Excerpt From:

How Could This Happen to Annie Liebowitz?

http://nymag.com/fashion/09/fall/58346/

From her earliest days at Rolling Stone, Leibovitz demonstrated a near-crippling fear of not coming back with the shot. Lloyd Ziff, a former Rolling Stone designer, remembers Leibovitz being sent out to get a simple image of the world’s oldest Coke bottle kept in some little museum. “She took 300 to 500 Polaroids of it,” he says. “I don’t care who you are or what levels of energy or patience you have,” says Carter, “Annie will wear you out. She’ll beat you. Because she’ll have more patience than you do. And she will eventually get her shot.” Arnold Schwarzenegger still jokes about flying through a blizzard in a helicopter, then nearly freezing to death for the 1997 Vanity Fair cover image of him on skis on a mountain top in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Leibovitz once described her portraiture method as “get ’em somewhere where they’re bored shitless and there’s nothing to do except take pictures.” From there, she would work her subjects to the point of exhaustion, a state that could lead to revealing moments of vulnerability. For a 1981 Rolling Stone shoot, William Hurt sat in his parents’ house in New Jersey one afternoon. At seven o’clock the next morning, Leibovitz was still shooting the actor, who by now was wearing only a pair of briefs. Getting her subjects to disrobe became such a familiar gambit that by the time Leibovitz moved to Vanity Fair, she vowed to “shake this reputation as the girl who gets people to undress.” That never happened, of course. Some of her most talked-about shots at Vanity Fair were the naked-and-pregnant 1991 Demi Moore cover, the 2006 Hollywood Issue cover with Tom Ford hovering lasciviously over the nude Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson, and the 2008 shot of 15-year-old Miley Cyrus covered only in a sheet.

Her bloated work expenses were a chronic concern. Anthony Accardi, Leibovitz’s onetime printer, recalls that jobs were often rushed, like the time he had to show up to a lab at 3 a.m. to pick up film of Bill Clinton and have work prints ready by 7 a.m., a job so hurried that he billed Condé Nast three times his regular rate. Accardi was stunned by the number of work prints Leibovitz would order, and apparently so was Condé Nast. After Accardi printed 300 oversize work prints of a Roseanne Barr shoot and billed Vanity Fair some $15,000, he received a letter from Graydon Carter himself, informing him that after this job, he’d be paid for no more than 50 such prints. “Like I was going to tell Annie that?” Accardi says with a laugh. “She would’ve boxed my ears.”

Eccles remembers many mornings of walking into a hotel restaurant and seeing Leibovitz stewing because she wasn’t convinced that she’d yet come upon the ideal setup for a shot. “She could never quite relax, because she was afraid that there was an even better idea,” Eccles says. “The anxiousness about whether a photograph was going to be good enough was hard to be around. It seemed like a difficult way to live.”

In 2007, Leibovitz agreed to take Tina Brown’s portrait for her Princess Diana biography. “I thought she would just take a snap at my home,” Brown says. Leibovitz insisted that the shoot be on the beach near Brown’s summer home in Quogue, even though it was March and freezing. Leibovitz showed up in a van with a stylist and assistant. A second car stuffed full of clothes soon arrived. A wind machine would eventually be engaged. This was all on Leibovitz’s dime; she refused to charge Brown a cent. Unsatisfied with the day’s work, Leibovitz suggested that they try again the next day. “We’re through!” Brown told her, appreciative but worn out. “She’s a massive perfectionist,” Brown says, “and absolutely doesn’t care about the impact on her own bottom line.”