Flirty pictures

She made my author photo look cool and tough. The trouble is, I'm still just a writer.

By George Packer

Aug 2, 2000 | The top of my head has become a sunburn risk. My face is dominated by the broken bridge of my nose. Squint lines are a permanent feature of the landscape, like wadis in a desert. On the verge of 40, I'm an increasingly bad bet for the kind of glamorous repackaging that seems required of an American literary career: rugged Sebastian Junger, demure Susan Minot, Elizabeth Wurtzel on her own book cover as naked and belligerent as Demi Moore. So when my publisher recently hired a top-notch studio professional to take my picture for a book jacket, I was afraid of letting everyone down.

Most writers I know are not beautiful -- nor should they be. In early life the rewards of good looks would have lured them out of the isolation and inwardness that nourish imaginative life. As they age, the constant resentment, anxiety, envy and self-hatred are unlikely to have an improving effect on their physiognomy.

W.H. Auden went from horse-faced boy wonder to a shrunken head of smoker's wrinkles without any decrease in literary stature. Virginia Woolf lost her youthful grace to mental disturbance and kept her place among the great modernists. Her friend E.M. Forster had a negligible chin and a hypertrophic nose. Even some American writers, in the country and century that invented mass media, escaped detection. Do you know what Elizabeth Bishop or John Berryman looked like? Did James Baldwin's frog eyes and Flannery O'Connor's horn-rimmed homeliness give their publishers pause?

One of the exceptions, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was described by his sometime friend Ernest Hemingway as looking "like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty," which proved fatal to Fitzgerald. Before their first encounter in a Paris bar was over, Fitzgerald was well on the way to his crack-up. "His face became a true death's head, or death mask, in front of my eyes," wrote Hemingway. Beauty damned Fitzgerald and his literary talent shattered.

Today an author's image has apparently become such a central element of a book's chances for success that on Renata Adler's recent memoir about the New Yorker, the photo credit is two decades old. Back in 1979, Richard Avedon made her look lithe and attractively strung-out. It's like the old Hollywood studios that never updated the publicity shot for an aging actress from her starlet days.

Publishers have always expected readers to judge a book by its cover. Now they expect a writer to be judged by his face. Given the unlikelihood that good books will be written by beautiful people, publishers can either lower their literary standards or improve their authors' faces. More and more seem to take the second approach.

I've gotten used to picking up a book by someone I know personally and checking the back flap to see what authorship has done to their appearance. Dark background, unusual garment, oblique angle, tilt of head, hair falling forward, chin resting on hand, cool gaze: my nervous-smiling, twisty-nosed, sad-eyed acquaintance has undergone the most startling transformation. I never understood how it was done.

Sometimes I glance at the name of the alchemist responsible. About half a dozen photographers seem to share the franchise on authors. One them of is Sigrid Estrada. I especially feared letting down someone named Sigrid Estrada. On the phone she sounded Nordic and insouciant, and I found myself slipping into a disarming candor so that she would forgive me my defects when we met.

The woman who opened the door of the studio on Broadway matched her name and voice: a tall middle-aged blonde, sheathed from turtleneck to shoes all in black. She looked like a Euro pop icon from the '60s whose glamour had grown warm and kind without fading. As for me, I hadn't slept well the night before, I was sweating, and my most recent haircut had gone badly.

"Ah yes," Sigrid Estrada said. "There you are." My heart sank. The snapshots she'd asked me to send ahead were not particularly flattering -- they made me look more or less like myself. And that was just the problem. For 15 years as a writer I've been plagued by all the usual worries about whether my prose measured up. Now I had to worry about whether my face measured up.

As Sigrid unpacked my bag and inspected the various shirts and jackets that she'd asked me to bring, she kept looking into my face with sympathetic eyes and a slight smile, murmuring to herself, as if she was already casing the finished product.

"Would you like a cup of coffee before we start?" In her kitchenette she ironed my shirts. This is a service few women have ever extended to me. It gave her studio -- a working woman's if there ever was one, with photography equipment and wires and backdrop occupying what should have been the living area -- an odd suggestion of domesticity, even intimacy.

Far from detached and monotonic, Sigrid Estrada was warmly engaging. The last syllable of each sentence rose and sank on her Germanic cadence with a kind of wistful rue. Searching for the right shirt, refilling my coffee cup, applying a touch of cover around my underslept eyes, she kept staring at my face. All these attentions should not have been flattering, any more than the attentions of a dental assistant or a stripper should be flattering. Yet I felt flattered, and a little unnerved.

Sigrid picked out a shirt. She asked me to put on my leather jacket over it and we went to work.

Next Page: She had to iron my shirts; I had to try for Matt Damon

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