JFK Jr., George, & Me: A Memoir - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Since the 1990s, creative director Matt Berman has been collaborating with some of the most influential photographers in fashion and art to create some of the industry’s most enduring imagery in print. In 1995, Matt was hired by JFK Jr. to serve as the creative director of George magazine. He wor­ked side-by-side with John until his death in 1999 to craft his boss’s unique vision for a new kind of magazine. Matt then moved to Paris and continued to serve as creative director on several French magazine titles and advertising campaigns. Presently, Matt is a creative director living in Los Angeles.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

JFK Jr., George, & Me

1.

I HAVE ALL FOUR, YOU ONLY HAVE TWO!

I first met John in 1994. I had been working at Elle magazine on Madison Avenue for four years. The French publisher Hachette owned Elle, and I’d gotten the job by cold-calling the art department, trying to sound blasé but determined to work there. A girl with a singsong Parisian accent answered the phone, “Hello, may I help you?” She turned out to be the art director, Olivia Badrutt, and invited me to come in and meet everyone. I started working for her that day.

Elle was run by a group of French businessmen led by a dashing CEO named Daniel Filipacchi. Daniel would rush through the offices wearing a pair of solid gold Cartier glasses and leather-and-fabric loafers with the exact same fabric made into a matching tie. He looked like a movie producer, a French Bob Evans, and acted as if he had exactly two minutes to sign a seven-figure deal. Daniel had come to New York with two other Frenchmen, named Régis Pagniez and Jean-Louis Ginibre, to launch the French soft porn magazine Oui, which was giving Penthouse a run for its money. Oui showed full frontal nudity, but it was art directed with a lot of style, more like a European fashion magazine than typical porn mags.

The guys were about the same age as my dad, but Dad and his friends were nothing like this. While my dad’s wild weeknights were about playing racquetball with Bill Greenbaum and picking up Chinese takeout on his way home, these guys went out late at night to jazz clubs and hot spots like Raoul’s, Nell’s, and Le Zinc. They came to work in limousines, took three-hour lunches, and flew to Paris on the Concorde.

Régis, the publication director, knew everything about art and food and film. He had the most refined taste of anyone I’ve ever known. His daily uniform was a Brooks Brothers blue blazer, pale blue oxford shirt, gray flannel pants, and Hermès shoes. I liked the idea of having a uniform and invented a junior version of my own, wearing Levi’s, a navy agnès b. zip-up sweatshirt, and Paraboot shoes. Régis was a legendary art director. I stood beside him assisting in any way I could, pouring his Coke into a glass (he would never drink from the can) and Xeroxing a word in ten different sizes so he could select and place the perfectly proportioned headline next to the perfectly cropped photograph.

The editorial staff of Elle was largely from the upper crust of Parisian society. Everyone’s father or husband or brother was somebody well known in Paris. The fashion editor who dressed the models for the covers was the daughter of Jean Louis David, the Vidal Sassoon of France. The food editor was the wife of Jean-Pierre Cassel, the famous French movie star, and the mother of the actor Vincent Cassel, who as a teenager used to hang out at the office and help his mother on shoots. On the business side, there were people who had fathers, uncles, or friends in the French government. My laid-back Brazilian intern was well connected among the senior executives and wasn’t exactly worried about job security. She took thirty-five minutes to do a round-trip job at the copy machine, slowly sauntering down the hallway like she was strolling along Ipanema beach without a care in the world. There were several attractive women at the office who held less important positions, like editing the astrology page or the travel stories, and I always wondered what credentials they had. Later, I learned that some of them were former Air France stewardesses who, I imagined, had been hired at thirty thousand feet by the Hachette playboys.

I took note of what my French bosses ordered in restaurants, and I listened to what they said about how people should behave. I tried to understand what they considered chic, which was always understated. It was the industry’s best graduate program in style, and I was getting paid for it. When it was my turn to order at a restaurant, I followed the rules I’d learned and never ordered a beef carpaccio appetizer and a poached salmon entrée; meat and fish were never mixed. When white wine was poured, I’d hold my glass by the stem to be sure my hand didn’t warm the chilled Sancerre; when red was on the table, I held my glass however I liked.

The subject of food and weight triggered lots of reactions. I was at a staff lunch at Café Un Deux Trois on West Forty-fourth Street, and a waiter asked me, “Would you like fries with that?” I heard Sabine Cassel tsk-tsking from the other end of the table, “Oh là là, il est trop jeune pour être si gros.” (He is too young to be so fat.) I realized five pounds overweight meant fat in France. I once asked another editor how I could knock off a few pounds and she said, “Matt, have you seen pictures of those people in Auschwitz?” I nodded, acting cool, though I was horrified at where she was headed with this. “Did they look fat, Matt?” I shook my head from side to side. “Do you know why? Because they didn’t eat.”

What mattered at Elle was beauty, and there was plenty to learn about that. I was standing next to Régis looking at the December 1988 cover of supermodel Yasmin Parvaneh (later Le Bon). It was a photo of her head and neck, the background blurred. She wore a black turtleneck, small gold hoop earrings, with her hair pulled back in a tight bun. “It’s so boring,” I said. Régis replied, “Matt, this cover is good, because this girl is the perfect age.” I was learning a new language. I couldn’t speak it yet, but I was starting to hear it.

Things at Elle were scrutinized in a way I hadn’t imagined. From the width of a typeface, to the length of a skirt, everything was judged. I once bought a chartreuse shirt to try to break out of my safe navy blue sweatshirt routine. Olivia shook her head from side to side and said, “Oh là là, Matt, you are too white to wear this color.” Seeing my crestfallen face, she said, “Well, maybe if you get a tan.” Régis added, “Or if you were black.” I wore navy the next day.

Elle didn’t look like anything else on the newsstand, with its crisp Swiss design and in-your-face photos. It had a bold point of view in its photography, as well as in its styling, mixing clothes in a way Americans weren’t used to. We did profiles on Régis’s fashion designer friends Azzedine Alaïa, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Claude Montana. They would come into the office to drink red wine, admire our postcard view of midtown, and watch us lay out the magazine.

Years later, while I was living in Paris, I sat next to Claude Montana at a café, Le Nemours, at Palais-Royal. There was no mistaking him, with his fried and dyed orange hair, bright blue quilted leather bolero jacket, skintight red leather pants, and motorcycle boots. He was by himself, eating a parfait glass full of fromage blanc and sipping white wine. Seeing him, I was transported back to 1988 faster than hearing George Michael’s Faith. I took a gulp of wine for courage and leaned toward him, reminding him who I was. He was a little tipsy, but he was kind to me and chatted for half an hour about his childhood with his strict father, his rise to fashion superstardom, and his fall from grace. It was sad to see him there, all alone, dressed in his outfit, and it made me miss the madness of the ’80s, when there were people like him to inspire us.

Along with fashion, we did profiles on Régis’s artist friends Red Grooms, César Baldaccini, and David Hockney, as well as layout interviews with stars...