ODD COUPLE OF PHOTOGRAPHY : CHECKING OUT ODD COUPLE OF PHOTOGRAPHY

“Helmut won’t do anything manual,” says June Newton, cranking out the awning over the balcony of their Monte Carlo apartment. Known as a photographer by her pseudonym, Alice Springs, June Newton has been married to Helmut Newton for nearly four decades. She has wound out awnings, answered his telephones and, in the heat of the metier, turned to photography herself.

She has also watched her husband evolve from snapping pictures of baby booties for an Australian homemaker’s magazine to shooting his infamous photo of a woman in panties and a Hermes saddle on her back.

Noted for bringing sex into fashion photography, Helmut Newton created a notorious array of high-style, hard-edged nudes, who variously sport velvet and sadomasochistic chains, bob their breasts over plates of food and thrust their heads down toilet bowls. Yet, in a markedly contradictory mode, the bete noire of feminism has for decades remained the old-fashioned, monogamous husband of Alice Springs.

In the midday heat of the Cote d’Azur, Springs drinks mineral water in the newly created balcony shade. The color of a California swimming pool, the Mediterranean sparkles below her. Both she and Newton are dressed coolly in white, he in only a pair of shorts.

The apartment, in a high-rise, hill-top building, is equally cool, and as unsentimentally slick as a Newton photograph. The single hot spot of color, amid the glass and chrome, the beiges and creams, is a wall-size painting of a pink bull, which dominates the living room.

While Springs talks on the balcony, Newton telephones. “Ici Newton,” he announces with thudding German enunciation. Ending a call to a photo editor, he roars out a put-down of her.

At 66, Newton is tanned, trimmed from swimming and as tense and fiery as his pink bull. He is also largely dependent on Springs, and, while she’s being interviewed, he is being ignored. He paces back and forth in front of the bull. “How are you doing?” he calls. “I’m doing all right,” she replies. Then, as lunch-time passes, he bellows, “I’m starving!” “Too bad,” Springs says softly, out of earshot.

“I don’t think two people could be more unalike,” she comments. He’s highly organized, pressed for time, driven by work. She’s calm and a little vague. He is secretive about his private life and puts on a billboard smile for the public. She laughs spontaneously and is congenially open. He calls her “Sweets,” she calls him “Hel.”

Newton’s a Scorpio, a stinger. Springs is a Gemini, an empathizer. “Scorpios sting themselves,” says Springs. “He’s never stung me; he knows better than that. But he has stung other people.”

“She’s very strong,” says Newton of Springs. “She’s the only one who can persuade me to do things.”

The differences between husband and wife are evident in their photography. Springs flips to a spread in the French magazine, Egoiste, which features two pictures of Charlotte Rampling, one by Newton and one by Springs. Springs has focused on Rampling’s riveting eyes.

“It’s the faces that interest me,” she says. Newton has portrayed Rampling full-length, looking sultry and detached. Springs covers Rampling’s body with her hand. “If you take only the face, she’s away from it all. Helmut often likes to have the models play a role. He knows how to manipulate people. He gets out of them exactly what he wants. You can see it happening when he’s working. All of a sudden you think, ‘Oh, oh, there it goes again.’ ”

Newton remains unfazed by the outrage his depiction of women has produced. “I don’t give a damn,” he retorts. “I’m not here to be liked.” Some years ago, he recounts, a model said of his photographs of her, “This is not me at all.” “I said, ‘My dear, I’m not paid to photograph you; I’m paid to photograph what I see in you.’ ”

He readily concedes: “My pictures are a little bit scandalous and I like that. I’m a frustrated paparazzi . June is very unscandalous, very straight.”

Springs was raised on a sheep farm outside of Melbourne at a time when she says, “(open) sex was unheard of in Australia.” For women, “the house was what you had to have, the home and the garden.”

Newton was brought up in the permissive Berlin of the ‘20s and ‘30s: “Sex (for him) was like we would have our meals,” Springs says.

He recalls his mother’s strong influence. “She was very modern in her outlook on sex.” While his father urged him to follow the bourgeois life of an industrialist, his mother encouraged him in photography. He would look at her Vogue magazines and, he says, “I watched her making up and getting ready to go out in the evening.” When he became interested in girls, he started photographing them around swimming pools.

It was not until he was over 50, however, that Newton’s work became markedly lurid and outre, following a near-fatal heart attack. “I changed my life; I changed my outlook,” he says. “I wasn’t so interested any more in making money. I wanted to do exactly what I wanted to do.”

Says Springs of the heart attack: “It opened up something in him. He started doing work that was tremendously influenced by his bourgeois background.”

Newton much admired Luis Bunuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” satirizing upper-class European life, and in 1976, he made a definitive statement of his new perspectives with the publication of “White Women.” In it, he published his famous picture of a model in panties pushing another model’s head down a toilet at the exclusive Paris nightclub Regine’s.

“I thought he went too far when he put the head down the toilet,” says Springs. “That was the only one that was a real turn-off for me. I told him he mustn’t put it in, but he did because he liked it.”

Still, Springs says, “I’m not very women’s lib. I’d never say that he was putting down women.”

However, Newton, to the contrary, claims, “I’m a great feminist.” Springs chuckles exuberantly at this. “Oh, I think he talks a lot.”

Nevertheless, Newton insists, “I believe there should be no social or class difference (between women and men). I get terribly annoyed when it says woman photographer. It’s like saying a Jewish and a Catholic photographer. Who cares?”

When the Newtons were married in 1948, Springs recalls, “None of our friends thought it would last. They thought I was going to be completely overpowered by Helmut. They could see me giving up my career as an actress.”

Springs did give up an acting career and took up photography 16 years ago when she shot a cigarette ad for Newton, who was sick in bed. In the early years, she also posed for Newton. “She was beautiful,” he says, showing a 1947 photograph of her stretched out in a bathtub.

The two fell in love when Springs began modeling sweaters for the young photographer, who had moved from Berlin to Melbourne and had set up an eclectic business taking pictures of knitwear, baby clothes and weddings. Springs fast became her husband’s factotum, setting up shootings, giving ideas, hanging exhibits and “doing all the things a secretary should do,” she says.

When Newton proposed to her, she remembers: “He said there’s only one thing. ‘If I ever have to choose between you and photography, I would always choose photography.’ That’s where we differ. He is driven, and I certainly wouldn’t be a photographer if I wasn’t with Helmut. My passion was acting.”

Still, as a portrait photographer, Springs has achieved notable success, snapping such arts celebrities as William Styron, Anthony Burgess and William Burroughs.

Ironically, in the last two years it is Newton who has come to his wife’s speciality of portraiture and both have books of portraits coming out--Springs’ “Portraits” (Twelvetrees Press) this month and an as-yet untitled book by Newton in the spring.

“Now portraits is all he wants to do,” says Springs. “He’s bored with fashion. He’s been doing it all his life. Also fashion today doesn’t correspond to the fashion he likes to photograph. The layered clothes, the disorganized mess that women wear. . . . He was only interested in photographing fashion because he was interested in women. The particular thing that he liked to do with high heels and the sexy clothes has gone out of fashion a lot.”

Springs describes her husband as “very gay, nothing like his work. That’s another side, the dark side. I don’t know anything about that,” she insists. He is also “never suspicious” (“You can get away with absolute murder with Helmut”) and “extremely sensual.”

And sensitive? “I think the sensitivity is well-hidden, but it’s absolutely there.”

Springs has seen Newton cry twice--once at a movie and once at a performance by Marlene Dietrich toward the end of her career. “Newton was set to take pictures when Dietrich came onstage pathetically poured into her dress. I saw Helmut’s head on the tripod and he was looking down,” says Springs. “He was crying. He said, ‘Why is she still singing? I can’t take any pictures.’ He has those little things that astonish.”

Separately and together, Springs and Newton lead independent lives. He travels alone to Berlin to photograph its contours and denizens. “It’s a break he needs and one I welcome,” Springs says. Together, they travel annually to Los Angeles, where they winter at the Chateau Marmont and see friends Tina and Barbara Chow and Timothy and Barbara Leary. In the fall they migrate to Paris.

The Monte Carlo apartment is their only residence and they operate with no office staff or studios. “I don’t want to own anything anymore,” says Newton. “I just want to take photographs.”