My mum Lee Miller bathed in Hitler’s tub & romped with Picasso… but horrific childhood trauma shaped her life
GRINDING her muddy boots into the immaculate white bath mat, model turned photojournalist Lee Miller stripped off and lowered herself into the tub.
The date was April 30, 1945, the location Munich, and the bath was in the private apartment of Adolf Hitler — who killed himself later that day.
The photograph, taken by her friend David E Scherman, caused a sensation.
It was given added impact by Lee placing a framed picture of the Fuhrer on the bath edge.
Afterwards, she spent the night in the bed he had shared with his wife Eva Braun — with whom he had died 360 miles away in a Berlin bunker in a joint suicide.
“It was comfortable but it was macabre to doze on the pillow of a girl and a man who were now dead,” she said.
The extraordinary story of the vivacious war correspondent is the subject of new film Lee, with Kate Winslet in the titular role, which will hit cinemas on September 13.
Lee wasn’t going to be a conventional woman in a conventional role, she was going to be creative and as naughty and outrageous as she wanted to be.
Lee’s son, Antony Penrose
It was a part the Titanic star had yearned to play and she became the driving force behind getting the film made.
In an exclusive interview with Lee’s son, Antony Penrose, he tells us about growing up with his American-born mum, the struggle to bring her story to the screen and the Bohemian circle she and his artist father mixed in.
Speaking at her family home in Sussex, which features in the movie, he says: “The film is based on my book, The Lives Of Lee Miller, which Kate read — and she saw this woman who made her own life.
“Lee wasn’t going to be a conventional woman in a conventional role, she was going to be creative and as naughty and outrageous as she wanted to be. But at the same time, she had this fantastic integrity and desire to do things of importance.”
Wild spirit
With such a colourful life, it’s not hard to see why Lee’s story became a passion project.
Sexually abused as a child, the trauma affected Lee all her life.
She also lost two teenage loves in tragic circumstances — one in a boating accident, the other in a plane.
Adored by men who were captivated by her beauty and wild spirit, she found it difficult to love back.
When she married, Lee had an open relationship with her husband in which they both took lovers. And she enjoyed an abiding friendship with Picasso.
She was a fashion model in New York in the 1920s for Vogue, whose editor Edna Woolman Chase thought her beauty and confidence the perfect mix for the “modern girl” she had been looking for.
Antony, 76, says: “If it was daring, she would do it.”
In 1934 Lee met and married Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey and moved to Cairo. But she soon grew bored and returned to Paris in 1937 where she met Antony’s father, the surrealist painter Roland Penrose.
Living in London at the outbreak of World War Two, Lee and Roland — played by Alexander Skarsgard in the movie — ignored pleas to return to the US. Instead, Lee embarked on a new career as the official war photographer for Vogue.
The photograph of Hitler placed on the edge of his bath had a huge nuance behind it.
Antony Penrose
She reported on the Blitz before going to Europe where she teamed up with fellow American Scherman, a life photographer, on many assignments.
Together they documented dying children in a Vienna hospital, concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau and the liberation of France. But it was the photo taken by Scherman (played by Andy Samberg) of Lee in Hitler’s bath that was to become associated with her for ever.
Antony says: “She was tipped off about his apartment by the Signal Corps, who were around the area repurposing the telephone lines that converged on it.
“The photograph of Hitler placed on the edge of his bath had a huge nuance behind it.
“It’s a vanity portrait of Hitler by his revolting pet photographer Heinrich Hoffmann and it was the basis for a poster that was all over Germany and Nazi-occupied territories which said, in English, ‘One People, One Nation, One Leader’.
“It was a hateful piece of work. So she plonked that on the edge of the tub as a calculated insult to the Nazis. In the movie, Kate does that so beautifully.
“The morning of that day, the boots she was wearing had carried her around Dachau so she is stamping the filth of Dachau into that nice, pristine bath mat in this intimate space of the man’s bathroom.
“Metaphorically, she’s grinding her heel into his face.”
But the horrors of what she had seen and photographed took their toll when she returned to England after the war.
She suffered clinical depression and began to drink heavily.
After discovering she was pregnant she divorced Bey to marry Penrose and Antony was born in September 1947.
Two years later they bought Farley Farm House in Chiddingly, East Sussex, which became a Mecca for visiting artists, including Picasso, Man Ray, Henry Moore and Max Ernst.
“As a child I had a very difficult relationship with her,” says Antony. “She had been so badly affected by the war and she was suffering from what we would today understand as post-traumatic stress disorder.
“She became a depressive and an alcoholic and for a kid, that is really difficult because there are so many rapid personality changes. It made me feel very remote from her.
“People fell in love with Lee easily but it was a bit of a one-way street. Emotionally, she was very limited.”
While researching his mum’s life, Antony was struggling to understand “why she was such a daring free spirit and why she never had really meaningful, loving relationships,” until her younger brother Erik revealed a dark family secret.
Lee had been raped at the age of seven and caught gonorrhoea, leaving her traumatised.
“This was 15 years before the antibiotics needed to cure that were invented so she had to carry the disease all that time,” Antony says.
“The family closed ranks and they made it an absolute secret. My dad wasn’t even told. The difficulty for Lee was how to cope with this trauma. She didn’t even tell her closest women friends.
‘He crashes and dies’
“It was a lifelong secret because there was a culture of victim- blaming for girls who had been raped and they were considered damaged goods. Nobody would ever want to marry them so they concealed it.”
It was to affect all of her relationships, along with the unimaginable heartbreak surrounding her first two loves.
Antony continues: “As a young teenager, she falls in love for the first time. Nice young chap called Brad. They go out on a lake in a canoe. He falls in the water and dies instantly. He had a weak heart and nobody knew.
“Then another guy falls in love with her. She’s sailing to France on a liner and he is in a little biplane and swoops over the liner and romantically drops red roses on to the sun deck and flies away — but crashes and dies.
“So, I think she learnt a lesson about not falling in love. I think she felt that if she fell in love with someone they were going to die and that is perhaps why she was so distant from me.”
Towards the end of her life, Lee conquered her alcohol addiction and depression by throwing herself into a new passion — cooking. She died of cancer in 1977 aged 70.
At Farley Farm, Antony curates the Lee Miller archives, containing thousands of photos, journals, letters and souvenirs she left behind. The house and gallery is open to the public along with an exhibition called Lee & Lee about the making of the film.
Lee was a woman who lived her life on her terms and she paid a horrific emotional price for all of it.
Kate Winslet on Lee
“Kate came here endlessly to immerse herself in all this material. I think she read everything and she is so accurate in her portrayal of Lee,” Antony adds.
Kate spent eight years getting the passion project made — but it was a role she felt she was born to play.
The Oscar-winner told Vogue: “Lee was a woman who lived her life on her terms and she paid a horrific emotional price for all of it.
“I wanted to tell the story of a flawed middle-aged woman who went to war and documented it.
“Getting it off the ground was the most phenomenal fight.” Even when cameras began to roll, not all went to plan. On day one, while rehearsing for a scene of Miller running down a street in the city of Saint-Malo, Brittany during an air raid, Winslet fell and hurt her spine, leaving her “barely able to stand”.
With a determination worthy of Lee herself, she refused to delay filming and was in hair and make-up by 5am the next day.
She also drummed up investors between scenes and, at one point when the money was low, covered two weeks of the crew’s wages to keep things going.
Wanting to be as authentic as possible, she ensured all her costumes were identical copies of Lee’s and learned to use the cumbersome camera she had used.
Antony says: “Strangely, when Titanic came out I went to see it with my wife and I said, ‘If I ever get to make a movie about Lee, that’s who I want to play her’.
“Kate played a woman with hidden depths and we see her rebelling but in an intelligent way.
“Also, she is incredibly beautiful but she doesn’t mind getting knocked about, being in danger. And that was Lee — feisty, daring and highly intelligent.
“Kate is an intelligent risk taker, too. The pair of them would have really got along. They would have been inseparable.”
- Lee is in cinemas from September 13.