Francesco Scavullo, 82; Photographer of Beautiful Women

Francesco Scavullo, one of the world’s best-known photographers of beautiful women, died Tuesday in New York City. He was 82.

His companion, Sean Byrnes, told the Associated Press that Scavullo was preparing for an assignment and collapsed after complaining of feeling unwell. He died of heart failure, Byrnes said.

In a career spanning more than five decades and countless covers for magazines such as Seventeen, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Town & Country and Harper’s Bazaar, Scavullo photographed some of the most beautiful women in the world, including Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, Michelle Pfeiffer, Kim Basinger and Diana Ross.

But he was best-known in the magazine world for his covers for Cosmopolitan, which he began creating in the mid-1960s at the request of Helen Gurley Brown, who was then editor in chief.

Scavullo created the seductive “Cosmo girl” style: far sexier than many of the other women’s magazines of the day. One of those Cosmo girls was Farrah Fawcett, whom he initially photographed for a shampoo ad. She later starred in the television show “Charlie’s Angels” and built a career as an actress.

Scavullo had singular control over the Cosmo cover process. He picked the models, told them what to wear, and dictated their hairstyles and makeup. He said the pictures overshadowed his other work.

“It became an icon, and I became very famous because of the cover,” he said in a biography on his website. “Everybody knew the Cosmo girl, and everybody wanted to be the Cosmo girl.”

He was also responsible for the magazine’s then-controversial nude male centerfolds. His photograph of Burt Reynolds in the buff, published in the April 1972 Cosmopolitan, helped rejuvenate the actor’s career.

Among his famous photographs was one of Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand that was used to promote the film “ A Star Is Born.” Another photo taken in 1975 of a 10-year old Brooke Shields was striking for making her look twice her age.

Over the years, Scavullo’s glamour makeover photographs were legendary and well publicized. They included such figures as broadcaster Barbara Walters, singer Helen Reddy and Martha Mitchell, the wife of President Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell. At the peak of Scavullo’s career, he commanded as much as $10,000 for a portrait sitting.

Once called by Cosmo’s Brown “absolutely the best woman’s photographer in the world,” Scavullo was born on Staten Island, one of five children. His family later moved to Manhattan, where his father ran a casino in Central Park.

Scavullo was drawn to art and fashion as a child.

“I was fascinated when my mother got done up. My mother made the transformation from Cinderella every day of her life,” he told AP some years ago.

His visual sense was enhanced by frequent trips to the movies. He recalled being “spellbound” by the luminous Greta Garbo in “Queen Christina,” the first motion picture he saw.

As a boy, he borrowed a camera from his father and began taking photographs of his older sisters, making up their faces to resemble Dorothy Lamour, dressing them in costumes and posing them for maximum effect. Soon his sisters’ friends wanted to have their faces made up and be photographed too.

“They were my guinea pigs,” he said years later.

Although his father had hoped that his son would go into the restaurant business, by the time he was in high school Scavullo knew that he wanted to be a fashion photographer. After graduation, he took a job in a studio that put together fashion catalogs. Tipped to a photo assisting job at Vogue magazine, he was hired on the spot and spent three years working with such noted photographers as Cecil Beaton and John Rawlings.

But most often Scavullo worked with the photographer Horst P. Horst, becoming his assistant and learning much of the photographer’s stock in trade: lighting techniques and camera angles.

In 1948, he shot his first magazine cover for Seventeen, which brought him a lucrative contract with the magazine. A short time later, he opened Scavullo Studio in a converted carriage house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which became his residence and headquarters.

In addition to his magazine work and portraiture, Scavullo took several notable album cover photographs, including one for the album “Diana,” which showed Diana Ross without makeup, with wet hair and wearing a wet T-shirt. He shot the cover of the Edgar Winter album “They Only Come Out at Night.” Scavullo’s website says it was the first rock album cover to feature someone in full drag makeup.

Scavullo published six books about his life and his work. His photographs are in the permanent collections of a number of leading museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He also directed television commercials, notably the Memorex spots with jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times some years ago, Scavullo noted that you have to be a lot more than a perfect 10 to make it as a cover girl.

“It’s not just a matter of good features or perfect bone structure,” he said. “It’s the way the light falls off your face, the way you move in front of the camera, the expression in your eyes while the camera’s clicking. You must have a certain kind of skin (luminous), a certain kind of body (a willowy 5-feet-8 to 5-feet-10), a very long neck, a long waist and long legs -- not to mention great hair, lips and eyes.”

But he added that if one’s goal is simply to achieve the illusion of perfection, all things are possible.