Some of My Lives (34 page)

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Authors: Rosamond Bernier

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In 1990, I wrote an introduction to the former
New Yorker
writer Janet Flanner's book
Men and Monuments: Profiles of Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and Malraux
, which was originally published in 1957 and then republished by Natalia Danesi Murray for Da Capo Press in 1990.
 
 
I can still see Janet Flanner as I first caught sight of her in the late 1940s, when I was a young woman in Paris on my first job and she had been for almost a quarter of a century the acclaimed author of the “Letter from Paris” in
The New Yorker
.
She had arrived in Paris from her native Indiana in 1922, at the age of thirty. Like hundreds, if not thousands, of other American would-be writers at that time, she couldn't wait to make the most of the freer air, the richer culture, and the smaller expenses that Paris had to offer.
Before long, her letters back home struck her friend Jane Grant as just what was needed for the new magazine of which her husband, Harold Ross, was editor. Its name was
The New Yorker
. And in October 1925 it carried the first “Letter from Paris,” for which Janet was paid forty dollars. Like all the letters that were to follow, it was signed “Genet”—the nom de plume that Ross had chosen for Janet.
I did not of course know at the time of our first meeting that Janet was to go on writing for
The New Yorker
until she was in her eighties. Nor could I know of the lengthy profiles that she was to research with such exemplary care and yet manage to present, in print, as if they had given her no trouble at all.
The day-to-day detail of life in Paris was her prime and lifelong
concern. Like the Parisians themselves, she loved a good murder and was fascinated by scandals of every kind. She was forever in touch with whatever was newest in art, in the theater, in literature, in music, and in the fashion industry. Nor did she neglect the sociabilities to which those interests gave rise.
She had a very good eye for an eccentric, and—again like the Parisians—she adored a good funeral and could sum up the deceased with an admirable and lively concision. She enjoyed state occasions, too, and brought them alive in a way that was the envy of every other foreign correspondent. On the American in Paris, from Gene Tunney to Edith Wharton, and from Alice B. Toklas to Isadora Duncan, Marian Anderson and Josephine Baker, she was at her most observant. But she was in Paris primarily for the Parisians, and in dealing with them—Georges Clemenceau, Paul Poiret, Suzanne Lenglen, the Duchesse d'Uzès, Maurice Chevalier, François Mauriac, Erik Satie, in no particular order—she was consummately and enviably at home.
Much of this came out in just a phrase or two. But she could also turn her hand to monumental reportage with a skill that caused William Shawn—the most perceptive of editors—to rank her with Rebecca West. What Rebecca West was to the Nuremberg trials, Janet Flanner was to the looting of art by the Nazis and its subsequent salvaging by the victorious American forces.
Characteristically, it was in a bar that I first saw her. After the end of World War II, foreign correspondents in Paris lived in the Hôtel Scribe and used its bar as their meeting place. Later they moved for drinks only—the rooms were too expensive—to the Hôtel Crillon. And that is where I saw her, talking, talking, talking. What she said was always incisive, well modulated, with the words so well chosen that they could have been wafted, unchanged, onto the printed page. She smoked the whole time, eyes crinkled above the smoke. And, from that small frame, there would emerge a surprisingly Falstaffian laugh.
For Janet, though not frail, was small—delicately chunky, one might say. With good reason, she was proud of her elegant little feet. (She wore size four and a half.) When custom-made shoes were a luxury but not a financial catastrophe, she had all her shoes made by
a famous
bottier
. In her chosen mannish style, she was always very well dressed. Every year, she had one suit made by a top couture house—Chanel, it might be, or Molyneux. She loved bright silk scarves and usually had one—knotted with seemingly casual care—round her throat. In later years, the red ribbon of the Légion d'Honneur made a bright accent on her every lapel.
For decades, she lived in a mansard room in the Hôtel Continental on the rue de Castiglione. How she could live permanently in such tiny quarters was a mystery to me. She had a little balcony with a view over the Tuileries, but I doubt she ever took the time to step out and have a look round.
Some of the furniture was hers. Its main feature was a boulle
bureau plat
—heaped, of course, with books and papers. She had spied this luxurious table in the front window of a butcher's shop on the Left Bank. Maybe a client had left it there on consignment. Anyhow, Janet marched right in and bought it. There were papers of all kinds everywhere. Janet read all the newspapers, and there used to be a great many of them in France. She had a batch of fat red and blue pencils, and she would go through the newspapers imperiously marking any item—however small—that might nourish her fortnightly “Letter from Paris.” “You have to look even at the smallest items at the bottom of the page,” she used to say. “That's where you might find something.” She clipped and clipped. There were mounds of clippings all over the place. Perhaps only Marcel Proust's bedroom had such a shifting sea of papers.
Underneath the boulle desk, she kept a wicker hamper stuffed with papers. And then, when Janet was going away for a few months—to America, to Italy—the papers got shunted elsewhere. Marie, the floor maid, and her husband, Emile, one of the hall porters, would transfer Janet's clothes into the hamper, which would then be taken down and stored in the bowels of the hotel.
The staff of the hotel adored Janet. They waited on her, took care of her, took pride in her. She was a particular favorite with the barman, who acted as informal host to the streams of people who came, in later years, to see Janet (or in hopes of seeing her). She gave appointment after appointment in the bar, and people took their turns, edging along the narrow banquettes until they were next to the large leather armchair that was her throne.
She was totally undomestic and quite proud of living, as the French say, like a bird on a branch—with no permanent anchor anywhere. She lived the life of a convivial
homme de lettres
—monocle and all—who just happened to be a woman.
She was generous—with her time, her person, her resources. I only discovered after her death that a number of people—Alice B. Toklas, among them—were getting small (and sometimes not so small) checks from Janet. It was in character that after a friend of hers had dropped dead when about to have dinner with her, she paid for the funeral expenses.
She loved to invite her friends for a splendid meal in a good restaurant. On festive occasions, or to celebrate when, for once, her “Letter from Paris” had gone off to
The New Yorker
on time, we used to go to a bistro called L'Ami Louis that she especially liked. I still remember the foie gras sautéed with grapes, followed by little roast birds. She was a good judge of food and wine, yet she didn't know the first thing about cooking.
Although her Paris letters and her profiles read with seamless clarity, she agonized over them. How many telephone calls did I get at the small office where I edited the art review that was my reason for being in Paris! “I can't get it finished!” she would moan. She could only write at the last minute, with the deadline hanging over her like a sentence of death. Only then would she attack her typewriter in a frenzy, working through the night until four or five in the morning. On some of the longer pieces, and after months of research, she would be closeted in her room like a desperate bear, working on her private marathon until driven out in search of food.
Though she knew her worth as a writer, she could be curiously shy and uncertain of herself. When she was preparing the profile of Georges Braque, she asked me if I would mind taking her to Braque's house on the rue du Douanier (now renamed the rue Georges Braque), up by the Parc Montsouris. Perhaps I could introduce her and generally hang around? Later, she sent me two pages of typewritten notes, along with an affectionate scrawled message, asking me to correct or add anything that I remembered from the interview.
Until age and infirmity slowed her down, Janet went everywhere—to concerts (she loved music), art exhibitions, political meetings, cabarets, parties. Deep down, she disliked the theater, perhaps
because as a child she had been pushed onto the stage in amateur productions by her mother, who was a passionate and gifted amateur actress. But the fact is that she could have been an actress. When called upon to speak in public, or on television, she was immediately in command. She never used notes. Her wit, her unexpected and cogent turn of phrase, never failed her.
News was her business, but it was not in her nature to intrude in order to get it. For a long time, after the end of World War II, she would sit just a few feet away from Picasso night after night in the Café de Flore. She never presumed to speak to him, but some fifteen years later, when she was taken to his house in Cannes, he said, “But of course I know you! How often did I not see you at the Flore! Why did you never speak to me?” and threw his arms around her.
As a talker, she could be sharp, incisive, jaunty, and ribald, though never malicious. But she was also—unlike André Malraux—a natural listener. She had great reserves of compassion and was poignantly responsive to the tribulations of others. One morning, when she was sitting over a cup of coffee in the garden of the Ritz in Paris, she heard of a friend's bad news. On the instant, heavy tears began to course, uncontrollably, down her furrowed cheeks.
She often complained that she could never get down to the books that she ought to write and wanted to write. In private, she would admit that it was not only her demanding work for
The New Yorker
that was responsible. The long haul was not for her. As she wrote to her friend Kay Boyle, “I seem to live on in a steady conflagration of matches, easily burnt out, but always re-lighted.” She did actually write two articles for my magazine,
L'ŒIL
—one on her old friend Mark Tobey, the other, less predictably, on Helena Rubinstein—but although we commissioned her to write the text for an illustrated book on Paris, she backed out.
Happily, she lived to know that her reports from Paris and elsewhere were being reprinted in book form. She enjoyed the belated personal recognition—her pseudonym, Genet, concealed her identity for many years—and toward the end of her life, when debilitating illness prevented her from writing, she took an enormous delight in reading herself in book form. She would laugh uproariously. “I must say,” she told her friends, “that nobody ever amuses me as much as reading myself!”
That amusement is contagious. Janet Flanner was a person of very strong convictions, but she never preached. Delight was what she offered, from one decade to the next, and it has never staled. The profiles in this book are as fresh as they were on the day that she wrote them. As for “The Beautiful Spoils,” her account of the looting of art by the Nazis from 1940 onward, it too is a profile but a profile of iniquity, minutely researched in often difficult circumstances. We can learn from all these pieces, but in doing so, we also have ourselves a very good time.
This is my introduction to the catalog for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 1978 exhibition
Avedon: Photographs, 1947–1977.
 
 
F
ashion is theater. It has its authors and its directors, it has its actors and its actresses, and it has an audience that can be very large indeed. It is art, and it is also big business. It is trade, of a particularly complex and ramifying kind, and at its best it is poetry as well. It has successes that seem for a season or two to take the whole world and roll it flat, and it has its failures that are both gruesome and definitive.
It has variables—names that come and go—and it has constants. One of its constants over the last thirty years and more has been the activity of Richard Avedon. Avedon is self-evidently one of the best photographers of the day. But he is also a philosopher, a historian, a moralist, a poet, and a wit. He does not see fashion photography as a chore to be got through as quickly as possible. He gives it everything he has; and that “everything” includes those fantasies which take hold of us in childhood and never let go.
However implausibly, it was while serving in the Merchant Marine, during World War II, that he learned the techniques of photography that later served him so well in the world of high fashion.
He began his activity in that domain at a time right after the war, when nobody in this country knew anything about the state of high fashion in France, for the very good reason that there was nothing to work with and nothing to show. But the French fashion industry wasn't willing to lie down and die; and just to show that it was still
alive, the French sent over to New York an exhibition of small and extremely lifelike dolls that were dressed just as real live full-sized people would be dressed when the couture houses could open again. The show was called
Le Théâtre de la Mode
, and among the people who came over with it was Christian Bérard, the most brilliant stage designer of his day.
It made a great stir, and when the French fashion houses began to open up again in 1946–47, American magazines thought it worthwhile to send people over to report on them. One of these people was Richard Avedon, who was seeing Paris for the first time. It was the decisive moment in his professional life. He knew nothing of Paris, beyond what he had picked up from the movies of the 1930s, and he was overwhelmed not only by the city itself but by the world of high fashion with its impassioned commitment to elegance and technical perfection.
He was in Paris when a soft-spoken, moonfaced man called Christian Dior showed his first collection. Such was the shortage of fabrics in France at the time that many women in the audience were still wearing skirts above their knees. His models came sailing through the crowded gray salons like sloops in a high wind. As they pirouetted this way and that, their long full skirts swooshed out around them, knocking ashtrays off the tables as they went. It was the New Look, the proof that Paris could still call a tune that the whole world would follow, and people wept to see it. It meant that miles of French cloth would be sold, and it meant years of work for the skilled French fingers that made braid, flowers, belts, buttons, and embroidery. The finely trained artisans of
la haute couture
were in business again.
Avedon the fashion photographer had his first great success in the atmosphere of high excitement and overflowing emotion that was the mark of Paris reborn. Those new fashions were a triumph for French intelligence, French wit, and French craftsmanship. For one or two men and women of genius and for a great many hardworking people of talent they foretold a lifetime of constructive activity; and for the pride and the dignity of a lately humbled France they were a tremendous tonic.
Coverage of the Paris collections was a serious matter in those
days. Preparations were made long in advance. The girl who was to model the clothes was chosen way ahead in New York and worked over like a vestal virgin predestined for a magic ritual. Avedon went to Paris ahead of time to choose and rehearse his locations. The whole magazine team spent three weeks to record the showings. Nothing was left to chance. What looked like accident and spontaneity was nothing of the kind. There was not a breath of the reportage spirit. Every last effect was thought out in advance: the concierge in the doorway, the still-unchanged life of the street, the unexpected encounters, even the rising cloud of pigeons with their wings akimbo.
Avedon lived and worked in the closed world of couture and the clothes he was to photograph. He spent all day on location and all night in a small studio on the rue Jean Goujon. Paris for him was his little team: the model, his assistant, an electrician, the aged messenger who brought the big dressmaker's boxes round on his bicycle. He had no contact whatever with the glittering world that was conjured up in the photographs that would appear in
Harper's Bazaar
and later in
Vogue
.
Reclusive by choice as much as by necessity, Avedon at the age of twenty-four did not attempt to impress himself upon Paris. But when he shot in the Palais Royal, he knew that somewhere behind an upper window Colette was writing with her
fanal bleu
beside her. He also knew that at any moment Jean Cocteau, who also lived in the Palais Royal, might saunter down, with his carefully permed mane waving in the breeze, to have lunch at Véfour.
Paris after the liberation was full of bitterness and recrimination. Yet something was coming alive again, and behind that renewed vitality was the most imaginative of economic programs: the Marshall Plan.
Madeleine Renaud and Jean-Louis Barrault at their Théâtre Marigny under the bare chestnut trees delighted with their repertoire. A few years later the Barraults were to offer Pierre Boulez the hospitality of their small upstairs, where, on excruciatingly uncomfortable chairs, the Parisians heard Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and Boulez's own music for the first time. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were writing and holding court, first at the Café de Flore, then downstairs in the dark bar of the Pont Royal when too many gawkers
invaded their Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Albert Camus came back from North Africa to run the most intelligent newspaper,
Combat
.
The austere and splendid Nadia Boulanger was still pouring out her enthusiasms, insights, and perceptions to a new generation of musicians in her freezing apartment on the rue Ballu (unchanged since Aaron Copland became her first composition pupil in 1921).
The tradition of intelligent popular entertainment continued. While over on the avenue George V Balenciaga showed superb black dresses as stiff with heavy embroidery as a jeweled icon, across the Seine on the Left Bank Juliette Gréco, in worn black slacks and sweater, sang
désabusé
songs written for her by Sartre and Raymond Queneau. And of course Piaf, diminutive sparrow of sorrow in a shapeless black shift, broke everybody's heart singing “La Vie en Rose.”
These early photographs chart Avedon's evolution. From the start, he differed from the famous figures who preceded him: Baron de Meyer, Steichen, Man Ray, Hoyningen-Huene, Beaton, Horst. For one thing, he chose to observe, rather than to mingle with, the professionally elegant world. To that world he brought wit, vitality that never quite masked an underlying anxiety, and the ability to distill drama from frivolity. He did everything his own way. Not for him the backlighting that aureoled hair and profile, the ectoplasmic shimmer of a flattering background, the static pose by a Grecian column. Avedon's models are rarely still: they run, pivot, stride. (An early photograph of a girl gleefully speeding along on roller skates horrified officials of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, who thought it undignified.)
The clothes themselves take on a tautened nervous energy: panels fly, poufs billow, coats jut and twirl. Shoes become monuments. There is an acute sensitivity to texture: he is as alive to sunlit cigarette smoke against a cheek as he is to the mushroom bloom of a suede hat or the sheen of fur against the grain of wool.
These photographs reflect his romance with Paris: the loving side-look at uneven paving stones, the worn surface of a wall, the curve of a café chair, the watery lights on a bridge, the siphon of soda water on a bistro table, the old-fashioned lettering on a shop front, the Art Nouveau arabesques over a doorway.
An increasing interest in portraiture that was to blossom uncompromisingly
in the 1960s creeps into the fashion photographs as the French fashion press crowd around girls in evening dress, members of the Dior
état-major
flank one of their creations. He knew just how to juxtapose everyday people with the improbable perfection of the professional beauty.
There are moments of cinematic quality—episodes from an unwritten story when the action is not yet defined. Something has happened, or is about to happen: we never know which. Tongue-in-cheek mini-dramas comment indirectly on the world they set before us. In one image a young woman sits in a French railway carriage (Avedon's Anna Karenina?). As she clasps her little dog, her frail face emerges, bathed in tears, from a sea of flowers. This photograph was refused by his magazine editor. “No one cries in a Dior hat” was the tart comment. Incidentally, while most of these photographs were done during assignments for
Harper's Bazaar
and
Vogue
, some favorites of his were never published.
Soon the romance is over. A new emphasis on humor, frenzy, and finally wry satire takes over. The gaiety is more frantic than exuberant, the openmouthed laughs look strident, everyone seems to be smoking nervously. Boredom creeps in as handsome bodies loll on beaches. There is a radical change in what is considered beautiful and acceptable. The first breasts are bared. The first black model appears. High fashion and the high stepper were one, at that moment in time. Avedon dealt with a world of performers. The anonymous models of the immediate postwar years were replaced by young women who became celebrities in their own right. At the same time, it turned out that the professional performers and the redoubtable heiresses to great fortunes asked nothing better than to put their persons in the public domain by modeling whatever was newest in high fashion. Beauty and notoriety and a certain stylish abandon were adroitly compounded by Avedon in images that quintessentialize one of the more curious moments in recent social history.
With the 1960s come the tough fashions, the clunks of jewelry, the face mask like Maori tattooing, the space-age glasses, the matted hair. The photographer-ringmaster urges his models to movement and yet more movement: they wheel, leap, cavort in midair.
These tough fashions corresponded to radical changes in a world
that in the late 1960s and early 1970s was falling apart and did not know how to put itself together again. Fashion came out of the quilted silence of the couture houses and into the streets for its inspiration. Nothing could be too odd, nothing could be too extreme, nothing could contrast too abruptly with the fastidious perfection that had once been the aim of high fashion. It was a visual moment that got completely out of hand; and already after less than ten years the fashions in question look as remote from us as the costumes that went berserk under the Directoire. But Avedon was there; those frantic fashions were his material; and he went to work among them the way Claude Monet went to work among his water lilies.
The last room leaves the discotheque universe for the quiet privacy of Avedon's studio. It tells us as much about the man behind the camera and the journey he has undertaken as it does about the seven women who are enshrined there. Here is simplicity—of dress, of pose—with all artifice gone and nothing but the white studio wall behind the straightforward frontal pose. Alberto Giacometti used to say that what mattered to him in sculpture was to capture
le regard
—the gaze. The other features were only a framework for
le regard
. Once you had this, everything else fell into place. Richard Avedon has wrought this particular miracle, time and time again.

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