THE FULL RAMPLING

A CELEBRATED PORTRAIT GETS A SEQUEL

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I've taken lots and lots of photographs of Charlotte over the years. This picture of her from 1973 (above) was pretty daring at the time. I had gone to Arles, where she was shooting Zardoz with Sean Connery, to photograph her for Playboy. We had gotten on very well, and I said I'd love to do some black-and-white pictures—the ones for Playboy were in color—and would she spend some more time sitting for me? She said, "I'd love to." So I shot lots of other photographs of her, but this is the one that really hit the headlines.

When we got together recently, I told her I wanted an echo of the picture from 1973. She said to me, "Would you like me to take my clothes off?" I said, "That would be wonderful!" She had put her glasses on sometime earlier during the sitting, to read or to look at something, and I had said, "My God, you look fantastic with those glasses—I think they make you look very sexy." As a general rule, I love glasses on a beautiful woman. So she kept those on. Then I asked, "Do you still smoke?" She said yes and I stuck a cigarette in her mouth. So there she was, looking, as you can see from the photograph, absolutely gorgeous 28 years later—and voila! It was all over pretty quickly. She's drinking water, by the way, but people are free to think it's vodka.

HELMUT NEWTON