A Story Lately Told (23 page)

A few times, after hours, Joan took me down to Max’s Kansas City on Park Avenue South. Initially, it was hard to comprehend her enthusiasm for this funky nightclub and diner in a grim part of town, with its red-and-black interior, chickpeas on the tables, and a clientele who seemed to consist of drug addicts, crazies, hookers, artists, models, poets, and transvestites. But there was a seedy attraction to the place. It was there that I came to meet some of the many dark souls, wayward spirits, and lost
children of New York. It was a moment when angst and irony came together and little was sacred.

When I think of the faces, it is always by artificial light. Andy Warhol at his customary table, like the white rabbit of Alice’s tea party, surrounded by his transsexual sirens: Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis, and Ondine. The actor Michael Pollard, fresh from the screen in
Bonnie and Clyde,
was often there, as was his friend the musician Bobby Neuwirth, the brilliant illustrator Antonio Lopez, the bombshell Amanda Lear, and the actress Sylvia Miles, a graying blond with a thick Bronx accent and chipped nail polish, dripping in black jet beads, torn lace, and old velvet—all these people clinging to their nocturnal perches above Union Square.

Once in a while I’d go to Grandpa’s restaurant for lunch, and he would sit me down in a red leather banquette and order steak and spinach for me. He told me that I would never be as beautiful as my mother but that I had character and it would serve me well. He was consumed with sadness over Mum’s death and blamed Dad, who he declared was a gambler.

•  •  •

I got a call from an editor at
Harper’s Bazaar
who said they wanted to take my picture for the magazine. I guess it was early publicity for
A Walk with Love and Death.
They had chosen Bob Richardson as the photographer. A few days later, Bob showed up at the Lunt-Fontanne stage door in a tiny little open-roofed red Fiat. A big blond poodle sat in the backseat. It was an arresting sight. Bob introduced himself and the dog: “This is Lucky.”

Bob was tall and rangy, very thin, with high cheekbones, a strong chin, and knowing, empathetic gray eyes. His teeth jutted in an overbite, which made his lips pout, and he was self-conscious when he smiled. He had curly gray hair and wore a
white shirt, blue jeans, and a black fedora with a straight brim. He drove us out of New York past the smokestacks and the refineries to a stretch of sand, Jones Beach, forty-five minutes from the city.

Awaiting us was the fashion editor, who, as I recall, dressed me in a long skirt and a peasant blouse with a red velvet waistcoat. Bob and I walked up into the dunes overlooking the water; the wind rustled through the sea grass. Bob told me he had been working on a back-to-nature series; he said it was the wave of the future. He held a Nikon delicately in his long slender hands and studied me for a while. When it started to feel dangerous, he’d lift the camera to his eye and take the picture. He stared at me so penetratingly, I felt that he could follow the ebb and flow of my emotions. He lowered the camera and looked deeply into my eyes. He’d shot only a couple of reels. “We have the picture,” he said.

•  •  •

Bob had grown up on Long Island, one of six children in an Irish Catholic family. During high school, he made thousands of line drawings and paintings—“cars and airplanes, bottles and boxes, clothes and accessories”—and began drawing women. After graduating, he enrolled at Parsons School of Design and then Pratt Institute in Brooklyn for graphic design.

In the forties, a friend gave Bob a Rolleiflex camera. He shot a still life and never painted a landscape again. He said once that he always photographed loneliness, because that was his life, and the pictures were about himself. In the fifties, Bob married for the first time and fought in Korea. When he returned to America, he learned that his wife, Barbara, was an alcoholic. He claimed she was hostile and jealous, and they divorced.

In the sixties, Bob was discovered by
Harper’s Bazaar
editors
Marvin Israel and Diana Vreeland and began to shoot for the magazine. He said that his photographs were often deemed “too dark, too real, and too sexual for publication,” but he was also erratic, and that scared a lot of people. Danger fascinated Bob; he was more of a reporter than a fashion photographer.

In 1963, Bob married his second wife, Norma, a Copacabana dancer who went on to work with him as a fashion stylist. Two years later, they had a son, Terry. The family moved to Paris and lived for a couple of years in the 16th arrondissement. When they returned to New York in the late sixties, they took an apartment on Jane Street in the Village. It was soon after this that I met Bob, when he received the call asking if he wanted to photograph me for
Harper’s Bazaar.

I don’t remember what happened immediately following my first encounter with Bob Richardson, or when he told me that he and Norma were separating, or how he convinced me so quickly that we belonged together. But I felt that he could see into my soul almost in a psychic way, like Mum. And I believed that he would be my champion and teacher and protector. He wrote short, passionate notes to me: “I will spend my time loving you.” “You will never be alone.” “You will always be with the man who loves you.” “Each year you will grow more beautiful, and I shall love you more each year.”

The first time we made love, Bob placed me in front of a mirror and we smoked a joint together. It was almost an out-of-body experience. I felt we were the same animal, the same breed, although he was much older than I. Bob was forty-two; I had just turned eighteen.

•  •  •

In the early summer, when I was on tour in Boston with
Hamlet,
Bob came to visit. There was a brass four-poster bed in my
hotel room, and he played the tape of Dylan’s
Nashville Skyline
album, with the song “Lay Lady Lay.” I felt a sense of destiny in being with him.

When the run in Boston ended,
Hamlet
toured to Chicago. I didn’t want to remain with the company and decided to return to New York. Bob insisted that I stay with him at the Gramercy Park Hotel. He had a studio downtown on Fifth Avenue, and often, after he left the hotel for work, I would spend the mornings watching soap operas—
As the World Turns
and
Days of Our Lives
—interspersed with bulletins about thousands of people in Washington marching against the Vietnam War and attacks on protesters by construction workers referred to in the news as “hard-hats.”

Working with Dad had not been an experience I longed to duplicate, so I decided to give acting a rest. Fortunately, at just that moment Dick Avedon called to ask if I would let him photograph me for
Vogue.
I was very excited at the prospect of working with Dick, having entertained dreams of high fashion since before I posed for him in London, when he declared to Mum that my shoulders were “too broad.”

Dick Avedon was the most famous fashion photographer in the world. His studio was the Holy Grail for a model—what every girl dreamed of. He’d loved my mother and always had a soft spot for me. Avedon was legendary for making women look beautiful, and he had photographed the most beautiful women in the world—from Dovima at the circus, among the elephants in Dior couture, to Suzy Parker, running from the paparazzi at the Place Vendôme in Paris, to Verushka, Jean Shrimpton, and Lauren Hutton, leaping like exotic birds in midflight across the pages of
Vogue.
Avedon himself was the model for the role of the photographer played by Fred Astaire in
Funny Face.

When I think of Dick, most often he is standing alert beside his tripod-mounted Hasselblad camera, his face close to the lens, a line to the shutter between his thumb and index finger. He wears a crisp white shirt, Levi’s, and moccasins. His black-framed glasses travel from the bridge of his nose up to his forehead. As he focuses, he sweeps back a forelock of thick gray hair when it falls across his eyes. His gaze is keen and critical. He understands glamour like no other photographer. Dick’s studio exuded an atmosphere of luxury and taste, a place where art and industry dovetailed harmoniously. Although I considered him a friend first, I rarely saw him socially. He was one of the grown-ups.

Polly Mellen was the fashion editor with whom Avedon worked most at
Vogue,
under the grand and exotic reign of “the Empress,” Diana Vreeland. Polly was emotional and intense, with the profile of an Indian brave, under a short, straight, steel-gray bob. Before a sitting, Polly’s assistants would arrange racks of shoes, bags, accessories, and jewelry on long refectory tables. Working for
Vogue
was a big production, and the studio assistants were constantly on the move, urgently following directions.

I sensed the challenge to come up to par, all of us seeking out the excitement of that moment when the elements came together and a picture got made. There was a rush like no other when Dick called out smoothly, “Beautiful,” above the music, and Polly’s eyes shone with pride, and the rhythm of the shutter accelerated along with the white flash of the strobe light. Sometimes I’d be shaking when I walked off the no-seam paper, returning to the dressing room.

Diana Vreeland had taken a liking to me, and consequently assigned Dick, the fashion editor Babs Simpson, and Ara Gallant, who did fascinating and unexpected things with hair, to
work on what would become a twenty-eight-page feature in Ireland. I was called up to Ms. Vreeland’s office at the top of the Graybar Building. The corridors were monochromatic beige and lined with workspaces occupied by cool, efficient women. Cutouts from magazines, photographs, and swatches of fabric were pinned to the walls of the cubicles. The low hum of fashion’s tension built the closer one came to Ms. Vreeland’s lair.

As I recall, the interior of her office was lipstick red, and the carpet was leopard-skin print. On the wall to the right was a collage of exquisite images, including the head of Marlon Brando and the foot of Rudolf Nureyev. The woman herself was tall and imperious, with a large nose and a helmet of jet-black hair back-combed into the shape and texture of a stag beetle. Her cheeks were rosy and her mouth a full, deep crimson. Her small dark eyes glittered pointedly at me as she indicated the racks of clothes that had been selected. An hour or so into trying on outfits, I fainted dead away and came to with Ms. Vreeland gently slapping my cheeks and barking for an editor to bring me water.

Bob was unhappy with my plan to go to Ireland and voiced his concern that I would not be coming back. I did my best to assure him that I would return. However, I couldn’t refuse this great opportunity to travel with Avedon. I was beginning to get comfortable in my own skin, and I enjoyed working for the camera. Dick had decided that he wanted the story to be about a couple traveling in the West Country in a painted tinker caravan, and in an effort to include me, he’d shown me pictures of beautiful young men as potential photographic partners. I rejected an image of the singer-songwriter James Taylor and chose as my companion an attractive blond, Harvey Mattison.

On July 11, 1969, we arrived in Ireland. We were staying
at a small hotel out in the Connemara wilderness when the astronauts landed on the moon for the first time. Looking up at the moon’s sad white face, her mouth a shadowy crater, I felt intensely protective of her, as if her purity had been invaded.

Ara Gallant and I became fast friends. We laughed because we were in Ireland and Ara abhorred the color green. I always thought Ara just appeared one day on earth. He was diminutive in stature but moved like a flamenco dancer in his high-heeled cowboy boots. Gay, of Russian-Jewish origin, and a full-blown New Yorker, Ara wore black at all times, a sailor’s pigtail to his waist, with chiseled sideburns ending in a point beneath his cheekbones, and a Kangol spitfire hat full of charms on top of his dark curls.

Once we were out on the bogs, Ara and I teased Harvey mercilessly. I asked him to dive into a freezing lake to capture a water lily. He was very brave, but he almost got hypothermia.

Dick had expressed a desire to take my picture with a falcon on my arm, and as a result we found ourselves at a private avian sanctuary at the home of a German baron in Co. Meath. We were astonished to see his commendations from the German army hanging behind glass in a cabinet inside the front door. When he came downstairs to greet us, the baron was wearing spats, jodhpurs, a stock, and a monocle. He was actually flexing a little whip. Dick almost fainted.

We were escorted outside by several efficient workmen and shown the baron’s amazing collection of fierce birds: owls and hawks of various species, several of which were placed on my fist for Dick to photograph. All in all, it was a very strange scene, with the baron barking in German to the bird handlers, and the talons of the raptors digging into my wrist. We were not unhappy to leave the baron’s estate.

Our little caravan traveled from Dublin to Tipperary to Limerick to Galway. Dick photographed us in the fields and the bogs, romping in haystacks, running through gorse, and playing in ruined castles. When we were in Dingle, Dick made the mistake of handing out a few shillings to a bunch of tinker children from the window of our car. The next thing, they were clinging to the windshield and the bumper, jumping and banging on the roof. In those days, there was an enormous amount of poverty in rural Ireland. Eventually, Dick, Ara, Harvey, and Babs left for New York after dropping me off at St. Clerans.

•  •  •

Allegra and Nurse were now in residence at the Little House. Leslie Waddington had offered to raise Allegra after Mum died, but it became evident that it was too much for him and his new wife to take on this small, autocratic little girl, as well as Nurse, who was devastated by Mum’s death.

Allegra’s father, John Julius, was married with two children. Later he said that after Mum died, his wife, Anne, offered to raise Allegra alongside her teenage brother and sister, but Dad had intervened and offered to bring her to Ireland. They reached an agreement that Dad would raise Allegra as his own daughter and John Julius “would be hitherto presented as her godfather.” Recently, Allegra said, “John Julius could be accurately referred to as my father, but I had only one dad.” I was proud of Dad when he agreed to raise Allegra at St. Clerans. It was a moving, openhearted gesture, and he loved her as his own, taking great pleasure in her intelligence and aptitude for learning. Finally I felt she was safe.