This text will be in Part I of the finished book.
It was in the Summer of 1955. I was not quite 21 yet, but have now advanced to become second assistant to Richard Avedon. Although I had not yet handled a really major job by myself, somehow Dick decided to take me along on this assignment with no other help. Why I don’t know, as I nearly screwed up royally.
The job was a dream for all concerned. We were to travel to San Francisco, spend almost a week there taking exactly one photo, then meet with the movie director Stanley Donen and travel with him to the Hearst Castle at San Simeon where they would discuss making a musical loosely (very loosely) based on Avedon’s photo career. My role was to drive, to keep the client away from the boss, and to do the technical work of making it all happen.
I flew out before them, carrying a monster 8x10 camera, film, lights, stands, and other stuff. This was before jets, and the only flight I could get was to Burbank on a DC-7, then the latest airliner in service. Along the way, just before the crack of dawn and flying over either Nevada or New Mexico, I was startled by a blinding flash of greater intensity than I had ever known. For a moment I thought that the sun had exploded, but then the pilot announced that we had just witnessed an atomic bomb test. Wow! From Burbank I took a bus to Los Angeles International and another piston plane to San Francisco.
Checking in at the Fairmont Hotel, I just dumped everything in the room without checking it first. Big mistake.
The next few days were spent acclimating ourselves to the city by riding cable cars and eating at places like the Blue Fox. Every night I entertained the client by being his drinking companion at pubs all over town. The whole lot of us even hit the original Trader Vic’s in nearby Oakland, devouring Mai Tais and the Tiki culture. After that experience, Dick always wanted to dine at the local Trader Vics if there was one.
Finally, the day for shooting. The assignment was for a photo of Dave Brubeck and his quartet with model Suzy Parker for a joint promotion by Helena Rubinstein cosmetics and Columbia Records. His new LP record, Jazz Red Hot — and Cool, was given away with a purchase of both the lipstick and nail polish of the same name. It was shot at the hungry i, a hip nightclub, and depicted Suzy in a red gown, smoking and leaning over an open piano while Brubeck looks at her while playing. The ad appeared, among other places, on page 23 of the November 1955 issue of Harper's Bazaar.
Now about that monumental screwup. Being young and stupid, I neglected to check the equipment and just left it in the hotel room. The only preparation I did was to load the 8x10 film holders in a darkened closet. When I arrived at the hungry i a few hours before the rest, I began setting up and noticed that the rear of the huge camera was smashed in. In near panic, I checked the Yellow Pages for a camera repair place, hurried to it, and pleaded with the guy to do it immediately. He took pity on me, and I was back at the club with everything ready — and no one was the wiser.
(Suzy Parker, Dave Brubeck, Avedon, photo above)
Photography took place that afternoon, using the hastily-repaired 8x10 Deardorff camera with what was probably a 12” Goerz-Dagor lens, mounted on a Majestic tripod. The film was Ektachrome Type B, and the lighting was by a single Saltzman 1,500-watt flood lamp balanced at 3,200° Kelvin plus ambient room lights. I determined the exposure with a Norwood Director meter. The resultant photo was used as both the cosmetic ad and the album cover.
Next on the agenda was the movie. Paramount Pictures wanted to do a musical inspired by Avedon’s career, to star Audrey Hepburn as a model and Fred Astaire as the fashion photographer, called Dick Avery in the film. Stanley Donen was to direct Funny Face, as it was called, but there were details to work out first. Since Avedon was closely associated with the Hearst Corporation, he wangled an invitation to use the Hearst Castle at San Simeon for the conference on the pretext of making a photographic record of the estate for posterity. We actually took some photos of the buildings, which was totally not his thing. Nine of these appeared in the July, 1955 issue of Harper's Bazaar, a Hearst publication. William Randolph Hearst was already dead, and the family only occasionally used the place, and later gave it to the State of California for use as a tourist attraction.
I drove the whole party, Avedon and his wife Evie plus Donen and his wife, all crowded into a rented convertible, along the coastal road with a detour through the Monterey Peninsula. A sidetrip was made down the famous 17-Mile Drive through Pebble Beach, with a stop at the landmark Lone Cypress, where Dick took a few pictures of me — which I still treasure (contact strip, left). We had lunch in the artsy village of Carmel, then continued on Route 1 past Point Lobos and Big Sur for about 70 miles or so to San Simeon.
Once off the public road we came to the fenced-in estate, with a gate (photo, right) bearing a sign that read “DANGER – WILD ANIMALS – UNSAFE FOR PEDESTRIANS.” One of our party opened the barrier while I drove through; then we began the long climb up to the castle that was hardly visible in the distance. As we approached, Dick commented on the many, many statues surrounding the main buildings by referring to them as “alabaster asses,” quoting what I think was a passage from Huxley’s 1939 novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan — which was a thinly-veiled attack on Hearst and is regarded as the inspiration for Orson Welles’ infamous movie.
(Me, Avedon, Evelyn, photo above)
The estate, about the size of an entire county at some 2,500 square miles, looked like a scene right out of Citizen Kane. This 1941 film by Welles was, of course, all about Hearst, who threatened to either sue or pay the studio to destroy all existing prints of it. In fact, it went largely unseen until the late 1950s. Stanley Donen was extremely curious about the film and thought that there might, perversely, be a copy in the castle’s movie theater. So we snuck into the projection booth and searched but, alas, no such luck. Neither did we find the charred remains of “Rosebud.”
(Avedon, me, Mrs. Donen, photo above)
The main building is a copy of a 16th-century Spanish cathedral, with a confessional booth that was actually an elevator to the upstairs living quarters. We had fun riding this as we ascended to inspect Hearst’s private rooms. An ancient Roman temple brought over from Italy faces the gigantic outdoor swimming pool, while the indoor one was modeled after classic Roman baths and is lined with gold tiles. In the estate’s heyday a steady stream of guests arrived by private railroad or by air at the estate’s own airfield, occupying the 56 bedrooms and busying themselves with a vast choice of activities. In the evening they were expected to dress formally for dinner with Hearst himself.
Funny Face got made the next year, and was released in 1957. While I was away in Army Basic Training I received a letter from the studio inviting me to a private screening in New York, but the only way I could do that was to go AWOL, so I declined. I finally saw it on TV a few years later, and now have it on DVD. An entertaining flick, but any resemblance between the story and the real events was, as they say, purely coincidental.
From San Simeon I drove them to Bel Air, then stayed a short while in Beverly Hills during which time I got stopped by the local police for walking down a sidewalk, a very suspicious activity in a land completely dominated by automobiles. They probably thought I was casing the place, or was too poor to own a car. But I was well dressed and had proper ID, so they let me go. The next day I returned to New York on another DC-7.
The only other great location job before my military service was for almost a week in Jamaica, during which time we did exactly one photo, again an ad for Helena Rubinstein Cosmetics. Our group included Avedon, the model, the Art Director and his wife, and myself. We all flew down on an AVIANCA Constellation, where we had a private first-class cabin set off from the rest of the plane and played Scrabble all the way to Montego Bay.
Our base was at Round Hill, begun in 1953 as a private community of stars and shakers in the entertainment world such as Noel Coward, Adele Astaire, Oscar Hammerstein, and the like. Now one of the world’s premier resorts, Round Hill occupies a 100-acre peninsula jutting out into the Caribbean that was once a sugar-and-coconut plantation. This was a perfect vacation spot for celebrities, a place where they could be with friends, have privacy, and totally avoid gawking, autograph-happy tourists. Its cottages are still privately owned, but rented out when the owners are not in residence. Since this was in an off-season and the place was not crowded, we each had our own cottage overlooking Montego Bay. There is also a small, Colonial-style hotel, a restaurant, and other resort amenities.
The “cottage” that we used as a photo location belonged to William Paley, the founder and CEO of CBS. He was a friend of the boss. Photography was done with the same 8x10 Deardorff camera and lens that we had used in San Francisco, but this time there were no lights to drag along. When finished, Avedon stayed on vacation and I was to go to New York with the film. On the last night we had dinner with the British Governor of Jamaica (still a colony at the time), who offered to pick me up in the morning for the drive to the airport as he was also flying. So I flew with His Excellency, first to Cuba (pre-Castro) and then to Miami, from which I got a flight to New York.
Photos from California were taken by Stanley Donen except the contact strip was by Avedon, those in Jamaica were by me.
Copyright © 2009 Earl Steinbicker.
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