Lee and Me
I wanted to be the objectifier of men and their wars, quirks, and shortcomings, not the objectified. Why was this so hard?
When I heard that it took nine years for Kate Winslet to turn Lee Miller’s life as a war photographer into Lee, her latest film, I was less shocked by the length of time it took and more by the fact that she was able to get it made at all. Particularly since Kate (*See Writer's Note) insisted on viewing Lee the way Lee viewed the world—flaws and all, through a female lens, using female collaborators. Which—how shall I put this?—is not, in my experience, how these things are done.
Lee was born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1907. She moved to Paris as a young woman, and began her career as a fashion model and muse to artists such as Man Ray and Picasso. She then became, in her late 30s, a pioneer in the field of female war photographers as well as a hero—along with the likes of Margaret Bourke-White and Gerda Taro—to those of us who followed in their footsteps. Lee was one of the first photographers, female or male, to document the horrors of Dachau. She was able to pursue this line of work—and for Vogue, unbelievably, at that—because Audrey Withers, then editor-in-chief of British Vogue, not only encouraged Lee but, critically, funded her work in Great Britain, France, and Germany during World War II.
Kate, too, had a team of female collaborators to back up her vision: her co-producer (and co-Kate), Kate Solomon; screenwriters Liz Hannah and Marion Hume; and director Ellen Kuras, the brilliant cinematographer she met on the set of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, who has shot dozens of well-respected films but—I had to fact check this twice—is only now making her feature film directorial debut with Lee (and FFS, Hollywood, may it lead to many more).
Oh, and get this: When the film’s budget ran out during two critical weeks of filming, Kate Winslet, who was badly injured on set when she slipped and fell on her coccyx in a rehearsal, paid the cast and crew’s salaries out of her own pocket and did not miss a single day of work.
If you haven’t yet seen Lee, I urge you to run to your nearest movie theater and do so, if only to let Hollywood know that, yes, we want and need more films like this.
If you haven’t yet seen Lee, I urge you to run to your nearest movie theater and do so, if only to let Hollywood know that, yes, we want and need more films like this—in which the lead actress wields both power and a camera, but also is not afraid to appear on screen barefaced and un-botoxed, scraggly-haired and curvy-bodied. Hers is a role that presents woman as we actually are—complicated characters with agency, depth, contradictions, and flaws—and not as anodyne sex objects to be acted upon by others.
“I think we live in a time now where we are starting to see actresses play parts that are redefining what it means to be feminine,” Kate said recently. “Femininity is different now. Femininity isn't a flowery dress and a tiny little figure and a full face of makeup. Femininity is resilience and courage and power and passion and sisterhood and standing up for oneself. And for me that's who Lee Miller was.”
Three Verbs
As counterpoint to this supportive sisterhood, let me take you back to March, 2000.
Picture this: I am taking the subway downtown to Random House, my publisher, to drop off a cardboard box containing the hard copy manuscript of my first memoir along with the requisite floppy disc. I am 33 years old, about to become a published author, and proud of the book in my hands which chronicles my oft-terrifying escapades as a very young, very green, award-winning photojournalist.
The manuscript and floppy disc have been carefully labeled Shuttergirl, a name we—I, along with my publisher and agent—had finally settled on after they’d rejected my latest preferred title, Develop Stop Fix: the three-act arc of both my life as a war photographer and of a piece of paper in a darkroom. “Three verbs,” they said. “It’ll never fly.” (Six years later, Eat Pray Love was published.)
Why Shuttergirl? Because I was 22 back in 1988 when I, like Lee, moved to Paris, knocked on several photo agency doors, and convinced the (now-defunct) Sygma agency to fly me to Israel to cover the first intifada. Another agency, Gamma, then sent me to Peshawar, Pakistan to sneak over the Afghan border to cover the end of the war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan. After this I became a staff photographer for Contact Press Images.
I covered dozens of stories over the course of my photojournalism career, including girl gangs in Los Angeles; heroin addiction in France, Switzerland, and Holland; the crack crisis in Washington, D.C.; a rhino poaching war in Zimbabwe; the Romanian revolution and post-revolution crises (including my discovery of Dickensian orphanages which—like Lee’s photos from Dachau—I had to fight to get published), the Soviet coup; and the 1992 election between Bush and Clinton.
Shuttergirl—emphasis on girl—felt appropriate for a coming-of-age memoir of a 22-year-old woman at war, both literally and figuratively, trying to make sense of her life, love, and the world at large.
But then, a week or so after dropping off the manuscript, I was pushing my children in a double stroller when my giant brick of a first-generation cell phone rang. It was the editor-in-chief of Random House. She was insisting on changing the title of my book from Shuttergirl to Shutterbabe—emphasis on babe—a title we’d discussed before, but I’d rejected.
“But…but…” I sputtered. “It’s a book told from the perspective of the female gaze. I am the subject, objectifying the men, both in my life and at war. Babe makes me the object.”
The kids started crying about whatever toddlers cry about—a dropped cracker, wind—and I told the editor I’d sleep on it. I slept on it. I still hated it. I asked my agent for help. She said I had no choice. Shutterbabe was more marketable than Shuttergirl. End of argument.
A few weeks later, I was invited back to Random House to approve the book’s cover: a cartoon female torso—naked, and only the portion below the neck—on a bubblegum-pink background with a camera covering her genitals. “Um, it’s usually my eye behind the camera, not my vagina,” I told the designer. In the end, thank goodness, I was able to convince them to use a photo I shot myself, looking into a mirror, with the camera in its proper place. But the title stayed.
Criticism of Shutterbabe—owing at least in part, I believe, to the self-objectification of its title—was bizarre, falling into one of three camps: (1) the book is good, but I wish she hadn’t gotten married and had children, now she’s just a boring, stupid mother; (2) the book is good, but she’s a slut, and her rape was due to poor judgment; or (3) the book is shit, no one likes her, and she’s a whore and an opportunist who slept her way into stories—for the record, so not true. Headlines for these madonna/whore hit pieces ranged from “Bang Bang Girl” to “Battlefield Barbie” to god-knows-what else. I had to stop reading for self-preservation.
Headlines for these madonna/whore hit pieces ranged from “Bang Bang Girl” to “Battlefield Barbie” to god-knows-what else. I had to stop reading for self-preservation.
Still, the book was out and Hollywood started calling.
My interaction with the movie business was even more enchanting, with even less control over the narrative. First, I was invited to lunch by George Clooney’s producer, Grant Heslov, to discuss the duo’s buying the film rights to the memoir. At the end of our lunch, I said I would like to be involved in telling my own story, if possible.
I never heard back from either.
Next, Darren Star (of Sex and the City fame) bought the rights and sold the project to DreamWorks. We were sent on a first class, all-expenses-paid, week-long fact-finding mission to Paris, where I introduced Darren to my French colleagues and friends, so he could better understand my expat life between assignments. It would be his first feature film, if he could pull it off. But most of his eventual script took place in Beijing, during the Tiananmen Square massacre—a story I had not photographed because I happened to be on a month-long assignment for French Géo in Italy, Yugoslavia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt, and Hong Kong at the time. In the end it didn’t matter: The co-heads of DreamWorks were fired, and the project died with their departure.
Over the next decade and a half, I lost count as male executives at the helm of well-respected production companies such as Likely Story, Sundance, and Participant bought the rights, and did their best to get the film made. Yet each time they were stymied by other men holding the purse strings.
The narrative didn’t fit—or so they said—any of the four traditional audience quadrants: (1) men over 25 wanting to see men at war (2) women over 25 wanting to see women not at war (3) men under 25 wanting to see stuff blow up with the addition of sexy female characters as set decorations, not protagonists; (4) women under 25 wanting to see hunky men being hunky and falling in love with, say, a prostitute with a heart of gold or a bespectacled but actually beautiful secretary but absolutely definitely not a war photographer. No way. Not ever. The love interest would be emasculated!
Also, there was the ongoing issue of the humor in my war stories. Sure, M*A*S*H* was funny, but it had men. When a female protagonist goes to war, she’s not allowed to be funny or poke fun at the men around her or at life in general. She either needs to be the butt of the joke, like Goldie Hawn in Private Benjamin, or bypass being funny altogether and focus on doing her noble, history-witnessing job.
The reality, of course, is that nobility was often in short supply on the road back then, what with the rampant sexcapades between journalists; the jockeying for position and stealing of scoops; the addictions and lies and compromises and contradictions, all of which would have made for excellent and darkly-funny filmmaking fodder, had executives wanted to tell true stories about life on the road, instead of sanitized stories of saints.
In a recent interview in Vogue, Kate, too, railed against the same.
“The men who think you want and need their help are unbelievably outraging. I’ve even had a director say to me: ‘Listen, you do my film and I’ll get your little Lee funded…’ Little! Or we’d have potential male investors saying things like: Tell me, why am I supposed to like this woman?”
The final man (I’ll call him Eddie, as I did in a recent memoir) who wanted to make Shutterbabe contacted me over Facebook messenger to say he loved the book and wanted to know if the rights were available. When they were, I messaged Eddie back. He’d had a long and successful TV screenwriting career, and after we pitched it all over Los Angeles, Eva Longoria’s production company with NBC signed on as producers to re-conceive it as an episodic TV show with Eddie and me as co-writers.
Finally, I thought: a female producer! Eva understood exactly how the story should be told. But right after Eddie and I turned in our script—for which he was paid three times my quote, though we each did equal work—the NBC executive who green-lit our project was fired, and, once again, that was that.
Soon thereafter—I hesitate to even tell this part of the story, given the criticism of Shutterbabe, but it’s apt, given that it made me give up on ever getting my story adapted for the screen—good old Eddie separated from his wife, called to tell me this, and admitted he had feelings for me. My two-decade marriage had ended a few years earlier, and I wasn’t dating anyone at the time, so I thought, sure, why not? We write well together. Maybe we could live well together, too.
But I was also wary: Was that why Eddie had wanted to adapt my book, so he could date me? Or, was his interest in the story real and his interest in me a secondary outcropping of the former? Luckily, our nascent relationship was road-tested within the first six months of its existence, when my cervix erupted in geysers of blood, and I had to have it removed. I asked Eddie to please accompany me to the hospital and help me recover. He said, “Sorry, hospitals are not my thing,” and that was that.
(He’s now dating a former supermodel who coincidentally also wrote a memoir—they seem really happy together, from what I can tell on social media, good for them—and I’m now in a relationship with a man who, when I called to tell him I’d been in a serious car accident, arrived on the scene as fast as the ambulance—on a Citibike—and gently cleaned the blood, drop by drop, from my body.)
Les Deux Femmes
Lee had severe PTSD from what she saw in Dachau and Buchenwald. After World War II, she left photojournalism, became a gourmet cook, suffered through her husband’s long-term affair with a trapeze artist, and, by her son’s own account, was a terrible drunk of a mother. A lifelong chain smoker, she died of lung cancer in 1977. I left war photography for a career in TV news then writing. After a good friend and colleague was killed in Iraq, I realized I’d had one too many close calls myself, plus I had my own PTSD to work through.
In the end it was hardly a choice: After speaking with a fellow parent at my kid’s school—a shrink who works with the children of war correspondents—about the trauma these children must process and endure, I made a vow to myself and to my family: not only no more wars, but no more anything that might unnaturally shorten my life, including alcohol, biking without a helmet, or even aspartame.
Photography, on the other hand, has remained my lifelong love and companion as well as a consistent secondary source of income to my writing. Two of my seven books are photo-based. I’ve shot magazine assignments, corporate portraits, headshots, author photos, family photos, demonstrations, and yes, even the occasional wedding and bar mitzvah, as well as many of the photos for my own publication.
Which is why I was surprised to read, while researching this essay, the following paragraphs in a 2015 story in Elle that I had never before seen. At the time, Kate was just getting interested in making Lee, and Steven Spielberg had just bought the rights to another female photojournalist’s memoir, It’s What I Do, by Lynsey Addario, whose fantastic work you have likely seen in the New York Times.
"I don't know if anyone will get upset I told you this," [Addario] tells me, laughing, "but I submitted the whole thing, and there was not one mention of a boyfriend or a man in the entire manuscript, and Ann [Godoff, the renowned editor] just looked at me and said, 'Do you honestly want me to believe that you've never had a boyfriend?' "
"I didn't want it to be that kind of book," she continues—in other words, a typical female memoir. (Specifically, she may have wanted to avoid the kind of criticism visited upon Deborah Copaken Kogan's [sic] memoir, Shutterbabe, with chapters named for each man she bedded during her brief overseas photography career.)
If you haven’t read Shutterbabe yet, allow me to bring you up to speed: Each of the three sections of the book—Develop, Stop, and Fix—contains two longish chapters. Each of these six chapters takes place in a different country (Afghanistan, the Netherlands, Zimbabwe, Romania, the Soviet Union, Haiti) and describes a different war or story I covered while weaving back and forth through various other countries and time periods.
In my version of my story—told through my female lens, with my female gaze—I wanted to be the objectifier of men and their wars, quirks, and shortcomings, not the objectified.
I deliberately named these chapters after the secondary male characters mentioned within as a wink-wink, nudge-nudge, I’m-in-on-the-joke turning of the sexist tables. In my version of my story—told through my female lens, with my female gaze—I wanted to be the objectifier of men and their wars, quirks, and shortcomings, not the objectified. (In French, I was intrigued to learn, the word objectif can mean either objective or camera lens.) Four of those men, yes, I “bedded,” if you must call it that, though one would become my husband, so it’s kind of a weird way to describe marriage. The other two were as follows: a helpful male journalist, and my eldest son, neither of whom, you’ll be relieved to know, I had sex with.
My four-year “brief overseas photography career” (thanks, Elle), I should also note, was longer than Lee’s. I won several awards and produced tens of thousands of images published in hundreds of publications worldwide. Indeed, this same career has continued, minus the war part, as a separate line item on my tax return every year. That’s 40 years, for those counting, since my first paid assignment at 18. But even back in 1989, when I was 23, and I was invited as one of just two women to be exhibited at the first ever Visa Pour L’Image photojournalism festival in Perpignan, France, I had to put up with discrimination. Of the 25 exhibits that year, 24 were named for the male photographers who shot the photos therein. And just one—a shared exhibit between me and the other female photographer Alexandra Avakian—didn’t get that naming treatment. Our was called “Les Deux Femmes Sur Le Front”—The Two Women on the Front Lines.
But sure, go off, Elle. Go off, Hollywood, the publishing industry, critics, and the culture at large. Minimize my contributions. Create a cat fight where there is none. Claim I used my body to get ahead. Blame my rape on “poor judgment.” Call me a “soccer-mom-in-training" or say that I "left journalism altogether in 1998 to become a full-time mom" in reviews of a bestselling memoir which sold for $175,000 and which (I can assure you) did not write itself. It’s been our fate as women forever to have our work trivialized, to be pitted against one another, to be judged by and for our sexuality, to be narrowly-defined, and to be maligned for our life choices, whatever they may be.
Meanwhile, men will continue to fight wars, whether with weapons or words, over control of our borders, our bodies, and our basic human rights, while being lionized for their destruction or—heaven help us—getting elected to be our next president. And the women who expose men’s horrors? They will, for the most part, be denigrated, trivialized, and/or forgotten.
Had you ever heard of Lee Miller before today? What about Catherine Leroy, Christine Spengler, Françoise Demulder, Susan Meiselas? Do any of those names ring a bell? In a just world, they would, and their work would be as well known as Robert Capa’s—much of which was actually shot by Capa’s girlfriend at the time, Gerta Pohorylle. Gerta, later known as Gerda Taro, died covering the Spanish Civil War when she was 26. That’s the same age as I was in 1991 when, while lying face down in a puddle after an explosion, with bullets whizzing above me, I decided enough. I can no longer risk my life exposing the insanities of men.
As for a “typical female memoir,” good lord, I give up. There’s no such thing. Each of us, female or male, has our own story to tell, and, if we’re lucky, those stories, like Lee’s, involve love and sex, too, because that’s what we humans, driven by Eros and Thanatos, do. We fuck and we fight. Or as a wise shrink once told me, “Everything in life is about sex. Except for sex, which is about aggression.”
I just hope Lynsey’s It’s What I Do becomes a film, too, as it deserves to be. And that it portrays Lynsey with as much depth, insight, and dimensionality as Lee portrays Lee. And that it doesn’t take Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, and all the other dudes who’ve signed on to the project nine more years to make it.
Deborah Copaken, founder of Ladyparts, is a NYT bestselling, award-winning author, photographer, journalist, TV producer, screenwriter, and women's health advocate. Her most recent memoir, Ladyparts, tells the story of all of this.
Josie Cox
Josie Cox
Josie Cox
