He called sometime in the late spring of 2000. I was living in Brooklyn, in a two-bedroom walkup on Washington Avenue, with a distant view of the tops of the Twin Towers. My first novel, “Bee Season,” had come out in May and was getting the kind of literary attention my childhood self had always dreamed about. This was a pre-cell-phone, pre-caller-I.D. era: when the telephone rang, you picked up. After the man on the other end of the line confirmed that I was Myla Goldberg, he introduced himself and asked if I’d heard of him. When I told him that I hadn’t, he chuckled. He was a photographer, he explained. He really liked my book and was interested in taking my picture. Would I mind making an appointment to visit his studio? In the meantime, he’d have samples of his work sent to me.
“Jason?” I asked my husband, after I hung up. “Have you ever heard of a photographer named Richard Avedon?” For a moment, my husband just stood there, staring at me, and I wondered if I needed to repeat the question.
Within an hour, the door buzzed. Five floors below, a messenger waited with a package containing two glossy coffee-table books of photography, inscribed to me in exuberant black Sharpie and signed “Dick.” When I paged through them, I understood my husband’s look of incredulity and pity: it was a sympathetic stare that one offers to an idiot. Because of course I knew who Richard Avedon was, just not by name. Like the rest of the world, I knew him by his photographs.
That phone call was my first brush with a truly famous person. As a girl, I had fantasized about becoming a published writer, and, at twenty-eight years old, I was then becoming one, but my appetite for fame was contradictory: I wanted to be known but not known, my books read and my name recognized, but not my face. I wanted popular approbation and anonymity at the same time, a flavor of fame specific to writing that’s a bit like wanting to have a dog without being saddled with the responsibility of feeding it and taking it for walks. Novelists create worlds from the blank page up; we can specify the slant of a nose or the tremor of a single leaf. The kind of fame we desire is the kind that we can control.
The following week, on the appointed day, I rode the subway across the East River and up to Avedon’s studio, on East Seventy-fifth Street, with a bag containing a few prospective outfits in one hand and a bouquet of basil, from my community-garden plot, in the other. The basil was a last-minute addition that I hoped might double as a thank-you gift and advance apology for the fact that there was no way that this was going to go well. As honored and flattered and dumbfounded as I was by what was happening, none of that changed the fact that I hated having my picture taken. When I was allowed to make faces in front of a camera, I was fine; when I was asked to “be myself” in front of a camera, I turned wooden.
Avedon’s studio was on the top floor of a townhouse that he owned, with skylights in the ceiling to let in the sun. Meeting him felt like meeting someone’s gracious, slightly nervous uncle. He seemed genuinely delighted by the basil, thanking me in a quiet, eager voice, which allayed a few of the doubts that had followed me in. Having sorted through my thrift-store wardrobe, I’d selected two candidates that seemed photo-worthy: a black-and-white-checkered dress and a vintage men’s bathing suit, the sort of one-piece black wool unitard that had been all the rage in 1922. Avedon opted for the suit. After I changed, in a side room, he placed me in front of a big, somewhat old-fashioned-looking camera on a tripod, which he stood beside while holding a cable release. While we talked, he silently signalled and re-signalled for me to look at the camera rather than at him. As he continued to press the button that snapped the shutter, we commiserated over the oddness of gender and bodies, the strangeness of a person being judged by the size and shape of the flesh container she happened to inhabit, and he told me that Audrey Hepburn had shared some of my feelings.
Though the session didn’t last longer than twenty minutes, I will forever remember the feeling of standing barefoot in that light-filled room while Avedon apologetically tilted his head toward the lens I kept ignoring, as if the camera were a socially inept friend that the two of us needed to make concessions for. I never became comfortable or managed to redirect my gaze toward the camera with anything but slight alarm, but I did enjoy our conversation. Had we been having it over coffee, we wouldn’t have been photographer and subject, or legend and first-time novelist: we just would have been two people having a nice time.
The photo arrived a month or so later. I remember feeling momentarily let down that it was neither trademark Avedon glamorous nor provocative but instead depicted the goofy, slightly awkward person that is indisputably me. I didn’t see the contact sheet, so I’ll never know what the other options were. I can only assume that Avedon chose the least embarrassing one. A photograph is a collaboration between the artist and the subject. A photographer, no matter how great, is limited by his material. Perhaps, if Avedon had kept me in front of his camera longer, I might have been able to let down my guard over time, but he hadn’t been on assignment, and he hadn’t been trying to make a statement; he’d just wanted to meet me. In an alternate universe in which we weren’t two people with no real reason to cross paths, it’s possible that we could have become friends.
During the next two years, we exchanged a few brief notes, the paper kind that come in envelopes with stamps. When he invited me to the opening of his Met retrospective, in 2002, I didn’t know whether it was because he was being nice or because my portrait was in it. (I was too naïve to know that people with their pictures in museum shows get advance notice of such things.) I showed up that night almost sick to my stomach with the thought of a face-to-face encounter with myself on a museum wall; I was abashed that my relief was equal to my disappointment when my portrait wasn’t there. For a moment, there had been the possibility of my fame extending beyond my reach. Perhaps it’s the nature of ambition to crave and fear that at the same time.
The last note I received from him came about a week later: he was sorry to have missed me at the show, but, for the next three months, he had a pass that granted him admission to the Met on Mondays, when it was closed to the public, and the two of us could go there and walk around. In an alternate universe where we weren’t busy living non-overlapping lives, that might have happened. In this one, I was on a road trip two years later when the news came on the radio that Avedon had died, in Texas, while on assignment for this magazine. His photograph hangs on my bedroom wall, where it has stayed my secret for the past eighteen years, commemorating a moment about which I remain equal parts shy and proud.
