Eight Girls Taking Pictures (28 page)

Instead, she felt exhilarated, calm, and not unhappy—all the emotions that she would never, ever, for the rest of her life, admit to anyone.

After that first, big attack, Lenny’s father sent her a telegram, demanding that she come home. She sent him a telegram with her London address, a reply both definitive and unmistakable.

The attacks of the Luftwaffe went on for fifty-seven days and nights, with the worst fires, the most damage, the most casualties occurring in the following May. In between the fifty-seven consecutive raids and that unthinkable day in May, Lenny went on as did everyone else: working, falling in and out of love, arguing, making up, raising children, having children, going to school, going to the market, seeing friends, falling out with friends, being with family. People did not flock to the Tube stations. People did not rush to their Anderson shelters. People were so calm that a kind of weird boredom settled in. It was almost as if the planes overhead, the antiaircraft fire, and the enormous barrage balloons—which were just thin silver-tone material around gas, so insubstantial, yet effectively protecting the city and its inhabitants by forcing the planes to fly higher to avoid them—created an atmosphere that both provoked
and negated fear. Though she understood them as a defensive measure, the barrage balloons only reminded Lenny of the lighting lessons of Tin Type, who’d explained that a silver object doesn’t generate its own light.

An artist friend of Lenny’s who’d fought in the Great War told her of the time he came upon dead farm animals suspended from the branches of a very old, very large tree, which struck him as an ideal Surrealist sculpture: the horse, the goat, the pony, all blown up into, then tangled among the branches, the very things that should not have been there yet seemed ordinary in the panic of the war.

She reflected on her Surrealist photographic tendencies as she donned a tin hat to go out amid the wreckage of the city, day after day, making pictures of the nightmare that now surrounded her: a tall old building, its entire center blown out, leaving the sides and the top floor, approximating Venice’s Bridge of Sighs; the smashed typewriter; the waterfall of books that rushed from the windows of the library onto the street.

There were doors completely blocked with rubble; a classical statue of a woman lying on the ground in the embrace of another fallen statue. Still another statue, of a sixteenth-century king, wearing a gas mask and a flak jacket, with a sign around his neck saying, “All dressed up and nowhere to go.”

The bombings democratically hit every borough of the city, bringing its citizens together in a way that hadn’t happened before.

Lenny viewed the cityscape, with its vast holes where houses and businesses once stood, marveling at the random pattern of destruction, picking her way through little mountains of bricks, stones, mortar. She wanted to weep when she came upon a structure, centuries old, damaged beyond repair (often leveled altogether), thinking of all the men and the hundreds of years it took to construct this city, only to see it come to this in a historically scant fifty-seven days. Mostly, Surrealism kept away despair, except when she wondered as she walked in the wake of the bombs and fires, Is this Breton’s convulsive beauty? Or, when she though of all those vacant Jewish houses, Is this de Chirico’s empty city?

Francis Walker was away more and more working with the military. Lenny had no patience for Natasha and her needs and her fears; Natasha said that Lenny’s coldness was due to jealousy, and Lenny allowed her to believe that because it was easier.

Mauritz had emigrated to America after begging Georges to come with him. But no amount of pleading or declarations of love could dissuade Georges from traveling to Paris to be with his family, despite the Vichy government, which surely sealed all their fates. It was always a mistake to think that, no matter how well you had done in the world, you would be seen as the exception.

Lenny went to A.W., the female editor in chief of British
BelleFille,
asking to be given war assignments. “I’ll take pictures and I’ll write,” she said. As if anyone, let alone a high-fashion magazine, would send a woman to report the war. When she was told no, she continued photographing at home.

Then, after D-day, women in numbers so small everyone knew their names began reporting from France. This was how Lenny found herself on a transport plane, bumping and rolling through choppy air, to land on the French coast where the Americans believed the Germans had surrendered, only to find themselves fighting for territory. Lenny, excited and scared and brave, began shooting rolls of film, recording the battle from the vantage point of the soldiers, stopping only once to feel the love and elation of being back in France.

This was in 1944, when Francis Walker was in Italy and the Allies were ending the war and Lenny, in her custom-made soldier’s uniform, boots, and bags of film; her camera, her typewriter, her cigarettes and gin, traveled with the American military, taking pictures of the surrender, with the exception of that first battle. She never would’ve been sent if the magazine had known it was a war zone; women weren’t sent to photograph war. She was meant only to write and photograph the war’s end.

Paris was not Paris. All her old friends, the ones who had somehow escaped the camps, or had been in the camps and survived, now seemed unhealthy and hollow and barely present. She was moved to
fury and sadness as she held them in her arms. Prewar memories of masquerade balls, dinners that went deep into the night; art exhibitions, paintings traded for meals at La Coupole and Le Dôme and the occasional, awful American breakfast at Deux Magots because an American begged for it. All the love affairs and broken hearts and marriages. The manifestos. The feeling of promise. No one could think of it now. So seeing one another was a double-edged blade that couldn’t help but cut when handled.

No one expected that a high-fashion magazine like
BelleFille,
with American, French, Italian, British editions, would pay Lenny to travel with the American troops as they moved through Europe in the waning days of the war that was all but formally over. But when Lenny happened into battle, the extraordinary A.W. saw the possibilities of her dispatches. It was an almost unimaginable pairing: Fortuny gowns and Cartier jewels and Hermès handbags with the wreckage of war. To that end, who better to photograph and write the dispatches than a former fashion model with Surrealist sensibilities and an attraction to risk?

“Here,” said the young American soldier, a photographer for a U.S. paper, who had been assigned to drive Lenny, that is, when Lenny would allow him to drive. It was an ongoing argument between them.

She took the telegram and read it before lighting it with the same match she used to light her cigarette. She noticed Jack Fisher watching her. “Francis’s wife. She’s very needy.”

Francis knew that Jack’s involvement with Lenny wasn’t limited to driving, and that they shared a bed on the road and a room at the Hôtel Scribe when in Paris—though the room reflected her more than it did Jack. All her belongings—typewriter, camera, film, prints, negatives, underwear, cigarettes, tins from her parents, along with the chocolates she loved so much, canteens, gin bottles—were scattered everywhere. The perpetually unmade bed, the crowded desktop, the filled ashtrays, and wastebaskets with tossed paper both inside and outside. Her uniforms, her leggings, her filthy boots.

Jack’s gear, on the other hand, was limited to what could fit into a camera bag and a footlocker that he slipped under the bed.

Their nine-year age difference excited him. In college he’d studied art with the idea that he would one day make movies. He knew of Lenny before their introduction: She was the subject of work by Tin Type, Picasso, Cornell, and Cocteau, whose film, in which she starred as Venus, was said to be a “visual poem, made in a state of grace.”

She said the reason she and Francis Walker got along so well was that he was crazy about her (Francis had his own aspirations to make art) and he didn’t care about sexual exclusivity. “Thank God.”

When thinking of Lenny as a lover, a companion, and a comrade, Jack found himself questioning the line that divides reckless from adventurous, until she languidly came over to where he was working across the room and unbuttoned his shirt, changing the direction of his inner debate completely.

 • • • 

So began their crisscrossing of Europe, a journey marked by drinking, smoking, sex, photography, reporting, the surprise of each day. It was an unpredictable vagabond life punctuated by the danger of a dwindling war. Lenny and Jack would venture out for weeks, then head back to the Scribe, then out again. They lived in suspended time that rendered everything weightless. They asked each other “What day is it?” so often that it became a running joke. Whether she was drunk or sober, Jack had never seen anyone more content or calm than Lenny.

As Lenny, Jack, and the American soldiers rolled through villages that reminded her of fairy tales, she found herself thinking of the lines of an e. e. cummings poem that she barely knew:

anyone lived in a pretty how town

(with up so floating many bells down)