Shooting Stars

PAT YORK'S PHOTOGRAPHS CAPTURE THE FAMOUS IN REPOSE

It's so sad that people aspire to it," says photographer Pat York of celebrity. Her keen eye for the subject will be honored this month in a retrospective at the Galleries of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in Beverly Hills. Celebrity is a staple of the world in which she has lived since marrying a movie star, actor Michael York, in 1968. She met her husband while on assignment for Glamour in the late 1960s. Check out the photo she took of him in Spain in 1974 while he was filming his role as D'Artagnan in the Musketeer movies. He is sitting in a pool with his androgynous back to his wife and appears to be a Helmut Newton beauty resting between shots. "Oh, God!" says York with a laugh that has lilted through many a Hollywood dinner party over the years. "If that were true, he'd have to be turned the other way with his boobs showing." In another photo, Jane Fonda—making pasta in costume during a break from filming Barbarella—is turned York's way in an image of mind-blowing domesticity that could be cooked up only on a movie set. Among other subjects: John Travolta, Barbra Streisand, Gene Kelly, Billy Wilder, Sean Connery, and, in one particularly stunning picture, a forlorn Tennessee Williams. He is seated at a train station on a piece of luggage with his typewriter case by his side, looking shockingly like Willy Loman, that other playwright's insecure and tragic hero who always stayed too close to his own bag of goods. "Tennessee once clinked his sake glass against mine," York recalls, her laughter receding into the sweet seriousness she associates with her time with Williams, when her husband starred in one of his later plays, Outcry. "He said to me, 'Pat, while there is doubt, there is hope.'"

KEVIN SESSUMS