Photograph by Herb Ritts
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THE DATE PART II – BY GEORGE KAPLAN
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Rhodes Cardell was used to being around women, *lots* of women; often in varying states of undress. He was, he pretended, inured to female nudity, not an eyelid did he bat at an undraped feminine form parading before his camera’s eye, any more than he did at *masculine* nakedness. In truth, that was part of his – carefully manufactured, or at least manicured – mystique. The mystery of Rhodes Cardell’s sexuality was a neat talking point, it was *obvious* that he loved women, they said, but it was equally “obvious” that he *must* be gay. It was simply in-con-ciev-able that he was straight; wasn’t he too precise, too polite, too witty, to be anything but gay? And, what about that slightly camp air he occasionally exuded, didn’t *that* settle the question? It didn’t seem to occur to these milk-bland people that Rhodes might affect campness because it amused his very English sense of humor, or that he was doing it, purposely, to play with preconceptions.
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His friends, the artist Ken Cauldwell and the designer Scott Fremont, both of whom were gay, found it hilarious that Rhodes – whom they knew well enough to call Will – could be mistaken for homosexual; Ken being inclined to make creatively disparaging remarks about Rhodes’s sense of style, though Scott Fremont’s lover, Andrew, delighted in relating how Scott had once been convinced of the opposite – Rhodes’s riposte? “Ha! Yes, but Fremont tends to think *all* men are gay, when he first meets them!”) – they knew that beneath Rhodes Cardell’s enigmatic image was Will Makepeace, shy, romantic, sexually – frustrated, and dead straight. In the world of exposures, apertures, lenses, gels, filters, and what have you he was at home. Rhodes Cardell was able to carry on animated conversations with beautiful intelligent women and be bluffly unmoved by their nakedness; poor Will Makepeace on the other hand, had a hard enough time attempting to talk to fully-clothed ones. It was a conundrum.
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It was *worse* than a conundrum. Even as confident witty Rhodes Cardell, Will Makepeace’s lovelife was more dead than anything else. Some of the more priapic and annoying photographers of his acquaintance wielded their cameras like substitute phalluses (Rhodes/Will liked his penis well enough but had never considered taking pictures with it) and were highly successful in the romantic stakes – though for most of them, romance was far from their minds – yet Rhodes had never been like that, the camera was for his *art* and it gave him confidence in that but it did not change the diffidence and romantic unconfidence of outsider-Will, besides it would be unprofessional and dubious to use his job to develop romantic relationships. Or so he told himself. However, when he looked into the mirror of his mind and was *honest* he saw that this conviction along with his constructed sexual-mystery persona was more about self-protection than anything else. So it was that as he ascended in the photographic world, his romantic life descended into orphean gloom. The Rhodes Cardell persona that had made him and freed him had trapped him, too. All the creative dancing that he had done recreated as Rhodes energised by the power of the camera and what it gave him, left him alone as ever.
He had told himself that he was fine with that; “Let the Art be All of Me” he’d said, unbelieving that any change could come – yet coming to feel with every woman he photographed that he was drowning in misery, even as the Rhodes-mask remained, impeccably polished and in place.
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Imagine his surprise then, when, after photographing the much-feted and formidably intelligent actress Isabella Arden he heard himself say, stumblingly, and in an accent more English than his Cardell version, “Um, Isabella. I mean, Ms Arden. Would you be interested in, ah, going on an er date with me?” Then imagine how he felt when this very un-Rhodes Cardell-like faltering question was answered with “Yes, yes I would. And it’s *Isabella*!” A date…