![]() ![]() ![]() In the den and the office, there’s also a fair showing of kitsch: a naked mannequin doing a handstand against the wall, with a blonde wig and high heels a two-foot-tall Marlene Dietrich doll smoking a cigarette a “Nancy Fantasy” blow-up doll still in the box a small collection of Barbies and-my personal favorite-a deck of “Friendly Dictator Playing Cards.” An Eames black leather chair here, an orange and tan Ligne Roset couch there. There are Hockneys and Warhols and Wesselmans and Christos and Ruschas and a thrilling collection of framed originals: Mapplethorpe, Brassaï, George Hurrell, O. Some of Helmut’s Big Nude series-larger-than-life-size black-and-whites of naked women in heels-stare straight at you rather menacingly from the hallway and bathroom. The Newton’s actually have three apartments on the 19th floor of La Tour one is their home, one is Helmut’s office, and one is for guests. When I arrive, Lynn Wyatt is there, in a tight black silky jumpsuit, Gucci heels, and that hair. One night in Monte Carlo, Helmut and June invite me to their home for dinner. Indeed, no place on Earth embodies the Newton aesthetic more than Monte Carlo-except, perhaps, Los Angeles, where the photographer has wintered for the past 20 years in the Chateau Marmont. I’d be willing to bet that it was in this obscene tax haven that it first occurred to some over-tan lady to just keep those stilettos on all day long-even, perhaps, while standing around the house nude. That Newton should have wound up in Monte Carlo makes perfect sense: a soulless metropolis of grand hotels, casinos, turquoise swimming pools, money, dangerous curves, and a bored, faintly ridiculous bourgeoisie. Herb Ritts had told me, “Helmut loves nothing more than going for a swim in a warm ocean,” and here is the proof: under that full head of thick silver hair, a look of total contentment. Young Helmut Newton was, as he likes to remind people, “a championship swimmer” when he was growing up in Berlin, and you can see that the old coot has still got it a perfect, measured stroke pulls him cleanly through water the color of designer jeans. In short, they struck me as deeply modern-the coolest septuagenarians I’d ever met. Watching the couple-with their signature haircuts and distinctive eyeglasses-holding court that night, I got the sense of two people as a single organism, a couple capable of pretentiousness and impossible snobbery, and yet also earthy and delightfully vulgar. At the end of the shoot, I was invited to the wrap dinner Helmut and June held in the restaurant of the Delano Hotel. I had first met the couple in Miami, on a freakishly cold day, at a photo shoot with Naomi Campbell on the beach. I had bought all of my Newton books in the strange spring and summer of 2000, when I followed Helmut and June around the world, it seemed. ![]() Those Newton books- A Gun for Hire, Work, Pages from the Glossies, to name a few-were all art-directed by June Newton, Helmut’s wife of 56 years (and widow since 2004), who died last week at the age of 97 in her Monte Carlo home. In my fidgety boredom that day this winter, I stumbled on the Helmut Newton section, long obscured by a “Smoking Grandpa” tin toy and an orange-and-black Playboy Club ashtray from the 1960s (and, more recently, by a clay figurine of Joe Biden giving Donald Trump the finger, a heartwarming Christmas gift from my father-in-law). Somewhere toward the end of my scrupulous, yearlong quarantine in Woodstock, New York, I started culling and decommissioning tchotchkes cluttering up the shelves (and obscuring the beautiful spines) of the hundreds of art and photography books I’ve collected over the years. ![]()
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