By all accounts, Lee Miller—the subject of an upcoming biopic starring Kate Winslet—was a remarkable woman. A renowned beauty, she was an accredited war photographer who covered the Second World War for Vogue, capturing in images, and words, the reality of combat. She was honest with her emotions, shared her rage, but also unexpected observations such as: “A company of soldiers was filing out of St. Malo, ready to go into action, grenades hanging on their lapels like Cartier clips, menacing bunches of death.” Where others saw troops, Miller saw people, and the good and bad in them.
In anticipation of Lee, the movie, and in celebration of Vogue’s October cover story, here is an abbreviated timeline of Lee Miller’s life.
Elizabeth Miller born in Poughkeepsie, New York, the second child, and only daughter, of Theordore Miller, an engineer and amateur photographer (who used his daughter as a model), and Florence (née MacDonald) Miller. A beautiful child with a seemingly idyllic upbringing, she was molested by a family acquaintance and contracted a STD in 1914.
Having enrolled and been expelled from several schools, the 18-year-old Miller was sent abroad to attend finishing school. She sailed on the SS Minnekahda# with—according to a 1974 article in Vogue—“two spinster chaperones, one an impoverished Polish countess, who her father had engaged to protect his innocent daughter in the month she was to spend in Paris before going off to school in Nice. …Somehow their first hotel turned out to be a maison de passe. ‘It took my chaperones five days to catch on,’ Lee told the magazine, ‘but I thought it was divine! I was either hanging out of the window looking at the clients come and go or watching the shoes being changed in the corridor with amazing frequency. Although I looked like an angel, I really was a fiend. In a short time I managed to have my chaperones recalled to America, and instead of going to school I began life. I worked in a theater in Montmartre and met all the artists in Paris.’ ” Miller enrolled at L’Ecole Madgyes pour la Technique du Theatre.
Having refused to return home, Miller is escorted back to the States by her father. Taking up residence on East 49th Street Miller studied at the Art Students League and trained as a dancer.
Miller enters Vogue’s orbit by accident. “She was wearing a Parisian dress when she inadvertently ‘stepped into the path of an oncoming car and was pulled back onto the sidewalk by a well-dressed stranger [Condé Nast], into whose arms she collapsed. She ridiculously babbled on in French, evidently in a state of shock,’” reports Susan Ronald, the publisher’s biographer. Nast suggested Miller might work at Vogue; then editor Edna Woolman Chase arranged for Miller to be drawn by the French artist Georges Lepape. She appears on the March 15, 1927 cover of the magazine, where her cloche-covered head and pearl-wrapped neck dominate the cityscape; Miller is presented as the epitome of the modern woman; powerfully beautiful, streamlined in the Deco fashion, and slightly androgynous. She also sat for pictures. “When I went back to America after a year or so, I worked as a model for Edward Steichen and all those old boys. I think Steichen took the first photograph of me,” Miller later said. “I did lots of modeling for Vogue, but I wanted to become a photographer myself.”
Returns to Paris, seeks out Man Ray. “When I met [him] in Paris, I asked him to take me on as a pupil. He said he never accepted pupils, but I guess he fell for me. We lived together for three years and I learned a lot—about photography,” Miller later told Vogue. Together they would develop the technique of solarization. “As the famous story goes,” reads a post on the Lee Miller Archives account, “whilst Lee was developing some work something, perhaps a mouse, made Lee jump, engaging her instinct to turn on the light at a vital stage. Knowing what she had done she quickly turned the light straight back off. The effect that resulted was a reversal of the tonality of the photograph—the dark areas became light and vice versa….” Miller continued modeling, both for Man Ray, who often photographed her nude (it’s said that her breasts inspired the design of a champagne glass), and for Vogue’s man in Paris, George Hoyningen-Huene, and his then assistant Horst P. Horst. Miller was producing work of her own.
Appears in Jean Cocteau’s surrealist film, Blood of a Poet. Travels to Stockholm with her father.
Travels to London for photography assignments and to model.
Shutters Paris studio and heads back to New York and opens one there. “Being photographed by Lee Miller became quite the thing to mention at cocktail party,” writes Antony Penrose, the photographer’s son, in his book, The Lives of Lee Miller.
In April, Man Ray exhibits at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. Time reported: “Also exhibited were views of assorted sections of his favorite model, Miss Lee Miller, known as ‘Lee-Girl’ to her intimates, widely celebrated as the possessor of the most beautiful navel in Paris. She too is a photographer, has taken many pictures of Man Ray.” Later in the year, the same gallery will devote wall space to Miller’s work, of which Vanity Fair’s Frank Crownshield wrote (as noted in The Lives of Lee Miller): “In her French environment she learned not to restrict herself to formal photography, but to see artistic possibilities in all sorts of subjects.”
Having been left by Miller, Man Ray revisited his 1923 work Object to be Destroyed—a photograph of an eye paperclipped to a time-keeping metronome—he reworks it, using a photograph of Miller’s eye. The following year, the artist would complete his painting of Miller’s floating lips, Observatory Time—The Lovers.
Miller marries Aziz Eloui Bey and honeymoons at Niagara Falls. “At a party I met a marvelous Egyptian; we decided to marry and went off to live in Cairo,” Miller told Vogue in 1974. “We were always off on expeditions into the desert, looking for new oases, for lost villages, for traces of unknown civilizations. Of course we never found anything.”
Travels alone to France. Meets Roland Penrose at a dress-up party in Paris. Picasso paints a portrait of Miller and she photographs the artist. (Penrose would later write a biography of Picasso.)
Miller leaves Bey; moves to London. War is declared on September 1, 1939. “Lee wasted little time in getting around to Vogue studios and offering her services as a photographer. To begin with she was given the cold shoulder. Her professional work had lapsed by five years and the studio…was well enough staffed,” writes Penrose.
Miller hired by Vogue.
Takes photographs for a book, Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire, with editor Ernestine Carter and newsman Ed Murrow.# (She’ll profile the latter for the August 1, 1944 issue of Vogue, writing: “Ed Murrow is literally tall, dark, and handsome. In a press comment on his winning of the Peabody Prize, he was also described as saturnine and elegant. Elegant, yes—he wears very good clothes with very good style, whether it’s a pinstripe lounge suit, army uniform, or the open necked shirt and tweed jacket I saw him broadcast in. Saturnine, no….”
Nast’s biographer states that Miller became “an accredited U.S. Army war correspondent for Conde Nast Publications” in December of this year. Lee would later say, “I became, I think, the first woman war correspondent. I was there as a photographer not as a writer; you know, the old cliché—one picture is worth a thousand words. I knew all the American war correspondents. There were men but no women in the European Theater of War and I wanted to do something so I invented the job. They asked me what the rules should be and I said, ‘Just treat me like one of the boys,’ which they did. That was long before Women’s Lib and I felt like a one-woman brigade.”
Vogue publishes Miller’s written and photographic account of an American Tent Hospital in France. “As we flew into sight of France I swallowed hard on what were trying to be tears, and remembered a movie actress kissing a handful of earth,” Miller wrote. “It was France. The trees were the same—with little pantaloons like eagles; and the walled farms, the austere Norman architecture.” Her prose is full of unexpected detail, and emotions ranging from rage to empathy. The caption to a photograph of a soldier barely recognizable for all his bandages read: “A bad burn case asked me to take his picture, as he wanted to see how funny he looked. It was pretty grim, and I didn’t focus well.”
She is Paris when it is freed. “I was with the first American troops in the liberation of Paris and the first thing I did was to go to see my old friend Picasso. Picasso always said I was the first American soldier he saw.”
Traveling to Saint Malo, which was supposed to be calm, she encountered combat. “Everywhere I went things seemed to happen, maybe because I have no sense of direction,” she related in 1974. Once, after I’d gone back to London to get all my stuff I was assigned to a tank-crafter to get back to France. The landing craft got a signal in mid-Channel to go to Saint Malo. I was supposed to be covering something quite peaceful, but when we got there, there was a terrible siege and battle. I got some terrifying photographs of the first jelly bombs. I was awfully scared, but I said to myself, ‘Nobody made you come here.’ ”
In January, Miller reports on the “Luxemburg Front” for Vogue, and in the following months files stories on the state of Brussels, a profile of the French writer Colette, and an essay on “G.I. Lingo in Europe.” That April she is infamously photographed by her close friend and collaborator, the war photographer David E. Sherman, in the bathtub at Berchtesgaden. Miller reports on Alsace and Germany in May, and in June Vogue publishes “ ‘Believe It’ ”, the photographer’s horrifying documentation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Penrose shares a snippet of a letter from Miller to British Vogue editor Audrey Withers on the Archives’ Instagram account: “I don’t take any pictures of these things usually as I know you don’t use them. Don’t think for that reason that every town and every area isn’t rich with them….I would be very proud of Vogue if it would run a picture of some of the ghastliness—I would like Vogue to be on the record as believing.”
Vogue published Miller’s story “Middle-Europe Album: Hungary” and a piece on cameras.
Married Penrose in 1947, and gave birth to their son, Anthony Penrose. They buy Farley Farm House, which becomes a mecca for artists. In a 2016 interview with The Guardian, Penrose states that Miller suffers from postpartum depression and struggled with alcohol, perhaps due to PTSD.
Having mostly given up photography, Miller became a chef. “I didn’t like the Cordon Bleu much. It wasn’t clean. A fish would fly out of the chef’s hand, it would land on the sawdust floor, and he would simply pick it up and slam it back into the pan. And the noise was terrifying. The pots must have been made of concrete. But I did learn to cook,” she told Vogue.
Food writer Ninette Lyon visits the Penroses at home for Vogue. “At the Penrose farm, Lee Miller Penrose does most of the cooking, mainly because she so dislikes country life that she finds the kitchen a heaven,” noted Lyon. “The Penroses live at the centre of the world they love—that of art and artists—in London and on a Sussex farm at Muddles Green, Chiddingly. Here Lee Penrose cooks, amusingly, inventively, for guests, in a large pleasant kitchen, surrounded by Picassos, by cookbooks from all over the world, and the newest kitchen gadgets.”
Roland Penrose is knighted, Miller becomes Lady Penrose.
Vogue publishes “How Famous People Cook: Lady Penrose and a related story, “The Most Unusual Recipes You’ve Ever Seen.”
“Cookbooks are my favorite bedtime reading,” Lee said in the accompanying interview. “Sometimes I consult as many as 50 books for one recipe before I throw them aside and go off on my own.”
Death of Lee Miller. Her son and his wife discover the artist’s work in an attic and begin archiving and documenting her life.
Antony Penrose publishes The Lives of Lee Miller.
Carolyn Burke’s biography, Lee Miller: A Life, is published.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art hosts “The Art of Lee Miller.” This is one of many solo and group exhibitions dedicated to Miller’s artistic output.
The Entertaining Freezer was meant to be the title of Miller’s unpublished cookbook, notes Penrose, who wrote the introduction to Ami Bouhassane’s book, Lee Miller: A Life with Food, Friends and Recipes.
Lee, a biopic starring Kate Winslet, premiers at the Toronto International Film Festival.