Jerome Zerbe & Lucius Beebe

Society photographer Jerome Zerbe (1904-1988) was born of privilege in Euclid, Ohio. He was an originator of a genre of photography that is now known as “celebrity paparazzi.” In the 1930s Zerbe was a pioneer of shooting photographs of famous people at play and on-the-town. However, he differed from his successors in a major way – Zerbe was of the same social class as his photographic subjects, and he arrived at high society parties with his own engraved invitation in hand. He often traveled and vacationed with the stage and film stars he photographed.

Some of his best known images were of Greta Garbo at lunch, Cary Grant helping columnist Hedda Hopper move into her new home, bodybuilder/actor Steve Reeves shaving, playwright Moss Hart climbing a tree, Howard Hughes having lunch at “21” with Janet Gaynor, Ginger Rogers flying first-class, plus legendary stars Charlie Chaplin, Gary Cooper, surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, Jean Harlow, writer Dorothy Parker, boxer Gene Tunney, author Thomas Wolfe and the fabulously wealthy Vanderbilt family.

Zerbe’s mother was Susan Eichelberger*, the child of a successful railroad lawyer in Urbana, Ohio, and his father was a prominent and prosperous businessman, owner of the Ohio and Pennsylvania Coal Company. Two of his uncles were lawyers in Urbana, another the Superintendent of West Point. Jerome’s mother was so beautiful and possessed of such a captivating voice that, while once visiting New York City,  she received a serious offer from a theatrical impresario to star in a play, and she accepted. When her parents found out, they dispatched an uncle to return her to the “safety” of Urbana. Her family’s social standing was such that they subscribed to the mandate that a woman’s name should appear in print only three times: at birth, upon marriage, and at death.

*There is a street named Eichelberger in Urbana, Ohio.

Young Jerry Zerbe was driven to public school in the family limousine, which got him beaten up by bullies. He survived well enough to make it through Yale. A supreme social networker, he gained important social prominence in New Haven, which later would serve him well in New York, London and Paris, where he studied art. Soon after graduation from university he went to Hollywood to try his hand at drawing portraits of famous film stars. He was befriended by Gary Cooper, Hedda Hopper, Cary Grant, Errol Flynn, Randolph Scott, Marion Davies and Paulette Goddard. Soon enough he picked up a camera, photographing stars in Hollywood’s Golden Age as well as mere hopefuls, who, before they became famous, would pose for him with few, if any, clothes.

He was for years the official photographer of Manhattan’s famed Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center and fabled nightspot El Morocco, the places to see and be seen at the time. Zerbe pioneered the business arrangement of getting paid by a nightclub to photograph its visitors, before giving away the photos to the gossip pages of print media. For over 40 years, Jerome Zerbe traveled the world taking pictures of celebrities, amassing an archive of over 50,000 photographs.

Below: 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor (center) and first husband Conrad "Nicky" Hilton, Jr. (right) at El Morocco in 1950.

After taking up residence in New York City, he served as art director of Parade magazine and photographer and society editor for Town and Country. Zerbe also contributed photographs to Life and Look magazines and was a Navy photographer during World War II. He was the author of several books of photographs, including Happy Times (1973), which includes his photographs from the El Morocco years. A trip to Paris to photograph estates and country homes (and their occupants) led to a secondary career as an architectural photographer.


In 1988 Jerome Zerbe died at age 85 at his New York City apartment on Sutton Place. Oh, I forgot to mention that Jerome was credited with having invented the vodka martini.

Below: Lovers Cary Grant and Randolph Scott photographed "at home" by Zerbe (1933):

Romantically, Zerbe’s most significant relationship was with syndicated society columnist and writer Lucius Beebe (1902-1966), who made almost embarrassingly frequent and flattering references to Jerome in his newspaper column “This New York,” read by millions each morning. Beebe was so wealthy and possessed of such a confident personality that he became one of the first members of high society who lived as an openly gay man. When questioned about his sexual orientation, Beebe (photo below) could slam down his drink and shout, “Go to hell,” and that would be the end of it.

Beebe also wrote 35 books, and I just now got around to reading one that's been on my Kindle for well over a year: The Big Spenders: The Epic Story of the Rich Rich, the Grandees of America and the Magnificoes, and How They Spent Their Fortunes (1966)

Written in florid, effusively dated language, this was Beebe’s last (35th) book, detailing how über-rich Americans blew through their vast fortunes in rather eccentric ways. Part of the fun of reading this is being introduced to characters now long forgotten. We all know the peccadillos of the Astors and Vanderbilts, but Beebe introduced me to Mrs. Kate Moore (1846-1917), an heiress from Pittsburgh, who became one of the leading figures in Paris high society, especially among the expatiate Americans. She entertained lavishly, and she commissioned the great society portraitist John Singer Sargent to paint her several times. Sargent wrote to Henry James about her in 1884, “I am dreadfully tired of the people here and of my present work, a certain majestic portrait of an ugly woman [Mrs Kate Moore]. She is like a great frigate under full sail with homeward-bound steamers flying.”

Beebe’s comment about this inveterate social climber, who bought her way into society, “(she) departed from life as she would from the Ritz, handing out tips to everyone.”

Then there’s Spencer “Spec” Penrose (1865-1939, owner of Colorado Springs’ Broadmoor Hotel), who  maintained active membership in the Pacific Union, San Francisco’s most exclusive and expensive gentlemen’s club on the top of Nob Hill, as long as he lived. When asked why he remained a member of a club he never used, he replied, “My God, man. I might want a drink out there.” The idea of drinking in public never occurred to him, and the thought that he might not want a drink at any place, any time, was equally unthinkable.

After graduating last in his class at Harvard, he was enticed to Colorado in the 1890s by his Philadelphia neighbor Charles Tutt, and Spec was soon engaged working in Tutt’s real estate offices in Cripple Creek. He and Tutt went on to make unfathomable fortunes in gold, copper and mineral milling. So flush with cash, Penrose once left himself a note on his bedside table not to spend more than a million dollars the next day. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

“Penrose made a personal assay of Cripple Creek, a howling wilderness and suburb of hell whose Myers Avenue was the widest-open red-light district anywhere outside Butte, Montana, and whose three booming railroads were daily rolling up the hill with palace cars filled with additional girls, madams, hard-rock miners, anarchists, three-card monte men, tippers of the keno goose, whiskey salesmen, confidence-game artists, eastern capitalists, newspaper reporters, and real estate speculators. Penrose liked what he saw.”

Once he had left Philadelphia and resettled to Colorado in 1892, “the only criticism anybody had was of Spec’s clothes. He wore beautifully tailored riding breeches and English boots that cost $100 a pair. Apprised that the community considered him a dude in some respects, Penrose at once sent East for a suit of evening tails and a half dozen opera hats and started dressing for dinner. There were a few catcalls at first, but most of the roughnecks who took exception to his attire were out of the hospital as good as new in two or three weeks.”

After being rebuked by the management of the fabled Antlers hotel in Colorado Springs for riding his saddle horse up the front steps and into the lobby bar, Penrose’s gesture of retaliation was to build the Broadmoor Hotel in 1918 (at the then cost of $3,000,000), all the while stealing from The Antlers the hotel manager and its chef de cuisine, paying them double the salary they had been making at their former employ.

“Once in the 1930s Spec stopped briefly in Philadelphia to see a friend and visit his birthplace at 1331 Spruce Street. It had not been occupied for years, and not a piece of furniture had been moved in over a half century. An ancient butler met the master at the door as though he had only left that morning. A venerable cook appeared to get her orders for dinner. Penrose had kept it that way as a sort of family shrine, a memorial to his youth impervious to the hostile winds of change.”

Upon his death in 1939, Penrose’s $125,000,000 fortune was the largest sum ever filed for probate in the Rocky Mountain region.

If you are fascinated by this sort of thing, this is your book. The Big Spenders. Available in e-reader formats.

George Dureau

King of the New Orleans Art Scene

New Orleans based painter, sculptor and photographer George Dureau (1930-2014) died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. His black and white photographs, charcoal sketches and arresting paintings captured the spirit of New Orleans at its highest and lowest levels. Many of his art works were strongly homoerotic in nature, and he favored nymphs and satyrs, as well as live male models who were dwarfs and/or amputees. His art was placed all over New Orleans, in restaurants, bars, museums and outdoor public spaces.

Dureau was a larger than life character, often seen on his bicycle or black Jeep cruising through the old quarter. His unkempt long hair and beard, coupled with his booming bass voice spewing forth bawdy comments, led some to label him Mephistopheles. Dureau called himself a “neo-classical homosexual,” a reference to elements depicted in his paintings. He had a rare talent for being able to paint outsiders, often picked up off the streets, in a way that elicited no pity. There was always a dignity in the expression of his subjects.

George was a legend in his own time, and seemingly every citizen of New Orleans knew who he was. While it would have been to his professional advantage to relocate to NYC, he stayed put, reigning over his home town art scene. In fact, Dureau managed to forge a national and international reputation while staying home.

He had a vibrant personality and sharp wit, and he was a great entertainer. His buffet spreads looked like still life paintings, everything arranged just so. His youthful work as a window dresser was evident. Dureau’s apartment/studios were a riot of “arranged” clutter, a delight to the eye, which joyfully darted from one surprise and treasure to the other.

When recent medical costs led him to sell artworks and furnishings, his friends rallied and made sure the bills got paid. They were more than willing to give back to a local denizen who had brought such quirky interest and joy to their lives.

George Platt Lynes

George Platt Lynes - self portrait 1940s

c. 1952

The American fashion and commercial photographer George Platt Lynes (1907-1955) discreetly produced a large body of homoerotic images that he kept for himself or distributed to a carefully selected circle of friends. For many years after his death, it was thought that he had destroyed all his prints and negatives of male nudes, but it turns out that most of them had found their way into the archives of the Kinsey Institute (Indiana), which now possesses the largest collection of male nudes by Lynes to be found anywhere. 

During the 1930s, Lynes was commissioned as a fashion photographer for magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. After relocating from NYC to Los Angeles, he became Hollywood’s acclaimed celebrity portraitist. During this time he was also pursuing a personal body of black and white photographs of male nudes and homoerotic images that he kept private, fearing they would harm his reputation and business in a homophobic society. While his earlier nudes depicted idealized youthful bodies, such as a young Yul Brynner, he moved towards a rougher and more sexualized aesthetic in his later work. As a pioneer in masculine erotic photography, George Platt Lynes also helped forge Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s research on homosexuality.

Bill Miller (1953) by George Platt Lynes

Lynes was born in 1907 in East Orange, New Jersey, but a life-changing event came with his relocation to Paris in 1925, a move meant to prepare him for college. While in Paris he forged friendships among the artistic elite and was never seen without his camera. Once again stateside, he opened a photographic studio in NYC and began a private series of photographs that interpreted characters and stories from Greek mythology, but it was portraiture that brought financial stability. Today he is best known for his portraits of artists such as W.H. Auden, Jean Cocteau, Colette, Aldous Huxley, Igor Stravinsky and Thomas Mann. After he moved to Hollywood in 1946, he photographed Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, Gloria Swanson, and Orson Welles. In 1948 he moved back to NYC, where he remained until his early death from lung cancer in 1955.

Gordon Hansen (1954)

Robert McVoy by George Platt Lynes 

Earl Kage and Hamilton Driggs

Out in the office place at Eastman Kodak (Rochester)

By the 1950s the Eastman Kodak Company (Rochester, NY) had a number of gay male employees who,  although not "out" by today’s standards, did not keep their sexual orientation secret. Two examples were Earl Kage (1919-2008) and his partner, Hamilton “Bud” Driggs (1925-2008), who shared a home on Lafayette Park and a 100-acre country estate in the Bristol Hills, both in the Rochester area. After their deaths in 2008, the estate was donated to the University of Rochester.

Kodak photographer and arts patron Earl Kage  (photo above) was a one man cultural institution in his native Rochester. Distinguished by his pure white handlebar moustache, he was recognized as a sponsor of opera, dance, fine arts and numerous other cultural institutions. He worked at Eastman Kodak for 44 years, from youth to retirement. In 1987 he received the Culture and Arts Civic Award from the Rochester Chamber of Commerce, and in 1989 a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Arts and Cultural Council. Kage became head of Kodak Camera Research after attending The University of Rochester and serving in the U.S. Army in England during World War II as a photographer for the Stars and Stripes newspaper.

His dedication to the arts resulted in his serving on boards of the Friends of Eastman Opera, Garth Fagan Dance Company, the Rochester City Ballet, The Aesthetic Education Institute, Friends of School of the Arts and affiliations with the George Eastman House of International Photography, Rochester Children's Theater and the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. He often served as a judge for many art-related shows over the years.

Hamilton “Bud” Driggs worked for Eastman Kodak for 30 years as head of Exhibits and Displays, following employment at the Atomic Labs at the University of Rochester. He assisted Kage in setting up a photographic studio in Rochester. Driggs was also a talented silversmith who won prizes for his craft work. A professional photographer, he recorded his travels to such remote spots as the Arctic Circle, Nepal and New Guinea. Both Driggs and Kage enjoyed an atmosphere of acceptance while working at Eastman Kodak.

In fact, some historians purport that George Eastman (1854-1932), the father of modern photography and founder of the Eastman Kodak Company, was himself a gay man.  In the late 19th century homosexuality was a major taboo, so Eastman never went public with his sexual orientation. However, his private correspondence of over 700 letters and general accounts of Eastman’s personal life confirm that he was not heterosexual. Eastman was a generous philanthropist, and he established and supported the Eastman School of Music, one of the nation’s preeminent institutions of music. During the 1920s, Eastman was listed as the fifth-largest individual donor in the United States, and by his death he had given away about $100 million.  His total donations to the University of Rochester totaled $50 million. Using the name "Mr. Smith," Eastman gave $20 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) over many years. He also donated to several colleges for African Americans. At the onset of a nerve disorder and general failing health, Eastman took his own life with a pistol in 1932.

Herbert List

Gay German photographer Herbert List (1903-1975) was the son of a prosperous family that ran a coffee brokerage business. List received a classical education in literature at the University of Heidelberg but apprenticed at his family’s coffee company, which afforded him travel to Brazil, Guatemala and Costa Rica. He began taking photographs during these business trips, and his legacy became black and white homoerotic photographs of young men.

In his earliest photographs List shot portraits of friends and composed still lifes with a Rolleiflex camera, using male models, draped fabric, and masks – along with double-exposures. He had a fascination with Surrealism and Classicism. List explained that his photos were "composed visions where my arrangements try to capture the magical essence inhabiting and animating the world of appearances.”

In 1936 List left Germany to take up photography as a profession, finding work in Paris and London. He was hired by magazines to shoot fashion photography, but he soon returned to still life imagery, producing photographs in a style he called "fotografia metafisica", which pictured dream states and fantastic scenes, using mirrors and double-exposure techniques.

During the late 1930s he traveled in Greece, where he took photographs of ancient temples, ruins, sculptures, and landscapes that were published in books and magazines. However, in 1941, during World War II, he was forced to return to Germany, but because one of his grandparents was Jewish, he was not allowed to publish or work professionally. In 1944 he was drafted into the German military, despite being homosexual and of partly Jewish ancestry. During the war he served in Norway as a map designer. A trip to Paris allowed him to take portraits of Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Christian Berard, Georges Braque, Jean Arp, Joan Miró and other international celebrities.

While working as art editor of Heute (Today) magazine he joined Magnum, a cooperative of photographers founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson, among others. For whatever reason, List contributed only sparingly from 1951 until the mid 1960s.

For the next decade he concentrated his work in Italy, where he began using a 35 mm film camera and telephoto lenses. In 1960 he shot portraits of Marino Marini, Paul Bowles, W. H. Auden and Marlene Dietrich (shown). Soon thereafter he gave up photography to concentrate on drawings, recently displayed at Berlin’s gay museum (Schwules Museum, Mehringdamm 61). Although List died in Munich in the spring of 1975, his style lives on in the work of Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber, particularly.



Trivia: In 1988, Stephen Spender published The Temple, a roman à clef of his pre-war years in Germany; the novel includes a character named Joachim, who is based on Herbert List.

David Armstrong

Photographer David Armstrong (at right, portrait by Deidre Schoo) was born in 1954 in Massachusetts and studied painting at the Boston Museum School and Cooper Union (NYC). He soon switched to photography and earned a B.F.A. from Tufts University in 1988.

Armstrong first received critical attention for his intimate sharp focus portraits of men, who were either lovers or friends. In the 1990s he began to photograph cityscapes and landscapes in soft focus,  to contrast his portraits. Street lights, electric signs and automobiles were reduced to a sensual, mottled blur (collected as All Day Every Day). A series of black/white portraits appeared as The Silver Cord. His most recent art book publication is 615 Jefferson Avenue (2011).

Armstrong’s photographs have been included in numerous group exhibitions here and abroad, in such prestigious venues as the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Germany). A large body of David’s work has appeared in print media: French Vogue, L’Uomo Vogue, Arena Homme+, GQ, Self Service, Another Man and Japanese Vogue, among others.  As well, he has contributed to advertising campaigns for a variety of clients, such as Ermenegildo Zegna, René Lezard, Kenneth Cole, Burburry, Puma, and Barbara Bui.

In 1996, Elisabeth Sussman, curator of photographs at the Whitney Museum (NYC), enlisted Armstrong’s help in composing Nan Goldin’s first retrospective. She gained such respect for Armstrong’s eye that she acquired a few of David’s pieces for the Whitney permanent collection. He was subsequently featured in the Whitney 1994 biennial.

David is based in Brooklyn, New York, where his primary subjects remain young boys and men. “It has to do with issues of my own,” he says. “This thing about male youth, this idea that something is fading. I get older and still take pictures of boys that are the age I was when I was first shooting them.”

Sources:

New York Times interview:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/fashion/interview-with-david-armstrong-photographer.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Wikipedia

http://davidarmstrongphotographs.com

Horst

Born in Germany, Horst P. Horst (1906-1999) was a much celebrated fashion photographer also known for portraits, interiors and still life arrangements. His work was shot mostly in black and white, with his subjects arranged in glamorous classical Greek-inspired poses with stark shadows (examples at end of post).


Photo at right: Horst photographed by Orphanos

Horst moved to Paris while in his early twenties to apprentice with celebrated architect Le Corbusier. Moving in artistic circles, in 1930 he met Russian photographer Baron George von Hoyningen-Huene (1900-1968). Hoyningen-Heune was working for French Vogue at the time, and within a year Horst became his photographic assistant, model – and soon thereafter his lover. With blond hair and a trim, muscular body, Horst was an ideal model, and his relationship with Hoyningen-Huene resulted in his abandoning the pursuit of a career in architecture.

Youthful model Horst posing for Hoyningen-Huene (1931):

Horst in a classical pose photographed by Hoyningen-Huene (1932):

While traveling in England the pair met British Vogue magazine photographer Cecil Beaton, and Horst’s long association with Vogue began in 1931, when one of his photographs appeared in the French edition of the magazine. He was hired by Vogue in 1935, after Hoyningen-Heune quit the magazine and moved to Hollywood. Among their difficulties was Hoyningen-Heune’s jealousy over Horst’s headlong success. Upon Hoyningen-Heune’s departure, Horst began a relationship with film maker Luchino Visconti.

In 1932 Horst’s first exhibition was mounted in Paris, and a glowing review in The New Yorker magazine made him instantly famous. Within three years he had photographed numerous Hollywood stars, high society notables and various and assorted nobility and royalty. At the age of thirty-one Horst took an apartment in New York City, where he met Coco Chanel. He was to photograph her designs for decades to come.

Horst met British diplomat Valentine “Nicholas” Lawford (1911-1991), who was posted in New York, and the two men became lovers in a relationship that lasted until Lawford’s death. Nicholas was to become Horst’s biographer (“Horst, His Work and His World” 1984) and together they adopted and raised a son, Richard J. Horst, who was eventually Horst’s manager and archivist. In 1943 Horst became a U.S. citizen under the name Horst P. Horst, relinquishing his birth name of Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann, although from the beginning of his career he had used just his first name. He served in the U.S. Army as a photographer and became a friend of President Truman, whom he photographed in 1945. Soon thereafter Horst began a series of First Lady portraits for Vogue, from Mamie Eisenhower (1957) through Nancy Reagan (1981).

In 1990 pop star Madonna released a music video of her enormously successful single “Vogue,” in which she posed in recreations of some of Horst’s most recognizable fashion photographs – "Mainbocher Corset" (1939, shot at four in the morning in Paris, above), a portrait of an exhausted model seen from behind, wearing a partially tied corset made by Detolle, as well as "Lisa with Turban" (1940), and "Carmen Face Massage" (1946). Unfortunately Horst had not given permission for his photos to be used, and he expressed his displeasure at receiving no acknowledgment from Madonna. Her tribute music video went right over the heads of most of her younger fans.

Having moved to Oyster Bay on Long Island in 1947, Horst designed a white stucco house that was reminiscent of homes he had seen in Tunisia while traveling with George Hoyningen-Huene. Horst sold an original Picasso painting to buy 15 acres of land from the Tiffany estate to pay for the house and property. Many of the furnishings inside came from his close friend Coco Chanel. While based there Horst shot a large body of work for Vogue and House and Gardens magazines, both Condé Nast publications, and his partner Nicholas Lawford wrote the articles that accompanied the pictures. Horst’s last published photograph appeared in British Vogue in 1991, the year of Lawford’s death. Suffering from failing eyesight and declining health, Horst was at his home in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, at the time of his death at age 93 on November 18, 1999. In 2001 a retrospective of his portraits appeared in the book, “Horst Portraits: 60 Years of Style”. Horst’s work is featured in nine other publications, as well.

Three male nudes:

Maria Callas by Horst:

Still Life by Horst:

Fashion models by Horst:

Baron Niki de Gunzburg by Horst:

Duane Michals

Maverick photographer Duane Michals (b. 1932) is a self-taught American photographer whose initial success was won with his work for magazines (Esquire, Mademoiselle, Vogue) and under a contract for the government of Mexico, for whom he photographed the 1968 Summer Olympics. He also produced cover art for music albums (The Police and Richard Barone). His portraiture goes against the norm, because he features his subjects in natural settings, instead of in a studio.

Though he has not been involved in the realm of gay rights, his photography often addresses gay themes. He is noted for two innovations in artistic photography, which he developed in the 1960s and 1970s. First, he used a series of photographs to tell a story (Sequences, pub. 1970), and second, wrote text by hand above or below his photographs, giving information that the image itself could not convey (examples below).

    The most beautiful part of a man’s body
    I think it must be there,
    where the torso sits on and, into the hips,
    those twin delineating curves,
    feminine in grace, girdling the trunk,
    guiding the eyes downwards
    to their intersection,
    the point of pleasure. (1986)

The unfortunate man could not touch the one he loved
It had been declared illegal by the law
Slowly his fingers became toes and his hands gradually became feet
He began to wear shoes on his hands to disguise his pain
It never occurs to him to break the law.


His work is in demand and highly collectible. Elton John is one of the high profile collectors of Michals’ photographs.

Michals grew up in McKeesport, Pennsylvania (near Pittsburgh), to a Slovak immigrant family. Determined not to follow his father into the steel mills, he left home at seventeen on scholarship to the University of Denver and, after two years in the Army (driving tanks in Germany), took up residence in New York City, where he has lived a not quite quiet life for many decades, working his way into the textbooks of photographic history.

His photographs are highly manipulated, moody and often philosophical. Traditional photographers were aghast when Michals began writing directly onto his prints in his signature scrawl, thus creating an artistic scandal. Nevertheless, his work has been exhibited all over Europe and the U.S., and his globetrotting career is the envy of most professional photographers.

When The New Yorker hired him, at age 72, to photograph gay activist Larry Kramer, Michals revisited the house where he was born in McKeesport. The experience led to a book, “The House I Once Called Home” (2003 ), which Duane refers to as a “photographic memoir with verse”.

Michals lives in the Grammercy Park neighborhood of New York City with architect Fred Gorree, his partner of 53 years.