My father, however, lived in the immediate, proximate here and now. His lobotomy — that was the operation he had undergone — seemed to have left him pretty much unchanged, on casual examination. His mood was uniformly good but he had lost all interest in his old profession, the world of letters: he didn’t write a word, he didn’t read a word. His entire intellectual life, it seemed, was concentrated around the business of two-move chess problems — composing, plotting, testing and then sending them in to newspapers and chess magazines. And he was extravagantly unpunctual, showing up for lunch at 5.30 in the afternoon, or going to a dentist’s appointment in Brighton three days late. I once waited for him at Lewes station for two hours (he had arranged to pick me up in the car). I telephoned the house and was told that he’d set out to collect me just after breakfast. We had no idea what he’d been doing or where he’d been when he returned home shortly before midnight. He smilingly said he’d gone to pick me up but I wasn’t there. He gardened diligently and went for long walks on the Downs, a small travelling chessboard bulking out his jacket pocket. His world had become very circumscribed but he was entirely happy within it.
Towards the end of the year Cleve sent me a lengthy apologetic letter (I had written telling him of the transformation in my health, but not Sir Victor’s diagnosis). The London office would not be reopening, he said, offering up the usual excuses — money, the world crisis, the state of US publishing, retrenchment in the magazine business, other areas of expansion taking precedence — but he wanted me to meet a friend, a certain Priscilla Lucerne, who was coming to London early in the new year. He would set everything up — he thought it would be worth my while.
In February 1939 Priscilla Lucerne’s letter arrived. She would be in London for a week, staying at Claridge’s before moving on to Paris. She would love to invite me for tea. So I went up to London to meet her in the Palm Court. She was a petite, slim, elegantly dressed woman in her forties with her hair dyed Bible-black with a short fringe to mid-forehead. Her lips were painted the deepest scarlet. She smoked cigarettes from a ten-inch holder. She failed to hide her disappointment when it became apparent that I had never heard of her, apart from her connection with Cleve. She wasted no time in enlightening me: she was the editor of American Mode — and she wanted to offer me a job as a staff photographer.
I saw the hand of Cleve Finzi everywhere — Cleve’s sense of guilt in action, trying to make life good for me again after the disaster of Global-Photo-Watch.
‘But I’m not a fashion photographer,’ I said to Priscilla.
‘Cleve Finzi says you’re an excellent photographer and that’s all I’m interested in,’ she said, fixing another cigarette into its holder. She looked at me, openly. ‘Let’s be honest, dear Amory, taking a photograph of a fashion model is well within your capabilities. You know how to light an interior shot, I assume.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘We choose the model, the outfit, the location — even, sometimes, the pose. I’m sure you’ll cope admirably.’
I wondered what she owed Cleve Finzi, what debt to him had been cancelled by her offering me this opportunity. She didn’t seem particularly enthused; she didn’t even ask to see my portfolio. I requested some time to think about it. I explained I was convalescing after a long illness.
‘Take all the time you wish, my dear,’ she said with a wide but empty smile. She had done her duty.
I did think about it, for some weeks, as my strength returned and I began to feel like my old self again. Cleve wrote, prompting me further. Nothing else appealing was on the horizon and I had to earn a living so, eventually, I replied to Priscilla Lucerne saying I would like to accept her kind offer. Formalities ensued; there were the inevitable bureaucratic delays, but in the summer of 1939 I embarked once again for the United States of America, leaving Europe on the brink of war.
4. LE CAPITAINE
WE HAD SPENT THE morning in Central Park, west side, up in the 80s, shooting outdoors as if we were in the country, and now, in the afternoon, had moved back to a rented studio on 7th Avenue in the Garment District. I was taking photographs for a section of American Mode entitled ‘As You Were Leaving’. On the final two or three pages of the magazine there would be a spread of fashion shots of ‘affordable’ clothes by unnamed American designers, tacked on as an afterthought for readers who couldn’t afford French couture — not that there was much of that available now the war was well under way. This was my daily bread; I didn’t enjoy it particularly and I wasn’t very good at it, to be honest, but it paid my wages and my name was never credited.
Similarly, the models we employed on ‘As You Were Leaving’ were not the best known, perhaps a little past their prime, happy to accept a reduction in their usual fee just to be in work. The model I had been photographing in Central Park was Kitty Angrec, in her thirties, like me, and, like me, relatively content to be a back-page girl.
I took her photograph, setting her against a wide paper magenta roll lit with a 500-watt spotlight and a photo-flood number one with silver reflector. I knew it would look fine but my heart wasn’t in it and neither was hers — we were both growing tired; it had been a long day. I had an assistant, Todd — they were always changing, some kid or other — and I left him to remove the film from the camera, label it and send it round to the Mode labs and followed Kitty into the changing rooms for a drink and a cigarette.
Kitty was a rangy girl who just missed out on being a true beauty. That strange geometry that a face has — eye versus nose versus lips — had managed only to make her ordinarily good-looking. Her top lip was a little too long, the brow-lash connection slightly skewed. . I had tried to analyse it but couldn’t quite understand what was so slightly out of kilter. We both lit cigarettes and I took out a quart of rum and poured a couple of shots into paper cups. Kitty began to undress.
‘You want to meet up tonight, Amory? I’ve got a sitter.’
Kitty had a three-year-old son whose father was in the US Navy.
‘Not a bad idea. What’ll we do?’
We ran through the options as she removed her clothes. She slipped off her skirt to reveal fishnet stockings and high heels, and as she shimmied out of her slip she dropped her cigarette and stooped to pick it up.
‘Don’t move,’ I said and scampered off to find my camera. I snatched it from Todd — it was a Rolleiflex.
‘You haven’t unloaded.’
‘Not yet, Miss Clay.’
I ran back into the dressing room and switched on all the lights.
‘Just do what you did before,’ I said to Kitty. ‘Stoop down as if you’re picking up your cigarette.’
She stooped, bending her knees reaching for an imaginary cigarette. Click.
The resulting image was my best ever fashion shot, in my opinion, of all the hundreds I took for American Mode. I shot it in ten seconds with the lighting available in the room. I had it printed up and took it to Priscilla the next day.
‘Nice,’ she said. ‘But I can’t run this in Mode.’
‘Why not?’
‘We’re not Bazaar, we’re not Vogue. We’re American Mode. It’s a big difference.’ She handed the print back to me. ‘Nice try, Amory. But it’s too. . provocative. It would have been fine in your scandalous show but not in my magazine. Sorry.’