Vanity Fair packages a retrospective in beauty and style
Everyone knows what a “coffee table book” is. It’s something huge, gaudy and easily dismissed — something to make an impression on others in the “better” homes but not really to be taken seriously. It’s literary furniture — what you expect Aunt Lil and Uncle Harry to leaf through admiringly before everyone adjourns with their drinks to the dining room or the backyard.
No one, after all, expects you to read a massive picture book of Goya paintings in bed or on the bus; no one retires after morning coffee with a “Complete Photos of Walker Evans” weighing as much as a 10-month-old child. It’s something decorative between covers, something to festoon the good life and advertise your sense of taste.
Which is why “Vanity Fair: The Portraits” is likely to be the Coffee Table Book of the Year — or rather a Coffee Table Book That Isn’t a Coffee Table Book at All. (In that one sense, much like “You Must Remember This” — see the editor’s choice elsewhere on this page.)
It’s less to be leafed through and marveled at than something to be actually read and stunned by and contemplated with both seriousness and sensual delight.
That’s because there have been two major American Vanity Fairs — the big Newhouse slick with the pages smelling of perfume that all but defines celebrity in our time; and Conde Nast’s original which began as something called Dress and Vanity Fair in 1913 and perished at the height of the Depression in 1936. Before it died, it employed Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood and photographers Edward Steichen, Man Ray, Horst P. Horst and George Hurrell.
The phrase “Vanity Fair” is John Bunyan’s from “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” a place of “rascality and frivolity,” as the enclosed Vanity Fair time-line puts it, with all the implied disapproval one might assume any good upward-seeking Pilgrim should have. In his introduction to the book, atheist/rationalist/polemic brawler/ pub crawler Christopher Hitchens expands on the Depression view of British emigre to America W. H. Auden “the lights must never go out. The music must always play. Even in the darkest time, there must be beauty and style and the individual. (The importance of the individual against the massified and the collective is, in fact, one of the most important lessons to have been imparted by the 20th century.)”
All of which is lovely but does run aground more than a little when you’re talking about Peggy Sirota’s photo of the Olsen twins in stark frowning disarray or Madonna aping her chosen past goddess du jour (Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe) or rapper Nelly, wearing jeans, as the bottom layer in a beauteous bikini sandwich (as seen by Mark Seliger in 2003).
Put “beauty and style and the individual” through too many bleachings and whirls through the commercial rinse cycle and you wind up with studies in the mechanics of fading.
What makes this, though, such a spectacular book are the two reigns of Vanity Fair, with 47 years of nonexistence in between. There’s its current absolute monarchy, in one reign, over arresting images of fame (Annie Leibovitz’s nude pregnant Demi Moore on the cover, Whoopi Goldberg reaching out at the camera from a bathtub full of milk). And there’s its incarnation three generations ago as the place where high culture and mass culture intermingled in a world of money (none of which was being made all that legendarily by such legendary purveyors as Parker, Benchley, Steichen et. al.).
“Compare and contrast” is what we’re all taught to do in school as the first step toward any analytical thought at all. And yet how many photo books as gorgeous as this “coffee table” masterwork bother to do anything as simply and stunning as that?
Well, this one does consistently throughout its 350 pages and 300 photographs. On one page, you’ll find Freulich’s 1921 photograph of glowering Austrian actor/director Erich Von Stroheim carrying a cane and haloed by light; right across from it you’ll find Mary Ellen Mark’s 1999 photo of a semipsychotic looking Tim Burton in a beret carrying a severed head — cinematic extremism separated by 70 years, in other words. On the left, you’ll see Irving Penn’s somewhat fretful 1983 portrait of Susan Sontag with hands folded under her chin; on the right there’s Edward Steichen’s 1935 portrait of Colette, one hand atop the other and casting a cold eye at something out of the frame. Great literary women across half a century.
Does H. L. Mencken have a mischievous smirk holding a fat cigar? Good, put him on the left with Anthony Burgess on the right holding a belligerent cigarillo. How about all of the women of the Redgrave family — four generations no less — on the left and, on the right, Annie Leibovitz’ gorgeous 2006 photograph of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes with enraptured eyes shut in a sublime Western landscape, while Cruise holds their beautiful wide-eyed daughter Suri. Let TMZ jape all they want, that is one hell of a family picture.
Virtually every pair of photos is a pair chosen with wit, panache and intelligence. They’re like brilliant equations to be solved in some algebra of renown. And you’re talking about a book of photographs collecting, from one era, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo, etc.; and from our era everyone from George Balanchine, Joan Didion, Miles Davis, John Currin, Arthur Miller, David Hockney, Toni Morrison and Jessye Norman to Gwyneth Paltrow, Sienna Miller, Radiohead, Rob Lowe, Darryl Hannah, Geena Davis, etc.
This is decidedly not a book for mere perusal. “Leafing through” gives you only a microscopic fragment of what it offers.
This is a book that virtually encapsulates what we once thought of as fame to aspire to — and what we now do.
One final thing: in our era — and in a struggling city — $65 is no small piece of change. And yet if you think of the novels and memoirs by untried, overcompensated writers selling for half that, you realize that in the price structure of contemporary publishing, the huge and gorgeous “Vanity Fair: The Portraits” is — honest to God — close to a bargain.
Jeff Simon is The News’ arts and books editor.
