Avedon by Norma Stevens

Author:Norma Stevens [Aronson, Steven M. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

DICK PRIMPING SOPHIA LOREN.

Jim Morrison came in. But for Hiro, not Dick. He started coming on to me, doing his creepy Doors thing. I wasn’t responding—I was just trying to get him upstairs to the sitting. Afterward, Dick said, “Never just send somebody like that up—always introduce them to me first.” So then a little later, when those albino brothers Johnny Winter and Edgar came in, also for Hiro, and they started playing and stuff, and Paul Simon dropped by, I went running to find Dick.

Another time, Janis Joplin came in. For Dick. I remember her sitting on the big tufted black couch drinking Southern Comfort. To get her in front of his camera, he had to play her version of “Summertime.” That got her going—she sang along.

One weekend, fairly early on, I went to an art fair on Eighth Street and I saw Dick standing there alone, maybe waiting for somebody, maybe not, and I suddenly wondered if he was lonely. It had never occurred to me until that moment that Richard Avedon could be lonely.

I only really messed up once. I sent the psychedelic solarized prints of the Beatles to England by regular mail, and I had to tell Laura Kanelous that they hadn’t yet gotten there. She had just finished making her calls and was reaching for Dick’s portfolio to take on the road—that is, on the avenue. She said, “You did what?” in a way that the blood drained out of my body. When I heard they’d arrived, it was like a transfusion.

Four or five years after I left Dick to work full-time for Hiro, I got an invitation to a party for Laura that was being given by her husband. I guess it was a case of me not reading the invitation carefully enough due to being so excited about going to an affair at the St. Regis and getting to see Laura and Dick again—what it was was Laura’s memorial service.

I always accompanied Hiro to the collections, and one of the things he had me do was send flowers to the French editors. I would go into the Madeleine and pick out these gorgeous bouquets. I had always been flower-crazy, and later on I started a business in Manhattan called the Window Box, which grew to terraces and gardens. At some point Dick hired me to do a party for my old typing student Johnny. I used garden flowers, and weed kind of things, grasses, nothing floristy, and Dick loved it. In 1990 he asked me to do Johnny’s wedding to the daughter of Senator Moynihan. It was at Dick’s place in Montauk, so naturally I did it very Montauky, with rocks from the beach and wild roses.

After that, Dick hired me to take care of his terrace in town—he said he wanted it to look overgrown and gemütlich, as if the wind had just blown it all in. Whenever he called about something, I stopped the presses, even though he was far from my most famous client—I mean, I had Barbra Streisand and Madonna.

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