Focus by Michael Gross

Author:Michael Gross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

In December 1970, Richard Avedon moved his studio one last time, to a house on East Seventy-Fifth Street between First and York Avenues he bought from Reid Miles, a photographer and graphic designer best known for modernist LP record jackets for Blue Note, the jazz label. Miles had built a ground-floor studio in the house. “It was a photographer’s place,” says Avedon’s studio manager, Gideon Lewin, who loved its curved cyclorama wall that obviated the need for seamless paper backdrops. Avedon could paint it any color he wanted. Lewin added a basement darkroom and upstairs, living quarters.

Says Lewin, “He decided to simplify his life completely and live like a Spartan. He wanted to just be creative and do his work without interference.” Lewin had a policy not to pry into his boss’s private life and says, “Something was happening, but I didn’t know what. I built him a platform bed upstairs. A short time later, he showed up with suitcases.”

The troubled marriage of Dick and Evie had come to an end. She would henceforth live alone in an apartment Dick had recently bought at 870 United Nations Plaza, one of twin modernist towers just north of the United Nations, the last great luxury cooperative apartment houses built in Manhattan, and later home to both Si Newhouse and Alexander Liberman.

The Avedons would never divorce, but would never live together again. “They see each other often,” the former fashion editor D. D. Ryan would say in the nineties. “He’s looked after her. They go to the theater. He’s involved with the romance of photography, the romance of friendship. After seventy years of therapy, he sees it all very clearly.”

Avedon’s professional colleagues felt certain he never had another sexual relationship in his lifetime, though he had close relationships with several women and there was a certain curiosity about them. The novelist and essayist Renata Adler, whom Avedon photographed in 1969, was the first. Another was Doon Arbus—one of the two daughters of Diane’s—who was Avedon’s longtime in-house copywriter and editor. Years later, he was also said to be involved—somehow—with Nicole Wisniak, a Parisian married to a French magazine editor, who became a fixture on the city’s artistic-social scene in the early 1970s. She started publishing Egoïste, her own magazine, funded by her parents, in 1977, met Avedon when she interviewed him in 1984, and collaborated with him for twenty years.

The back-to-back moves into United Nations Plaza and the new studio were followed by the fifty-year-old Avedon’s collapse and hospitalization in spring 1974. He blamed it on pericarditis, a minor heart condition that can feel like a heart attack. “I got a call,” says Gideon Lewin, “he’d had an emergency and he was hospitalized.” He wasn’t a good patient. “He would not stay in the hospital. He left before he was supposed to.”I But he was hobbled, he later said, and unable to work for nearly a year.

Avedon had reached a moment of truth. “Something serious happened to me,” he said in previously unpublished portions of an interview he gave in 1992.

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