Annie Leibovitz

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. I'm Stephen Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut. I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of, you know, developing the profile of this beautiful finished product. With every sip, you get a little something different. Visit Gentleman'sCutBourbon.com or your nearest Total Wines or BevMo. This message is intended for audiences 21 and older. Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky. For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit Gentleman'sCutBourbon.com. Please enjoy responsibly. I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.

0:37My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed. It doesn't matter how much I fight. It doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this. It doesn't matter how much justice we get. None of it's going to get me pregnant. Listen to What Happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ruthie's Table 4 is now on YouTube. To watch this episode and others, just visit ruthiestable4.com forward slash YouTube. You're listening to Ruthie's Table 4 in collaboration with me and Em, intelligent style for busy women.

1:23Last November, after a long day in the River Cafe, I was finally getting into a taxi there when I saw three women, kind of lost, looking for our front door. Instinctively, I felt they were from New York, and instinctively, I knew it had been a long day for them too. It was only when they were safely inside that I looked up and saw someone I'd never met but I'd always loved, Annie Leibowitz. The restaurant wasn't ready for dinner, but we went to a table close to the kitchen. It began a conversation that I wished could have lasted forever. What we were thinking, the books we'd been reading, where we were going, how we were feeling, and the friends we shared.

2:05Today, Annie is here at home to continue the conversation. We'll talk about food, our memories, her mother's recipe for chicken liver, and most of all, her book, Women, that is next to my bed. Annie Leibowitz, a woman I met in the rain, a woman I loved before meeting her, and a friend I love now. Oh, my gosh. Thank you. This is amazing. Do you remember that day? Yes, we were just coming from Lindsay Yudario. And it's very rare that we have time at the end of the day. And Catherine said, come on, we're going to go to River Cafe. and we couldn't believe it that we could find the door or get in or anything.

2:44And the River Cafe is probably the most iconic restaurant in London and, you know, it's usually like hard to get into. But there was a time in the late 90s, you know, when I was with Susan Sontag. She was obsessed with food and going out and my time with her. I really learned about going out to eat with Susan Sontag, you know, and she loved the River Cafe. And food was going out, was it? Did you ever cook at home? I mean, was food going out? Well, at a certain point, you know, I really wanted, I wanted to stay home. And I started to argue with her about not going out all the time. And, you know, she knew Alice Waters.

3:34Yeah. And And honestly, everything that I know about food streams down from Alice Waters. Well, that's a good stream down because she is an influence. I had a cook, Mona Talbot, who worked with Alice. And all the people I know are kind of like in food. I'm a big admirer of food, but I don't cook myself because I'm working all the time. but having children, I wanted them to eat well. And we really, Mona Talbot and Laura's Rubin, I don't know if you know Laura's Rubin, but each one of them had worked for me and now they are off on their own. I was going to ask you, so you grew up, you had six children in your family, right?

4:27So you had a mother who cooked, a father who cooked? Yeah, she cooked, but the food was really not very good. Well, you're feeding six children, by the way. I mean, that's quite... How many... What level... Where are you in the six? I'm the third, yeah. You're the third. So two older and three younger. Right. And what was that like, having all those kids? Did you all sit down to dinner every night? Tried. You know, my father was in the military. He had come back from World War II and started a business in Waterbury, Connecticut. It kind of went bankrupt, and then he went back into the military.

5:05And then we grew up moving every couple years going on the road. Biloxi, Mississippi, Fort Worth, Texas, Fairbanks, Alaska. Because of the military. And he stayed in the military for the rest. He stayed in the military. he retired and then he went into you know building houses and he succeeded you know he did very well and so what was it like sitting down to dinner with six children your mother would she cook a different meal every day or would be all kind of depending on what day of the week it was we that's what we're like you know Friday night was fish sticks okay Saturday was hot hot dogs you know It's like Sunday would be a roast beef.

5:50Did she work? Did she have a job? I mean, she didn't really, on and off, she worked. But she pretty much had us, and it was full on. But she was such a bad cook, she didn't want us in the kitchen. Oh, she was a bad cook. She was not a good cook. Oh, I see. And I didn't know that food could taste good until I left home. I didn't know bread could taste good. I mean, it was like, we had like Wonder Bread. And so when we left home, but she was a great baker. Oh, so she could, that's cooking. She was a great baker. And she would make the best desserts and pumpkin pie. What do you remember? What do you remember from baked desserts?

6:35Angel food cake. Angel food cake was our birthday cake. That cake that rises very high. Beautiful, beautiful. And did you, but still the meals, would you all, Was it chaotic? Because I'm still slightly overwhelmed by the six children's part of the story. Yeah, I think especially as my older sister and brother left for college and it just sort of dwindled down, it was hard to... I think there was an attempt to try to sit together, but it didn't really, didn't always work. she never I'm just remembering she never really sat down for dinner she didn't she would like stand in the kitchen did your father cook at all no no okay no he would well he could do eggplant on the you know because his mother cooked his mother who was your grandmother were they Rachel Rachel Rachel but you would go to her house and she would always have a kitchen she would always have a chicken in a pot did she that's pretty good She always had chicken.

7:42She lived in Waterbury, Connecticut. So, you know, when I started working for Rolling Stone, you know, and I was working on the East Coast, I would sometimes, you know, go up and see her and drive her. Whose is the chicken liver recipe that you have? The chicken liver is my mother. So when she wasn't baking, she did make a recipe that you have how many years later? This is something you've kept with you? We all remember this because, you know, and it's true, in her later years, she would save food. I mean, I think, you know, being not having much money, they were very careful about food. And so she would save food and, you know, leftovers.

8:26And then when you would go visit my father and my mother in their later years, there'd be things in the refrigerator you'd be afraid to. You didn't know what you were, you know, you'd be afraid to eat. She was great around the holidays. She loved holidays. When would you have the chicken liver? Almost every holiday. She would make this chopped chicken liver. Was your identity as a family, a Jewish family? Yes. And what was the background? Where did they come? Were your grandparents to come or your great-grandparents? Do you know? Well, my father, Romania, and his mother, Romania, and then my mother was Kirif, which was really Russia at the time.

9:18Yeah. So the identity of Jewish food, chicken liver, I grew up, you know, chicken liver, so it's a very identifiable recipe for a Jewish kitchen. She left us a recipe, but it was still very vague. My younger sister and I tried to make it. We're not too sure of the ingredients, and we worked on it the last few. It usually happens at, I know it's chicken liver, but we usually do it, believe it or not, at Thanksgiving. So we go out and get the chicken livers. So you make it. It is funny because when my mother, my father died first, and then when my mother died, and we were going through all the belongings in the house, you know, between the six of us, you know, everyone pretty much talked about what they would like to have out of what was there of my parents.

10:14Everyone was very happy with, you know, how we divided everything up. I have one sister who's a lawyer, so she was there in case, you know, we decided, you know, there was a problem. so there was only one problem and that was um my sister barbara wanted uh the chopping device you know there and there so there there were actually two of them and then there were wooden bowl two wooden bowls that they made the chicken liver my mom made the chicken livers and so there was a bit a bit of a a fight for it so we had to like draw straws you know and um you wanted it and she wanted it. She wanted it, yeah.

10:49It was great. And who got it? She got it. She got it. I got the secondary one, though. Yeah. And what is that photograph? That's my mother, who is a hard act to follow, for sure. I mean, she danced. She took, you know, lessons from Martha Graham when she was young. Did she dance with you? Did you dance with her? She sent us all to dance lessons. I mean, I mean, I've gone to dance classes with her, but, you know, I mean, she danced until, you know, late in her life, yeah. So she studied with Twyla Thorpe? No, not with Twyla, with... Martha Graham, I mean. Martha Graham. If you look at photographer's life, there are photographs of her, you know, dancing with my father.

11:37Yeah. This photograph was taken, is that your mother and your father? Just at the Hamptons. Just my father and mother just on the beach. And my mom just doing her kick. She was famous for her kick. She looks great. She would kick whenever. I don't know if we can see this. On YouTube we can. On the audio we can. But it's beautiful. Did you mostly eat out? Did you eat out in restaurants? All six of you? No. Never could. Never ate out. No. I even remember there was a period of TV dinners. You know? Yeah. So after living at home, when did you leave home? What did you do when you? when you kind of went to high school.

12:12I went to school in the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco. It's not quite clear to me when food really became more important. I knew it tasted better when I left home, for sure.

12:34I think the first year I was away from home, my cornflakes and ice cream, you know. I mean, I didn't really, you know. But you went to, when you went to the Art Institute, presumably you had an apartment or you lived in residence? No, I had, well, I lived the first semester with my older sister who was in Berkeley and then moved into the city into an apartment and then shared an apartment on Telegraph Hill. What year was that? God, 69, 1970. Yeah, in 69 I came here because a lot of my friends were leaving for the draft, you know, because of the war. There's a picture upstairs I'll show you of a demonstration outside the embassy.

13:16But they were heady times. You know, I do want to say it was interesting coming into London, and I was in Spain just, you know, opening a show there of fashion work at the Mop Foundation there in Corona. and just leaving the United States and coming into London, it just felt so normal. Yeah. I thought we could talk about that. I know in your perception it may not be, but compared to America right now, it's just you don't realize the tension and the oppression in the air. Yeah. I was there last week, and every morning I wake up and I read the New York Times, and every night I go to bed and I watch Christiane on the board and everybody else on CNN.

14:05So you feel, I mean, I do feel it. You try not to see the news all the time. Yeah, but you can't. You can't. Well, I can't. But then I always say it's a bit like pollution, that we're walking around and we don't see it. We know there is something in the air that's getting inside us and making us sick. It's like when people swam when there was smog in California. do you remember in the 80s and people would swim and a friend of mine said she'd get out of the pool and she couldn't catch her breath and sometimes I personally feel I can't catch my breath because it's so bad you know what is going on in our country but I think there probably is a bit of distance that you get here I know from friends of mine who live in New York or California wherever they're living and they get here they say exactly what you say really it just feels is that palatable You know, that you feel, I mean, you think, well, now you understand why people moved here.

15:04You know, I mean, I'm American, and I'm going to, I have work to do there. You know, I want to work on, you know, whatever can be done. I mean, it was interesting. I saw Christian Anuport do an interview with Jon Stewart. Did you see that? Yeah, he's great. That was great. He is phenomenal. and she is. She was great. They both are. Because she said, you know, she made me feel like, you know, we are doing our job. We're reporting this. We're going to continue doing this. We're going to just, and that is what we need to just keep doing. So it was very promising to hear her speak, even though it's really hard.

15:49I think that's what I ask everyone is how do we oppose? You know, I know how we used to oppose. you stop, you demonstrate, you don't pay your taxes, you chain yourself to the White House. No, so we come out of that. And then you think, what do we, how do we do that now? But I think, you know, and I don't know, we just, every day we're thinking about it and acting on it and talking. I think it is important to talk about it and to take steps and to be, you know, as we just saw in the White House the other day in the Oval Office with an ABC journalist being spoken to in a way or a Bloomberg journalist being called picky.

16:24You know, why didn't people walk, you know, why didn't everyone just walk out of that room and say, this cannot be done. You cannot do this, you know. I'm a flower. I can, I can, I can. Which is why, you know, the women's book, you know, right now. Yes, let's talk about that. With this, I feel so responsible to it. I wish I was, the people who should be talking are really the people who wrote the essays, you know, Susan Sontag. and Gloria Steinem and Shimamanda Adichie. You know, the essays are amazing. They are. They really, really are. And it was interesting with Gloria because I really went to her right away when I thought about doing the second volume.

17:10And, you know, she wrote something that was, you know, nice to begin with. And I, you know, I called her back up And I said, Gloria, no. You need to tell us where we are. What's going on? Are we gone backwards since we lost road versus weight? What is going on? And she put it into perspective so well. I mean, she grew up in the 50s. And she said, we're not going backwards. And I love Chimamanda saying, these women in the new book, You could have done those photographs 25 years ago. Why? These women are, she said, fearlessly competent. It's true. That was the word I was using, was I felt a confidence in who we are as women today in these photographs.

18:10But when she said fearlessly, and quietly competent. Tell me about the first volume and the second. The first one was written. No, the first one was done with Susan Sontag in 1999. That's what I was asking, the 1999. So that was 25 years ago. Yes. And things were pretty good for women in the late 90s, middle, late 90s. It just came out of Hillary Clinton at the Beijing Conference for Women as the First Lady saying, you know, that speech where things went, you know, it went viral, basically, where she said, you know, women's rights are human rights. No, human rights are women's rights. It was Susan's idea to do a book on women, and I thought it was a bad idea, because I just thought it was too big of a subject.

18:58It was like you talking about, you know, doing your book with Ed Rache, you know, just pick one thing. One thing. Lemons. But there is a continuity to it. There is a power to that book. It has a range, but it has very, each page, every photograph takes you there. And then sometimes I look at it, as I said, it's next to my bed. Do you have an original, do you have the, when it first came out? No, I don't. No, I don't. I too think it's like a remarkable book. It was designed by Ruth Ansel, who's really a great designer, and and there was a lot of thought put into it. It was really, we imagined, I mean, I kind of thought about every single walk of life, try to have as many different walks of life as possible, and it was really kind of modeled after August Sanders' book on people in different trades in Germany.

19:56It took three or four years, you know photographs done for the book so um and this so the second volume is really just an homage to the first volume it's just a collection of work that i've done in the last 30 years 25 30 years since the first volume and certainly i never had any kind of plans to to make that to make another volume on women you know so this was this was like it's more like a magazine you know I just kind of like did it really we did this in a year we did this like really fast and that is fast Hillary Clinton had had come to me about a year ago and said we really would like to commemorate the original book from 1999 and and and the book was out of print and I thought it was an interesting idea and and then we thought about I thought about this companion book to put with it.

20:53Did you meet Alice, by the way? Yes, of course. Was that when you were there as a student? Not until really knowing Susan. I mean, Susan opened up the whole... I became a little more serious knowing Susan, but I met so many incredible people. And Susan loved food. Susan loved food. Did she grow up with good food? Did she what? Did she grow up with good food in her background? That's a good question. I mean, she would have been a great person for your podcast. Because, you know, we ate out every single night. And she would, you know, comb the New York Times for reviews of restaurants. And all over her refrigerator would be, you know, she'd rip them out and put them on the refrigerator.

21:37And when she walked into a restaurant, it was like, you know, the queen was walking. And they always had a table, you know, for her. and she was... I was just reading about Joan Didion. Did you read that piece in the New York Times? No, I did not read that piece about Thanksgiving. I know many people who went to that Thanksgiving. They were kind of like people had no place else to go. So Mona Talbot, who is kind of like this protege from Alice Waters. We were doing a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton and Mona was cooking for me at the time because I had managed to talk Susan into letting me have a cook.

22:21And then, you know, like maybe once or twice a week we would eat at home. She's the one who, for Susan's 60th birthday, made her brains. Yeah. It's very funny, actually, to give Susan some type brains. So it was great to be home eating. Did you eat brains? I don't remember eating them. Susan would eat anything. So she made her brains. She made her brains for Susan. But Mona stayed on through having my first daughter, Sarah, and she's the godmother of Sarah. But when we had that fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, she insisted upon bringing in apples from the Hudson Valley. And it was like she said, why do people buy fruit from Florida?

23:13You have the Hudson Valley, which has this incredible fruit. Farms and feds, yeah. It's amazing. I honestly never understood that about the Hudson Valley. It was like she really has helped develop the whole food idea in the Hudson Valley. It's sort of sprung out from Alice. and so she has a wonderful place in Hudson that she sells food from all the wonderful farmers and everything. But anyway, I ended up finding this place upstate because I didn't even know there was an upstate. Yeah, yeah. It's amazing. It is funny that we call it upstate. I love upstate. Every state has an upstate, but it's very tied to New York.

24:04So tell me about it. Do you have a farm there? Do you grow vegetables there? No, I have a couple hundred acres, but we... Is it on the river? On the river. The buildings aren't on the river. I was always going to build on the river, but you could walk out to the river. But it does go out to the river. But for sure, we have a vegetable garden that we love, and we have chickens, you know, and we don't like fresh eggs. And my daughters, they all are great cooks. Are they? Okay. Oh, here you go. You heard that, Susan? Susan? We have her Susan here. So tell me about their cooking. When did they? No, they, you know, what I'm impressed with, my older daughter, she can make anything out of leftovers.

24:49It's kind of impressive. You know, she loves to dabble like that. And I have a cook, but she doesn't want the cook to cook for her. She likes to cook, you know, for herself. That's cool. Sarah, the older one. Imagine having Mona Talbot and Laura Zerubin, who's another Alice Waters person, kind of mentored these girls as they grew up and taught them everything about cooking. So it's kind of wonderful. They kind of broke that, you know, have gotten into it. A wonderful place with understanding food and seasonal food particularly.

25:34I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin. My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed. We have some breaking news to tell you about. Tennessee's attorney general is suing a Nashville doctor. In April 2024, a fertility clinic in Nashville shut down overnight and trapped behind locked doors were more than a thousand frozen embryos. I was terrified. Out of all of our journey, that was the worst moment ever. At that point, it didn't occur to me what fight was going to come to follow.

26:13But this story isn't just about a few families' futures. It's about whether the promise of modern fertility care can be trusted at all. It doesn't matter how much I fight. It doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this. It doesn't matter how much justice we get. None of it's going to get me pregnant. Listen to What Happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Stephen Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut. I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of developing the profile of this beautiful finished product. With every sip, you get a little something different.

26:51Visit Gentleman'sCutBourbon.com or your nearest Total Wines or BevMo. This message is intended for audiences 21 and older. Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky. For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit Gentleman'sCutBourbon.com. Please enjoy responsibly. My daughter Sarah loves the British Bake Off. Oh, let's talk about the British. Guess what? I auditioned for that and I didn't get the part. Oh my God. You've been so great. They gave it to somebody else. Oh, no, no. I wasn't critical enough. She says, are we watching tonight? And then what she likes to do is in the middle of the program, she likes to go to the kitchen, make a dessert, and then come back out because it's taped, and eat a dessert.

27:39She makes these incredible desserts that are kind of amazing, chocolate this and this and that. When you were at the Art Institute, was that when you started doing photography? because I was going to ask you about photography I was a painting major and took a night class in photography and loved it because I was an awkward undeveloped person developed not developed and the photography just took you out and socialized you and took you out into the world I don't know if it's much better right now but yeah no it is but did you take the photography and then continue with that through through school you know it was the middle of the Vietnam War yeah the um GIs would come back through San Francisco and and on the GI Bill they could go to school so they were a lot of um so you know met a lot of photographers who were soldiers and um it was such a difficult time in America I actually made a decision to go to Israel.

28:50And I didn't know if I was going to come back. As a student? Still as a student. I set up my own kind of program where I would go away for a semester or a year. But I ended up going back to school. And then within a semester, my boyfriend drove me down to Rolling Stone magazine. And I showed them my work. And they started, you know, I didn't even get a chance. That Rolling Stone started in San Francisco. Right. And then so you started working with Young at Rolling Stone in those early days. Right. So 13 years there. How old were you? Probably 19, 20. So did you finish school? My father insisted that I finish school.

29:31They let me graduate early. I graduated a year early. And how did it work at Rolling Stone? Would he say, we're going to do a story about Mark Dillon and you have to take photographs? Well, they weren't really interested in visuals. What did they want from you? It was more of a, well, they liked the idea that I could, you know, take photographs and it didn't look like it was going to cost them very much money. And it was kind of, you know, it wasn't just about music. It was, you know, about popular culture and what was going on. Actually, my first cover was, Jan Was Away. and it was a protest in the middle of San Francisco and you know Allen Ginsberg smoking a joint and you know and they ran that while Jan was away they ran it as a cover Jan went away and they would run things that you know he didn't necessarily so you did a cover of Rolling Stone when you were how old say 19, 20?

30:30maybe yeah and then what was the heady days like and did Jan like to eat? did you guys go out? was food any importance at all? They were very sophisticated. Is that when you learned that food could be good? Is that when you discovered that eating could taste of something good? I think just things just tasted better in general, you know, regardless. Did you travel? Did you experience other cultures? Did you have other food from other cultures? Greek food, Indian food, Chinese food? Well, in San Francisco you can get all of that. Yeah. Yes. And so what was it like? So then you went to New York, just going through the trajectory of your life.