Classiq - An online journal that celebrates cinema, culture, style and storytelling.

14 July 2021

This Summer We’re Channelling: Léa Seydoux in “Saint Laurent”

Léa Seydoux in “Saint Laurent”, 2014. Mandarin Films, EuropaCorp

One July afternoon in 1968, Yves Saint Laurent met Loulou de la Falaise. They met at a tea party at the house of Fernando Sanchez at the Place de Furstenberg, in Paris. Fernando was part of Saint Laurent’s closed and exclusive world, his entourage, his clique, an old concept in Paris fashion. More than being a group of people who formed the beau monde, trapped in their own arrogant self-obsession, partaking recklessly of the excess, alcohol, drugs and casual sex that abounded in Paris in the 70’s, the clique also enabled designers to infiltrate walks of life hardly accessible to them. It was a way of establishing a link between them and the society, between them and the people who wore their clothes, and, especially in the case of Yves Saint Laurent, between him and the streets. For the designer, who was very reclusive, his clique represented an extension of his world that was divided between his fashion house and his home, bringing him a touch of reality while at the same time preserving the mystique of the name Yves Saint Laurent.

“That afternoon in July 1968, there was a young girl floating around the apartment, giggling madly behind a dandelion puff of hair,” recounts Alicia Drake in her book, The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris, the moment Yves met Loulou de la Falaise. “She had the face and poise of a Burne-Jones portrait with none of the passive tragic overtones. She was filled with a sort of electric vitality. She was stoned and ravishing in Ossie Clark chiffon tunic and matching satin fly-away trousers, headscarf around her head and beads around her neck. […] He took in everything about her – the Bakst-inspired fauna print on chiffon, the way she stood with one arm flung up behind her against the door jamb, the wide-set blue eyes and narrow bone-structure. His eye was drawn to her tiny wrists and a bracelet she was wearing which he could have sworn was one of those metal bands they put on the corner of tables to hold down the tablecloth in the wind. It was; Loulou had taken it off the table at the Bistro Petit Saint Benoît and wore it as a Paris talisman.”

Léa Seydoux in “Saint Laurent”, 2014. Mandarin Films, EuropaCorp

In Marrakech, the wonder boy from Oran discovered, or rediscovered, the light, other colours, in the street, on the walls, in the clothing of the women of the Atlas. But Loulou was right there from early on, too. After their meeting in Paris, Yves invited Loulou to Marrakech, “where she arrived with a duffle bag out of which she pulled sarong after sarong after scrap of fabric, astonishing everyone with her outfits and imaginations”. She breathed new air, and colour, and fantasy and her own world into his aesthetic. She would become his inspiration, his muse, his motivation, his provocation. Yves’ style was French through and through. She challenged it with her eclectic tastes. She brought the outside world into the exclusive and closed world of Saint Laurent.

“She was a catalyst in Yves’ rediscovery of colour,” writes Alicia Drake. Influenced by Chanel, Saint Laurent had only used colour timidly in his collections – “There’s never any colour in Paris,” illustrator Joe Eula recounted the shouts of the press in one of his storyboards before an YSL show. “He had a phenomenal sense of colour,” Loulou is cited in the book, “but he needed me to jerk it out of his system. He always had it in him because he was brought up in colour, but then there was all that sort of good education and Parisian conformity. Most people think that if they use colour it won’t be comme in faut and I think I showed him that colour was not vulgar. I think I opened the doors for him. That is what creativity is: you use people to open doors that are your own. You do not copy other people, but they make things accessible within you.”

And Yves knew that he needed her and the mesmerising effect that she projected to feed his imagination and creativity. He had always, and always would, surrounded himself with women. He loved women, he loved to observe them and learn from them what they wanted. His obsession was not with fashion, but with the inner nature of women, and that was his radical change. Loulou “came along bearing both the lineage of the old world so dear to every couturier and, crucially, the cool swing of London.” She had both aristocratic bearing and free will, both innate elegance and excess, both beauty and dark sensuality, both mystery and enthusiasm. She had the wilderness and rebelliousness of the streets in her. Saint Laurent had already sensed that, he had already turned towards ready-to-wear because it was an opening on everyday life he personally had nothing to do with, and yet presented women with what they needed to change themselves and their style and their life and be free. And he knew how to discern the appeal of the new generation represented by Loulou.

Léa Seydoux and Gaspard Ulliel in “Saint Laurent”, 2014. Mandarin Films, EuropaCorp

The 1970s found haute couture at a crossroads. For the first time, its relevance was fervently questioned. Aristocracy and wealth had become démodé, “today only personality counts… ravishing personalities are most riveting things in the world – conversation, people’s interests, the atmosphere that they create around them,” Diana Vreeland proclaimed. Ready-to-wear was starting to dictate what women should wear. Alicia Drake’s book paints a profound, dramatic and truthful portrait of those times in her book (having Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld center stage), of the beauty and ugliness, fun and tragedy, seduction and stinginess of fashion, and its deep roots in and influence on everything surrounding it, from history and art, to politics, and especially to everything happening in the world.

Loulou de la Falaise had both English and French heritage. Her mother, Maxime Birley, married a French count, Alain de la Falaise, and moved to Paris after the war where she “owned one pair of jeans and a push-up bra”. She started to work at Schiaparelli to make a living, then worked for Paquin and Faith and eventually became a styliste, the French term French designers prefer to designer, working freelance for the house of Chloé. Loulou had the independent spirit of her mother and she pursued her own path in fashion not only as a way to find her own independence, but to escape an unhappy childhood. After her parents’ divorce, she and her brother Alexis were sent to foster families and then to boarding school in England. She was 21 that summer that brought her to Paris. Loulou’s exuberance was a way to fight hardship; therein lies her vibrant force. “Loulou’s force also lay in her ability to cut herself off from reality and escape inside her imagination”.

“Saint Laurent”, 2014. Mandarin Films, EuropaCorp

Back in Paris, Yves Saint Laurent and Loulou de la Falaise became inseparable, both as friends, and at work, too. But, more importantly for the name of Yves Saint Laurent, Loulou became the embodiment of the YSL collections, of the YSL woman.

Whether it was her wedding look of golden-toed sandals worn over white socks, “huge white bouffant harem pants caught beneath the knee, white organza wrap, a mass of beads, a white turban stabbed with an apricot feather and large diamond brooch”, or her wedding ball outfit, “wrapped in an acre of midnight-blue chiffon shot with gold, bangles up and down her arms, teetering in a pair of high silver heels”, or her dressed in “a sharp black velvet jacket, waist cinched in a man’s belt, man’s white shirt, tartan scarf and diamond and jade earrings”, or her wearing the YSL Cossack hat and boots, or the gold tassels and pagoda shoulders from the Opium collection, Loulou de la Falaise met her own inherent, intuitive and incredible style with that of the genius of YSL, on the background of the changing times.

In the film Saint Laurent (2014), director Bertrand Bonello plunged into the era of effervescence and madness of the 1970s and into the mind, creative genius and demons of its leading designer, played with such intensity by Gaspard Ulliel. Léa Seydoux has the luminous presence and grace and exuberance to carry out the role of Loulou de la Falaise. Léa Seydoux is a modern Loulou de la Falaise. In contrast to Jalil Lespert’s film Yves Saint Laurent, released the same year and where Laura Smet played Loulou, Léa Seydoux’s character is truly seen as being part of Yves’ life. She is always there for him, as a friend, or in his studio, with her turban on, at every excess, every success and every devastating fall, just as it comes through in the book The Beautiful Fall – “We lived together for thirty years. I saw him more than any other person.”

Léa Seydoux and Gaspard Ulliel in “Saint Laurent”, 2014. Mandarin Films, EuropaCorp

Saint Laurent will forever be remembered for having made a cult out of ready-to-wear when he launched his Rive Gauche label to connect with the women in their every day wardrobes and their life on the street and for putting a large number of women into trousers, adapting many garments from the male wardrobes into female items – “You are the only one today, Mr. Saint Laurent,” one of the characters, a loyal client, trying on a trouser suit, hair let loose, hands in pockets, lipstick on at Yves’ own indications, says to him in the film Saint Laurent, referring to the way his clothes made woman feel and to the way they reflected the feeling of the time. It’s a beautiful moment in the film this one, when she is transformed right under our eyes, just through clothes and through being looked at by Yves.

But in 1976, the designer presented his haute couture Ballet Russes collection, which he later considered if not his best, most certainly his most beautiful – for the film, costume designer Anaïs Romand redid 35 pieces or so from the collection. Once again, it seemed that he set out to change the course of fashion and to set a new standard of luxury. “It was my answer to the press which had disqualified the haute couture trade as old fashioned and antiquated,” he would say. His sable-trimmed Cossack coats in gold lamé, bright babushka dresses, gypsy skirts piped in gold, luxuriously embroidered waistcoats and tunics, whisper-thin glittering blouses with full sleeves, and golden Cossack boots were inspired, Saint Laurent confessed, by everything from Delacroix’s odalisques, Ingres’s women, and van Eyck’s Woman with a Pearl, to Degas’s black-corseted ballerinas, the Civil War, and von Sternberg’s Dietrich. “For daywear, everything came from traditional cuts found in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Morocco. That was the source of the cutting that, along with colour, makes it youthful.” But I see Loulou de la Falaise in that collection, too. Beautiful excess and youth.

editorial sources: The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris, by Alicia Drake; Yves Saint Laurent, by Fondation Pierre Bergé Yves Saint Laurent; Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, by Lisa Immordino Vreeland; Eula, by Cathy Horyn

MORE STORIES

This summer we’re channeling: Léa Seydoux in Daniel Craig in “Spectre”

This summer we’re channeling: Paul Newman in “Sweet Bird of Youth”

This summer we’re channelling: Catherine Deneuve in “Le sauvage”

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8 July 2021

This Summer We’re Channelling: Catherine Deneuve in “Le sauvage”

Catherine Deneuve in “Le sauvage”, 1975. Lira Films, Produzioni Artistiche Internazionali

They meet in Caracas by chance. Nelly (Catherine Deneuve) is a young woman who is about to marry Vittorio, but realises she doesn’t want to and runs away from him. Martin (Yves Montand) is a middle-age man who left behind his career as a famous perfumer to seek out a more tranquil life on an island, off the coast of Guaira, Venezuela. He gets her out of trouble. She gets him into more trouble. Montand perfectly offsets the antic behaviour of Deneuve.

Young, free-willing and beautiful, with energy to spare and perfectly articulated rapid-fire speaking, Deneuve sweeps you off your feet. You end up following her around, because she never stops, she is in constant motion, out-running and out-talking Montand. In an interview between her and the director of the film, Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Deneuve confessed that talking fast was a family defect, remembering how “Truffaut used to say that my coming from a numerous family with four children, all girls, may have led to that. It was always a competition among sisters, who to take the first place and the second place. Words played a major role.” She also mentioned the influence of the American screwball comedies and the fact that what she loved about them was the rapid succession of events and talk. The screwball moments in Le sauvage are beautifully pulled off, and she glides through them so naturally, and are in beautiful contrast to the quiet moments when she is alone that look like she has just stepped out of a painting or to the scene when she quietly tells Montand that she wants to stay with him on the island.

Le sauvage feels like the movie that liberated Deneuve’s own personality on the screen. “I am shocked when people talk about me and sum me up as: blonde, cold, and solemn,” she would say about her image of porcelain beauty imprinted in the audience’s collective memory. “To film, the beauty of Catherine Deneuve is a joy, an enlightenment,” Jean-Paul Rappeneau said in an interview for Télérama.

Catherine Deneuve in “Le sauvage”, 1975. Lira Films, Produzioni Artistiche Internazionali

For almost six decades, Deneuve has been the embodiment of the French screen icon, of its allure, sophistication and cool and quiet elegance, having worked from the very beginning, the 1960s and 1970s, with some of the best European directors, such as Buñuel (Belle de jour, Tristana), Truffaut (Mississippi Mermaid, Le dernier métro), Polanski (Repulsion). Most notably in Belle de jour, Catherine Deneuve’s image and sexuality was signaled through clothes and through an association with fashion. The exclusivity of her YSL wardrobe (the film ensued a long-term, lifelong friendship with Catherine Deneuve, their relationship becoming an integral part of the cult of Saint Laurent) forms its own narrative in Buñuel’s fetishistic film (“My fascination with fetishism was already obvious in the first scenes of El and the boot scene in Diary of a Chambermaid,” Buñuel wrote in his autobiography, My Last Sigh), where her highly polished surface and her severe and restrictive clothes act as barriers to sexual expression as well as the very means for reaching sexual fulfillment. “The novel is very melodramatic,” Buñuel further elaborated in his book about Joseph Kessel’s novel Belle de jour, “and it offered me the chance to translate Séverine’s fantasies into pictorial images as well as to draw a serious portrait of a young female bourgeois masochist.” Saint Laurent’s Designs for Séverine “pitched subversive chic against a frigid conservatism with devastating success,” wrote Alicia Drake in her excellent book, The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris.

Catherine Deneuve in “Le sauvage”, 1975. Lira Films, Produzioni Artistiche Internazionali

Her image in Le sauvage is hardly associated with fashion, and that’s part of the reason why this role is so fresh and different and liberating. After the opening sequence, when she is wearing an elegant white dress at the party celebrating her up-coming wedding, she dresses in jeans, white shirt and trench coat when she runs away. Every woman’s attire, the most timeless of them all. But, in movies, the trench has played such an ambiguous garment, impersonating so many roles, and here the trench coat can also hide the secret of someone who plans something dangerous, or just to change her life. Then we see her in a striped shirt dress for a big part of the action – there were four copies of the dress with different degrees of wear depending on the story progression. After her dress is torn to shreds after a plunge in the ocean, she practically lives in Martin’s shirts, t-shirts and cardigan which she steals off the hanging wire. Oversized and practical, they are not just the perfect attire for the island, but by wearing not just masculine but men’s clothes, she creates this alternate allure, becoming much more feminine, and more attractive than she has ever been on screen.

Catherine Deneuve in “Le sauvage”, 1975. Lira Films, Produzioni Artistiche Internazionali

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Delon, Belmondo, Borsalino and The myth of the gangster dandy

François Truffaut’s heroines

Breaking the rules of a leading lady: Bette Davis in “The Letter”

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4 July 2021

July Newsletter: On Christmas in July and My Summer of Jackie Brown

Photos: Classiq Journal

If I were to choose a film of the last ten years to watch in cinemas for the first time this summer, then it would be Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. Two years on after its release and it’s still on my mind. Few others (I am writing about another one further down in the newsletter) of the last decade have stayed with me. But if I were to pick just one, I would choose Tarantino. I would choose it because, as I have written before, it’s delirious, funny, shocking, exhilarating, beautifully crafted around movie lore and history, blending fiction with reality, brimming with pop culture detail and an idiosyncratic soundtrack that takes you to another time and another Hollywood. That’s the Hollywood of my mind.

Because the Hollywood I would have loved to see is not the Golden Era Hollywood, nor the modern day Hollywood, but that very Hollywood depicted in this film. A Hollywood trying to make peace with itself and move forward, a Hollywood that reflects the changes taking place in those times, in America and in the film industry, a time of changing identities and manhood perceptions, a time of decline for the old studio system and of rise of the independent cinema. But also a Hollywood that for sure is not just one of reality, but one of Tarantino’s imagination as well. And I find that even more fascinating. Another incredible thing about this Hollywood is that the two main characters, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton and Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth, are themselves voyeurs of the glamour of Hollywood. They are like you and me.

I would choose this film because Quentin Tarantino is one of the last purveyors of movie making. He loves cinema. He showed that artistic freedom is still possible, that you can still think in terms of making movies just for yourself, that he puts every thought and every sense and every emotion into making a film, that, yes, he can do what he likes and say what he likes – it’s his story. And he transports you to another time with the kind of film that requires the luxury of taking the time to watch at the cinema, as one should. That allows you to lose yourself in the story and watch it unfold on the big screen. And just see where it goes. Nothing else matters. Nothing else matters while you are watching a film on the big screen.

As I am writing this, I am waiting for Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, the book, to arrive. If I can’t have the film again in cinemas, this will be the next best thing. It would be like Christmas in July.

There is another Tarantino film, Jackie Brown, that I watched on repeat one summer years ago with my brother. It used to be my favourite Tarantino film until Once Upon a Time came along. When we used to watch it all these years ago, when I was about twenty, a few years after it was released, Tarantino had made only these three films, and Jackie Brown felt different – seven more movies and twenty years later, it still does. I don’t remember what it was that made me love it so much (do we really need an explanation for that?), I just know that I did, and that at university and in our group of friends it soon became the movie by which your taste in movies was judged. I remember how quickly I made friends with a colleague I had barely spoken to before when we both found out that Jackie Brown, not Pulp Fiction, was my as well as his favourite Tarantino film.

If I think of what I feel about it now, there is something about the vintage tunes playing perfectly over the film’s scenes, even more impeccably than the other perfectly chosen soundtracks of his films, and the snappy dialogue that’s a little different than, and not as gimmicky as in other Tarantino films. It feels much more realistic, with an uncharacteristic linear narrative, with a great, real, middle-age love story between Max (Robert Forster) and Jackie (Pam Grier), with a perfect balance between believable characters, with very much feeling and life experiences and failures in them, and you end up having some sort of affection for each of them, even if each of them is flawed. The shot that follows Ordell driving around to kill Livingston is still one of my favourite scenes in a Tarantino film. I just love how reluctant Beaumont is and low long it actually takes him to get in that trunk, then Ordell tactfully putting on his gloves when he is finally behind the wheel and turning on the radio on the sound of Strawberry Letter 23 and the car driving off in a long shot just to see it making a short, first turn to the left, and then, full stop. Perfection.

Maybe sometime in the future, Jackie Brown will turn out to remain my favourite Tarantino film. But right now, this summer, I will have to choose Quentin Tarantino’s black comedy crazy bravura and auteurist excursion, by way of his liberal take on history and freeing visionary mind. This could be a perfect summation of summer.

“The inspiration behind Le Kasha’s aesthetic is sourced from my own travels… and the ones I’m dreaming to do…,”
says Mali Marciano, above, about her brand, Le Kasha. Photo to the left: Le Kasha

Viewing

The Letter, 1940

I have recently rewatched The Letter on what was one of the summer’s first hot nights. It was perfect. Actually I may make it a summer tradition, to watch on an unbearably warm night. Because noir is the genre that offers the perfect contrast to my favourite season, to the bright and euphoric summer days. Watching noir films during summertime keeps me grounded: “Don’t kid yourself that this will last forever.” Because you almost do, don’t you, believe in an endless summer? The Letter is perfect from its great opening tracking shot to the very end. The effect is striking. So is the atmosphere of the entire film, mainly shot at night, the moon light casting dramatic shades – and a spell, it feels, on the main protagonist, Bette Davis’ Leslie Crosbie, who always seems to be driven by its presence – through the shutters of the beautiful island home of the Crosbies or through the leaves of the jungle trees. You are in the heart of darkness, where evil inner forces can take control over your life, like a force of nature, or the moon, that disconsiders man entirely, distort your reason, and thrust you into ruin. I have recently written about Bette Davis as the most audacious white-wearing film noir heroine here.

Le sauvage, 1975

They meet in Caracas by chance. Nelly, Catherine Deneuve, is a young woman who is about to marry Vittorio, but realises she doesn’t want to and runs away from him. Martin, Yves Montand, is a middle-age man who left behind his career as a famous perfumer to seek out a more tranquil life on an island, off the coast of Guaira, Venezuela. He gets her out of trouble, she gets him into more trouble. Young, free-willing and beautiful, with energy to spare and perfectly articulated rapid-fire speaking, Deneuve out-runs and out-talks Montand. These screwball moments are in beautiful contrast with the quiet moments when she is alone that look like she has just stepped out of a painting or when she quietly tells him she wants to stay on the island with him. Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s Le sauvage feels like the movie that liberated Deneuve’s own personality on the screen. “I am shocked when people talk about me and sum me up as: blonde, cold, and solemn,” she would say about her image of porcelain beauty imprinted in the viewers’ collective memory.

Le dos au mur (Back to the Wall), 1958

There is something about the opening shot of a film that has a defining imprint on my movie experience. The almost 20-minute long opening sequence of Édouard Molinaro’s Le dos au mur is wordless, pure visual style. After so many noir films watched, I was still taken aback by the striking black and white shots and sharp angles that made me register every single detail and object, especially when the story is filmed inside the apartment in the beginning, which connects to my love of design. Starring Jeanne Moreau as Gloria, the infidele wife of industrialist Jacques Decrey (Gérard Oury), the film is a classic noir story, where deceit, betrayal, jealousy and revenge drive the narrative. On Mubi, Adrian Curry writes about the exceptional poster of the film designed back in the day by Clément Hurel.

Pouic-pouic, 1963

There are few things that can lift my spirit as quickly as a Louis de Funès comedy can. Pouic-pouic is one of them. It also offers one of those great supporting roles, Christian Marin as Charles, the sees-it-all, knows-it-all valet de la maison.

A Quiet Place, 2018, & A Quiet Place: Part II, 2021

A Quiet Place is the other film I was mentioning above and which I would watch for the first time this summer. Set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where sightless alien creatures hunt their prey on even the faintest sound, this is a world in which only very few and the most quiet and careful humans survive. There is not much that can be invented in cinema anymore, but that concept felt new and thrilling in A Quiet Place. Silence never sounded so terrifying. Emily Blunt and her real life husband, John Krasinski, who also directed, play a loving couple with young kids and they have to speak in sign language and walk with bare feet and even the vaguest sound can mean almost instant death. It’s clever, nerve-shredding and beautifully executed, and I kept telling myself that this can’t be so good until the end. But it absolutely is. And it also feels like a great yet trying adventure of this wonderful family who only have each other. This is a film that I love so much that I have kept postponing watching A Quiet Place: Part II, recently released in cinemas, and I have to admit that I still wish they never made a second part. But I eventually did watch it. The element of new is gone, which was to be expected, but the film is good, it keeps the suspense, the completely silent scenes are unbelievable and Regan, the Abbots’ eldest daughter, played by Millicent Simmonds, beautifully leads the story and her family.

Reading

“How can you know anything about literature if all you’ve done is read books?” Geoff Dyer was determined to write the ultimate study of D.H. Lawrence. Out of Sheer Rage should have been it. It isn’t. Actually, the book defies categorization, and that’s why I find it so… different. Dyer writes about himself, about his personal life, about his travels, and, yes, occasionally and profoundly about D.H. Lawrence. But, thank God, it’s not an academic study. “That is the hallmark of academic criticism: it kills everything it touches,” says Dyer. It is the constant relation, and the constant yet unforced relation of Lawrence, to Dyer’s own life that lends the book an immediacy, and everything seems written as it is experienced, often times hilariously.

If I am to read books about films, I always prefer to read about them from their makers, and at the moment I am enjoying Jacques Deray’s J’ai connu une belle époque. He talks about everyone from Lino Ventura and Charlotte Rampling, to Jean-Paul Belmondo, Romy Schneider and Alain Delon, and about their experiences together. A beautiful journey into one of the most beautiful times in cinema history. The book is not currently available from the publisher, Christian Pirot, and because I only support artists and independent publishers and bookshops, I unfortunately can not link to it, leaving you the choice to find it at your bookstore of choice.

Travelling wider into the movie world with Christopher Willoughby in my recent interview with him, where we talked about the Hollywood photographer who was a great as the stars he shot, his father, Bob Willoughby.

Listening

Alessandro de Rosa’s playlist*, La chitarra sopravisduta al desserto, inspired by his book by the same name, that was in turn inspired by the communal experience of watching Rear Window in a square in San Francisco.

Exploring

The art of reportage illustrator George Butler. When for so many travel is still driven by wanderlust and a sense of selfish adventure, George Butler goes to places everyone else is leaving, or trying to leave, from war zones to refugee camps. And instead of photographing, he draws the stories he sees, which I find extraordinary powerful, telling and moving. Illustration is a conveyor of the times, much more so than photography, I believe, as it requires a different mind set, therefore showing the viewer something much more personal and effecting reflection and reaction on a different scale. In his new book, Drawn Across Borders, the artist has gathered true, sensitive and powerful stories of migration.

Making

Le Kasha, the family-owned cashmere brand founded in 1918, respects its storied past and challenges contemporary creatives to channel classic influences into their designs while perfecting what essentials mean for the modern woman. Almost a century later, Mali Marciano set out to carry on her family heritage and revive the brand with the launch of her first Cachemere de Voyage collection in 2016. The Le Kasha collections are infused with the stories of Marciano’s travels which not only create a beautiful narrative around each piece, but says a lot about how she and her brand want to approach the future of fashion: with intention. I have recently talked to Mali Marciano about the brand.

Le Kasha is a brand with tradition, it was an innovator, a road opener at the beginning of the twentieth century. Somehow, I sense that your line Cachemere de Voyage is doing the same. Free of other fashion influences, it’s doing its own thing, it’s more about a way of being than about fashion. What do you want Le Kasha to represent?

I would like Le Kasha to represent a lifestyle instead of just being a «fashion» brand. Indeed, Le Kasha is a brand which provides pieces that our client always keep with them, our clothes are generally full of memories from travels… Our collection are infused with the spirit of freedom. In my conception, Le Kasha is a timeless lifestyle brand and I would like to be part of people’s essentials.

Has this last year changed in any way the way you see your brand and its place in the modern woman’s wardrobe?

It didn’t really impacted Le Kasha. People need to feel comfortable and elegant; look and feel great.. no matter what happens, if they stay home or not. Our pieces can be worn anytime and everywhere.

Cachemire de Voyage is inspired by the spirit of travel and adventure. Do you have any great traveller or adventurer as inspiration, or is it in your own travels that you find the greatest source of creativity?

The inspiration behind Le Kasha’s aesthetic is sourced from my own travels…and the ones I’m dreaming to do… As a child, I was always obsessed with the idea of travelling the world; my room was full of globes and maps, travel magazines… Those insights are empowered by movies, books.. that feed me with images of strong characters living exciting adventures and discovering places beyond imagination.

Today, I’m lucky enough to have the opportunity of discovering those places by myself, to meet the people living those extraordinary places and nourish myself with inspirations from everywhere. I want all these elements to be present in Le Kasha’s collections and DNA, our aim is to produce clothes in which people feel like they’re travelling and adventurous.

”Often times, at nightfall, Alain and I would find ourselves in the shade
of this divine house with a swimming pool. The disappearance of the sun
scattered the film crew, who left the set for the attractions of the French
Riviera. Privileged moments of complicity made up of silences and gazes
on the horizon. I remember one evening, in this abandoned place, our
conversation which was to give birth to another great adventure:
Borsalino.”
Jacques Deray, J’ai connu une belle époque (photo above)

The regulars: The interviews, newsletters and podcasts I turn to every week and/or every month because they are that good. Craig Mod’s all three newsletters: Roden, Ridgeline, and Huh. Wes Del Val’s book-ish interviews. Soundtracking, with Edith Bowman. Here’s the Thing, with Alec Baldwin. Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter. Sophy Robert’s The Art of Travel. Monocle magazine, in print.

*Note: As Alicia Kennedy writes in one of her newsletters, “I’m also aware that Spotify is terrible, which is why I purchase albums, concert tickets, and merchandise as much as possible to support the artists I love”. So I hope a Spotify playlist is just the starting point and that you opt for the whole, immersing experience of listening an album on the turntable or on a CD and watch a film uninterrupted on a big screen or at least in the player at home on a big enough screen.

Posted by classiq in Books, Culture, Film, Interviews, Newsletter, Style | | Comments Off

27 June 2021

Breaking the Rules of a Leading Lady: Bette Davis in “The Letter”

Bette Davis, James Stephenson and Victor Sen Yung in “The Letter”, 1940 | Warner Brothers

I have recently rewatched The Letter on what was one of the summer’s first hot nights. Actually I may make it a summer tradition, to watch on an unbearably warm night. Because noir is the genre that offers the perfect contrast to my favourite season, to the bright and euphoric summer days. Watching noir films during summertime keeps me grounded: “Don’t kid yourself that this will last forever.” Because you almost do, don’t you, believe in an endless summer? It was perfect. Perfect from that great opening tracking shot, the silent, calm start as the camera slowly moves down the trunk of a rubber tree where the valuable substance drips into special collecting containers and then across a compound’s thatched hut where native laborers listen to music and play games in the dampness and heat of the Burmese jungle after the working hours, moves past a white cockatoo revealing the background of a colonial veranda, when you hear a first gun shot followed by the flight of the bird and several other short shots as a man is fleeing in the night while a woman pursues him with a pistol.

William Wyler held his line and did one of the most beautiful opening shots in the history of cinema. The effect is striking. So is the atmosphere of the entire film, mainly shot at night, the moon light casting dramatic shades – and a spell, it feels, on the main protagonist, Bette Davis’ Leslie Crosbie, who always seems to be driven by its presence – through the shutters of the beautiful island home of the Crosbies or through the leaves of the jungle trees. You are in the heart of darkness, where evil inner forces can take control over your life, like a force of nature, or the moon, that disconsiders man entirely, distort your reason, and thrust you into downfall. And there is, of course, Bette Davis, breaking all the rules of a leading lady.

Bette Davis in “The Letter”, 1940 | Warner Brothers

Bette Davis was dressed by Orry Kelly for the film. He was known as one of “The Big Four” – Adrian, Travis Banton, Omar Kiam were the other three. “For my money, Kiam was by far the greatest,” Orry Kelly wrote in his autobiography. “Time is the best test – Omar’s clothes hardly dated.” But watching Bette in The Letter 81 years on, the same can be said about her costumes. Orry Kelly decided from the very beginning that the only way to be different from the others – “Adrian used elaborate embroidery on Garbo, Shearer and Crawford, while Banton dressed Colbert and Lombard in all-over beaded gowns” – was to avoid glitter. “Starting with Kay Francis, I designed simple, unadorned evening gowns – black velvet, white, beige and black chiffon or crepe. I introduced what was the forerunner of the shirt maker dress for evening: taking the daytime sportiness with kick pleats, I dropped those to the ground, using tailor arrowheads where the inverted pleats met. At first, only those with sensitive taste were impressed,” the designer would confess.

Bette is dressed in simple evening gowns or streamlined looks, white shirts with dark coloured knee- or floor-length skirts – the long skirt has stripes and a high waist, lending a commanding, elongating quality to the silhouette, like a pair of trousers. In fact, Leslie is often seen wearing white throughout the film, the most suggestive being her floor-sweeping, short-sleeve white dress with a white laced shawl wrapped around her head when she goes to retrieve the incriminating letter from the dead man’s wife he had just married, Mrs. Hammond. Repeatedly wearing white, Leslie Crosbie presents a heavily consistent image, a controlled appearance that also reflects her control over the action and the characters around her. She is often shown knitting lace in tense moments and that takes a lot of concentration and patience, as her lawyer aptly observes. And white is the personification of innocence, but in noir film, and in a femme fatale character, it exemplifies inverse symbolism, at the same time questioning and underlining her duplicity.

There have been other white-wearing film noir heroines who commanded the screen with ferocity – Lana Turner in A Postman Always Rings Twice, Jane Greer in Out of the Past, Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai – but none of them had the audacity of Bette Davis’ Leslie Crosbie, who not only inverts the symbolism of colour, of good and bad, but ironically inverts the roles of bride and mistress. She is trying to weave an intricate veil of innocence around her and she pursues it to the extreme. Dressed in immaculate white, she ensnares everyone to ensure the success of her scheme and doubt her dark impulses. And it does seem to work for everyone around her, mainly the men, especially her husband, but not Mrs. Hammond, the widowed newly wed, who orders Leslie to take her lace shawl off before she can have the letter. Bette stands tall, but she obeys. How telling that confrontation scene is for the role of the femme fatale in film noir, whose complexity is often evoked in her appearance but never fully grasped by the men who fall for her and blindly chart a course through a disillusioned or fated life.

Mirrors of a character: Rita Hayworth in “The Lady from Shanghai”

80s style rocks in neo-noir: Rachel Ward in “Against All Odds”

Posted by classiq in Film, Film costume, This summer we’re channelling | | Comments Off

21 June 2021

Bob Willoughby: The Photographer Who Was as Great as the Stars He Shot

Audrey Hepburn and George Cukor on the Covent Garden set of “My Fair Lady”, 1963
Photograph by Bob Willoughby. © The Bob Willoughby Estate

It could capture the essence of an entire movie in a shot. And the emotions and thoughts of an actor during the making of his art. It could also sell a film. Bob Willoughby’s photography did all that. He was Hollywood’s first behind the scenes photographer, hired specifically by movie studios to take on-set promotional “stills”. He made the movie stars human. A pioneer of 20th century photography, Bob Willoughby introduced photojournalism to a previously highly staged field and captured some of the most famous and best actors in the history of cinema not posing for the camera, not only during a take as it was unfolding, not only in character for the roles they played, but with their guard down, in moments of repose, pensiveness or intimacy – and this, somehow, made them even more fascinating in the eyes of the audience. Generations on, and his photography still does that. Now, when we are inundated by images on social media with their even more growing lack of ability to hold our attention for long, Bob Willoughby’s photography still has the power to appeal to the imagination and make a visual impact.

He would roam the set freely, mingle with directors and actors, invent the remote-camera, hide behind the crew, find, and if necessary create, the right angle and light, become part of the decor – spontaneous moments look best on film, always, and, in that regard, a good photographer is the one you don’t even get to see. He seized the moment, he knew when he had seen something remarkable, and granted the public unprecedented, unedited access behind the closed doors of Hollywood. He watched and recorded as a world was being made, by filmmakers and actors and the entire crew, and he let his personal creativity to create a world of his own, too. He was not after perfection, not after the star image but after personality, a feeling, he was not after selling an image but about communicating emotion. His photographs offered beauty and insight into the world of each of his subjects. Bob Willoughby, who studied film at the University of South California and design with renowned graphic designer Saul Bass at the Kahn Institute of Art, loved the big screen and those on it, and it just shows that his work stemmed from passion for and understanding of cinema, and art, and of the human kind.

I have recently had the great pleasure to talk to Christopher Willoughby, Bob’s son, about his father’s legendary work, Bob’s special friendship with Audrey Hepburn, the moments he met Hitchcock and Marilyn, the many other greats that he photographed and the one that got away, and why he moved his family away from Hollywood.

Frank Sinatra. Photograph by Bob Willoughby. © The Bob Willoughby Estate

I would like to start with those words of Sydney Pollack about your father’s work: “Sometimes a film-maker gets a look at a photograph taken on his own set and sees the ‘soul’ of his film in one still photograph. It’s rare, but it happens. It happened to me in 1969, the first time I looked at the work of Bob Willoughby during the filming of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?.” Do you know which photograph he was referring to, and what do you think was your father’s secret in his ability to recognise the soul of the story through his camera?

Hi, Ada. Thank you for your interest in my father’s work.

The Sydney Pollack quote is part of an amazing foreword Sydney wrote for the book The Star Makers (Merrell). I’m not sure he was speaking about a specific image, but we could puzzle it out I think. There are a couple of iconic shots.

Sydney and Dad spoke at length about the visual resolution of the film. Something wasn’t quite gelling for my father – and Sydney, because of these conversations, ended up shooting an extra scene for the end of the film.

What does it take to recognise the soul of a story and transform that into a photograph? First, there has to be a soul. If there was something there, as there was in Horses, Bob would find it. And if there wasn’t, he would create one. There were plenty of filmmakers who wished their movie looked like Bob’s photographs of their movie.

Often my father had a genuine admiration for the director or actors he was working with and real connections were made. He and Audrey Hepburn were great friends and worked together over many years.

I believe a strong contributing factor to what made my father’s work special was his deep understanding and love of art, his ability to recognise a beautiful piece of art from any culture or period and know what made it important. He was a tremendous collector and he brought that mental catalogue onto the set every day. You can see those influences in his compositions and use of light.

Jane Fonda on the set of “They Shoot Horses Don’t They?” 1969
Photograph by Bob Willoughby. © The Bob Willoughby Estate

Was there any piece of art from his collection he was particularly fond of? Any artists he drew constant inspiration from?

He had such an eclectic collection, it would be difficult to put my finger on just one, so sorry Dad if I’m getting this wrong – I think Degas would be someone he appreciated for his unique perspectives and figure placement.

Was there any other director he had such a collaborative approach with, as in the case of Sydney Pollack? Any film he developed a special bond with?

We heard more about the directors he didn’t get on with, or who made his job more difficult than it already was. He did seem to have a unique relationship with Otto Preminger who yelled at everyone on set, but never had a harsh word for Dad. I think there was some sense of mentoring, and certainly mutual respect.

My father was a big fan of Mike Nichols and was impressed by his intellectual flexibility, his ability to change direction on set; getting the cast to play a serious scene for laughs for instance.

Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman on a specially constructed set at Paramount during filming “The Graduate”, 1967.
Photograph by Bob Willoughby. © The Bob Willoughby Estate

There are some iconic images from the set of The Graduate: Katherine Ross and Dustin Hoffman running from the church, Dustin Hoffman hiding in his room, and that striking shot of Anne Bancroft in close up and Hoffman in the back.

When dad started on the film, he was introduced to the cast, including Dustin Hoffman, a young New York actor doing his first film, but he looked familiar. As they were shaking hands, dad asked if his mother’s name was Lillian and his father’s was Harry – and Hoffman said “Yes”. “Dusty! I used to babysit you and your brother Ronald a hundred years ago on Orange Drive”.

”I guess he [Frank Sinatra] thought dad was the best!
He called him Bobby.”

Bob Willoughby is considered Hollywood’s first behind the scenes photographer, the first “unit photographer”. His job was to capture the moments of a performance live, during a take as it was unfolding, and also between takes, watching everything as the world was being made. Was he on the set every day when he was working on a film? Did he also read the script? What was his creative process like?

Bob’s job was to create a story for his clients – they usually had a specific angle, but because he had multiple assignments for each film, there was a lot of crossover coverage. Often film production would overlap and he would move from one film to another.

He always read the script and the shooting schedule and would research the film – was it to be on location, were there historical aspects to the script he could incorporate? He needed to figure out the most productive times to be present on set, but sometimes the studio hired him for the entire film. When that happened, he would bring the family along and we’d get to live in France or Ireland for the length of the production.

He wasn’t a unit photographer actually. A unit photographer is a union photographer traditionally hired by the studio and is part of the film crew – and when they’re done, they hand over all the work to the studio. Bob was referred to as a special and retained ownership of his work. The images were licensed to magazines and other clients, including the studios, for publication. Bob was never out of print for over twenty years.

Humphrey Bogart, one of the most memorable faces in the history of cinema, portrayed as Captain Queeg in “The Caine Mutiny”,
Columbia Studios, 1953. Photograph by Bob Willoughby. © The Bob Willoughby Estate

Shooting during an actual take could be a problem, because sound was being recorded. Camera sounds would be picked up by the microphones. One solution was shooting rehearsals. This had its own set of problems with actors not in costume yet, or unfinished sets. Bob developed a number of technologies to shoot during sound takes; The Sound Blimp to sound proof the camera, and radio controlled motor drives (used very successfully on They Shoot Horses and The Great Race) to photograph where you would be seen or it was unsafe.

It makes perfect sense what you say, that he wasn’t actually a unit photographer. Bob’s work seems to transcend the film he was shooting and his photographs can stand alone as individual works. How did he start working in the movie industry? What sparked his interest in cinema?

In 1951, he was noticed by Charles Block at Globe Photos who introduced his work to Alexey Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar. Since he was in Hollywood, he would often get assignments to grab a shot of an actor on set. By 1954, when he went to cover Judy Garland on A Star Is Born, he had assignments from seven different magazines. Judy was seemingly making life difficult for everyone, but Dad and Judy got on swimmingly. When Warner Bros decided to shoot an additional dance number, she requested him by name. This resulted in his first Life Magazine cover and, from that moment on, things got very busy.

”Bob’s work broke with the traditional, staid
Hollywood portrait. He created images of intimacy
that showed the vulnerabilities of his subjects.”

Montgomery Clift. Photograph by Bob Willoughby. © The Bob Willoughby Estate

Katharine Hepburn on set of “The Lion in Winter” at Ardmore Studios, Bray, County Wicklow, Ireland, 1967.
Photograph by Bob Willoughby. © The Bob Willoughby Estate

What is your most beautiful recollection of those times spent during the production of a film abroad?

We got out of school! My dad had roaring arguments with Mother Celine, the principal at our grade school – He wasn’t going to let school get in the way of a good education!

I have a memory of dinner near Pompeii during Goodbye Mr Chips with mom and dad, Peter O’Toole and Petulia Clark and others from the production. They were drinking a red wine made from grapes grown on the slopes of Mt Vesuvius and, when they opened the bottle, it foamed pink.

Building wooden forts out of logs in our house in Fontvieille near Arles during The Lion In Winter.

Watching the Apollo 11 moon landing in our sitting room in Ireland.

Going down into town in the morning to buy bread by ourselves in St Maxime. I have many wonderful memories.

With his portraits of actors, he captured the humanity in each subject, but he made them memorable, too. He brought his own creative instincts and abilities in. Is good set photography both creative and witnessing?

Bob’s work broke with the traditional, staid Hollywood portrait. He created images of intimacy that showed the vulnerabilities of his subjects. Some are full of bravado and playfulness, others reveal shyness and insecurity. There is a documentary aspect to his work, so yes, witnessing played a part, but that was not the primary focus.

Bob always came up with a solution to get what he needed – if he had to, he would set up his own shoots next to the film production. He created his own parade on location for Dr. Dolittle when the director was being uncooperative – “What are you going to do, come back without the shot?” But, most importantly, he cared about the people he was photographing. His images are human and trusting. He always wanted them at their best, even in their unguarded moments and his subjects knew this and trusted him.

Steve McQueen on location for “Junior Bonner”, Prescott Arizona 1971
Photograph by Bob Willoughby. © The Bob Willoughby Estate

He also seemed unfazed about celebrity and lacking in pretension himself, a great professional who wanted to do his job. Did that also help in putting the stars at ease around him?

I think most professionals in Hollywood can’t really be taken up with celebrity and get any work done. Dad treated the actors, directors and whoever he was shooting as fellow professionals. He also had a pretty solid sense of his own worth. He told Barbra Streisand once, when she was being a little difficult, that he was at least as good a photographer as she was a singer – and could we just get to work.

Dad worked hard to keep his family separate from the Hollywood lifestyle. Most of my parents’ close friends were not part of the business and, ultimately, he moved his family to Ireland where he thought we had a better chance of growing up safely.

Looking back now, do you feel you grew up safely?

We definitely grew up safely – my parents felt Los Angeles was becoming less safe, and so, by the time I was 13, they had moved the family to Ireland, and rural Ireland at that. A much more relaxed lifestyle.

Rock Hudson in his trailer, on location in Grado, Italy for “A Farewell to Arms”, 1957.
Photograph by Bob Willoughby. © The Bob Willoughby Estate

Did you grow up thinking that people in Hollywood are like everyone else? It’s easy to see why one might think otherwise, especially when you see an image like Rock Hudson behind his typewriter in his trailer and his admirers gathered at the window.

We had limited exposure and really we were too young to be impressed by actors. Although it’s funny now to see pictures of us kids climbing all over Tony Curtis in our living room.

”As Marilyn came towards him, he looked down into
the camera and felt the hair on the back of his neck rising.
He said he realised then what all the shouting was about.”

He photographed Hitchcock in 1964, on the set of Marnie, that great shot of the filmmaker’s famous profile. How was that experience?

Dad was impressed with Hitchcock. During a lull in filming, he was asking the director some questions about the script and, to dad’s delight, Hitchcock took the time to run through his whole vision of Marnie with him. Hitchcock was famously bored with aspects of filming – he could see the whole film in his head, he found the actual shooting anti-climatic.

Alfred Hitchcock on the Universal Studios set of “Marnie”, 1964.
Photograph by Bob Willoughby. © The Bob Willoughby Estate

I am returning to Audrey Hepburn, to a shot of her, I think it is from the set of My Fair Lady, when she is chatting with George Cukor. I think that extraordinary shot simply captures the scale of a film set you are working on, evoking the feeling that you inhabit a silent world where you are on your own just watching. And I think that just shows how special his job was, but how good a photographer he was, too.

That shot of Audrey and Cukor was on the Covent Garden set on a Warner Bros soundstage in Burbank for My Fair Lady. It was after the first day of shooting, Dad was packing up his gear when Audrey came out and sat down to discuss the day with George Cukor. It is a wonderful image that, I think besides being beautiful, conveys the scale of the movies, the magic of the movies and the dedication of cast and crew.

Your father also published a book with his photographs of Audrey Hepburn. Was Audrey your father’s favourite subject? What was his favourite memory of Audrey?

Taschen published a wonderful book of my father’s images of Audrey. I think Audrey and dad hit it off the first day they met and over the years worked together on half a dozen films. Both Audrey and my mother were pregnant at the same time; her son Sean’s birthday is two days after mine, and there are fun shots of us crawling around the house and having birthdays together.

There is a shot of Marilyn Monroe on the set of Let’s Make Love. Did he impart with you any views about Marilyn from the set of that film?

Wistful and vulnerable sometimes and able to turn on a very potent sexuality when she was being photographed. The first time he photographed Marilyn was at a Photo Op at Fox Studio, not really dad’s sort of thing. He managed to find a spot away from the other photographers which, out of sheer luck, was the right spot. As Marilyn came towards him, he looked down into the camera and felt the hair on the back of his neck rising. He said he realised then what all the shouting was about.

Jean Seberg during filming “Bonjour Tristesse” in France, 1957.
Photograph by Bob Willoughby. © The Bob Willoughby Estate

He shot Jean Seberg during Bonjour Tristesse. About Seberg in this film, Truffaut had said that her “wide-open blue eyes” had “a glint of boyish malice” and “when Jean Seberg is on screen you can’t look at anything else. Her every movement is graceful, each glance is precise.” Bob seems to have captured that piercing look, and then some, in his photographs. You said he got along great with Preminger. What was his collaboration with Seberg like?

Before Bonjour Tristesse, dad worked with Otto and Jean on Saint Joan in 1957 – Otto had hired Bob for an earlier film, Carmen Jones, and seemed to like Bob right off the bat, I think they had similar interests in art and culture.

Jean was a seventeen year old Iowa schoolgirl who emerged as Saint Joan after a massive publicity based talent search. During production in London, Jean was young and out of her depth and on set Otto was emotionally brutal with her, trying to get the performance he wanted. Dad and Jean became good friends and spent a lot of time together. I believe Otto was relieved Jean was being chaperoned around and that he didn’t have to do it.

By the time Bonjour Tristesse went into production, they were old chums. Here again I feel trust and affection is the collaboration and played a huge part in creating those beautiful images.

James Dean goes over his script on the set of “Rebel Without a Cause”, Warner Bros. 1955
Photograph by Bob Willoughby. © The Bob Willoughby Estate

Two of my absolute favourite photographs of Bob Willoughby are the ones of James Dean from the set of Rebel Without a Cause, between takes looking over a script with a cigarette in his hand, and that of Montgomery Clift on the set of Raintree County.

Dad was working on the Warner lot when his agent called and asked him to go over and get a few shots on the set of a little film called Rebel Without a Cause. He mentioned there was a new actor from Broadway playing opposite Natalie Wood, and it might be good to have a few shots of him. And that was James Dean.

During production on Raintree County, Montgomery Clift was in a serious car accident coming home from a party at Elizabeth Taylor’s and the lower part of his face was badly damaged. It delayed the production for months, Monty never really got over it and became increasingly eccentric. My father was very impressed with how maternal and caring Elizabeth was towards him.

Elizabeth Taylor on the set of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, 1965
Photograph by Bob Willoughby. © The Bob Willoughby Estate

And he also photographed Frank Sinatra, who had the reputation of having only the best photograph him, or let come near him. What was Bob’s relationship with Sinatra like?

It was great! – I guess he thought dad was the best! He called him Bobby.

Did he ever think “I could have taken a better shot”?

Nope.

Is there anyone he wished he had photographed and didn’t have the chance to?

I’m sure there was, but he went where the job dictated. There are certainly a few holes in the collection – I know he liked Robert Redford, for instance, and we don’t have anything on him. It’s also interesting to see who it was assumed would be a big deal and who would be a flash in the pan – and turned out wrong.

And something like that happened with…

Hmmm – Geoffrey Horne in Bonjour Tristesse springs to mind, or maybe Christopher Jones in Ryan’s Daughter?

Towards the end of his career, photographer Terry O’Neill said: “I’m not really interested in photography anymore. I’ve semi-retired; there’s nobody I want to photograph now. Nobody as great as all the people I used to photograph. Standards have fallen where photography is concerned. Now when you go to a film premiere, the photographers look at their pictures as they take them and when they have ‘the shot’, they just stop shooting.” How did Bob feel about that? Did he think the quality of stardom had been absolutely debased in time?

He didn’t feel that way at all, he loved photography – He photographed until the very end of his life and was always working on his own projects. O’Neill is talking about paparazzi and that isn’t the type of work my father did, it was always a collaboration with the actors and the studios. And there are still great faces out there.

That’s actually reinforcing to hear. Before he became known as the great chronicler of Hollywood stars, Bob Willoughby produced an astonishing series of photographs of pivotal jazz musicians. Why did he stop photographing musicians?

Time, mostly, I’d say. He loved jazz, it was always playing in his office while he worked. I think his shooting schedule was taken up almost entirely with movies and he didn’t have time to go to shows. And record labels didn’t have the budget to compete with the film studios either.

Marcus Roberts listening in the wings at Jazz Gipfel in Liederhalle, Stuttgart, 1992.
Photograph by Bob Willoughby. © The Bob Willoughby Estate

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