The World Behind Sixty Hours ’Til Sunset
I spent twelve years making up some of the most photographed faces in the world. My work took me from New York studios to fashion shoots in Milan and Paris, and eventually to advertising campaigns that paid considerably better than magazine covers. I met editors, models, photographers, designers, and the people who wanted desperately to be near them.
That world gave me Mackey McGill.
It did not hand me his story. Mackey is a character I invented, and Sixty Hours ’Til Sunset is a novel. But I knew the rooms he might walk into. I knew how a photographer could make someone feel beautiful, exposed, powerful, or utterly insignificant with one click of a camera.
I learned early that talent did not always look the way fashion editors expected it to look. Once, while I was preparing Polly Mellen for a photograph, she praised my work and invited me to Vogue. I hurried home certain that my life was about to change.
When I arrived with my portfolio, she looked at me with surprise. I was too clean-cut, too American, too preppy, she said. I did not look like an artist. She turned the pages, admired the makeup, and asked how I had done it.
“Well, Polly,” I said, waving an imaginary brush, “I dipped my brushes into the makeup and applied it to these gorgeous women.”
I did not become the artist Vogue America expected. I went to Europe, where the magazines and photographers were delighted to put me to work. In Milan and Paris, I learned that glamour was a business, an art, and sometimes a magnificent performance. The camera showed one version of a person. What happened after the lights went out was often more interesting.
There were glorious days. I walked into a shoot at the Hôtel Bristol in Paris and found a model I knew floating in a mound of bubbles before the photographer’s camera. There were also absurd days, difficult people, and jobs I was glad to leave behind. I watched, listened, and remembered. At night, there were the clubs and the company that made that period feel as though it might never end.
Years later, when I began writing Mackey, I could place him in that world. I knew the pace of a shoot and the strange intimacy of working inches from another person’s face. I knew the ambition it took to succeed and the tricks people used to be noticed.
But Mackey’s greatest secret began long before he picked up a camera professionally. It began with Dink Westergaard in Louisville, when they were young enough to believe they had all the time in the world.
By the time we meet him in Sixty Hours ’Til Sunset, Mackey has become a legendary photographer. He has built a life, a family, and a story about himself that others have accepted for decades. Now he has sixty hours left, and a bundle of old letters threatens to tell a different story.
I wrote this novel because I wanted to know what would happen when a man who had spent his life looking closely at others was finally asked to look at himself. The fashion world gave me the setting and some unforgettable characters to draw from. Mackey and Dink gave me the reason to keep writing.
