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[title]Black eyes stare blankly from a head encased in white plaster. Water ripples over the face of a dead SS prison guard floating in a German canal. A white-capped nurse strokes the head of a skeletal dying child. Photojournalist Lee Miller captured some of the most arresting images of World War II: her black-and-white photographs serving as frank yet compassionate observations of the reality of conflict.
These extraordinary images have been brought to life in Lee, a new film starring Kate Winslet. It charts Miller’s career as a war correspondent for British Vogue taking photographs of the devastating aftermath of the London Blitz before doggedly fighting to become one of the first female photojournalists to follow the US army as it advanced over the front lines. Along the way she encountered the Liberation of Paris, the battle of Saint-Malo and the liberation of the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps, capturing some of the first photographic evidence of the Holocaust.
In one of her most famous shots, Miller herself bathes topless in Hitler’s bathtub in his abandoned flat in Munich. A portrait of the dictator is propped against the tiles and Miller’s boots – caked with dirt from Dachau where she’d been earlier that morning – sit symbolically on the bath mat. The photograph was taken on April 30, 1945. Hitler would kill himself later that day.
Until recently, these important historic photographs were completely forgotten. For decades they lay undiscovered, gathering dust in the attic of a farmhouse deep in the English countryside. Now, as Miller’s life has been thrown into the spotlight, you can step inside it yourself by visiting her former home in East Sussex.
Home sweet home
At first glance, Farleys House in the sleepy village of Muddles Green looks like a quintessentially British chocolate box home. But, behind its quaint red brick facade, covered in climbing plants and dolls house-style sash windows, you’ll find a truly extraordinary interior that reveals remarkable stories about its former owner.
This was Miller’s home when she came back to England in 1949 after the war. It’s where she lived out the later stages of her life, and what a life it was. Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907, Miller began her career as a fashion model in New York City after being serendipitously discovered by Mr Condé Nast when he pulled her from the path of a car while walking down the street. Soon, she turned her gaze behind the camera, moving to Paris and becoming embedded in the avant-garde Surrealist art scene alongside figures like Man Ray and Pablo Picasso. After setting up her own photography studio in New York before a stint living in Egypt, she settled at Farleys with her second husband, the artist Roland Penrose.
A cabinet of curiosities holds a Picasso sculpture alongside a mummified rat
The house remains almost exactly as it would have been in Miller’s time: a rabbit-warren of twisting passages painted in bold primary colours and decorated with a mish-mash of Surrealist art, objet trouvé and family bric-a-brac. A cabinet of curiosities in the cobalt-blue hallway holds a muscle man sculpted by Picasso out of a champagne muselet alongside a mummified rat and family glassware. In the lilac-hued sitting room – which was recreated for the film – you’ll find the little Roliflex camera Miller used to take her wartime snaps, a baby Hermes typewriter she used to file her reports for Vogue, and a set of knuckle dusters, one for day and one for evening, that she wore around her neck on a ribbon for self defence while travelling during the war.
In the custard yellow dining room a huge mural of a ‘Sun God’ fills the fireplace. Painted in sweeping geometric shapes by Penrose in 1953, it’s thought to be inspired by the mysterious Longman of Wilmington, the figure etched into the slopes of Windover Hill which can be seen from the house on a clear day.
Divine eccentricity
However, it was the kitchen Miller gravitated to most. An avid cook, she spent hours at the blue Formica counters – a real mod-con when they were fitted – experimenting with recipes and entering them into village show competitions. A picture on the wall shows Miller smiling next to an electric oven she won as a prize.
Her Surrealist roots also seeped their way into the kitchen. An original Picasso tile decorated with a bulbous yellow nose and abstract eyes was added to the tiling above the Aga, where the dishes she concocted were just as avant-garde as the artwork (like her recipes for ‘Tomato Soup Cake’, ‘Cauliflower Breasts’ and a rum-infused guacamole she called ‘Green Bitch’). Miller would serve the dishes at raucous dinner parties attended by a roster of eminent guests like Picasso, Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington, who would be tasked with doing odd jobs around the house in return for their supper.
At the same time, though, Miller spent the last three decades years of her life at Farleys haunted by her memories of the war and battled with post-traumatic stress, alcohol addiction and depression.
She never spoke about the conflict she’d seen first-hand and her son Antony Penrose, who grew up at Farleys, had a tumultuous and fractured relationship with her. ‘I knew my mother as a useless drunk, for whom catching a train to Lewes was a major drama,’ he says. ‘There were lots of hostile and negative feelings. We fought like demented alley cats.’
A new history
It wasn’t until after Miller died in 1977, when Penrose was 30, that he discovered the details of her intrepid former life. ‘When I was born my mum wanted to see baby pictures of my dad to see if we looked alike,’ says Miller’s granddaughter, Ami Bouhassane. ‘But when they went to the attic to find them they discovered a manuscript of my grandmother at the Siege of Saint-Malo.’
Penrose unearthed a cache of more than 60,000 negatives and thousands of manuscripts that had been dumped in the attic and forgotten about. ‘It took 10 years to really make sense of what there was,’ says Penrose. And as he pieced together the huge treasure trove of memories, he discovered a side to her he’d never known while she was alive. To deepen his knowledge of his mother, Penrose travelled around the USA and Europe meeting people from her past, including her brother who divulged a secret about Miller that Penrose describes as like ‘being kicked in the gut by a mule’: when Miller was just seven years old she had been raped and infected with gonorrhoea. For Penrose it was a ‘light bulb’ moment. ‘The minute I understood that, everything I knew about her fitted together,’ he says.
Try a slice of Miller’s onion upside down cake in the on-site café
Now Miller’s story has left the confines of the dusty attic, all her unique and varied life experiences can be felt in the rooms at Farleys: from the pictures of Miller as a glamorous 1920s it-girl in New York City to the scores of cookery books she collected later in life that still line the bookshelves.
Visit the house today and you can try a slice of Miller’s ‘Onion Upside Down Cake’ in the on-site café, head to the galleries in the farm’s remodelled barns and you can see her striking black-and-white photographs that show the horrors of war she witnessed up close. Spot the work of world-famous artists around the house, or trace Miller’s own steps through the gardens where Surrealist sculptures peek out from behind flower beds. You can even join the house’s annual Surrealist summer picnic on the August bank holiday weekend, where guests are encouraged to dress up and tuck into bizarre food like illuminated cockroaches in blue jelly.
‘She didn’t do a lot for me when I was a kid but she’s done a lot for me since,’ says Penrose, who says he can still hear her ‘gin and cigarettes voice’ echoing through the house. It may be nearly half a century since Miller died, but her intrepid spirit is well and truly alive in the rainbow walls of Farleys House today.
Farleys House and Gallery is open Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays between April and October. House Tour tickets are £23 and include a 50 minute house tour. Gallery and Garden tickets are £10. ‘Lee’ is in UK cinemas now.