Two Extraordinary Women: Lee Miller & Kate Winslet

I went to see LEE on the weekend, in which Kate Winslet turns in the performance of a lifetime as war correspondent Lee Miller. Those of you who’ve been following me for a while will know that my 2019 novel, called The French Photographer in most of the world but going by the title The Paris Orphan in North America, features a main character who was inspired by Lee Miller, and that I’ve long been fascinated by Miller. So the stakes were high for me—I wanted Winslet to do justice to the bold, troubled, visionary, and deeply sad woman that Miller was.

Winslet nailed it.

I have so many thoughts about the movie and so many thoughts about Miller that I’m going to try to make them cohere into some kind of sense here. I will give an overview of Miller’s life a little further down in the post but I wanted to start by ruminating on the long and complicated process of getting this movie onto the screen.

From what I’ve read, there is no doubt that, without Winslet, LEE wouldn’t have been made. She poured her entire self into making this movie over eight years, is a producer on the film, knocked down doors to get it funded and even used her own money to cover everyone’s paychecks for a couple of weeks when the funding dried up. As I was watching, I wondered: was it that difficult for biopics about men, like Oppenheimer and Napoleon, to get off the ground?

So I went searching for articles to see how hard it was for Winslet and it took me just one Google search to discover that the sexism Lee Miller faced when trying to get herself over to Europe to report on D-Day was equalled by the kind of sexism Kate Winslet faced when trying to get her movie into production. This short piece from Vulture will give you the general idea.

It makes me so sad to read this. Why is it so hard for a male director to imagine that Miller’s vast and groundbreaking life might be interesting to viewers? There was nothing “little” about Miller—or Winslet for that matter. Barbie pulls in the funding and the studio support but Lee Miller isn’t worthy of the same level of interest? Come on!

This is exactly why I write historical fiction—to show that there are huge parallels between the past and the present, to persuade the world that women still aren’t equal and will never be if we be pretend they are, and also to celebrate how far we’ve come in some ways and to demonstrate that in others, we have a hell of a long way to go.

Just as making the movie physically damaged Winslet—she hurt her back badly on the first day of shooting but carried on in spite of the pain—so too did covering the war destroy Lee Miller. She gave her mental health to the war because she believed that the world needed to see and to understand what was happening in Europe. Without pictures, she knew, we would never grasp how atrocious humans could be to one another.

She wanted her photographs and her stories to show us that war was something we should never enact on the world again. It’s a timely message given where the world is today.

The Extraordinary Lee Miller

Let’s go back to the beginning of my own interest in Miller before I move onto discussing the movie in more detail.

I first heard of Lee Miller when I was researching my novel The Paris Seamstress. There was a throwaway line in an article I was reading that mentioned Miller and other female war correspondents who, after WWII ended, had not been able to continue working as serious journalists because the men had returned from overseas and taken all of the available jobs.

It caught my attention; what would it have been like to be reporting on a war and then to come home to America and be assigned work as a fashion photographer, a celebrity photographer during the winter season at Saint-Moritz, and an occasional contributor of recipes for Vogue, as happened to Miller?

I went looking for more. And I found a story so incredible I couldn’t help but be inspired by it.

Before the War

So, who exactly was Lee Miller? She was a famous model throughout the 1920s after being discovered by Condé Nast on the streets of New York. Her face graced the covers of magazines like Vogue and Harpers Bazaar. Then her image was used without her knowledge in an advertisement for Kotex sanitary products and her modelling career came to an abrupt halt.

It’s hard for us to imagine what a taboo menstruation was at the time, and how this could end a career, but it was and it did. Nobody wanted to see the ‘Kotex girl’, as she became known, in photographs designed to show off evening gowns.

Miller then went to Paris where she met Man Ray. She learned photography from him and is sometimes referred to as his muse, but the fact is, she discovered photographic techniques like solarisation and earned the right to be called a photographer rather than just a muse. You should definitely check out some of her work from this period (just do a Google search; the images are copyright and I can’t reproduce them here).

A “Gal Reporter” Fighting to Do her Job

With the advent of WWII, Miller was accredited as Vogue’s photojournalist, reporting from Europe. I was fascinated by that transition—how did a woman who was so obviously beautiful manage in the very male and often chauvinistic environment of an army during a war, an environment where the female journalists were referred to as “gal reporters” and where their byline was left off their reports, simply because they were women?

Miller worked for British Vogue during WWII, although many of her photographs and reports were also published in American Vogue. She took some extraordinary photographs: she stumbled upon the battle for Saint-Malo and photographed the US Army’s first use of napalm there (those photographs were censored and never ran); she reported from Paris, Luxembourg, Alsace, Colmar, Aachen, Cologne, Frankfurt and Torgau, amongst other places; she was one of the first to document the horror of the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau; and she was the subject of an iconic photograph, bathing in Hitler’s bathtub in his Munich apartment after having left her filthy boots to drop the dirt of Dachau, as she put it, all over the Führer’s pristine white bathroom.

As if confronting and documenting those dreadful scenes wasn’t enough, she had to contend with shocking sexism. Despite having proven herself as a reporter, Miller and all other female correspondents weren’t allowed to go over to Normandy with the D-Day landing fleet to report on the invasion. Correspondent Martha Gellhorn, one of Ernest Hemingway’s wives, but a brilliant reporter in her own right, flouted that regulation and stowed away in the bathroom of a hospital ship to be the first woman to report from France post-invasion in June 1944. She even beat her husband to the story!

Some of the female correspondents of WWII. Miller is second from the right.

The female correspondents tried anything and everything they could think of to be allowed to go with the invasion fleet, even requesting permission to attend parachute jump training so they could be parachuted in to Normandy. They were refused permission because of what the “sharp jolt of the exploding parachute canopy could do to the delicate female apparatus.” That quote is from Never a Shot in Anger by Colonel Barney Oldfield, a public relations officer for the Allies, and was reported to have come from a major in the Surgeon-General’s office in 1944. Can you imagine being told you couldn’t do a parachute jump because you had a vagina?

As if that’s not bad enough, to keep the women reporters “safe”, they weren’t allowed to stay at Press Camps once they were finally allowed into France. Instead, they were told to stay at the hospitals with the nurses, which were far more dangerous as the hospitals were located much closer to the front. At the Press Camps, the male correspondents were given information about where the fighting front had moved to, what area would be under heavy fire that day and much more. The women were told to ask the injured men who came in to the hospital where the safe areas versus the hot spots were, or else to rely on luck. It’s hard to see how that was supposed to keep them “safe”.

But Miller, like the other female correspondents, persevered and thank God she did.

Personal Trauma

Underneath all of that is what happened to Miller as a child. A family friend raped her when she was just seven years old, infecting her with gonorrhoea. Her mother told her never to speak of it, so Miller silently carried that burden with her for the rest of her life. And her father took nude photographs of her as a teen. It’s impossible to imagine the effects of these experiences on Miller, and how it felt to have her trust so cruelly broken by the adults who were meant to protect her.

There was more tragedy ahead for Lee. After the war, she suffered from post-traumatic stress as a result of viewing and recording so many horrors. She used alcohol as a coping mechanism, trying to forget that she was ever a witness to war and all its atrocities. So effective was she at excising this from her past that, when she died at age seventy, her son, Antony Penrose, had no idea of what she had done during the war.

Her work had been entirely forgotten.

One day, Penrose’s wife, in the attic at Farley Farm, Miller’s home, found some sixty thousand photographs and negatives, plus clippings, cameras and wartime souvenirs, as well as Miller’s correspondence with her Vogue editor, stored haphazardly in cardboard boxes. Penrose immediately understood that his wife had made an incredible discovery, that his mother had been a true artist, and that her words and pictures had, once upon a time, meant something.

LEE: The Movie

As you can see from this brief description of her life, Lee Miller was a complicated woman. Kate Winslet is remarkable at capturing both her vulnerability and fierceness. Winslet’s face, so beautifully un-botoxed, is more expressive than words and it’s in those moments when the camera is in close-up on her face and you can see exactly what’s going on inside her head that you get a sense of the drive that propels both actor and subject, and also what that drive costs them.

There’s one scene in particular where Miller comes upon a young girl in one of the concentration camps. There’s hardly any dialogue at all but it’s one of the most poignant moments I’ve ever seen on a screen. I was in tears, and it was the pivotal moment that made me really feel the immense burden Miller must have carried with her after the war. How could anyone look at a child surrounded by dead bodies, a child who’d likely had terrible things done to her, and not have nightmares each time you closed your eyes forever after?

The movie is, of course, a fictionalised account of Miller’s life and it’s impossible to contain her entire life in a two hour movie. So there are gaps—her relationship with Life correspondent David Scherman is contained to a friendship when they were actually lovers; her relationship with Roland Penrose, the man who became her husband after the war, is depicted more romantically than Miller’s biographer Carolyn Burke presents it. But I understand why those decisions were made—the friendship and the romance are the moments of light that will help make this film appeal to people who aren’t as obsessed with Miller as I am!

There’s another moment in the movie when Penrose, Miller’s lover, covers her nude body with camouflage paint. It might interest you to know that Penrose then photographed the naked and painted Miller and, when he lectured in camouflage techniques during the war, he used this image as his ‘startle slide’ to make sure all the soldiers in the audience were paying attention.

I don’t know whether Miller consented to that. I’ve read accounts that say she didn’t. In any case, it’s hard not to see that moment as being yet another occasion when Miller’s body was used by careless men. It’s the one instance where I wish the film had had the space to show what Penrose did to the woman he supposedly loved after he painted her body.

In Conclusion …

Please go and see LEE. Getting audiences along to movies like this tells studios and producers that films about remarkable women from history are profitable. It encourages them to make more movies like this. It means that women from the past who ought not to be forgotten are given a second chance to inspire the world.

The final word should, of course, be Lee Miller’s. Something she wrote in a letter to Audrey Withers, her editor at Vogue, sat with me as I wrote my novel and tried to imagine what it might have felt like to witness and then to record both the horror and the heroism of war: ‘Every word I write is as difficult as tears wrung from stone.’

Sadly, the war wrung Miller completely dry. I wish her story had had a different ending.