Noted photographer Leo Friedman dies

Photographer Leo Friedman, who captured iconic images of such classic Broadway musicals as "West Side Story" and "My Fair Lady," died at his Las Vegas home last week from complications of pneumonia. He was 92.

Services will be at 2 p.m. Friday at Southern Nevada Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Boulder City.

Friedman, a Southern Nevada resident since 1995, was on a first-name basis with showbiz legends from Barbra Streisand and Sammy Davis Jr. to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

He photographed them all, with hundreds of others, charting a booming bygone era on the Great White Way.

Even after his retirement, Broadway remained as close as the walls of Friedman's Las Vegas garage, where he displayed his photographs, which graced record albums, sheet music covers and magazines during Broadway's golden age.

Among the indelible images: "West Side Story's" Romeo and Juliet, Carol Lawrence and Larry Kert, dancing down a grimy New York Street; Streisand, trading matching grins with her dog; "My Fair Lady's" Rex Harrison, looking down (literally) on Julie Andrews; "Music Man" Robert Preston; Bette Midler in "Fiddler on the Roof," her Broadway debut; and Laurence Olivier as a fading music-hall comic in "The Entertainer."

When Katharine Hepburn played designer Coco Chanel in "Coco," she didn't want Friedman to photograph her -- but after she saw his pictures, she called to tell him, "you're damn good, fella."

Friedman asked her to repeat the praise, after which he quipped, "It sounded better the second time."

Friedman, born in 1919 in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, first stormed Broadway as a frizzy-haired 16-year-old chorus boy in the 1936 musical "White Horse Inn." (Friedman told show officials he was 12, prompting people to ask his mother, " 'How can you let your son go out with showgirls?' " Friedman recalled -- with a chuckle -- in a 2010 Review-Journal interview.)

Those chorus girls became Friedman's first models when producer Mike Todd, who had hired Friedman as a $12-a-week office boy, promoted him to a $25-a-week photographer -- despite the fact that he knew nothing about photography.

Eventually, he learned -- and from then on, Friedman saw the world through a camera lens, from World War II Army service (where he went AWOL briefly to capture Gen. George S. Patton's arrival in Munich) to postwar New York.

After freelancing for such magazines as Life and Look, Friedman began specializing in theatrical photography, opening a New York studio in 1957 with partner Joe Abeles.

Abeles handled in-studio portraits; Friedman concentrated on action-packed production shots -- and, in the process, enjoyed a front-row-center perspective on the era's plays and players.

Burton was a special favorite of Friedman, who remembered how, "at breakfast, I'd be having ham and eggs -- and he'd be drinking beer."

Friedman also knew Burton's equally legendary wife, Taylor -- whom he first photographed when she and his old boss, Mike Todd, were honeymooning on the French Riviera.

Years later, after Todd had died in a plane crash and Taylor had married Burton, she welcomed Friedman to a backstage birthday party by running up to him and saying, " 'You're the only photographer who asked for permission to take my picture,' " Friedman remembered. But "I never thought of it that way," he mused. "I was just doing the right thing."

Even after Friedman moved to Las Vegas with Doris, his wife of 45 years, he remained a Broadway baby at heart.

Although Friedman "loved the shows" here, there was something he loved even more, according to his son, Eric: the fact that "he knew he could walk past New York-New York and see the Empire State Building."

In addition to his wife and his son, a Los Angeles-based movie consultant, Friedman is survived by two grandchildren.

Contact reporter Carol Cling at ccling@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0272.