Empresses of Seventh Avenue by Nancy MacDonell

Author:Nancy MacDonell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

8

The American Look

Diana Vreeland and Louise Dahl-Wolfe

I was always fascinated by the absurdities and the luxuries and the snobbism of the world that fashion magazines showed … I was always of that world, at least in my imagination.

—DIANA VREELAND1

I believe that the camera is a medium of light, that one actually paints with light.

—LOUISE DAHL-WOLFE2

The girl on the cover of the March 1943 issue of Harper’s Bazaar had “a bit of the panther about her,” thought Nancy “Slim” Hawks. Her gaze was direct, just this side of insolent, suggesting she would direct a saucy comment at you while you lit her cigarette or mixed her a drink. She was dressed in a tiny white skullcap-style hat, a white blouse, and a navy blue suit, the collar of which flared out behind her tawny blond head and called attention to her hooded eyes. Behind her was a windowed door lettered with the words “American Red Cross Blood Donor Service”; a woman in a nurse’s uniform was visible through the glass. It was a nod to both the urgent need to stock blood banks and the new roles women had assumed since the United States had declared war on Japan and Germany. Bazaar’s art director, the legendary Alexey Brodovitch, had been unsure about this cover. The model, he thought, looked too “decadent” to be associated with the Red Cross.3 But it’s this loucheness, offset by the tailored clothes and patriotic theme, that produced the arresting image that caught Slim’s attention.

The model, she said, “was certainly my taste in beauty. Scrubbed clean, healthy, shining, and golden.”4 She showed the magazine to her husband, the director Howard Hawks, and suggested that this was the leading lady he had been looking for. Hawks had the girl fly out to California and gave her a screen test. She made her film debut the following year, at nineteen, opposite the much older and more famous actor she would soon marry. By the time the film, To Have and Have Not, loosely based on the Hemingway novel of the same name, was released in October 1944, Betty Bacal, née Betty Joan Perske, had become Lauren Bacall.

In the film, Bacall’s character is known as Slim. She wears clothes copied from Slim Hawks’s wardrobe and speaks dialogue that she fed to her husband, including the memorable line “You know how to whistle, don’t you? Just put your lips together and blow.” Bacall’s on-screen persona—smart, independent, quick with a comeback, and elegantly but never fussily dressed—was one that Slim Hawks had earlier perfected. Her archetypically American style, a mix of sophistication and freshness, had already caught the eye of the editors of Harper’s Bazaar. Carmel Snow was so impressed with Slim, who is often called the first California Girl, that she offered her the job of West Coast editor. Slim turned it down when she discovered she was pregnant, so the magazine had to be content with photographing her instead.5 She appeared in Bazaar’s pages in a mitered striped suit by

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