Teen Vogue vs Trump; American Vogue vs Hitler
Teen Vogue’s excellent coverage of Donald Trump is being treated as a surreal media event. How come political commentary is appearing in a lifestyle magazine? The story of American Vogue photographer/writer Lee Miller shows that ‘women’s media’ has always been prepared for the frontline when all hell breaks loose.
In 1945, soon after Nuremburg had been taken by the allies, a former Vogue model from New York State had her photo taken in Hitler’s bathtub. Hitler looks at her from a small portrait leaning against the tiles. Nearby on the washstand is a classical female statuette. The army boots on the bathmat, the woman’s discarded uniform, and the sponge she holds to her bare shoulder indicate that this is a well-earned bath.
The woman in the picture is Lee Miller, a photojournalist who produced some of the war’s most compelling pictures, many of them for Vogue. Earlier that day, she and her companion David Scherman (of Life magazine) had witnessed and photographed the liberation of Dachau concentration camp. The Nazi’s massive crematorium had run out of fuel five days earlier and hundreds of bodies, sorted in piles according to gender and age, revealed the nightmare that had taken place. The starved and executed were accompanied by the sick and dying, lying in pools of excrement and vomit on the ground. Disease was rife and the stench was overwhelming. In Scherman’s recollection, the survivors were awe-struck by Miller, as she moved amongst them in her baggy uniform and bright red lipstick. She took photographs of the horror that had been inflicted upon civilians, then of the Nazi guards who had been beaten by the freed prisoners. Miller cabled Audrey Withers, editor of British Vogue, ‘I implore you to believe that this is true’. They left for the war front, ‘gulping for air and for violence’, needing to see Munich fall.
The Dachau pictures were published in American Vogue with the title ‘Believe it…’, accompanied by Lee’s extensive captions. The familiar celebrity house and garden format was turned inside out for her article, ‘Hitleriana’, printed in both British and American Vogue (July and August respectively), opening with the words:
I was living in Hitler’s private apartment when his death was announced. It was an ordinary semi-corner old fashioned building on a Platz.
It had been taken over as the command post of the 179th Regiment of the 45th Division. The place ‘lacked grace and charm, it lacked intimacy, but it was not grand’. She goes on to describe its layout, the books signed by Nazi well wishers, and the office chair which ‘Hitler’s bottom had warmed’. The creepy housekeeper confides that Hitler was a ‘Star Boarder’ who used to help fix the fires.
In the main entrance hall were cupboards holding crystal and china, linen and silver, all swastika’d and initialled A.H. There was a rubber plant and a black plaster eagle with folded wings. His bedroom was hung with chintz and the bed was upholstered in the same material. The bed table had a push-button gadget, which had Maid, Valet and Guard marked, and there was a large cream-coloured safe in the corner. The adjoining bathroom could have been bought from a furnishing catalogue, and connected through to a small single bedroom where intimate friends of the Führer stayed when they were in town.
It was a scoop crafted and delivered for the Vogue reader. To be inside Hitler’s home so soon after his death, to walk on his carpets and eat off his china, was an assurance to readers that the war was over. To Miller, the corner house was not a command post but a museum — a collection of objects that made the atrocities more real. In a letter to Withers she wrote ‘He’d never really been alive for me until today. He’d been an evil machine-monster all these years, until I visited the places he made famous, talked to people who knew him, dug into backstairs gossip and ate and slept in his house. He became less fabulous and therefore more terrible, along with a little evidence of his having some almost human habits’. The Vogue approach of getting to know someone through their home, their taste and their guests was, in this case, about knowing your enemy.
The photograph of Miller in the bathtub (taken in collaboration with Scherman) was typical of Miller’s style. Described by one critic as ‘the ultimate surrealist conceit’, it demonstrated her eye for the absurd; truth through the juxtaposition of competing images and ideas. One beauty (the statue) signifies the fascist ideal, now decidedly overthrown by a real, living beauty — the American GI washing off the grime of battle.
Lee Miller started out as a young model in the fast lane of New York. Not long back from Paris and art school, she was crossing the road when an unseen car caused her to step back suddenly into the arms of a stranger. The stranger turned out to be Condé Nast, the creator of Vogue magazine who was then living on Central Park. He was charmed by Miller and immediately offered her modelling work. Her face appeared on the cover of American Vogue in March 1927, designed by Georges Lepape and she soon became one of Edward Steichen’s favourite models. Miller had a look typical of the twenties; tall and slim with a strong, elegant profile and a relaxed, uninhibited attitude. She later commented on her modelling career: ‘I was terribly, terribly pretty. I looked like an angel, but I was a fiend inside’. A modelling career and Condé Nast’s extravagant, glamorous parties failed to hold her attention and she began craving Paris and creative expression. At the age of 22 she left for France with a list of contacts into Vogue and the address of photographer Man Ray. Miller was determined to be his apprentice rather than his model. Arriving at his apartment, she was told that Man Ray had just left for Biarritz. She went to a nearby café to contemplate her ill fortune when the Man himself walked through the door.
I told him boldly that I was his new student. He said he didn’t take students, and anyway he was leaving Paris for his holiday. I said, I know, I’m coming with you — and I did. We lived together for three years. I was known as Madame Man Ray, because that’s how you do things in France.
They became lovers, which did not stand in the way of her other infatuations. She continued to model for the Vogue studios in Paris, mostly for George Hoyningen-Huene but was soon taking photographs for Man Ray, freeing him up to devote more time to his surrealist painting. Their relationship ended suddenly when she fell in love with an Egyptian entrepreneur, Aziz Eloui Bey, and took off to Alexandria with him. There she ‘oscillated between extreme boredom, hypochondria and adventurism’ and passed the time by taking pictures, throwing parties and setting out on desert expeditions with her society pals. When the fun wore off she returned to Paris where she became involved with surrealist artist (and founder of the ICA in London), Roland Penrose. They were on holiday, visiting Picasso at Antibes, when they heard that Hitler had invaded Poland. Miller and Penrose travelled not to safety in America but to England, where she received a letter from the US embassy instructing her to return or they would no longer be responsible for her. She tore it up.
One of Lee Miller’s greatest achievements is a book published with Edward R. Murrow, entitled Grim Glory: pictures of Britain under fire, which was aimed at the general US public with the intention of demonstrating the suffering of the blitz. It was done with a sense of the poetic and her usual wry humour. One image shows two geese in front of a landed barrage balloon, another a damaged typewriter — not typical images of war, but designed to show the reader that there was life and humanity amongst the horrors. Seeing how well the American journalists were living compared to the locals, Miller decided to become a US war correspondent, assigned to Vogue.
Critics to this day are surprised that the only woman combat photographer to accompany the Allies advance across Europe was working for Vogue. Miller was not officially allowed to be there; everyone expected her to stick to stories of nurses and women’s work. However, with her ‘casual, no-sweat, yet compassionate manner’ she gained acceptance by the troops and managed to talk herself all the way into battle. When she was sent to report on ‘how the Civil Affairs team moved in after hostilities to get things running smoothly’, Lee found that someone had forgotten to tell the Germans that St. Malo was no longer hostile. She had accidentally landed on the front, at the HQ of the 83rd Infantry who were under heavy fire. She was soon on good terms with the officers who ‘found nothing extraordinary in her presence’. David Scherman writes in the introduction to a collection of her war photography and journalism:
I chuckled to myself at the monstrous irony. Not only had Steichen’s former model been a fastidious, obsessive clothes-horse (snappy dresser, as she called it), but she was also a rabid food hypochondriac who had collected a home pharmacopoeia of exotic liquids and powders to combat the lethal effects of our civilised gastronomy. Now, in the excitement — and joy — of battle, all this nonsense went out the window. For about a year, with occasional exceptions, she looked like an unmade, unwashed bed, dressed in o.d. (olive-drab) fatigues and dirty GI boots, and she wolfed down, without pill or powder, whatever chow the current mess-sergeant saw fit to shovel up. She thrived on it, and it didn’t really effect her automatic eye for fashion either — dig that chic line in the St Malo story: ‘the soldiers emerged with grenades hanging from the lapels like Cartier clips’.
Sherman recalls the irony of being sent to cover the first Paris Fall collection since the German occupation for Life whilst Miller was on the fighting front near Luxembourg for Vogue. He admits that his story was an artistic disaster, whilst Lee’s on liberation ‘turned out to be as eloquent and telling an account… as you’ll find anywhere’. She wrote:
What is Liberty? It is the little things, added up to equal freedom instead of despair. It is the columns of evacuees leaving the front, sad to leave their land, but willing; it’s the cinema for no purpose; it’s the group in the street, laughing; it’s trusting your friends and your family; or a newcomer because he has an honest face; it’s the opportunity to offer or refuse yourself for something you understand.
The pattern of liberation is not decorative. There are the gay squiggles of wine and song. There is the beautiful overall colour of freedom but there is ruin and destruction. There are problems and mistakes, disappointed hopes and broken promises. There is wishful thinking and inefficiency. There is ‘Military Expediency’. There is grogginess like after a siesta, a ‘sleeping beauty’ lethargy…
Miller’s journalism is only just beginning to be recognised for the humane and eccentric style that distinguished it from so much wartime reporting. In Vogue, Miller asked the questions that wouldn’t have occurred to the news press:
Who polished the verdigrised saucepans? Who replaced the rusted well chain? Were the shelves dusted? The cupboards clean? Who swept up the petits-moutons which must have gathered under the bed? There must have been a hell of a mess. Did they start their quarrels and gossip where they left off? Did they ask what the neighbours and been saying about them all this time? Had the milkman left rows and rows of bottles on the sill? Had the tradesmen tried to collect their bills? Were there fresh lettuces and eggs in the larder?
Lee Miller sent Withers long stories and wrote detailed captions, anxious to know whether they were making it to print and badgering her editor for more direction, paper and digestants. ‘I have no way of knowing what you like or what you are using and find myself coming to full unnecessary stops in work because you never comment’, she cabled. Nonetheless, Withers published as much of it as would get through the censors, describing it as ‘the most exciting journalistic experience of my war. We were the last people one could conceive of having this type of article, it seemed so incongruous in our pages of glossy fashion’.
Lee Miller continued to work for Vogue up until 1953. Although Audrey Withers loved Miller’s writing and continued to accommodate it, Miller found the act of writing increasingly tortuous. Roland Penrose sent a private letter to Withers imploring her not to give his wife any more written assignments as it inflicted pain on both Miller and her household. After her retirement as a photographer, Miller became dismissive of her achievements and brushed off requests to exhibit and publish her work. According to her son, she suffered from post-natal and post-traumatic depression. In his account, the only thing that kept her alive was her cooking, which she took on with all the creativity, obsession and humour that she devoted to her former career. She collected thousands of magazines and cook-books, threw extravagant dinner parties and won awards for her culinary skills. She even used her cooking as a form of revenge:
One day, Cyril Connoly, who delighted in being rude to his hostess, was expounding his views on the decadence of American culture. ‘They have the moral strength of a marshmallow and will drown themselves in a sea of that revolting beverage Coca-Cola’, was his contention. Lee said nothing, but disappeared to the kitchen. That evening the desert was particularly delicious and Lee’s eyes gleamed with triumph as Cyril congratulated her. It was made from marshmallows and Coca-cola (Antony Penrose).
As critic Becky E. Conekin has written, this era of Miller’s life is often depicted as a retreat, a surrender to the private sphere. Domestic comfort, commodity and consumption came to define the 1950s, along with a baby boom that returned many women to the home. Although there is some indication that Miller sacrificed her career to allow Penrose to take the spotlight (she became Lady Miller when he was knighted), it is not necessarily the case. Her life — attitude and achievement — is notable for the way in which she amalgamated the public and private spheres. She moved easily between war and home, fashion and truth, reflecting the reality of women’s experience.
At the end of her life Miller became the subject of various magazine features. American Vogue and Studio International both ran full length articles on her but it was her cooking, rather than her photography, that they were interested in. House and Garden produced a story consisting of 3 double-page spreads with photographs by Ernst Beadle of Miller in her kitchen and her home interior. It should have been titled ‘Milleriana’.
Lee Miller’s story is the perfect reminder that domesticity, fashion and politics (especially war) are not separate within a human life. To separate these spheres as belonging either to lifestyle media or to political commentary denies the experiences and expertise of female journalists and their readers. Teen Vogue takes down Trump? Believe it…
