Jonathan Van Meter reflects on the time he spent with the extraordinary June Newton, who died last week at the age of 97.
A Vogue Writer Remembers June (and Helmut) Newton
Somewhere toward the end of my scrupulous, yearlong quarantine in Woodstock, NY, I started culling and decommissioning tchotchkes cluttering up the shelves (and obscuring the beautiful spines) of the hundreds of art and photography books I’ve collected over the years. In my fidgety boredom that day this winter, I stumbled on the Helmut Newton section, long obscured by a “Smoking Grandpa” tin toy and an orange-and-black Playboy Club ashtray from the ’60s (and, more recently, by a clay figurine of Joe Biden giving Donald Trump the finger, a heartwarming Christmas gift from my father-in-law).
Those Newton books—A Gun for Hire, Work, Pages from the Glossies, to name a few—were all art-directed by June Newton, Helmut’s longtime wife (and widow since 2004), who died last week at the age of 97 in Monte Carlo. I had bought all of my Newton books in the strange spring and summer of 2000, when I followed Helmut and June around the world it seemed. I had first met the couple in Miami, on a freakishly cold day, at a photo shoot with Naomi Campbell on the beach. At the end of the shoot, I was invited to the wrap dinner Helmut and June held in the restaurant of the Delano Hotel. Watching the couple—with their signature haircuts and distinctive eyeglasses—holding court that night, I got the sense of two people as a single organism, a couple capable of pretentiousness and impossible snobbery, and yet also earthy and delightfully vulgar. In short, they struck me as deeply modern—the coolest seventy-somethings I’d ever met.
Because I had Newton on the brain from rediscovering his books on my shelves, when I checked into a hotel in Beverly Hills for a week in February, I took a walk one morning along a still Covid-deserted Sunset Boulevard to a shuttered Chateau Marmont, a pilgrimage of sorts: I wanted to touch the plaque that was put up at the spot where Helmut died.
And then, in early March, tired of being in that depressingly empty room-service-free hotel in Beverly Hills, I moved to a beach house in Santa Monica for three weeks . I was meeting a tennis pro, Ben, a few times a week at the courts on the beach in Ocean Park and towering above them, were twin apartment blocks, built in the ‘60s, that reminded me so much of La Tour, Helmut and June’s apartment building in Monte Carlo. I was so intrigued that I Googled around to see what was available in the buildings on Ocean Park and before long was saying to Andy, my husband, that we could rent on a high floor with a balcony overlooking the ocean “and live like Helmut and June Newton.”
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Jonathan Van Meter
