Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #453045 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 446 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Miller (1907–1977) began her career as a fashion model, and quickly decamped for Paris, where she became Man Ray's muse and student. After they split, she returned to Manhattan for a brief stint as a studio photographer, but eventually returned to Europe. Her surrealist background led to her taking stunning photos of the London Blitz, but she shot her most memorable—and disturbing—images accompanying American troops from Paris to Dachau as a war correspondent for Vogue. Burke's meticulously detailed biography reveals how keenly Miller's wartime experiences haunted her during her final troubled decades, but it also probes sympathetically into the artist's other significant trauma: a childhood rape, which was, Burke conjectures, exacerbated by her father's practice of photographing her nude well into early adulthood. Burke (Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy) writes with a careful sense of how Miller might have approached her work and of how it is perceived by modern viewers. Her descriptions of Miller's imagery are so vivid that, despite the dozens of photographs reproduced here, readers will find themselves wanting to see more. As the first major biographer outside the Miller family, she traces a dynamic life that embodies the spirit of the 20th century's first half. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
If, like Auntie Mame, you believe that "Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death," you'll surely want to read Carolyn Burke's delightful biography of Lee Miller. Here was a woman who needed no exhortation from anyone to "Live! Live!" Her life was filled with adventures -- in New York, Paris, Cairo, London and the battlefronts of World War II. She caroused with Picasso, Man Ray and Jean Cocteau, peeled off her clothes to pose for avant-garde masters, then switched roles to become a photographer for Vogue. Charlie Chaplin posed for her; so did Colette, Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier. After she settled down with the British painter and curator Sir Roland Penrose, she took up cooking with gusto, befriending such culinary legends as James Beard and planting a country garden of earthly delights.

But as in Candide, the best of all possible worlds can contain troubles. Burke's meticulously researched biography begins with Miller's birth in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1907. Her father, Theodore, was a successful engineer and avid photographer; her Canadian mother, Florence, a former nurse, doted on golden-curled little Elizabeth. Variously called "Li Li, then Te Te, Bettie, and in her twentieth year, Lee," she grew up on a 165-acre farm in idyllic surroundings. If her story were told in a series of snapshots, you would see her climbing trees, sledding down hills, riding the toy locomotive that her brother and father built. What would surely be omitted from such an album is an incident that took place when she was 7: While her mother was sick, Lee was sent to Brooklyn to stay with friends, during which time she was raped by a young sailor who unexpectedly returned home. The trauma was compounded when she contracted gonorrhea.

"Judging by Lee Miller's adult life, she never quite awoke from this nightmare," Burke writes. "Decades later, [she] put her outraged emotions into her compositions -- where enigmatic doorways hint at damage to the house of her self."

But readers may sort out the many fascinating details of her life and come to a different conclusion -- that she managed her fears quite successfully. Miller was blessed with supportive parents: Her mother's training as a nurse helped immensely in dealing with hospital and home care, and hiring a psychiatrist probably speeded her recovery. And later, she had plenty of devoted friends and lovers to support her.

By the time she turned 18, Miller knew what she wanted -- "La vie de bohème." She sailed off to France in 1925, enrolled at a school that taught stage design and promptly fell in love with the city: "One look at Paris, and I said, 'This is mine -- this is my home.' " The book hints at an affair with Ladislas Medgyès, her Hungarian stage artist instructor, but when Mom arrived after seven fun-filled months, Lee had to kiss Paris goodbye.

Back in Poughkeepsie, she joined Vassar's Experimental Theatre and became adept at stage lighting. She saw many plays during this period of her life, from "Emperor Jones" to "Hedda Gabler," and persuaded her father to let her take dance lessons in New York. The gorgeous girl soon found work on the chorus line of George White's "Scandals" (a rival of the Ziegfeld's Follies), along with Louise Brooks. Then one day (this is straight out of Hollywood fantasy, but Miller claimed it really happened), she was about to cross a street, almost got hit by a car and fell into the arms of Conde Nast -- yes, the man with the vast publishing fortune. After seeing her Parisian attire and good looks and hearing her "babbling in French," Nast practically hired her on the spot.

At Vogue, she posed for the crème de la crème of renowned photographers -- Edward Steichen, George Hoyningen-Huene and Horst. Soon she was milling about at swank parties with the likes of Frank Crowninshield (the editor of Vanity Fair), Dorothy Parker and Charlie Chaplin -- and having "more affairs than Lorelei Lee," Anita Loos's heroine in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. But she was also planning her next move.

As she continued to model for photographers, she thought of trading places. Her father was an accomplished photographer; why not become one herself? She returned to Paris in 1929, determined to become Man Ray's assistant. With an introduction from Steichen and a portfolio of her modeling, it must have been easy to convince the avant-garde master to take her on. At the time, his mistress -- and the subject of many of his photos -- was the legendary model Kiki de Montparnasse. But out she went from his studio, to be replaced by the blonde American goddess. One of Ray's finest works, "Observatory Time -- The Lovers," shows Miller's luscious lips looming large above a landscape, floating among dappled clouds like a combination of erotic fantasy and nightmare. After three years with Ray, Miller left to establish her own photographic studio, but they remained lifelong friends.

Miller's life had many phases, all of them interesting, and Burke captures them in 17 chapters. After "Montparnasse with Man Ray," "La Femme Surrealiste" and "The Lee Miller Studio in Manhattan" come three chapters devoted to her time as Madame Eloui Bey: She met and married Aziz Eloui Bey, a Francophile Egyptian, and lived in Cairo until the monuments bored her stiff.

But it was World War II, with all its drama, that truly brought out Miller's talent. In London during the Blitz, she worked with Edward R. Murrow's friend Ernestine Carter to produce a book, Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire, which she dedicated to Winston Churchill. Through Conde Nast, she obtained a press pass to cover the Allied liberation of France; then she hitched a ride to witness the fall of Nazi Germany, along with Life photographer David E. Scherman (another amorous conquest), and raced east to Hungary and Romania. In a lighter moment, Scherman took a shot of Miller washing herself in Hitler's bath in his abandoned Munich apartment. She photographed the victims and survivors of Buchenwald and Dachau. Readers of Vogue saw her horrific pictures in the June 1945 issue of their fashion magazine.

The war left her appalled, and she was a wreck by the time she returned to England. She'd stopped taking care of herself and drunk heavily with her comrades in arms. She lost her once svelte figure.

Carolyn Burke met Miller in 1977, the year she died. Miller immediately confided to Burke that she was dying of cancer. Something must have clicked between them, and the chance meeting eventually resulted in this fine biography. (Burke's 1996 book, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy, was about another free spirit, who painted and wrote poetry in Paris.) Burke acknowledges her debt to Miller's only son, Antony Penrose, who, sadly, was estranged from his mother until the final stage of her life. After her death, Penrose discovered a cache of her photographs and negatives. The two books that he produced, The Lives of Lee Miller (1985) and Lee Miller's War (2005), are indispensable to a full appreciation of her talents.

After reading this book, I watched Rosalind Russell play "Auntie Mame" in the 1958 film version on DVD, and it struck me that Miller's life -- far more eventful than Mame's -- has tremendous theatrical potential. Put up an enormous painting of her sensuous lips as a backdrop, fire up the city lights of Paris, roll out the battle scenes from St. Malo to Nuremberg and give her a champagne bath in Hitler's apartment. And if this book ever gets produced on Broadway, don't forget to fill the stage with the aroma of her cooking. After all, her life was indeed a banquet.

Reviewed by Kunio Francis Tanabe
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Burke is a fluent, illuminating biographer who chooses her subjects wisely. First came poet Mina Loy (Becoming Modern, 1996); now Burke recounts the galvanizing story of Lee Miller. A native of Poughkeepsie, New York, Miller, already a head-turning beauty as a girl, survived the horror of being raped at age seven and maintained a weirdly intimate relationship with her father, who took nude photographs of her for decades. A glamorous phoenix, fearless and defiant, Miller had a knack for securing mentors. A chance encounter with Conde Nast led to her long, fruitful association with Vogue. In Paris, the surrealist Man Ray, who loved her madly and used her image in many works, encouraged her artistic pursuits. But Miller always set her own course and reinvented herself at will, ultimately becoming a gutsy photojournalist in London during the Blitz and one of the first war correspondents to confront the death camps. Miller's experiences are heart-stopping, her virtuoso photographs indelible, but she has been largely overlooked. Now, thanks to Burke's masterful portrayal, readers will know the entire kaleidoscopic life story of this inspiriting survivor, extraordinary photographer, and daring witness to humankind at its dazzling best and monstrous worst. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

not an ordinary life or biography
How often do you read a biography that immerses you in the subject's vitality, essence, the dark side and the shining one? Carolyn Burke's astonishing biography of Lee Miller does just this. The reader dives easily into Miller's extraordinary life, from her childhood days in Poughkeepsie to her youth and adulthood as the muse and student of Surrealist artist Man Ray in Paris, to her own career as a model, photographer, and journalist, traveling far and wide for work and pleasure, always with her eye and mind attuned to landscape and nuance, the poetry of any given moment or situation.
Burke's empathic understanding of her subject's psyche allows her to focus on both the inner and outer workings that drove and created Lee Miller's talent, work, and life. There are accompanying photos throughout. This is a biography that reads like a riveting story, as chapter after chapter reveals a complex woman who lived in extraordinary times and was an important and potent contributor to those times. Burke achieves a beautiful balance of details, history, and conversations, so satisfying that you don't want it to stop.

A Glamorous Enigma
Lee Miller is an enigma- though Carolyn Burke tells us a lot about her incredible life. As a biography, this is an honorable book. It is comprehensive and tells us about the fabulous life and career of a woman who participated in some of the most exciting times of the 20th century. From NY in the 20s to the Paris of Surrealists in the early 30s, back to NY and then to Egypt and the middle east. By this time Lee Miller was only 30 and some of her greatest adventures were ahead as Vogue's war correspondent and photographer during World War II in Europe. Her work continued during the immediate post war era and Ms. Burke's book illumniates some of the problems of post war Europe, which calls to mind some of the dislocation and problems currently in Iraq.
The portraits in the book make it clear that Lee Miller was a great beauty and the photos she took make it clear she was talented. Yet her precipitous decline after the war and her marriage to Roland Penrose is depressing and hard to figure out. As carefully as Ms. Burke's shares the facts of the book and even her occasional forays into trying to psychoanalyze Lee's motivation, I, like other reviewers found it hard to deciper who Lee really was. A great beauty, a madcap free spirit,a sexually free but emotionally closed woman, a deeply injured child of abuse, an alcohol abuser and indifferent mother to her only child could accurately describe her. Was she a victim of the post war attitudes towards women in the 1950s as she gave up her work to become an uber-housewife and chef in her English country home? It calls to my mind David Hare's play " Plenty" that portrayed the severe dislocation of a woman who had worked in France for the Resistance during WWII and then proceeded to destroy her life and injure those around her in the post war years. Ms. Burke suggest post traumatic stress as a source of Lee's post war problems. As one of the first people to photograph the concentration camps at the end of the war, Lee took breathtaking and disturbing images that affect us today- hard to imagine the affect of actually being there.
Most of the correspondence Ms.Burke quotes made it clear Lee Miller didn't share her deepest feelings with others in letters. Perhaps she didn't in person either- since her son only found out about her wartime work after her death when he discovered boxes of her negatives and photo work. She remains an enigma today. While this biography tells us about her, it can't unlock who she really was beneath the glamour and sadness of her life. I think there is a great movie here.

Interesting Life, Still Mysterious
I was thinking about writing this review about halfway through the book, but felt bad about my thoughts towards the end of the book, since my main issue with this biography was what the author strived most to accomplish. Lee Miller led a fascinating life, and Carolyn Burke obviously enjoyed writing about it. But I realized that I never felt like I KNEW Miller, only was following her life. I was aware of what she was doing at each stage of her life, but not necessarily what drove her to do so, or what was going through her mind. I know Burke wanted to look at Lee Miller's life through Lee Miller's eyes, but I never felt that I had that perspective.

I would have loved to see more of the photographs too that Burke described. Those included in the book were wonderful to look at, and there were plenty, but I was hoping to see even more.

I am grateful though that Burke did bring such a fascinating person to light.