Shownotes Transcript
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This episode is sponsored by our good friends at Sky, all because their new Sky original film, Lee, is available from the 13th of September only in cinemas. Now, Lee charts the life of one of the most remarkable photographers of the Second World War, Lee Miller. And that's the person we're going to be talking about in today's episode. It's
It was her photographs of Dachau and her photographs from across the ruins of the Third Reich, Tom, that brought home the horrors of the conflict to the British and American public. So
So Kate Winslet plays Lee, but it is kind of an amazingly A-list cast all round. So there's Andy Samberg, Alexander Skarsgård, Marielle Cotillard, Josh O'Connor, Andrea Rysborough, all starring alongside her. Well, Tom, as you know, I've always been really fascinated by Lee Miller as a character because I often think that without photographs like the ones that she took...
would the world have been able to come to terms with what was happening and understand what was happening in the concentration camps in quite the same way. Yeah, it explores that, explores other aspects of the Second World War, the relationship of photography to conflict and to horror. And I mean, it's a real kind of prestige drama, a very serious story on one level, but also thrilling. I really loved it. Lee is out in cinemas from Friday the 13th of September, and you can go to sky.com to find out more.
These are pictures of a nation at war. They are honest pictures, routine scenes to those of us who have reported Britain's ordeal by fire and high explosive. These Englishmen have bought survival with their tender-roofed old buildings, with their bodies and their nerves.
This little book offers you a glimpse of their battle. Somehow they are able to fight down their fears each night, to go to work,
each morning. So that was the legendary CBS war correspondent Ed Murrow in the introduction to his book Grim Glory, Pictures of Britain Under Fire. And it was a book that was designed, essentially designed as pro-British propaganda in the Second World War, showing the American public how
Britain was carrying on during the Blitz. But Dominic, the real interest of that book isn't the deathless prose, which I just read, I think, very beautifully. So beautifully. Yeah, thanks. But the pictures, and specifically perhaps the identity of the woman who took those pictures,
Which is the great photographer Lee Miller. Yes. So some listeners may not have heard of Lee Miller, but I'm guessing that almost all of them will have seen her pictures, whether they know it or not. So the most famous ones, probably the most infamous, I suppose, are the pictures she took of Dachau when Dachau was liberated. So that's the sort of late April pictures.
1945. But she also took, there's a very famous photograph of a GI on Hitler's bed in his apartment in Munich, reading a copy of Mein Kampf that went around the world. And there's probably an even more famous picture now of Lee Miller herself reading
In Hitler's bath, Tom, you must have seen that picture. I have, yeah. Tremendous image. I've always been really interested in Lee Miller. I have a sort of stash of old magazines from the 1940s at the back of my office. And a lot of them have Lee Miller photographs. And I've always been interested in her because she's a pioneering female photographer and
because she's a great link between the world of the kind of 1920s, 1930s artistic avant-garde. You know I love the avant-garde, Tom. I know you do. You love a bit of surrealism. Love it. All over it. I mean, actually, I'm quite a surrealist kind of person. I know you are. I think I'd fit into that milieu beautifully. Lobster telephones, all of that. Yeah, exactly. But also her experiences in the war are pretty extraordinary. So she's a great character.
Yeah, so I'll put my hand up. I only had the vaguest sense of her. So I knew about the photos she took of the Holocaust and of her in the bath and a vague sense that she's kind of hanging out with Man Ray and Picasso and Cocteau in Paris, leading her best American expat life there.
as research for this yeah I've done two things Dominic yeah so I went yesterday to Goldhanger Towers where Gary Lineker has had a private cinema built for himself really yeah who goes to that you Alan Shearer Alistair Campbell yeah we're all hanging out there oh my god I'm never invited and obviously Theo was there with the popcorn yeah Tabby was serving ice cream had a wonderful time oh I'm
I'm so jealous. And they were screening a new film about Lee Miller, which stars Kate Winslet. Really? Who puts in fantastic performance. Because actually, you know, she looks quite like Lee Miller. Okay. So that taught me all kinds of things I didn't know. So I didn't know that she ended up in a farm in Sussex. And also, I didn't know that she was married to Alexander Skarsgård, which was a pleasant surprise to discover. Yeah, you must have been excited by that. Who has a very good English accent. Yeah. Which I hadn't realised. Yeah.
And then I came back from watching that and I went into the Bodleian and I made copious notes. So I now feel that I am ready to go head to head with you. I'm full of Lee Miller facts. You're full of interesting anecdotes that aren't true. Well, this is what I want to find out. I want to find out what's kind of accurate in the film, what's accurate in Wikipedia. I'm suspecting the film is more accurate than Wikipedia, but whatever. Take it away, Dominic. Okay.
Okay, so the story of Lee Miller. So she's born, Tom, I'm very pleased to say, in Poughkeepsie, New York. I mean, that is ridiculous spelling, isn't it? I thought it was Poughkeepsie. I don't know. Why can't they have sensible spelling in America, like Worcester? Yeah, like Gloucester. Yeah, exactly. They let themselves down there. Anyway, she's born there in 1907.
So that's in, I think, the Hudson Valley. Her father, Theodore Miller. Tom, brilliantly, he's descended from one of the Hessians who fought for the legitimate authorities at the end of the 18th century against the tax chiefs. Yeah, so he's in favour of paying tax. Definitely. He's the work superintendent at a factory. He's a great tinkerer.
And in fact, they're a family of tinkerers. Tinkerers, not tinkers. Yeah, exactly. They're definitely not tinkers. Selling pots and pans from door to door. No, they're not. So one thing we know about her, there's a biography of her by her son, Anthony Penrose, that sort of goes into the details of her life.
So she was a great enthusiast for a chemistry set, and she's tinkering away with her chemistry set while her father has built a dark room under the stairs. And his big love is photography. So obviously, from a very early age, she's surrounded by cameras. She loves all this. You know, they love messing around with little machines and stuff. But actually, Tom, there's quite a dark shadow over her childhood. I was quite shocked to read this. Very, very dark, isn't it? She went to stay with family friends in Brooklyn when she was seven.
And the son of these family friends abused her. And she got back to Poughkeepsie and she was infected with venereal disease. And the only treatment in those days, pre-penicillin, was they had to sort of douse her with dichloride of mercury. And this apparently was very traumatic. When she was seven? Yeah, when she was seven years old. This was very traumatic. And her parents then sent her to a psychiatrist and...
In the biography by her son, he says that the psychiatrist basically went out of his way to say to her, sex and love are two totally different things. You know, you can completely disassociate them. And I don't think you have to be too much of a kind of amateur psychiatrist.
psychologists to think that this had an impact on the way she thought about personal relationships, as we will see, because she ends up being somebody who does completely disassociate sex and love. But I suppose, Dominic, also this is the era where Freud's ideas are starting to be popularized. Psychoanalysis is becoming very mainstream. And so I suppose she will grow up in that milieu, won't she? And particularly in Paris, where she ends up. Yeah, definitely. All of these ideas are very, very current. Yes, absolutely. She's a very wayward person.
child in some ways. She's always, she's not clearly bright, but she's always been kicked out of various private schools in New York. In 1925, so when she's a teenager, one of her teachers, who's actually a Polish woman,
who teaches French, she's taking a shine to Lee and she says, I'll take you to Paris for the summer. And she goes to Paris. She absolutely falls in love with it. I mean, this is kind of Paris in its heyday, really. Between the wars. Painters, Montmartre, all that. All that stuff. Exactly. And she actually then decides she's going to stay. And she stays for a year. She studies theatre. I like to think of her doing a lot of mime. Yeah.
Yes. At a theatre that had been co-founded by Erno Goldfinger. Oh, brilliant. The inspiration for Goldfinger, the Fort Knox robbing sort of rotund supervillain. But he was an architect, wasn't he? He was an architect. Who Fleming fell out with. Yes, exactly. Because he was building, he was always building modernist buildings in Hampstead, I think was the problem. Anyway, this isn't an issue at this stage.
She's in Paris. She's learning the theater. She loves it so much, actually, that her father actually has to come to bring her back. So it's very kind of Dickie Greenleaf in Townsend, Mr. Ripley. There's a kind of Patricia Highsmith quality slightly to the story. Definitely there is. And then a very Patricia Highsmith-ish kind of moment. She comes back to New York. So what is she now? She's about to turn 20. And she's crossing the road in New York.
And basically, she steps into the traffic and is almost run over. Like Churchill. Yeah, like Churchill. Exactly the same. I mean, uncanny. So all these kind of luminaries in the Second World War, narrowly dodging being run over in New York. Yeah. Very odd. I know. It is very odd. Anyway, the bloke who pulled her back, Tom, would you believe it, is Condé Nast, the magazine... Oh, he's a person. Yeah. I had no idea. Yeah. Condé Nast is a person who...
He's a sort of magazine and newspaper, more magazine than newspaper, tycoon. So it's Condé Nast that the world has to thank for Vogue and Vanity Fair. Condé Nast is a very kind of dapper man. He rescues her.
And according to Hassan's biography, she, who has just got back from Paris, babbled in French in a glamorous manner at him. And he said, my dear. Is he French? No, he's American. He went to Georgetown University. So where does Condé come from? It's just showing off, isn't it?
He says, my dear, you know, you're a very charming young woman. Would you care to model in my new magazine Vogue? And she does. By March 1927, so just a year after she's come back from Paris, she's on the front cover of Vogue. She has a kind of very roaring 20s vibe, doesn't she? She definitely does. So she's very tall. She's very blonde.
She's a very striking, very attractive woman. You can see absolutely why she'd be such a hit. And the most famous ad that she did actually, which doesn't sound terribly glamorous, she's supposedly, I mean, I've actually done some digging into this and I can't really work out how true this is.
But it is said she is the first model to be photographed to advertise sanitary towels. This is a firm called Kotex. This ad ran in all the fashionable magazines and was sort of seen as groundbreaking and stuff. And, you know, at first she doesn't control her image. The photos are taken for an agency and then they're kind of sold.
So at first she's a bit taken aback by it, but actually she loved the kind of notoriety of it. So in the Bodleian, which I was doing intensive research yesterday, it said that this ruined her career. Yeah, that's tosh and rubbish. Is it? Yeah. Okay, well that's a mistake. Because she goes on to do loads of modelling. Poor from the Bodleian. Yeah, they've let themselves down. Oh my God, such a venerable library as well. Yeah, they've let me down, they've let Lee Miller down, but worst of all, they've let themselves down. Yeah, and they've let Kotex down, which is sad.
Anyway, the thing is, she's not just interested in what's going on sort of in front of the camera, but she's also interested in what's going behind it. Because her father is massively into his photography now. And at weekends, she'll spend the week in New York modelling. Then she'll go back to the Hudson Valley. They will experiment on photography together. Now, the one thing that I think is slightly odd is... Well, let's be honest. I mean, very odd. Yeah. His passion is nudes. Yeah. And he loves nudes of Lee.
And she loves it. But again, this is all very kind of Freudian psychology or Alice in Wonderland hint. Maybe more open-minded listeners than me may say, what are they complaining about? They're so repressed. This is completely reasonable behavior. I wouldn't have modeled for my father when I was in my 20s. Tom, would you? I don't want to go down this avenue, no. No. Well, anyway, I don't think you would, frankly.
I don't want to presume, but I don't think you would. Anyway, she does that for a while, but basically she can't wait to get back to Paris. So 1929, she goes to Paris. She's now very well connected, obviously, in kind of the modeling world, the fashion world, that kind of nexus. But also, Dominic, just to ask, so all of that, but also all this stuff about her dad taking photographs and things, and she's been having psychotherapy, presumably, since a young age. I mean, this makes her...
absolutely ideal for all the surrealists who are in Paris. I mean, they're massively into all that, aren't they? Yeah, they are, of course. The sort of introspection, but also the obsession, obviously. Bunuel and Dali and all of that. Yeah, the obsession, the sort of post-Freudian obsession with sex and all of that stuff. Absolutely. And as it happens, when she goes back to Paris, a friend gives her an introduction to a
a very well-known person, one of the best-known photographers in the world at this point, one of the best-known of all the surrealists, who is this guy, Man Ray.
And Man Ray is actually from Philadelphia. He's American. He's Emmanuel Ratnitsky. I think he's a family of Russian, I think, immigrants. And he was famous for his kind of Dadaist and then surrealist kind of collages and images and so on. Lee Miller said later that he kind of looked like a bull. He's this kind of very bear-like man, big eyebrows. And she just turns up to see him and says, I want to study with you. And he says, well, I don't have any students.
Anyway, I'm going on holiday. I'm leaving Paris. And she said, brilliant, I'll come with you. And she did. And they ended up living together for three years. And they were a great partnership. You know, he teaches about surrealism. He teaches photography and stuff.
They have this kind of open relationship. Well, I read in your notes that she was known as Madame Man Ray. Yes. Surely it would have been easier for her to be known simply as Woman Ray. I knew this joke was coming. This tremendous joke. It's a joke I've been waiting to make all the show. What's so shameful about this joke is that Theo crafted a joke for you overnight and you stamped on it very coldly. Well, I wasn't having my jokes upstage. So that you could use your own fanfare.
frankly, weak joke. Oh, I think the listeners will be rolling in the aisles at that one. Okay. So she's still doing a lot of modelling. She's modelling for the Parisian edition of Vogue. Cecil Beaton, British photographer who actually... Cecil Beaton, my erstwhile neighbour.
Yeah, of course. Yeah. We used to kick footballs over his wall and go and roam in his garden. Yeah. It's nice to think that I have a link to 1920s Paris. So Cecil Beeson said of Lee Miller, he didn't even like Lee Miller, but he said, she looked like a sun-kissed goat boy from the Appian Way. Didn't he said that of you? No.
You may well have done, actually, thinking back. He's a very entertaining figure in the film, just mentioning that. I felt upset on Cecil Beaton's behalf. Really? A bit. I've always had a soft spot for him. He was always very nice to us. He didn't mind us running around like whatever it was. Like goat boys on the Appian Way. Goat boys on the Appian Way. He was very into that. Okay. So she's massively into her surrealism, loves all that.
She gets her own apartment. She gets her own studio by 1930, just down the road from Man Ray's studio. And she starts to carve out a little bit of a niche for herself as somebody who's not just modeling, but also taking photos. So not just a muse, in other words. Not just a muse, exactly. History's full of muses of this kind. But she is more ambitious than that. And especially in Paris at that time. Yeah, of course. I mean, that's what Picasso's all about.
She's more ambitious because she is taking kind of society portraits. So she's doing loads of kind of bohemian people. She gets in with the French aristocracy. So this is the thing about the nexus between the fashion industry and
in the sort of early 20th century fashion industry and the world of high society, kind of aristocratic types. She has all these kind of aristocratic friends, doesn't she? Can I tell you about one of them? Do. Who I read about in the Bodleian yesterday. Yeah. It's an interesting link to the French Revolution. I love a link to the French Revolution. And also she's in the film, she's played by Marianne Cotillard. And this is Solange Marie Christine Louise de Labrif, the Duchess of Aisne, who is married, Dominic, to the son of the 8th Duke of Nain.
No. So remind me, the Duchess of Nouailles was the person who greeted Marie Antoinette when she arrived in. Yeah. And. Stickler for etiquette. And Lafayette married into the family. Right. And her son is the guy who kicks off the abrogation of feudal privileges. Yeah, that's right. In the National Assembly. Should have done it two years earlier. So she's a fashion editor of French Vogue. She lives in a chateau. She's the kind of the beating heart of Le Tout Paris. And, you know.
That's great. I mean, it's kind of Proustian, I guess. Yeah, it is Proustian. Proust, Picasso, Cocteau,
Coco Chanel, she's friends. I mean, it's amazing. It's like that Woody Allen film set in Paris where they kind of rush around meeting Hemingway and everybody. Basically every famous person in Paris, she is meeting. And do you know what? Her father comes over in December 1930 and he's a man from... Did you take photographs of her? Oh, my darling. Do you want to take your clothes off, Lee? Do you want to, for old time's sake, and we'll take a quick photo? He comes over from Poughkeepsie, New York, and he's a work superintendent, remember? And you would think, now if this was a film...
If this bit was a film, you would say he'll be very shocked at this point. He'll be very disappointed. No, he loves it. And you know who he particularly likes? Man Ray. He loves Man Ray. Can't get enough of him. They're both photographers, aren't they? Man Ray says, oh, I've invented a brilliant new tripod and theatre. Miller.
It's not a euphemism. And Theodore Miller is absolutely delighted by this. Can't get enough of it. So that's all great. But there is a cloud. There are numerous clouds, actually. But this is one. It's an Egyptian cloud. So she ends up having a relationship in Paris with this guy called Aziz Eloui Bey.
who's married a Circassian woman. Who are famously beautiful, aren't they? The Circassians. They're very beautiful. It was providing the slave girls in the Harlands. Yeah, exactly. Madness to divorce a Circassian, which is what this bloke does. He divorces his wife because he's so infatuated with Lee. But also by this point, Man Ray. He's all in. He's very possessive. And is Mr. Aziz, I mean, is he very rich? I think he is rich, yeah. Is he very charming? Is he very suave? What is he? He's Omar Sharif. Dodi Al-Fayed. Well, yes, that's a slightly less...
I think Omar Sharif is a more enticing proposition than Dodi Fayed, isn't he? Yeah. I mean, not dissing Dodi Fayed, but Dodi Fayed put up the finance for the Killingfields, Chariots of Fire. Yeah, Chariots of Fire. And the producer said he was the laziest man he'd ever met in his life. He's always on yachts, isn't he? Yeah. Kind of hanging out in restaurants in Paris. Yeah. So anyway...
She flees away from this love tug of war, tug of love. She flees back to New York. She opens her own studio. So New York is now in the depths of the depression. It's late 1932. There'd have been soup kitchens, you know, starving people on the streets. She's not interested in that at all. She will, of course, be very interested in the gritty reality of life and capturing that in her photographs, but not in 1932.
So she's spending her kind of nights playing poker and dancing and that kind of high life and a day society photos. Which again, it's that kind of Dorothy Parker, wisecracking, broads, you know, speakeasies. Absolutely. She really is kind of...
She's inhabiting every going cliche in the interwar years. Exactly. And she's living it to the full. She is. Absolutely. Then in the summer of 1934, so two years later, this bloke Aziz turns up in New York and they sort of rekindle their romance. She introduces him to her father. I don't know whether they bond over photography. I don't think they do. Yeah. So is Aziz into photography? I don't think he is massively, actually. I think he's into it.
He's into Lee Miller. He's into Lee Miller. But also, here's an interesting thing. He's really into air conditioning. Is he? Yeah. There can't be much air conditioning in Cairo at this point. No, he's in on it early. Early adopter. He has a contract from the Egyptian government to provide a lot of air conditioning. And this will become a theme of his later life.
Anyway, she introduces him to her parents and she says, Mr. Adi, he loves his air conditioning. Brilliant. And her parents think, oh, charming man. And then to their astonishment, because they've met loads of her boyfriends. She goes off with him to the Egyptian consulate and gets married to him in New York. And everyone is astounded by that. Is it, I mean, is it love? I think she's, I think it's a lark. Okay. Bit of a lark.
disappointingly, perhaps slightly prosaically. Do you know where they go on their honeymoon? I do, because you've got it down on the notes. Yeah. Pretend you don't know. I don't, Dominic. Where do they go on honeymoon? They go to Niagara Falls. To me, that's a bit coach party for a honeymoon, even in the 1930s. Yeah, but maybe it's ironic in a surrealist way. Yeah, like getting married in Las Vegas or something. It's slightly ironic, do you think? Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, they then go off to Egypt. So she's then in Cairo for the next three years. Cairo.
gyro yeah she doesn't actually it's not as glamorous and exotic as you would think however dominic however yeah she does take a photograph that will subsequently be employed by the great belgian surrealist painter renee magrita in 1938 she does i know she does she does that in the desert doesn't she yeah but we have a letter to her parents in 1935 um she hasn't communicated them for about a year she says um
I've spent an extremely happy and healthy year, my time being occupied between studying chemistry six mornings a week at the American University and three afternoon hours a week of Arabic. Also a great deal of poker and bridge. I think that's quite an impressive way to pass your time. A year of doing chemistry? Come on, Dominic, you're not going to be doing chemistry. I wouldn't. I wouldn't. So I don't think you're in any position to throw stones. Okay. What she does do that's more exciting, she's still keeping up with her photography. So she goes to Jerusalem for a day.
She goes to the monasteries in Sinai. Have you been to them? Yes, I have. You must be all over them. Yeah, I've filmed there actually. Have you? So you've gone one better. She was just taking still photographs. Yeah, I've one up and checked there. She goes somewhere I know you haven't been, the oasis of Siwa, where Alexander was proclaimed the son of Zeus Amon. And she takes all these fantastic photos of the desert. So if you look at one of the books on Lima, and you've got her desert photographs, they're quite surrealist and they're very stark and very striking.
They're obviously very much of their time. Well, they're like a Magritte painting. Yeah, they're kind of windswept rocks in a sort of phallic formation and all this kind of thing. Clouds looming over the dunes, all this sort of business. That look like the naked female torso. Exactly, exactly. That's exactly what it is. Or the wings of a dove. But she's clearly, frankly, a bit bored with Mr. Rousset. There's only so much air conditioning. Chat, one can...
Air conditioning banter one can put up with. But talking of banter, so she sometimes goes back to Paris. And when she's in Paris, she meets this posh Englishman who has partly dyed himself. So this is Alexander Skarsgård. In the film. Roland Penrose in reality, who has partly dyed himself bright blue for surrealist bants reasons. But not permanently. No, not permanently. So he's Roland Penrose. He is a Quaker.
Quakers are such a theme of the rest is history. He's a Quaker. Yeah, we love a Quaker. Richard Nixon, Benjamin Lay. And also he went to Queens College, Cambridge, my alma mater. Really? Yeah. God, it all connects. Yeah. Cecil Beaton. You filmed at Sinai. You kicked a ball over. I am shadowing Lee Miller's life. That's a terrifying image.
So he's a Quaker. He's a conscientious objector. He's a tremendous friend of Picasso and of various surrealists. Because he's got an amazing collection, hasn't he? Incredible. Yeah, and he goes on to become... He founds the ICA, doesn't he, or something? He does. He founds the Institute for Contemporary Art. He becomes the grand old man of British contemporary art. And just a spoiler, he has a tremendous war. He does, indeed. So he's a funny mix because on the one hand, he's a Quaker. So he's very formal and he's very kind of well-mannered.
On the other hand, he's a surrealist. He loves dyeing himself blue. So he's blue. He's blue like an ancient Briton, I guess. Anyway, they start this relationship and they go traveling the Balkans and stuff. And he actually comes out to Egypt to see her. And I think she must have with Aziz the similar kind of man-raised style open relationship because they're all tremendous friends.
And in the spring of 1939, she says to Aziz, he's talking about air conditioning units. And she says, I've got something to tell you. I've decided to go and hang out with this blue guy. Yeah. Go to England with this blue Quaker. Fair enough. Aziz says, you know, my dear, my dear, I'm very pleased for you. I'll give you some money. And he even comes to Port Said to see her off on their boat to Southampton. So,
By the late summer of 1939, she has moved in with Roland in Hampstead, naturally. Does Mr. Aziz provide air conditioning? Do you need it in North London? I don't believe you do. Probably not. And also there'd be no room for it. But Mr. Goldfinger, he'd be all into it.
They're neighbors. They must be neighbors of Goldfinger. Yeah, I don't connect. Anyway, there wouldn't be a room because his house is full of artworks. Picasso, Krak, Miro, Magritte, all of this stuff. And when she arrives in the house, she actually says, my God, you've got so many brilliant copies. They look like the originals. And he sort of says, my dear, they are the originals. But,
But then, Tom, so I was reading all this in the biography and I was like, this is great. Love all this. And then I turned the page and you know what? The sentence that I read next, Tom, the clouds of war were gathering and they were. And the greatest adventure of Lee Miller's life was about to begin. Okay, well, let's take a break there. And when we come back, we will be looking at the extraordinary story of Lee Miller's record in the Second World War and indeed Rowland's.
This episode is sponsored by our good friends at Sky, all because their new Sky original film, Lee, is available from Friday the 13th of September, only in cinemas. Now, Tom, I know you love a red carpet premiere. I do. You've been to a few red carpet premieres, thanks to The Rest Is History, but you had a personal screening. Is that possible? Are you so important? Well, as I mentioned in this episode, it was in Gary Lineker's private cinema at Goldhanger Towers. And I was there for a few years.
And it was a pretty luxurious experience. Well, I'll leave it to listeners to make up their own minds what they think of that. But Tom, what do you think of the film? It's really gripping. It kind of wonderfully conveys the sense of Lee Miller's life before the war. And so what we talk about in this episode, the way in which she goes from being the cutting edge of the avant-garde high society, all of that, to becoming this hard-boiled woman
almost kind of female gi who goes absolutely into the heart of the nazi darkness it's it's really good yeah and of course it's photography like hers kind of second world war photography that lays the foundation for a lot of the kind of war correspondence and war photography stuff that we associate with later conflicts so vietnam for example yeah so on the vietnam war there's an amazing sequence where she sees the first use of napalm in samalo
And it's one of the kind of the great moments in the film. So highly, highly recommended. Lee is out in cinemas from Friday, the 13th of September, and you can go to sky.com to find out more.
The building we were in and all the others which faced the fort were being spat at now. Ping, bang, hitting above our window, into the next, breaking on the balcony below. Fast, queer noise. Impact before the gun noise itself, following the same sound pattern. Hundreds of rounds, crossing and recrossing where we were.
Machine gun fire belched from the end pillbox. The men fell flat, stumbling and crawling into the shelter of shell holes. Some crept on, others sweeping back to the left of the gun's angle, one man reaching the top. He was enormous, a square-shouldered silhouette, black against the sky between the pillbox and the fort. He raised his arm, the gesture of a cavalry officer with saber waving the others on. He was waving to death, and he fell with his hand against the fort.
So that was Lee Miller writing in Vogue in October 1944. And she's describing the battle for San Marlo, which she is in the middle of it. And in the Kate Winslet film, it's just opening. This is what the film opens with, very dramatic kind of Band of Brothers style action sequence. And Dominic, it's a huge contrast, isn't it? With all the photography and the air conditioning and the...
psychoanalysis and Picasso and blue Quakers and stuff of the first half. So what's going on? How does she get from all that to being shot at in newly liberated France in 1944? Well, it's a remarkable story. And I suppose you could say in a way that's the story of Western society in the 1930s and 1940s in microcosm in one person's life. So the very abrupt transition from, as you say, that world of
parties and photography and surrealist larks to the sort of deadly serious
battle for San Marlo in 1944. It's quite striking prose, I think. I mean, she's not really renowned as a writer, but... But she's influenced by, I guess... Well, she goes on, doesn't she, to do a kind of photo sequence after the war about Joyce's Dublin. And there's a kind of... The influence of modernist prose there. Yeah, Hemingway or something. Which is exactly what you'd expect, or Hemingway, yeah. Exactly. And I think the other... The striking thing, it's in vogue.
that report. Is that British Vogue or American Vogue? Yes, British Vogue. Okay, so that's with Audrey Withers, who's her editor. Yes. So we left there in 1939, having arrived in Britain, and within weeks, the storm clouds of war have burst. Have broken. Have broken, yeah. So Britain's at war, and she immediately volunteers her services to British Vogue.
And actually what they use her to do is, I mean, this is a sign of the kind of phony war that at first 1939, 1940, they're literally using her to take photographs of handbags. There'll be a sort of feature on nice new belts in the season.
And she's doing it because, of course, for most people, the war in Britain, the war has not yet impinged. The war is happening in Poland. It's somewhere else. But she does have Cecil Beaton being catty to her. Yes, that's right. He is consistently very catty. Pretty grueling. But it's as late as sort of the summer, autumn of 1940. So after Dunkirk, after the Battle of Britain, during the Blitz,
You can open Vogue and there is no mention of the war at all, very little mention of the war. So Vogue was actually bombed in October 1940 and
Production of the magazine didn't stop. Presumably because the assumption is that people want it as a reminder of the world of peace, the world of comfort, where you're not being rationed, where there aren't restrictions on the clothing you can buy. That's right. Certainly at first, I think. And I think that speaks to a wider issue, which is that in Britain in particular, in 1939 and the first part of 1940,
The war is really happening at one remove and people don't want it to feel real. You know, they don't want Britain to be like Poland or wherever, Norway. They want to preserve, as you say, a bit of life, but actually, yeah, a bit of normal life. But,
Vogue has gone to subscription only because of print and paper rationing. So actually, all this stuff that she's doing, it's good stuff, Tom, but it's not reaching the newsstands. It's exclusively for Vogue subscribers. So very much like the Rest Is History Club. Very much like the bonus episodes that we do for the Rest Is History Club, exactly. Which are actually the best, aren't they? That was the analogy that struck me. That was completely the analogy that's going to mind, organically. Anyway, Vogue.
She's very keen. You know, she has this curiosity and this ambition. So she is keen to get out and actually chronicle the war. So that Ed Murray thing that we opened with. Yeah. Did she feel that she is doing her bit for Britain's war effort? I think so. I think absolutely. Because some of her images, they're perfect for the sort of propaganda efforts, particularly for rousing people in America. So if you'd look at the Grim Glory book that you began with, the
The most famous photograph in there is called Revenge on Culture. And it's an image, again, that I think a lot of people may have seen, even if they don't immediately realize it was by Lee Miller. It's a statue that has fallen and a kind of iron bar has fallen across the statue as though it's cutting its throat. And the breast of the statue has been kind of bruised and battered by a falling brick. So it's just kind of lying amid the rubble.
And this photograph with the title Revenge on Culture, it's an image, a symbol of the Nazi onslaught against Western civilization. And this went kind of viral, as it were, worldwide. So it was even reproduced on the front pages of sort of Egyptian newspapers and things. And it was seen as a symbol of Nazi barbarism. Then there's a story that she did that ran as a big spread in American vogue.
It was about women, ATS women, auxiliary territorial service women, manning a searchlight in North London. So not far from where she lived. And again, it's like ordinary women doing their bit for the war. And then she did things like she took photographs of Henry Moore, the war artist, in London underground stations. So stuff like this. And she is experimenting also, I mean, for people who are interested in photography,
The war sees tremendous advances in photography. So there are new cameras, like there's a 35 millimeter Leica camera, which has a much faster lens and faster film speed so that you can take images. You know, you can improvise spontaneous pictures in a way that you couldn't have done 10 or 20 years earlier. So she's very good at that, at sort of taking pictures on the fly.
And she's also kind of keen to write her own copy. She doesn't want to see her pictures butchered by other people's copy. You know, that extract that I read, I think it's pretty good. Yeah, I think it is good. She actually hates writing. She's quite good at it, but it's a really, it doesn't come, photography comes naturally because she's always done it with her father. And because you said this, she's always on the move, obeys her instincts, and
And I imagine, you know, the faster the speed at which she can take photographs, the better it suits her temperament, perhaps. Totally. Would that be fair? I think that's absolutely right. I think that's exactly it. When she's actually rushing around, taking photographs spontaneously, she loves it and she's brilliant at it. When she gets back to the hotel and she has to type, I mean, she ought to be massively overwrite. So no, I'm not one to criticize her for doing that. But she will send Vogue, you know, 10,000 words of copy to accompany a couple of images. And they're like, this is kind of too much. We were hoping for about 500.
Anyway, what she really wants to do is to be a proper war correspondent. She's fallen in love with that. That has given her, I think, a sense of mission and a sense of a purpose that she's actually lacked all her life. And I think one of the tragic things about Lee Miller's life is that she's very restless, the first part of it. That's why she's hanging around with the air conditioning magnates in Egypt and whatnot. And then she has this brief moment during the war
where she knows who she is and what she wants to do. And then as we'll see after the war, she's kind of restless and unfulfilled again. And there are so many people like that, aren't there? There are, absolutely. Who live at their most vivid during the war. Absolutely. And then it's a terrible come down afterwards. It's a terrible letdown, yeah. Once the US joins the war, she gets accreditation to the US forces in Britain. But she's still quite frustrated because she's still stuck in Britain.
And she wants to be kind of on the move and doing exciting things. And then D-Day happens in June 1944. And that really is her break. The liberation of Europe is the moment where her career really comes alive. And for her, going back to France, where she'd been so happy...
I mean, it must be very, very intense in the way it is, say, for Hemingway. Yeah. If it was somewhere else, it wouldn't have the kind of resonance. Because she speaks the language. She's got lots of friends there. And as we'll see, I mean, lots of her friends have had terrible experiences, her French friends. Yeah. So it's really personal for her. But before she goes to France, so she goes over first in July and she goes to, she's sent on an assignment to cover US Army field hospitals in Normandy.
because the battle in Normandy is incredibly bloody even after D-Day and she's there for five days
And she takes 35 rolls of film and she writes 10,000 words. And she gives this to Vogue. And they are stunned. They weren't expecting anything like this. And they run it in two double-page spreads in the next issue, in the September issue. And from that point onwards, it's like she's found her meaning. She even changes the way she dresses. So all the sort of the stylish...
you know, 1930s high society look. That's all gone. She wears kind of battle dress, you know, prides herself on eating the same rations as the servicemen on kind of sitting around playing cards and, and,
That kind of, you know, almost like the routine of the war, the long stretches of boredom interspersed with sudden activity. She loves all that, that kind of world that the GIs... It suits her temperament, clearly. Yeah, it absolutely does. And she wangles this deal to go and cover what's going on in San Marlo. And actually, at this point, the Allies are kind of telling their public that San Marlo has been taken. But she gets there and she finds out it hasn't at all. Basically, the Germans are all in this citadel.
And the U.S. 83rd Division, U.S. Army 83rd Division, are fighting this ferocious and incredibly brutal battle to get it. And so she, that bit that you read, is her kind of in the thick of the action. People are dropping dead around her. But also the really shocking thing I discovered from the book
The US Air Force are using napalm. It's one of the first instances of the sustained use of napalm. Brilliantly done in the film, Dominic. Is it? Yeah, I mean, I can imagine it would be incredibly spectacular.
And she, you know, takes photographs and she writes about this. Because I had no idea napalm was being used that early. No, I didn't. I foolishly, just because I associated with Vietnam, I just assumed, yeah. But no, the censors in London took out all her shots of the napalm being used because understandably they were like, this is very bad publicity for our war efforts. And actually because she had exceeded her
So she had gone into the combat zone when she was meant to have been chronicling the restoration of civil order.
She actually gets in trouble and she gets temporarily put under house arrest in Wren. Don't the British Secret Service worry that she might be communist as well, working for the Soviets? Is that true or not? I'm not sure that is true, actually. I haven't seen... Certainly in the biography by her son, there's no evidence of that. I have seen... I think what's happened is I've read newspaper reports about her name being in files, being in a list. But I think it's just...
It's not like Charlie Chaplin being refused a re-entry to the United States or whatever it was. Obviously, she has associated, perhaps in a less overt way than your Oppenheimers or something, she's associated with some pretty left-wing people. I mean, that's what happens when you hang around with blue-painted Quakers in the salons of surrealist Paris, Tom. It's a kind of occupational hazard. But I don't think it massively holds her back or anything.
Because she's let out again anyway, she gets to Paris for the liberation. And all her kind of surrealist pals are kind of surfacing from their studios where they've been hiding away for the last few years. And they're really astounded when
when they see this woman. Yeah, this hard-boiled woman of action. Is this the same Lee Miller who was kind of, you know, looking so stylish and getting up to all kinds of amusing... But equally, Lee Miller, when she meets some of her friends, finds them utterly changed as well. So we mentioned Solange, the...
the aristocrat, you know, the aristocratic epicenter of Parisian life. Yeah. And she had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 because her husband, the son of the eighth Duke of Nye had been in the resistance and there'd been an anonymous denunciation. Yeah. And so he got sent off to Belson where he died just a few days before the, uh, before its liberation.
And she was in prison a good long time. And Leigh Miller found her, she said, you know, she'd been terribly changed. Although she does, I mean, she goes back and then works in Vogue after the war and becomes a luminary of the Trente Glorieuses and all that. Well, again, I mean, it's a good example of these people whose lives maybe seem so pampered and so luxurious. They are embodiments of wider social kind of political changes that are affecting millions of people. Mm-hmm.
Anyway, she's there in Paris. And actually, the sad thing is that she'd always loved Paris and thought it was brilliant and all that stuff. But actually now, especially after Sam Marley, she actually finds it too tame. She's now addicted to the adrenaline rush.
of, you know, combat and the horror and all that kind of thing. And this is something that if you've ever read memoirs and war correspondence, they will say how at first they're horrified and they find it so shocking, but it becomes a kind of compulsive thing. Not for me. Not for you. Never again. Right. I like how you're bracketing yourself there.
Give me the impression you had a little flirtation with a life as a war correspondent. Well, kind of. I mean, going into the Islamic State heartlands when they're all hanging and rushing around capturing Westerners and chopping off their heads. I just thought, no, I'm too cowardly for this. He came back and did a podcast with me instead. That says it all, doesn't it? That's true courage. So she joins this, basically signs up to go along as an embedded photographer of the US Army with this friend of hers, another photographer, a very good photographer called Dave Sherman.
And all through kind of late 1944, 1945, they are moving through. For somebody from, you know, high society New York,
I mean, this is an apocalyptic scene. The roads choked the refugees, villages bombed out, bodies everywhere. It's pouring with rain. There's mud. Constant fighting. But the worst is yet to come, isn't it? Yeah. Constant fighting. And she is loving it in a way. I mean, that's a weird thing to say because obviously it's horrible. And she says she comments on the horror. But she feels the purpose, I suppose. Yeah. And if you read her writing,
I think her prose captures this kind of weird, I don't know whether sensuousness is the right word, the sensuousness of the horror of war. She talks about the colours and the sound and all that stuff. But the kind of camera she now has, she can take photographs very rapidly in a way that technologically hadn't been possible before. And so in that sense, she must feel that she is in a position to bring home to people away from the front the
what it looks like in a way that simply hadn't been possible before ever in history. Yeah, I think that's true. She has two cameras. So she's taking with two shots all the time.
because she has 12 shots on a roll and she never wants to miss anything. So she's taking loads and loads of photographs. And I agree, the photographs are capturing the horror of war in a way that even arguably in the First World War, you know, it'd been very, very difficult to do. Certainly in even the very first kind of modern wars, the Crimean War, the US Civil War, something. It'd been almost impossible to do. And even the way she writes,
There's a visual quality to it. I'll never see acid yellow and gray again, like where shells burst in his snow without seeing also the pale quivering faces of the replacements gray and yellow with apprehension, their fumbling hands and furtive short-sighted glances at the fields they must cross. And the way she writes about the kind of the pitted cratered battlefield and stuff, it is,
You know, the training in photography and surrealist art has kind of prepared her for all that in a weird way. And so, Dominic, we come now to probably, I mean, the greatest horror that she will see and the photographs for which perhaps she's most famous. Yeah. Which is the photos that she takes in Dachau. Yeah. And there is a sense with that, isn't there, that the horror is almost too great for her
pros to cope with. Yeah. Therefore the role of photography becomes, I mean, seismically important. I think it's massively important because of course documenting the reality of what the Germans had done than what the Nazis had done was so important in the denazification process and
And the idea that you have to show people the reality and merely describing it is not enough. You have to show, not tell. And you need proof, don't you? Yeah, you need proof, exactly. Because people won't believe what they're being told otherwise. Exactly. And remember, Dachau is not a Holocaust extermination camp. Dachau is a concentration camp, one of the first set up after the beginning of the Third Reich.
It's outside Munich, so it's in the kind of Nazi heartland. It was liberated on the 29th of April 1945. She and Dave Sherman, her friend and colleague,
They're in the first group of press men who are allowed into the camp and the place is littered with bodies. So there were 39 railway cars full of dead bodies. Those people who are still alive in the camp are living in unimaginable squalor, riddled with cholera and typhus and utterly emaciated. I mean, it's a vision of, to say a vision of hell is such a cliche, it doesn't do it justice.
Only the photographs do it justice, actually. And a lot of the photographers are physically sick. They struggle to even take the photos. She does it and she sends this telegram with the photos back to Vogue. I mean, the fact that they're being sent to Vogue to Audrey Withers, isn't it, in London? Yeah. Andrea Risborough, I think, in the film, isn't it? You were saying? Yeah. The fact that it's in Vogue makes it all the more...
incongruous and horrific. And she says, I implore you to believe this is true because obviously she knows people won't believe it. Anyway, they've been to Dachau. And as I said, it's just outside Munich. She and Lee go into Munich.
And they basically find a place, you know, there are soldiers everywhere, US Army, whatever, lots of people pouring into the city. They find a billet in one of these apartments, loads of apartments being taken over. And it's at Prince Regent Square, number 27. And as her son's biography says, it seems like a very respectable place. It looks like a merchant or a retired clergyman lives there.
And when they get in, they see that on the silver, it's all embossed with this monogram, A-H, and there's swastikas everywhere.
And it is Adolf Hitler's old apartment, which he had maintained in Munich while he was off in Berlin and the Wolfslayer and all this. This is where he'd been hanging out when he was meeting up with Unity Mitford in the cafes and things. Right. Yes. Oh, my word. I can't believe you've shoehorned Unity Mitford. That is textbook Holland. Now, this is the image that lots of people have seen. She gets into the bath and has a bath. And the reason she has a bath is not because it's Hitler's bath. It's
It's because she's covered with mud. The mud of Dachau. The mud of Dachau. Yeah, you're right. And Dave takes a photograph of her with her boots in front of the bath. And she's looking out of the bath. And of course, this is the photo you'll often see now when you Google Lee Miller, because people are struck by the incongruity of this pioneering female photographer in Hitler's bath. I mean, it's the one thing I think that everyone will know about her. Maybe even more than the Dachau photographs. But the interesting thing is that wasn't the photograph that really caught people's attention at all.
At the time. Was it not? No. So at the time, that photograph is not a great sensation and people don't all know about it. At the time, the photograph that goes viral, as it were, is a shot they set up
which is they get a GI and they get him to lie on Hitler's old bed reading Mein Kampf with the telephone in one hand. And Dave took it and it was in Life magazine and it was a huge, huge sensation. When did the Hitler bath one become as famous as it has become? I think it didn't become famous until Lee Miller became famous. And Lee Miller didn't become famous...
until her son published this biography in the 1980s. Because as we will see, actually, if we'd done this podcast in the 1970s or 60s, nobody would have really heard of it. She was forgotten, which is an interesting story in and of itself.
So they go to Ava Brown's apartment and Lee has a nap on Ava Brown's bed. They then go out to the Berghof, the Eagle's Nest, Hitler's kind of mountain retreat. And it's being destroyed. It's razed to the ground by the US Army. And there's a fair amount of looting. Understandably, people are taking souvenirs. So Dave takes the complete works of Shakespeare in translation with Hitler's book plate, which
So Hitler's copy of the complete. Well, he's Jewish, isn't he? So, you know, it's all the more personal for him. And Lee took Hitler's drinks tray, which she kept. And presumably the family still have Hitler's silver. Well, if you see the film, it features. Well, that's great. So the war ends just a few days after that. And her son in his biography says this was the great anticlimax of Lee's life.
Because after that point, she has lost that wonderful, precious, but also horrifying sense of purpose that she had for that brief moment.
period of time she still is doing stuff for vogue and whatnot this is a good example of how what anti-climax it was the next assignment they gave her they said go to denmark and um you know take photographs showing how everything's going back to normal in denmark now the war is over of course intrinsically that's not the same is it it's such a boring story yeah you know
Danish people are buying shoes again or whatever. I mean, it's not exciting. And meanwhile, Dominic, what about Roland? Because we mentioned that he actually has a very interesting war because he's a conscientious objector. So obviously he's not in the army, but he using his mastery of the visual arts and
He becomes senior lecturer at the Camouflage Development and Training Centre at Farnham Castle in Surrey. Yeah. And he has this colour photograph of Lee Miller kind of painted in camouflage and kind of uses this as illustration of what you can do to disguise things. Because she's naked in the photograph. Yeah. And she's covered with this camouflage net and he shows it to his students and he says...
If I can hide my friend Lee's charms with camouflage, then you can hide anything. Of course. So they're not married at this point? No, they're not married. They're just good friends. She's married to Mr. Aziz still. Of course, with his air conditioning. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, God knows what's been going on with him. So before she goes back to Hampstead, to North London, you can see she's trying to rekindle the spirit of adventure. If you think of that sort of third man experience,
you know, Vienna. Yeah. Bombed out, battered, ravaged. Yeah. And also, I suppose the Iron Curtain is starting to come down over Europe. All that. So she goes to Vienna, she goes to Budapest and she actually photographs the execution of the kind of fascist collaborationist prime minister. Yeah.
She goes on into Romania. There, Tom, she is massaged by a dancing bear. Really? How did that happen? She has a very bad back because she's been sleeping on the ground, traveling with the soldiers. And she meets somebody in Romania and they say, well, you've got a bad back. There's only one cure for a bad back and that's to be massaged by a dancing bear. And she actually finds that...
The Romanian government had tried to outlaw dancing bears because they said it was a symbol of backwardness. What, so retrain them as massage therapists? No. No, the massage was always part of the dancing bear repertoire. Oh, I see. Anyway, she finds this village and there's this bloke who's a Romani guy and he's got a dancing bear. And she gets the bear to massage her.
And she wrote afterwards, the bear knew her business. She walked up and down my back on all fours as gently as if on eggs. And there's music playing. So the bloke's obviously playing some like violin or something. As the music started, she raised up on her high legs and shuffled up and down my back. It was crushing and exhilarating. She said it was brilliant. It fixed her back.
So if you've ever got a bad back, Tom. Right. Remember this. Get hold of a bear. Yeah. Have you ever seen a dancing bear? No, I've never seen a dancing bear. I hobnobbed with a dancing bear at the Kaprischnitz Folk Festival in Bulgaria. Did you? When I was backpacking. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is quite a theme that we could perhaps do an episode on is dancing bears in the Second World War. Because, of course, there's a very famous Polish bear.
who gets rescued. Oh, it's a Voitek. Voitek, who ended up having swims in the River Tweed directly below my Scottish estate. Wow. So he's very big in our neighbourhood. See, even if we've done monkeys and dogs. Yeah, we should do bears. Bears would be a great subject. Anyway, Dominic, we're going off piste. Yeah. Basically, she's rushing around. She's trying to get her adrenaline kick. Yeah.
Yeah. Try and relive old glories, but she doesn't. The war is over. So how does she end up married to Roland Penrose? Because she does, doesn't she? That's, I mean, they end up married and they live and die as a couple. She effectively has a breakdown in Bucharest. She gets all the way to Bucharest and she has a breakdown. She can't keep writing. She's run out of money. She's actually run out of options. She's gone almost, as it were, to the end of the line in an attempt to try and recapture this spirit of excitement. Yeah.
And Dave, her old pal, says, you know, you've been ignoring Roland's letters. I think you should just go back to him now. And that's actually the one thing that she doesn't want to do is to settle down. She's never settled down all her life. I mean, the whole point of her is that she's this kind of free spirit. But she has no other option. So she goes back to Hampstead. Roland, who I have to say comes out of this incredibly well. She's been ignoring all his letters and stuff. But she says, I'm back now.
And he says, great. Well, you know, welcome home. They have a son, Anthony. They get married. Roland, it's all brilliant for him. He's been a tremendous hit with his camouflage in the war. Yeah. He fans the Institute for Contemporary Art. He does loads of stuff for the British Council. He becomes a big star of the arts world. He ends up getting knighted. So, yeah.
It's onwards and upwards for him. And some people may well say, this is the classic story. The man succeeds and the woman, you know, unbelievably talented in her own way is just forgotten, which is exactly what happens because she's very, she's empty. She's depressed. It's like,
It's such a classic war correspondent story. And they end up in a farm in Sussex. That's right. Full of Picasso and Hitler's drinks tray. But Picasso is kind of coming over, isn't he? Yeah. All her old surrealist and artist friends from Paris are always coming over to this farmhouse in Sussex. And she's kind of rustling them up. Weird kind of deep fried marshmallows or something like that. Yeah. So here's the interesting thing. She was a terrific photographer. And in the 1940s,
Her photographs had been sensations across the world and had been some of the defining images of the Second World War. But by the 1950s or 1960s, that is completely forgotten. And not least because she herself almost...
willfully tries to put it all behind her and to say it happened to somebody else who's long gone and all this kind of thing. So yes, she's doing all this cooking and she's, you know, basically almost like a kind of house, I mean a housewife. That's what she is. But she's also, she's drinking very heavily. Yeah, drinking very heavily. Piling on the pounds. Yeah, her son paints a very
unsparing and you've got it here I mean her face no longer had its fineness wrinkles and folds were proliferating and her eyes were becoming puffy her hair was getting thinner and lifeless the fat was piling on making her body look coarse and bulky to make matters worse the woman who had once been described as a snappy dresser was fast becoming a slob I mean that's
That's no way to write about your mother, is it? Tom, if your own heirs write that about you one day, you'd be very upset. You'd be very upset. Right. I think it's actually a very sad story. And the saddest element of it for me is that she puts all her cameras in the cupboard and
Never takes them out again. She refuses to take photographs again. I mean, she won't even take family photographs. So people will say to her, come on, you love photography. Photography is your thing. You're actually one of the world's great photographers. But you can see that. I am reminded of Sir Geoffrey Boycott, the great England opening batsman. Yeah.
who, when he retired from cricket, put away his bat and has never picked it up since. Right. Well, that's the parallel that will immediately have occurred. You know, if you've played against the greatest bowlers, you don't want to be arsing around on the village green. Yeah. And it may be the same kind of idea. But the interesting thing is that Geoffrey Boycott, Tom, was never...
one to downplay his own achievements. No, that's true. But Lee Miller, people go to her and they say, I understand you were a great photographer in the second world war. I would really love to see your negatives. I'd like to see the old pictures. And she says, they're all gone. They're all destroyed, which is not true. They're hidden away. And actually she dies of cancer in 1977, which is 70 years old. And at that point,
she is pretty much completely forgotten. I mean, her death is not a news story at all.
And then her son basically decides to rescue her from obscurity. And he finds 60,000 negatives in a box in the attic. And he's like, what? Oh, my God. And then he writes this biography in 1985 in which he says, you know, what a tremendous person she was, what an interesting life. Yeah. His book really rescues her and creates her, creates the Lee Miller. I mean, there is a small kind of Lee Miller industry now. Yeah.
And understandably so, because she's a terrific photographer. And it's a great story because she's a woman. I think that's a really important part of the story, that she is a pioneering woman in a conflict that is seen almost entirely as a men's war, isn't it? Yeah. Quite wrongly. But also the sense that her photographs give you as vivid a sense as you can have in visual form.
of the horrors of the concentration camps and the heart of the Nazi darkness. Yeah. I mean, when did the photographs you took of that start to be associated with her name? Golly, I would say not until the 80s. Right. So the same. Yeah, I think it's the same thing. I think you can't overestimate how much her name had disappeared. And she had colluded in that. You know, she...
wanted to lock all that part of her away. There's a kind of self-loathing there, I think, which is actually part of the tragedy, really. She's kind of the female Ernest Hemingway. That idea of the American who has been part of Parisian life before the war, who then rolls into liberated Paris and is making it into art.
I mean, she's doing that in the way that Ernest Hemingway, because he's Ernest Hemingway, is famous for doing. So it's all, as you say, it's kind of wonderful that her attempt to sabotage her own reputation has been redeemed. So she's got the film now. Lee. It is called Lee, yes. So that's the story of Lee Milliton. And we love a female protagonist on The Rest Is History, don't we? We absolutely do. Nothing more. Especially one with songs. Yeah.
Songs. Yeah. So we like photography. We like song. We're all about the arts. And the good news for everybody is if you've enjoyed this on Monday, we will be back with a story of possibly the only person in world history more glamorous.
than Lee Miller, arguably the most famous female protagonist of the whole 20th century, a woman whose life became synonymous with her country's political history. And that is the story of Eva Perón, Evita. And I have to say, it will feature...
I don't know what the word is. I'm trying to, I'm groping for the word. It will feature performances by our very own Tom Holland. So on that bombshell, that was the story of Lee Miller. Next week, Evita. Thank you all for listening and goodbye. Bye-bye.
