“Roving Eye” is a psychosexual study of the life and work of American model and photographer Lee Miller. It begins piquantly with a description of an extraordinary photo of Miller lying under a camouflage net, wearing nothing but a clump of sod on her vagina. Thurman writes,
On my way to the London preview, I stopped to ponder a startling image of Miller in a show of military and couture camouflage at the Imperial War Museum. The French were the first, in 1915, to experiment with “disruptive patterns” of light, shade, and color hand-painted on uniforms and artillery—a technique indebted to Cubism. In 1940, the rich and eccentric British Surrealist Roland Penrose decided that he could best contribute to his country’s defense by recruiting artists for a camouflage unit, and lecturing on their research to the Home Guard. The unit had been testing an ointment developed to hide skin from a rifle scope, or at least to disguise it, and on a summer day, in a friend’s garden, Penrose asked Miller, his mistress (they married a few years later, to legitimatize their only child, Antony), to play the guinea pig.
Miller was in her mid-thirties. She had been covering the blitz for British Vogue, and, after the Normandy invasion, she would help to document the liberation of Europe as one of an élite company of women (Margaret Bourke-White, Marguerite Higgins, Mary Welsh, Helen Kirkpatrick, and Martha Gelhorn, among others) accredited as war correspondents. That afternoon, she gamely stripped for the assembled house party, smeared the dull, greenish paste over her body, and stretched out on the lawn under a caul of camouflage netting. In the course of the demonstration, her groin was covered by a clump of sod bristling with matted weeds—a trompe-l’oeil pubis—and one of her nipples snagged in the net. As a finishing touch, the severed heads of two blood-red lilies were placed between her breasts like a funerary offering. The couple’s friend (and partner in a ménage à trois) the American photojournalist Dave Scherman captured the scene, and Penrose used the image in slide shows—no doubt to great effect with the guardsmen.
Gamely stripped for the assembled house party ... stretched out on the lawn under a caul of camouflage netting ... her groin covered by a clump of sod bristling with matted weeds ... trompe-l’oeil pubis ... one of her nipples snagged in the net – Thurman, you have my attention.
Who is this ravishing, uninhibited, naked poser? Thurman tells us. She explores Miller’s childhood (“The earliest known nude study of Lee Miller, who was christened Elizabeth, was made by her father, Theodore, an engineer whose hobby was photography”). She says of Miller’s parents, “They kept up appearances, but something in the household was seriously peculiar.” In a quintessential Thurman move, she uncovers and probes “a painful secret”: “At the age of seven, Elizabeth [Miller] had been raped, ostensibly by a family friend (all attempts to verify his identity, Penrose told me, ‘have drawn a blank’), and infected with gonorrhea.”
Analyzing Miller’s life, Thurman turns the camouflage of the Penrose/Scherman photo into brilliant metaphor. She writes,
Miller’s story suggests that beauty can also be a form of camouflage, one that successfully deceives the beholder without offering much protection to the wearer. Her art was always improvised on the run, escaping from or to a man or a place, and she described her life as “a water soaked jig-saw puzzle, drunken bits that don’t match in shape or design.” The memory of a trauma is often fractured in the same fashion by that most devious of camouflagers the unconscious.
Miller went on to apprentice with Man Ray in Paris. After three stormy years with him, she returned to New York, where she modeled for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vanity Fair. She became, Thurman says, “one of the most sought-after commercial photographers in New York.” She married Aziz Eloui Bey, an Egyptian railroad magnate. “But life in Egypt was also much like her childhood: charmed on the surface, roiling beneath.” In 1937, age thirty, she escaped Eloui and returned to Paris, where she met Penrose. She posed for Picasso. In 1942, she became a war photographer for Vogue. Thurman describes her pictures:
With an eye for the macabre visual ironies scattered by the bombs like promotional flyers for Surrealism, she photographed a ruined chapel, bricks cascading from its portico like worshippers after the service; a smashed typewriter (“Remington Silent”) lying in the gutter; an egg-shaped barrage balloon nesting in a London park behind a pair of geese that are strutting as if they had just laid it; and two air-raid wardens—nubile vestals—masked totemically by their eye-shields.
Perhaps most famously, Miller posed naked in Hitler’s bathtub. Thurman reports the circumstances:
Dachau was liberated on April 29, 1945. The next morning, Miller and Scherman were among the first journalists to document a scene of depravity that sickened combat veterans. Numbly, she did her work. Later that afternoon, they reached Munich, and “wangled a billet,” Penrose writes, in Hitler’s private apartment, on the Prinzregentenplatz—the command post for the 45th Infantry Division. Scherman took a picture of his lover and comrade nude in the Führer’s bathtub. For Scherman, it was a great journalistic coup, and it brought him fame. It brought the model fame, too, though not of the kind that her war journalism deserved. That sensational moment of callous clowning after an ordeal is the image of Lee Miller that is, perhaps, best remembered.
My favorite passage in “Roving Eye” is the final paragraph. Thurman describes Picasso’s portrait of Miller:
What the artist saw was a golden face with green hair and a pert profile; an inverted eyeball leaking a tear and caged by red lids; a blue earlobe with a corkscrew earring; a clenched fist; teeth bared in a smile or a grimace; bulging shoulders—white globes with a brown crust, each bigger than the head—which might be the breasts, displaced, or a bursting heart. But the black cavity of her body has the jagged shape of the torn screen from her “Portrait of Space,” with a void beyond it.
Thurman’s fascination with Miller shows in the vividness of her descriptions. “Roving Eye” is an unforgettable portrait of an entrancing woman.
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