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Extract here from Robert Brustein, ‘Everybody Knows My Name: review of Nothing Personal by Richard Avedon and James Baldwin’, in The New York Review of Books, December 17, 1964.
Extract here from Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966).
Extract here from John Cheever, John Cheever: The Journals (London: Cape, 1991).

Norma Stevens and Steven M. L. Aronson have asserted their right to be identified as the authors of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

William Heinemann is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

OVERTURE

NEW YEAR’S EVE 1975. My husband and I were having a few friends over for a champagne toast. Martin was the worldwide creative director of Revlon at the time and had invited to drop by—should he have nothing better to do—his go-to photographer for big splashy four-color “lips and matching fingertips” ad campaigns (“Fire and Ice,” “Persian Melon,” “Cherries in the Snow,” “Stormy Pink,” “Wine with Everything” …). A little before midnight Richard Avedon—the ne-plus-ultra arbiter of feminine grace and beauty, the ambassador of glamour, the epitome of chic—burst through our front door bearing a dozen American Beauty roses, which he presented to me with romantic-comedy panache, fanning them out as if he were showing his hand in a card game. “You shouldn’t have,” I said, “but now I think I’d be disappointed if you hadn’t.”

It was an entrance—a performance—worthy of Fred Astaire. And why not, I thought, since Astaire’s character in the film Funny Face had been modeled on him. I remember what he had on that night: lavender silk shirt, skinny black knitted tie, dove-gray double-breasted suit fitted to his wiry frame. And behind the horn-rimmed glasses, those black mile-a-minute pinwheel eyes! And then the crowning glory—his untamed mane of silvery hair.

After I’d introduced him to our other guests, he pulled me aside and said, “I’ve got to talk to you. Where can we go?”

I HAD MET Richard Avedon for the first time in the late 1960s when I was a Mad Woman—the creative director of a small advertising agency. I worked on girlie accounts like Coty, Charles of the Ritz, and Monsanto—cosmetics, fibers, and fabrics—while aching to cut my teeth on bigger-budget stuff like cars and booze. One of my clients, Almay, was about to launch a hypoallergenic line to compete with Estée Lauder’s Clinique, for which Irving Penn had produced a series of pristine still lifes that spoke to the product’s immaculate conception. There was only one photographer who could give Penn a run for his money, and that was Richard Avedon.

I contacted his longtime rep, Laura Kanelous, who asked right off the bat, “What’s in the budget?” When I told her, she said, “Forget it. He won’t work for that.” I doubled the money. She said, “Keep going!” I said, “That’s it.” She said, “Okay, but you only get six months’ usage,” and she put me through to Avedon. “What’s up?” he barked. I was hearing that unmistakably New York voice for the first time. In my New York voice I told him how I saw the ad: clean, white, pure, nun-like. He said “I got it” and hung up.

The morning of the sitting I dressed expressly for him—cream silk shirt, crisp blue blazer with gold buttons, designer shoes. I walked the few blocks from my office to the Avedon studio on East Fifty-eighth Street eager to meet the legend, and I’m not embarrassed to admit that when he charged into the reception area to greet me I felt the electricity.

Over coffee he fired off a volley of personal questions—where had I gone to college, what was I reading, what did I like to eat?—but before I could get two words out he was directing my attention to one of his celebrated portraits of Marilyn Monroe that was propped against a wall. And before I knew it he was telling me how she had reached out to him from a phone booth in Beverly Hills just a couple of days before she “committed sui” because she needed him to know that he was the only photographer she implicitly trusted and that more people complimented her on the pictures he had taken of her than on the pictures—the movies—she’d made. “She confided in me an awful lot,” he said. “She even gave me the phone number she said no one else had.”

At that point the stylist appeared and said, “We’re ready,” and the model, a Swedish beauty, emerged from the dressing room. Avedon approved her hair and makeup, and then back she went, to be dressed. But when she reappeared, she was swathed not in white organdy like the virgin I’d envisioned but embalmed head to toe in rolls of Saran Wrap. He said to me, “Don’t you love this!” I did—I recognized it as something that had never been done before. No surprise there: Avedon was the photographer of so many firsts—the first portrait of the First Family, JFK and Jackie; the first belly button in an American high-fashion mag, Suzy Parker’s; the first bared breasts, Contessa Christina Paolozzi’s; the first ménage à trois; the first fashion-mag cover boy, Steve McQueen; the first haute-couture black beauty, Donyale Luna; the first to shoot outdoors in Paris after the Occupation … So why not, now, the first hypoallergenic mummy?

He led the model onto the set, turned up the music (Ella Fitzgerald), and clicked away. When I presented the image to my client, they didn’t buy it: they wanted something literal. I broke the news to Laura Kanelous, who said, “No reshoot. And Avedon gets paid in full.” This felt like the ending of Dick and Me. It was just the beginning.

THE NEXT TIME I encountered Richard Avedon, I had just married his biggest client. He sent Martin the following telegram: CONGRATULATIONS STOP YOU HAVE JUST WON THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT OF THE YEAR STOP YOU AND YOUR BRIDE ARE EXPECTED AT THE AVEDON STUDIO ON THURSDAY 10 A.M. LOVE DICK. I slipped back into my flowered black voile wedding dress for the occasion. Avedon took one look at me and said, “Oh, it’s you! The Almay girl. The girl with white on the brain. Who I see got married in a black dress. This union is doomed,” he said, laughing.

The celebrity hairdresser Ernie Adler was on hand to do my hair. When he was done, Avedon turned on the big-band music he knew Martin liked, and said to us, “Dance!” I did an arabesque holding on to Martin’s arm (I had once, briefly, been a bunhead—a baby ballerina). He said “Fabulous!” and clicked. It was over so quickly I had post-performance depression. Which lifted the minute he brought out champagne and caviar, crying, “Eat! Drink!” Later that week he sent us a complete album of wedding photographs, ending with a signed formal portrait: the first of the innumerable Avedons we were to own, and the most precious.

IT WOULD BE a couple of years before I saw Avedon again. Martin and I ran into him and his onetime star model Dorian Leigh in 1972 in the lobby of the Paris Ritz, and he insisted that we join them for a drink in the bar. Martin and Dorian were nose to nose, catching up, so Dick turned his attention to me. “I’ve just bought a carriage house way over east on Seventy-fifth Street that I’m going to make into my new studio,” he said. “I’m planning to live there, too. Over the store—like the Goodmans do, above Bergdorf.” I asked him how his wife felt about the move. “I’m running away from home,” he told me. “I’m flying the coop. I’m going to go it alone. Only I haven’t told her yet. What do you think I should say?” I was so startled by his question that I had to take a sip of champagne before answering, “Tell her it’s nothing personal, it’s just about work.” He said, “Oh, that’s good. You’ve saved my life.”

“Dick,” Dorian was elbowing him, “you’ve been ignoring me!” He spun around. “How could I possibly ignore my first Bazaar cover?” he exclaimed. “My first face for Revlon. My Fire and Ice girl, who ‘loves to flirt with fire,’ who ‘dares to skate on thin ice.’ I even forgave her for having once been engaged to Irving Penn.” He turned to Martin: “Did I ever tell you that Dorian and I won first prize in a Charleston contest at the Tavern on the Green when we were kids? Actually, I was twenty-nine and leaving the next morning on my honeymoon with Evelyn. Oh boy,” he said, turning back to Dorian, who was giving him an icy stare and breathing fire, “let’s go—we have a reservation at Véfour.”

No sooner were these avatars of glamour out of earshot than Martin was regaling me with how, once when he had had to put a Revlon shoot on hold because Dorian was outrageously late, Dick had amused himself by compiling a list of all the men he knew for a fact she had slept with. He had gotten up to sixty-two by the time she appeared, and had just finished saying, “She’d go to bed with anything.” Martin sheepishly informed me that he was on the list.

Within the year I heard that Richard Avedon had left his wife. I remember wondering if he had used my line of departure.

NOW, THREE YEARS later, he was back in my life. He was standing in my living room, having just asked me where we—I was pinching myself: he and I—could go to be private.

I led him into the library, where he sank into the couch, put his head in his hands, and broke down. “Forgive me for making an exhibition of myself,” he finally said, “but the single most important person in my life for the past twenty-five years just died.” I had noticed Laura Kanelous’s name in the Times paid obituaries—she had slipped away on Christmas Eve, at only fifty. Everyone in the business had known for a long time that she was deathly ill. “I never saw it coming,” Dick insisted. I mentioned that I had run into her a couple of times at lunch at the Isle of Capri and she was wearing the telltale turban. He said, “Yeah, but I thought it was just a fashion statement—Laura trying to be stylish.” Terminal denial.

Now he was welling up again. “Laura was so funny!” he said. “The week before she died she was carrying on that I owed her a full-length mink. She claimed that schlepping my heavy portfolio all around town to all the art directors in the early days had worn a big bald spot on her dark ranch coat. I went straight to Maximilian the next morning and dropped ten grand. I have the beast hidden in my studio. I can’t face going to work. I’m totally lost without her. I’m probably going to have to close the studio. The last deal she made for me was with a Japanese client who kept going back and forth on the fee. In the end she wore him down. The guy said, ‘Okay, okay. We’ll start shooting December seventh,’ and she quipped, ‘Not this time you won’t!’ That was Laura for you all over. And now it is all over. Where am I ever going to find a mouthpiece like that again?”

I said, “Don’t worry, Dick, you’ll find someone great—they’re going to be lining up around the block to work for you.” He apologized again for “the waterworks,” and downed a third flute of champagne before calling it a night on the last night of the year.

AT TWO IN the morning, Martin and I were in bed rehashing the party when the phone rang. The voice on the other end said, “Did I wake you? It’s Dick. I was so impressed with how you received my flowers tonight—with open arms and then holding them close. That’s my dream of how flowers should be received.” I said, “Are you all right?” He said, “I will be—if you promise to come work with me and never leave.” I said, “Dick, you’ve had too much to drink.”

He said, “I’m serious. Laura got 10 percent of advertising, I’ll give you 15. And I’ll give you a month off every summer, and a month in the winter. We’re going to make a lot of money together and have a lot of fun.” (A year later, he upped my percentage to 25, but I never got even a week off without a fight.) Whenever anyone asked me how I got the job, I left out Dick’s wild middle-of-the-night call, thinking it made the win less “earned,” somehow. But now I want to own it.

AFTER HANGING UP, I rolled over in bed and said to Martin, “You’re never going to believe this …” He said, “Grab it! It’s the perfect job for you. You’re going to really click with Dick.” I protested that I didn’t know enough about the photography business. He reassured me, “If Laura could do it, you can. She knew advertising from the outside in, you know it from the inside out.”

Later that morning Martin methodically laid out the pros and cons for me. He had, after all, been experiencing the ups and downs of working with Richard Avedon for years—they had done fifty Revlon ads together. First of all, he pointed out that if I became Avedon’s agent, studio director, and business manager, he and I would be reversing roles in relation to Dick: he would become “Norma’s husband,” and I would no longer be just “Martin’s wife.”

“He’s overwhelming,” Martin warned me, “but you can handle him. You’re also going to have to be the bad cop with the clients, because nothing is ever too much where Dick is concerned when it’s OPM—other people’s money—he’s spending.” Martin then rattled off a few examples of how extravagant Avedon could be. For the shade ad “Persian Melon,” Dick had a replica of a Persian palace built, which turned out to be too big for the studio Martin was renting, so he had to rent a more palatial one. Another Revlon shade ad had a jazz theme, and Dick had thought nothing of hiring a clarinetist from the New York Philharmonic to show the model how to hold the instrument. Then, for an ad for Revlon’s “Rio!” lipstick campaign, after Martin had approved the booking of a carnival dancer to back up model Janice Dickinson, Dick hired the whole cast of a Broadway show: twenty-four hoofers in full costume. “See this!” Martin gestured toward the bouquet of handmade lilacs in our bedroom that he had recently brought home from a “Lilacs in the Snow” shoot. “There’s a city block full of places where you can get beautiful, realistic-looking artificial flowers, but that’s not Dick’s way—he had to have them custom-made in silk by a French floral couturier. And if you take the job, it’s you who are going to have to make the client understand that this is all part of getting the perfect picture.

“He’s an incredible stickler for perfection,” Martin went on. “Even if he was only doing a head shot and the hands and feet weren’t going to show, he would insist on a manicurist for the nails and toes so the model would feel totally beautiful. You’ll have to watch out—he can get very emotional about his work. One time, when he clashed with the Revlon marketing director over the size of the product shot, he grabbed him by the throat and wrestled him to the floor—which to this day remains that guy’s claim to fame.

“With only a day and a half to go before the deadline for our new lipstick and nail color, ‘Tawny,’ he was reviewing contacts and decided he didn’t like the model’s body, although he loved her face. They both belonged to Candice Bergen, by the way. So how does Dick solve the problem? The next afternoon he’s photographing Jean Shrimpton for another client, and at the end of the session he has her lie down in the ‘Tawny’ position, and then later, in the darkroom, he puts Candy’s head on The Shrimp’s body, like a jigsaw puzzle. And remember the picture he did of Elizabeth Taylor with the diamonds on her back? It wasn’t her back.”

I thought, This is going to be fun! The next morning I gave notice at my ad agency, and a couple of weeks later I went to work for Dick.

HOW MANY PEOPLE can say they were never for a minute bored with their job? For the next thirty years, I had the time of my life managing all aspects of Richard Avedon’s professional life. To the degree that he was married to his work, which was the nth degree, I was his work wife. This meant I had two husbands. Every once in a while my marriages would collide. During my first year with Dick, Martin and I had a standoff: my real-life husband had a certain amount budgeted for my business husband’s Revlon fee, and I wanted double. Martin said, “C’mon, back off—you have to do this for me.” “No,” I said, “it’s Dick I have to do it for.” I got the fee. “I created a monster,” Martin groaned.

From the moment I started working at the studio, I was pulled in two directions—Dick in one, Martin and our son and daughter in the other. No matter which way I went, right or left, I felt guilty. There were no boundaries as to when Dick would call or what he would demand. Martin would answer the phone in the middle of the night, and Dick would growl, “Norma there?” and Martin would answer, sarcastically, “She’s been expecting your call.” Dick worked 24/7 and expected the same of me. When I got in at nine in the morning he would be standing there looking at his watch and going, “Where have you been?” And when I tried to leave at six-thirty to go home to my family, he would say, “Half a day?”

I was earning my keep, believe me. Over time I drove up Dick’s prices to the point where one client felt entitled to call me a pig to my face. I came up with the idea that for select clients Dick should function in the capacity of creative director as well as photographer: he would conceive, conceptualize, copy-write, art-direct, design, cast, and produce TV commercials and print ads, and thereby receive, in addition to his fee for per-print ad shots, 15 percent of the media budget. He would be operating in effect as a one-man ad agency. Among the clients who jumped at the opportunity to have Dick do everything for them were Calvin Klein and Christian Dior. The day the first check cleared as a result of this new arrangement, Dick left this little billet-doux on my desk: “Norma, love and money forever, the two of us!” (Dick was funny about money. There was the time he was mugged, at knifepoint—he had pocketsful of cash and his life was on the line, yet he pulled out a dollar. The guy repaid him with a punch in the eye socket. Never one to waste a photo op, the next morning Dick took a self-portrait-with-shiner.)

Dick and I stuck together through thick and thick. The commissions I received often verged on the torrential—they poured in. And this wasn’t counting the perks: front-row seats, first-class travel, four-star restaurants, five-star hotels, cars and drivers. And clothes—the latest Versaces, Pradas, Calvins, YSLs, Diors, and so forth—all complimentary. Not to mention jewels: one morning I arrived at work to find my desk strewn with emeralds, diamonds, and rubies, all of them neatly scissored out of magazine ads by Dick, who personally pinned each one on my blouse.

During the course of our business marriage—our thirty years in cahoots—Dick never made a move of any consequence without me. I negotiated all his advertising and editorial contracts, plus his portrait commissions; I collaborated on all the presentations to clients; I participated in the final choice of every photograph submitted to magazines and museums; I accompanied him on all his far-flung lecture tours and to all his exhibitions here and abroad; and I had significant input in his groundbreaking books. Dick could be temperamental—to the point of storming off the set when he wasn’t getting his way. It would then be left to me to placate often equally ornery clients, magazine editors, art directors, models, and stars.

Dick and I talked on the telephone the first thing every morning and the last thing every night. He was never not telling a story, but it was usually very late at night or on weekends when all the deep tales of his childhood and adolescence, all the really personal stuff, came spilling out, backward and forward, sideways and upside down, and he would say, “Did you get that?” They were too good not to scribble down occasionally. Some of them, truth to tell, were too good to possibly be true. (Dick would sometimes make merry with the facts—he even joked that if he ever wrote an autobiography he would call it Here Lies Richard Avedon. He said, “There is no truth, no history—there is only the way in which the story is told.”)

In 2004 I was at his side when he left this world. And he expected me to be there beyond. Dick’s Last Will and Testament instructed the directors of the eponymous foundation he was creating to “employ Norma Stevens as its executive administrator and as agent with respect to sales of and licensing of rights in my photographs (in which capacity she is acting during my life and in which capacity I desire her to continue after my death).”

I duly launched the Richard Avedon Foundation, and led it for five productive years, protecting Dick’s work and extending his legacy. I initiated gallery and museum exhibitions (complete with heavy-duty catalogues), including, in 2008, the first Avedon retrospective in France—at Paris’s Jeu de Paume. And I oversaw the execution of five books of Avedon photographs: Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946–2004; Performance; Woman in the Mirror; Portraits of Power; and Avedon Fashion: 1944–2000.

Avedon Fashion, designed by one of Dick’s most talented stalwarts, Yolanda Cuomo, was published in conjunction with the final exhibition that I coordinated as the official keeper of Dick’s flame: the International Center of Photography’s 2009 full-dress survey of his fashion work. It occupied the entire museum and ended up being one of the best-attended shows in ICP’s history. It brought me full circle from the first museum show I’d worked on with Dick: the Metropolitan Museum’s thirty-year retrospective of his fashion work, in 1978.

WRITING ABOUT DICK was something I had never given a thought to, until one day in the mid-eighties when he was sitting in the Eames chair in his living room reading and he began laughing out loud. I asked him what was so funny. He handed me the book—a bestseller called Madame, an irreverent, sharply affectionate chronicle of the life and times of his erstwhile client the colorful cosmetics tycoon Helena Rubinstein, written by her closest associate. “I hope your book will be this much fun,” he said.

“I know what an irresistible subject I am,” he said, laughing. “Let’s face it—you’re going to write about me someday.”

Later, right around the millennium, Dick and I were flying home from Qatar, where he had just completed the most exotic and lucrative private commission of his sixty-year-long career: photographing the private menagerie of endangered species belonging to a movie-star-handsome, art-and-photography-collecting billionaire sheikh. Dick turned to me and said, “This was certainly one for the books. You’re going to put it in yours, I hope.” By this time I knew what he meant, because periodically in the intervening years he would refer to the book he presumed I’d one day be writing, which he was far more sure of than I was. He called up the famous curtain line of Tea and Sympathy, mock-intoning, “Years from now, when you talk about this, and you will, be kind,” quickly adding, “Only, don’t be kind—I don’t want a tribute, I want a portrait, and the best portrait is always the truth. Make me into an Avedon.”

CURTAIN RAISERS

WHEN I JUMPED headlong into the world of Richard Avedon, the master of the fashion-photography universe was up to his eyeballs in eye shadow, eyeliner, mascara, lipstick, blusher, perfume, and just about every other habit-forming product in the United States of Advertising. He was in demand: his ads all “pulled.” My job was to keep it all going, and then some.

While Dick was putting almost everything he had into his commercial work, it wasn’t what he got the most out of (aside from money, needless to say). What nourished him was his portrait work, which drew on the artist in him. The instrument of choice for his portraits was his eight-by-ten mahogany Deardorff view camera mounted on a vintage Majestic tripod. This contraption looked like a cross between the camera that Mathew Brady used during the Civil War and the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001—it was, in other words, the four-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. Dick counted on its intimidatingness to heighten the gravity of the occasion for the sitter. He had switched to it at the end of the sixties when the small handheld Rolleiflex he’d been using for a quarter of a century began to feel like a reflex. Also, you had to look down through its viewfinder, which Dick came to regard as a barrier between him and his subject. “You know—three’s a crowd!” he quipped.

“This dinosaur I don’t even need to stand behind,” he explained, of the Deardorff, which he had had souped up. “I can just stand a couple of inches to the left of the lens and control the shutter with the cable release I’m holding in my hand, and meet my subject eye to eye.” For a lecture Dick would often come onstage dragging the Deardorff behind him. “This is my best friend,” he would tell the audience, and they were indeed, for all practical purposes, joined at the hip.

The meet-greet-and-eat area of the studio served as a platform for Dick and the sitter to get acquainted. He referred to this as “the foreplay,” which wasn’t that much of an exaggeration—Dick could get intimate with anybody in nothing flat. At the far end of the carriage house’s first floor was the set—the cyclorama, or cyc, for short. It consisted of a cove, a curving eggshell-shaped wall painted white (and repainted for each sitting). The floor was white as well—“as white as a Beckett landscape,” Dick maintained, “or a snowstorm.” And the white was flat and without depth and therefore seemingly without end; the space engendered a feeling of spaciness. There were no props, no trappings, in sight—the sitters were isolated in the cyc and could thereby “become symbolic of themselves.” Dick’s oft-stated aim was to use what he called “the emotional topography” of the face to expose and explode the façade. “The portrait photograph is Avedon’s naked stage, his blasted heath,” Salman Rushdie, whose portrait Dick took twice, once wrote.

Richard Avedon called the shots: as far as he was concerned, there were only two things involved in any sitting—manipulation and submission. (He had confessed to the photographer Walker Evans in 1969, in the hope of securing a sitting, that “much of my past work has been manipulative, in a way that would make me reluctant to pose for me.”) What’s more, Dick believed that he was manipulating his sitters in order to express himself. “I key right into them, try to get them to donate themselves to my own feelings and ideas, and then I squeeze them out,” he declared—small wonder he was taken to task for leaving his figurative fingerprints all over their faces. He felt he could will what he wanted to see, which was, more often than not, what the subject wanted to hide—it was literally a command performance on Dick’s part. “A sitting can become a kind of duel,” Dick admitted—to which one critic retorted, “Avedon is supremely seductive and few are inclined to turn down his invitation to a beheading.” Though I witnessed the process times beyond number, all I can say is there was a lot more to it than met the eye. It was witchery, black-and-white magic—the art that concealed art.

I hadn’t been working at the studio more than a few weeks when Dick walked into my office, closing the door behind him. All this commercial work he was getting was great, he said, but it was also serving to confirm the jaundiced view the art world had of him. He told me that there was a proposal for an Avedon fashion retrospective being floated in the sacrosanct precincts of America’s grandest temple of art, the Metropolitan Museum, but that things were moving at the molasses pace of bureaucracy: at museum speed, which didn’t register on his odometer. He said, “The Met’s never going to give me a show.” To which, quick on the uptake, I replied, “Not so fast!”

DICK HADN’T HAD much of a history in terms of museums. His first exhibition, however, had been held in a place that was American history incarnate—the Smithsonian Institution. In 1962 he had called them cold to say that he was considering donating some of his early negatives and prints. The upshot of that short conversation was a mini fashion-and-portraits retrospective that November. Dick had bristled when he learned they wanted to put him in what he characterized as “a ghetto”—their photography gallery. “I explained to them that I considered myself an artist—an artist who happened to work in the medium of photography—and that I didn’t want my pictures treated like stepkids.” They told him he could take it or leave it.

To help with the show, Dick recruited Marvin Israel, a graphic designer and a painter of original vision, whose judgment he trusted and often deferred to. Marvin came from a similar background—his father owned a chain of women’s specialty shops. He was scruffy, grouchy, short-fused, and combustible—he once kicked one of his female students at the Parsons School of Design in the shin. Some of Marvin’s paintings were of aggressive dogs, and some of them he described as self-portraits. Dick wittily said of him that “he refused to rub life the right way.” At the time of the Smithsonian, Marvin was the newly installed art director of the magazine with which Dick’s name had been synonymous since the mid-forties—Harper’s Bazaar. When he was fired the next year, after a mere twenty issues, Dick graciously commented, “Marvin found the pressure of commercialism emasculating.” But by the time I arrived on the scene, they were no longer speaking. In fact, one of the first things Dick said to me was, “If somebody by the name of Marvin Israel calls, hang up.”

Marvin had leapt at the chance to work with Dick on the show. “He was a genius at taking bits and pieces with seemingly no connection and making them look like they were meant for each other,” Dick explained to me. “He came up with a new way for the viewer to experience a photography exhibition—more like magazine pages.” Marvin’s inspiration was Dick’s own studio wall. The museum was expecting cohesion, but what they got looked more like chaos: a patchwork of photographs interspersed with archival material such as notes to and from sitters, ad-page proofs, Photostats, contact sheets complete with instructions for retouching and marks for cropping, and even an engraver’s plate. The Smithsonian craftily promoted the show as a “100-foot-long collage … a panoramic composite.”

Two of Marvin’s innovations were no-nos: no identification labels on the photographs, and no frames on many of them (they were to be simply tacked up at the top and left to hang loose). Several were blown up to an unprecedented size—“to have the impact of Easter Island statues,” no less. Visitors to the exhibition were for the most part taken aback, and the reviews were not even few and far between. The sole mention the show received was in Betty Beale’s gossip column “Exclusively Yours” in the Washington Evening Star. She groused that “unless you recognized them you would not know that two of the beautiful women photographed were out-of-town guests at private dinner dances in the White House last year: Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia and Mrs. Gianni Agnelli, wife of the Fiat tycoon. You also wouldn’t know that the beauteous young woman who was photographed standing full-faced and nude from the hips up is Countess Christina Paolozzi of Italy.” As Dick and Marvin saw it, ignorance was bliss.

Dick would have to wait until 1965 for his next show. The venue was admittedly a bit of a comedown from the toplofty Smithsonian: the halls of an ad agency—McCann-Erickson, of future Mad Men fame. The installation, once again, amounted to an oxymoron: controlled chaos. The material was mainly Dick’s commercial stuff: page proofs, layouts, tear sheets, contact sheets, and blowups tacked up on or propped against the walls. The opening was wall-to-wall, too—“more like a happening,” Dick recalled. At the end of the evening, various items were missing, and the agency hired a couple of security guards for the duration. This time Dick had a hit on his hands—the critic for Popular Photography gushed that it was “the most spectacular photographic show ever,” adding presciently, “This explosive talent called Avedon will have long-range effects on all men who think seriously about hanging pictures on walls.”

Five years later Dick would actually have the most spectacular photography show ever—the largest yet devoted to the work of a single photographer by any American museum. Ted Hartwell, the founding curator of photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, was the first in the photography-curator fraternity to recognize that Richard Avedon was far more than just a fashion photographer, and he was prepared to deploy the better part of his museum to make his case. The press release heralding the exhibition described Dick as “a photographer previously known primarily for his fashion photography.” (Previously? For the rest of his natural life Dick would go on being primarily described as primarily a fashion photographer, and the headline of his front-page obituary in The New York Times would read “RICHARD AVEDON, THE EYE OF FASHION, DIES AT 81.”) At the outset Dick stipulated that the show not include a single fashion picture. “Even one would confuse the issue,” he insisted. “Fashion is the f word, the dirtiest word in the eyes of the art world.”

Again he collaborated with Marvin on the show, and the fur flew. In the week leading up to the opening people saw Marvin literally pushing Richard Avedon around—possibly to show off in front of his girlfriend, Diane Arbus, who was in Minneapolis to lend a helping hand. Dick recalled that Diane was out of sorts, having recently discovered that Marvin was also involved with Doon, her older daughter, who had just gone to work for Dick (something Diane also deeply resented). Why did Dick, of all take-charge people, put up with Marvin’s take-no-prisoners behavior? “I needed him,” he explained. It was Marvin who suggested the silver palette for the Masonite walls and the silver-foil coating for the catalogue. Together with Dick he created a sense of momentum, even of suspense, for the show; there was no way for the viewer to anticipate what kind of thing he might be seeing next, whether a mummy from the Capuchin catacombs of Palermo or a Manhattan City Hall wedding.

The approximately 250 portraits—taken in Dick’s by then signature style, with the subject isolated against the background of stark-white seamless paper, facing into the lens for a head-on view—represented a cross section of his portrait work since 1947. Most of them already occupied a place in the visual vocabulary of the magazine-reading public.

Among the literary leading lights on view in Minneapolis were Dick’s friend Truman Capote (they had collaborated on the landmark 1959 book Observations), his high-school classmate James Baldwin (they had collaborated on the divisive 1964 book Nothing Personal), Noël Coward, Dorothy Parker, Somerset Maugham, Isak Dinesen, two wordsmiths named Miller (Arthur and Henry), one Mailer, E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound, taken the day after the poet’s release from a psychiatric hospital and showing him in three-quarter-length view with eyes squeezed shut and mouth pried open—a work that Dick justifiably felt rivaled the great nineteenth-century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait of Thomas Carlyle.

Artists in the exhibition included Giacometti, de Kooning, Braque, Chagall, Duchamp, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Picasso (his son Claude had been one of Dick’s studio assistants); performing artists numbered Charlie Chaplin, Judy Garland, Bogart, Nureyev, Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, Charles Laughton, Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Durante, Bert Lahr, Ethel Merman, Arthur Rubinstein, Van Cliburn, Ringo Starr, Maurice Chevalier, and Igor Stravinsky; and political figures were represented by Adlai Stevenson, Adam Clayton Powell, Malcolm X, George Wallace, and Billy Graham (the latter two were pointedly hung next to each other).

At the eleventh hour Dick decided to exhibit his portraits of the antiwar activists known as the Chicago Seven, which he had taken in his suite at the Hilton in September 1969, the day after their conspiracy trial began—they were ultimately convicted of crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot and of delivering inflammatory speeches. “They’re heroes,” Dick declared, “and they need to be seen, and seen as such, now.” He had the individual photographs blown up huge, and the group portrait enlarged to mural-size. The pictures may have looked like mugshots, but they felt tectonic. Marvin knew at a glance that the only place to display them was the corner gallery—the last stop in the show.

The room he designed had a black entrance curtain, black carpeting, a black bench, and skylights blacked out—amounting to, in Marvin’s words, “installation as social commentary.” Dick had the photographs individually lit. It was also his idea to have, in place of music, speakers on the ceiling broadcasting a tape of choice incendiary remarks that the Seven had made during interviews with Doon Arbus, such as Abbie Hoffman’s incendiary “Living in America I expect to get killed.” Such recriminations were sure to be music to the ears of the counterculturists whom Dick and Marvin were counting on to show up in force and occupy the room at the July 2, 1970, opening. Dick and Marvin went to exceptional lengths to pack the house with the most anti-establishment characters they could find: night after night they drove up and down the mean streets of conservative Minneapolis dispensing invitations through the window to anybody objectionable-looking enough to offend, if not appall, the museum board.

An unholy number of hippies turned up in fringes, beads, sandals, and headbands, some of the boys barefoot and bare-chested. In the words of curator Hartwell, “The trustees thought the revolution had caught up with them.” Many of them had loosened up enough by the end of the long evening to join in when Sweet Mama, the fiery, redheaded singer Dick had hired, belted out “God Bless America,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and “America the Beautiful”—in, let’s not forget, the Chicago Seven gallery. This was all a radical departure for any museum in 1970, let alone one in the Midwest.

And speaking of sweet mamas, Dick’s very own, Anna Polonsky Avedon, was there, singing along, while his antisocial wife, Evelyn, stylishly outfitted in a cream-colored white cotton dress, didn’t utter a peep. Dick was also attended by two other Harper’s Bazaar art directors—Marvin’s immediate predecessor, Henry Wolf, and one of his two successors, Ruth Ansel.

Post-opening, Dick and Marvin hosted a poolside party at the suburban motel they were staying in. Upon arrival each guest was handed a favor in the form of a stick mask of Dick’s face fashioned from Dick’s passport photograph by his studio manager, Gideon Lewin, who later took an eerily apt photograph of Dick himself wearing his mask. The bash soon got out of hand—Dick would later refer to it as “the swimming pool riot.” Hordes of unwashed hippies stripped down and propelled themselves off the diving board. Then Dick jumped in, fully clothed, risking his Cartier watch and patent leather shoes. Having failed in his attempt to drag Marvin in, the minute he got out, dripping wet, he ran over and drenched him. The high spirits turned out to be justified—the Minneapolis notices were ecstatic.

Back in New York, Dick learned that a New York Times review would run on July 26. Anticipating another rave, he grabbed a cab to the Times building on West Forty-third Street around midnight when the first copies of the paper went on sale in the lobby. With the first words of the review, Dick realized that he had made a fatal mistake in neglecting to invite the Times photography critic, Gene Thornton, whom he had spotted in the opening-night crowd at the museum, to the pool party:

The first thing you see … is a larger-than-life-size picture of two hairy men locked in a loving embrace and gazing down the length of three galleries toward the entrance where you stand … They are naked as frogs, and unlike Adam and Eve they feel no shame at their nakedness … I found it hard to go right up and look at [the picture] … At one point during the opening, so many people were standing with their backs to it that it was almost invisible from halfway across the room. The reason for all this embarrassment was not just the subject matter, though of course that helped. It was also the failure of the photographer to connect with any ordinary human feelings. The picture challenged us to accept and understand the love that only a few years ago dared not speak its name, but it gave us no sense of what that love was like, and how it resembled more familiar kinds. It dared us not to accept it, but gave us no reason why we should.

The same lack of interest in what human beings are really like characterized most of the pictures in the exhibit … In spite of their lack of humanity they made a splendid theatrical spectacle.

The hirsute men in question were, famously, Allen Ginsberg and his longtime lover Peter Orlovsky, and Ginsberg had written Dick to express his admiration and gratitude for the image—in his own estimation, it was no less than “a photo of humane art.” In Dick’s 1993 picture book, An Autobiography, he would wickedly juxtapose this photograph with his portrait of Henry Kissinger—who had pleaded before the shutter clicked, “Be kind to me”—after having overheard him utter the word faggots at a Washington dinner party.

Thornton went on to sum up the portraits that filled five of the six galleries as “ugly,” saving his most savage epithet for the central gallery, where Dick had placed what he considered his strongest work—“the Chamber of Horrors,” he labeled it. (He later conclusively dismissed Richard Avedon as “a brilliantly gifted fashion photographer, an immensely successful advertising artist, and a first-rate glamour portraitist of famous ladies.”) As Dick stood in the Times lobby, reeling, he promised himself he would never say yes to another show.

FOR ALL HIS protestations, four years later, in 1974, when he was offered his first museum show in New York—an astonishingly late milestone for a by then fifty-year-old major photographer—he said yes in a New York second. It was to consist solely of the photographs he had been taking, over the previous seven years, of his father, with whom he had had what he once described to me as “a lifelong adversarial.”

In the wake of Jacob Israel Avedon’s death the year before, Dick had enlarged well over a hundred out of the thousands of exposures he had made and pinned them floor-to-ceiling on the white-painted beaverboard walls of his studio. “I made my own private wailing wall,” he said. “The pictures added up to a truthful portrait of our relationship—the truth of love, the truth of hate, the truth of truth, the truth of lies.”

Hearing that the head of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, John Szarkowski, no great fan of Dick’s work (“Avedon has a very keen eye for the discovery of those objects that conform to his intuition of what the world is like,” he had stated), had just lost his father, Dick realized that this would be an opportune time to have him look at the work. “He was visibly moved by what he saw,” Dick told me. “He said, ‘I’ve got to do this—it will make the perfect small show,’ and he put it on the books for that May.” Szarkowski even agreed to let Dick and Marvin design the installation.

Marvin began working on the plans in his messy studio in an octagonal cupola of a Beaux-Arts building on lower Fifth Avenue. He had the idea to build a twenty-foot-square chapel-like chamber off the museum lobby for the eight portraits that he and Dick had whittled the show down to—the biggest of them to be blown up to the size of a large-scale Abstract Expressionist painting. As in Minneapolis, the photographs were left unframed and unmounted, tacked from their top corners to the walls so they would hang like tapestries.

Dick titled the show simply “Jacob Israel Avedon” and had the silk-screened wall text reflect only the bare facts of his father’s chronology, womb to tomb. When it came to the time line of the photographs, however, the chronology was “something you can always move around,” as Marvin put it. The image of Dick’s father looking hale and even debonair was a shoo-in to go first (it was shot well before Jacob Avedon was ravaged by cancer), but when it came to selecting the show’s terminal portrait, Marvin persuaded Dick that it didn’t have to be from the final sitting. Together they picked an earlier portrait—“one where the face looks the most like an actual death mask and my father looks like a mummy.” Dick told me that when his mother, who had been abandoned by her husband in the early 1950s, saw this photograph for the first time, at the MoMA preview, she said to him, “You made him look too good.”

That night Dick lay awake anxiously anticipating the critical reaction and nervous about the television interview the museum had arranged for the next morning. At around two a.m. he experienced severe chest pains. He managed to get himself to the emergency room at New York Hospital. The diagnosis was pericarditis—an inflammation of the lining of the heart, which Dick never tired of describing as the perfect metaphor for the relationship he had had with his father. A few days later, as he was resting in a private room, one of his assistants dropped off the Arts and Leisure section of the Times containing a review of the exhibition, poisonously penned by the Thornton in his side.

Once again the critic lit into Dick with a vengeance, finding no “real penetration of the subject matter” and equating the pictures—taken in what he described as “Avedon’s ugly, distressing style”—with Dick’s celebrity portraits. The last line of the review drew Jewish blood: “The average conventional viewer (whose voice I try to be) is bound to ask what kind of son it could be who would take such pictures of his dying father, yet.” A year later, when I went to work for Dick, he was still fuming about it: “That anti-Semitic bastard! Putting the comma before the yet to get the idea of the Yiddish accent across.”

Dick called his friend the writer Renata Adler for advice and sympathy. She told him to take a match to the review. He took her at her word—loopy as he was from his heart medication, he found the strength to stagger down the hallway to the nurses’ station to pinch a pack of matches. He then draped the entire Arts and Leisure section over the open toilet in his bathroom and fired away. The flames did more than he had bargained for—they quickly enveloped the plastic seat, charring it, cracking it in places, and leaving scorch marks on the wall. Unbelievably, he claimed to the hospital authorities that he had no idea how the fire started.