Biography: Lee Miller (1907-1977) was an American model, photographer, war correspondent and amateur Cordon Bleu cook of legendary beauty and lavish promiscuity until heavy drinking marred her appearance.
But this well-crafted, industriously detailed biography is no morality tale. Carolyn Burke, an Australian who lives most of the time in California, celebrates the joyous times of Lee Miller's hedonistic amorality with the enthusiasm of a middle-aged groupie, and explains all the lapses with uncritical sympathy.
Lee was born Elizabeth at home in Poughkeepsie, in upstate New York, where her father, Theodore, was the affluent, respected superintendent of a large company that made machines for separating heavy liquids from lighter ones, such as cream from milk. He regarded himself as only a mechanic; however, he had artistic aspirations: he was a keen photographer. He adored blonde, blue-eyed Elizabeth, his favourite child (there were two boys), and photographed her throughout her childhood, adolescence and early womanhood, often in the nude. Burke does not indulge in excessive Freudian analysis, but a reader might deduce that Theodore's fondness was dangerously close to incest and that the willing object of his love developed an Electra complex which endured the two unstable marriages and innumerable affairs of her adult life. Although she asserted a certain degree of independence at the age of 20 by calling herself Lee, evidently she always remained daddy's girl. He provided her only sense of security.
When her mother was temporarily incapacitated by illness, Lee, at the age of seven, was sent to stay with friends in Brooklyn. Their son, a sailor on leave, raped her and infected her with gonorrhoea. In those days before antibiotics, the cure in her case took several years of painful and humiliating therapy, administered by her mother.
A psychiatrist advised Lee's parents to tell her that sex was merely physical, not necessarily connected with love. This assurance seems to have influenced her emotions and behaviour ever after.
Her career as a photographic fashion model began by chance when she accidentally bumped into Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, who, like so many other men, was impressed by her beauty and gave her a top job.
In the hothouse of haute couture, she was an immediate success. Edward Steichen, then one of the two highest-paid photographers in the world, made her a cover girl, a star. Looking back on that period, she said many years later: "I was terribly, terribly pretty. I looked like an angel, but I was a fiend inside." Lee was always noted for her sense of humour.
Her doting father readily financed a visit to Paris, which went on much longer than expected. Lee was chaperoned at first by two Polish ladies who spoke so little French that it took them a week to notice that the "hotel" they had chosen was actually a brothel. That realisation was a characteristic Lee Miller joke, related widely. In Paris, she became the mistress and photographic apprentice of Man Ray, an American photographer in exile, who introduced her to surrealism and the society of the city's avant-garde artists, including Picasso, who became an intimate friend of hers until his death.
The Lives of Lee Miller (Thames & Hudson, 1985), by Lee's son, Antony Penrose, is pictorially superior to the new biography, but Burke has been able to amass more information, especially about Lee's sexual escapades. The surrealists were a playful group, with an avid delight in orgies. Lee was quick to fit in, as she never committed herself to only one man at a time. The surrealist sections of the book are scandalously entertaining.
Burke also thoroughly anatomises Lee's marriages, first to the unfortunate Egyptian businessman, Aziz Eloui Bey, who was rich until Lee finished with him, kind and astonishingly patient, no matter how flagrantly he was cuckolded. Roland Penrose, founder of London's Institute of Contemporary Arts and later Sir Roland, managed to stay the erratic marital course to the very end. He, too, was a great friend of the French surrealists and Picasso, and was just as actively adulterous as Lee.
Having progressed from modelling, Lee Miller became a wonderfully creative photographer. She moved far beyond fashion as a photojournalist in England, France and Germany during the second World War. When she got to Hitler's house in Munich she looted some souvenirs and frivolously posed in his bathtub. But then she was one of the first correspondents to photograph the horrors of Dachau, an experience that no amount of alcohol was ever able to wash from her mind.
Lee MillerBy Carolyn Burke Bloomsbury, 426pp. £20
Patrick Skene Catling is a writer and critic