Books: Peeping Tome

OBSERVATIONS (151 pp.)—Photographs by Richard Avedon, comments by Truman Copo/e—Simon & Schuster ($15).

The camera marks the most important advance in the technology of eavesdropping since the invention of the keyhole. The prying eye can now record what it sees, and gossip has become a visual as well as a verbal art. This is vividly apparent in Observations, a sort of peeping tome in which Photographer Richard Avedon’s pictures are discussed by Author Truman Capote. Unfortunately, Capote writes in a style that combines the worst features of Henry James, Dorothy Kilgallen, and deb talk (says he of Marilyn Monroe: “Just a slob really: an untidy divinity—in the sense that a banana split or a cherry jubilee is untidy but divine”). But Avedon’s pictures have the poignancy, and sometimes the pettiness, of inspired gossip. He is at home in a theatrical world where statement is overstatement, appearance is reality, personality is character.

Photographer Avedon, 36, began to learn his trade at 19, in the perfumed atmosphere of Harper’s Bazaar. He has the usual virtues of the good fashion photographer, is brilliantly skillful, tirelessly careful, madly inventive. But he also has the vices of trick, splash and artiness. In his pictures he never murmurs if he can shout. He is a determined celebrity chaser, and with Observations he establishes himself as an accomplished face-dropper. Among his best pages:

¶ A cruelly realistic portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor that shows the aging lovers no more mercy than the hand of time has done. Yet by seeing them as they are, the picture also concedes to them a human quality that the society pages have failed to report.

¶ A glimpse of Marianne Moore, the Muse of Brooklyn, looking for all the world like the Good Fairy in a Walt Disney cartoon.

¶ A fine, silly trick shot of Elsa Maxwell in bed with a skunk.

¶ A shuddery look at Jean Cocteau, in which France’s brilliant jack-of-arts sits tickling his lips with a stalk of lily of the valley, calculating his audience as coldly as a lizard calculates a fly—a portrait of the infant prodigy as an old man.

¶ An arresting snapshot of Mr. and Mrs. T. S. Eliot, in which the wrinkled old (71) poet stands with his arms looped fondly but awkwardly around the neck of his wholesome young (32) wife, his face caught in a quizzical expression, half doubt and half delight—a portrait of J. Alfred Prufrock, who has dared to eat a peach.