In Horst P. Horst’s Mainbocher Corset, which appeared in the pages of Vogue in 1939—and is sure to be the centerpiece of “Horst: Photographer of Style,” opening at the V&A in London this week—a woman’s back, bare but for a laced garment, is stark against a backdrop of white. Her arms are raised, her head tilted to the right. It is a classic image, and for several years of my life, I was convinced that it was a photograph of my grandmother. To me this made perfect sense: She was, in my childish opinion, the most exotic and exciting woman in the world—and Horst was one of her closest friends. Their houses in Oyster Bay on Long Island were less than a mile apart and the pair of them, along with Horst’s partner, Valentine “Nicholas” Lawford, a retired British diplomat, were constant companions, having lunches and dinners together, talking late into the night.
Ammah (as my younger sister and I called her) was a widow in her sixties during this time, living alone in a white brick house overlooking the water. I adored visiting her; I loved her laughter, her unpredictability. She was an artist with strong opinions about art: A piece isn’t any good, she always said, “if once you’ve seen it once, you’ve seen it.” If I misbehaved, she was delighted. “You little devil!” she’d say from the driver’s seat of her tiny red Omni, wearing her trademark hairnet, pink lipstick, and a column of rings—diamond, ruby, emerald, and sapphire—around her fourth finger.
Her husband, my grandfather, died when I was two, and I only pretended that I remembered him—in part to impress my sister, and in part to feel closer to Ammah, who told us bedtime stories of the years she spent with him in Rio. Before landing there, they’d traveled the world together. He’d been an inventor and a pilot for Pan Am, she said. His bedroom was adjacent to my grandmother’s, but I never dared enter; the door was closed, and when I once caught a glimpse inside, the lights were off. His books remained on the shelves, and the orchids that he’d tended for years still hung in rows inside the greenhouse across the drive. When my sister and I followed Ammah in there to water, the air felt thick and exotic, with an earthy smell that registered on the tongue.
Weekends spent with Ammah in Oyster Bay were sacred, but I was nervous the Sunday she arranged for the friend we called “Horse” to take a photograph of my sister and me. I remember hanging back in the doorway as we were introduced. “Nicholas,” the first man said. He was handsome and charming, kneeling down to take our hands in his own. “Horse,” grunted the other man, who nodded at us once, his eyes dark beneath bushy white eyebrows.
Ammah had bought us matching dresses for the occasion: they were white, with a shiny ribbon woven through the bodice and a pink bow marking an empire waist. I remember the columns of the slate terrace where the portrait was to take place, a maze of rhododendrons sloping toward the water under blinding sunlight. I remember how thirsty I was, and how itchy from chlorine (we’d been swimming in a neighbor’s pool just before). Ammah left us alone with Horst who instructed us to sit on a low table; daunted, we complied, and allowed ourselves to be arranged. Though I don’t recall the specific directives, the photograph is clearly staged: the hem of my dress is pulled slightly up my thigh, and my sister holds a rose in her lap. Horst pressed the shutter on his camera almost perfunctorily, then rearranged us for another picture. In all of them I look more anxious than happy, and I felt distinct relief when Ammah came sailing through the door with tall glasses of lemonade in hand, sunlight glinting in the stones of her rings.
It was later, as I waited for my sister before we left to go, that I found my eye drawn to the Mainbocher Corset—one of several photographs hanging on the wall. Perhaps it was the perfect turn of the model’s upswept hair that made me think of Ammah. Perhaps it was the curved shape of her back, which looked like the one I’d help cover with sunscreen in summers. Perhaps it was the fact that the model was so completely at home in the image—so completely herself and intimidated—that I decided it couldn’t be anyone but Ammah. Whatever the reason, the notion hardened into truth, and I felt my earlier discomfort transform into a certain pride; I wondered if someday my sister and I would hang on Horst’s wall too.
Ammah died three years later. It was sudden: She went into the hospital with a bad back, and in the space of five weeks she was gone. The doctors said she had meningitis and pyoderma gangrenosum, but neither should have been fatal. My father’s diagnosis was a broken heart. “She was never the same after your grandfather died,” he told us. “I think you girls were what kept her alive. You and Nicholas and Horst.” When I pursued this theory further with my mother, she agreed. My grandfather’s death, from a series of strokes, had crippled Ammah. In the years that followed, she’d stopped painting, and had started to drink and smoke more that she should have. Was that true? I remembered her only as full of laughter and life, unpredictable and infinitely fun—even as my parents said that a large part of her had been missing in those years.
I did remember that she drank—vodka and milk on ice—and that she smoked Marlboros. The ashtray in her Omni was a garden of half-smoked cigarettes. And I remembered once accompanying her to lay a flower on my grandfather’s grave; she had been uncharacteristically quiet. I wondered what other signs of her unhappiness I’d missed.
Then, a year later, another revelation: I encountered the photograph I’d so admired at Horst’s house in a different context. I was at a friend’s and the music video for Madonna’s “Vogue” came on MTV. I was struck by the familiarity of Madonna’s costume and setting in a series of frames toward the video’s end: her back laced in a corset, the background plain and white. It was as if my grandmother had been set in motion. I was eleven at the time, still too young to know exactly what I was looking at—a music video appropriating images by a famous Vogue photographer named Horst—but just old enough to understand that if this image was famous enough to be on MTV, my assumptions about it had to be wildly mistaken.
In other words, Ammah wasn’t the model in the photograph. Watching Madonna dance across the television screen, I felt foolish for ever thinking she had been. And then I had to ward off an even harder and sadder feeling: a doubling of disappointment I’d felt talking to my parents after Ammah’s death.
I’d loved my grandmother, but I hadn’t really known her. Could I have? I’d only been a girl, dazzled by her merry laughter, her worldly friends, the way she transformed a room. Perhaps loving her was all that was required. “My dear,” she’d liked to say, fixing me with her amused gaze, “if you only have seventy-five percent, celebrate!”
When I got home that afternoon, I wanted to tell my mother what I’d believed about the photo on Horst’s wall, but I decided not to. I would keep that private version of Ammah to myself. She could be the model in Mainbocher Corset a little longer.
“Horst: Photographer of Style” will be on view at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London from September 6, 2014, to January 4, 2015; vam.ac.uk.