Marisa Berenson: A Life in Pictures

From her earliest breath, Vittoria Marisa Schiaparelli Berenson has lived her life in the sight of a camera’s lens. Even her christening portrait was published in Vogue. Marisa was born to style; her formidable grandmother was Elsa Schiaparelli, the Italian-born designer with Medici blood who transformed the fashion landscape with her antic and Surrealist designs. Schiap’s pretty and creative daughter, the Countess Maria Luisa Yvonne Radha de Wendt de Kerlor (known as Gogo), married Robert L. Berenson, a dashing diplomat from a dynasty of intellectuals. The happy union produced Marisa and her younger sister, Berinthia, who as “Berry” Berenson Perkins was to become a photographer who mastered the art of the captured moment.

Marisa’s childhood was spent following her peripatetic parents, although her education in a succession of European boarding schools was firmly entrenched in old-fashioned values and the culture of finishing school.

At sixteen, she was “discovered” by Vogue’s dynamic editor Diana Vreeland, a family friend, who proved to be Marisa’s Svengali, transforming the painfully shy and self-conscious teenager into the epitome of worldly self-possession, of-the-moment pizzazz, and ultimately the ideal of chameleon Youthquake beauty. As one of the most successful models of the age, she has worked with many of the great photographers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from Penn and Avedon and Hiro and Sokolsky and Sieff and Stern and Rizzo and Bailey and Beaton and Newton and Bourdin to Meisel and Scavullo and Ritts and Moon and Issermann and Afanador and Roversi and Lacombe, to name just a few. Off the printed page she has animated the work of designers from Ossie Clark and Yves Saint Laurent and Emanuel Ungaro and Valentino and Halston and Giorgio Sant’Angelo and Loris Azzaro to Azzedine Alaïa and Donna Karan and John Galliano and Tom Ford. Each has found a different facet of Marisa’s diamond-like beauty to illuminate with their lenses or accent with the cut of their cloth or feature on the cover of Vogue or Bazaar or Elle or Playboy or Newsweek or Time.

The legendary filmmaker Luchino Visconti, responding to her poetic, green-eyed beauty, cast her as von Aschenbach’s tormented wife in his magnificently evocative 1971 adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and successfully mined the histrionic talents that her modeling roles had hinted she might possess. Her performance in Bob Fosse’s 1972 Cabaret, as the chic but naive Fräulein Landauer, brought her Golden Globe nominations and confirmed a talent that Stanley Kubrick amplified further still when he cast her in his 1975 eighteenth-century epic, Barry Lyndon. Berenson inhabited the role of Lady Lyndon, an ambulant Gainsborough beauty who glided, preened, and primal-screamed through some of the stateliest rooms and most ravishing landscapes in Britain. Her movie career has subsequently taken her from comedic Hollywood romps (Blake Edwards’s 1981 S.O.B.—and the comedy continued when she gave Miss Piggy some dating advice on The Muppet Show) to a channeling of Katharine Hepburn in Clint Eastwood’s White Hunter Black Heart to European art-house productions, latterly Luca Guadagnino’s acclaimed 2009 Viscontian dynastic drama I Am Love. She has shined on Broadway’s boards in giddy Noël Coward plays, and written manuals to style and dressing.

Meanwhile, Marisa’s private life has been the stuff of legend. She has stepped out with some of the most dashing and eligible and dangerous bachelors of the age, from the beauteous actors Terence Stamp and Helmut Berger and Sam Shepard and Kevin Kline to the crooning Bryan Ferry and the tousle-haired sugar scion and surfer Arnaud de Rosnay (whose photo essays for Vogue, starring Marisa, defined sixties fantasy fashion), Rikky von Opel, of the car-making family and Formula 1 racing driver, and best-dressed David de Rothschild, scion of the French banking dynasty, whose stepmother, Marie-Hélène, gave the most dazzling costume balls of the sixties and seventies (several of them illuminated by Marisa herself).

Celebrating birthdays and openings and fashion shows and weddings and parties and the sheer joy of being young and beautiful and glamorous and at the pulsing heart of the fashionable world, Marisa’s early life was lived in the full glare of paparazzi flashbulbs, of Berry Berenson’s and Gerard Malanga’s lenses, and of Andy’s Polaroid flash. They recorded her at Xenon and Studio 54 and Régine’s and Le Sept and Le Palace with Andy and Halston and Liza and Truman (who named Marisa’s Shih Tzu King Kong, which she abbreviated to K.K.) and bronzing on the beaches of St.-Tropez and striking poses in the salons of Ferrières and gossiping with Bianca and Paloma and Loulou in the couture houses of Paris and dazzling at the White House (in Halston’s hammered satin toga) and dancing with Travolta in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Marisa transformed from golden girl to golden woman before our eyes, and (wearing Valentino ruffles) she gave her hand to the riveting James Randall before 800 guests, including Anjelica and Jack and Alana and George and le tout Hollywood, as Rona Barrett declared, “Romance is back!” The union produced a beloved daughter, Starlite Melody, but proved short-lived (Marisa’s second marriage, to the lawyer Richard Golub, lasted only a little longer).

Through it all, through the scintillations of being an It girl and the desolations of private tragedies that became public ones, Marisa has remained beautiful and serene, her life guided by the mysticism and spirituality that she first discovered during a vigil at an Indian ashram with the Beatles in the sixties.

Marisa Berenson: A Life in Pictures, $36
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