Toni Frissell: From Fashion Photographer to the Front Line
Toni Frissell (1907-1988) was born into a privileged Manhattan family. She used her background of wealth and social position to build a career as a fashion photographer for Vanity Fair, Vogue and Town and Country. She was one of the first photographers to move fashion photography out of the studio, transforming the way fashion and the fashionable were presented in print.
By the end of the 1930s, as the situation in Europe became more tense, Frissell became anxious to photograph something other than fashion and celebrities, writing "I became so frustrated with fashions that I wanted to prove to myself that I could do a real reporting job." Even with her connections and her track record as a magazine photographer, she was unable to get the type of long-term newspaper or magazine assignment that would allow her to be accredited as a war correspondent.
Since she couldn't get to the front, she used her social connections to pursue wartime assignments with agencies such as the U.S. Office of War Information, the American Red Cross and the Women’s Army Corps. Many of her assignments during this period were photo-reports of society women working for the Red Cross or the federal government—probably not as big a change from fashion photography as she had hoped for. There were exceptions. In 1942, in her role as pictorial historian for the American Red Cross, she covered Eleanor Roosevelt’s Red Cross trip to England and Scotland. One of her most important assignments was a story on Oveta Culp Hobby, the first director of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAACS). *
It was 1945, when the war was winding down, Frissell got a chance to visit the frontlines as part of a group organized by the Writers’ War Board.** While in Italy, she had the opportunity to photograph the Tuskegee Airman during their daily activities. She was the only professional photographer to photograph the unit, and her work is an invaluable record of their service.
After the war, Frissell returned to fashion photography, including a stint as the first woman staff photographer at Sports Illustrated.
*And later the first secretary of the new Department of Health, Education and Welfare, making her the second woman to hold a cabinet position. So many amazing historical women, so little time to write about them.
**The Writers' War Board was a private organization devoted to producing domestic propaganda during World War II. Establish by mystery novelists Rex Stout at the request of the U.S. Treasury Department soon after the United States entered the war, its original purpose was to organize prominent writers to support the sale of war bonds. It quickly moved beyond its original mission, matching writers with government agencies, and quasi-government agencies, that needed help in shaping their story. Sigrid Schultz, for example, wrote several stories about Nazi Germany for children's magazines at the request of the Writer's War Board. (Not her finest work, I must say.)
Marvin Breckinridge: One of “Murrow’s Boys”
When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 American filmmaker and freelance photojournalist Mary Marvin Breckinridge (1905-2002)* was traveling through Europe on two photojournalism assignments. She immediately went to London, where she took some of the first photos of air raid shelters and documented the evacuation of British children from the city. She was one of only four American photographers in Britain for the first months of the war and she saw no reason to leave. As she wrote to her mother, “I had planned to take the first boat home if war should start, but it now seems foolish to run away from the most interesting thing that I could be doing on earth right now.”
In November, 1939, Edward R. Murrow, head of CBS’s newly founded news division in Europe, invited Marvin to appear on a radio broadcast about changes the war had brought to England, based on a piece she had done called “An English Village Prepares for War.” That broadcast was followed by a second about women firefighters in London. Soon thereafter Murrow hired her as CBS’s first female staff broadcaster in Europe, despite the long-standing prejudice against women newscasters in radio. Murrow told Patterson: "Your stuff so far has been first-rate. I am pleased, New York is pleased, and so far as I know the listeners are pleased. If they aren't to hell with them."
One of only a handful of American women in Europe working in radio,** Breckinridge made fifty broadcasts from seven countries, including Germany. Broadcasting from Berlin, she famously slipped a negative assessment of Germany past the Nazi censors.*** Mentioning the German newspaper Völkische Beobachter, she said, almost as an aside “The motto of this important official paper is Freedom and Bread. There is still bread.”
Breckinridge's broadcasting and photojournalism careers ended abruptly in June 1940 when she married American diplomat Jefferson Patterson, who was then serving in Berlin. The State Department did not allow diplomatic spouses (which effectively meant wives) to publish photographs or articles or to broadcast on the grounds that such work could compromise diplomatic work. What a loss!
*She chose to use the name Marvin as an adult so as not to be confused with her cousin Mary Breckinridge, who founded the Frontier Nursing Service. Breckinridge (Marvin, not Mary) made an acclaimed silent film about the Frontier Nursing Service, The Forgotten Frontier, which was released in 1930.
**Including Sigrid Schultz, who added broadcast journalist to her resume in September 1938 during the Munich Conference. At first she worked as a stringer for the Mutual Broadcasting System, which was a cooperative radio network owned by member radio stations, including WGN in Chicago, which was a Tribune affiliate. By January, 1939, Sigrid was a regular in the Mutual lineup, with a fifteen-minute segment of news and analysis that ran on Sunday evenings live from Berlin
***Not that easy to do. A trio of German censors had to approve each script before broadcasters went on the air.
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Eleanor Packard. Half of “Pack and Peebee.” (I couldn’t make this stuff up.)
Eleanor Packard was a long -time correspondent for the United Press, who covered the Ethiopian War, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II. She worked as a team with her husband Reynolds Packard. They reportedly met in a bar when he got into a fight and she floored his adversary. (What the New York Times called their “two-fisted and venturesome” approach to reporting created a lot of anecdotes. It’s hard to know which stories about them are true and which are not.) Known as Pack and Peebee,* they covered major stories on four continents, beginning with China, often splitting up to cover more territory.
Big, tough-looking and often unkempt, she was no “tiger in white gloves. ” She often said she was too busy covering wars to worry about her appearance.
As a case in point, she was the first woman to wear slacks in an audience with the Pope.** In 1944, the day after American troops liberated Rome, she was one of a group of correspondents waiting to see Pope Pius XII. Packard had arrived in Rome with the Fifth Army with no clothing except her war correspondent uniform.*** There were two other women in the group, both of whom wore dresses. Vatican officials asked her to leave because of her inappropriate attire.
Just then the Pope entered the room. As he made the rounds of the correspondents, he stopped in front of Packard. saying “I presume you are American. And you have been reporting this war?”
She said yes, and tried to explain that she didn’t have any other clothes with her. He smiled, and gave her a rosary and his picture. She stayed for the interview. The story made headlines around the world.
Later that week, she was held by some Italian villagers and three American G.I.s, who suspected her of being a spy. When the G.I.s asked if she could prove she was who she claimed ,she produced her passport her war correspondent accreditation, her vaccination record, her New York checkbook and her PX card. It was the PX card that convinced the G.I.s. “We’d never seen a woman correspondent so close to the front,” one of them apologized. "It just didn’t look right."
After World War II, the Packards made their headquarters in Rome, now correspondents for the New York Daily News. Eleanor ( I refuse to call her Peebee) specialized in covering the Vatican, Including the deaths of three popes and the coronations of their successors. None of my sources mention whether she ever wore slacks to the Vatican again
*I have no idea.
**Those of you/us old enough to have endured dress codes that forced us to wear dresses to school in the winter will realize that this was a big deal.
***She apparently did not opt for the version with a skirt.