Slim Aaron (1916-2006)
from the NY Times….
Around the middle of the 20th century, princes, polo players and a certain class of performers bounced between places like Monaco and Marbella, as lesser beings marveled at their glorious comings and goings.
Noël Coward and Truman Capote used words to record this rarefied universe, but Mr. Aarons's photographs in magazines like Harper's Bazaar, Town & Country and Life showed it. There was the picture of the 10th Duke of Marlborough and his wife Mary on a garden bench at his ancestral home, Blenheim Palace — he reading The Times of London, she embroidering the ancestral crest. Or the Hearst family at home in taffeta and black tie.
He photographed the grand dames Babe Paley, Gloria Guinness and most famously C. Z. Guest, as she held the arm of her 5-year-old son in front of a temple to the goddess Diana at her family's Palm Beach, Fla., estate. He shot Man Ray at his Paris studio, Joan Collins in bed with her pink poodle and Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull at an Irish mansion.
"Attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places" was his mantra.
His most celebrated image was shot on New Year's Eve of 1957 in the Crown Room at Romanoff's restaurant in Hollywood. Called "The Kings of Hollywood," it showed Clark Gable, Van Heflin, Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart — what Smithsonian magazine called "a Mount Rushmore of stardom" and the novelist Louis Auchincloss "the very image of American he-men."
The men are laughing. Mr. Aarons sometimes said he did not know why.
He gained entree to villas, yachts and chalets by becoming one of the crowd. He told of sailing with Katharine Hepburn and seeing a drowning man. After being rescued, the man pulled out a camera and started shooting Miss Hepburn.
She threatened to break it on his head. Mr. Aarons stood by, welcomed as a valued guest, who happened to be a photographer.
"I knew everyone," he said in an interview with The Independent in 2002. "They would invite me to one of their parties because they knew I wouldn't hurt them. I was one of them."
George Allen Aarons was born in Manhattan on Oct. 29, 1916. He was reared in New York and New Hampshire and was an Army photographer in World War II. Afterward, he and his Army buddy Bill Mauldin, the cartoonist, headed for Hollywood.
Mr. Aarons, who won a Purple Heart, said combat had taught him that the only beach worth landing on was "decorated with beautiful, seminude girls tanning in a tranquil sun."
He had a rapport with stars: When Stewart was approached by strangers, he joked, "No, I am Slim Aarons." It is likely that Mr. Aarons was the model for Stewart's part as the fascinated watcher in Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window," and his apartment surely inspired the one in the film.
Mr. Aarons opened a bureau for Life magazine in Rome, where he vowed to make a career out of photographing beautiful people, doing it his own way with natural surroundings, little makeup and no artificial light. In 1951 he married a young Life employee, Lorita Dewart.
Seize the Day. Carpe Diem.
No comments:
Post a Comment