LEE MILLER was a beautiful girl from Poughkeepsie, New York, who landed a gig modelling for Vogue and wound up in Paris hobnobbing with Surrealists and dating Man Ray. She wanted to be a photographer, not a model, though, so he taught her to take pictures. After she left him he spent 40 years making metronomes with a cut-out photo of her eye on the ticker. She became a fashion photographer, married an Egyptian millionaire, then dumped him as well. On a Greek island she met an English poet; she would marry him after the war and settle down on a farm in Sussex, inviting her old friends Picasso and Ernst over for weekends.
But that would be later. Now it is 1945, and she is a photojournalist travelling with the American army. She has shot a gory field hospital in Normandy and been caught under German fire at St Malo. She and her boyfriend, David Scherman, both working for LIFE Magazine, have photographed a concentration camp and are wandering around Munich. They have stumbled on Adolf Hitler’s apartment there. She has an idea.
