Burke’s lushly illustrated biography of the iconic Vogue model turned World War II photojournalist has been winning excellent reviews and wide media attention ever since its publication in 2005 by Alfred Knopf (US) and Bloomsbury (UK).
Lee Miller: A Life, featured in the New York Times daily and Sunday review sections, was named a New York Times “Editors’ Choice” and one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year. It was also nominated for the 2005 Biography Award by the National Book Critics Circle. Lee Miller will be published in French translation by Autrement in 2007, the centenary of Miller’s birth.
Burke has given talks on Miller at a variety of venues in the US, France, and Australia, including the National Arts Club, the Metropolitan Club, New York University’s Maison Française, Princeton University, University of New South Wales, and Sydney University.
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“Carolyn Burke has given us a richly detailed, excellently written, and critically observed
account of this life — one that deserves a superb biography and has gotten it.”
Fall 2006
Beauty and Artiste
by Samuel McCracken
Lee Miller: A Life by Carolyn Burke (Knopf, 428 pages, $35)
Like Walt Whitman, Lee Miller contained multitudes. A longtime nude model for her amateur-photographer father, she was as a teen the toast of New York fashion photographers. Settling in Paris, she became the pupil, lover, and partner of surrealist photographer Man Ray. She opened her own studios in Paris and New York before marrying an Egyptian businessman and retiring briefly to the amateur ranks. Traveling the Egyptian desert she made many of her most riveting surrealist images. In World War II, she became, along with Margaret Bourke-White, one of the two credentialed women combat photographers and the only one representing a fashion magazine (Vogue). She accompanied her photographs with prose of distinction and would have had an honorable place as a war correspondent had she never trained a camera on war. In her later years in Sussex, she photographed less and less, but found time to become a sort of surrealist Julia Child and an alcoholic. And, oh yes, she was astonishingly beautiful.
Miller was an artist of merit with a life perhaps more interesting than her art. Carolyn Burke has given us a richly detailed, excellently written, and critically observed account of this life — one that deserves a superb biography and has gotten it.
Elizabeth Miller (she did not become “Lee” until she was 20) was born in 1907 to an upper-middle-class family in Poughkeepsie. Her father was the CEO of the American branch of a Swedish-based producer of cream separators. The Millers can be precisely located by saying that in a small city they were among the members of the country-club consuming class.
On a visit to Brooklyn, the seven-year-old Elizabeth appears to have been raped by a friend of her hosts. The incident is still obscure, but her twelve years of frequently painful treatment for gonorrhea are amply documented. She was a fractious child and adolescent. Today almost any eccentricity can be laid to rape at seven; years of posing in the altogether for Daddy’s stereoscopic camera would ice the cake. Burke treats the latter influence judiciously. She sees the oddness of the thing, but notes without a snigger that there is no evidence of any sexual contact between father and daughter. Theodore Miller may well have been the Lewis Carroll of Poughkeepsie: it does not seem that any of the Reverend Mr. Dodgson’s child models suffered from the experience.
Miller’s education could be called turbulent. She was thrown out of a number of schools before enrolling in the great open university of New York City. Discovered on the sidewalk by Condé Nast, she became the vogue of Vogue and studied to become an artist.
She appeared in front of the camera just when photographers as well as their models were beginning to attain celebrity. Arriving in Paris in 1929, Miller made a rendezvous not only with Man Ray but with her artistic destiny. She quickly moved behind the camera, in a milieu where the photographer was gaining acceptance as an artist rather than a purveyor of ersatz substituting for “real” art. In their studios, Miller and Ray worked with barely mobile devices recording images on sheet film or glass plates. When they went out to photograph in the streets of Paris, they used the simple folding cameras of the day.
Readers might want to know what cameras she took with her on the journey, though Burke points out that Ray thought “equipment mattered less than the person who pushed the button.” Certainly true. But this was the era of the Leica, the first high-precision camera using 35mm film, and the preferred instrument of Miller’s friend Henri Cartier-Bresson. Compact and light, yet allowing exhibition-size prints, the Leica transformed the opportunities open to the photographer. Might Miller have used such a camera in addition to the Rolleiflex Burke mentions? (A 1969 photograph shows her holding a Hasselblad.)
Much of Miller’s current reputation is as a surrealist photographer. (Her beauty has been preserved in a brilliant nude by Man Ray as La Femme Surréaliste.) Surrealism is, possibly, an acquired taste. In the hands of a Dalí — an incomparable draftsman (admitted Orwell, who detested his work) and not unskilled at self-promotion — it has endured as a phenomenon.
But the photographic surrealists lived in a frontier province. For painters, realism was a challenge and surrealism one more. Think Dalí’s Persistence of Memory: painting those watches before they began to go limp would have been a challenge in itself. For photographers, by contrast, realism came from simple competence, and surrealism required not only imagination but the development of new techniques. Hence “solarization,” in which the tones of a photographic negative or print are partially reversed by exposure to light during development. Although this effect was discovered early and often by the careless, it appears to have been Lee Miller who first found it an artistic tool. Ray’s solarized portrait is another of his splendid images of her.
Miller’s photography had stepped completely out of the studio by 1934, when she married Aziz Eloui Bey, an Egyptian engineer and official, and moved to Cairo. They roamed the Egyptian desert together, and she produced a number of surrealistic landscapes. In these she began to move away from Ray’s assertion that he did not photograph reality but his fantasies. Later, as she stared reality full in the face during war, she completed the move, although she remained ever alert to the surrealistic possibilities of realism.
In 1939 Miller left Egypt (and Eloui, although he did not fully realize it at the time) to join Roland Penrose in London. The War provided many opportunities for her surrealist’s eye. Like everyone living in London in 1940, she witnessed combat, as she would later on the continent. One of the most arresting images she captured during the Blitz is of the façade of a Nonconformist chapel. The walls within the structure, outside the frame, have been blown down, and the individual bricks spill out through the door in a perverse cornucopia. They fill the mouth of the horn — in this case a severely neoclassical Doric rectangle — and block the street with an obscene abundance of destruction. The surrealist sensibility may be subject to bouts of frivolity, but this photograph shows it in dead earnest.
When Miller got to the war zone with her improbable Vogue credentials, she teamed up with David E. Scherman of Time-Life. As was often the case, her professional partner became her partner in the contemporary sense. (Burke records a contemplative Miller wishing she had been more generous with her body, but on this score she did not seem to have had much reason for self-reproach.) Although photojournalism does not lend itself easily to direct collaboration, their relationship was artistically fruitful. It was Scherman who, on the day of Hitler’s suicide, took the famous photo of Miller in Hitler’s bathtub — a subject embodying the surrealism inherent in war’s Götterdämmerung stage.
Surrealism continued to inform her life until its end. After her divorce from Eloui, her 1947 marriage to Penrose kept her near the main channel of surrealism in England until her death in 1977. Her photographic career, largely working for British Vogue, dwindled and ended after the war. She turned to cuisine: Burke includes several of her recipes, such as one for marshmallow-cola ice cream, a dish worthy of Dalí. Miller also turned increasingly to drink.
Carolyn Burke shows us that the largely forgotten Lee Miller is well worth remembering and judging. Her realistic photographs, including the war reportage and the later portraits of her friends and acquaintances — running from Picasso to Cocteau to Charlie Chaplin to Gertrude Lawrence and many in between — are her true legacy, at least for those who regard photographers as something different from painters, even surrealist ones.
“Carolyn Burke a bien senti que Lee Miller attirait les génies comme une limaille . . .
Cette biographie magnifique se tient fièrement à la hauteur de son sujet.”
4 octobre 2007
Lee Miller, la femme phénix
Marc Lambron
« Lee Miller dans l’oeil de l’Histoire, une photographe », de Carolyn Burke, traduit de l’anglais par Marie-Claude Rideau (Autrement, 504 pages, 25 €).
Mannequin vedette pour Vogue, maîtresse de Man Ray, amie de Charlie Chaplin et de Pablo Picasso, grande photographe . . . Une biographie et une exposition racontent les vies de Lee Miller, la nymphe au Rolleiflex.
Au moment où le Victoria and Albert Museum de Londres célèbre par une grande rétrospective le centenaire de la naissance de Lee Miller (1907–1977), les éditions Autrement publient en français la première biographie sérieuse de cette femme phénix. L’auteur, Carolyn Burke, une universitaire née à Sydney et installée en Californie, a bénéficié d’un accès à des archives jusqu’alors inexploitées, qui permettent de cerner les mystères d’un étrange trajet rimbaldien, entre haute couture, surréalisme et lignes de front.
Les vies de Lee Miller composent un destin séquencé qui incarne les incandescences du XXe siècle. Fille d’un ingénieur de l’Etat de New York, cette sylphide ressemblait dès 1925 à un mannequin de Ralph Lauren. Elle sera l’un des premiers grands modèles de Vogue, une sorte de Claudia Schiffer d’époque Scott Fitzgerald. L’année 1929 trouve cette intrépide polygame à Paris, assistante et maîtresse de Man Ray, amie intime de Charlie Chaplin, prototype de la muse surréaliste que Cocteau annexera pour lui donner le rôle d’une statue parlante dans son premier film, « Le sang d’un poète ».
De modèle elle devient alors photographe. En 1934, Lee Miller épouse un Egyptien fortuné et part vivre au Caire, fuyant bientôt les mondanités coloniales pour de longs voyages au désert, une espèce d’héroïne de Lawrence Durrell qui vivrait comme Théodore Monod.
L’Europe et ses tragédies vont reprendre cet être fractal. En 1937, dans l’entourage estival de son ami et probable amant Pablo Picasso, elle s’éprend de Roland Penrose, un peintre anglais qui est aussi l’honorable correspondant du surréalisme en Grande-Bretagne. Elle y vivra sous les bombes du Blitz, photographe du quotidien, avant de débarquer en France après le 6 juin 1944. En battle-dress, la nymphe au Rolleiflex couvre alors la libération de Paris, la bataille des Vosges, la jonction russo-américaine sur l’Elbe, et sera parmi les premiers photographes alliés à entrer dans Dachau. Un célèbre cliché la montre prenant un bain à Munich dans la baignoire de Hitler le jour même où le dictateur se suicidait à Berlin. Après la guerre, Elizabeth « Lee » Miller pose sa caméra et devient en Grande-Bretagne l’épouse assez alcoolisée de Roland Penrose, auquel ses états de service dans l’art contemporain vaudront l’anoblissement en 1966. C’est donc sous les traits de Lady Penrose que l’indomptable chimère s’éteint en 1977.
Carolyn Burke a bien senti que Lee Miller attirait les génies comme une limaille. Modèle de Man Ray et de Picasso, actrice de Cocteau, amie de Hemingway époque Ritz 1944, égérie de plusieurs libérations, celle que Georges Bataille et Michel Leiris tenaient pour la plus belle femme qu’ils aient jamais vue traversa son existence comme une longue saison blonde. Derrière cet oeil du silence qu’est toute focale, une femme bouleversée s’inventait une liberté en noir et blanc. Autant que le cours éblouissant et secret d’une vie, rendu avec une précision factuelle au-dessus de l’éloge, Carolyn Burke raconte l’histoire d’un regard. Cette biographie magnifique se tient fièrement à la hauteur de son sujet.
Exposition « The Art of Lee Miller », Victoria and Albert Museum, Londres, jusqu’au 6 janvier 2008.
“Burke captures all the verve and energy of Miller’s life . . .”
Lee Miller: A Life, by Carolyn Burke
Lee Miller’s life embodied all the contradictions and complications of the twentieth century: a model and photographer, muse and reporter, sexual adventurer and domestic goddess, she was also America’s first female war correspondent. Carolyn Burke, a biographer and art critic, here reveals how the muse who inspired Man Ray, Cocteau, and Picasso could be the same person who unflinchingly photographed the horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau. Burke captures all the verve and energy of Miller’s life: from her early childhood trauma to her stint as a Vogue model and art-world ingénue, from her harrowing years as a war correspondent to her unconventional marriages and passion for gourmet cooking. A lavishly illustrated story of art and beauty, sex and power, Modernism and Surrealism, Lee Miller illuminates an astonishing woman’s journey from art object to artist.
“Demonstrating the same clarity of observation and sensitivity to subtleties that distinguish
Miller’s photographs, Burke indelibly portrays a radiant woman forced to look into the heart of darkness.”
December 25, 2005
The many faces of Lee Miller
A blazing story of personal reinvention and artistic evolution
by Donna Seaman
Donna Seaman grew up in Lee Miller’s hometown, Poughkeepsie, New York. She is an associate editor for Booklist and host of the radio program “Open Books” on WLUW 88.7 FM.
Lee Miller: A Life by Carolyn Burke: Knopf, 426 pages, $35
Who was Lee Miller? A great beauty and a brilliant yet overlooked photographer. A small-town girl who defied convention. A fashion model, an artist’s muse and a war correspondent. A witness to humankind at its best and worst. A biographer couldn’t ask for a more compelling subject, and Lee Miller couldn’t have asked for a more insightful and eloquent biographer.
Carolyn Burke writes with lucidity and energy. As adept a storyteller as she is an ardent scholar, she is generous with details yet never gets bogged down. Fluent in the nuances of ambiguity and cued to the obdurateness of paradox, she provides thoughtful and measured analysis that is genuinely enlightening and never intrusive. Burke met Miller by chance while researching her first book, a life of poet and artist Mina Loy, and knew instantly that Miller would be her next subject.
Elizabeth Miller was born in 1907 in the pretty but staid Hudson River city of Poughkeepsie, New York, the second of three children and the only girl. Her Indiana-born father, Theodore, was an ambitious mechanical engineer. Her Canadian mother, Florence, was a nurse, shy and reserved. Blue-eyed and blond, Elizabeth was strikingly beautiful even as a child, and clearly her father’s favorite. The fact that Theodore expressed his adoration by photographing his photogenic daughter in the nude well into her adulthood is one of the more inscrutable aspects of Miller’s complex existence.
Burke describes Elizabeth as a confident and happy tomboy until age 7, when she suffers a shocking ordeal while staying with family friends: She is raped, and infected with gonorrhea. The treatment, administered by her mother, is invasive, further complicating the trauma of the rape and its psychological repercussions. But everything is hushed up, and Elizabeth is encouraged to resume her life as though nothing happened. Theodore continues to lavish affection on his daughter, and perhaps intends to reassure her, and toughen her up, by having her pose naked in the snow two weeks before her eighth birthday.
Smart, headstrong and rebellious, Miller is expelled from nearly every school she attends. Bored with life in conservative Poughkeepsie, she finds an outlet for her burgeoning creativity studying stage design and painting. Daring, sexy and free of any sense of obligation to anyone else, especially her many male admirers, Miller is at loose ends in New York City when, in a scene right off the silver screen, she steps in front of a speeding car and is swept out of harm’s way. Her savior? Publishing magnate Condé Nast, who promptly invites her to work for Vogue.
Tall and chic, her fair hair bobbed, her azure gaze steady, Miller epitomizes the new look for the modern woman, the very image Vogue is seeking to promote. She changes her name to the sleekly androgynous Lee, debuts as a cover girl and makes the most of her sudden fame. Burke suggests that Miller’s ready success as a high-fashion model derived from her experiences posing nude for her father. Miller possesses a cool and detached demeanor, one of presence and absence. Miller could become, at will, a living statue, which is exactly the role she later played in Jean Cocteau’s famous art film “The Blood of a Poet.”
Was this disassociation from her physical self an unconscious reaction to being raped? And what exactly went on between father and daughter? Burke is judicious in her efforts to understand these essential facets of Miller’s life. In contemplating a set of Theodore’s nude studies of Lee, Burke writes, “We wonder why a father would take such pictures, why a mother would not intervene, and what long-term effects such sessions would have on a moody nineteen-year-old whose early sexual experience still haunted her.”
Yet Burke also understands that Lee “became complicit in their sessions and may have taken pride in her dual role as object and collaborator.” Certainly Lee feels at ease enough to encourage her female friends to pose nude with her for her father, and Theodore and his daughter remain exceptionally close until his death.
Determined to live as freely, actively and ambitiously as a man, Miller decides, after two years in front of the camera, to take charge of its all-seeing eye. Encouraged by photographer Edward Steichen, she heads to Paris and hooks up with Man Ray, a Surrealist experimenting with painterly photography techniques. As his lover, muse and protege, Miller collaborates in some of his most haunting works and takes photographs of her own that evince an edgy and ironic wit and “an eye for unsettling moments.”
On the Vogue payroll and embraced by the Parisian art world she has it made, but Miller is not one to get comfortable. Instead she abruptly ends her intense relationship with Man Ray and returns to New York in 1932 to open her own studio. She soon reigns supreme as the photographer for the elite, then executes another about-face and marries wealthy, well-connected Egyptian Aziz Eloui Bey.
“Lee embarked on marriage as if it were a holiday,” Burke writes, and so begins the “black satin and pearls” chapter in Miller’s life, a time of luxurious, often hedonistic leisure. But Miller is too restless, inquisitive and independent to lead this pampered life for long. She flees Cairo and returns to Paris and portraiture, taking elegant and evocative photographs of the likes of Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore, Margot Fonteyn, Dylan Thomas, Igor Stravinsky, T. S. Eliot, Colette and Elsa Schiaparelli. She also falls in love with Roland Penrose, a wealthy English artist and collector eventually knighted by the queen.
Miller’s story of personal reinvention and artistic evolution blazes right along, and Burke feeds the flames with just the right mix of straight-ahead chronicling and shrewd commentary, steering the reader to the apex of Miller’s life, her courageous and artistic response to World War II. Miller truly comes into her own during the London blitz, photographing women contributing to the war effort in images of resonant respect and striking design. Donning a soldier’s uniform with “War Correspondent” stitched above her heart, she heads for the front, where she risks her life documenting pitched battles, the wounded and the nurses who care for them. Writing vivid and quirkily precise dispatches to accompany her arresting photographs, Miller is among the first to reach the death camps.
Concealing an intimacy with suffering and secret valor beneath the carapace of her beauty and elan, Miller faces this hell on Earth without flinching, taking meticulously composed and bleakly beautiful photographs of atrocities beyond comprehension. Her dispatches smolder with anger compounded by her bitter awareness of how perfectly her looks exemplify the ideal Aryan female. In Munich Miller and her fellow photographer and lover, David E. Scherman, visit Adolf Hitler’s house, where Miller, drawing on her theatrical side and taste for irony, has Scherman take a startling photograph of her bathing in Hitler’s tub.
But as Miller travels across Eastern Europe reporting on the aftermath of the war, emotional burnout and spiritual exhaustion set in. Surprised to find herself pregnant at 39, she marries Penrose. After the birth of their son, she turns away from photography and writing and takes up gourmet cooking. The fire in her heart is banked down to embers, and Lady Penrose keeps a low profile, often with a drink in hand. When she spoke with Burke not long before she died in 1977, Miller said:
“I got in over my head. I could never get the stench of Dachau out of my nostrils.”
No one who reads Burke’s involving biography will ever forget Miller. So visually rich and electrifying is her story, a movie version seems inevitable. But whatever interpretations the future may bring, Burke’s vital and incisive portrait will be the wellspring.
Demonstrating the same clarity of observation and sensitivity to subtleties that distinguish Miller’s photographs, Burke indelibly portrays a radiant woman forced to look into the heart of darkness, and an artist who cast light on a brutalized world, illuminating its abiding beauty and grace, and enhancing our empathy and awe.
“Compelling, riveting . . . [Miller is] a forgotten visionary photographer who was muse and lover
to some of the most influential artists of the early twentieth century, as well as one of the few women able to transcend this role and become an artistic force in her own right.”
January 8, 2006
Look at Me
by Elissa Schappell
Lee Miller: A Life, by Carolyn Burke
It seems fitting that Carolyn Burke, whose first biography corrected history’s error of undervaluing the avant-garde poet and artist Mina Loy, has written “Lee Miller: A Life.” Fitting, also, that she begins the tale of a forgotten visionary photographer who was muse and lover to some of the most influential artists of the early twentieth century, as well as one of the few women able to transcend this role and become an artistic force in her own right, with Miller’s birth as a muse. At the age of seven, the year Miller was raped by a family friend in Brooklyn and subsequently contracted gonorrhea, she began posing naked for her father, Theodore — the only man she was ever faithful to, an amateur photographer and gadget geek who, Burke posits, might have imagined these “art studies” as “treatment” for her trauma. This practice continued into Miller’s twenties and eventually culminated in group shots with several of her compliant gal pals. What it did do was create a bond that would remain the strongest and most secure in Miller’s life, as well as create in her — out of necessity or desire — the ability to dissociate, which, Burke argues, “would become her way of dealing with those who sought to capture her image, her body and her trust.”
Those seeking to capture her image were legion. In the 1920s, Miller’s cool, sexually liberated flapper visage was everywhere. On the cover of Vogue and in other publications, her blond bob gleamed like the golden helmet of a gin-alley goddess. It was while modeling for Edward Steichen that Miller began to learn the basics of photography, and found herself inspired to move behind the camera. In the thirties, Miller plunged into the Montparnasse art scene, appearing in Jean Cocteau’s film “The Blood of a Poet,” sitting for Pablo Picasso’s portraits of Provençal wenches and, most fortunately, after presenting herself to Man Ray as his protégée, becoming his lover, muse and eventual collaborator.
The extraordinary power Miller had over Man Ray is obvious in such works as “Observatory Time — The Lovers,” in which an enormous pair of Miller’s painted lips loom and undulate over the landscape like a giant vaginal dirigible, and in one famous self-portrait (shot after Miller left him to marry an Egyptian businessman) in which a despondent Man Ray sits in a chair with a noose around his neck and a gun to his head.
So entwined were Man Ray’s and Miller’s visions, and so close their collaboration in taking photographs, that it was often hard to tell who had shot what. It seems a cruel joke that the inspiration Miller so famously provided others is what prevents us from recalling her as an artist in her own right.
In the forties, during World War II, Miller’s wanderlust carried her into the trenches, where, surrounded by the violence and danger of the London blitz, the Normandy aftermath, the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau, Miller found her muse: war. Her photojournalism for Vogue — including images of atrocities in the concentration camps as well as more intimate horrors, as in a family portrait of the Hitler-loving treasurer of Leipzig surrounded by his wife and daughter, all dead from suicide — created a sensation.
But the thing that proved to be Miller’s own muse would be the thing that destroyed her. After returning home from the war, Miller suffered not only from post-traumatic stress disorder but also from withdrawal. Her physician informed her rather coldly, “We cannot keep the world permanently at war just to provide you with entertainment.”
It is unfortunate that when Miller cracks up under the strain of depression and alcoholism, her character doesn’t crack open. Thus, the last chapters of Miller’s life — her failures as a mother; her marriage to Roland Penrose, a curator and lesser painter who was jealous of her success; and her re-creation of herself as a chef — seem lackluster. Miller’s rubbing shoulders with James Beard simply isn’t as riveting as Miller’s rubbing noses with Charlie Chaplin; a trip to Norway to accept its tourist board’s award for the best open-faced sandwich can’t stand up to a Surrealist orgy in the country where artists swapped wives and lovers like paintbrushes.
To be fair to Burke, the enigmatic Miller was by all accounts aloof and unreachable, keeping everyone at a distance. (That includes Burke, who met Miller in 1977, shortly before her death at the age of seventy.) Miller didn’t leave any particularly revealing letters or diaries, so her inner life never really comes alive.
The photograph that may give the truest glimpse into Miller’s nature is a portrait shot in Hitler’s bathtub after the Allies had taken over his house: a picture of the Führer balances on the lip of the tub; a classical statue of a woman sits opposite it on a dressing table; Lee, in the tub, inscrutable as ever, scrubs her shoulder. A woman caught between horror and beauty, between being seen and being the seer.
Given that the real story of Lee Miller can be gleaned only from her work, the scant twenty-four glossy photographs included here feel like a tease, a mere pinhole view into Miller’s work and psyche, which forces the reader to do what people have always done to Lee Miller — project their own desires onto her, seeing what they want to see.
“Superb . . . [Burke] is the ultimate photographer’s assistant: setting up the background
against which her subject can shine, clever, capable, sympathetic, and never in the way.”
November 22, 2005
Fleeing the demons
by Alison Rowat
Lee Miller, by Carolyn Burke: Bloomsbury, £20
A tale of twenties New York. A beautiful young woman steps into the path of an oncoming car. At the last second she is pulled to safety by a stranger. He turns out to be Condé Nast, publisher of Vogue. Captivated by his fallen angel, he puts her on the cover of his magazine and makes her immortal. Such a wildly improbable scenario could only happen to the utterly fabulous Lee Miller.
Giddiness is an occupational hazard for any writer who comes within a mile of Miller’s life. The woman Cecil Beaton described as looking like “a sunkissed goat boy from the Appian Way" was the original It girl who had it all. As well as a photographer in her own right, she was Man Ray’s muse and a friend to Picasso, Cocteau and Chaplin. Later, her photos and despatches from the Second World War made her a legend among war correspondents. In one last display of surrealism, her final incarnation before her death in 1977 was as a cookery writer.
To think of Miller is to see her as she is on the cover of Carolyn Burke’s book, an impossible, beguiling beauty. But the face that was her initial fortune would later obscure her achievements. “Because she did not pursue a conventional career,” writes Burke, “her reputation, until recently, has been eclipsed by her legend, and the famous men who helped construct it.”
Born in 1907 in Poughkeepsie to a well-to-do family, young Elizabeth (she later changed her name to the deliberately androgynous Lee) wanted for nothing. There was one thing no amount of money could change. At the age of seven, Elizabeth had been raped by a babysitter. The experience broke her spirit and the gonorrhoea she contracted condemned her to years of painful, invasive treatment. She grew up hating herself. “I looked like an angel," she would later say, “but I was a fiend inside.”
Knowledge of the rape colours everything that comes next. Instead of a spoiled flapper, Miller appears a woman constantly in need of reassurance, running helter skelter from her past. She craved distraction and new experiences. The outbreak of war, by providing her with both, would prove her finest hours.
Flying under the bizarre flag of Vogue’s war correspondent, Miller reported from the battlefront, was there when the death camps were liberated and was one of the first photographers into Hitler’s home after the war ended. It was there that the famous picture of her in the fuhrer’s bath was taken. Burke, an art critic when she is not being a biographer, describes with perfect exactness how Miller, ever the aesthete, staged the shot for maximum effect. After the war, life for Lee would never again be as exciting. The bird did not take well to going back into the gilded cage, and her frustration played itself out in alcoholism and depression and a troubled relationship with her son, Antony Penrose.
Interest in Miller has been revived recently by her son’s books and several major exhibitions of her work. Between the personal and the critical there would not seem much more to say. Burke, to her immense credit, defies such reasoning. She met Miller while working in Paris on a biography of Mina Loy and knew she had found her next subject. That was thirty years ago. This, clearly, is not a woman who rushes into print.
In all, it took seven years to research and write this biography, and it shows. Just as Miller lived what seemed like ten lives, so Burke has done enough work for ten books. The effect is never stifling, however. Miller was a creature of context, rising or falling according to the times. To understand her, one needs to understand those times. Burke renders them superbly, never skimping on salient details or letting a good tale slip by. She is the ultimate photographer’s assistant: setting up the background against which her subject can shine, clever, capable, sympathetic, and never in the way.
She makes an exception to this rule when it comes to Miller’s strange relationship with her father. Theodore Miller first photographed his daughter in the nude when she was 18 months old and continued the sessions into adulthood. Burke, along with the reader, struggles to understand this. Though she does not believe the relationship was incestuous she remains troubled by it, returning to it again and again.
Miller, at least in public, did not seek protectors and was devoted to her father. She was always brave enough to defy convention, bold enough not to make excuses. “If I need to pee, I pee in the road,” she told a friend. “If I have a letch for someone, I hop into bed with him.”
As Burke shows, the truth was more complex, the price to be paid for such freedom higher than anyone knew. Liberated as she was, Miller herself was aware that limits had been imposed on her life.
In a letter to her husband, Roland Penrose, she once wrote: “I keep saying to everyone, ‘I didn’t waste a minute, all my life — I had a wonderful time’, but I know, myself, now that if I had it over again I’d be even more free with my ideas, with my body and my affections.”
After reading this superb work, one can only echo those regrets.
“Delightful, meticulously researched, fascinating . . . Miller’s life had many phases,
all of them interesting, and Burke captures them in [this] fine biography.”
November 27, 2005
Beauty and the Beasts
The Poughkeepsie girl who became a model, a muse and a photographer in her own right
by Kunio Francis Tanabe
Lee Miller: A Life by Carolyn Burke: Knopf, 426 pages, $35
If, like Auntie Mame, you believe that “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death,” you’ll surely want to read Carolyn Burke’s delightful biography of Lee Miller. Here was a woman who needed no exhortation from anyone to “Live! Live!” Her life was filled with adventures — in New York, Paris, Cairo, London and the battlefronts of World War II. She caroused with Picasso, Man Ray and Jean Cocteau, peeled off her clothes to pose for avant-garde masters, then switched roles to become a photographer for Vogue. Charlie Chaplin posed for her; so did Colette, Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier. After she settled down with the British painter and curator Sir Roland Penrose, she took up cooking with gusto, befriending such culinary legends as James Beard and planting a country garden of earthly delights.
But as in Candide, the best of all possible worlds can contain troubles. Burke’s meticulously researched biography begins with Miller’s birth in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1907. Her father, Theodore, was a successful engineer and avid photographer; her Canadian mother, Florence, a former nurse, doted on golden-curled little Elizabeth. Variously called “Li Li, then Te Te, Bettie, and in her twentieth year, Lee,” she grew up on a 165-acre farm in idyllic surroundings. If her story were told in a series of snapshots, you would see her climbing trees, sledding down hills, riding the toy locomotive that her brother and father built. What would surely be omitted from such an album is an incident that took place when she was seven: While her mother was sick, Lee was sent to Brooklyn to stay with friends, during which time she was raped by a young sailor who unexpectedly returned home. The trauma was compounded when she contracted gonorrhea.
“Judging by Lee Miller’s adult life, she never quite awoke from this nightmare,” Burke writes. “Decades later, [she] put her outraged emotions into her compositions — where enigmatic doorways hint at damage to the house of her self.”
But readers may sort out the many fascinating details of her life and come to a different conclusion — that she managed her fears quite successfully. Miller was blessed with supportive parents: Her mother’s training as a nurse helped immensely in dealing with hospital and home care, and hiring a psychiatrist probably speeded her recovery. And later, she had plenty of devoted friends and lovers to support her.
By the time she turned 18, Miller knew what she wanted — “la vie de bohème.” She sailed off to France in 1925, enrolled at a school that taught stage design and promptly fell in love with the city: “One look at Paris, and I said, ‘This is mine — this is my home.’” The book hints at an affair with Ladislas Medgys, her Hungarian stage artist instructor, but when Mom arrived after seven fun-filled months, Lee had to kiss Paris goodbye.
Back in Poughkeepsie, she joined Vassar’s Experimental Theatre and became adept at stage lighting. She saw many plays during this period of her life, from “Emperor Jones” to “Hedda Gabler,” and persuaded her father to let her take dance lessons in New York. The gorgeous girl soon found work on the chorus line of George White’s “Scandals” (a rival of the Ziegfeld Follies), along with Louise Brooks. Then one day (this is straight out of Hollywood fantasy, but Miller claimed it really happened), she was about to cross a street, almost got hit by a car and fell into the arms of Condé Nast — yes, the man with the vast publishing fortune. After seeing her Parisian attire and good looks and hearing her “babbling in French,” Nast practically hired her on the spot.
At Vogue, she posed for the crème de la crème of renowned photographers — Edward Steichen, George Hoyningen-Huene and Horst. Soon she was milling about at swank parties with the likes of Frank Crowninshield (the editor of Vanity Fair), Dorothy Parker and Charlie Chaplin — and having “more affairs than Lorelei Lee,” Anita Loos’s heroine in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. But she was also planning her next move.
As she continued to model for photographers, she thought of trading places. Her father was an accomplished photographer; why not become one herself? She returned to Paris in 1929, determined to become Man Ray’s assistant. With an introduction from Steichen and a portfolio of her modeling, it must have been easy to convince the avant-garde master to take her on. At the time, his mistress — and the subject of many of his photos — was the legendary model Kiki de Montparnasse. But out she went from his studio, to be replaced by the blonde American goddess. One of Ray’s finest works, “Observatory Time — The Lovers,” shows Miller’s luscious lips looming large above a landscape, floating among dappled clouds like a combination of erotic fantasy and nightmare. After three years with Ray, Miller left to establish her own photographic studio, but they remained lifelong friends.
Miller’s life had many phases, all of them interesting, and Burke captures them in seventeen chapters. After “Montparnasse with Man Ray,” “La Femme Surréaliste” and “The Lee Miller Studio in Manhattan” come three chapters devoted to her time as Madame Eloui Bey: she met and married Aziz Eloui Bey, a Francophile Egyptian, and lived in Cairo until the monuments bored her stiff.
But it was World War II, with all its drama, that truly brought out Miller’s talent. In London during the Blitz, she worked with Edward R. Murrow’s friend Ernestine Carter to produce a book, Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire, which she dedicated to Winston Churchill. Through Cond Nast, she obtained a press pass to cover the Allied liberation of France; then she hitched a ride to witness the fall of Nazi Germany, along with Life photographer David E. Scherman (another amorous conquest), and raced east to Hungary and Romania. In a lighter moment, Scherman took a shot of Miller washing herself in Hitler’s bath in his abandoned Munich apartment. She photographed the victims and survivors of Buchenwald and Dachau. Readers of Vogue saw her horrific pictures in the June 1945 issue of their fashion magazine.
The war left her appalled, and she was a wreck by the time she returned to England. She’d stopped taking care of herself and drunk heavily with her comrades in arms. She lost her once svelte figure. Carolyn Burke met Miller in 1977, the year she died. Miller immediately confided to Burke that she was dying of cancer. Something must have clicked between them, and the chance meeting eventually resulted in this fine biography. (Burke’s 1996 book, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy, was about another free spirit, who painted and wrote poetry in Paris.)
Burke acknowledges her debt to Miller’s only son, Antony Penrose, who, sadly, was estranged from his mother until the final stage of her life. After her death, Penrose discovered a cache of her photographs and negatives. The two books that he produced, The Lives of Lee Miller (1985) and Lee Miller’s War (2005), are indispensable to a full appreciation of her talents.
After reading this book, I watched Rosalind Russell play “Auntie Mame” in the 1958 film version on DVD, and it struck me that Miller’s life — far more eventful than Mame’s — has tremendous theatrical potential. Put up an enormous painting of her sensuous lips as a backdrop, fire up the city lights of Paris, roll out the battle scenes from St. Malo to Nuremberg and give her a champagne bath in Hitler’s apartment. And if this book ever gets produced on Broadway, don’t forget to fill the stage with the aroma of her cooking. After all, her life was indeed a banquet.
Kunio Francis Tanabe is the art director and a senior editor of Book World.
“Burke’s splendid and gripping and thoroughly researched book offers an opportunity
to re-assess the three-dimensional woman and her two-dimensional prints.”
February 27, 2006
Shutters and Shudders
by Toni Bentley
Lee Miller: A Life by Carolyn Burke (Alfred A. Knopf, 426 pp., $35)
Lee who? Uncanny beauty, fashion model, Surrealist muse, assistant and model of Man Ray, Vogue photographer, war photographer, sexual bohemian, Lady Roland Penrose: thus is this genuinely fascinating woman identified, diffused, and therefore mostly forgotten. Even those who recall her name often are not sure why. Too many talents or accomplishments in a beautiful woman arouses suspicion. She must be a dilettante who was given the opportunities that beauties often are granted, usually by the men who want them, or something from them.
But Lee Miller cannot be so easily dismissed. Her messy, unbelievably interesting life, full of famous lovers and momentous encounters with the history of her time, provides an occasion to reflect on the problem of the intelligent beauty. It is a problem that rarely elicits understanding or sympathy. If Miller had been an ordinary-looking woman who had taken her lacerating photographs of World War II and its aftermath, she would probably be better known and more regularly praised. Talent is always acceptable as a substitute for beauty. But both? Men, and even many women, have trouble with so much kindness from fate. It must also be noted that Miller herself did less than nothing to promote her reputation. After her death, more than sixty thousand photos and negatives were found piled in boxes and trunks scattered in the attic of her English farmhouse. It is thanks to her son Antony Penrose and his wife Suzanna Penrose that we have these extraordinary images at all.
Miller’s life as a Vogue cover girl who was shot by the greatest photographers of her time — Edward Steichen, Arnold Genthe, George Hoyningen-Huene, Horst P. Horst, Man Ray — preceded her life behind the camera. She made the rare transition from object to subject, her intelligence and her restlessness providing the bridge from one to the other. It is as if the need to escape the narcissism that was required of her as a model forced her to pick up a camera in self-defense. Thus Miller manifested a notable androgyny, beginning as a goddess of the infamous “male gaze” and then becoming the gaze herself. In so doing, she confounded her friends, her lovers, and herself.
Now Carolyn Burke, the author of a fine biography of the poet Mina Loy, has produced the first full-length life of Lee Miller, almost thirty years after her death. Burke’s splendid and gripping and thoroughly researched book offers an opportunity to re-assess the three-dimensional woman and her two-dimensional prints. To look at the photos of Miller and then the photos by he, produces a kind of visual and emotional dissonance: Miller in an elegant gown by Patou reclining languidly on a wall like a young Garbo; and then, a few pages later, her image of the legs of liberated Dachau survivors in their stripes, standing around a great white, dusty pile — the gassed, gray bones of other Jews. Concentration camps are not the usual hangouts of ex-supermodels.
The story starts with Elizabeth Miller’s rape, at the age of seven. But we must begin at the beginning. She was born on April 23, 1907, the second of three children of a well-to-do bourgeois family. The only girl in the family, she immediately became her daddy’s darling. Theodore Miller was a person of considerable accomplishments and intelligence, a mechanical engineer with a lifelong interest in any and all gadgets. (His father had been a champion bricklayer.) Thomas Edison was his hero. He was an Emersonian Democrat, an educated man, and a great believer in science. “What counted,” writes Burke, “was what one could measure or record.” He was also a defiant atheist. Waking from a coma at the age of ninety-three, as if emerging from a metaphysical experiment, he scandalized the nurses attending him by declaring triumphantly, “I want you to know that God does not exist!”
With five hundred employees under his firm but benevolent jurisdiction, Theodore Miller was the superintendent of Poughkeepsie’s largest employer, the DeLavel Separator Company, whose machines separated heavier liquids from lighter ones. His delight in physical transformation and modern technology found its greatest outlet in his lifelong hobby of photography. And his blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby daughter became his favorite subject — her life lovingly documented literally every step of the way. Early on in her childhood, he gave Elizabeth her first camera. The darkroom was a sanctuary.
Miller’s mother, Florence MacDonald, of Scots-Irish descent, had been Theodore’s nurse during a bout of typhoid, and while she clearly made a good match with the ambitious Miller, she was the less prominent parent, and her husband ruled the roost. While Theodore doted on his little princess, who became a tree-climbing tomboy, Florence favored the eldest son, John, dressing him in girls’ clothes — a habit he continued well into adulthood, with the occasional public scandal.
During a visit to a family friend in Brooklyn in 1914, young Elizabeth was raped by a male friend of the friend. She was rushed back to Poughkeepsie with great concern, but also great secrecy. The details of the crime remain unknown, but the results were clear. The seven-year-old contracted gonorrhea and was thus traumatized, repeatedly over the years, not only by the illness but also by its horrific cure. For the next twelve months, isolated from any social intercourse, she had to visit the hospital several times a week and, at home, endure antiseptic baths administered by her mother, followed by an “irrigation” of the bladder with potassium permanganate using a glass catheter, a douche can, and a rubber tube. This pre-penicillin medieval torture was followed by a douche with a mixture of boric acid, carbolic acid, and oils. Twice a week, the little girl’s cervix had to be probed with a cotton swab to remove infected secretions and then daubed with “picric acid in glycerine.” Elizabeth’s brothers were not told what was wrong with their sister; they just heard her screams from the bathroom and then watched as their mother disinfected every surface the contaminated little girl had touched to prevent further infection.
Miller never mentioned her rape, but it haunted her forever, and it haunts Burke’s book. The beautiful little girl became “wild” after this, her brother John later observed. Within the year, Theodore proposed a new kind of photo for his daughter: mimicking the scandalous painting “September Morn,” which featured a nubile naked girl, he had the eight-year-old Elizabeth pose naked but for her slippers outside their house in the freezing snow. “December Morn” was the first of many nudes that Theodore would take of his daughter over the next few decades.
Daddy took lots of naked pictures of his grown daughter. Lee sitting on a table, facing forward, one leg crossed, barely hiding her sex, looking sideways; Lee in the bathtub; Lee naked with naked girlfriends. “Theodore was always begging us to pose for him in different stages of undress,” said Tanja Ramm, a close friend. “If you didn’t do it, you’d feel prudish.” The photographs can be dated as late as the 1930s.
Burke handles this curious situation with a simple telling of the facts. Florence was often in attendance at the photo sessions. There was never any sign that Elizabeth’s intimacy with her father went further than posing for his lens. Many people — including her brothers — attested that Miller adored her father and trusted his love probably more than that of any man who followed. OK. Got it. No funny business — except that all of this is funny business. Burke shies from further interpretation; but to look at these nudes and see them, inevitably, through the eyes of the father is creepy to say the least, and incestuous to say the obvious. While one can believe that Theodore meant well and adored his daughter, he would be regarded very suspiciously today.
Between her rape and her nude photo shoots, Elizabeth became — surprise! — a rebellious teenager. She cursed, she smoked, she performed practical jokes for which she was expelled from her Quaker boarding school. But other influences were at work to inspire her dramatic persona. She was enthralled by performers — Bernhardt, Pavlova, the Denishawn dancers, the Ziegfeld girls, all of whom she saw perform on stage. She took some “interpretive” dance lessons and acted in a few local plays, but reserved her highest respect for women writers. She emulated her idol Anita Loos by writing movie scripts with her girlfriend that were “full of naked sinners on bearskin rugs.” Theodore could have shot the movie.
When Elizabeth was seventeen, her mother attempted suicide by gassing herself in the car — she had fallen in love with another man — but Theodore saved her just in time. As with Elizabeth’s rape, it was all very hush-hush. Florence proceeded, against Theodore’s advice, to see a well-known Freudian analyst, and remained in her marriage. He, meanwhile, had numerous affairs over the years and was still pinching his caretakers’ bottoms from his wheelchair in his nineties.
A year later, at age eighteen, Elizabeth sailed to Paris for the first time, chaperoned by her Polish French teacher Madame Kohoszynska, who was wonderful but couldn’t speak French. Unnoticed by Madame, they checked into a maison de passe, a brothel. “It took my chaperones five days to catch on, but I thought it was divine,” Miller gleefully recalled. She spent her days watching clients go in and out of rooms, and shoes being changed in the hallway with regular frequency. “I felt everything opening up in front of me,” she said. Her future was found and she declared Paris “my home!” She stayed seven months studying at a school for stage design and learning the language.
Back in Poughkeepsie, she was out rowing on a local lake with one of her many eager suitors when the young man dove off the side of the boat. Elizabeth watched as his dead body was dragged from the lake a few hours later. His mother blamed her. Soon came an aborted stint at Vassar, after which Elizabeth, financed by her father, moved to New York and enrolled at the Arts Students League. She was discovered by no less than Condé Nast himself. Standing on a street corner, the founder of the magazine empire pulled Miller back on the curb out of oncoming traffic. Between her beauty and her babbling in French he immediately suggested that she visit his offices. She appeared shortly thereafter on the cover of the March 1927 issue of Vogue in a drawing by George Lepape, a cloche framing her face.
Not yet twenty, Miller was launched as a top model into New York society. She wrote in her diary of her “supreme egoism.” With her shimmery bobbed hair, smooth fine features, and slim body, she perfectly embodied the flapper, the garçonne, the sexually free modern woman. A mini-scandal ensued when an elegant shot of her by Steichen showed up in magazine ads for the “new and improved” Kotex sanitary pads.
After two years of New York celebrity, Elizabeth found that she had absorbed a lot from the distinguished photographers for whom she had posed, and she wished to learn more about their work. Armed with an introductory letter from Steichen to Man Ray, an American expatriate painter and photographer who had acquired widespread fame in Europe for his experimental Surrealist images, she set sail again for Paris. This was the beginning of her nomadic multi-continental existence. She said later that she went to Paris “to enter photography by the back end,” by studying with the masters. In this she was not alone; she was in fact in the vanguard of women entering the art form behind the camera. Margaret Bourke-White, Berenice Abbott, and Germaine Krull were all beginning their careers in the 1920s.
In true bohemian fashion, two of Elizabeth’s young American lovers were friends and tossed a coin to decide who would see her off from the pier. Alfred de Liagre (who was to become a well-known Broadway director) won the bet, but the other swain, a pilot, flew his plane overhead, dropping a cascade of red roses on the ship’s deck at Elizabeth’s feet. Flying back to his airfield, he picked up a student for a flying lesson, and their plane crashed, killing both of them. (Burke, curiously, declines to mention this tragic ending to a grand romantic gesture.) Elizabeth, now twenty-two, already had two dead lovers to her credit. Somewhere across the Atlantic, between New York and Paris, the femme fatale called Lee Miller was born.
In Paris, she went straight to the home of Man Ray, but was told that he had left town for the summer. She proceeded to a local café and in walked Man Ray. “I asked him to take me on as his pupil,” she recalled in one understated version of the much-told tale. “He said he never accepted pupils, but I guess he fell for me. We lived together for three years and I learned a lot about photography.” Man Ray’s affair with Kiki de Montparnasse, the unforgettable and flamboyant model of some of his greatest portraits, had been over for a year, and he was, as he recalled, “ready for new adventures.” He got them. Miller — seventeen years his junior and a good head taller — became his student, his assistant, his receptionist, his collaborator, his muse, his lover, and finally his misery.
“I have loved you terrifically, jealously,” he wrote in the middle of their affair, while Miller was openly having others. “It has reduced every other passion in me, and to compensate, I have tried to justify this love by giving you every chance in my power to bring out everything interesting in you.” “For the first and last time in his life,” said a friend, “Man had to surrender. To have this fascinating, intelligent woman as his mistress was fatal.” But the endless melodrama notwithstanding, their artistic collaboration was magnificent. “I do not photograph nature,” Ray explained, “I photograph my fantasy.” He got plenty of that from Miller, with her body frequently sectionalized in his images of her, as in “La Prière,” with her back and backside scooped in Sadian worship, and in “Observatory Time,” with her lips — and lips alone — floating enormously across the sky. He placed her all-seeing eyeball at the tip of a metronome’s pendulum, and in numerous photos her nude torso is headless.
Miller was unintentionally responsible for the discovery of “solarization,” a photographic technique that produces enhanced edges in a photograph due to a partial reversal of the black and white of the negative. In the darkroom one day, she accidentally turned on the light while some negatives were still being developed. Man Ray was furious, but as the model was no longer available to redo the photos, they developed the images anyway. Thus accident was, as usual, the mother of invention.
By 1930, Miller and the Russian émigré Tatiana Iacovleva — muse to the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and later the infamous wife of Bertrand du Plessix and mother of Francine du Plessix Gray — were called the most beautiful women in Paris. Miller met all of Parisian society. She even starred, to Man Ray’s consternation, as the painted Muse in Jean Cocteau’s classic experimental film The Blood of a Poet. In December 1930 her father came to Europe, and took photos of his twenty-three-year-old daughter nude in the tub in their shared hotel room in Hamburg. Back in Paris, Man Ray and his mistress’s father indulged their mutual delight in photographing scenes of three or four naked girls frolicking on a bed with Miller as the centerpiece. As testament to this extraordinary father-daughter relationship, Ray produced one of his most moving images of Miller in profile, conservatively clothed, nestling across her father’s lap, eyes closed, resting her head upon his shoulder. Oh, that every woman could be so trusting of her father.
During a visit to St. Moritz with Charlie Chaplin — also a likely lover — Hoyningen-Huene introduced Miller to a handsome and wealthy Egyptian businessman named Aziz Eloui Bey and his beautiful wife Nimet, whom Miller befriended and photographed. Bey was almost twenty years Miller’s senior, and they began a secret affair that would result over the course of the next few years in devastation for Man Ray — he made a self-portrait with a gun to his head. It also was the cause of the suicide of Nimet, in a hotel room from alcohol poisoning.
By 1932, Miller had returned to New York alone and, with the financial backing of several businessmen, opened her own studio. She employed her younger brother Erik as an assistant and photographed, in addition to fashion shoots, many artists of the day — Joseph Cornell, Gertrude Lawrence, Virgil Thompson, and John Houseman (who wrote of his “unrequited lust” for her). Miller’s images were shown at the Julien Levy Gallery, with whose eminent owner she had an affair. It was at this time that she took the famous portrait of herself in profile, short, wavy hair held back with a headband, clothed in rich, ruched velvet, looking like a flapper transplanted as Renaissance maiden. The photo was intended as an advertisement for the headband.
After less than two years of her New York life, a success by any standard, she again changed course. Bey arrived in America, and in June 1934 she abruptly closed her New York studio, married him, spent her honeymoon at Niagara Falls like a good American bride, and then sailed, like Cleopatra, for Alexandria and a new life in Egypt as Madame Eloui Bey. For the next few years, she played bridge, drank martinis, took long desert safaris, learned snake-charming, raced camels, skied on sand dunes, and photographed the epic landscape from the top, and bottom, of pyramids — and became, as was her way, increasingly bored. “I could easily and with pleasure become an alcoholic,” she wrote.
The human costs of her adventurous way of living continued to mount. Of one photography expedition, she wrote to her brother: “Unfortunately I ran over a man or something . . . it spoiled the trip . . . but the pictures are swell.” On her love life, she reported in an equally cool fashion that “If I need to pee, I pee in the road; if I have a letch for someone, I hop into bed with him.” And there were several abortions along the way. (The gonorrhea had not left her infertile, as it did in 50 percent of cases at the time.)
The summer of 1937 found her back in Paris, without her husband, in a whirlwind of social activities. At a costume party in Paris she met Roland Penrose, a wealthy British painter and writer who was an eager member of the Surrealist circle. After waking in his bed two mornings later, she embarked on a passionate affair with Penrose, and a wild summer of bohemian partner-swapping and exhibitionism that included a visit to Picasso at Mougins. There Lee was painted by Picasso six times and gladly loaned to him by Penrose for a night or two. Back in Roland’s bed, he introduced her to bondage, apparently with her full compliance. (Later he gave her a set of handcuffs made from Cartier gold.)
Eileen Agar, a friend, wrote in her memoir that in the South of France that summer there was “Surrealism on the horizon, Stravinsky in the air, and Freud under the bed.” Meanwhile, the adoring Bey was sending Miller money for her summer sojourn.
Back in Cairo, Miller kept up a constant correspondence with Penrose and made plans for future European exploits. “I want the Utopian combination of security and freedom” she wrote to her husband in November 1938, not only hinting at her double life but stating her lifelong credo, “and emotionally I need to be completely absorbed in some work or in a man I love. I think the first thing for me to do is to take or make freedom — which will give me the opportunity to become concentrated again, and just hope that some sort of security follows — even if it doesn’t the struggle will keep me awake and alive.”
To another lover, Bernard Burrows, she stated a year later, “You see darling, I don’t want to do anything ‘all for love’ as I can’t be depended on for anything. In fact I have every intention of being completely irresponsible.” (Burke’s version of this declaration is: “I don’t want you to do anything ‘all for love’ as I won’t marry you, I won’t live with you and I can’t be depended on for anything.”) It was 1939 and Hitler was about to provide Miller with an opportunity to unleash herself “completely.”
She left Egypt — “I’m never returning,” she wrote — for England and remained in Europe for the entire war. She began working again for “Brogue,” as British Vogue was called, and remained in London photographing the Blitz, which resulted in a book published in 1940 called Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire, edited by Ernestine Carter and written by Edward R. Murrow. She was living with Penrose, and soon his ex-wife Valentine moved in and completed the family. Miller was appointed a war correspondent for Condé Nast and in July 1944, just over a month after the Allied invasion of Normandy, she was sent by Audrey Withers, the editor of Vogue, across the channel to report on the battlefield duties of American nurses. She proceeded, often against Army orders, to traipse through war-torn Europe with her camera and notebook in hand. She became lovers with Dave Scherman, a brilliant young photographer on assignment from Life. In Paris for the Liberation, she stayed at the Hotel Scribe, which had been requisitioned — the Nazis had used it as their press bureau — for Allied journalists, and she was a happy participant in the celebratory festivities of drinking, eating, and bed-hopping.
She subsequently traveled with her camera to Brussels, Alsace, Frankfurt, Aachen, and Heidelberg. In Leipzig, she photographed the corpses of the city’s treasurer, his wife, and their daughter (who looks eerily like young Elizabeth), suicides from poison. In Berlin, she was famously photographed by Scherman taking a bath in Hitler’s tub. (Could one get clean in such a place?) Later, down the street, she took a nap on Eva Braun’s bed. In Dachau and in Buchenwald, she photographed survivors scavenging in garbage for food, the piles of the starved but freshly dead, the pits of decomposing skeletons, the utter desolation of mass murder. Those images are unforgettable.
With her constant supply of cognac in a flask, as well as an assortment of uppers and downers, Miller was by the end of the war worn, haggard, ill, depressed, and alcoholic. Unable to return to normal postwar life, she continued across Europe documenting the devastation. In Bucharest, she found a gypsy with a trained bear and got the massage of her life, providing a rare sweet and humorous moment, captured astonishingly on film by Harry Brauner. “The bear [Miller surmised she was three hundred pounds] knew her business,” wrote Miller. “She sat her great, furry, warm bottom down on the nape of my neck, and with gentle shuffles, went from my neck to my knees and back again . . . I felt marvelous afterwards, racing circulation, flexible and energetic.”
In Vienna, a well-equipped children’s hospital had everything but drugs for its tiny patients, and thus they died, one after the other, producing Miller’s most moving piece of prose and the haunting photograph to match.
For an hour I watched a baby die . . . He was the dark dusty blue of these waltz-filled Vienna nights, the same colour as the striped garb of the Dachau skeletons . . . a skinny gladiator. He gasped and fought and struggled for life, and a doctor and a nun and I just stood there and watched. There was nothing to do. In this beautiful children’s hospital with its nursery-rhymed walls and screenless windows, with its clean white beds, its brilliant surgical instruments and empty drug cupboards there was nothing to do but watch him die. Baring his sharp toothless gums he clenched his fists against the attack of death. This tiny baby fought for his only possession, life, as if it might be worth something. . . .
Below this entry the page is slashed by the nib of Miller’s pen.
Back in England, she was granted a divorce by Bey and married Penrose. They moved to a sprawling country estate called Farley Farm. There she continued her slapdash bohemian existence with a constant rotation of houseguests, and produced with Penrose, at the age of thirty-nine, a son. She was disinterested in motherhood and the relationship with her only child involved years of mutual verbal abuse and belittlement. A rapprochement of sorts occurred shortly before her death.
For her remaining thirty years, Miller was a ruin. Despite a face-lift, she became barely recognizable for her early beauty. She drank, gained weight, lost interest in sex, caused frequent hysterical scenes, and watched while her husband took a series of young lovers. She lost interest in photography and took her only solace in a passion for cooking, which resulted in a friendship with James Beard, and in winning the rather dubious honor for the best open-faced sandwiches from the Norwegian Tourist Board. She called cooking “pure therapy.” But it did not cure her. “I could never get the stench of Dachau out of my nostrils,” she told Burke shortly before her death. In 1966 Penrose was knighted — he called himself “Sir-Realist” and Miller became “Lady Penrose from Poughkeepsie.” She died eleven years later of cancer, at the age of seventy. The obituaries were brief and inaccurate.
Miller’s legacy resides in a few haunting images: Miller on her father’s lap, Electra triumphant, an American pietà; Miller’s vacant radiance solarized, epitomized, and deconstructed by Man Ray; and then Miller herself looking deeply into the wide-open eyes of a dying child and making us look with her into that abyss. Rarely, if ever, has a woman wielded such potency, and such vulnerability, both before and behind the lens. Yet by the end of this sad, busy life, as Burke tells it, one retains little love for Miller. Can a life be both fascinating and empty? While Miller certainly had moments of distinction behind her camera, the pervasive inconsistency in all her endeavors leaves her a shadowy figure.
Jane Livingston has suggested that Miller’s tragedy was “that the artist never really wholly believed in the reality of her own driving gift and powerful achievement” — the problem of the talented woman again. There is something to this, obviously; but I cannot escape the feeling that finally Miller was a party girl at history’s party. And yet there may be some edification even in this stern judgment — the encouraging thought that nobody is too small or too obscure for his or her own times, and that history, and art, may find even a girl from Poughkeepsie.
Toni Bentley is the author, most recently, of The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (Regan Books).
“Burke’s book is what biography ought to be . . . Lee Miller: A Life belongs on the shelf
of anyone interested in how people of [Miller’s] generation dealt with their times.”
December 10, 2005
Life and Times
Biography of Lee Miller explores exciting journey
by Tom Honig
Sentinel editor
It’s one of the great joys of reading: a story about someone you’ve never heard of, giving you insight into something you didn’t know you cared about.
That’s the gift from Santa Cruz author Carolyn Burke, whose new biography about model/photographer/free spirit Lee Miller is commanding attention both here at home and in Europe. She will read from her book and answer questions at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Capitola Book Cafe.
The book, Lee Miller: A Life, is a captivating read, one that raises questions in the reader’s mind about how things have changed — and how they’ve stayed the same — in women’s lives over the past century.
Burke is a biographer from an older tradition, one that explores her subject through the lens of the times in which she lived. And those times were remarkable, from the flapper era of the 1920s through the war years when Miller became a formidable photojournalist, chronicling the horrors of the Nazi death camps as they were freed by the Allies.
After the war her life changed again, and she set down her camera, ultimately done in by her wartime experience. By the postwar years, she was a mother and a gourmet cook. Burke graciously provides “A Lee Miller Dinner for Eight” as an appendix.
But she also was haunted by her war memories, and perhaps other aspects of her singular life. She drank; she was depressed, but by the end faced her approaching death with remarkable composure.
Miller was a formidable presence, one that Burke brings to life in a slow but purposeful way.
Was Miller a feminist?
“Not in our modern terms,” said Burke in an interview. However, Burke said, Miller walked her own path during her seventy years. Her childhood was shocking, even by today’s standards more on that later. Her young adulthood was hardly ordinary: her life changed one day in 1926 when she was discovered on a New York sidewalk by magazine magnate Condé Nast.
Burke met Miller in May of 1977, just weeks before Miller’s death. The story of their meeting is a surprise for the reader, because Burke’s biography until then is a more comprehensive and even distant look at Miller, her legacy, her photographs and even the times in which she lived.
For Burke, the meeting was memorable, but she didn’t decide to work on a biography of Miller until many years later. Her memory of her subject was “that she was so down to earth. . . . There was gaiety. And she was dying with tremendous equanimity.”
Long after that personal connection, Burke began delving into Miller’s life. Burke comes from an academic background, having taught at Princeton, University of California Davis and University of California Santa Cruz. But she left her academic career far behind as she worked on the book.
And, as she confesses, the work became a major part of her life.
The most unsettling part of the book, both for the reader and the author, stems from Miller’s girlhood. At age seven, she was apparently raped. In addition, the rape was said to have given her a case of gonorrhea.
Beginning as early as the next year, the girl’s father, an amateur photographer, began shooting pictures of her — including nudes.
“At first,” said Burke, “I thought it was a case of incest. But in the course of interviewing family and friends, it wasn’t what it seemed. It probably didn’t go so far as that, but it certainly is unsettling.”
Miller’s father continued to shoot nudes of his daughter well into womanhood. Those years presaged her years in Paris, as she became a free spirit, a Bohemian and the lover and muse of photographer Man Ray — among many others.
Burke portrays a young woman who proclaimed her sexual freedom even while expressing doubts about it.
“She wanted to be loved,” said Burke, who went on to describe a comment from Miller that “I was very pretty, but I was a fiend inside.”
It’s this aspect of the biography that makes the work so fascinating for today’s readers. The book has won her glowing reviews in publications as diverse as the fashion magazine W, the youth-culture magazine Nylon, The Economist and The New York Times. “Young people are apparently latching onto the story," she said.
Woman of contradictions
For those of us unfamiliar with Lee Miller, the story is a remarkable one. Miller was, ultimately, a woman of contradictions, of great beauty, great power and ultimately great talent. She was a woman of her times, one whose life changed along with her adopted home of Europe during the first three-quarters of the twentieth century.
Burke details Miller’s transformation from Parisienne to a reluctant wife of a wealthy Egyptian. The book truly takes off as Miller transforms again into a photojournalist, documenting the horrors of the blitz on London in the early war years. Then, the reader is once again astounded by the graphic descriptions of Miller as war correspondent, as she goes along with servicemen during their ghastly discoveries in German prison camps. At one horrific scene, a French doctor who was also taking pictures observes a scene of dead and dying people tumbling out of a freight car, which makes him sick to his stomach and unable to go on. “Lee took the pictures I could not take," the doctor reports.
Miller’s story changes again, after that. Obviously haunted by the war memories, she puts down her camera for good. The trajectory of her life, from there, trends downward. Despite motherhood and a new role as gourmet chef, Lee Miller sinks into alcoholism and depression, her famous good looks long gone. Her second husband, the artist Roland Penrose, holds her as she dies at age seventy, of cancer.
Burke says that the research and the writing about Miller became part of her life as she proceeded with the story.
“Writing the Paris chapters, especially about her relations with Man Ray, I felt how blessed it is to be close, even briefly, to someone who shares in one’s creative life. Especially when it’s deeply entwined with the sexual/emotional.”
But an even more surprising change for Burke came during her research into the war years.
“I have been a peace activist for many years,” she said. “But when writing the war chapters, I came to understand the adrenaline rush, the high of combat and the camaraderie. . . . I admire her bravery and her ability to be one of the guys, the GIs, even though it proved to be too much for her once the postwar disillusionment and depression set in.”
The rhythm of Burke’s book builds as it goes, and reaches its peak with Miller’s war years. The final years are almost like a postscript, but the reader bids Miller farewell a bit reluctantly.
Burke’s book is what biography ought to be — and too often isn’t in this age of tell-all accounts and “pathographies,” as some have termed them. Lee Miller: A Life belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in how people of her generation dealt with their times. It’s a memorable tale.
“This handsomely produced and impeccably written and researched book is surely
a state-of-the-art biography.”
November 16, 2005
An Archetypal Twentieth-Century Woman
by Carl Rollyson
Was there an archetypal trajectory to the lives of women artists in the twentieth century? So many seemed to flee from a provincial or bourgeois upbringing to a cultural capital, ally themselves with a favored male artist, and then struggle to find their own individual creative identity. This template came to mind while I was reading Carolyn Burke’s ruminative life of Lee Miller (Alfred A. Knopf, 426 pages, $35). Her peregrinations reminded me of innumerable others’ — Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Rebecca West, Susan Sontag, and Jill Craigie, to list only those I’ve personally pursued as biographical subjects.
As I read about Miller’s Poughkeepsie, New York beginnings, where she chafed at provinciality and took off for Paris to study stage design, I thought of her contemporary Martha Gellhorn forsaking St. Louis for the same foreign capital and making the same mistake: checking into a maison de passe, a hotel for prostitutes. Both modeled clothes — Miller becoming the very image of the Vogue fashion plate. Both aligned themselves with major artists and became celebrated war correspondents.
In our template, the woman is as talented as her male counterparts but finds herself confined to what Gellhorn called “the kitchen of life.” Miller made the most of her postwar role as Lady Penrose — she was married to the Surrealist poet and Picasso biographer Roland Penrose — discovering the joy of cooking and establishing an international reputation as, among other things, “the sandwich queen.”
Of all the women I have in mind, Miller strikes me as the most heroic. She was raped at age seven and overcame both the horror and a resulting case of gonorrhea, which required painful treatments and made her feel that her life had been blighted almost before it began. She became a first-rate photographer and a pioneer photojournalist, taking some of the most arresting photographs of the Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the concentration camps (especially Dachau, where Gellhorn herself alighted and set what is perhaps her most important novel, Point of No Return).
Another part of the template is these women’s theatricality. Unlike Rebecca West, who did so much to open the world’s eyes to fascism and communism; or Lillian Hellman, who rivaled Miller in the culinary arts and shared a knack for self-dramatization; or Gellhorn, who grew bored when she could no longer live for adventure; or Susan Sontag who sought late martyrdom in wartorn Sarajevo, Miller came to terms with her desire to be at the center of history. In her explanation of this, Carolyn Burke rightly emphasizes a shot of Miller herself in Hitler’s bathtub.
Taken in the last days of the war, she sits in the tub, a grimy Aryan goddess, making a mockery of Nazi racial ideology, to be sure, but also suggesting how she is implicated in the evil of adoration — caught between the photograph of the Fuhrer on one edge of the tub and a small statue of Venus on the other. Ms. Burke brilliantly draws on Miller’s own history to understand this photograph. Miller knew that her own posing for Vogue created a certain kind of standard for beauty, a figure others were meant to idolize. She understood, in other words, what the cost of charisma can be when it narrows the world to a typology of the ideal, especially when that ideal is revved up by the modern media of photography and film.
In the same vein, Miller took a stunning photograph of Martha Gellhorn. The writer sits in front of a mirror, pen in hand, watching herself write while above her a photograph of Hemingway hovers. Gellhorn, Hellman, West, and Sontag never acknowledged just how self-conscious they were about writing themselves into the world’s consciousness. Miller is their superior in understanding what it meant to model yourself after others in order to make yourself the next model.
Only Jill Craigie, a documentary filmmaker who, like Miller, later in life settled into marriage (Labour leader Michael Foot was her third husband), understood the devastating toll the artistic life can take. Craigie’s name does not appear in Ms. Burke’s biography, but it should, since Craigie was the director of “Out of Chaos,” a documentary about wartime artists filmed in London in 1943. Miller visited the set and was photographed with Craigie and Henry Moore. Miller made sure Vogue wrote about the film because she understood that Craigie was breaking down the barrier between Modernist artists and the general public. Craigie’s footage of Moore drawing and describing how he did his tube shelter drawings is a major document of the self-revelation of twentieth-century art — a piece of film that has been used repeatedly in documentaries about Moore and Modern art.
Lee Miller’s photographs do much the same thing as Craigie’s film: They dramatize art and history, making both more accessible. Ms. Burke describes Margaret Bourke-White photographing the suicide scene of a Nazi officer.
She ”shot the scene from above, at a distance” but:
The treasurer and his family still lay on their deathbeds when Lee [Miller] reached the site hours later. She photographed them not from above but on the same level, the macabre scene formed by the women in the background and the man in the foreground, his allegiance signaled by the portrait of Hitler opposite his desk.
“On the same level” — history brought home, in other words.
Lee Miller was an exceptionally honest artist-observer, one who knew just how deeply implicated she was in her scenes. The composition of such photographs is obvious yet hardly lacking in subtlety, for we are being told so much not only about the scene but also about the scenic eye. This handsomely produced and impeccably written and researched book is surely a state-of-the-art biography.
“Lee Miller was an astounding woman, brought memorably to life in this astounding book.”
November 28, 2005
As rational as a scattered jigsaw
by Alastair Sooke
Lee Miller: A Life by Carolyn Burke
Carolyn Burke is upfront about this in her meticulous study of the feminist icon who hung out with Picasso (le Maître painted six portraits of her as a Provençal wench). Researching Miller’s life, Burke felt as though she were “assembling a puzzle from which pieces were missing” — an image that becomes more potent when you read what Miller said, despairing for her future, in 1945: “I feel about as popular as a leper and as rational as a scattered jigsaw puzzle.” No wonder that her son, Antony Penrose, pluralised the title of his portrait of his mother, The Lives of Lee Miller.
Born Elizabeth Miller in 1907 in a small town in upstate New York, she was raped by a family friend when she was seven years old. The incident remains murky — her son only found out about it after her death — but the damage inflicted cannot have been salved by her father’s insistence, throughout her adolescence, on photographing her in the nude.
By her late teens, she was a minxish bombshell, a flapper straight out of the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her career began after her accidental discovery, in New York in 1927, by Condé Nast, and an invitation to model for Vogue. She made her debut on its cover, a month before her 20th birthday, and was soon in demand as the soignée embodiment of modern womanhood.
Keen to try her luck behind the camera as well, Elizabeth changed her name to the androgynous “Lee” so that her sex wouldn’t get in the way of a career as a photographer. She moved to Paris in 1929 and tracked down Man Ray. The Surrealist photographer took her on as an apprentice, and — despite a difference in age of nearly seventeen years — the two became lovers, making erotic home movies in his Montparnasse studio.
The next few years were a giddy mix of libidinal and artistic energy. Lee became known for having the shapeliest breasts in Paris. One glass manufacturer even modelled a champagne glass after her bust. Her bête noire Cecil Beaton was a little more ambiguous, describing her as “a sun-kissed goat boy from the Appian way.”
After her relationship with Ray floundered, Miller married a wealthy Egyptian before falling for the English Surrealist artist and collector Roland Penrose in 1937. She spent the summer in a Cornish farmhouse at his invitation. The party included Max Ernst, Henry Moore and the English artist Eileen Agar. “It was a delightful Surrealist house party,” Agar recalled, “with Roland taking the lead, ready to turn the slightest encounter into an orgy. I remember going off to watch Lee taking a bubble-bath, but there was not quite enough room in the tub for all of us.”
This chapter of “al fresco romps” marks a turning point in Burke’s biography: the group converged on Picasso’s summer quarters outside Cannes, where they enjoyed déshabillé picnics in the mould of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, but their golden summers were soon tarnished by the prospect of war.
Miller was in London during the Blitz, holed up with Penrose in his Hampstead house. After D-Day, she became a photojournalist, and spent the rest of the war hot-footing it across Europe, filing pictures for Vogue. She documented the liberation of the concentration camps (“I could never get the stench of Dachau out of my nostrils,” she later said), and visited Hitler’s kitsch house in Munich, where she staged the darkly ironical image of herself in his bathtub, scrubbing her left shoulder. The contrast with her former self cavorting in a Cornish bathtub is devastating.
Miller’s wartime experiences changed her irrevocably. She drifted into irascible alcoholism, and drink destroyed her looks. By the 1950s, she had moved with Penrose to a farm in the hamlet of Muddles Green, East Sussex, where cooking became her passion. Old friends were stunned to see her in an apron, though, typically, her domestic display masked defiance. When Roland and the critic Cyril Connolly disparaged the American taste for marshmallows and Coca-Cola, she deviously prepared a “bombe surprise” for dessert. “When they’d eaten every last mouthful,” she recalled, ”I was pleased to announce that they had just eaten my patriotic invention: marshmallow-cola ice cream.”
It’s nigh on impossible to get a handle on Miller, who died from cancer in 1977, in Roland’s arms. Her life was a frenzy of reinvention and metamorphosis, and Burke often deploys metaphors of movement to describe her subject. Miller is “a spark-shredding locomotive,” “her own perpetual-motion machine,” “always in motion,” even towards the end of her life. “I keep saying to everyone, ‘I didn’t waste a minute, all my life’,” she said in 1947, concerned that she would not survive a Caesarean section. “But I know, myself, now, that if I had it over again I’d be even more free with my ideas, with my body and my affection.” That sense of freedom is irresistible.
Since her death, Miller’s reputation as a photographer has grown, and she is no longer known primarily as the Surrealists’ “perversely enchanting muse.” Burke stresses her claim to be remembered as an artist in her own right. Muse or artist, her independence is worth commemorating in itself. Lee Miller was an astounding woman, brought memorably to life in this astounding book.
“At last, a life and an album about one of the most beautiful women who ever lived. . . .
A remarkable book. . . . [Burke] lets the facts speak for themselves.”
November 28, 2005
Goddess From Poughkeepsie: Ravaged Arc of a Beauty’s Life
by David Thomson
Lee Miller: A Life by Carolyn Burke. Alfred A. Knopf. 426 pages, $35.
At last, a life and an album about Lee Miller, one of the most beautiful women who ever lived — an account that’s generally free from the adoration, the caution and the flat-out evasion that have spoiled so many other books.
Yes, there could be more pictures — not just those Miller took herself at the end of World War II, as she enjoyed the most intense experiences of an odd life; not just the complete works that came from those staggering years in Paris with Man Ray, when passion, voyeurism and benign accident changed the flame-like potential of eroticism; but dozens and maybe hundreds of the patient, long-suffering, half-imprisoned and deeply enigmatic nude studies for which she posed — as a young woman, an adolescent and a child — so that her father, a very practical man from Poughkeepsie, could gaze on her and . . . Well, already we’re touching on the mysteries of Lee Miller.
The question mark comes at the very start of her life. It cannot be ignored or eased aside; and the kind of minimalization that has sometimes been practiced in the past has answered nothing and spared no one.
Elizabeth Miller was born in Poughkeepsie on April 23, 1907, the child of Florence and Theodore Miller. Her father was the superintendent of the DeLaval Separator Company, a business that separated heavier from lighter liquids. Raised among Quakers, though not of that faith, Theodore Miller had taken a degree in mechanical engineering by correspondence course. And he had much practical experience with machinery. He had cameras and he took pictures of his children. As a baby and as an infant, the unknowing Elizabeth was posed for him in the nude. The father also possessed a stereoscope, an instrument that could show two adjacent pictures side by side, then unified to give the illusion of body and depth. What does Mother do when Father has such a hobby?
In 1914, when Elizabeth was seven, she spent a little time with family friends in Brooklyn: They were Swedish, and it’s said that their name was Kajerdt. On one visit, the little girl was apparently left in the care of an “Uncle Bob” and was raped — or, if not exactly raped, she was sexually molested so that she contracted gonorrhea. Carolyn Burke’s account of the event is brief — alarmingly so — and it includes no real speculation on the Kajerdts or “Uncle Bob.” As far as I can tell from this book — and every other published account of the incident — no one was ever apprehended or charged with the crime. There doesn’t seem to have been a pursuit. Perhaps this was tacit recognition of a truth endlessly rediscovered over the past ninety years: that when young children are sexually molested, it’s often at the hands of their own family.
There’s more to the story. Elizabeth required medical treatment — douches and “irrigation” with potassium permanganate. Ms. Burke is restrained in describing this, whereas I think every detail is relevant. We want to know more, for example, about the vague “psychiatric” counseling given to the child (sex and love, she was told, are different things and not to be confused).
At this point in her book, Ms. Burke is hesitant to the point of neglect, and I began to think there’d been family pressure on her to go gently with the matter. But Ms. Burke trusts the reader to find his or her own outrage; she lets the facts speak for themselves. And the facts are vivid.
In April 1915, with snow still on the ground, the father took his daughter out of doors, naked except for slippers, and photographed her for a study he called December Morn. In this picture, frostbite may seem a more immediate danger than sexual intrusion. But in her teens, already outrageously beautiful, Elizabeth was still the subject of her father’s stereoscopic photography — downcast, shy to the point of freezing, her eyes turned away, the hands she treasured lost to sight — in images that are both arousing and intensely uncomfortable. Ms. Burke’s opinion is still gentle and charitable, but now she does begin to point up a weird dissociation in Elizabeth, between erotic glory and her desperate refusal to notice that she’s being seen.
It’s easy to imagine an afflicted Elizabeth Miller still inhabiting some grim mental institution near Poughkeepsie; it says a great deal about her courage and her spirit that instead she’s universally famous, not just for her beauty but for the adventurousness of her life. Ms. Burke cannot say how quickly or thoroughly the girl recovered from gonorrhea, but by her early 20’s she’d become “Lee Miller” — not just a noted photographic model in New York and the casual lover of many artists, but the muse to Man Ray, his lover and companion, his dark-room apprentice, his personification of l’amour fou.
Man Ray, Lee Miller — to this day, there are feminist struggles over who did what, and Ms. Burke is a good enough art historian to insist on chance or accident helping, too. She concedes that the solarized “rayographs” were discovered by a mistake. She makes it clear that Lee was a brilliant pupil led to take up the camera herself. And she spells out some of their lesser-known pornographic work, in which Lee seems to have taken the lead. There doesn’t need to be a winner: Like partners in a sex act, they needed each other, and the details of the work — above all, Lee’s mouth and breasts — now float in the collective imagination.
No, this does not seem like a young woman traumatized by rape. But read on. Lee was plainly promiscuous, utterly unimpressed by loyalty. She married an Egyptian in the thirties, not without fondness, but just as much to experience Alexandria and desert scenery. Then, in the years just before the war, she met the Englishman Roland Penrose — collector, artist, impresario and friend to the modernists. She knew Max Ernst and Picasso. With Penrose, it feels like real love, and it takes Lee to England — to Hampstead in the days when London anticipated real bombs as well as the bombes surprises of surrealism.
With the war, Lee Miller found herself. Attached over the years to such magazines as Vogue, she got work as a photojournalist. Still in her thirties, still a knockout, she saw serious combat at Saint-Malo; she was in on the reclaiming of Paris, the crossing of the Rhine and the relief of the concentration camps. She was depicted by another lover, washing in Hitler’s bath. And her own camera was clicking away — no matter that the bodies she was photographing at Dachau were so terrible that only the act of photography protected her soul.
This is the best part of a remarkable book. For not only does Ms. Burke subtly equate the horrors of war with the impact of rape, she also shows how the headiest days in Lee Miller’s life — her real liberation as artist, writer and human being — were bound to result in anticlimax and dismay.
So it proved. Despite infidelities on both sides, she stayed with Penrose after the war, had his son and yielded to the country life he preferred in Farley Farm, a lovely but run-down property in East Sussex. She lost her looks. She took up drinking. And she gradually inherited the unhappiness or depression that busy years had suppressed.
There’s still much more that needs to be said, but for the first time the ravaged arc of Lee Miller’s life is clear, beautiful but lined in pain. In the end, the material may be too urgent for biography — it needs a novel or a great movie. Don’t think that actresses haven’t been tempted (Jodie Foster and Madonna, for starters). But none of them looked half as good, or a quarter as fiendish, as the girl from Poughkeepsie.
David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf), reviews books regularly for The Observer.
“Burke’s sympathetic tribute sheds . . . light on the lives of this highly original,
often misunderstood woman.”
December 1, 2005
Troubled witness
Lee Miller: A Life by Carolyn Burke. Knopf; 426 pages; $35. Bloomsbury; £20
Lee Miller was a bold, 22-year-old beauty from Poughkeepsie, New York, when she tracked down Man Ray in 1920s Paris and told him she was his new student. The American-born surrealist painter and photographer replied that he did not take pupils. But, as Miller explained decades later, “I guess he fell for me. We lived together for three years and I learned a lot about photography.”
Miller became a master of the surrealist image who then came into her own as a photojournalist during the second world war. Her photographs — of the liberation of Paris, of bombed-out Aachen and Cologne, the suicide of a prominent Leipzig family in 1945, or a Dachau prison guard floating dead in a canal — are hard to forget.
Until relatively recently, however, Miller’s fame, as a flawless beauty, photographic collaborator and model, overshadowed her artistic legacy. This first full-length biography, by Carolyn Burke, an Australian-born art critic, shows how Miller’s complex nature contributed to this neglect. Her photographic career was sporadic, with spells of intense activity alternating with bouts of lassitude. Also, unlike many artists, she rarely promoted or even showed her photographic work to those who might help her.
Miller was born in 1907, the only daughter of an engineer, inventor and keen photographer from whom she inherited a fascination with the technical intricacies of image-making. Ms Burke shows how their exceptionally close relationship is there to see in the nude photo sessions of Miller as a child and as a young woman, as well as in Man Ray’s photographs of her sitting in her father’s lap. She was also raped at the age of seven — an event which left the child with lingering gonorrhoea and chronic psychological difficulties, which were particularly visible in her relationships with men.
Miller’s steadiest commitment was with photography. An art student and cover model for American Vogue, Miller moved to Paris in 1929, where she started her own studio, photographing still lives and portraits. Ms Burke describes Miller’s affair with Ray, and her friendships with Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Max Ernst and Paul Eluard, all in careful detail. But the biography truly comes to life when, basing herself in a room overflowing with guns, camera equipment and crates of cognac at the Hotel Scribe in Paris, Miller became a war correspondent. This was an exhausting period that culminated in a famous image of her posing in Hitler’s bath after weeks on the road with the troops.
Miller cuts a lonely figure in later life. An adventurer at heart, she was not suited to marriage, motherhood and English country life with her second husband, Roland Penrose, a connoisseur and art collector. Gourmet cooking, fashion assignments for Vogue or taking photographs for Penrose’s books on Picasso and Antoni Tàpies left her unfulfilled. Her delicate features marred by drink and depression, Miller was often “out of sorts,” alienating her closest friends as well as her son Antony. Penrose meanwhile enjoyed a string of open love affairs with other women. “We cannot keep the world permanently at war just to provide you with entertainment,” Miller’s doctor argued. Lack of adrenalin was only part of the problem. Miller was also haunted by flights of wartime memories: “I got in over my head,” she explained to Ms Burke when they met briefly in 1977, adding that she could never get the stench of Dachau out of her nostrils.
Miller died of cancer later that year, leaving behind 60,000 negatives and photographs carelessly stuffed in cardboard boxes in the attic, as well as a further 20,000 documents, journals, cameras, love letters and Nazi relics. As he catalogued his mother’s work, Antony Penrose said he realised he had been “cheated out of knowing someone exceptional.” Carolyn Burke’s sympathetic tribute sheds further light on the lives of this highly original, often misunderstood woman.
“This book provides a rare and valuable sideways look at the mid-twentieth-century avant-garde.
Written in an easy style, peppered with a wealth of quotes and perceptive comment, it takes the reader deeply and unforgettably into the psyche of the strange little girl from Poughkeepsie who grew to become one of the most extraordinary women of her time.”
December 4, 2005
Lee Miller
by Iain Gale
Lee Miller: A Life by Carolyn Burke. Bloomsbury, £20
Every age has certain people who, standing on the periphery of the art world, draw to themselves — almost unconsciously and with often dramatic consequences — the brightest stars of their time.
Few, though, could boast of having spanned quite as many decades as the magnetic, enigmatic Lee Miller, now the subject, nearly thrty years after her death, of a welcome and long overdue biography sure to become essential reading for any student of the history of art and photography in the twentieth century.
Miller cast her spell over some of the century’s greatest artists, who in turn immortalised her: Roland Penrose, who became her husband; Man Ray, who taught her art in Paris; and the notoriously sex-hungry Picasso, to name only a few. It has been all too easy for her own story to be subsumed by those of her friends and lovers, but Miller was an artist as well as a muse.
Carolyn Burke, building on her illuminating essay for the 2001 Penrose/Miller show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, strips away the myth to uncover not only Miller’s artistic achievement, but her true character.
She was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in April 1907, into an apparently unremarkable middle-class family.
Her father Theodore worked in the chemical industry, but his interest in photography provides the first hint of Lee’s future. Such is the subtlety of Burke’s approach to her subject that almost by stealth the reader becomes aware, in a similar way perhaps in which it dawned on the young Lee Miller herself, that she was destined to be something special.
Intelligent, beautiful and fiercely independent, she was forced at an early age to confront her own dynamic sexuality. At the age of seven she was raped, probably by a family friend, and as a consequence contracted gonorrhoea. The effect, both psychologically and physically, was devastating, and Burke paints a picture as bleak as it is revelatory, writing with poignant acuity: “during rape integrity is ruptured, trust in the world undone.”
If Miller’s outgoing personality and daredevil character were a direct consequence of the rape, perhaps they were a form of compensation, or merely the result of feeling that life just couldn’t get any worse. What, after all, did she have to lose?
Burke draws us into the domestic life of Miller’s outwardly respectable family, which was in fact deeply troubled. We witness Lee’s expulsion from school after school, and experience vividly the agony of her father’s serial philandering with other women which led eventually to the attempted suicide of her mother.
Lee’s further education seems almost to have been a way out of this claustrophobia. But if her mother hoped for great things, she was to be disappointed, as Lee became by turn a dancer and a lingerie model. By 1925, casting herself as the archetypal “flapper,” she was heading for Paris to study art in the city of light characterised by Hemingway and Fitzgerald. It was a Damascene experience from which she never looked back, and her return to the States could only yield a drab comparison.
Predictably she escaped to New York City, still only nineteen, yet with a sophistication which belied her years. Here, while she now began to climb the social ladder, she continued at the same time her clandestine involvement in one of the most disturbing aspects of her life.
Throughout her childhood and teens Lee consented to being photographed nude by her father. In particular, Theodore Miller’s studies of his daughter in her late teens exude sensuality, and we can only wonder at the motive of both the photographer and his compliant model. Yet there was apparently no hint of actual incest, and the curious bond between the two is typical of the complex and intriguing relationships which Miller enjoyed throughout her life. The detail and care with which Burke treats the whole episode defines a book whose relentless close-ups bring her subject to life as never before.
Naturally, the core of the book concentrates on Miller’s relationships with the great and the good of the twentieth-century art world and the international glitterati.
First to appear is Condé Nast, founder of the magazine publishing empire, who in 1927 rescued Miller from being run over in a New York street. Typical of the sort of good fortune which ran throughout her life, the encounter led to the offer of a job at Vogue. By March of that year she was on the cover. Photographed subsequently by the great Edward Steichen, Lee began to wonder whether she might not eventually use a camera.
First, though, she set out to conquer New York café society and was soon rubbing shoulders with Fred Astaire, Cecil Beaton and the Vanderbilts. The rest is history — a romp through the century in the company of its greatest names. To go into detail here would only spoil a book which reads not only as serious biography but often like a picaresque novel, as Miller, initially known for her Surrealist-influenced fashion shoots and brooding, witty images of Paris, goes on to become something far greater than the sum of her parts. What gives Burke’s book an edge in telling this tale is the way she reveals that, while leading the double life of mentor and creator, Miller was continually absorbing all she could.
While she might have appeared to epitomise hedonism, Miller worked with a genuine sense of purpose conditioned by a real understanding of the meaning of life. We might have expected her to have excelled at fashion photography — as she did — but her real métier was the battlefield. Miller ranks up there in the pantheon of war photographers along with Robert Capa and Don McCullin.
Fearless and ever hungry to get that one truly great shot, she always made sure she was as close to the action as a woman could then get — from the London Blitz to the bloody siege of St Malo, the liberation of Paris and, most memorably, at Buchenwald and Dachau.
But if she became a doyenne in her chosen field, Miller never quite lost touch with her love affair with the opposite end of the lens. Who but she, after all, could have contrived to have been photographed in Hitler’s bathtub in Munich at the very moment when, in his Berlin bunker, the Führer was committing suicide?
More than a biography, this book provides a rare and valuable sideways look at the mid-twentieth-century avant-garde and high society. Written in an easy style, peppered with a wealth of quotes and perceptive comment, it takes the reader deeply and unforgettably into the psyche of the strange little girl from Poughkeepsie who grew to become one of the most extraordinary women of her time.
Army: The Soldiers’ Newspaper (Australia)
“This full-length biography is a fabulous read and a great insight into [Miller’s] remarkable life. . . .
The period around World War II is of particular interest.”
April 20, 2006
Off the Shelf
by Cpl. Damian Shovell
Lee Miller — model, actress, inventive photographer and among other things, war correspondent. This full-length biography is a fabulous read and a great insight into her remarkable life and those of the 1930s and 40s avant-garde, as she was involved with many of the leading artists in Paris and New York including Jean Cocteau and Man Ray. This in some ways later detracted from the recognition she deserved for her own work in photography. The period around World War II is of particular interest. During the war she helped produce a book in London titled Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire. And later, as a US war correspondent, she photographed the Allied liberation of France, then went on to witness the fall of Nazi Germany (the photo of her in Hitler’s bath is still considered an iconic image), before photographing pits full of corpses, the skeletons, and the starving survivors scavenging for food in rubbish dumps at the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald.
“As the first major biographer outside the Miller family, [Burke] traces a dynamic life
that embodies the spirit of the twentieth century’s first half.”
Lee Miller, A Life by Carolyn Burke: Alfred A. Knopf, November 2005
Miller (1907–1977) began her career as a fashion model, and quickly decamped for Paris, where she became Man Ray’s muse and student. After they split, she returned to Manhattan for a brief stint as a studio photographer, but eventually returned to Europe. Her surrealist background led to her taking stunning photos of the London Blitz, but she shot her most memorable — and disturbing — images accompanying American troops from Paris to Dachau as a war correspondent for Vogue. Burke’s meticulously detailed biography reveals how keenly Miller’s wartime experiences haunted her during her final troubled decades, but it also probes sympathetically into the artist’s other significant trauma: a childhood rape, which was, Burke conjectures, exacerbated by her father’s practice of photographing her nude well into early adulthood. Burke (Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy) writes with a careful sense of how Miller might have approached her work and of how it is perceived by modern viewers. Her descriptions of Miller’s imagery are so vivid that, despite the dozens of photographs reproduced here, readers will find themselves wanting to see more. As the first major biographer outside the Miller family, she traces a dynamic life that embodies the spirit of the twentieth century’s first half. Photos.
“[Lee Miller] does its complicated subject more than justice, adding welcome depths and nuances
to the familiar legend . . . Burke relates all this with sympathy and fluency.”
The beautiful and the damned
by Kevin Jackson
Lee Miller by Carolyn Burke: Bloomsbury, 448 pp., £20
Some artists lead quiet and routine-dominated lives: the Kafkas. Some lead rackety, adventurous lives: the Rimbauds. And then there are the rare artists who lead not just one, but a whole fistful of remarkable lives, any one of which might make a juicy feature film, crammed with sex, danger, celebrity and fun. At which point, cue Lee Miller (1907–1977). Depending on your bias, you could film her life as the story of one of the bravest war correspondents of the last century’the only woman photographer of the Second World War to work under enemy fire — who took part in the liberation of Dachau and Belsen and literally washed the filth of those death camps away in Hitler’s private bathtub. (The filth left in her mind by Hitler’s slaughterhouses never quite washed away.) Or you could tell the fairy-tale story of the pretty little girl from Poughkeepsie, New York, who ended up as a British aristocrat, pillar of the cultural establishment.
The story that people usually like best, though, is the very modern fable of the muse who metamorphosed into an artist. Variously described as the most beautiful woman in Paris, in New York, in Cairo, and in the whole world, Miller posed for, acted for or simply inspired male artists by the legion. Man Ray caught her face and body at their most glacially perfect in photos from the early 1930s; Cocteau, although more of a connoisseur of masculine charms, gave her a key role in his film Le sang d’un poète; Picasso, a lifelong friend who may also have been a lover, made paintings of her in the traditional dress of Arles. A less driven woman might have been content with such generous helpings of immortality, but she was not that placid woman. She took up the camera herself and, within barely a couple of years, had won international acclaim as a portraitist. It is as if Mona Lisa had grown bored with sitting, grabbed the brush from Leonardo’s hand and set up her own thriving atelier.
This is gloriously rich stuff for any biographer, and it would take a pedant or a zealot to make it dull. Fortunately, Carolyn Burke is neither of those tiresome things: she’s a good, hard-working, traditional biographer, and though her book might be faulted for one or two small lacunae, it does its perplexingly complicated subject more than justice, adding welcome depths and nuances to the familiar legend. The Miller we get to know in these pages can’t have been an easy woman to live with and love, especially in the later years when her blokeish hard drinking became full-blown alcoholism, but if you managed not to have your heart broken by her, you could surely bask in her fierce loyalty and gluttonous appetite for experience.
Her life story falls into quite clearly defined periods. What seems to have been a previously agreeable childhood was torn violently apart when, at the age of seven, she was raped by a family friend. Although the psychological consequences of this violation did not detonate for some years, she was also left with gonorrhoea, and had to undergo a series of painful and invasive treatments.
The experience does not seem to have dampened her delight in penetrative sex — if she felt a “letch” for a man, she would promptly seduce him (seldom a tough job) — though she was known to say that her father was the only man she ever trusted: a curious fidelity, since one of his favourite pastimes was taking highly erotic nude photographs of her.
A brief period in Paris at the end of her teens gave her a glimpse of an ideal spiritual home; a spell at art school in New York sharpened her creative ambitions; and a chance discovery (one of many “movie moments” in the biography) soon had her launched as one of America’s most sought-after fashion models.
The Manhattan of Gershwin was thrilling, but Paris had even greater charms, so she upped sticks, sought out a famous mentor in the person of Man Ray, and more or less overnight became his student and mistress. She loved Paris ardently; Paris loved her back. She became la femme surréaliste, not merely the most celebrated beauty of her day but a virtual incarnation of its adventurous, hedonistic spirit. It was wonderful, and yet it did not