Lee Miller: A Life

by Carolyn Burke

Overview

Lee Miller’s life embodied all the contradictions and complications of the twentieth century: a model and photographer, muse and reporter, sexual adventurer and domestic goddess, she was also America's first female war correspondent. Carolyn Burke, a biographer and art critic, here reveals how the muse who inspired Man Ray, Cocteau, and Picasso could be the same person who unflinchingly photographed the horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau. Burke captures all the verve and energy of Miller’s life: from her early childhood trauma to her stint as a Vogue model and art-world ingénue, from her harrowing years as a war correspondent to her unconventional marriages and passion for gourmet cooking. A lavishly illustrated story of art and beauty, sex and power, Modernism and Surrealism, Lee Miller illuminates an astonishing woman’s journey from art object to artist.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226080673
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	04/23/2007
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	446
Sales rank:	56,657
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Carolyn Burke has taught at Princeton and the University of California at Santa Cruz, among other universities in France, the U.S., and Australia. She is the author of Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy.

Read an Excerpt

A Poughkeepsie Girlhood

(1907–15)

On April 23, 1907, Theodore Miller entered the birth of his daughter, Elizabeth, in his diary, noting the time of day (4:15 p.m.), the place (the Miller home, 40 South Clinton Street, Poughkeepsie, New York), her weight (seven pounds), and the names of those in attendance (Dr. Gribbon and Nurse Ferguson). His firstborn, Elizabeth’s brother John, had come into the world two years earlier, but the little girl—Li Li, then Te Te, Bettie, and in her twentieth year, Lee—would always be her father’s favorite. Her blue eyes and blond curls enchanted him. Whatever name she went by, she was his Elizabeth, whose growth he would continue to document, one might almost say obsessively.

By the time Elizabeth was born, Theodore Miller was the superintendent of Poughkeepsie’s largest employer, the DeLaval Separator Company (its machines separated heavier liquids from lighter ones). An ambitious man of thirty-five who was on his way to becoming one of the town’s elite, he had married three years earlier after securing his position at DeLaval’s recently enlarged plant on the bank of the Hudson River. Florence Miller, his wife, is not mentioned in the diary entry, as if her part in the arrival of their daughter could not be reckoned among the facts and figures that gave him his grip on the world. Perhaps it was taken for granted. Like most men of his time, Theodore believed that a woman’s place was at home, a man’s with the new world of science and technology—the forces that enabled entrepreneurs like himself and the country as a whole to move forward.

Theodore always said that he came of a long line of mechanics. A tall, erect man with penetrating blue eyes, he might have stepped out of a Horatio Alger novel. Born in 1872 in the aptly named Mechanicsville, Ohio, he grew up in Richmond, Indiana, at that time the largest Quaker settlement in the country. Although the Millers were not Quakers, he thought well of this sect despite his opposition to formal religion and, in adulthood, his atheism. More important to him than the Society of Friends and the Inner Light were facts. As a youth he had worked in a roller-skate-wheel factory, then a machine shop where he operated lathes. Earning his qualification in mechanical engineering through a correspondence course reinforced the idea that hard work led not only to self-improvement but also to material rewards.

When telling his children about his rise in the world, Theodore emphasized the Miller self-reliance. His ancestors included Hessian mercenaries who had fought for the British in the Revolutionary War; his father was famous as the man who laid seven thousand bricks a day when helping to build Antioch College; his older brother, Fred, was an engineer widely known as the editor of the American Machinist. Theodore’s career illustrated the belief that a self-confident man could try his hand at anything. In his twenties he had worked in New Jersey at a U.S. Navy shipyard, in Brooklyn at a typewriter factory, in Mexico at the Monterrey Steel Works, and in Utica, New York, at the Drop Forge and Tool Company, where he became general manager. So intent upon making his way that he did not think about marriage until he turned thirty, he then proposed to Florence MacDonald, the fair-haired Canadian nurse who had cared for him during his treatment for typhoid at Utica Hospital.

It was typical of their union that the children heard more about the Millers than about the MacDonalds. Florence told them little of her background except that her people were Scots-Irish settlers from Brockville, Ontario, where she was born in 1881, and that her parents had died when she was a girl, after which she went to live with relatives. Only later did they learn that the MacDonalds had been defeated by their hard, rocky land, and that Florence had had little education apart from nurse’s training. Then, nursing was one of the few paths open to women from poor families. There were more opportunities in the United States than at home but the work required dedication. Florence would have earned little more than room and board at the training hospital in Utica—except for the hope that once certified, she could work anywhere. Theodore Miller may have won her heart, but he was also a good catch.

Their life together as members of Poughkeepsie’s bourgeoisie began when they married in 1904, after he had settled into his position at DeLaval. It would have required an adjustment on Florence’s part to manage a household staffed with servants, including some from the town’s black community. In the few family photographs taken before 1904 Florence is a shy, slender young woman. She was happy to trade her white cap and nurse’s uniform for the large-brimmed hats and flowing gowns of the 1900s, to collect bric-a-brac for her new house, and in time, once her children were at school, to educate herself.

Although Florence took her turn giving the tea parties expected of the Poughkeepsie ladies with whom she mingled, some insecurity prevented her from enjoying these occasions. She fussed about details. Unsure which of Poughkeepsie’s many Protestant churches to attend, she tried them all. Traces of her time as a nurse were still discernible in her bathroom, where white tiles and a doctor’s scale implied that cleanliness was next to godliness. Florence retained a horror of germs and a reverence for doctors. She was also in awe of her husband, who was nearly ten years older and the mainstay of their comfortable life.

The Millers often told their children a story from their early days in Poughkeepsie. Because of Theodore’s position, the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution invited his bride to join this ultraconservative organization. Florence filled in the genealogical forms required of new members. Her husband’s Hessian forebears, who had fought against the revolution that gave the group its name, raised a few eyebrows, but as soon as the membership committee saw that she was Canadian, the invitation was withdrawn. Having been treated as less than loyal Americans, the Millers turned the incident into a joke. And since it was impossible to infiltrate the old families whose cupolaed mansions overlooked the Hudson, they made the best of the matter by establishing themselves as citizens of the new century.

Depending upon whom you were talking to, Poughkeepsie in the 1900s was either a declining regional capital or an industrial center ready to take advantage of its strategic location. Both accounts were accurate. To the town’s more progressive citizens, its values seemed Victorian. Yet at the same time, institutions like Vassar College—located two miles east of town—were trying out new ideas about women’s social and intellectual potential, and forward-looking businesses like DeLaval, a Swedish firm, were rethinking the relations between civic and professional life. Many Poughkeepsians believed they lived at the center of things. The New York Central’s trains sped north along the Hudson to Albany and south to New York City, the bridge across the river encouraged trips west to New Paltz and the Catskills, the Dutchess Turnpike ran east past rich farmlands to Connecticut.

Since the eighteenth century, the “river families,” the old guard of Dutchess County, had looked down from their hilltop estates on the villages along the Hudson’s shores as if they were the fiefs in some American version of feudalism. Poughkeepsie, a town of twenty-four thousand when Elizabeth was born, had always been something of an exception. Its inhabitants prided themselves on their town’s history as a seventeenth-century Dutch settlement and an early state capital, the site of New York’s ratification convention for the U.S. Constitution, and from the 1860s on, the hub of swift railroad connections to the north and west. Although the symbol of the new century, the Twentieth Century Limited, flew past Poughkeepsie on its way from New York to Chicago, the city’s position halfway between New York and Albany was thought to ensure its influence—provided the town fathers could agree on what was meant by progress and how to go about implementing it.

Prominent Poughkeepsians looked to technology as the way to be “up-to-date.” At a time when civic leaders all over the United States indulged in boosterism to enhance their town’s reputation at the expense of neighboring ones, they proclaimed Poughkeepsie’s superiority over its rivals, Syracuse and Albany. Yet in reality it had grown very little since the 1870s, a number of businesses having failed or gone elsewhere. Industries clustered along the Hudson in former times had included shipbuilders, dye mills, a brewery, and an ironworks, many of which had been replaced by larger, more modern concerns like DeLaval and Queen Undermuslins, a manufacturer of women’s underwear. What was good for these businesses was good for Poughkeepsie, town officials said, as were recent municipal gains like electric lights, telephones, and macadam paving. But there were those who said that they had been right to decline Thomas Edison’s offer to make Poughkeepsie the first fully electrified American city, after which he bestowed the honor upon Newburgh.

In Theodore Miller’s espousal of modern technology, he spoke for the “progressives,” those who favored any and all improvements. His credentials—a professional engineer’s license, membership in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and his new post—so impressed members of the town’s preeminent social group for men, the Amrita Club, that they made him a member within months of his arrival in 1903. There he met local aristocrats like the Roosevelts and those who were on their way to positions of influence in banking, commerce, and politics. By the time Elizabeth was born, Theodore was known as the forward-looking manager of DeLaval’s large workforce or, alternately, as its benevolent dictator.

DeLaval had opened the plant in 1892 for the manufacture of its centrifugal cream separator (which separated cream from milk), then enlarged it the year before Miller was hired to quell labor unrest. A history of Poughkeepsie published in 1905 hails DeLaval as the town’s most advanced industry, functioning with electricity “driven by a dynamo driven by the only turbine engine so far installed in the city.” Over the years, new applications were developed for DeLaval’s machines. Theodore oversaw the production of machinery designed to clean industrial oils and varnishes, prepare blood plasma, and perform other tasks based on the principle of separating liquids from solids. The company was known as a good place to work. Theodore paid higher wages than were being paid in the rest of the county, instituted a forty-eight-hour workweek, and set up employee benefits including a restaurant, insurance, and profit sharing. To a labor force that had known harsh conditions elsewhere, he seemed a humane employer.

Nonetheless, good labor relations depended upon the employees’ knowing their place. The noblesse oblige attitude that prevailed in social circles—the river families’ distant patronage of their inferiors—operated at DeLaval. Theodore’s position, which would lead to his serving on the boards of civic institutions, planning commissions, and local banks, presupposed absolute control of his workers. The women employees whom he fondled did not complain of harassment, the members of ethnic groups—Italians, Poles, and other minorities, mostly Catholic—did little in the face of the “Wasp” values that kept them from advancing, and the few members of the town’s black community thought themselves lucky to have jobs. Theodore’s strict rule over his five hundred employees was taken for granted.

In this respect his ideas about the workforce were only somewhat more liberal than those of his cronies at the Amrita Club, which barred from membership Jews, Catholics, and blacks. Members invited their wives and daughters to a New Year’s Day tea dance, but the rest of the time women were excluded. Much of Poughkeepsie’s growth was decided at the Amrita Club’s dinner table, which was served by the best cook in town. Like the rest of Dutchess County, the city fathers were Republicans, but in this respect as in others (such as his atheism), Theodore demonstrated his independence of mind by voting Democratic. Despite these eccentricities, his preeminence was not disputed.

During the last decades of the nineteenth century, civic leaders had sought to express the town’s standing in monumental public buildings. In 1912, when the Amrita Club’s elegant new premises were completed, members concluded that they too belonged to the country’s elite—since McKim, Mead and White, the architects of New York’s Harvard Club, had designed their Colonial Revival headquarters. The new building, the mayor declaimed, symbolized “the orderly progress of a community” by incorporating modern conveniences into a design recalling the town’s colonial beginnings. Poughkeepsie was “the ‘City Beautiful,’ ” according to the board of trade. Greek Revival banks, Gothic churches, and Renaissance palazzo department stores lent a sense of history; the mansard roofs of Vassar’s Main Building evoked the Tuileries Palace, the Eastman Business College’s turrets recalled Oxbridge. Young men entering the portals of the new YMCA, whose façade evoked a Medicean palace, would emerge “the better for that beauty,” the town fathers told themselves.

The young men of the day, most of whom hoped to make their way as Theodore Miller had, no doubt felt the better for time spent out of doors rather than inside the edifices intended to civilize them. Few could afford the train trip to New York, where increasingly people of Miller’s standing would go for entertainment; many were intimidated by the idea of the big city. Young people took part in a round of local activities that began in autumn with trips to apple orchards for cider, winter carnivals, ice skating and boating on the frozen Hudson, fishing in April when the shad ran downriver, and in warmer months, garden parties and socials beneath the flowering fruit trees or among the azaleas.

The social calendar peaked in June when rowing crews from the Ivy League colleges came to train for the Intercollegiate Regatta. Poughkeepsians spoke proudly of having won out over Saratoga Springs, the home of the regatta until 1898—when the broad four-mile stretch of the Hudson north of town was deemed more appropriate than Lake Saratoga. Thousands of rowing enthusiasts came by train to stroll along the river, watch the rowers, and boost the local economy. The crews and their supporters occupied all the rooms in the area. Young men in boater hats strolled around town in the company of ladies with upswept hairdos; romances flourished. For a month the river was a watery stage crisscrossed by ferryboats full of rowing buffs and lined by viewing stands on specially fitted railroad cars.

This spectacle enchanted the local girls and decided the futures of a number of Vassar students, some of whom settled in Poughkeepsie. Elizabeth Miller had no such fate in mind for herself. She would always refer to her hometown as “P’ok”—as in poke, to prod, pry, or meddle, and pokey, as in cramped, frumpy, or, in slang, a prison—and she would do anything to épater the local bourgeoisie. Once she knew something about the Old World always being evoked in “P’ok,” Europe became her destination. By the end of her life, when she had lived abroad for fifty years, she had assimilated the Surrealists’ antibourgeois stance and accepted her odd status as the wife of Sir Roland Penrose—this after having been born into privilege, American style, and turning her back on what Poughkeepsie had to offer.

Table of Contents

Contents
 
Introduction xi
 
Part One: Elizabeth
 
1. A Poughkeepsie Girlhood (1907-15)
2. Never Jam Today (1915-25)
3. Circulating Around (1925-26)
4. Being in Vogue (1926-29)
 
Part Two: Miss Lee Miller
 
5. Montparnasse with Man Ray (1929-30)
6. La Femme Surrealiste (1930-32)
7. The Lee Miller Studio in Manhattan (1932-34)
 
Part Three: Madame Eloui Bey
 
8. Egypt (1934-37)
9. Surrealist Encampments (Summer 1937)
10. The Egyptian Complex (1937-39)
 
Part Four: Lee Miller, War Correspondent
 
11. London in the Blitz (1939-44)
12. Covering the War in France (1944-45)
13. Covering the War in Germany (1945)
14. Postwar (1945-46)
 
Part Five: Lady Penrose
 
15. Patching Things Up (1946-50)
16. A Double Life (1950-61)
17. A Second Fame (1961-71)
18. Retrospectives (1971-77)
 
Afterword
 
Appendix: A Lee Miller Dinner for Eight
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

Editorial Reviews

Lee Miller was an astounding woman, brought memorably to life in this astounding book.

Telegraph (UK)

Carolyn Burke's startling achievement is to document each persona with empathy and insight, to embed them all in time and place, and to weave the whole together into an absorbing narrative. . . . The result is an engrossing double portrait, a subtle analysis of two enigmas: Miller herself and the exhilarating and appalling century in which she lived.

Guardian - Judith Rice

At last, a life and an album about Lee Miller. . . . For the first time the ravaged arc of [her] life is clear, beautiful but lined in pain.

New York Observer

"[This] impeccably written and researched book is surely a state-of-the-art biogrpahy."

New York Sun - Carl Rollyson

2006

New York Times Notable Book of the Year

"No one who reads Burke's involving biography will ever forget Miller. So visually rich and electrifying is her story, a movie version seems inevitable. . . . Demonstrating the same clarity of observation and sensitivity to subtleties that distinguish Miller's photographs, Burke indelibly portrays a radiant woman forced to look into the heart of darkness, and an artist who cast light on a brutalized world, illuminating its abiding beauty and grace, and enhancing our empathy and awe."

Chicago Tribune - Donna Seaman

Finalist

National Book Critics Circle Award

Lee Miller went through life as a serial dazzler, adopting and shedding…guises a chameleon might envy.”

New York Times - Janet Maslin

Like Walt Whitman, Lee Miller contained multitudes. . . . Miller was an artist of merit with a life perhaps more interesting than her art. Carolyn Burke has given us a richly detailed, excellently written, and critically observed account of this life—one that deserves a superb biography and has gotten it. . . . [She] shows us that the largely forgotten Lee Miller is well worth remembering and judging.

Columbia Magazine - Samuel McCracken

Carolyn Burke’s biography of Lee Miller (1907–1977) stands out for its thoroughness and professionalism. . . . Burke is neither an art critic nor an expert in photography, but she does know how to enlist psychological insights as keys to her narrative.

Art in America - Andy Grundberg

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. . . . Delightful, meticulously researched, fascinating. . . . Miller’s life had many phases, all of them interesting, and Burke captures them in [this] fine biography.

Washington Post Book World

"[This] impeccably written and researched book is surely a state-of-the-art biogrpahy."--Carl Rollyson "New York Sun"

"No one who reads Burke's involving biography will ever forget Miller. So visually rich and electrifying is her story, a movie version seems inevitable. . . . Demonstrating the same clarity of observation and sensitivity to subtleties that distinguish Miller's photographs, Burke indelibly portrays a radiant woman forced to look into the heart of darkness, and an artist who cast light on a brutalized world, illuminating its abiding beauty and grace, and enhancing our empathy and awe."--Donna Seaman "Chicago Tribune"

"At last, a life and an album about Lee Miller. . . . For the first time the ravaged arc of [her] life is clear, beautiful but lined in pain."-- "New York Observer"

"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. . . . Delightful, meticulously researched, fascinating. . . . Miller's life had many phases, all of them interesting, and Burke captures them in [this] fine biography."-- "Washington Post Book World"

"Lee Miller was an astounding woman, brought memorably to life in this astounding book."-- "Telegraph (UK)"

"Like Walt Whitman, Lee Miller contained multitudes. . . . Miller was an artist of merit with a life perhaps more interesting than her art. Carolyn Burke has given us a richly detailed, excellently written, and critically observed account of this life--one that deserves a superb biography and has gotten it. . . . [She] shows us that the largely forgotten Lee Miller is well worth remembering and judging."--Samuel McCracken "Columbia Magazine"

"Lee Miller went through life as a serial dazzler, adopting and shedding...guises a chameleon might envy."

--Janet Maslin "New York Times"

"Carolyn Burke's biography of Lee Miller (1907-1977) stands out for its thoroughness and professionalism. . . . Burke is neither an art critic nor an expert in photography, but she does know how to enlist psychological insights as keys to her narrative."--Andy Grundberg "Art in America" (10/1/2006 12:00:00 AM)

"Carolyn Burke's startling achievement is to document each persona with empathy and insight, to embed them all in time and place, and to weave the whole together into an absorbing narrative. . . . The result is an engrossing double portrait, a subtle analysis of two enigmas: Miller herself and the exhilarating and appalling century in which she lived."--Judith Rice "Guardian" (11/18/2006 12:00:00 AM)

Finalist-- "National Book Critics Circle Award"

2006-- "New York Times Notable Book of the Year"

From the Publisher

Lee Miller went through life as a serial dazzler, adopting and shedding…guises a chameleon might envy.—Janet Maslin, New York Times

 

 

 

 

— Janet Maslin

New York Times

Ms. Burke's approach is generous even when facts present Miller in a less than flattering light…while [she] sometimes lets lists of parties, trips and famous friends overwhelm her, she also captures the excitement of Miller's omnivorous spirit…Certainly the book provides connective tissue between the woman and her work during the most vibrant part of her life.
—The New York Times

Janet Maslin

It seems fitting that Carolyn Burke, whose first biography corrected history's error of undervaluing the avant-garde poet and artist Mina Loy, has written "Lee Miller: A Life." Fitting, also, that she begins the tale of a forgotten visionary photographer who was muse and lover to some of the most influential artists of the early 20th century, as well as one of the few women able to transcend this role and become an artistic force in her own right, with Miller's birth as a muse.
— The New York Times Sunday Book Review

Elissa Schappell

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. Agent, Georges Borchardt. (Dec. 5) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

A great beauty, Lee Miller (1907-77) started modeling at a very early age, eventually appearing in the pages of Vogue. Behind the camera, the intrepid, creative, and talented Miller went on to work as a portraitist, a fashion photojournalist, and a war correspondent. She covered the London blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the burning of Hitler's house, all the while creating striking and haunting images that reflected her surrealist sensibility. Given Miller's involvement with dozens of the last century's major artists-Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, and Man Ray among them-this biography reads like a social history and who's who of the era and its luminaries. Biographer, art critic, and translator Burke (Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy) discusses many of Miller's photographs in depth, but the 24 pages of stills here (and the 58 that appear in the text) are probably not going to satisfy readers. It may be advisable to order books solely covering Miller's photographs to complement the biography. Otherwise, this meticulously researched chronicle is a valuable contribution to World War II literature, photography, Surrealism, and biography collections. Highly recommended.-Ann D. Carlson, Oak Park and River Forest H.S. Lib., IL Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Illuminating life of the once-renowned model, photographer and traveler who drew few distinctions between life and art. Born to a well-to-do industrialist, Lee Miller (1909-77) was raped by a family acquaintance at the age of seven; or so, writes Burke (Becoming Modern, 1996), it "must be inferred from the patterns of her later life." Whatever the unknowable but inferable facts, Miller seems to have regarded herself as damaged goods; it probably did not help matters when her father's nude photograph of Miller, "December Morn," was published, becoming, in its time, "as famous, or notorious, as the Mona Lisa." Later traumas would come, and Miller, a free spirit bound, would process them between what she called her good and bad sides. As a disciple of Alfred Steichen and devotee and lover of Man Ray in Paris, she played the ingenue a little but was more knowing than all that; indeed, she recalled, she was a bit of a fiend. Ray came eventually to regard her as a threat, though it was likely for the ever-deepening quality of her work as a photographer rather than any conflict she herself set in motion. She posed for Picasso, spent pleasant hours with the surrealists, knew Hemingway and Gellhorn, had the kind of life that the present-day bohemian can only aspire to; yet Miller fully came into her own as a combat correspondent (for Vogue) in Europe during WWII, photographing the liberation of Paris and the conquest of Germany. She later recalled, "I got in over my head. I could never get the stench of Dachau out of my nostrils." Wealthy (she married an English nobleman), well traveled and well connected, Miller became progressively less well known as the years rolled on and her life became lesstumultuous, if always more complicated than other people's lives. Burke's graceful biography restores Miller to attention; students of art photography, in particular, will want a look. Agent: Anne Borchardt/Georges Borchardt Inc.

Kirkus Reviews