THE BIZ : New Leafs

As a free-lance photographer for Time and Saturday Evening Post in the 1930s, Earl Leaf went behind Communist lines in China to photograph rebel leaders Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai; during World War II, he worked for the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services. But by the late 1940s, he, like so many artists of the restless postwar generation, had landed in Hollywood, becoming a fixture at press functions--a tall, gaunt, bearded paparazzo in a safari jacket and ascot, cameras over one shoulder, pretty women on both arms.

While cultivating the pose of dissolute lotus eater, Leaf amassed an amazing portfolio: three decades of movie- and rock-star portraits and candids that he left to the magazines he’d shot for. After Leaf died in 1980 at the age of 75, Michael Ochs, owner of Michael Ochs Archives, learned that the magazines no longer had Leaf’s photos or negatives. A year ago, Ochs finally traced the negs to Leaf’s film processor and bought them in a five-figure deal: thousands of negatives, including some of the photographer with celebrity friends (Mamie Van Doren above, Marilyn Monroe, right.)

“It’s taken a long time for us to break them down (and identify everybody),” says Ochs, who plans to do a book of the pictures. Meanwhile, he is exhibiting 10 new prints at Genghis Cohen, a Chinese restaurant on Fairfax: Sophia Loren and Jayne Mansfield; Mamie Van Doren; a young, bare-chested Johnny Carson; Marilyn Monroe. A baby-faced Clint Eastwood wields a gun; Joan Collins hides behind dark glasses. Elizabeth Taylor, swathed in fur, smokes a cigarette. Ah, Hollywood.