The Photographer Who May Have Inspired My Mother’s Journey

( Second Draft )

After viewing Winslett’s film, “Lee”, I now realize that my mother, Jean Hollyman, was probably inspired and empowered to become a photographer by Lee Miller’s example, who worked as a war photographer for Vogue Magazine.

Do pay the $4.99 fee to download “Lee”, the story about pioneering war photographer Lee Miller, produced and starring Kate Winslett. Why pay, you ask? If you’ll see in an interview on 60 Minutes with Winslett, none of the studio “Big Boys”would produce this film about Miller, a model turned photographer who is mostly remembered only for sleeping around and bathing in Hitler’s tub. Kate Winslett, The Titanic movie’s sweetheart, now a determined first time “un-Hollywood” producer, made the film despite the Boys. She even played the part without makeup, wrinkles and all. And it’s making money.

Kate Winslet: There was one potential investor who said to me, 'why should I like this woman?' I mean, she's drunk, she's, you know, she's like loud. She, I mean, he just probably stopped short of saying she has wrinkles on her face. - 60 Minutes, 1/1/2024

For a portion of the seven years it took to produce this film, Winslett picked through Miller’s archives with Miller’s son. Miller, a troubled woman, sadly spent most of her post-war years living in the British countryside as an alcoholic plagued with PTSD, with her memories of concentration camps unwanted guests who continued to plague her.

My mother like Miller, was a model during the war years. However after injuring her knee in a skiing accident , my mother could no longer walk New York’s fashion runways. She was then an ardent reader of Vogue Magazine for whom Miller was then covering the War in Europe. Perhaps influenced by Miller’s example, my mother began working as a photographer in the studio of commercial photographer Elliot Clark. ( Eileen Ford, later the super-model agent, was then Clark’s secretary) Richard Avedon, just starting out his career, was my mother’s peer.

My Aunt Maud ( another story in herself! ) introduced my father to my mother. My mother later wryly remarked that she “was beguiled by his Army uniform”. My father was working as a photographer for the US Army’s Stars and Stripes Magazine along with the “Best and Brightest” journalists of the later years, including cartoonist Herblock, the CBS commentator Andy Rooney and others. When my father was discharged from the Army, the couple married and teamed up to become the “Tom and Jean Hollyman” photo team who covered post-war Europe for Holiday Magazine as assigned by legendary photo editor Frank Zachery.

Mom is briefly memorialized in a New Yorker Magazine article (February 2004), “La Vie En Rose by then Senior Editor Roger Angell. This feature about the halcyon days of journalism covering Europe after World War II, was published by The New Yorker a few months before my mother finally died from COPD, a consequence of having smoked too many cigarettes in her lifetime. As she lay in a morphine-induced coma at a Connecticut hospice , Mom’s Jamaican companion, Vanzie, paid her a visit. She pulled my mother’s toes from beneath the sheets. As she massaged them, she said, “You’re famous now, Jean”. My mother gave a last small smile. A few hours later she passed.

“La Vie En Rose, The New Yorker, February, 2014:

In my mother’s wonderful letters, I read of the time they were invited to tea at 10 Downing Street by Prime Clement Minister Atleee, ( Churchill’s post-WWII rival), to discuss their up- coming photo shoot. Famished from post-war rationing, my mother wolfed down the remaining cucumber tea sandwich on the silver tea-plate before learning that it had been preserved for Atlee’s daughter who later walked in to find nothing left for her to eat.

My mother plunked out letters back home of the couple’s adventures on an Olivetti portable typewriter, whose letter “e” was later stuck. She typed these vibrant missives to family members back home using carbons on onion-skin paper to make copies. She was the daughter of a former banker whose world crumbled in the Great Depression and they lost their home. As the family could only afford to send her older sister to college, Mom was self-taught and read voraciously.

In one of these letters home she describes lighting up Monte Carlo with flash bulbs, using only guide numbers and a dragged shutter for the photograph. Later in that assignment made by Frank Zachery, my mother was invited by the Aga Khan to join his party at the Casino when one of his guests had dropped out of a major gala. The Aga Khan was superstitious and since his party now only included 13, he sent a minion to the bar where my mother was sitting to invite to join her to join his party as his host of the grand event. My mother wrote that she was wearing only an “eight dollar black dress from Wanamaker’s,” when she was called upon to draw the winning lottery number for the gala.

Her letters could make a Substack newsletter all by themselves. I’ve often thought they would make an excellent feature for Vanity Fair but have no idea how to get through the plethora of gate-keepers there.

Any ideas?