Writing and Photos from the archive of Marc Balet

“Chris needs cocaine, Marc. You know how Chris can be when he needs cocaine.” warned Robert, our fashion editor. “You have to find it. You know Rome.”

“OK. I’ll find it.”

I was art director of Vogue Patterns magazine. It was a venerated periodical published monthly enticing American women to purchase sewing patterns created from the original work of fashion designers. This month we were shooting in Rome, a city where I had previously spent three years studying architecture. Now, I was an art director, way more fun.

Our photo team was lodging at The Grand Hotel on Via Veneto.

Chris von Wangenheim was our photographer on this assignment. Chris appeared to be of noble ancestry, and he never let me forget it. I was never sure if the ‘von’ was real or meant anything but he acted as though it did. He’d flip his very straight, shiny, brown hair back with the condescending European air of perpetual nonchalance. He was strict on set, his manner often intimidating. He infuriated a lot of people with his self-assured demeanor and often mean temperament. I loved a challenge.

He had been shooting break-through pictures at that time for Dior. One depicted a Doberman ‘biting’ the hand of a bejeweled and gowned Lisa Taylor. Another had Christie Brinkley’s impossibly long leg kicking in the screen of a television set while wearing a pair of ‘come fuck me’ Dior heels. The campaign was modern, strong and successful. Chris was a star.

Though he had been criticized for copying the towering work of Helmut Newton, the topic never came up in our conversations. Though, I did think that.

I was at his spare studio on Union Square one day discussing a shoot when I realized I owed a call to rival photographer Albert Watson.

I waited till Chris was on another line, then I discreetly dialed Albert and chatted business for a couple of minutes. When I put the phone down I looked up to see an infuriated photographer glaring back.

“Who were you on the phone with?’

“Albert Watson”

“What? What?! He raised his hands above him in exasperation. You must never call a photographer like Albert Watson from my phone. Never. His work is awful. Impossible. How can you respect yourself as an art director and work with someone like that!” The hair tossing was epic.

I studied Chris for a minute in silence, then I picked up the phone again and dialed.

“Who are you calling now?”

“Shhhh. Hold on a sec…Liz? It’s me again. I’m here with Chris von Wangenheim. Yes, that is nice. Anyhow, he mentioned how much he’d like to meet you and Albert for dinner Tuesday night. Tuesday night?” I nodded to an incredulous Chris.

Without waiting, I continued, “Chris says perfect, I think in German. How great. We’ll see you and Albert at Parma on Second near to you? Can’t wait.”

Dinner was wonderful. Everyone got along great. Chris fell in love with Liz Watson, Albert’s sexy wife and made plans to photograph her for his book we were creating.

He died before taking the picture.

Not long before his sudden death from an auto accident while on assignment on some Caribbean Island, Chris asked me to come over and look at photos for a book he wanted me to design. At his meticulous studio he had carefully laid out sixty or so images for me to view. Not one photo was askew.

I looked carefully at the pictures he had lain out on his long, cold, stainless, steel table. There were prints of all sizes, tear sheets, and multiple plastic sheets of chromes from previous years. Many were of the model Gia and Chris’s wife, Regine, in sexually provocative poses. There were photographs of other beautiful girls scantily clad, lit with his super charged light that served to intensify the girls’ diffident attitude.

I thought of Helmut.

I found one image, however, of his current girlfriend Shay that I responded to.

It showed the voluptuous Shay walking away from the camera striding across a large, empty ballroom wearing a skin-tight dress that showed off an amazing ass. Her head defiantly bent back, swigging a bottle of expensive champagne, indicated that the big party may have concluded but a wilder, more intimate one was about to heat up. She had a fuck-you attitude that was book perfect.

I peeled that polaroid off the table and held it aloft triumphantly. With my free hand I bent over and, in a much too dramatic gesture, swept all else off the table. His life’s work cascaded directionless down to a gleaming, perfectly waxed floor. Chris looked on in shock as years of his hard work lay strewn around him.

Then I placed the photo of Shay in the middle of the table by itself.

“We’ll start here.” I said flatly. “We’ll call the book ‘Women Alone’ showing the power of strong, assertive, and sexy females. We started there in 1981.

Now, in Rome, Chris needed coke.

Soon, the concierge at the Grand rang my suite alerting me that gentlemen were in the lobby asking for me. I had them sent up. Two pair of two-tone snub-nosed shoes appeared at the door. Inserted into those were a couple of short, scruffy Neapolitans sporting awfully bad haircuts and last year’s color block, knit sweaters. Knock-offs.

They found me tucked into my king-sized bed resting comfortably under a mountainous, cocaine colored comforter.

“Venga” I yelled to them. “C’l’hai la roba?”

To my right, our impeccably dressed fashion editor, stood hand on hip, at attention.

Suspicious and paranoid, they asked me who he was.

“He’s my taster.” I responded in Italian, playing the part. “I travel with him. I don’t buy without his ok. Give him a hit.”

They were about to when they glanced to a far corner of the enormous, gold embellished room.

There, side-by-side stood Lisa Cooper and Christie Brinkley, two of the most blond and beautiful ladies in waiting. Eyeing these luminous models, wearing very little, was almost too much for the Southern mob Italians to comprehend.

You could hear them thinking in their semi-indecipherable southern dialect “Who is this guy buried under these covers, who travels with a drug taster and two exquisite whores?”

It was me. Sono io! Marc Balet from Waterbury, Connecticut. And those were no whores!

The shorter of the two came forward and nervously opened a packet for Robert. He sniffed then shook his head in approval. It was good. I could make the buy.

The girls smiled, ladies in waiting?

Then I dug deep under a pillow and extracted two wads of Lira thick enough to choke a Sicilian Don. The guys were so overwhelmed by this charade that they never counted it. I spied them trying to cop a last glance at the girls as they sheepishly made for the door stuffing the wads into the pockets of their cheap, counterfeit bell-bottoms.

A day later, I drove through Piazza del Popolo alongside a stuffy director from the American Academy. The traffic slowed. Outside the open car window appeared my two drug delivery guys working the piazza. They were wearing the same sweaters.

“Ciao, Ciao, Signore,” they screamed for the whole piazza to hear. “Ciao, come va?”

They looked desperately into the car searching for another blond fix.

“Ciao, come stai?” I shouted back at my dealers, “Tutto bene? Come va il tuo lavoro?” (How’s your work going?)

As the traffic lurched ahead my director pal eyed me over and asked how I could possibly have made this sort of person’s acquaintance. I had only arrived two days before.

“Vogue Patterns. Word gets around,” I winked. “Nobody hems like him”.

Several days and many photographs later our merry group was situated on the Palatino Bridge readying the next shot. Coked up Chris waited impatiently for that wonderful ‘end of day’ light. The magic hour which every photographer adores, and every art director fears.

It is at that juncture of the day when you, the art director, makes ready to ‘fight the light’. It’s when there’s an all-out effort to capture those last heavenly lit shots you must have before the sun, and your luck, has set.

It is most often at that time of the day, however, when the stylist suddenly finds himself needing a bit more time to get the bow straight, to tighten a belt, to fix a hem. It’s just then that the hairdresser cannot bear for a minute more the model’s bangs falling to the left, when the make-up artist sees a lower lip as a canvas in need of another stroke, when a photo assistant realizes he’s loaded Koda instead of Ekta or when a photographer, grumpy from a long day of coaxing beautiful women to do what he wants and sore from bending on one knee while doing it, realizes that a photo’s about all he’s going to get out of these girls.

With gnawed cuticles, I watched my sun setting fast over the Tiber. I prayed there would still be time to shoot the Paisley on Christie before dark.

Then we heard shots.

At first, we had no idea what the sound was. Even as jaded New Yorkers the ‘pop, pop, pop’ sounded foreign. So fixated were we all upon Christie’s charming ensemble that we hadn’t focused on a group swelling in numbers on the Trastevere side of the river.

Seconds after the shots we noticed a very large crowd dispersing quickly and noisily. There were screams. Smoke. Politics. Something bad had happened.

We all stood on the bridge stunned by what we were viewing in the distance. Much closer were our bags of accessories and clothes strewn about the old bridge’s walkway. There were printed jackets and silk blouses on padded hangers tossed over a railing. In black and silver cases make-up and hair and photography equipment lay open on the pavement for quick access.

The freaked-out crowd saw the bridge as their quickest means of escape from the police who had fired at them. Hundreds began to run in our direction.

I looked at the darkening sky. Today’s photo shoot was officially over.

“The clothes! Get the clothes,” screamed Robert.

“Oh my God. My make-up,” screamed the makeup artist, running over and grabbing a case.

“I have to get my stuff,” yelled Garren, the hair stylist.

“Close the photo cases and run NOW,” screamed Chris to his assistant. “Run for it!”

“Oh my God,” yelled Lisa to Christie as she saw the hysterical crowd bearing down. “We’ll be trampled!”

“Taxi,” I shouted above the melee. Upon seeing one of those cute, green cabs pull up, as if on cue, at the near end of the bridge, I raised but one finger, hailed it and hopped in. For safety, mine, I quickly locked the car door.

An art director seemed so superfluous at that moment.

From the narrow, back window of the moving cab I watched the crowd miniaturize while descending upon my team like locusts. Those emotional Italians were everywhere shouting and screaming and crying.

Those outfits will all have to be re-ironed”, I muttered to myself. I had been ‘this close’ to getting that last outfit on Christie. The bridge in that light would have been genius. That Paisley moment was lost forever. “I’ll have to do extra shots tomorrow,” I griped to myself and folded my arms in regret. “Andiamo al Piazza del Popolo” I called to the driver, making sure he understood “Piazza del Popolo”.

Chris would be needing more coke.