When Lee Met Dave

From the front lines to Hitler’s bathtub, Lee Miller and my father, David E. Scherman, made one of the great World War II photojournalistic duos

Air Mail Magazine, September 28, 2024 (Author’s note: I wrote a longer version of this piece several years ago, as part of an as-yet-unpublished family memoir. With the Kate Winslet movie “Lee” approaching, Air Mail magazine found out about my piece and wanted to peg it to the movie’s release. “Lee,” which was seven years in the making, stars Winslet in the title role: the model-turned-World War II photojournalist Lee Miller. Winslet’s co-star is Andy Samberg, who plays Miller’s photographic mentor and lover: my father, David E. Scherman, a lynchpin of Life magazine’s great photography staff. Lee has just opened in theatres worldwide. This is the story behind the movie).

Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub, 1945. Photograph by David Scherman.

One afternoon in the spring of 2003, while researching a biography of Andy Warhol, I interviewed the art director turned filmmaker Robert Benton. Affectionately recalling a friend from his Esquire years, a photographer’s stylist named Betsy Scherman, he paused.

“A relative of yours?”

Betsy was my cousin, I said.

Benton’s eyebrows went up.

“Who was your father?”

“His name was David E. Scherman.”

“The guy who had the affair with Lee Miller.”

“That’s right.” It would not have occurred to me to characterize my father’s early years in those terms.

“For years, I wanted to make a film about Lee Miller,” Benton said.

Three times Hollywood has set out to portray the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, as Elizabeth Miller of Poughkeepsie was known in the late 20s. The earlier projects, first with Nicole Kidman, then Cate Blanchett, fizzled, but Lee, starring and co-produced by Kate Winslet, will be released on September 27. The comic actor and Saturday Night Live alumnus Andy Samberg plays my father.

Kate Winslet as Miller in Lee.

“I looked like an angel, but I was a fiend inside,” Lee Miller once said. On her first visit to France, at 22, she ditched the chaperone her parents had saddled her with and ran wild in Paris.As ambitious as she was stunning, Lee apprenticed herself to the artist Man Ray, whose most celebrated painting is À l’Heure de l’Observatoire—Les Amoureux (Observatory Time—The Lovers), a giant pair of fluorescent-orange lips, Lee’s, against a mackerel sky. When Lee walked out on him, an agonized Man Ray scribbled, “Elizabeth Elizabeth Elizabeth Lee Elizabeth,” over and over, across an entire page of his notebook.

Lee returned to New York, quickly establishing herself as “THE photographer to be photographed by,” in the words of one society columnist. She opened the Lee Miller Studio, which she advertised as the American branch of “the Man Ray School of Photography,” to its namesake’s rage.

For the rest of the 30s, Lee shuttled between Paris and Manhattan, the toast of two continents—three, after she married an Egyptian aristocrat in 1934. For years, the gracious Aziz Eloui Bey endured Lee’s constant absences, in the summer of 1937, for instance, when she joined Picasso and his friends on the Côte d’Azur. The great painter, who became a lifelong friend, made six portraits of Lee that summer as Lee was beginning an on-and-off affair with the Englishman Roland Penrose, a wealthy, young Surrealist painter, from then on a major figure in Lee’s life.

When war broke out, Lee was in London. She talked her way into occasional photo assignments from Brogue, as British Vogue was known, until Vogue itself put her on staff, to photograph the war and send dispatches from the front.

Miller’s husband Roland Penrose, left, and Man Ray, with whom she had an affair, 1946.

On February 16, 1942, Dave Scherman, a Life photographer stationed in London, wrote his older brother, Bill, back in Westchester:

“Dear Will.... Hellzapoppin is sure a swell movie. I seen it oncet,”—a lowbrow usage favored by Dave’s idol, Ring Lardner—“and am seeing it right now with Lael and Steve and Lee Miller who is a dame who will soon live with us in our flat.”

At 25, Dave had already acquired a reputation as one of Life’s most gifted, hell-for-leather war photographers. His photographs of a camouflaged German warship, taken as his own ship was going down, led R.A.F. bombers straight to the Atlantis.

Dave was an innovator, too, if in a journalistically dubious way. If you muffed a picture, no problem; you faked or “re-framed” it, as Dave euphemistically put it. “You invent a good picture,” he liked to say, “and I was the pioneer of the faked, invented picture. During the war, I shot nothing but.”

Born and raised in upper Manhattan’s lower-middle-class, largely Jewish, Edgecombe Avenue neighborhood, Dave was an uneasy Dartmouth man (’36) when the Ivy League was purgatory, at best, for a Jew. Bill was a Big Greener, too, who, with Dave and their gals, regularly road-tripped down from campus to an idyllic cabin on Cape Cod, which Dave took to calling “Camp Sandycrotch.” Bill’s Aryan features allowed him to keep his ethnic identity well hidden; in later years, he was a Congregationalist deacon. Dave, whose Jewish beak was a dead giveaway, nursed a quiet, lingering resentment of the ease with which his brother could pass.

Dave spoke his own language, delivered sotto voce, gangster-style. “Wise Sayings,” he called the one-liners he tossed off, along the lines of “I was born on Coogan’s Bluff, and I’ve been living on bluff ever since.” Now and then, his hard-boiled terseness gave way to a Joycean flood. At loose ends in Paris, he wrote Bill, “I’m on my pratt, no identity cards, no food tickets, no international touring club, no garage, no wife, no moustache, no expensive shops, no quaint little bistros in that little allee behind the Eglise de St. Simon-et-Ste-Eustache-de-chat-qui-puke.”

Scherman, Miller, and Penrose, 1943.

Lee took an immediate liking to Dave, who called her “Stinky Miller.” Before long, they were more or less inseparable, Lee having chosen to overlook the chronic depression that Dave’s insouciance masked. One drunken night on a fifth-floor balcony, Lee wrapped her arms around an inconsolable Dave, who kept making runs at the railing. Though she’d grown used to such displays, Lee could never be certain that he didn’t have it in him to hurl himself over the balustrade.

Penrose remained in the picture, if peripherally; he was Captain Penrose now, tearing around the English countryside teaching camouflage techniques to the Home Guard. On one return to his Hampstead apartment, which Lee and Dave had commandeered in his absence, he had occasion to ask, “Darling, I’m very fond of the Dave, but must he leave his pajamas under the pillow?” After the liberation of Paris, Lee and Dave shared a suite at the Hôtel Scribe. Passing by, Life’s picture editor, John G. Morris, glimpsed Dave lying in bed, reading. The next day, Lee invited Morris up for a drink. This time, lying in the same bed, reading, was Penrose.

Dave, the outsider, knew his future lay elsewhere. Although he did his best to talk Lee into marrying Penrose (as she later did), Lee and Dave bonded still further when they became a working team. And they were among the best, running from explosions, crawling through mud to get the picture, following their colleague Robert Capa’s credo “If your picture is no good, you weren’t fucking close enough.” Marguerite Higgins, of the New York Herald Tribune, once complained to Dave, “How is it that every time I arrive somewhere, you and Lee are just leaving?”

Lee could not have made a better apprentice. “She was the only dame, the only snapper, period, who stayed through the siege of Saint-Malo,” Dave wrote Bill. The dispatches she sent to Vogue were riveting, but coaxing Lee through a single paragraph, Dave said, “is like feeding my brain through a meat grinder.”

On April 30, 1945, Dave and Lee were among the first journalists to enter Dachau, where 32,000 Jews died. Steeling herself, Lee took her widely reproduced pictures of dying prisoners and stacked corpses. Dave could not work.

That afternoon, they drove 15 miles south to Munich. The door to Prinzregentenplatz 16, Hitler and Eva Braun’s pied-à-terre, was wide open, so Lee and Dave poked their noses in, and he took his unforgettable picture of a grimy Lee soaking in the Führer’s bathtub, her combat boots befouling the pristine bath mat. Switching places, they came up with a less memorable series of photographs of a clowning Dave, the original 97-pound weakling, scrubbing his hair.

“How could you put your bare behind in Hitler’s tub?” they were later asked.

“We hadn’t taken our clothes off in three weeks,” Dave said. “We stank like a bunch of polecats. Here was hot water, soap, towels, a tub. We couldn’t resist.” Lee even took a nap on Eva Braun’s bed. “It was comfortable but macabre,” she told her Vogue readers, “to doze on the pillow of a girl and a man who were now dead, and be glad they were.” When they drove off, Hitler’s personal Shakespeare set went with them, “A.H.” and a swastika stamped in gold on every volume’s spine.

But the more or less inseparable days were nearing an end. Dave went to England to photograph ivied ruins for his first book, Literary England. Lee wandered east, photographing bombed-out Austria, Hungary, and Romania, unable to adjust to life without tension or danger or moral certainty. “Lee is having a tough time,” Dave wrote Bill, “largely of her own making. Sooner or later she is going to break all to pieces like a bum novel.”

Lee could not find it in herself to accept that her days as a war correspondent—the most fulfilling days of her life—were over, and to return to Penrose. Roland, who had spent a good portion of his life waiting for Lee to make a commitment to him, had finally become involved with a new woman, who was as accommodating as Lee was difficult.

To Dave, who, despite his feelings for Lee, was doing his best to secure her future, there was every chance that she was in danger of being dumped for a more compliant partner. “Rollers almost gave her the runout,” he wrote, “but by herculean efforts I got her back in time, and after a touch and go month, maybe she’s in the clear.” To anyone congratulating him on his rescue, Dave would have said, “Saved her my ass—I saved myself.”

Literary England received high praise, and Dave began considering Literary France. To keep him on staff, Life sent him an assistant. “You oughtta see my researcher. Smart as a whip, and what a looker!” Dave wrote, adding, “She’s a little nuts. She overresearches and I miss my goddamn deadline. I can tell she’s gonna be trouble.” In 1949, Scherman and crimson-haired Rosemarie Redlich, a Viennese refugee, got hitched, the start of 48 years of more or less uninterrupted trouble.

That year, Lee and Penrose moved to the hamlet of Muddles Green, deep in the East Sussex countryside, with their one-year-old son, Antony. Lee could not have made a worse mother. The boy suffered from dyslexia, still largely unrecognized, and Lee called him “stupid” to his face.

After swinging for years between restlessness, contentment, and misery, Lee died of cancer in 1977. Two weeks later, Tony Penrose’s wife was searching the attic for baby pictures of her husband when she came across a huge pile of junk. Behind it were hidden stacks and stacks of cardboard boxes, stuffed with 60,000 photographs and negatives.

Miller’s son, Antony Penrose, with a box of her photographs.

Lee had never cared much about the past. Tony, who knew next to nothing about his mother’s photography, had found his calling and has spent the rest of his life writing copiously about Lee, traveling nonstop to introduce her pictures to the world. Man Ray always said that one of Lee’s greatest gifts was making work for other people.

In 1990, Dave and Rosemarie and my brother, John, and I went to the gala New York opening of “Lee Miller: Photographer” at the International Center of Photography. Dave walked through the rooms blank-faced, now and then saying out of the corner of his mouth, “I shot that.” I didn’t know whether to believe him or not.

When he grew too old to continue his second career as a carpenter, Dave sat down to write How I Sank Atlantis, amusing himself no end, rubbing his hands together in glee at his manual Smith Corona. The book was rejected by every publisher Dave submitted it to. His final encounter was with an editor who looked to the 81-year-old to be no more than 30.

“This is just journalism,” the editor said.

When I saw him a few days later, Dave was distraught. “Just journalism!” he spat.

Dave entered what I have always considered a terminal depression, though it was cancer that finished him off. Bill came to visit, startled and saddened to find his brother “vacant.” Alternately coherent and morphine-addled, Dave spent his final days on the living-room sofa. Rosie, John, and I took turns sitting with him. He died on Rosie’s watch, in the pre-dawn hours of May 6, 1997. In short order, two linebacker-size young men in suits and ties arrived in an S.U.V., zipped Dave up in a black vinyl bag, and drove off.

I saw the film with my daughters at a private screening in New York last November. Winslet, who is in virtually every scene, is splendid; hers is an Oscar-worthy performance. Samberg has a tougher job and doesn’t make out as well. Granted, as Dave’s son, I’m biased; this is not, moreover, my father’s film. But Dave Scherman was a sui generis character, who, the filmmakers fail to indicate, taught Miller photojournalism. If the writers had accurately portrayed the wise guy and minor genius, Samberg would have walked away with the film.

Tony Scherman is the author of Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol and Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story

Photos: Lee Miller and David E. Scherman/© Lee Miller Archives, England, 2024, all rights reserved/leemiller.co.uk; courtesy of Roadside Attractions; Lee Miller/© Lee Miller Archives, England, 2024, all rights reserved/leemiller.co.uk; David E. Scherman/© courtesy Lee Miller Archives, England, 2024, all rights reserved/leemiller.co.uk.; Jim Holden/Alamy