudes in his midst, he was participating in the visualization of the cultural metamorphosis that was happening all around him. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, like West Side Story, say, would not enter the collective unconscious for another decade, yet they both came out of this optimistic moment at the end of the 1940s in which Dick’s creativity, too, was establishing new precedents that would prevail as resonant metaphors and abiding touchstones of mid-twentieth-century American exuberance and individuality.
In the late 1940s, everyone Dick knew was trying to reinvent him- or herself, whether it was the change of name from Jewish to goy, or from Dorcas to Doe, or, in his own case, the transformation of a struggling middle-class neurotic and closeted Jewish homosexual into an accomplished, eminent, and debonair man-about-town. In his fashion work he was inventing a visual iconography in which to put forward a thoroughly modern woman with a new, more carefree independence of mind and manner.
“Avedon’s greatest creation has been a kind of woman,” Irving Penn said in a workshop in the 1960s. “She’s a definite kind of person. I know her. I’d recognize her if she walked in this room. She’s sisterly, laughs a great deal, and has many other characteristics. . . . To me, this is a very great achievement. It’s a kind of woman I’m talking about projected through one very powerful intellect and creative genius.” Penn emphasized this point with a description of this new style of woman: “She’s a very real woman and not to be mixed up with any other age. The way she stands—the curious stance of her feet planted wide apart was something unique—a revolution of the nice woman and the world has changed because of this. . . . As a photographer, I’m fascinated by Avedon’s frozen instant of a laugh or an expression that comes about. As a moment in time, I’m very fascinated and touched and moved by these.”
Despite the source of Capote’s original idea of Holly Golightly, her cinematic apotheosis in the character played by Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s is, by every measure of her spontaneity, idiosyncrasy, tomboyish figure, and sublime urban chic, the consummate “Avedon woman.”
IN JANUARY 1949, U.S. Camera published an article called “Richard Avedon: Photographic Prodigy.” In it, Jonathan Tichenor writes, “Certainly he is the most controversial figure in photography—one either likes or dislikes his pictures; there is no middle ground.” The article describes the way Avedon took New York’s fashion world, shook it up, and added an entirely new dimension. “And it is still seething over the shock.” The feature includes several of his portraits of Marlene Dietrich, in which the glamorous movie star vamps it up in a dressed-down-to-her-bathrobe sort of way, “lounging,” as the caption describes it, on a prop brass bed in Avedon’s studio, flaunting her legs to their best advantage.
Citing the similarity between Avedon’s fashion pictures and these decidedly early portraits, Tichenor concludes that the single thread running through them in both genres is life. “Avedon’s portraits are not the common shots of head and shoulders, but, rather, the pictures of living, breathing individuals. In his studio pictures the models are not beautiful dummies, but actual women.”
The portraits of Dietrich to which Tichenor referred were made on the occasion of the release of A Foreign Affair, and one initially appeared in the August 1948 issue of the Bazaar. It is uncharacteristic of what we know an Avedon portrait to be today. Images from the entire shoot conjure the sexual bedroom, which was unprecedented for a fashion magazine in 1948: Dietrich sits at the foot of the bed, her hands on the brass frame, her eyes mere slits as narrow as her barely parted lips, a cigarette between them. She is wrapped in a finely checked bathrobe, showing just enough leg. In others she is reclining with a come-hither expression. Dick seemed to be intentional in presenting Dietrich on a bed in the studio setting, photographed with available light, the actress in a mock performance for the photographer. There is no attempt at verisimilitude. It is difficult to understand today how radical Avedon’s approach was at the time. He was trying to capture the act of photographing, as if to underscore the point that what he was photographing was not real. He was “photographing” the medium of photography as much as he was photographing the subject before the camera, and this brings to his work a fascinating new dimension.
IN 1949, SURROUNDED BY other fashion photographers, Dick worried about being typecast within this professional ghetto. At that moment, photojournalism was ascendant. Cartier-Bresson was then preeminent in the field, and Magnum photographers and Time and Life photographers alike were setting a new gold standard for photography internationally.
In September 1947, Harper’s Bazaar published the first in a series of photo essays about America by Henri Cartier-Bresson—this one called “Highway Cyclorama”—with an introduction that describes the photographer, along with the writer John Malcolm Brinnin, traveling across the country from New York, covering thirteen thousand miles in thirty states, collecting material for a book. The full-page opening picture shows a mother and her three children walking toward the camera on the shoulder of a four-lane highway. The editorial copy discusses Frenchman Cartier-Bresson’s impressions while traveling across America, about which he was “struck by things so familiar to Americans that they forget them: the violence of the climate, the lack of obsequiousness, the friendly good manners, the fantasies of roadside publicity, the poverty in an abundant land.” In the same issue of the Bazaar, September 1947, two ordinary fashion pictures appear by the twenty-three-year-old Robert Frank, an émigré newly arrived from Switzerland. To be sure, the pictures that Cartier-Bresson made across America in the late 1940s would have prototypical resonance for the body of work Robert Frank produced the following decade as he, too, traveled across the country in the mid-1950s to create his masterpiece, The Americans.
“The great pleasure for my Leica was to have the spare elements of a collage suddenly jump from the street to the lens,” Cartier-Bresson once wrote about the process of photographing the actuality of life. From that he would later coin a phrase, “the decisive moment,” which, in the tradition of documentary photography, defines the impulse to strike an equal balance between the happened-on scene and the way the photographer observes it. “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms [as they are perceived visually] which give that event its proper expression,” Cartier-Bresson wrote. The result, then, is not just a moment in time caught by the camera but the timelessness of the moment expressed in visual form.
That Cartier-Bresson established the photographic trope “the decisive moment” is a worthy distinction, but in 1947 his role as one of the four founders of Magnum, the cooperative photo agency, is of greater historic significance. Along with Robert Capa, George Rodger, and David “Chim” Seymour, they formed the collective to wrest control from the magazines of their photographic subject matter, as well as the way their pictures were used, and also to determine where and the manner in which their work would be presented. Cartier-Bresson’s series in Harper’s Bazaar was one example of his control as a photographer over editorial content.
Avedon was aware of Cartier-Bresson not only from Brodovitch, but also from the issues of Harper’s Bazaar in which their work appeared at the same time. “He is the greatest photographer of the twentieth century,” Avedon would proclaim to Charlie Rose about Cartier-Bresson in a 2000 television interview. “He is like Tolstoy was to literature. He covered all the ground, in a vast way—politically, socially—and with the most personal and complex insight into the human personality. He showed the movements of history.”
In 1948, Cartier-Bresson was in India and visited Gandhi moments before he died. His coverage of Gandhi’s death was published in Life, among other publications, and vaulted him to a new level of recognition in the world of photojournalism. His coverage of the postwar transformation of Asia over several years in the late 1940s exemplified the reputation he would gain as a photojournalist for “being in the right place at the right time.”
In early 1949, the very fact of Cartier-Bresson—along with other photographers who traveled the world, identifying the historic moment—was making Dick restless. Fashion wasn’t enough. He decided to take a year off from fashion—more or less—but his attentions were divided. On the one hand, he enrolled at Columbia University to take courses in philosophy, but then he also took a position as a staff photographer on a newly redesigned magazine called Theatre Arts, a full-size monthly that used high-production color photography on the cover and featured lengthy profiles of actors, reviews of plays, and coverage of the other arts as well. His masthead title was “editorial associate,” and for almost two years he published multiple pictures in the magazine every month. Now he could see every play produced on or off Broadway, which for him was nothing less than transporting. He was obsessed with the theater, thrilled with the invention of life onstage—the narrative, the sets, the costumes, and, ultimately, the transformation of an actor into a character. The theater provided him something of interest to talk about with any cultural luminary he was assigned to photograph, a perfect antidote for his insecurity about his knowledge of art and high culture. He had opinions about the theater and a growing basis of comparison to give his opinions weight.
The publisher was John D. MacArthur (of the eventual MacArthur Foundation) and the editor was his brother Charles MacArthur, a playwright married to Helen Hayes. Bob Cato was the art director; he had worked with Brodovitch as an assistant art director on the Bazaar and Junior Bazaar, which is likely how Dick was brought on staff. Other notable photographers, too, appeared in the magazine, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Lillian Bassman, and Martin Munkacsi. Before Dick was hired as the staff photographer, he had shot Henry Fonda in Mister Roberts for a cover story that appeared in the summer of 1948, before Bob Cato redesigned the magazine. Beginning in 1949, a banner year for the theater, Dick photographed Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock in Death of a Salesman; Mary Martin in South Pacific; Estelle Winwood in The Madwoman of Chaillot; Anita Loos, who wrote Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Carol Channing, who played Lorelei Lee. He would make portraits of Clifford Odets, W. H. Auden, George Balanchine, and Mae West.
Some of his portraits were dramatic and atmospheric, uncharacteristic of the graphic simplicity and forensic clarity he eventually arrived at as the defining signature of his later portraiture. These are portraits of actors, if not in costume and on set, certainly behind the scenes and of the theater. “At once elegant and gritty, they are on the one hand individual characterizations, images with some of the telling quality one wants in portraits, signaling through clothes, gestures, and above all facial expressions a truth about their subjects’ identities,” Jane Livingston writes in a 1994 Whitney exhibition catalog.
Bobby Clark, the vaudeville performer and comedian, was in a revue on Broadway called As the Girls Go, and Dick photographed him for a feature that appeared on the cover of the September 1949 issue of Theatre Arts. In a playful and haunting picture across two pages on the opening spread, Clark stares into the camera, a painted-on black eyeglass rim framing one eye. His countenance, head and shoulders, takes up only a quarter of the frame; behind him is a strong geometric composition not unlike a Constructivist montage. Clark is in sharp focus while the background is softer, blurry, impressionistic. This portrait exemplifies the reference Dick made about putting on glasses for the first time, when he was six; the interplay between Clark, in focus, and the background, in blur, underscores the point. Dick achieved the blurred background effect in the darkroom, utilizing an unorthodox technique he learned from Lillian Bassman. “It might have something to do with my myopia,” Avedon told Jane Livingston. “The details in the background always distracted me. Too much irrelevant information. So I used to get rid of them in the darkroom by putting tissue paper over the image and printing through that. Light would go through the tissue paper, and where the tissue was pressed tight to the image, it would print sharply—where the tissue paper was looser, it would create an out of focus quality.”
Dick’s work for Theatre Arts would not represent his only alternative to fashion. In the late 1940s, one August after the Paris shows, he and Doe traveled with Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel to Italy, where Dick had made a series of documentary photographs in Sicily, as well as some set-up scenes made to look like documentary images. Sometime in early 1949, Life magazine called him with an offer he could not refuse. “They gave me $25,000,” Avedon said, to do a magazine-length feature of photographs of New York. “I closed my studio and I worked for six months.” But at the end of that period, dissatisfied with his own pictures, he returned the money to Life. He concluded that this kind of photography belonged to a tradition that already existed, citing specifically the work of Lisette Model, Robert Frank, and Helen Levitt. “That was a certain school of photography, and I’ve never felt that I’ve been part of any school. I felt that my interests were different. It wasn’t me.”
In July 1949, Life did publish a six-page feature entitled “Broadway Album: Avedon Pictures Capture Season’s Triumphs,” which includes his portraits of Irving Berlin, Elia Kazan, and the picture of Bobby Clark described earlier (which would not appear in Theatre Arts for another month), as well as several full-page tableau-like group portraits of leading actors in full costume for High Button Shoes, Kiss Me, Kate, and South Pacific. Life magazine was the pinnacle of achievement for photographers at that time, and it was a notable cultural acknowledgment of Dick’s prodigious talent, to be sure, to be given such a showcase for his theater pictures. But, equally, Avedon’s name added top-of-the-moment luster to the magazine.
Although Dick was exploring his options outside fashion, it did not prevent him from going to Paris to shoot the collections for the Bazaar. While he claimed not to be good at seeking “decisive moments” out of real-life events, he would prove to be brilliant at constructing them from his imagination and giving them the look and feel of actual documented moments. One such example is Dorian Leigh, Evening Dress by Piguet, Helena Rubinstein Apartment, Île St. Louis, Paris, a variation of which appeared in October 1949: It is the picture of a woman in a spectacularly modern strapless evening gown standing—like a Brancusi—in a lavish bathroom, staring at herself in the mirror. Seen in profile, she is angled forward—shrugged shoulders, arms akimbo, hands on her waist—to take one last look for any finishing touches before going out into the evening. Everything in the frame is considered: her silhouette against a full-length white frosted window behind her; the bouquet of flowers in the corner; the bottles of perfume on one side of the luxe marble counter and a cotton swab on the other. The shape of her arm in the context of the entire frame adds an element of sculptural grace to her gesture—the Avedon je ne sais quoi. As if we happened upon this scene, she is caught in a private moment of preening, an activity born as much out of feminine insecurity as social necessity. By capturing a moment of spontaneity in a simulacrum of reality, he was creating fiction, metaphor, imagery—in fact, a complete visual poem. Wilmer Stone be damned.
BY 1950, DICK HAD entered a new stage in his career, not only because of the publication of several magazine profiles about him, but also due to the people he was meeting and photographing, as well as his own friends who were becoming famous. He signed a lease on a large studio in a low-slung two-story building at 640 Madison Avenue that took up the entire block between Fifty-Ninth and Sixtieth Streets (until it was razed in 1954). It had been the studio of George Platt Lynes, who used it for not only his Vogue fashion work but also the many magazine portraits he made of the artists, actors, and writers of his day. As an artist, Lynes also used this studio to make his own work—male nude studies, often ballet dancers, positioned in mythical tableaux of his creation—which would not be shown in public for another thirty years.
The studio was on the second floor and faced a large interior courtyard. There was a sizable shooting area under an ample skylight and a huge electrical panel feeding 5,000-watt Saltzman lights. Dick had one office and his business representative had another; there was a photo lab, a darkroom, a dressing room for models, and storage space. It was in this studio that the business enterprise of Avedon Inc. would go into high gear and his income would now derive not only from his editorial work at the Bazaar and Theatre Arts; he was launching himself into the lucrative arena of advertising.
Dick had a new secret weapon for this venture: Laura Kanelous. Once again, he had Milton Greene to thank for an inadvertent introduction. Greene had introduced Dick to Laura’s husband, John Kanelous, an illustrator at the department store B. Altman, and it was through him that she learned that Richard Avedon was looking for a business representative. John encouraged Laura to pursue the job, but she was reluctant. “I don’t know how to sell anything,” she said. “You won’t have to,” her husband replied. “Just show his work.” Before she married John Kanelous, in 1945, Laura Greene (née Greenspan—and no relation to Milton) had been a superb student at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn—a history and Latin scholar—and, for a while, long after she graduated, she was reviewing books. Dick hired her, and soon enough she proved her husband to be correct. As she made her way in and out of the advertising agencies up and down Madison Avenue, the work came in like an avalanche. “My mother was a very astute businesswoman,” Helen Kanelous said. “She was the first female artist representative. She eventually helped start a union—the Society for Photography and Artists Representatives.”
The separation of church and state between the editorial operation of any respectable publication, such as Harper’s Bazaar, and the companies that advertised with the publishing company, such as Hearst Magazines, was more porous than it would later become. In the early 1950s, Dick would shoot the collections in Paris for the magazine, and then either provide a studio outtake or photograph a model in a couture gown from the collections against a seamless backdrop for Bergdorf Goodman to use in a full-page advertisement in the same issue. Avedon would get an agate-size credit on the side of the picture. So, in what for years has been considered in journalism to be a conflict of interest, he was being paid by the magazine and also, at an infinitely higher scale, by an advertiser in the same issue. Less than a year after Avedon photographed Dorian Leigh in Helena Rubinstein’s Paris apartment, and the picture appeared on the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, he was shooting an advertising campaign for Helena Rubinstein cosmetics. Earl Steinbicker, Avedon’s studio assistant for almost fifteen years, acknowledged this manner of logrolling between Avedon’s commercial commissions and his editorial work: “Avedon was only able to exercise his real talent to its fullest because he had made a substantial amount of money through his advertising photography,” Steinbicker later confirmed. “And the reason he attracted high-end advertisers was because of his innovative fashion photography for Harper’s Bazaar magazine and, later, Vogue magazine. So, fashion opened the way for advertising, which in turn allowed him to devote time and resources to his passion for portraiture.”
In those early years, the list of Avedon’s commercial jobs kept growing as he juggled one commission after another. Dorian Leigh was his model of choice in 1952. She appears in a series of ads for Lilli Ann, a very smart boutique in San Francisco known for its elaborately designed suits and coats made with fine French fabrics. The ad campaign was modeled after the Bergdorf Goodman ads; they also ran in Harper’s Bazaar, with a single full-page image and the logo of the store at the bottom left or right corner. At the bottom of the picture was the credit “Avedon photograph” in agate type.
His fashion advertising was interspersed among other types of accounts he was shooting, ranging from Alcoa to Clairol, DuPont, Jergens, Maidenform, Pepsodent, Revlon, and Tareyton cigarettes. By 1951, the studio was operating at full tilt, and Dick was shooting up to 150 commercial commissions a year. Pennies from heaven—in torrents.
INCREASINGLY, AS PART OF Dick’s tutorial at Harper’s Bazaar, he had been exposed to—and had come to expect—nothing less than the best of everything. Certainly that was an underpinning of the entire Harper’s Bazaar ethos. Dick was always surprised by the personal kindnesses Mrs. Snow bestowed on him when they were in Paris, always taking him along with some literary eminence or a legend of the stage to a perfect little French bistro for dinner, where she would insist he order something he had never heard of before and it would be the most flavorful meal of his life, or someone at the table would order a bottle of Chateau Margaux and the first sip was transporting enough to spoil him for anything less extraordinary. This is one reason Dick would say over the course of his lifetime, “Carmel taught me everything I know.”
Mrs. Snow had dresses in her closet from every important designer going back to the 1920s—Poiret and Vionnet and early Chanel—and when she first met Evelyn Greene, Mrs. Snow would say, “Oh, I have the most wonderful Mainbocher that would look so good on you, Evelyn. I want you to have it copied. In gingham pink.” A box would arrive the next morning with the name of the dressmaker who would copy it.
Whether Dick felt it was obligatory to be married to become a respectable member of society; or he believed it to be a requirement of his career; or, maybe, because Evelyn had garnered Mrs. Snow’s approval; or simply because he felt comfortable enough with her to establish a partnership in marriage, Dick and Evelyn were married in his apartment on East Seventy-Third Street on January 29, 1951. Soon enough, “Mr. and Mrs. Richard Avedon” would move to a town house on Beekman Place at Forty-Ninth Street, where they would occupy three floors. As Michael Gross described it, there was a “ground-floor kitchen, formal dining room, an Etruscan-inspired statue of a dancing nude. Up the spiral staircase were works by Picasso and Braque.” Beekman Place, a three-block stretch along the East River, is lined with prewar high-rises and charming brownstones. Because it was considered such a tony little enclave, people for many blocks around would lay claim to living in the “Beekman Place area.” Along with the discreet comings and goings of family members of American dynasties such as the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts, the Avedons could count on more visible cultural figures, such as Irving Berlin, as neighbors.
As Dick was becoming more acquainted with producers, directors, playwrights, and the stars of Broadway, he was exposed to ever-more-discriminating tastes—custom-made shoes of Argentinean leather, or a table reserved in the private dining room of a notable popular restaurant, or season tickets in the parterre center box at the Metropolitan Opera. It seemed fitting, then, for Dick to be able to squire his new wife in Mainbocher out for an evening at the theater, followed by dinner, and then to return to the old-world charm of Beekman Place, so exclusive and genteel and poetic.
IN EARLY 1952, EARL Steinbicker, a high school senior from Allentown, Pennsylvania, with a strong interest in the technical aspects of photography, wrote to ten photographers in New York in search of a job as an assistant. He offered to work hard for little pay and emphasized his proficiency with large cameras and darkroom techniques. The Avedon studio was the only one to invite him to come in for an interview. His father brought him to New York in May. “When I first walked into the studio at age seventeen the glittery background [of the “Fire and Ice” campaign] was propped up against the wall, so I knew for certain that this is where I wanted to be instead of college,” Steinbicker remembered. “He hired me on the spot.” Steinbicker offers a kind of tutorial on his blog to young apprentice photographers today, distilling his own experience as Avedon’s studio assistant of fifteen years as a highly gratifying great adventure on the one hand and, equally, an unforgiving hazing ritual on the other. Aside from the necessity to be knowledgeable about all aspects of the photographic process, and to be hardworking, dependable, physically strong, able to follow direction, and in possession of a clean driving record, he enumerates the flip side of those requirements: be as invisible and unobtrusive as possible; be available at all hours of the day, sacrificing your own plans on the spot, if necessary; be quick on your feet and ever resourceful in doing whatever it takes to get the job done.
Dick had just completed the Revlon “Fire and Ice” campaign when he interviewed Steinbicker. Barrett Gallagher, a Fortune magazine photographer and the president of the American Society of Magazine Photographers (ASMP), was present during that shoot. The ASMP had been established, as Gallagher once described it, because “the magazines—especially Life and the big ones—were quite unfriendly to the whole idea of a union and quite unfriendly to making any commitment as to the day rate or the page rate or any other facts of life.” Dick had already established enough of a reputation to command his own rates. Whether it was at the suggestion of Gallagher, or simply the business acumen of Laura Kanelous, every print that came out of the Avedon studio had a copyright stamp to protect it from use without credit or payment. This was way ahead of industry practice.
In the picture Gallagher made during the “Fire and Ice” shoot, Dick poses Dorian Leigh in front of an industrial-size sheet of aluminum insulation material hung against the wall like a roll of studio paper. She is wearing a silver sequined evening gown and wrapped in a shocking red overgarment with voluminous curves at the shoulder and the hip. The contrast between her hot-red lipstick with matching nail polish and the glacial silver dress and reflective metallic background illustrates the point of the Revlon campaign. The copy invites women “who love to flirt with fire . . . who dare to skate on thin ice . . . Fire and Ice . . . for lips and matching fingertips. A lush-and-passionate scarlet . . . like flaming diamonds dancing on the moon!”
When Dick brought his picture to Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon, for his approval, Revson objected to the model’s hand, held up to her face with her fingers fanned out to show off her red-painted nails. Not everybody was capable of the gestural agility or dexterity that Dorian Leigh possessed with her hands, and in this case, it was too extreme for Revson. He told Dick that no woman would do that with her hands and wanted the picture to be reshot. It is not known if this was the first time Dick had encountered an adverse reaction from a client, but he defied Revson, claiming that the picture was beautiful and there was no need to reshoot it. Revson insisted that it was unnatural and went looking for a woman in his office to prove it. It was after hours, and the only woman around was an elderly cleaning woman. Revson brought her into his office and asked her if she saw anything wrong with the picture. She didn’t, and Dick smiled triumphantly. “Well,” Revson said to the cleaning woman, “if you don’t see anything wrong with her hand, let me see you do the same thing.” The cleaning woman demurred, saying that she wasn’t able to spread her fingers like that. Dick had to reshoot it, furious that a nonprofessional was the one to pass judgment on his picture. Regardless, the ad campaign was wildly successful.
Dick did not suffer indignities easily. As his reputation grew, so did his sense of authority about his work. He took his assignments and commissions very seriously, worked extremely hard, and believed that he—and not the client—was the final arbiter of the output from his studio. He was capable of being a savvy diplomat with his clients, and utterly professional, but, equally, if he did not have final say or if he was required to redo an image, his petulance could get the better of him. Over the years, he survived the embarrassment of his occasional tantrums and the alienation of clients, inoculated only by the prestige of his reputation.
The altitude of Avedon’s ambition was beyond comprehension in these early years, but the signs were everywhere. Not only was he maintaining a consistent presence on the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, but he was also running as fast as he could to fulfill the onslaught of commercial commissions coming his way with as much creative integrity as he brought to his editorial assignments. On top of that, he was beginning to get commissions for private portraits, and so he was thinking about the nature of portraiture. He was also beginning to think about subjects of his own choosing to invite to sit for portraits.
One was Charlie Chaplin, the beloved actor and critically revered auteur. Months had passed since Dick had first written to ask if he could photograph Chaplin. He made several subsequent attempts but to no avail. Chaplin was married to Oona O’Neill, one of Dick’s swans, but that did not provide an inroad. One day, though, in mid-September 1952, Avedon’s studio received a call from Chaplin. When Dick came to the phone and heard Chaplin’s voice, he thought he was being played. “Yeah, and I’m President Roosevelt,” Dick said, and hung up. Chaplin called right back and convinced Dick of his identity. Dick canceled his appointments for the following day to give himself over to the session with Chaplin. Avedon later recalled that when the director walked in, he told himself: “This is Charlie Chaplin! There is a Charlie Chaplin!” Avedon sent all his helpers out of the studio and the auteur and the photographer worked alone. “I was a wreck,” Dick said with nothing less than reverence. Chaplin was, after all, the idol of every moviegoing American in those early years of cinema, when, as an antic, accident-prone, nonsensical tramp, he kept audiences in hysterics. His exquisitely timed slapstick turned Modern Times and City Lights, about the socioeconomic conditions in Depression-era America, into incisive and hilarious cinematic masterpieces.
“I did the pictures as simply as I could,” Avedon said, photographing Chaplin against a white seamless backdrop. When he indicated that he was satisfied and had gotten the picture he wanted, Mr. Chaplin said, “Now, I could do something for you.” He bent down, concealing his face, put a finger on each side of his head, and came up with a violently grotesque expression. Then he turned and smiled. A smiling devil. Dick took the picture.
After spending the entire afternoon in Dick’s studio, Chaplin, his wife, Oona, and their four children that night set sail on the Queen Elizabeth for Britain, where his new movie, Limelight, was scheduled to open. While Chaplin was on the weeklong crossing, the US attorney general, James P. McGranery, announced that the “famed comedian” was being investigated and might not be able to reenter the United States. Several years earlier, the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating Communists had blacklisted Chaplin. When the Queen Elizabeth arrived at Southampton, Chaplin received “a rapturous greeting from fans and well-wishers, and later that day gave a press conference in London where he resolutely stated that he was not a Communist, but someone ‘who wants nothing more for humanity than a roof over every man’s head.’” In the end, Chaplin, a British citizen, had his US visa revoked and lived the rest of his life in Switzerland. He knew this might be the case when he spent the afternoon at Avedon’s studio. Pointing out the devil ears Chaplin made with his fingers and his demonic smile, Avedon told an audience of students in Maine in 1991 that “this was his last message to America. The sitter offered the photographer this gift that arrives once in a lifetime.”