Helmut's Hollywood Album

Each winter HELMUT NEWTON, the great European photographer, leaves Monte Carlo for three months in Los Angeles. Three months of sun and stars, of fabulous flesh and fantasy

MICHAEL CAINE AT HOME WITH HIS WIFE, SHAKIRA.

Helmut Newton hates winter. Each year, at the beginning of December, he takes his wife and his camera to Hollywood, where he settles in for three months at the Chateau Marmont hotel. He normally lives in Monte Carlo, where the winters are balmy enough, but Hollywood has an added attraction: the greatest concentration in the world of handsome, powerful, and professional exhibitionists. Hollywood allows him to set his light meter to permanent sunshine and illusion. He discovered Hollywood as a tourist in 1957, and says, "I felt like I was acting in a movie just by being there." Hollywood is the ideal natural backdrop for a photographer who approaches each shot like a movie director and who is more interested in the public image of famous people than in any of their private truths. "It's a place with no reality, a sort of extension of Monte Carlo, and I can go there from home without getting the bends."

He says, "The home industries in Hollywood are music and movies, just as the home industry in Limoges is porcelain, just as in the middle of the Black Forest you find little old women making dolls." The dolls of Hollywood are served up to Helmut Newton as if on a silver platter. The swimming pool, a recurring motif in his photographs, is the most common garden accessory. Bare legs with high-heeled shoes are the norm: everything Helmut Newton has to assemble painstakingly in Europe, in order to make his pictures, grows here naturally. Maybe that's why he feels so comfortable in Los Angeles. ''I can get in my car, turn on the country-and-western station, and cruise around town just for fun, with nowhere in particular to go. I feel free. There's no angst. It's also amusing." The only cloud in this brilliant sky is the modesty that besets young actresses confronted by Helmut Newton's camera: ''They don't want to show one square inch of their flesh. They're even more prudish than during the Hays Office days. It makes me frustrated, but I'm always optimistic that they'll show me just a little more next year."

Does he express any critical attitude in his photographs? He answers in an ingenuous voice, ''I am an innocent bystander who happens to have a camera and who happens to love women."

Nicole Wisniak