The Fox in the Foxhole

The Times' Janine di Giovanni tries to figure out who Lee Miller, the model, war correspondent, artist, portrait photographer, Surrealist muse and cook, really was:

Along with her great friend, the Life magazine photographer David Scherman, she was one of the first to arrive at Hitler’s secret apartments -- "I had his address in my pocket for years," she would blithely say -- where she stripped off her clothes and her muddy boots, fresh with the dirt of Dachau, and slid into Hitler’s bathtub to wash. Then she would sleep in his bed. "Mein host was not home," she liked to say. But his telephone line was still working.

"Naturally I took pictures," she told the celebrity radio interviewer Ona Munson in 1946, in her deep movie-star voice. "What’s a girl supposed to do when a battle lands in her lap?" (NYT)

I became enamored with Miller as a teenager, although I can't even remember how I first heard about her (a Life magazine article?). I remember that my brother Bill bought me "The Lives of Lee Miller" for Christmas one year and I was completely taken with her glamorous life as a Conde Nast model, war correspondent, Picasso's lover, object of Man Ray's obsession, star of Jean Cocteau's film "The Blood of a Poet" and so on. It turns out Lee's only son, who wrote the book, didn't even really know who his mom was until years after her death. "When Lee closed something, she closed it," he said firmly. "I knew she was handy with a camera when I was little -- but that was about it. She never talked about the war." But, as di Giovanni discovered on a trip to Miller's old homestead, "the war, and certainly her childhood rape and the loss of her extraordinary beauty, threw Miller into dark moods. She was, in many ways, tormented by her gleaming past."