Angus McBean

Silver print, printed 1969/70 from the original glass negative, mounted to card. Signed and dated 1951 in black ink in the lower margin of the card, and annotated Copyright Angus McBean The first published picture of Audrey Hepburn - picked out of a chorus line for a beauty product 'ad' in 1951 in blue ink on the reverse of the mount (unframed)

From the collection of the Artist's biographer, Adrian Woodhouse

A Darker Side of the Moon, exhibition catalogue, Impressions Gallery, York, 1977; Adrian Woodhouse, Angus McBean, Quartet Books, London, 1982;
Adrian Woodhouse, Angus McBean: Facemaker, Alma Books Ltd, Richmond, Surrey, 2006
Time, 7th September 1953 illustrated p.36;
Angus McBean Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2006. cat. no.53;
Audrey Hepburn: Portraits of an Icon, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2015, cat. no.13.

This print is in overall very good condition. With small areas and dots of retouching throughout the image, and two small indentations on the upper edge and upper right quadrant, only visible in raking light. Unframed.
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                  How Audrey Hepburn was Made in Britain

 

But for a 1940s beauty lotion with the distinctly unglamorous name Lacto-Calamine, the world might never have had Audrey Hepburn.

In the autumn of 1950 Lacto-Calamine’s manufacturer, Crookes Laboratories, wanted to give its product a boost. The firm asked the photographer Angus McBean - famous for more than a decade for his dramatic, often surreal portraiture of performing stars - to come up with a series of striking images of pretty girls which could be displayed on advertising cards in chemists’ shops. Crookes had in mind McBean’s celebrated pre-war “sand pictures” in which beauties like Diana Wynyard and Frances Day (and even the less comely Flora Robson and Beatrice Lillie) appeared half-buried in Dali-esque deserts.

McBean, who seldom carried out advertising commissions, accepted. His “table-top surrealism”, as he described it, was very simple: he needed nothing more than a large sand-covered board with a hole in it, a backdrop painted by a friend and a scattering of props to create an infinite desert in his Covent Garden studio, while pretty girls could be hired for a standard modelling fee.

For his first image McBean remembered a delicate young chorus-girl whom he had photographed in June the previous year along with the rest of the cast of a West End revue, Sauce Tartare. His two surviving 1949 images of her solo display how her unforgiving fringe, fierce stage make-up and darkest-red lipstick had done little for her looks. Nevertheless he recalled her “lovely wide-set cat eyes”.

Her name was Audrey Hepburn and, although since their earlier encounter she had done magazine advertising shoots with photographer Anthony Beauchamp and taken tiny parts in two yet-to-be released films, she remained just a chorus girl - now in a late night Ciro’s club rehash of Sauce Tartare. Would she model for Mr McBean, chronicler of great stars? Of course she would.

Accordingly, the 21 year old arrived at McBean’s studio on 23rd October 1950. (Later he would habitually mistake the year.) He asked her to soften her fringe and her lipstick. Nervously she told him: “I don’t take my clothes off, you know.” Gently he explained that all “Miss Hepburn” had to do was to place her head and upper torso through the hole of his already constructed table-top desert (complete with antique miniature classical columns picked up in a junkshop ) and then slip down her dress and bra straps to reveal little more than her shoulders.

McBean adjusted his lights and, in barely half an hour and half a dozen slightly varying poses, the session was over. Miss Hepburn readjusted her clothing, stepped out from under the smallest set she ever occupied, brushed off some grains of sand and departed happily with her four guinea fee.

Crookes was over-joyed by the photos it received and decided that no other pretty girls were necessary for the campaign. Within a month Audrey Hepburn was back in Endell Street, WC2 for the creation of more “sand” images for follow-up Lacto-Calamine advertising in magazines - for which she sported a variety of halter-neck tops and sunglasses with the classical columns ditched for sea-shells or ostrich-feathers. She went on to sit for McBean three further times in the early months of 1950. 

None of these subsequent images, however, quite matches the one sublime shot from the first session: McBean, truly Shelley’s traveller from an antique land, had conjured out of his own lone and level sands boundless and bare not shattered Ozymandias but a timeless Aphrodite whose level gaze compels all to look on her flawless beauty and despair.

This was duly printed on stand-up display cards with the less than poetic catch-line: “Lacto-Calamine the foundation of skin loveliness”. In the first weeks of 1951 these began to appear - as the American Time magazine would report in an Audrey Hepburn cover article of 7^th September 1953 which also illustrated the display card - “in every drugstore in Britain”.

The rest is legend. British film director Thorold Dickinson, who had turned the mere chorus girl down when she auditioned for him the previous year, spotted her McBeanification in a shop window. Instantly he gave Audrey Hepburn her first major film role in Secret People which he had already started making. That led to a film in the south of France where Colette insisted the young actress be cast as the title role in the Broadway version of her Gigi and, before that had even opened in late 1951, she was chosen to star opposite Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday.

Audrey Hepburn never forgot that Angus McBean had lit the touch-paper for her career: she sent him an invitation to her planned autumn 1952 wedding to the Yorkshire businessman James Hanson. And her face, meanwhile, had launched a thousand ship-loads of Lacto-Calamine.