IT'S NO WONDER TERRY'S A PERV
One of the world’s most notorious fotogs, Terry Richardson was raised by a drug-crazed, sex-obessed dad, according to new book
THERE are few more-controversial figures in fashion than Terry Richardson — a photographer as associated with the words “high fashion” as he is with “predator” and “pervert.” First given a camera by his mother, actress Norma Kessler, in 1982, Richardson, now 50, has shot often-hypersexualized advertising campaigns for Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford and Yves Saint Laurent, among others. But, since 2010, several models have stepped forward to accuse him of inappropriate sexual behavior, coercion and sexual assault.
As this excerpt from the new book by Michael Gross — “Focus: The Secret, Sexy, Sometimes Sordid World of Fashion Photographers” — suggests, perhaps Terry’s no-boundaries behavior shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, given his tumultuous childhood and the influence of his wildman dad, Bob Richardson, a successful fashion photographer in the 1960s and early ’70s.
‘Inever wanted a career,” Bob Richardson said. “My trouble was, I wanted to be great, a legend, not famous. Anyone can become famous.”
Judgemental, ambitious, competitive and hypercritical, Bob wasn’t easy to deal with. “I never did anything more than try to take beautiful pictures, but it was my way or no way,” he said.
He ruined clothes by shooting them underwater off Acapulco, throwing editors off sets, giving them nervous breakdowns. “I’m told you’re a genius, but I don’t see it,” Charles Revson, owner of Revlon, told him.
“Get your eyes examined,” Bob snapped.
Bob’s ambition sent him reeling into drug addiction when a model introduced him to amphetamine-laced vitamin injections. She took him to see “Dr. Feelgood” Max Jacobson, a New York physician who administered amphetamines and other medications to the likes of John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland. The photographer recalled how Jacobson “taught me to mainline and gave me the works” — including prescriptions for hypodermic syringes.
After each injection, Bob would stay awake two or three days. For three years, Jacobson steadily increased the doses. “I was black-and-blue from my knuckles to my shoulder,” said Bob. “I worked myself into a state where, without speed, I wouldn’t have been able to work.”
Drugs also infiltrated his pictures. He’d photograph models smoking joints for Paris Vogue and Bazaar and [editors would] think it was cigarettes.
In the mid-’60s, just after he and his wife, Norma, had a son, Terry (born in 1965), Bob was hospitalized. Manic, he’d gone to Jacobson for a shot and instead had been given Thorazine [an antipsychotic]. He wrecked his own studio and ended up in a straitjacket and a padded cell in the posh Payne Whitney psychiatric hospital on the Upper East Side.
“He was the most difficult human being,” says Barbara Slifka, then a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar. They worked together until the day Richardson returned all the clothes Bazaar wanted him to shoot. “He hated everyone, he hated us, he hated the work,” says Slifka.
After a brief move to Paris, Bob and Norma moved with Terry, then age 4, to Greenwich Village, but their marriage was doomed when they started swinging — “going to parties and bringing people home,” Bob wrote.
Terry, who discovered his father after a Paris suicide try — Bob had slashed his wrists — and for years had “visions of him in a room, all bloody,” was aware of his parents’ experiments.
“My dad definitely was sleeping with models and . . . my mom had lovers,” Terry has said. “Group sex. I remember my dad saying that after he tried to kill himself and [while] he was in the hospital, my mom was f--king his assistant.”
IN 1970, Bob, who was 42, met the 18year-old Anjelica Huston, whose mother had recently been killed in a car crash. (Anjelica’s father, John, was the legendary director of “The African Queen” and “The Maltese Falcon,” and Anjelica went on to star in “The Addams Family,” “The Royal Tenenbaums” and many more movies.) When Bazaar assigned Bob to shoot the aspiring model, he said, “Anjelica walked through the door and it was love at first sight.” She doesn’t remember when they became lovers, but soon “he implied that his life with Norma was over and not as a result of me.” They smoked a joint in front of a mirror before they first made love. Bob moved out of his Greenwich Village penthouse, leaving Terry with Norma, and into a hotel, where Huston joined him. “My mom pleaded with him not to leave, but he did anyway,” Terry has said. “It’s not that she was staying alone at home.” He recalls Jimi Hendrix visiting shortly before the musician’s death in 1970 — “Yeah, he was hung like this! Huge!” — and “seeing my mom making out with Kris Kristofferson on the fire escape.” But Bob’s departure “destroyed” Norma. Bob was in the room when Anjelica heard that famed photographer Richard Avedon wanted to shoot her — and over Bob’s objections, she agreed. Then Vogue editor Diana Vreeland asked Avedon to take Anjelica to Ireland for a shoot. “The black mood went on for days,” Anjelica says of Bob’s reaction. “I had no idea he was schizophrenic . . . but I lived in terror of him.” Back in their New York hotel room after the trip, Anjelica left for a television appearance, and Bob tore up her clothes and threw her jewelry out the window. She decided she’d hurt his feelings; she didn’t know he terrorized everyone around him. “No one said, ‘Look, Bob is crazy.’ Bob said, ‘I’m not crazy, they’re the crazy ones.’ ”
Terry was 5 years old when his mother moved to Woodstock, NY. Bob and Anjelica would take the bus so he could see his son. Norma wanted to “be a hippie, grow out her armpit hair, get a job as a waitress in a health-food restaurant,” Terry said. He recalls the scene as “total excess. People having affairs, sleeping around, drinking and taking lots of drugs.” Within a year, Norma met a British singer named Jackie Lomax and married him.
Lomax and Terry’s mother would go out and leave him home alone. “No! Don’t leave me! No! No!” he remembers saying. “I would be f--king terrified. And this happened over and over again.”
In late 1971, Angelica and Bob moved to London. Terry recalled spending a summer there and waking up at noon to the sounds of them having sex. “And at night sometimes they’d leave me alone,” he continued, “and I’d be shaking and staring at shadows. I actually started s--tting my underwear.” Later, on a visit to Woodstock, Huston discussed that with his mother “right in front of me. Humiliated by two women. It was all pretty traumatic.”
In 1973, Huston got a call from her father, who flew to New York to meet Bob for the first time. John Huston invited his daughter and Bob on a fishing trip to Mexico. As Anjelica expected, the trip turned out badly. Bob flung a bottle of tequila at her. He harangued her all night before they flew to Los Angeles with her father and stepmother. At the luggage carousel, she informed Bob she wouldn’t be returning to New York with him. They never saw each other again.
BOB went back to the Gramercy Park Hotel and back to work and still spent summers with his young son, including a work trip to Haiti where 11year-old Terry ended up in a shower with a model “with these big breasts, and I remember having this really erotic experience.” But Bob’s demons were never far away. “He’d show up at 4 in the morning drunk, ranting and raving,” Terry recalled.
After the breakup with Huston, “It was getting almost impossible to work,” Bob later wrote of the ’70s. He tried suicide again — slashing his wrists — and was put back on Thorazine after his parents brought him home to recover. One night he stripped naked in the street and
started screaming. “It’s amazing no one stopped me,” he wrote. He couldn’t see through his viewfinder, couldn’t focus his Nikon.
Terry moved [with his mother] to Sausalito, Calif., to England, back to Woodstock, and then to a Hollywood apartment. He had not one but two gypsy families. His violent behavior escalated, and Norma started sending him to a psychiatrist twice a week. Stability wasn’t an option. Then, in 1975 when Terry was 9, he was waiting for her to pick him up after a shrink session when she was rearended on a freeway and ended up in a coma. Six months later, Norma came home in diapers with permanent brain damage. She would recover, but only partly, and it took a long time.
Meantime, Jackie Lomax lost his record deal, and the family went on welfare. Terry tried suicide by swallowing dozens of pills — it was his second attempt. His maternal grandmother took him in, but couldn’t control him. “He was running wild,” Bob recalled.
As for himself, Bob had stopped smoking pot, because drinking cheap wine was easier than dealing with dealers. Then, one summer, “[Terry] called from LA and told me he didn’t want to come,” Bob later wrote. “What was left of me died.”
Not long after that, walking down Fifth Avenue, broke and unable to look anyone in the eye, Bob “decided to flee. A one-way ticket to LA seemed the only answer.” He pawned his last valuable possessions, drank away the proceeds, and ended up homeless, living on the beaches of Santa Monica and Venice. He remained there for several years, panhandling to buy food, liquor and drugs.
“Not once did I think about photography,” he recalled. But after reading up on schizophrenia in the library and gaining a better understanding of his plight, he applied for unemployment and got jobs sorting and filing, and delivering flowers and packages.
Bob later moved to San Francisco and, in the early 1990s, joined Terry in New York, where he tried to reignite his photography career. At first, he stayed “with a hostile Terry,” he recalled. “One day he threw a metal chair at me, just missing my head.” But Bob and Terry began pitching themselves as a team, showing editors their work while a boombox played Nine Inch Nails. They completed a few magazine assignments, and Bob got an apartment on Hudson Street, though he couldn’t always pay the rent.
Bob wrote to Vogue and Bazaar and asked for work. “They ignored me,” he recalled. Vogue Italia’s Franca Sozzani and Fabien Baron gave him assignments and helped him win an ad campaign, but then, Bob claimed, took his pages away and gave them to photographers “who kiss [Sozzani’s] ass.” Bob started calling the blond Sozzani “Goldilocks on acid.” He was back, and he hadn’t changed much.
‘ Bob Richardson wrecked his own studio straitjacket.’ and ended up in a —“Focus” by Michael Gross
Bob Richardson died in New York in 2005, of apparently natural causes. A few years later, Terry helped publish a book that included what remained of Bob’s archives after he’d burned most of his work. In March 2016, Terry Richardson became a dad himself, as he and girlfriend Alexandra Bolotow, whom he once photographed fellating him while sitting in a trash can, welcomed twin boys Roman and Rex.
Copyright 2016 by Idee Fixe Ltd. From the forthcoming book “FOCUS: The Secret, Sexy, Sometimes Sordid World of Fashion Photographers” by Michael Gross, to be published by Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.