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. 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).
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. 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. I had first met the couple in Miami, on a freakishly cold day, at a photo shoot with Naomi Campbell on the beach. At the end of the shoot, I was invited to the wrap dinner Helmut and June held in the restaurant of the Delano Hotel. 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. In short, they struck me as deeply modern—the coolest septuagenarians I’d ever met.
Because I had Newton on the brain from rediscovering his books on my shelves, when I checked into a hotel in Beverly Hills for a week in February, I took a walk one morning along a still COVID-deserted Sunset Boulevard to a shuttered Chateau Marmont, a pilgrimage of sorts: I wanted to touch the plaque that was put up at the spot where Helmut died.
And then, in early March, tired of being in that depressingly empty room-service-free hotel in Beverly Hills, I moved to a beach house in Santa Monica for three weeks. I was meeting a tennis pro, Ben, a few times a week at the courts on the beach in Ocean Park, and towering above them were twin apartment blocks, built in the ’60s, that reminded me so much of La Tour, Helmut and June’s apartment building in Monte Carlo. I was so intrigued that I Googled around to see what was available in the buildings on Ocean Park; before long, I was saying to my husband Andy that we could rent on a high floor with a balcony overlooking the ocean “and live like Helmut and June Newton.”
When June died on Friday, I reread my 2000 profile of Helmut and was astonished to see that a profile of Helmut is necessarily a profile of June. Indeed, the only time I was with Helmut without June was this scene from the piece, below:
“I’m a tenderfoot,” says Helmut Newton as we pick our way through the great throng of tanning rich people that is the Monte Carlo Beach Club one breezy Thursday in August. Newton lives in La Tour, a cliff-hugging apartment block that’s so close, as the crow flies, that he takes calls to his home on a vintage cordless phone that he has brought down the mountain with him.
Nearly every day he hops into one of his ever-changing cars (at the moment, a Mitsubishi) and winds his way down to his cabana at the beach club.
Newton doesn’t like to walk on the so-called beach—lousy as it is with huge, painful stones—so part of his journey to the water sees him walking along the jetty, which is a visual feast of Speedos, thongs, hard nipples, and glistening buttocks. When he arrives at the end, he plunges in, head first.
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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
The piece ended like this:
One night in Monte Carlo, Helmut and June invite me to their home for dinner. When I arrive, Lynn Wyatt is there, in a tight black silky jumpsuit, Gucci heels, and that hair. 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. The place is choked with art. 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. There are Hockneys and Warhols and Wesselmans and Christos and Ruschas and a thrilling collection of framed originals: Mapplethorpe, Brassaï, George Hurrell, O. Winston Link, Dr. Eric Solomon, Horst, Cartier-Bresson.
Their furniture is mostly modern. An Eames black leather chair here, an orange and tan Ligne Roset couch there. White carpeting. Fabulous views. 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.”
We enjoy Champagne and hors d’oeuvres in the den—served by an elderly, silent couple—and then move to the deck for a fairly simple dinner (melon and prosciutto, figs, chicken, rice, cheese, bread, and ice cream). As the plates are cleared and the red wine dwindles, the conversation picks up speed. There is a lively talk about Hollywood and photographers from the ’30s and ’40s, and a spirited debate about whether Helmut or Guy Bourdin put the sex back in fashion.
Suddenly, Lynn says to June, “Do you remember the time I asked you, after I saw your photographs, how is that you can be together with a famous photographer when you’re a photographer? How do you get along without competing? And you said, ‘I will never compete with Helmut. There are two of us and I love him and he’s the photographer. Wherever he goes, I go with him. He is first.’ I’ll never forget that. I thought it was brilliant.”
Helmut looks at June: “I’ve never heard her say that.”
“But when you think of our life,” says June, “is it any surprise what she’s saying, Hel?”
“What do you mean?” says Helmut.
“Of course it’s not a surprise,” says Wyatt, “but it’s still nice to hear.”
“It’s lovely to hear it,” says June. “It’s especially lovely for Helmut to hear it.”
Sheepishly, he replies, “Yes, June.”
It’s past 11 p.m. and Lynn announces that she must turn in. Helmut walks her to the door and June sneaks one of my cigarettes. When she’s sure that we’re alone, she whispers, “There are layers and layers and layers.” And then again, shaking her head in wonder, “Layers and layers and layers. Helmut. It’s amazing. He’s a very fascinating man.” She takes a long, deep, satisfying drag of her cigarette and slowly blows out the smoke. “I know a lot of those layers, but I don’t know all of them.”