The Woman in the Photograph (34 page)

Hollywood

August 1946

“When exactly was the last time we saw Man?” Lee asked Roland.

He turned from the window to give her his attention. “It was before the war.”

She snorted. “I knew
that
.” For Lee, the past fifteen years were inescapably divided into pre- and postwar: the before and after of that five-year parenthesis when everything they had once thought normal had abruptly stopped.

From the back of the taxi, she peered out the window and into the glare of California, a clean, modern place, untouched by conflict. The long snouts of shiny automobiles inched along the wide boulevard lined with palm trees and telephone poles; the neon and lights of the cinemas and restaurants were pale in the summer sun. When would Europe look like this again? Had it ever? The last time she'd been to the States was in the “before” category. Not that it mattered—the only thing changed here was the rise in its own prosperity. Lee fidgeted with the clasp on her handbag, remembering when she'd returned to
New York in 1932. Even before the war, her life had not been without danger. Though most of it, she admitted, was of her own making.

After Paris, she'd spent two wildly successful years in Manhattan: she had all the uptown socialites coming to the studio, the best accounts—Saks, Macy's, the fashion rags—her solo show, and
The Blood of a Poet
running ad nauseam on Fifth Avenue. But it had worn her out. Not the photography—soulless commercial work—but her frenetic social life. The relentless dinner parties, all-night poker games, the weekends on Long Island. The drinking, always drinking, with everyone so blotto that nothing ruffled them: a Rolls-Royce diving into a swimming pool, nearby gunshots, the smell of burning hair, a boathouse split by lightning . . . Nothing.

Lee's fevered pace—the constant outings and nonstop fun that did nothing to make her happy—had finally caught up with her. She was exhausted, unhealthy, perpetually cranky, on the verge of losing her looks. When Aziz Eloui Bey came to New York on business, they spontaneously eloped. She was ready; it was time. Lee had always needed change, novelty, motion . . . Ecstatic, she returned with him to Cairo; it took only a few months in Egypt to soundly squelch nearly all that enthusiasm.

It wasn't so much the god-awful heat, the mosquitoes, the typhoid injections, the crazy traffic, or the persistent odor of camel dung, as it was the boredom. On occasion, her intense longing for Europe would surface and overwhelm her like nausea, her idleness would paralyze her until she could scarcely get out of bed. Everything was so colorless in the desert, all ochre, tan, and bone. She became plagued by dark moods—the
Plagues of Egypt! But instead of frogs, locusts, and darkness, it was insomnia, depression, and recklessness. At times, Lee tried to combat the blue jitters with danger and excitement. She took lessons from a snake charmer, rode camels and a wild horse, swam with sharks in the Red Sea. And there was more drinking. Often and excessively. After a few years, Aziz, perpetually understanding, encouraged her to go off on holiday by herself, to spend the summer in France with old friends.

That was in 1937, two years before Hitler began invading everything, still during that enchanted time people now called the “Interwar Period.” And suddenly, for the first time in five years, Lee was in Paris.

Her first day in town, Julien Levy—who had evolved from lover to friend after their short-lived affair—whisked her away to a Surrealist ball. Although excited, she was nervous about bumping into Man Ray. Would he be hostile, icy cold, or filled with nostalgic longing? Would he still want to photograph her? Sleep with her? Would he follow her around Paris?

None of it. At the party he'd smiled and given her a wan kiss on the cheek. She was taken aback by his lack of passion. The maddening jealousy, the tireless arguing, the drunken stalking with a gun in his pocket—in five years, it had all been erased. They stood side by side, polite as strangers. Lee's relief was tinged with profound disappointment. Man Ray no longer cared.

He had then introduced her to the man next to him. A tall Englishman, barefoot and bare-chested, his hair painted green. It was Roland Penrose, an aristocratic Quaker, a modern art collector, curator, and painter. She looked at him now,
sitting by her side. Was it ironic that Man Ray had casually introduced them? Roland was the one who finally propelled her out of Cairo; the one she wanted to be with when war broke out.

“It had to have been
before
the war. The war just ended last year,” Lee said with a slight hint of derision, but truthfully, she could barely believe it was true. Although the war itself had passed slowly—the Blitz, the blackout, and the food rationing had seemed interminable; her three-year stint as a war correspondent, the work of a lifetime—ever since, she felt as though she'd been trudging through mud. No, mud was the currency of war. Noise, chaos, constant movement had all turned into the silent stillness of peace.

“Well, if you want precision,” he said, his accent refined, “I believe the last time we saw Man was in southern France, August 1939, a week before Hitler invaded Poland. Right before we ran screaming back to London.”

“That's right.” She frowned, remembering that last visit. It had seemed their common past had never existed. No longer his mistress or muse, she'd been demoted to little more than his friend Roland's lover. One of the women. Six years later, what would this visit to Man Ray bring? Was it a mistake to come?

At the crosswalk, Lee eyed the long-haired girls in their high-heeled sandals and flowered skirts, smiling at strangers, each one a Hollywood hopeful. She crossed her legs in the roomy backseat, feeling dowdy in loose-fitting slacks.

“I can't believe Man lives here,” she said, running a hand through her frizzy halo of hair. The cab turned right off Sunset and onto Vine. “It seems the polar opposite to Paris.”

“Didn't
you fancy coming here as a girl?” Roland teased her. “To get your start in the pictures?”

“Not for long. I was always more attracted to the Atlantic than the Pacific.”

The cab pulled up in front of a narrow redbrick apartment building with an arched gate: Villa Elaine. Two steps inside the quiet courtyard—a tame jungle of palms, hibiscus, and ivy—and the street seemed far away.

“Nice.” Roland nodded his approval. “Perhaps Man's found a corner of Provence here in Los Angeles.”

When they rang the bell, Man flung the door open. Although in his mid-fifties, he didn't look remarkably different from when Lee lived with him. His hair, still dark, had stopped receding years before; he was stylish, quick and slim. His big, curious eyes had not lost their glow—they seemed almost darker, more intense—though they were now framed by glasses. Remembering that magnetic pull that had attracted her at twenty-two, she smiled at him shyly. Lee had changed far more than he; almost forty, she was no longer slim, fresh, unlined. Bags hung under her slanted blue eyes, her fluffy blond hair needed re-dyeing. War and lifestyle had taken a toll on her looks.

“You made it.” After giving Lee a warm embrace, the kind reserved for favorite sisters and special friends, he shook Roland's hand in delight. “It's wonderful to have you. It's been too long.”

He ushered them in. The studio, with big windows, high ceilings, and a balcony, had a similar air to his old place in Montparnasse. Paintings and pipes mingled with books and old rayo
grams; a long piece of driftwood twirled up a standing lamp. In a nook of one wall, Lee noticed a small version of
Observatory Time,
the enormous painting he'd done, postbreakup, of her red lips dominating a gray sky. This one was a mere memory, a shadow of the original, obsessive piece. She sighed—of course, she no longer merited monumental proportions in his life—then noticed the new harvest of photos, all portraits of an exotic-looking brunette. As Lee turned back to face Man, the model herself walked in from the bedroom. Dark, with sculpted features and a graceful frame, she was at least five years younger than Lee.

“And here's Juliet,” said Man. “Darling, I'd like for you to meet some old friends from the Paris days. This is Roland Penrose, an English Surrealist, if you believe in such things. And Lee Miller. You've heard of her, of course. She used to be my assistant and model. You might recognize her from some of my earlier work.”

“Pleased to meet you both.” Juliet gave them a dazzling smile.

“And you.” Lee smiled stiffly, wondering why she felt so awkward. “Man, I can't believe you're in Hollywood. Are you working for the pictures?”

“Hell, no,” he said with a chuckle. “I'm doing what I've always done. You know, when I came here in 1940, I only planned to stay a week. I was off to Tahiti! I wanted to be as far from the war as I could get. But on my first day in town, I met Juliet.” He took her by the hand and gazed at her dotingly. “That decided it for me. We've been together ever since.”

Pleased, Juliet looked down, demure and docile. Lee raised
her eyebrows. Man's new muse was nothing like her or Kiki. Maybe this was the kind of woman he could hold on to and grow old with.

“Can I get anyone some coffee?” Juliet asked, smiling around the group. “Or tea?”

“I wouldn't mind something a bit stronger,” Lee said. “Isn't it about cocktail hour?”

In mild distress, Juliet looked over at Man. “Cocktails? I don't think we have anything. Of course, I could run to the market and get something. What would you like?”

“I don't want to be any trouble,” said Lee.

“No, you're right,” said Man. “We should celebrate with something more exciting than coffee. Champagne? Or vodka and orange juice? That's very California.”

“With lots of ice?” asked Lee. After years in England and the Continent, she'd been overly warm since they arrived to the American southwest. “Sounds like heaven.”

“I'll be back in a little bit,” Juliet said, picking up her purse.

“I'll go with you,” said Roland. “We can leave these two to reminisce. That way, they won't bore us with their old stories when we get back.”

As Man and Lee settled on the couch, they both sought tobacco. Man lit her cigarette, then puffed on his pipe.

“How long have you been in the States?” Man asked, preferring safe questions to talk of old times.

“We arrived in May. We visited friends in New York—I saw my family in Poughkeepsie, too—then we went to Arizona to see Max Ernst. He's doing great work.” She put on a happy face.

Although she'd been taking lots of photographs—mainly
portraits of artists—she hadn't felt passionate about working since the war. Their friends' artwork, shows, and lives all seemed so inspired, so fulfilled. Compared to them, she didn't feel talented or driven. Lee was just going through the motions.

“So are you thinking about coming back to the States?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I've been away so long, it doesn't feel like home anymore.”

“I think of Paris every day. Now that the war's over, I'm dying to get back. Not only do I want to live there again—Lord knows, there's nothing interesting about being an
américain
in America—but I want to see if my work survived. I only brought two suitcases with me. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to pack when you think you might never return. I filled one valise just with artwork, but my big canvases, archives, and readymades are still in France. That is, if they didn't get destroyed.”

“I was there at the liberation of Paris,” Lee said, wistful. “It was such a beautiful thing. I saw Picasso, Louis Aragon, Cocteau . . . Everyone was thin but well—and so happy to have done with the Nazis. Picasso told me that you'd left France.”

He took a quick puff on his pipe. “Although I'd lived there for nearly twenty years, once the Germans stomped into Paris, I couldn't take it. The Resistance hadn't been organized yet, my friends were out of town, I couldn't work. Finally, I made the decision to leave.”

“Probably for the best.”

“Could have saved my life.” He looked over at Lee. “Six weeks after I left, the Vichy government passed a law allowing
foreign Jews to be interned—and we all know what that means. I'm not a religious man, but I don't think the Nazis would have cared.”

Lee's mind suddenly began swimming with images from the death camps. An abandoned cart piled high with bodies; the overwhelming smell of uncontrolled bowels and rotting flesh; her combat boots covered in white ash: “Fucking hell!” she turned to a green-faced soldier as she tried to wipe it off, “this isn't from the ovens, is it?” Her eyes darted back to the pile. She stood up and stared down into her Rolleiflex camera, just a foot from the cart. She began taking photos to make the men real: the clutched hands, making baby fists; the open eyes, some blue, some blank; mouths wide as if in song; the extraordinary thinness, bones that had made bodies move. Zooming in on one face, her cold terror. There was a dark-haired man with dramatic eyebrows and a hawk nose. No, impossible. Picasso had assured her that Man had left—“on the same steamer as that idiot, Dalí”—but this cadaver looked so familiar, she'd wanted to touch it. Her former lover, mentor, companion.