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This episode is sponsored by our good friends at sky all because their new sky original film Lee is available from the 13 September only in cinemas now.

Lee charts the life of one of the most remarkable photographers of the Second World War, Lee Miller. And that's the person we're going to be talking about in today's episode. It was her photographs of Dachau and her photographs from across the ruins of the Third Reich, Tom, that brought home the horrors of the conflict to the british and american public.

So Kate Winslet plays Lee, but it is kind of an amazingly a list cast all round. So there's Andy Samberg, Alexander Skarsgrd, Marielle Cotyhard, Josh O'Connor, Andrea Risbrough all star in it alongside her.

Well, Tom, as you know, I've always been really fascinated by Lee Miller as a character because I often think that without photographs like the ones that she took, would the world have been able to come to terms with what was happening and understand what was happening in the concentration camps in quite the same way?

Yeah, it explores that, explores other aspects of the Second World War, the relationship of photography to conflict and to horror. And I mean, it's a real kind of prestige drama, a very serious story on one level, but also thrilling. I really loved it.

Lee is out in cinemas from Friday the 13 September. And you can go to sky.com to find out more.

These are pictures of a nation at war. They are honest pictures, routine scenes. To those of us who have reported Britain's ordeal by fire and high explosive, these Englishmen have bought survival. With their tender roofed old buildings, with their bodies and their nerves. This little book offers you a glimpse of their battle. Somehow they are able to fight down their fears each night, to go to work each morning. So that was the legendary CB's war correspondent, Ed Morrow, in the introduction to his book Grim Pictures of Britain under fire. And it was a book that was designed, essentially designed as pro british propaganda in the Second World War, showing the american public how Britain was carrying on during the Blitz. But Dominic, the real interest of that book isn't the deathless prose which I just read, I think very beautifully.

So beautifully.

Yeah, thanks. But the pictures and specifically perhaps the identity of the woman who took those pictures, which is the great photographer Lee Miller.

Yes. So some listeners may not have heard of Lee Miller, but I'm guessing that almost all of them will have seen her pictures, whether they know it or not. So the most famous ones, probably the most infamous, I suppose, are the pictures she took of Dachau when Dachau was liberated. So that's the sort of late April 1945. But she also took it. There's a very famous photograph of a GI on Hitler's bed in his apartment in Munich, reading a copy of Mein Kampf that went around the world. And there's probably an even more famous picture now of Lee Miller herself in Hitler's Bath. Tom, you must have seen that picture.

I have, yeah.

Tremendous image. I've always been really interested in Lee Miller. I have a sort of stash of old magazines from the 1940s at the back of my office, and a lot of them have Lee Miller photographs. And I've always been interested in her because she's a pioneering female photographer, because she's a great link between the world of the kind of 1920s, 1930s artistic avant garde. You know? I love the avant garde, Tom. I know you do.

You love a bit of surrealism, love.

It all over it. I mean, actually, I'm quite a surrealist kind of person.

I know you are.

I think I'd fit into that milieu beautifully.

Lobster, telephones, all of that.

Yes, exactly. But also her experiences in the war are pretty extraordinary. So she's a great character.

Yeah. So I'll put my hand up. I only had the vaguest sense of her, so I knew about the photos she took of the Holocaust and of her in the bath, and a vague sense that she's kind of hanging out with man Ray and Picasso and Cocteau in Paris, leading her best american expat life there. But as research for this. Yeah, I've done two things, Dominic. So I went yesterday to Gold Hanger Towers, where Gary Lineker has had a private cinema built for himself.

Really?

Yeah.

Who goes to that? You, Alan Shearer, Alistair Campbell.

Yeah, we're all hanging out there.

Oh, my God. I'm never invited.

And obviously Theo was there with the popcorn. Tabby was serving out ice cream, had a wonderful time.

I'm so jealous.

And they were screening a new film about Lee Miller, which stars Kate Winslet.

Really?

Who puts in fantastic performance, because actually, you know, she looks quite like Leigh Miller.

Okay.

So that taught me all kinds of things I didn't know. So I didn't know that she ended up in a farm in Sussex. And also, I didn't know that she was married to Alexander Skarsgard. Which was a pleasant surprise to discover.

Yeah. You must be excited by that.

Who has a very good english accent.

Yeah.

Which I hadn't realized. And then I came back from watching that and I went into the Bodleian and I made copious notes.

Yeah.

So I now feel that I am ready to go head to head with you.

So you're full of.

I'm full of Lee Miller fats.

You're full of interesting anecdotes that aren't true.

Well, this is what I want to find out. I want to find out what's kind of accurate in the film, what's accurate in Wikipedia. I'm suspecting the film is more accurate than Wikipedia, but whatever. Take it away, Dominic.

Okay, so the story of Lee Miller. So she's born, Tom, I'm very pleased to say, in Poughkeepsie, New York.

I mean, that is ridiculous spelling, isn't it? I thought it was Pofkeepsie.

I don't know.

Why can't they have sensible spelling in America? Like Gloucester.

Like Gloucester, yeah, exactly. They hurt themselves down there. Anyway, she was born there in 1907, so that's in, I think, the Hudson Valley. Her father, Theodore Miller, Tom, brilliantly. He's descended from one of the Hessians who fought for the legitimate authorities at the end of the 18th century against the tax chiefs. Yeah.

So he's in favor of paying tax?

Definitely. He's the work superintendent at a factory. He's a great tinkerer. And in fact, they're a family of tinkerers. So as a girl.

Tinkerers, not tinkers.

Yeah, exactly. They're definitely not tinkers.

Selling pots and pans from door to door.

No, they're not. So one thing we know about her, there's a biography of her by her son, Anthony Penrose, that sort of goes into the details of her life. So she was a great enthusiast for a chemistry set, and she's tinkering away with her chemistry set while her father has built a dark room under the stairs. And his big love is photography. So obviously from a very early age, she's surrounded by cameras. She loves all this. You know, they love messing around with little machines and stuff. But actually, Tom, there's quite a dark shadow over her childhood. I was quite shocked to read this.

Very, very dark, isn't it?

She went to stay with family friends in Brooklyn when she was seven, and the son of these family friends abused her. And she got back to Poughkeepsie and she had. She was infected with venereal disease and the only treatment in those days, pre penicillin, was they had to sort of douse her with dichloride of mercury. And this apparently was when she was 75. Yeah, very much. She was seven years old. This was very traumatic. And her parents then sent her to a psychiatrist. And in the biography by her son, he says that the psychiatrist basically went out of his way to say to her, sex and love are two totally different things. You know, you can completely disassociate them. And I don't. You have to be too much of a kind of amateur psychologist to think that this had an impact on the way she thought about personal relationships, as we will see, because she ends up being somebody who does completely disassociate sex and love.

But I suppose, Dominic also, this is the era where Freud's ideas are starting to be popularized. Psychoanalysis is becoming very mainstream. And so I suppose she will grow up in that milieu, won't she, in particularly in Paris, where she ends up.

Yeah, definitely.

All of these ideas are very, very current.

Yes, absolutely. She's a very wayward child in some ways. She's always. She's not clearly bright, but she's always been kicked out of various private schools in New York in 1925. So when she's a teenager, one of her teachers, who's actually a polish woman who teaches French, she was taking a shantelis and she says, I'll take you to Paris for the summer. And she goes to Paris. She absolutely falls in love with it. I mean, this is kind of Paris in its heyday, really, between the wars.

Painters, Montmartre, all that.

All that stuff. Exactly. And she actually then decides she's going to stay, and she stays for a year. She studies theater. I like to think of her doing a lot of mime at a theater that had been co founded by Erno Goldfinger.

Oh, brilliant.

The inspiration for Goldfinger, the Fort Knox robbing, sort of rotund supervillain.

But he was an architect, wasn't he?

He was an architect.

He fell out with.

Yes, exactly. Because he was building. He was always building modernist buildings in Hampstead, I think. Anyway, this isn't an issue at this stage. She's in Paris. She's learning the theater. She loves it so much, actually, that her father actually has to come to bring her back. So it's very kind of dicky Greenleaf in talented Mister Ripley.

There's a kind of Patricia Highsmith quality, slightly to the story.

Definitely. There is. And then a very Patricia Highsmith ish kind of moment. She comes back to New York so what is she now? She's about to turn 20 and she's crossing the road in New York, and basically she steps into the traffic and it's almost run over.

Like Churchill.

Yeah, like Churchill. Exactly the same. I mean, uncanny.

So all these kind of luminaries in the second world war narrowly dodging being run over in New York.

Yeah, very odd. I know it's very odd. Anyway, the bloke who pulled her back, Tom, would you believe it is Conde Nast, the magazine?

Oh, he's a person.

Yeah.

I had no idea.

Yeah, Conde Nast is a person. He's a sort of magazine and newspaper. More magazine than newspaper tycoon. So it's Conde Nast that the world has to thank for Vogue and Vanity Fair. Conde Nast, who's very kind of dapper man, he rescues her, and according to her son's biography, she, who has just got back from Paris, babbled in French in a glamorous manner at him. And he said, is he french? No, he's american. He went to Georgetown University.

Where does Conde come from?

It's just showing off, isn't it? He says, my dear, you know, you're a very charming young woman. Would you care to model in my new magazine, Vogue? And she does by March 1927. So just a year after she's come back from Paris, she's on the front cover of Vogue, because she has a.

Kind of very roaring twenties vibe, doesn't she?

She definitely does. So she's very tall, she's very blonde, she's a very striking, very attractive woman. You can see absolutely why she'd be such a hit. And the most famous ad that she did, actually, which doesn't sound terribly glamorous. She's supposedly. I mean, I've actually done some digging into this and I can't really work out how true this is, but it is said she is the first model to be photographed to advertise sanitary towels. So there's a firm called Kotex. This ad ran in all the fashionable magazines and was sort of seen as groundbreaking and stuff. And, you know, at first she doesn't control her image. The photos are taken for an agency and then they're kind of sold. So at first she's a bit taken aback by it, but actually, she loved the kind of notoriety of it.

So, in the Bodleian.

Yeah.

Which I was wicked. Doing intensive research yesterday.

Yeah.

It said that this ruined her career.

Yeah. That's tosh and rubbish.

Is it?

Yeah. Okay, well, that's total tosh.

That's a mistake.

Because she goes on to do loads of modeling.

Poor from the bodily.

Yeah, they've cut themselves down. Oh, my God. Such a venerable library as well.

Yeah, they've let me down. They've let lean Miller down. But worst of all, they've let themselves down.

Yeah, and they've let Kotex down, which is sad. Anyway, the thing is, she's not just interested in what's going on sort of in front of the camera, but she's also interested in what's going behind it because her father is massively into his photography now. And at weekends she would spend the week in New York modeling. Then she'll go back to the Hudson Valley. They will experiment on photography together. Now, the one thing that I think is slightly odd is.

Well, let's be. Let's be honest. I mean, very odd.

Yeah. His passion is nudes.

Yeah.

And he loves nudes of Lee, and she loves it.

But again, this is all very kind of freudian psychology, you know, Alice in Wonderland.

Hint, maybe more open minded listeners than me may say, what are they complaining about? They're so repressed. This is completely reasonable behavior. I wouldn't have modeled for my father when I was in my twenties. Some. Would you?

I don't want to go down this avenue.

No, no. Well, anyway, I don't think you would, frankly. I don't want to presume, but I don't think you would. Anyway, she does that for a while, but basically, she can't wait to get back to Paris. So, 1929, she goes to Paris. She's now very well connected, obviously, in kind of the modeling world, the fashion world, that kind of nexus.

But also, Dominic just. I mean, so all of that. Yeah, but also all this stuff about her dad taking photographs and things. And she's been having psychotherapy, presumably, you know, since a young age. I mean, this makes her absolutely ideal for all the surrealists who are in Paris. I mean.

Yeah, totally.

They're massively into all that, aren't they?

Yeah, they are, of course, the sort of introspection, but also the obsession, obviously.

Brunell and Dali and all of that.

Yeah, the obsession. The sort of post freudian obsession with sex and all of that stuff. Absolutely. And as it happens, when she goes back to Paris, a friend gives her an introduction to a very well known person, one of the best known photographers in the world at this .1 of the best known of all the surrealists. Who is this guy? Man Ray. And Man Ray is actually from Philadelphia. He's american. He's Emmanuel Ratnitsky. I think he's a family of russian, I think immigrants. And he was famous for his kind of dadaist and then surrealist kind of collages and images and so on. Lee Miller said later that he kind of looked like a bull. He's this kind of very bear like man, big eyebrows. And she just turns up to see him and says, I want to study with you. And he says, well, I don't have any students anyway, I'm going on holiday. I'm leaving Paris. And she said, brilliant, I'll come with you. And she did. And they ended up living together for three years. And they were a great partnership. You know, he teaches about surrealism. He teaches photography and stuff. They have this kind of open relationship.

Well, I read in your notes that she was known as Madame Man Ray.

Yes.

Whereas surely it would have been easier for her to be known simply as woman Ray.

I knew this joke was coming and this tremendous joke.

It's a joke I've been waiting to make all the show.

What's so shameful about this joke is that theo crafted a joke for you overnight and you stamped on it very coldly.

Well, I wasn't having my jokes upstairs.

So that you could use your own, frankly. Brilliant joke, weak joke.

Oh, I think the listeners will be rolling in the aisles at that one.

Okay, so she's still doing a lot of modeling. She's modeling for the parisian edition of Vogue. Cecil Beaton, british photographer.

Who actually, Cecil Beaton, my erstwhile neighbor.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah. We used to kick footballs over his wall and go and roam in his garden.

Yeah.

It's nice to think that I have a link to 1920s Paris.

So Cecil Beaton said of Lee Miller, he didn't even like Lee Miller, but he said she looked like a sun kissed goat boy from the appian way. Do you think he said that? Of you, he may well have done.

Actually, thinking back, he's a very entertaining figure in the film. Just mentioning that.

Okay.

I felt upset on Cecil Beaton's behalf, really a bit.

Right.

I've always had a soft spot for him. He's always very nice to us. You know, he didn't mind us running around like, whatever it was, like goat.

Boys on the happy way.

Goat boys on the happy way. He was very into that.

Okay, so she's massively into her surrealism, loves all that. She gets her own apartment, she gets her own studio. By 1930, just down the road from man Ray's studio, and she starts to carve out a little bit of a niche for herself. As somebody who's not just modeling but also taking photos.

So not just a muse, in other words.

Not just a muse. Exactly. History's full of muses of this kind. But she is more ambitious than that.

And especially in Paris at that time.

Yeah, of course.

I mean, that's what Picasso is all about.

She's more ambitious because she is taking kind of society portraits. So she's doing loads of kind of bohemian people. She gets in with the french aristocracy. This is the thing about the nexus between the fashion industry in the sort of early 20th century fashion industry and the world of high society kind of aristocratic types. She has all these kind of aristocratic friends, doesn't she?

Can I tell you about one of them? Do, who I read about in the Bodleian yesterday.

Yeah.

It's an interesting link to the french revolution.

I love a link to the french revolution.

And also she's in the film. She's played by Marianne Cotyllard. And this is Solange Marie Christine Louise de la Briffe, the Duchess of Ayenne, who has married Dominic to the son of the 8th Duke of Nye Nouai Noi.

So remind me, the Duchess of Noailles was the person who greeted Marie Antoinette when she arrived in stickler for etiquette.

And Lafayette married into the family.

Right.

And her son is the guy who kicks off the abrogation of feudal privileges.

Yeah, that's right.

In the National assembly.

Should have done it two years earlier.

So she's a fashion editor of French Vogue. She lives in a chateau. She's the kind of the. The beating heart of Le Tout Paris. And, you know, it's.

That's great.

I mean, it's kind of proustian, I guess.

Yeah, it is proustian.

Proust, Picasso, Cocteau, Coco Chanel. She's friends. I mean, it's amazing. It's like that Woody Allen film set in Paris where they kind of rush around meeting Hemingway and everybody, right? Basically every famous person in Paris she is meeting.

And do you know what? Her father comes over in December 1930, and he's the man from.

Does he take photographs?

He keeps seeing that with his.

Oh, my darling, do you want to.

Take your clothes off, Lee? Do you want to, for old times sake? And we'll take a quick photo. He comes over from Poughkeepsie, New York, and he's a work superintendent, remember? And you would think, now, if this was a film, you know, if this bit was a film, you would say, he'll be very shocked at this point. You know, he'll be very disappointed. No, he loves it. And you know who particularly likes Man Ray? He loves Man Ray. Can't get enough of it.

Well, they're both photographers, aren't they?

Man Ray says, oh, I've invented a brilliant new tripod. And Theodore Miller is absolutely, it's not a euphemism. And Theodore Miller is absolutely delighted by this. Can't get enough of it. So that's all great. But there is a cloud. There are numerous clouds, actually, but this is one. It's an egyptian cloud. So she ends up having a relationship in Paris with this guy called Aziz Elouibet, who's married a circassian woman who are famously beautiful.

Aren't they, the Circassians?

They're very beautiful.

That was providing the slave girls in the harbor.

Exactly. Madness. To divorce Circassian, which is what this bloke does. He divorces his wife because he's so infatuated with Lee. But also, by this point, man reigns. He's all in. He's very possessive.

And is Mister Aziz. I mean, is he very rich?

I think he is rich, yeah.

Is he very charming? Is he very suave? What is he?

He's Omar Sharif.

Dodi al Fayed.

Well, yes, that's a slightly less. I think Omar Sharif is more. He's a more enticing proposition than Dodi Fayed, isn't he?

Yeah.

I mean, not dissing Dodi Fayed, but Dodi Fayed put up the finance for the killing fields. Chariots of fire.

Yeah, chariots of fire.

And the producer said he was the laziest man he'd ever met in his life.

Always on yachts, isn't he?

Yeah.

Kind of hanging out in restaurants in Paris.

Yeah. So anyway, she flees away from this love tug of war. Tug of love. She flees back to New York. She opens her own studio. So New York is now in the depths of the depression. It's late 1932. There'd have been soup kitchens, starving people on the streets. She's not interested in that at all. She will, of course, be very interested in the gritty reality of life and capturing that in her photographs, but not in 1932. So she's spending her kind of nights playing poker and dancing and that kind of high life and a day society.

Photos, which, again, it's that kind of Dorothy Parker wisecracking broads, you know, speakeasies.

Absolutely.

She really is kind of inhabiting every going cliche in the interwar years.

Exactly.

And she's living it to the full.

She is, absolutely. Then in the summer of 1934. Two years later, this bloke, Aziz, turns up in New York and they sort of rekindle their romance and she introduces him to her father. I don't know whether they bond over photography. I don't think they do.

Yeah. So is Aziz into photography?

I don't think he is. Massively, actually. I think he's into.

Into Lee Miller.

He's into Lee Miller. But also, here's an interesting thing. He's really into air conditioning.

Is he?

Yeah.

There can't be much air conditioning in you in Cairo at this point.

No, he's in on it early.

Early adopter.

He has a contract from the egyptian government to provide a lot of air conditioning and this will become a theme of his later life. Anyway, interesting. She introduces him to her parents and she says that Mister Adiz, he loves his air conditioning. Brilliant. And her parents think, oh, a charming man. And then, to their astonishment, because they've met loads of her boyfriend, she goes off with him to the egyptian consulate and gets married to him in New York. And everyone is astounded by that.

Is it. I mean, is it love?

I think she's. I think it's a lark. Okay, a bit of a lark. Disappointingly, perhaps slightly prosaically. Do you know where they go on their honeymoon?

I do. Because you've got it down on the notes.

Yeah. Pretend you don't know.

I don't dominate. Where do they go on honeymoon?

They go to Niagara Falls. To me, that's a bit coach party for a honeymoon, even in the 1930s.

Yeah, but maybe it's ironic in a surrealist way.

Yeah. Like getting married in Las Vegas or something. It's slightly ironic. Do you think?

Yeah. I don't know.

Anyway, they then go off to Egypt. So she's then in Cairo for the next three years.

Cairo.

Cairo, yeah. She doesn't actually. It's not as glamorous and exotic as you would think.

However, Dominic. However, she does take a photograph that will subsequently be employed by the great belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte in 1938.

She does. I know she does. She does that in the desert, doesn't she?

Yeah.

But we have a letter to her parents in 1935. She hasn't communicated them for about a year. She says, I've spent an extremely happy and healthy year, my time being occupied between studying chemistry six mornings a week at the american university and three afternoon hours a week of Arabic. Also a great deal of poker and bridge.

I think that's quite an impressive way.

To pass your time, a year of doing chemistry.

Come on. Dominic, you're not going to be doing chemistry.

I wouldn't, I wouldn't.

So I don't think you're in any position to throw stones.

Okay. What she does do, that's more exciting. She's still keeping up with her photography. So she goes to Jerusalem for a day, she goes to the monasteries in Sinai. Have you been to them?

Yes, I have.

You must be all over them.

Yeah, I've filmed there actually.

Have you? So you've gone one better. She was just taking still photographs.

Yeah, I've one upmanship.

There she goes somewhere. I know you haven't been. The Oasis Siwa, where Alexander was proclaimed the son of the son of Zusamon. And she takes all these fantastic photos of the desert. So if you look at one of the books on Lee middle and you get her desert photographs, they're quite surrealist and they're very stark and very striking. They're obviously very much of their time. So it's kind of.

They're like a Magrita painting.

Yeah. They're kind of windswept rocks in a sort of phallic formation and all this kind of thing, clouds looming over the, over the dunes, all this sort of.

Business that look like the naked female torso.

Exactly, exactly. That's exactly what it is.

Or the wings of a dove.

But she's clearly, frankly, a bit bored with mister. Mister. He's only so much air conditioning chat one can.

Air conditioning banter one can put up.

With, but talking of banter. So she sometimes goes back to Paris and when she's in Paris, she meets this posh Englishman who has partly dyed himself.

So this is Alexander Skarsgrd in the.

Film Roland Penrose in reality, who has partly dyed himself bright blue for surrealist bance reasons.

But not permanently?

No, not permanently. So he's Roland Penrose. He is a Quaker. Quakers are such a theme of the rest of his history. He's a Quaker.

Yeah, we love a Quaker.

Richard Nixon, Benjamin Lay, and also he.

Went to Queen's College, Cambridge, my alma mater.

Really? Yeah. God, it all connects.

Yeah.

Cecil Beaton, you filmed at Sinai, you kicked a ball over.

I am shadowing Lee Miller's life.

That's a terrifying image. So he's a Quaker, he's a conscientious objector, he's a tremendous friend of Picasso and of various surrealists because he's got.

An amazing collection, hasn't he?

Incredible. Yeah. And he goes on to become.

He fancy ICA, doesn't he, or something.

He does. He finds the Institute for Contemporary Arts he becomes the grand old man of kind of british contemporary art.

And just a spoiler, he has a tremendous war.

He does indeed. So he's a funny mix because on the one hand he's a Quaker, so he's very formal and he's very kind of well mannered. On the other hand, he's a surrealist.

So he loves dyeing himself blue.

So he's blue. He's blue like an ancient Briton, I guess. Anyway, they start this relationship and they go traveling in the Balkans and stuff. And he actually comes out to Egypt to see her. And I think she must have with Aziz, the similar kind of man raised style, open relationship because they're all tremendous friends. And in the spring of 1939, she says to her, cease is talking about air conditioning units. And she says, I've got something to tell you. I've decided to go and hang out.

With this blue guy.

Yeah. Go to England with this blue Quaker.

Fair enough.

Zeus says, you know, my dear, my dear, I'm very pleased for you. I'll give you some money. And he even comes to Port said to see her off on their boat to Southampton. So by the late summer of 1939, she has moved in with Roland in Hampstead. Naturally.

Does Mister Aziz provide air conditioning as a.

Do you need it in north London? I don't believe you do.

Probably not.

And also there'd be no room for it.

But Mister Goldfinger, yeah, he'd be all into it.

Their neighbors have got. There must be neighbors of Goldfinger.

Yeah, connect.

Anyway, there wouldn't be a room because his house is full of artworks. Picasso, yeah, Miro, Magritte, all of this stuff. And when she arrives in the house she actually says, my God, you've got so many brilliant copies. They look like the originals. And he sort of says, my dear, they are the originals. But then, Tom, so I was reading all this in the biography and I was like, this is great. Love all this. And then I turned the page and you know what, the sentence that I read next, Tom, the clouds of war were gathering and they were, of course they were. And the greatest adventure of Lee Miller's life was about to begin.

Okay, well, let's take a break there. And when we come back we will be looking at the extraordinary story of Lee Miller's record in the second World War. And indeed Rowland's. This episode is sponsored by our good friends at sky all because their new sky original film Lee is available from Friday the 13 September only in cinemas now.

Tom, I know you love a red carpet premiere. I do. You've been to a few red carpet premieres, thanks to the rest is history. But you had a personal screening. Is that possible? Are you so important?

Well, as I mentioned in this episode, it was in Gary Lineker's private cinema at Goalhanger Towers, and it was a pretty luxurious experience.

Well, I'll leave it to listeners to make up their own minds what they think of that. But Tom, what do you think of the film?

It's really gripping. It kind of wonderfully conveys the sense of Lee Miller's life before the war. And so what we talk about in this episode, the way in which she goes from being the cutting edge of the avant garde high society, all of that, to becoming this hard boiled, almost kind of female Gi who goes absolutely into the heart of the nazi darkness. It's really good.

Yeah. And of course, it's photography like hers, kind of second World War photography that lays the foundation for a lot of the kind of war correspondence and war photography stuff that we associate with later conflicts. So Vietnam, for example.

Yeah. So on the Vietnam War, there's an amazing sequence where she sees the first use of napalm in so malo, and it's one of the kind of the great moments in the film. So highly, highly recommended. Lee is out in cinemas from Friday the 13 September and you can go to sky.com to find out more. The building we were in and all the others which face the the fort were being spat at now. Ping, bang, hitting above our window into the next, breaking on the balcony below. Fast, queer noise impact before the gun noise itself, following the same sound pattern. Hundreds of rounds crossing and recrossing where we were. Machine gun fire belched from the end. Pillbox. The men fell flat, stumbling and crawling into the shelter of shell holes. Some crept on, others sweeping back to the left of the guns. Angle one man reaching the top. He was enormous. A square shouldered silhouette, black against the sky between the pillbox and the fort. He raised his arm, the gesture of a cavalry officer with saber waving the others on. He was waving to death and he fell with his hand against the fort.

So that was Lee Miller writing in Vogue in October 1944. And she's describing the battle for St Malo, which she is in the middle of it. And in the Kate Winsett film that's just opening, this is what the film opens with, very dramatic kind of band of brothers style action sequence and Dominic. It's a huge contrast, isn't it, with all the photography and the air conditioning and the psychoanalysis and Picasso and blue Quakers and stuff. Of the first half. So what's going on? How does she get from all that to being shot at in newly liberated France in 1944?

Well, it's a remarkable story, and I suppose you could say, in a way, that's the story of western society in the 1930s and 1940s, in microcosm, in one person's life. So the very abrupt transition from, as you say, that world of parties and photography and surrealist larks to the sort of deadly serious battle for Sammolo in 1944. It's quite striking, bros, I think. I mean, she's not really renowned as a writer, but.

But she's influenced by, I guess. Well, she goes on, doesn't she, to do a kind of photo sequence after the war about Joyce's Dublin, and there's a kind of the influence of modernist prose there.

Yeah, Hemingway or something, which is exactly what you'd expect.

Or Hemingway.

Yeah, exactly. And I think the other. The striking thing, it's in vogue, that. That report.

Is that British Vogue or American Vogue?

Yes, British Vogue.

Okay, so that's with Audrey Withers, who's her editor.

Yes. So we. So we left there in 1939, having arrived in Britain, and within weeks, the storm clouds of war have burst and have broken. They're broken. Yeah. So Britain's at war and she immediately volunteers her services to British Vogue. And actually what they use her to do is, I mean, this is a sign of the kind of phony war that at first, 1930, 919 40, they are literally using her to take photographs of handbags. There'll be a sort of feature on nice new belts in the season. And she's doing it because, of course, for most people, the war in Britain, the war has not yet impinged. The war is happening in Poland. It's somewhere else.

But she does have Cecil Beaton being catty to her.

Yes, that's right. He is consistently very catty, pretty grueling. But as late as sort of the summer autumn of 1940. So after Dunkirk, after the Battle of Britain, during the Blitz, you can open Vogue and there is no mention of the war at all. Very little mention of the war. So Vogue was actually bombed in October 1940 and production of the magazine didn't.

Stop, presumably because the assumption is that people want it as a reminder of the world of peace, the world of comfort, where you're not being rationed, where there aren't restrictions on the clothing you can buy.

That's right. Certainly at first, I think, and I think that speaks to. To a wider issue, which is that in Britain, in particular in 1939, and the first part of 1940, the war is really happening at one remove, and people don't want it to feel real. You know, they don't want Britain to be like Poland or wherever, Norway. They want to preserve, as you say, a bit of life, but actually, yeah, a bit of normal life. But Vogue has gone to subscription only because of print and paper rationing. So actually, all this stuff that she's doing, it's good stuff, Tom, but it's not reaching the newsstands. It's exclusively for Vogue subscribers.

So very much like the rest is history club.

Very much like the bonus episodes that we do for the rest is history club. Exactly.

Which are actually the best, aren't they?

That was the analogy that struck me, yeah, completely. Then that was completely the analogy that came to mind organically. Anyway, she's very keen, you know, that she has this curiosity and this ambition, so she is keen to get out and actually chronicle the war.

So that Ed Morib thing that we opened with, did she feel that she is doing her bit for Britain's war effort?

I think so. I think absolutely, because some of her images, they're perfect for the sort of propaganda efforts, particularly for rousing people in America. So if you'd look at the grim glory book that you began with, the most famous photograph in there is called revenge on culture. And it's an image, again, that I think a lot of people may have seen, even if they don't immediately realize it was by Leigh Miller. It's a statue that has fallen, and a kind of iron bar has. Has fallen across the statue as though it's cutting its throat. And the breast of the statue has been kind of bruised and battered by a falling brick. So it's just kind of lying amid the rubble. And this photograph with the title Revenge on culture, it's kind of. It's an image, a symbol of the nazi onslaught against western civilization. And this went kind of viral, as it were, worldwide. So it was even reproduced on the front pages of sort of egyptian newspapers and things, and it was seen as a symbol of nazi barbarism. Then there's a story that she did that ran as a big spread in american vogue.

It was about women ats, women auxiliary territorial service, women manning a searchlight in north London, so not far from where she lived. And again, it's like ordinary women doing their bits for the war. And then she did things like she took photographs of Henry Moore, the war artist, in London underground stations. So stuff like this. And she is experimenting also. I mean, for people who are interested in photography. The war sees tremendous advances in photography. So there are new cameras, like there's a 35 millimeter Leica camera, which has a much faster lens and faster film speed, so that you can take images, you know, you can improvise spontaneous pictures in a way that you couldn't have done ten or 20 years earlier. So she's very good at that, at sort of taking pictures on the fly. And she's also kind of keen to write her own copy. You know, she doesn't want to see her pictures butchered by other people's copy.

You know, that extract that I read, I think. I think it's pretty good.

Yeah, I think it is good. She actually hates writing. She's quite good at it. But it's a really. It doesn't come. Photography comes naturally because she's always done it with her father and because you.

Said this, she's always on the move, obeys her instincts. And I imagine the faster the speed at which she can take photographs, the better it suits her temperament, perhaps. Would that be fair?

I think that's absolutely right. I think that's exactly it. When she's actually rushing around taking photographs spontaneously, she loves it and she's brilliant at it. When she gets back to the hotel and she has to type, I mean, she also massively overwrites. I know I'm not one to criticize her for doing that, but she will send Vogue 10,000 words of copy to accompany a couple of images, and they're like, this is kind of too much. We were hoping for about 500. Anyway, what she really wants to do is to be a proper war correspondent. She's fallen in love with that. That has given her, I think, a sense of mission and a sense of a purpose that she's actually lacked all her life. And I think one of the tragic things about Lee Miller's life is that she's very restless, the first part of it. That's why she's hanging around with the air conditioning magnates in Egypt and whatnot. And then she has this brief moment during the war where she knows who she is and what she wants to do. And then, as we'll see after the war, she's kind of restless and unfulfilled again.

And there are so many people like that, aren't there?

There are.

Who live at their most vivid during the war.

Absolutely.

And then it's a terrible comedown afterwards.

It's a terrible letdown, yeah. Once the US joins the war, she gets accreditation to the us forces in Britain, but she's still quite frustrated because she's still stuck in Britain and she wants to be kind of on the move and doing exciting things. And then D Day happens in June 1944, and that really is her break. The liberation of Europe is the moment where her career really comes alive.

And for her, going back to France, where she'd been so happy, I mean, it must be very, very intense in the way it is, say, for Hemingway.

Yeah. If it was somewhere else, it wouldn't.

Have the kind of resonance because she speaks the language. She's got lots of friends there, and as we'll see, I mean, lots of her friends have had terrible experiences, her french friends.

Yeah.

So it's really personal for her.

But before she goes to France, so she goes over first in July, and she goes to. She's sent on an assignment to cover us army field hospitals in Normandy, because the battle in Normandy is incredibly bloody, even after D Day. And she's there for five days and she takes 35 rolls of film and she writes 10,000 words. And she gives this to vogue. And they are stunned. They weren't expecting anything like this. And they run it in two double page spreads in the next issue, in the September issue. And from that point onwards, it's like she's found her meaning. She even changes the way she dresses. So all the sort of the stylish, you know, 1930s high society look that's all gone. She wears kind of battle dress, you know, prides herself on eating the same rations as the servicemen, on kind of sitting around playing cards and that kind of, you know, almost like the routine of the war, the long stretches of boredom interspersed with sudden activity. She loves all that, that kind of world that the gis.

But suits her temperament, clearly.

Yeah, it absolutely does. And she wangles this deal to go and cover what's going on in Sam Marlow. And actually, at this point, the allies are kind of telling their public that St. Malo has been taken. But she gets there and she finds out it hasn't at all. That basically the Germans are all in this citadel and the US 83rd Division. US Army 83rd Division are fighting this ferocious and incredibly brutal battle to get it. And so that bit that you read is her kind of in the thick of the action. People are dropping dead around her. But also the really shocking thing I discovered from the book the US Air force are using, napalm. It's one of the first instances of the sustained use of napalm.

Brilliantly done in the film.

Dominic, is it? Yeah. I mean, I can imagine it would be incredibly spectacular. And she, you know, takes photographs, and she writes about this because I had.

No idea napalm was being used that early.

No, I didn't. I foolishly so. Just because I associated with Vietnam, I just assumed. Yeah, but no, the sensors in London took out all her shots of the napalm being used because, understandably, were like, this is very bad probability for our war efforts. And actually, because she had exceeded her instructions. So she had gone into the combat zone when she was meant to have been chronicling the restoration of civil order. She actually gets in trouble and she gets temporarily put under house arrest in Rennes.

Don't the british secret Service worry that she might be communist as well, or working for the Soviets? Is that true or not?

I'm not sure that is true, actually. I haven't seen. Certainly in the biography by her son, there's no evidence of that. I have seen. I think what's happened is I've read newspaper reports about her name being in files, being in a list.

Okay.

But I think it's just. It's not like Charlie Chaplin being refused a, you know, re entry to the United States or whatever it was. Right. Obviously, she has associated, perhaps in a less overt way than, you know, your Oppenheimers or something. She's associated with some pretty left wing people. But, I mean, that's what happens when you hang around with blue painted Quakers in the salons of surrealist Paris, Tom. Kind of occupational hazard. But I don't think it massively holds her back or anything, because she's let out again. Anyway, she gets to Paris for the liberation, and all her kind of surrealist pals are kind of surfacing from their studios where they've been hiding away for the last few years. And they're really astounded when they see this woman.

Yeah. This hard boiled woman of accent.

Is this the same Lee Miller who was kind of, you know, looking so stylish and getting up to all kinds of amusement?

But equally, Lee Miller, when she meets some of her friends, finds them utterly changed as well. So we mentioned Solange, the aristocrat, you know, the aristocratic epicenter of parisian life. And she had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 because her husband, the son of the 8th Duke of Nye, had been in the resistance, and there'd been an anonymous denunciation. And so he got sent off to Belsen, where he died just a few days before the. Before its liberation. And she was in prison a good long time. And Lee Miller found her. She said she'd been terribly changed, although she does. I mean, she goes back and then works in vogue after the war and becomes a luminary of the trant closure and all that.

Well, again, I mean, it's a good example of these people whose lives maybe seem so pampered and so luxurious. They are embodiments of wider social kind of political changes that are affecting millions of people. Anyway, she's there in Paris. And actually, the sad thing is that she'd always loved Paris and thought it was brilliant and all that stuff, but actually, now, especially after Sam Marlowe, she actually finds it too tame. She's now addicted to the adrenaline rush of combat and the horror and all that kind of thing. And this is something that if you've ever read memoirs of walking correspondence, they will say how at first they're horrified and they find it so shocking, but it becomes a kind of compulsive thing.

Not for me.

Not for you.

No, never again.

Right. I like how you're bracketing yourself there. You know, you're giving the impression you had a little flirtation with the life as a war correspondent.

Well, kind of. I mean, you know, going into the Islamic State heartlands when they're all hanging and rushing around capturing westerners and chopping off their heads, I just thought, no, I'm too cowardly for this.

He came back and did a podcast for me instead that says it all, doesn't it?

That's true courage.

So she joins this basically signs up to go along as an embedded photographer of the US army with this friend of hers, another photographer, a very good photographer called Dave Sherman. And all through kind of late 1940, 419 45, they are moving through. For somebody from, you know, eye society in New York, I mean, this is an apocalyptic scene. The roads choked, the refugees, villages bombed out, bodies everywhere. It's pouring with rain, there's mud, constant fighting.

But the worst is yet to come, isn't it?

Yeah, constant fighting. And she is loving it in a way. I mean, that's a weird thing to say because obviously it's horrible. And she says she comments on the.

Horror, but she feels a purpose, I suppose.

Yeah. And if you read her writing, I think her prose captures this kind of weird. I don't know whether sensuousness is the right word, the sensuousness of the horror of war. She talks about the colors and the sound and all that stuff.

But the kind of camera she now has, she can take photographs very rapidly in a way that technologically hadn't been possible before. And so in that sense, she must feel that she is in a position to bring home to people away from the front what it looks like, in a way that simply hadn't been possible before, ever, in history.

Yeah, I think that's true. She has two cameras, so she's taken with two shots all the time, because she has twelve shots on a roll and she never wants to miss anything. So she's taking loads and loads of photographs. And I agree, the photographs are capturing the horror of war in a way that even, arguably, in the first world war, it had been very, very difficult to do. Certainly in even the very first kind of modern wars, the crimean war, the us civil war, something it had been almost impossible to do. And even the way she writes, there's a visual quality to it. I'll never see acid yellow and gray again, like where shells burst near snow without seeing. Also the pale, quivering faces of the replacements, gray and yellow with apprehension. Their fumbling hands and furtive, short sighted glances. The fields they must cross. And the way she writes about the kind of. The pitted, cratered battlefields and stuff, it is, you know, the training in photography and surrealist art has kind of prepared her for all that, in a weird way.

And so, Dominic, we come now to probably, I mean, the greatest horror that she will see, and the photographs for which perhaps she's most famous, which is the photos that she takes in Dachaudental.

Yeah.

And there is a sense with that, isn't there, that the horror is almost too great for prose to cope with. Therefore, the role of photography becomes, I mean, seismically important.

I think it's massively important, because, of course, documenting the reality of what the Germans had done than what the Nazis had done was so important in the denazification process. And the idea that you have to show people the reality and merely describing it is not enough. You have to show, not tell.

You need proof, don't you?

Yeah, you need proof. Exactly.

Because people won't believe what they're being told, are they?

Exactly. And remember, Dachau is not a holocaust extermination camp. Dachau is a concentration camp, one of the first setup after the beginning of the Third Reich. It's outside Munich, so it's in the kind of nazi heartland. It was liberated on the 29 April 1945. She and Dave Sherman, her friend and colleague, they're in the first group of press men who are allowed into the camp, and the place is littered with bodies. So there were 39 railway cars full of dead bodies. Those people who are still alive in the camp are living in unimaginable squalor, riddled with cholera and typhus and utterly emaciated. I mean, it's a vision of. To say a vision of hell is such a cliche. It doesn't do it justice. Only the photographs do it justice, actually. And a lot of the photographers are physically sick. They struggle to even take the photos. She does it and she sends this telegram with the photos back to Vogue. I mean, the fact that they're being.

Sent to Vogue, to Audrey Withers, isn't it, in London.

Yeah. Andrea Risbrough, I think, in the film, isn't it? Yeah. You were saying?

Yeah.

The fact that it's in Vogue makes it all the more incongruous and horrific. And she says, I implore you to believe this is true, because obviously she knows people won't believe it anyway. They've been to Dachau, and as I said, it's just outside Munich. She and Lee go into Munich and they basically find a place. There are soldiers everywhere, us army, whatever, lots of people pouring into the city. They find a billet in one of these apartments, loads of apartments being taken over. And it's at Prince Regent Square, no. 27. And as her son's biography says, it seems like a very respectable place. It looks like a merchant or a retired clergyman lives there. And when they get in, they see that on the silver, it's all embossed with this monogram. Ah. And the swastikas everywhere. And it is Adolf Hitler's old apartment, which he had maintained in Munich while he was off in Berlin. And the wolfs lair and all these.

This is where he'd been hanging out when he was meeting up with Unity Mitford in the cafes and things.

Right? Yes. Oh, my word. I can't believe you've shoehorned at Unity Mitford. That is. That is textbook Holland. Now, this is the image that lots of people have seen. She gets into the bath and has a bath. And the reason she has a bath is not because it's Hitler's bath, it's because she's covered with mud.

The mud of Dachau.

The mud of Dachau, yeah, you're right. And Dave takes a photograph of her with her boots in front of the bath and she's looking out of the bath. And, of course, this is the photo you'll often see now when you google Lee Miller, because people are struck by the incongruity of this pioneering female photographer in Hitler's bath.

I mean, it's the one thing, I think that everyone will know about her, maybe even more than the Dakar photographs.

But the interesting thing is that wasn't the photograph that really caught people's attention at the time.

Or was it not?

No. So at the time, that photograph is not a great sensation and people don't all know about it at the time. The photograph that goes viral, as it were, is a shot they set up, which is they get a GI and they get him to lie on Hitler's old bed reading Mein Kampf with the telephone in one hand. And Dave took it. And it was in Life magazine and it was a huge, huge sensation.

When did the Hitler bath one become as famous as it has become?

I think it didn't become famous until Lee Miller became famous. Right, and Lee Miller didn't become famous until her son published this biography in the 1980s. Because as we will see, actually, if we'd done this podcast in the 1970s or sixties, nobody would have really heard of Lee. She was forgotten, which is an interesting story in and of itself. So they go to Eva Brown's apartment and Lee has a nap on Eva Brown's bed. They then go out to the berghof, the eagle's nest, Hitler's kind of mountain retreat, and it's being destroyed. It's razed to the ground by the US army, and there's a fair amount of looting. Understandably, people are taking souvenirs. So Dave takes a the complete works of Shakespeare in translation with Hitler's book plate. So Hitler's copy of the complete.

Well, he's jewish, isn't he? So, yeah, you know, it's all the more personal for him.

And Lee took Hitler's drinks tray, which he kept, and presumably the family still have Hitler's silver.

Well, if you see the film, it features.

Well, that's great. So the war ends just a few days after that. And her son in his biography says this was the great anti climax of Lee's life because after that point, she has lost that wonderful, precious, but also horrifying sense of purpose that she had for that brief period of time. She still is doing stuff for Vogue and whatnot. This is a good example of what anti climax it was. The next assignment they gave her, they said, go to Denmark and, you know, take photographs showing how everything's going back to normal in Denmark now the war is over.

Of course, intrinsically that's not the same, is it?

It's such a boring story.

Yeah.

You know, danish people are buying shoes again or whatever. I mean, it's not exciting.

And meanwhile, Dominic, what about Roland? Because we mentioned that he actually has a very interesting war because he's a conscientious objector. So obviously he's not in the army, but he, using his mastery of the visual arts, he becomes senior lecturer at the camouflage development and training center at Farnham Castle in Surrey.

Yeah.

And he has this color photograph of Lee Miller kind of painted in camouflage and kind of uses this as illustration of what you can do.

Yeah.

To disguise things.

Because she's naked in the photograph.

Yeah.

And she's covered with the camouflage net. And he shows it to his students and he says, if I can hide my friend Lee's charms with camouflage, then you can hide anything, of course.

So they're not married at this point?

No, they're not married.

They're just good friends.

She's married to. To Mister Aziz.

Still, of course, with his air conditioning.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, God knows what's been going on with him. So before she goes back to Hampstead, to north London, you can see she's trying to rekindle the spirit of adventure. If you think of that sort of third man, you know, Vienna, bombed out, battered, ravaged.

Yeah. And also, I suppose, the iron curtain starting to come down everywhere.

Exactly. So she goes to Vienna, she goes to Budapest, and she actually photographs the execution of the kind of fascist collaborationist prime minister. She goes on into Romania. There, Tom, she is massaged by a dancing bear. Really?

How did that happen?

She has a very bad back because she's been sleeping on the ground, traveling with the soldiers, and she meets somebody in Romania and they say, what, you got a bad back? There's only one cure for a bad back, and that's to be massaged by a dancing bear. And she actually finds. Now, the romanian government had tried to outlaw dancing bears because they said they were. It was a symbol of backwardness.

What, so retrain them as massage therapists?

No, no, the massage was always part of the dancing bear repertoire.

Oh, I see.

Anyway, she finds this village and there's this bloke who's like, you know, a romany guy, and he's got a dancing bear. And she gets the bear to massage her. And she wrote afterwards, the bear knew her business. She walked up and down my back on all fours, as gently as if on eggs. And there's music playing. So the blokes obviously playing some, like, violin or something. As the music started, she raised up on her hind legs and shuffled up and down my back. It was crushing and exhilarating. She said it was brilliant. It fixed her back. So if you've ever got a bad back, Tom.

Right.

Remember this?

Get hold of a bear.

Yeah. Have you ever seen a dancing bear?

No, I've never seen a dancing bear.

I hobnobbed with the dancing bear at the Koprivsky folk festival in Bulgaria. Did you? When I was backpacking? Yeah.

Well, I mean, this. This is quite a theme that we could perhaps do an episode on. Is dancing bears in the second World War? Because, of course, there's a very famous polish bear who gets rescued.

Oh, it's a wojtek.

Wojtek. Who ended up having swims in the River Tweed directly below my scottish estate.

Wow.

So he's. He's very big in our neighborhood, seeing.

That we've done monkeys and dogs.

Yeah, we should do bears.

Bears would be a great subject.

Anyway, Dominic, we're going off pieced.

Yeah.

Basically, she's rushing around. She's trying to get her adrenaline kick, try and relive old glories, but she doesn't. The war is over. So how does she end up married to Roland Penrose? Because she does, doesn't she? I mean, they end up married and they live and die as a couple.

She effectively has a breakdown in Bucharest. She gets all the way to Bucharest and she has a breakdown. She can't keep writing. She's run out of money, she's actually run out of options. She's gone all the way. She's gone almost, as it were, to the end of the line in an attempt to try and recapture this spirit of excitement. And Dave, her old pal, says, you know, you've been ignoring Roland's letters. I think you should just go back to him now. And that's actually the one thing that she doesn't want to do, is to settle down. She's never settled down all her life. I mean, the whole point of her is that she's this kind of free spirit, but she has no other option. So she goes back to Amsterdam. Roland, who I have to say comes out of this incredibly well. She's been ignoring all his letters and stuff, but she says, I'm back now. And he says, great. Well, you know, welcome home. They have a son, Anthony. They get married. Roland, it's all brilliant for him. He's been a tremendous hit with his camouflage in the war. He found the Institute for Contemporary Art.

He does loads of stuff for the british council. He becomes a big star of the arts world. He ends up getting knighted. So it's onwards and upwards for him. And some people may well say this is the classic story. The man succeeds and the woman, you know, unbelievably talented in her own way, is just forgotten. Which is exactly what happens, because she's very. She's empty, she's depressed. It's such a classic war correspondence story.

And they end up in a farm in Sussex.

That's right, full of Picasso and Hitler's drinks tray.

But Picasso is kind of coming over, isn't he?

Yeah.

All her old surrealist and artist friends from Paris are always coming over to this farmhouse in Sussex, and she's kind of rustling them up weird kind of deep fried marshmallows or something like that.

Yeah. So here's the interesting thing. She was a terrific photographer, and in the 1940s, her photographs had been sensations across the world and had been some of the defining images of the second world war. But by the 1950s or 1960s, that is completely forgotten, and not least because she herself almost willfully tries to put it all behind her and to say it happened to somebody else who's long gone and all this kind of thing. So, yes, she's doing all this cooking and she's, you know, basically almost like a kind of house. I mean, a housewife. That's what she is.

But she's also. She's drinking very heavily.

Yeah, drinking very heavily.

A very piling on the pounds.

Yeah. Her son paints a very unsparing.

And, well, you've got it here. I mean, her face no longer had its fineness. Wrinkles and folds were proliferating and her eyes were becoming puffy. Her hair was getting thinner and lifeless, the fat was piling on, making her body look coarse and bulky. To make matters worse, the woman who had once been described as a snappy dresser was fast becoming a slob. I mean, that's. That's no way to write about your.

Mother, is it, Tom? If your own heirs write that about you one day, you'd be.

I'd be very upset.

You'd be very upset. Right. I think it's actually a very sad story. And the saddest element of it for me is that she puts all her cameras in the cupboard, never takes them out again. She refuses to take photographs again. I mean, she won't even take family photographs. So people will say to her, come on, you love photography. Photography is your thing. You're actually one of the world's great photographers.

But you can see that I am reminded of Sir Geoffrey Boycott, the great England opening batsman, who, when he retired from cricket, put away his bats, has never picked it up since.

Right. Well, that's the parallel that will immediately have occurred to, you know, if you've.

Played against the greatest bowlers. You don't want to be arcing around on the village green.

Yeah.

And it may be the same kind.

Of idea, but the interesting thing is that Geoffrey boycott Tom was never one to downplay his own achievements.

That's true. That's true.

But Leigh Miller, people go to her and they say, I understand you were a great photographer in the second world War. I would really love to see your negatives. I'd like to see the old pictures. And she says, they're all gone. They're all destroyed, which is not true. They're hidden away. And actually, she dies of cancer in 1977, and she's 70 years old, and at that point, she is pretty much completely forgotten. I mean, her death is not a news story at all. And then her son basically decides to rescue her from obscurity, and he finds 60,000 negatives in a box in the attic, and he's like, what? Oh, my God. And then he writes this biography in 1985 in which he says, you know, what a tremendous person she was. What an interesting life. His book really rescues her and creates her. Creates the Lee Miller. I mean, there is a small kind of Lee Miller industry now, and understandably so, because she's a terrific photographer and it's a great story because she's a woman. I think that's a really important part of the story, that she is a pioneering woman in a conflict of.

That is seen almost entirely as a men's war, isn't it? Yeah, quite wrongly.

But also the sense that her photographs, I mean, give you as vivid a sense as you can have in visual form of the horrors of the concentration camps and the heart of the nazi darkness.

Yeah.

I mean, when did the photographs she took of that start to be associated with her name?

Golly, I would say not until the eighties.

Right. So the same.

Yeah, I think it's the same thing. I think you can't overestimate how much her name had disappeared and she had colluded in that. You know, she wanted to lock all that part of her away. There's a kind of self loathing there, I think, which is actually part of the tragedy, really.

And she's the kind of the female Ernest Hemingway, that idea of the american who has been part of parisian life before the war, who then comes, rolls into liberated Paris and is making it into art. I mean, she's doing that in the way that Ernest Hemingway, because he's Ernest Hemingway, is famous for doing.

Yeah.

So it's all, as you said, it's kind of wonderful that her attempt to sabotage her own reputation has been redeemed.

So, what, she's got the film now? Lee.

It is called Lee, yes.

So that's the story of Lee Miller, Tom. And we love a female protagonist on the rest of history, don't we?

We absolutely do.

Nothing more.

Especially one with songs.

But songs, yeah. So we like photography, we like song. We're all about the arts. And the good news for everybody is, if you've enjoyed this, on Monday we will be back with a story of possibly the only person in world history more glamorous than Lee Miller, but arguably the most famous female protagonist of the whole 20th century. A woman whose life became synonymous with her country's political history. And that is the story of Eva Peron. Evita. And I have to say, it will feature. I don't know what the word is. I'm trying to. I'm groping for the word. It will feature sweet music performances. Sweet music by our very own Tom Holland. So on that bombshell, that was the story. Lee Miller. Next week, Evita. Thank you all for listening and goodbye.

Bye.