Let It Be

Richard Avedon and the scurrilous ‘60s would seem to be an oxymoron. Like mixing Leonard Bernstein with the Fugs. Or Fred Astaire--who played Avedon in “Funny Face”--with The Living Theater, whose members sweat it out nakedly in Avedon’s latest book. The Fugs are there too, showing off their bellybuttons. When you meet Gloria and Juan Gonzales, field marshal and minister of defense of the Puerto Rican revolutionary group, the Young Lords, who exchange these vows at their wedding in 1970--”If I go forward, follow me. If I stand still, push me. If I go backward, kill me”--then you know you’ve stumbled on a period album of some moment.

I say stumble because, though one expects riveting images in an Avedon collection, such as those found in his “In the American West,” one doesn’t necessarily learn much about the circumstances that shaped the character of the faces revealed. On the contrary, the tension that animates an Avedon portrait is born of the intimacy of the interaction between the photographer and the subject, an interplay that brooks no outside intrusion upon the seamless white backdrop of a set. Only by stripping away all paraphernalia and incident is Avedon able to transcend the subject’s subjectivity, as it were, and reach for the timeless iconic aura that is the hallmark of his work.

For the most part, these rules apply to the portraits in “The Sixties,” and yet unlike other Avedon collections, which are suffused with a great silence, this crowd conveys in posture and expression the peculiar passions of its era. Standing in ones and twos against the tabula rasa of an empty stage, they speak their thousand words, but many of the portraits come attached with homely blocks of typescript in which the subjects speak for themselves. And this makes all the difference.

The powerful images of a bedizened Janis Joplin clenching her fists, then standing in sorrow, acquire a deeper portent when one follows the train of thought that leads to her despair. “There isn’t going to be any next-month-it’ll-be-better, next f---ing year, next f---ing life,” she tells Doon Arbus:

“You just got to look around you and say, So this is it. This is really all there is to it. This little thing. Everybody needing such little things and they can’t get them. Everybody needing such a little . . . confidence from somebody else and they can’t get it. Everybody, everybody fighting to protect their little feelings. . . . It’s so shallow and seems so . . . f---ing . . . it seems like such a shame.”

A year later she died of a drug overdose in Hollywood at 27. Knowing that matters too.

It’s a bit like looking at Van Gogh’s painting of a cornfield with blackbirds flying out of it before turning the page and learning that it was the last painting Van Gogh painted before he killed himself. “It is hard to define exactly how the words have changed the image,” John Berger observes in “Ways of Seeing,” “but undoubtedly they have. The image now illustrates the sentence.” Or is in some way changed by it.

“The Sixties,” which opens with an etherealized Twiggy and ends with a graying Frank Zappa, mixes extravagant images from the rock and fashion worlds with the closed faces of political activists--also U.S. Embassy officials in Saigon--who concede nothing and everything to Avedon’s camera. That it works as a kind of docudrama is the result of the synergy between Avedon’s pictures and Arbus’ interviews. Arbus, the daughter of photographer Diane Arbus, who committed suicide in 1971, is Avedon’s longtime collaborator and the author of Brooke Shields’ memorable line (in an Avedon ad): “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins.” Her text, drawn mainly from interviews with political activists, musicians and war correspondents during the dangerous years of 1969-’71, acts as an undertow to the surge of brilliant imagery. The words invite reflection, and there is more that is new in what is said about the ‘60s than in what is revealed by faces which are, with notable exceptions (the Tiger Cage prisoners of Vietnam’s Poulo Condor), all too familiar.

Not that the photographs, some 250 large and small, don’t speak for themselves. They do, especially the nudes unembellished by commentary. A few are slapstick. Paul Krassner, grinning sheepishly--not an Avedon look--stands next to smiling actress Jada Roland while holding an American flag and sustaining an erection. Others are more mysterious, like the staring figures of the actors and “actress” Candy Darling in the extended tableau of groupies from the Warhol Factory. Standing apart from their clothed companions, the men convey the telltale tension of subjects who exist as objects in the eye of a beholder. Used to being watched, they radiate watchfulness. Change the pronoun and you have a paradigm for the classic nudes of Tintoretto, Reubens and Ingres, who also stare out at the viewer, away from their companions; available and yet inaccessible.

Such images convey little of the character of the individual and everything about the sexual fantasies of the times. They are different from the stark celebration of the male body one sees in Avedon’s photograph of Nureyev, standing alone, confronting the photographer-viewer with a touch of youthful defiance born of an awareness of his own beauty. He is paired on the facing page with Weatherman Bernadine Dohrn, who is encased in black leather and wool but conveys an identical expression. This linkage of opposites by facial expression is repeated throughout “The Sixties.” An unidentified woman carrying a newspaper announcing the death of President Kennedy mirrors the solemnity of Bob Dylan walking in the rain; a freckled boy-soldier carrying a massive carbine at Fire Base Charlie in South Vietnam has the same mouth as Joan Baez, whose dreamy image faces his.

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What the photographs of naked bodies possess, in contrast to classic nudes, is hair. Abundant hair in the case of men, accentuated in the darkroom. “Hair,” Berger writes, “is associated with sexual power, with passion,” traditionally the properties of men; hence the Renaissance convention of painting women without body hair, thereby retaining their virginal character for the male spectator. In “The Sixties,” hair is frankly associated with passion, in the close-up of Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky kissing; and with power, when a satyr-like Julian Beck, director of The Living Theater, twists through a knot of naked torsos.

What holds all these varied images together, apart from thematic groupings (the Chicago 7 Conspiracy Trial of 1968-69; South Vietnam, 1971) and expressive linkages, are shocking juxtapositions. Andy Warhol’s scarred torso faces the solarized head of John Lennon. A familiar photograph of the American Nazi Party with leader George Lincoln Rockwell is followed by a youthful James Baldwin, a loving portrait of an early colleague of Avedon’s made in 1945. Anjelica Huston romping with a photographer outside a ruined castle in Ireland segues into the fierce gaze of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, her handsome 70-ish face a study in self-possession.

“You know, a lot of the Catholic Workers go up in the world. And a lot of them go down in the world--to jail,” Day tells Arbus. “I must say I have much more esteem for those who keep trying to get lower. . . . We must continue to fill up the jails. Breaking the law is the only way of really testing it.”

One rarely hears such voices today, and their presence in the book separates it from typical sendups of the ‘60s as a time of youthful self-indulgence. Pacifist Dave Dellinger, elder statesman of the Chicago 7, who appears in Avedon’s trial lineup in his usual suit and tie, explains why he no longer fears prison. Jailed for draft resistance before World War II, he helped organize a strike on behalf of black convicts who were being mistreated. This led to a midnight confrontation with the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, who made it known that unless he stopped his activities, he would not get out of prison alive. After a few days in solitary confinement without food, Dellinger realized this was true. “And I just faced it,” he says, “and decided--not to sound heroic because I wasn’t heroic--that I couldn’t back down. That I would die there.” It was as if he “died [then] psychologically and spiritually” and thus couldn’t worry about the threat of prison in 1969: “It seems to be kind of an acting-out of a drama that I made a decision on a long time ago.”

Abbie Hoffman, demure in the Chicago tableau, outrageous in a solo portrait, bathes Arbus in rhetoric: “[G]oing to jail or dying. . . . Both times you’re removed from the street. . . . Dying makes a better movie but . . . what’s the difference?” Yet he gives voice to a partisan view that remains poorly understood when he states: “I’m not against the war in Vietnam. I’m for the National Liberation Front winning.” This was more than bravado. Commenting recently in The New York Times about why he wrote “The Price” in 1968, Arthur Miller states that as a play about the perils of forgetting, it was among other things a secret response to the Vietnam War: “As the corpses piled up, it became cruelly impolite if not unpatriotic to suggest the obvious, that we were fighting the past; our rigid anti-communist theology, born of another time two decades earlier, made it a sin to consider Vietnamese Reds as nationalists rather than as Moscow’s and Beijing’s yapping dogs.”

In this sense, Hoffman, along with Dohrn, who ratchets the argument higher--”Killing a cop just because he’s a cop, that’ll happen. And that should happen”--are children enacting a domestic drama of outrage and revenge over the deadly sins of their fathers. Not their biological fathers, the subject of biography, but the nation’s fathers, an unexamined subject of political history.

A great deal of ‘60s thought makes sense when you read it against this backdrop of unyielding anti-communism. When national leaders got stuck in the face of international power shifts they could neither comprehend nor control, a kind of pall fell over Western culture that was picked up first not by artists and intellectuals but by youth and elder-youth like psychoanalyst R. D. Laing. “There’s a sort of deadness that goes with the . . . normalcy that’s taken to be sanity,” Laing tells Arbus. “Really a physical and mental sort of flatness,” it opened the gates to an increase in real madness and a celebration of what was not always false madness. “Really flying,” Laing called the exodus from the old order, which was accompanied by mass experiments in mind-altering drugs.

In “The Sixties,” the errant fathers are represented by another lineup, the Mission Council, numbering 11 U.S. Embassy officials who managed the war from Saigon in 1971. Central casting has had a hand in the collective portrait, in which the suited subjects, including Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, appear uncomfortable, as if they were surprised in a Roman bath without their togas. Avedon is very good at choreographing these dioramas, which stood 9 feet tall at a one-man show at the Marlborough Gallery in New York in 1975, with Arbus’ tapes whirring in the background.

Other groupings, also from South Vietnam, are more naturalistic: a cohort of youthful bureau chiefs talking in front of Avedon’s traveling curtain; New Yorker writer Robert Shaplen, who first set foot in Vietnam in 1946, hobnobbing with Vietnamese reporters. Shaplen, who is “hooked” on Vietnam, echoes the traditional Cold War view that saw Indochina as an extension of either China or Russia. After World War II, Vietnam was “a smaller cradle of the revolution” that had begun in China. It was “virgin revolutionary territory,” he tells Arbus, where the fight between Democracy and Communism was still “contestable.”

A useful feature of “The Sixties,” along with its succinct chronology, are the biographies in the back of the book. There you learn what the bureau chiefs are up to today and that Juan Gonzales, long divorced from Gloria, co-hosts Pacifica Radio’s “Democracy Now”; or that after haunting the FBI’s “Most Wanted List” throughout the ‘70s, Dohrn heads the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University’s School of Law. Fitzgerald’s old saw that there are no second acts in American life is refuted once again--at least for the survivors of a political generation (how many have died!) who by and large have not betrayed their pasts.

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The reflections on political crimes and punishment, violence and nonviolence, social change and revolution, together with the war stories that enliven the book, seem remote from the concerns of contemporary activism. Though the would-be revolutionaries of the ‘60s and early ‘70s were reacting, whether they knew it or not, to the thinning of American power--to its corruption and comeuppance in Vietnam--today’s activists are struggling with the social and environmental fallout of vast conglomerations of economic power no longer beholden to any government.

California readers, meanwhile, will notice a decidedly New York tinge to Avedon’s ‘60s, wherein men hover collegially over their cigars: cartoonist Jules Feiffer, publisher Jason Epstein and attorney William Kunstler (“I will never be bored. And I will never be contented”). Also Norman Mailer huffing with Dellinger. As for the women, the less said the better. We are left with too many divas who have wandered out of the fashion pages where they belong. And Joplin, speaking in this pre-feminist decade, delivers herself of the opinion that what “women are for [is] to need and be with a man and bear children. . . . But,” she adds, “I got another trip going.”

Avedon, who was born into a family of lower Manhattan merchants in 1923, never was interested in what he saw as “everyone else’s subject matter, the man on the street.” He preferred working with what he understood better: “the confusing nature of beauty, the uses of power, and the isolation of creative people.” The result has been a triumphant career in fashion photography and the manufacture of a cerebral image of celebrity that has insinuated itself into the marrow of high culture. To the degree that this template helps shape “The Sixties,” with its focus on stars, even underground stars, it furthers the notion that this was the decade of the Me Generation when, in fact, the buzzword for millions of ordinary Americans who were questioning authority all along the line was not “Me” but “Why?”