Happy 65th birthday to Richard Gere. He was my second Vanity Fair cover story in 1990 and the first one I did there with photographer Herb Ritts after working with Herb for a couple of years at Andy Warhols Interview where I was executive editor. So this story has always been special to me in that regard. In fact, Richards cover was for the May 1990 issue and followed right after my Madonna cover story in April 1990. Those back-to-back cover stories, the Madonna one done with Helmut Newton and the Richard one done with Herb, started my career at VF out with a bang. Herb and Richard were very close, Herb having famously taken some of the earliest photos of him in 1977 when Richard was still an unknown - those now iconic San Bernadino photos of Richard at a desert gas station. I knew Richard’s girlfriend, Penny, who was an actress, and she introduced me to Richard, Herb told Francois Quintin, who was the associate curator of the Fondation Cartier pour lart Contemporain in Paris where Herb was having a retrospective of his work from December 1999 to March 2000. Actually, when I first started dabbling in photography, I was still working for my parents as a salesman, Herb continued. Penny was supposed to come to my house to take a head shot, but she never showed. Richard arrived; he was going to meet her there. I asked if I could take a picture of him, and he said no—he was very shy and had very long hair—but finally I did. A week or so later, we were driving around in Penny’s car and got a flat tire and ended up in a desert gas station, where we took pictures. Later that year, Richard told his new publicist, “Oh, Herb took a couple of rolls of me.” He had fairly well-known photographers shooting him already; it happened quickly for him. So I sent the negatives and forgot about it. What did I know? I wasn’t a photographer. Three months later, the pictures appeared in American Vogue, Esquire, and Mademoiselle. Big spreads. One day soon thereafter, Mademoiselle tracked me down and asked me to do Brooke Shields, and I said sure. I didn’t say I wasn’t a photographer. There is a bit of Herbs childhood in those early Richard Gere bad-boy desert gas station photos. I grew up in Brentwood, in West L.A. At the time, when I was a young boy in the fifties and sixties, it was a very low-key place to grow up, Herb told Quintin. It was upper-middle-class; not suburban, but not Hollywood, either. I did grow up next door to Steve McQueen, who was a very famous movie star at the time, but as a kid it didnt impress me. We always had great fun with him. He would take us out on Sundays on his motorcycles, riding around in the desert; he was like a second father. You can see some of Herbs adoration of McQueen in those San Bernadino Gere photos. Although once when Richard was sitting next to Henry Geldzahler and me at a production of Look Back in Anger at The Roundabout Theatre in 1980 - a production that starred Malcolm McDowell as Jimmy Porter and my old Juilliard classmate from Group VIII, Lisa Banes, as his put-upon wife Alison - Henry leaned over to me to whisper, after we had had a lovely conversation with Richard about John Osborne during the intermission and Richard then excused himself to go the bathroom, I do like that young actor but Im afraid hes going to be the Farley Granger of the 80s. I thought of Henrys curt assessment that day I walked into the presidential suite of a Hollywood hotel a decade later to interview Richard for the cover of Vanity Fair. Although I dont think Farley would have started off the conversation that day with the question that Richard asked me. (Maybe McQueen would have.) Before I could say anything that day, Richard silently took my measure and was rather curt himself. So whats your agenda? he asked me. I was rather taken aback by the question. I dont think Ive ever really had an agenda. Sometimes I wish I had had one. I would probably be more successful and certainly richer. Whats my agenda? I repeated the question. Not having one, I told him. But it did sort of piss me off that he started the session that way so the article was a bit tougher - with even a pointed edge creeping into it now and then - than the usual impertinent fawning for which I was to become known during the rest of the 1990s. I have admired his own agenda ever since, however, for his tenaciousness - if tenaciousness can be a Buddhist tenet - in his defense of Tibet.
Posted on: Sun, 31 Aug 2014 18:55:42 +0000
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