Quincy Jones, who once roomed with Herman Leonard in Paris, wrote of him: “When people think of jazz, their mental picture is likely one of Herman’s.” All certainly true of the wonderfully talented photographer who died in California two months ago at 87. Strictly speaking, there can be no jazz greats from the mid-1940s to the present who were not captured by Herman’s camera.
I first met him in Paris on the set, fittingly enough, of Paris Blues, a film that featured a plethora of iconic figures: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn. Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Sidney Poitier, and Diahann Carroll filled out the rest of the cast. It was about that time that I was also on an assignment from Playboy to produce a story on The Girls of Russia and the Iron Curtain Countries. My husband Richard and I had set forth from our Paris base to Moscow with a photographer in tow; but in Budapest, having had enough of Iron Curtain life, the photographer defected. Back in Paris I found that Herm would be only too glad to carry on with the assignment in Warsaw and Prague.
I seem to recollect that on the flight from Paris to Warsaw Herm filled me in on his earlier life: days with the U.S. Army in Burma and India during World War II, life in Greenwich Village and the jazz clubs, living next door to Marilyn Monroe (and noting Bobby Kennedy coming to visit), being an apprentice to Yousuf Karsh in Ottawa, travels in the Far East as Marlon Brando’s “personal photographer.” It was Herm’s photograph of the lovely young Czech actress Olga Schoberova that constituted the cover of the March 1964 issue of Playboy.
