The Beautiful American (40 page)

Lee Miller’s final photographic essay for
Vogue
had been published two years before that night in New York: a humorous guide for home entertaining that poked fun at the Soviet system of work camps. She had photographed Roland and a whole regiment of famous artists shelling peas, clipping the grass, watering the garden at Farley Farm. And then Lee had put away her cameras. I think she got tired of shadows, of tones of gray. I think the images she had taken as a war correspondent never faded in her imagination, and whenever she held a camera and looked through the viewfinder, she was seeing unspeakable things.

Lee channeled her famous energy and determination into cooking, of all things. I think that was how she finally found a measure of peace, through the simple act of preparing food and placing it before friends and family. She became quite good at it, a gourmet.

“Well, are you ready? Tad says he wants to drive.” Tad is Dahlia’s oldest son and he looks much like his father, Thaddeaus, tall and blond and a little too serious. Like his father, he wants to be a physician. Dahlia’s second son, William, thinks only about football and Dahlia already worries that he will be aimless, unambitious.

Her daughter, ten-year-old Adele, is a beauty. All anyone asks is that she smile. The sun comes out and all is right with the world when Adele smiles. Adele plans to become a photojournalist. Jamie gives her a new camera almost every Christmas.

Dahlia herself is a professor of French literature at New York University. As soon as she was old enough, as soon as she was able, she returned to the United States and studied here, not in Paris, agreeing to spend her summers with me in Nice as long as I agreed to spend Christmas with her in New York. Omar doesn’t like New York. Too cold. He stays in France when I make my visits, sits over his chessboard and answers the business phone when someone calls to commission a perfume. I have composed perfumes for several movie stars (more of Lee’s contacts), for the wife of a Nobel Prize winner, for several department stores that want a name brand.

Omar and I live in Cannes for most of the year, close enough to my beloved lavender fields and olive groves, but far enough away from Grasse and that sad history there so that we could start fresh with each other.

Shortly after Lee found my daughter for me, Dahlia met her father, and her father’s wife, Clara. We have created a livable peace for all of us, though when I visit, I still catch Mrs. Sloane looking at me as if she would rather I disappeared back to France and never bothered them again. Jamie adores his daughter by me, and Dahlia, an only child for so long, enjoys the company of her half sister and half brother, her nieces and nephews. It is a family filled with
tension and sometimes ill will and much too much regret. But we are bound together. Dahlia and I move back and forth, by plane now, not ship, and home is always in front of us or just behind us, except for the home we carry inside that is more than mere place.

Now that Lee is gone, part of my home is also gone. I think of her that day in front of the panther’s cage in Paris, smoking cigarette after cigarette, musing about love and what is given up in its name. Beautiful Lee Miller. The little girl, Lee. The radiant young woman enchanting all of Paris. The exhausted mother, the bickering wife. The model, the photographer, the trailblazing female war correspondent. They were all Lee.

Roland sent an old photograph along with the letter telling of her death. Lee and Man, me and Jamie, sitting outdoors at the Dôme in strangely old-fashioned clothing, looking young and hopeful, and all of us, in one way or another, wildly in love, in Paris. It’s a good photo. I wonder who took it? A stranger? Perhaps Aziz was there, or Julien? Doesn’t really matter anymore. There was a moment when anything was possible and the photograph proves it. Photos are a visual
sillage
, what remains when all else has left.

“Come on, Momma!” Dahlia yells. “The motor’s running.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

In addition to several other novels as well as short fiction and creative nonfiction,
Jeanne Mackin
is the author of
The
Cornell Book of Herbs and Edible Flowers
and coeditor of
The Norton Book of Love
. She is the recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society and her journalism has won awards from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, in Washington, D.C. She teaches creative writing at Goddard College in Vermont and lives with her husband, artist Steve Poleskie, in upstate New York.

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A CONVERSATION WITH JEANNE MACKIN

Q. What inspired you to write this novel?

A. Lee Miller was such a fabulous woman: beautiful, intelligent, brave, talented. Who could resist? Many people, myself included, read historical fiction because they want to learn about previous times and people, and it seemed the right time to bring Lee to the attention of readers. Her life was such a compendium of major events: the beginnings of photography as an art form, the Great Depression, World War II; her life seemed wide open for a fictional treatment. She was stunningly beautiful and yet she wasn’t content to be merely beautiful; she went on to create her own art. Her photographs are bold and subtle and sometimes ahead of their time. She made surrealist photos, as did Man Ray, but you can also see the beginnings of minimalism in her advertising work. And her war photos . . . those speak for themselves. What bravery they required. I wrote about Lee Miller because I wanted to learn about her, to think about her, and I thought others would find her fascinating as well.

Q. Why did you choose a fictional woman as your main character and make Lee Miller a secondary character?

A. I needed a character who could be in a relationship with Lee during many decades and in many settings, from Poughkeepsie to Paris to London. I invented Nora as a counterpart to Lee, almost an alter ego. Lee is wealthy; Nora is lower middle class. Lee is bold and somewhat reckless; Nora prefers the sidelines. The two women learn from each other, and perhaps that is what a lasting friendship offers. In real life, I think Lee was closer to men than women, so I gave her Nora as a kind of gift, the friend she may not have had.

Q. Several recent novels portray the American expat community in Paris during the 1920s, but your novel begins as the ’20s was concluding and goes all the way to post–World War II Europe. Why did you want to cover this longer period?

A. I wanted to show the full arc of Lee’s life, not just a section of it. As I worked on this novel, I saw that it became a story about consequences, cause and effect—this happens because that happened earlier—and sometimes it takes years, decades, for those sequences to manifest in a life. It was also important for me to show historical connections, almost a kind of inevitability in the way history unfolded, from the recklessness of the Roaring Twenties to the Great Depression, to the war that resulted from the poverty and unemployment the Depression created.

Q. Since readers may not be familiar with Lee Miller, can you tell us more about her popularity as a model and in what regard her photography was held then, and today? Can you tell us more about the childhood rape that haunted her? Do we know what medical treatment she received and what mysterious ill health dogged her for the rest of her life? What happened to her in her later years?

A. Lee’s father was a freethinker and he encouraged his only daughter to be equally freethinking. He encouraged Lee to pose for photographs, to learn to be comfortable in her body rather than be ashamed of it. I think that allowed Lee to heal as much as anyone can heal from the violence of rape. Because she was unbound by convention, and was startlingly, impossibly beautiful, modeling also made sense for her as a way to leave Poughkeepsie and live on a larger stage. Photographers as well as artists loved having her pose for them. You can see it in the photos of her: she treats her body like a medium as well as a message. She was unwittingly set up for scandal on some occasions, though. In one early modeling job she thought she was merely modeling an evening gown, but in fact the photo was used to advertise menstruation pads: it was the first ad to do so, and people were horrified that something so private was made public. Lee let the uproar die down, and went on modeling.

It’s difficult to know how many people actually knew about the rape. For the novel, I imagined it as a closely kept family secret. Small-town gossip could be especially devastating then, and memories could be so long.

The treatment for the gonorrhea Lee caught during the
rape—this was before penicillin and other antibiotics—was gruesome to read about: acid douches, antiseptic sitz baths, catheters, swabs of the cervix with more acids, done in the hospital by staff and at home by Lee’s mother. The child would have had to let her body be completely taken over by the process, no modesty allowed. In a way, it must have been a reliving of the rape every time she was treated. No wonder her father encouraged her to separate feelings from physical acts. And because the treatment was only moderately successful at best, for years after—perhaps for the rest of her life—she would have been dogged by the aftereffects of the disease, the debilitating fatigue and fevers.

After the war, after those images Lee took of the concentration camps and the general devastation, she eventually stopped taking photographs of anything other than family and friends. She turned to cooking and became well-known as a gourmet cook. She loved feeding people and Lee and Roland were famous for their hospitality. After Lee died, her son discovered crates of her photographs and journals, and they became the basis both of his wonderful biography about his mother,
The Lives of Lee Miller
, and the Lee Miller Archive at Farley House.

Q. Why was it important to you that Nora’s daughter should also become a victim of rape? What parallels between the two women did you want to explore?

A. More attention is being paid to the relationship between war and rape. Women’s bodies become so much collateral damage, a kind of territory to be “occupied.” We’ve seen this over and over
again in current political upheavals. Historians are also beginning to research wartime rape and document its prevalence during previous wars.
Savage Continent
by Keith Lowe (St. Martin’s Press, 2012) is an eye-opening book about the raping in Europe during and immediately after World War II, and what happened to the children of those rapes.

Dahlia is not raped by a soldier, but I still see her as a victim of the war; her rapist is empowered by the chaos of war. With so many men fighting at the front or surreptitiously in the resistance, or in prisoner camps, entire villages and towns were left more or less at the mercy of the men who stayed behind. And because there was such poverty and hunger, many women, housewives and schoolgirls as well, prostituted themselves just to keep food on the table. When sex becomes a commodity, lines are blurred between willing and not willing. The police were concerned with war crimes and keeping order; tracking down rapists wasn’t always a priority, even when the rapes were reported. In war everyone suffers, not just the soldiers.

Dahlia is older than Lee was when her rape occurs. Even in fiction, I couldn’t bear the thought of forcing such violence upon a very young child; bad enough that it happens to Dahlia in her teens. I thought it important that there be that parallel with Lee, though, to show that rape isn’t limited to certain times or ages. It is Lee’s suffering, repeated in her daughter’s life, that forces Nora to learn how to forgive.

Q. Can you tell us more about what happened to Man Ray after Lee left his life? Is his art as well regarded today as it was in the 1920s?

A. Man Ray created one of the most recognizable images of modern art: that photo of a nude Kiki de Montparnasse with the fret holes of a cello painted on her back, making the woman’s body an instrument. That image will endure because, first, it is very beautiful and memorable, and second, because it is such an important statement about how men often objectify women. Man Ray was not a feminist in any sense of the word, but his images are important, often startling statements. Then, too, the violence of some of his images was a precursor of the violence to come in the war. His art was playful, but also in touch with something mysterious. I don’t think you can know twentieth-century art without knowing his art.

Lee and Man became and remained great friends after their affair ended. I think Lee was one of those people with whom others just couldn’t stay angry. Eventually Man did move back to Paris and continued to live and work there.

Q. I loved learning about perfume. Is Grasse still the perfume capital of France? Have artificial scents improved since the 1940s?