Brad Elterman
In this ongoing series, writers choose and describe a single image.
This picture of 1970s teen heartthrob Leif Garrett with his then-girlfriend, starlet Nicolette Sheridan, encapsulates the texture of a moment so perfectly it feels almost impossible to analyze. The youthful, near-naked bodies; the tousled, his-and-hers dirty-blond coifs; the loose-limbed but still emphatic spooning – truly, this double odalisque might be what D. H. Lawrence had in mind when he wrote in Women in Love of “pure culture in sensation, culture in the physical consciousness.” It’s not that there’s nothing to say about this photograph; it’s that utterances – at least, my own – find themselves continuously folded into the tactile crevices of the green and beige floral sofa, following the coil of Garrett’s thin gold chain, dipping down towards the impossibly tiny white triangle of Sheridan’s string bikini bottoms. Indeed, this photograph is so chock full of punctums, it’s very difficult to step back and begin to tease out its studium.
What we do know of the picture’s back-story reads like something of a C-list, Malibu version of Sister Carrie, with Sheridan as the ascendant Carrie and Garrett as the fading Hurstwood. Garrett, whose success as a teen idol was already on the wane when the photograph was taken in 1980 (his biggest hit, “I was Made for Dancin’,” peaked at #10 on the Billboard charts a year earlier), wanted to show off his “new hot girlfriend,” according to photographer Brad Elterman’s official website. This was the first ever photo session for the 17-year old Sheridan, the stepdaughter of Kojak’s Telly Savalas (!), and, as Elterman explains, he wanted to capture her and Garrett’s “kind of just-fucked look” (which I guess is another, probably more direct, way of making Lawrence’s “pure culture in sensation” point).
Even though, as the online archive of People magazine tells us, Garrett and Sheridan dated until 1985, this photograph is clearly already the beginning of the long end. Garrett’s incipient bloat, his palish torso and stoned eyes, seem to foretell his multiple drug-related arrests and rehab stints (among them a televised, 2010-11 “celebrity” round at Dr. Drew’s Pasadena compound, for the treatment of a longstanding heroin addiction). Sheridan, too, didn’t end up faring so well. The relaxed stasis of her face and body in Elterman’s image ossified over the years into the hardened mask of plastic surgery. The last we heard of her, she was breaking off her engagement to 1990s crooner Michael Bolton.
I mean to evoke no nostalgia when I talk about this picture. Its Goyish vapidity; its coy vulgarity; Garrett’s large, knuckly paw on Sheridan’s smooth teenage thigh – all seem extremely alien to me. But there’s something about the photograph’s realness index that I love anyway. And certainly, its cuspiness is part of its charm: in the moment of transition from the Carter to the Reagan administrations, mildly famous girls and boys in California were still doing their thing and photographing it, and not over-worrying the consequences. Before rabid PR handlers and Photoshop, these highlighted post-hippies were just chilling out, allowing the beads of their broken puka shell necklaces to fall where they may.