The reason Bill Cunningham’s photographs for The New York Times quickly morphed from occasional small street fashion or society-affair feature into an enormously popular weekly visual column called On the Street was simple.
He had an unerring eye for catching every fashion wave well before anyone else, and doing so not just on runways (though he loved designer fashion shows), but out there on the pavement of good old gritty Gotham.
Say what you will about this unfair city, the parade here never stops, and no one understood that better than a Bostonian named William J. Cunningham. Starting in the 1970s for The Times, he created a singular image of himself by visually chronicling what people (overwhelmingly New Yorkers, but also Parisians) were wearing as they went about their business. Which was often trying to get Bill to photograph them.
As Bill’s features began to appear more regularly, each would showcase a fashion theme, and it was eventually decided that rather than just captions beneath the pictures, a short essay tying everything together was a better idea.
At first the essays were supplied by Bill, who would sit next to Alex Palmer, the Style department’s editorial assistant and a woman of boundless charm and good humor who was a better speller and typist than he was, and dictate. The result was 50 or so words that usually, as they say, needed a little work. Often, I was the copy editor chosen to perform the procedure.
Certainly I was no fashion authority, and whatever else I spun these miniature stories into, it was not to be mistaken for gold. But apparently it was printable and I genuinely enjoyed the connection with Bill, whose enthusiasm for what he was doing was irresistible, whether one cared about fashion or not.
He would come rushing into the office with photographs, recently developed at his local pharmacy, as if they were the Rosetta stone, assuring all of us, whom he referred to as “kids” or “child,” that this was the next big thing. Which inevitably it turned out to be.
Then came the essential part of the process: choosing the pictures for the layout. Bill and Nancy Newhouse, then the Style editor, would do this together. Ms. Newhouse recalled that Bill inevitably had double or triple the number that could fit in the allotted space, and passionately argued to cram in as many as possible.
“I loved going through those pictures with Bill, and always felt bad having to insist on fewer rather than more,” she said recently, “but he was always a good sport.”
He never gave up trying, however. After the copy was edited and the photos carefully winnowed, Bill was free to run back outside, hop on his bicycle and pedal up to Midtown to see what else he could find.
This habit did not please everyone in our department. In that Paleolithic era, designing pages was a cumbersome process, and substituting different photos as deadlines loomed (and the Style pages were among those that had to close early), could create instant migraines for our editors and art director.
A particular sufferer was Morton D. Stone. Over the years, Bill worked with a number of talented photo editors. Tiina Loite, who edited “Bill Cunningham: On the Street,” the new book from Clarkson Potter from which these images were chosen, was the Style photo editor in the 1990s and 2000s, which could be described as his breakout period.
But during my stint in that department the photo editor was Mort Stone. Mort possessed both skill and taste. He was also unflappable, as long as you drop the first syllable off that word. At the sight of Bill returning to the newsroom and the clock ticking, the color would drain from Mort’s face. “Oh my God,” he’d moan. “He’s back!”
Those days inevitably ended at the upstairs bar at Sardi’s, the famed theater district restaurant where Mort sought solace. Loathing the thought of a man drinking alone, I usually felt the least I could do was join him. By the second Scotch, Mort would volunteer that while Bill’s late additions may have created some peptic havoc, they made the feature better.
Mort was a pro, and like all of us, a genuine admirer of Bill’s work. It was simply impossible not to be. If Vincent Sardi had known that Bill was responsible for some of his best customers, he would have been an admirer, too.
Thinking back on those days, it is difficult to imagine two more different personalities than Bill and Mort. It’s also difficult to think of two other Timespeople for whom I felt more utter devotion, and I was not alone there. The difference was that Mort became an open, personal friend to a number of us, while Bill had a genius for elusivene
Much has been made of his dedication to his work and his spartan life style. At the same time he seemed endlessly upbeat and brimming with enthusiasm. “Hey there, Alex, young fella,” he would greet the not-so-young me in the Times cafeteria years after we had stopped working together. After a few quick pleasantries, he was suddenly off. “Gotta get snappin’ and crackin’,” he’d say, “lots going on out there and I don’t want to miss it.”
Not many of us really knew a lot about Bill until the documentary “Bill Cunningham New York” was released in 2010. It showed the snappin’ and crackin’ on the street, all right, but also his monastic digs in Carnegie Hall, where he slept on a pallet balanced on two of an almost uncountable number of file cabinets that held his life’s considerable work, and used what seemed to be a public bathroom down the hall.
The film delved into his childhood and time in the Army and offered up an excruciating moment when the subject of his sexuality left him totally frozen.
All those cabinets came back into focus a year and a half ago when serious research began on the book that goes on sale this week. If there is a key to who Bill was, it is crammed into the folders that are crammed into them.
And what an amazing treasure they hold. Hundreds of thousands of contact sheets and prints, many of which have detailed notes and drawings from couture shows in Paris and New York appended to them. There are scores of magazines, notebooks, invitations, thank-you notes, programs from shows. Your first question is, did he ever sleep?
The answer, apparently, is not much, if at all. Enid Nemy, a longtime Style reporter who frequently worked with Bill, confirmed what became his stripped-down lifestyle. “He didn’t care about food or drink — believe me, I went to his apartment on several occasions and I’ll tell you, the only thing in his refrigerator was film,” she said.
Ms. Nemy also recalled Bill’s strong reluctance to ever accept favors, large or small, which Anna Wintour confirms in a warm essay in the new book, recalling numerous offers of a ride, which he accepted only once, when he could not budge his bicycle in a snowstorm. When she dropped him off at the Times building, she writes, he jumped out of the car so quickly that she hardly had time to say goodbye.
A man who prized his independence, Bill for years insisted on working as a freelancer for The Times. He relented in the early 1980s, when one day, Nancy Newhouse recalled, he shyly indicated that he would like to go on staff, the advantages and security of benefits having become clear to him.
But, she said, ”It took a while for him to ask me where to pick up his paycheck. He found the subject embarrassing.” The arrangement didn’t last long, and Bill returned to freelancing until 1993, when he suffered serious injuries in a bicycle accident and quickly came back to the fold.
According to Enid Nemy, “Bill had three main interests: fashion shows, big charity parties and, most enduringly, what people were wearing on the street. And he became enormously influential in all three.
“For one thing, his knowledge of the history of fashion was simply more developed than anyone else’s,” she said. “He would look at a Dior design at a show and immediately be able to trace its lineage and influences. As for parties, his presence at them meant everything. The general feeling was that if Bill didn’t show up to photograph a big event, well, it simply didn’t really happen.
“And he loved to be out on the street because he didn’t like to miss anything,” she added. “People were aware of him, knew where he’d be near Bergdorf’s, so that’s where they’d be. And they’d talk about how many times they made Bill’s column. His impact was phenomenal.”
Bill preferred to call himself a fashion historian or, more modestly, a reporter, and he certainly fit those descriptions. As Ms. Loite points out in her preface to the book, he was reluctant to call himself a photographer. To which I want to say, “Oh please, Bill, give me a break.”
So what would Bill Cunningham, the reporter-historian-nonphotographer photographer think of this book? I’m pretty sure I know what he’d say, which is something along the lines of “Well, child, it’s just a collection of stuff that helped fill space in the paper.”
And, you know something? He’d be right. But as far as stuff goes, kids, it’s not too bad.
Alex Ward, who was the longtime editorial director of book development for The New York Times, retired from the company earlier this summer.
Reprinted with permission from Random House, from the book “Bill Cunningham: On the Street” by The New York Times Company.
