Read Dodie Kazanjian’s In-Depth 1994 Richard Avedon Profile for Vogue

He laughs and makes a sweeping gesture that somehow includes the room and everything in it. “You know what I’m going to do? Empty this place out. Put everything on the walls in boxes, or the warehouse or the fire. I’ll just dump everything and start again, see who I become. Try to do it better, more deeply, and if I lose it, hope that my friends shoot me or at least stop me from becoming Steichen, photographing the apple tree outside my window with a new young wife kneeling at my feet.”

There’s a brick fireplace that Avedon never uses because pigeons have nested in the chimney. The mantel is cluttered with stuff, like every other flat surface here. An empty bottle of 1923 Lafite-Rothschild, Avedon’s birth year, stands on a boxed bottle of the same vintage, undrunk, “waiting for the right occasion.” There are also three parcels in brown wrapping paper, tied in ordinary string, unopened. He knows what one of them is—a bleached-white skeleton of a bird’s wing that washed up on the beach of Antigua years ago, during a photographic shoot with Suzy Parker; Dick and Suzy both wanted it, and it became their “bone of contention,” which travels back and forth between them. The other two boxes, he says, “I hope to open just before I die. They’re from someone who means a great deal to me. If I’m alone when I die, opening them—discovering what’s in there—will be like the right person holding my hand.”

It’s a quarter to twelve, way after his bedtime. He wakes up at five every morning, gets out of bed at six, turns the coffee on, and does last night’s dishes “for therapy.” Breakfast is coffee and fresh apple juice, squeezed by Verlie from whole apples the day before. His personal trainer comes three mornings a week at 7:30 to give him a one-hour workout. When he says good night, his voice is a little raspier, but his restless energy shows no signs of flagging.

It’s the next morning, 7:30, and Avedon is calling in great agitation. He says last night’s interview “didn’t work,” and we have to try again. This time he’ll invite his old and close friend Twyla Tharp, and he tells me I can be a fly on the wall while they wing it conversationally. OK, I say, well aware that there’s no arguing with Avedon in his control-freak mood. I go, I listen, I’m charmed, I’m well fed—lamb roast and applesauce with horseradish, homemade pumpkin pie and the usual cornucopia of desserts. His son, John, is there, and John’s nearly three-year-old son, Michael. So are the seventeen candles, which almost send the bamboo tree up in flames. It’s a warm, family sort of evening, and the conversation goes off in two dozen directions, and if it were reproduced here, we could have yet another portrait of Richard Avedon. The possibilities are endless. •