What Is She Going To Do With Her Beauty?

Lee Miller (and Deborah Levy!) at the Tate Britain

A major exhibition of Lee Miller’s work just opened at the Tate Britain. If you’ve been here for a while, or read I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, you know I’m a bit of a Miller acolyte. I routinely make pilgrimages to her Paris apartment, and, for the Saltete Paris guide (paid subscribers get a discount…see the bottom of this email!) even went so far as to email Carolyn Burke (who wrote the biography on Miller) to ask if she knew which apartment Miller had occupied.

Alas, the opening of the show cut too close to my Paris departure for me to make it over, but as luck would have it my friend Carita was in London for work and went and brought me back the show catalogue.

Interestingly, though perhaps not surprising considering what I do, I came to Miller more through her war reporting than her photography. Many years ago, I picked up a Library of America collection of World War II reporting that included Miller’s dispatches for Vogue. It was only later I matched some of the dispatches to the photographs and proceeded to do a deeper dive.

I don’t necessarily have a comprehensive knowledge of Miller’s photography, but I’m now quite familiar with it, so it was nice reminder to hear Carita note how shockingly modern she found it all. “She looks like she could have been photographed yesterday!”

In this context, it’s also not surprising that Miller has been having a renaissance recently (I dearly wish the Kate Winslet biopic had done a better job). In an age increasingly dominated by visuals (to the point where I sometimes wonder if the techie overlords are trying to return us to the age of hieroglyphics), Miller’s photography lends itself to the succinctness of social media, while also managing to convey enigma and depth, what Deborah Levy described to Katy Hessel as “a sort of longing and pain and mystery.” (You can listen to Hessel’s interview with Miller’s granddaughter, Ami Bouhassane, here.) Miller is also, as Carita noted, recognizably beautiful. That’s a rare and compelling package.

Speaking of Deborah Levy! When I opened the show catalogue this morning (in a jet lag fugue induced, properly poured, 6am bubble bath, while eating all the Galaxy chocolate Carita also brought back for me…if this newsletter feels extra zingy it’s because I’m zig zagging through my morning on an UK chocolate sugar high) I discovered it includes an essay on Miller by Levy. Straight to my veins, as the saying goes. (Also, from where this newsletter takes it title.)

Here’s Levy:

Lee Miller’s beauty was not nothing. I love to gaze at her. But it is not everything either. When America entered the Second World War and she became an accredited war correspondent with the US Army for Condé Nast, it’s a part of her biography that transgressively disrupts the way we might put her together as an artist. It is true that, as the narrative goes, she stepped out of the delicate gowns of a fashion model and into the khaki uniform of a war photographer. Yet so much work and life happened in between. We could linger on the question of how any artist fits together. Miller’s art is how she put herself together and we can make of it what we will.

Miller’s art is how she put herself together! What a line.

Note title of photo.

Enjoy is by no means a heavily researched book, though it does contain some actual history. One of my favorite things to come out of the research I did do, was this Miller adjacent anecdote involving Martha Gellhorn and Colette. I complain constantly (and in the chapter in which the following is pulled from) about how we understand iconic women in isolation, but never in conversation with one another. So you can imagine my delight when I came across this footnote in Judith Thurman’s biography of Colette and was able to include it my own chapter about who gets a plaque in Paris (Miller only got hers two years ago).

Lee Miller photographed both Martha Gellhorn and Colette, within a year of each other, no less. The former in 1943, before either had set off to cover the invasion, and the latter in Paris in November 1944, presumably after Miller had returned from the front. Imagine being a fly on the wall in either of those sessions. Miller and Gellhorn particularly had followed a similar life trajectory from wealthy upbringing to glamorous women to war reporting and must have at least reflected on some of their shared experiences. But not surprisingly, it is Colette for whom the juiciest interaction with Gellhorn is reserved. Or at least the juiciest we know about.

In her twenties Gellhorn had a long, impassioned affair with Colette’s stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel [ed note: the basis for Chéri] (he was an adult at this point). At some point Gellhorn and Colette met, which we know about from a letter Gellhorn later wrote in 1993 to the author Donna Tartt (talk about secret history). Gellhorn described their meeting thusly:

She was a terrible woman. Absolute, utter hell. She hated me on first sight. She was lying on a chaise‑longue like an odalisque, with green shadow on her cat’s eyes and a mean, bitter little mouth. She kept touching her frizzy hair, which was tinted with henna . . . Having looked me over maliciously, she insisted that I pencil in my eyebrows—which were so blonde as to be non‑ existent—using a black crayon, so that the lines almost met in the middle. Well, I did it. Why? Because she told me to. And it was three days before some kind friend said to me, “My dear, what dreadful thing have you done to your face?” She was jealous of me . . . and Bertrand adored her all his life. He never understood when he was in the presence of evil.

Colette was a whole other sort of high‑grade bitch, it seems. [ed note: Hemingway had referred Beryl Markham as a “high grade bitch”] Though by the time Gellhorn wrote this, she was in her eighties, going blind, and was by all accounts not the easiest companion herself. Meanwhile, Colette’s love of remaking other people’s faces once manifested in an actual business. In the mid-Thirties she opened a beauty salon in Paris where she sold products that she made herself with fruits, vegetables, and cold cream. For the packaging, she used her own pro‑ file; for the label she used her signature. The business was a raging failure—she was accused of making one young client look like a so‑ called streetwalker—but Colette as the original beauty influencer who once remade Martha Gelhorn is something I dearly wish we could hear more about.

Miller’s portraits of Martha Gellhorn (London, 1943) and Colette.

I mean. You could make an entire series just from this one footnote!! Miller, Colette, Gellhorn AND Donna Tartt…a bingo card for the ages. And since we’re here, Thurman also included a terrific reflection on Beryl Markham (another personal obsession, and author of West With the Night) in the updated intro to her Isaak Dinesen bio, where she talks about meeting her during her research for the book.

At seventy-five, still rangy and glamorous, she resembled Greta Garbo not only in her chiseled features but in her sultry mistrust of words. Three or four large hunting dogs had the run of her disheveled bungalow, whose only library was a shelf of paperbacks. She served me the first of several gin and tonics at 11:00 a.m.; then we drove to the stable where she trained racehorses. I was dying of hunger by the time she’d fed them, so she proposed “a spot of lunch” at the venerable Muthaiga Club.

It only dawned on me slowly, as we lingered at the bar for another two hours, that she’d had no intention of paying for it. I watched with awe as Beryl flirted with a smitten, crimson-faced toff at least twenty years her junior, coyly feigning reluctance when he invited us to join him in the dining room.

Rangy and Glamorous. Sign me up.

The Tate show runs through February. If any of you make it, please tag me. I will happily consume any and all Lee Miller content.