Avedon secret ‘affair’

A NEW book on Richard Avedon claims that the iconic photographer carried on a “decadelong secret affair with director Mike Nichols,” we hear. The two have only been reported as great friends and collaborators. The tome “Avedon: Something Personal” — by Avdeon’s former business partner Norma Stevens and writer Steven M. L. Aronson, out Nov. 21 — is being described as “part-memoir, part-biography” that “exposes the twice-married Avedon’s hidden love life.” The book is also billed as including reminiscences on Avedon by Nichols himself as well as Calvin Klein, Claude Picasso, Brooke Shields, David Remnick, Twyla Tharp, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Bruce Weber, Cindy Crawford, Donatella Versace, Jann Wenner and Isabella Rossellini.

We hear that the explosive book from Spiegel & Grau has been kept completely under wraps so far, but that copies will float around a private launch party hosted by Barbara Tober at the Museum of Arts and Design on Wednesday, “first come, first grabbed.”

A source adds that the book includes Avedon’s private thoughts on celebrity subjects and colleagues, including Anna Wintour (“a very frosty concoction”), model Lauren Hutton (“wackadoodle”), socialite Marella Agnelli (“looked like an ostrich, a giraffe”) and photographer Weber in his “goddamn bandanna.” The book also describes how Jackie Kennedy sued Avedon in the mid-1980s for using a Jackie lookalike in a Dior ad, but that he later turned her down flat when she asked the photographer to use a couple of photos in a book.

Nichols was married to four women, including Diane Sawyer from 1988 till his 2014 death. Avedon died in 2004. He was outed as bisexual in another tome, “Focus: The Secret, Sexy, Sometimes Sordid World of Fashion Photographers,” last year. The Avedon Foundation didn’t get back to us. Nichols’ former rep did not comment.