What happens when a fat biography published for the holiday gift-giving season gets sidetracked by scandal and questions about its veracity? Perhaps it becomes the next summer’s juiciest beach read. That could well be the case for Avedon: Something Personal (Spiegel & Grau, www.spiegelandgrau.com), by Norma Stevens and Steven M.L. Aronson, which deserves a spot on every towel in P-town and Fire Island this summer for its binge-readability.
A little backstory: When this book, an Oral History/Memoir/Page Six hybrid, hit shelves late last year, Stevens, photographer Richard Avedon’s longtime agent and studio manager, and Aronson were assailed on several fronts. The Avedon Foundation (of which Stevens was a founder) issued a a laundry list of factual errors (incorrect dollar figures from contracts; wrong dates for real estate purchases; etc.) and more gravely claimed that substantial chunks of the book were lifted directly from a never-completed autobiographical novel that Avedon had been working on, resulting in Something Personal’s incorporating fictional elements into a book sold as nonfiction. The Foundation unsuccessfully demanded that the publisher recall the book and cease publication
Since the book can be considered Stevens’ memoir as well as Avedon’s literal life story, intelligent readers can, as must be done with any memoir, take it with a grain of salt. While the Foundation may have raised objections to some details, it didn’t dispute the content that likely made it most eager to have the book disappear: Avedon’s boldfaced carnal appetites led to affairs with James Baldwin, and, for over a decade, Mike Nichols according to Stevens’ account. It also didn’t attempt to undermine descriptions of Avedon’s meticulous image-making techniques and intense focus in the process of portraiture that includies shooting fashion spreads for Vogue; stark almost-journalistic studio portraits of working class subjects for his American Westseries; and photographs of politicians and fellow artists that felt like truth made visible. As in Avedon’s own seemingly “factual” photographs, elements of the authors’ telling of his story have surely been arranged, exaggerated, and polished for maximum effect. The story though—the sweeping, gossip-glutted account of America’s luxe pop culture from the 1940s to the 1990s—is irresistible, and the essence of Avedon’s career provides a lively throughline.
Originally published in PASSPORT magazine
