Today, Rita lives near her daughter in an apartment in an assisted living community. In her bathroom, she hangs her late husband’s famous photos, some starring her. Says Mary, “Sometimes I ask her, ‘Do your friends ever wonder who this lady is, why you have these photographs?’ I don’t think many of them have had their pictures in the New York Times. It’s sort of her little secret. If she’s in Vogue, she won’t be able to tell her dinner mates. She’s like, ‘Don’t tell anybody, don’t make a fuss!’”
Rita’s low-key way is one she shared with her husband. According to those who worked with him and knew him best, Slim knew his place as a documentarian, a chronicler—albeit, at times, one skilled in artful interventions. “Slim was an anthropologist with his camera,” says photographer Douglas Friedman. “He documented an entire era.” Though he was a genuine companion to the likes of Katharine Hepburn and James Stewart, his way of life was much more modest. In 1953, the photographer purchased a charming 1782 clapboard farmhouse in Katonah, New York. That was his Xanadu, a place he would return to after traversing the most glamorous corners of the earth, and where he would enjoy a quiet life with Rita and Mary. A Vanity Fair article from 2003 describes entering the home and being “greeted by an American flag and, at Christmastime, by a cardboard pinup of Charlie Brown.” The writer also cited in Slim a “weakness for needlepoint cushions.”
Slim was a man of three worlds: the one he memorialized in his preppy-colored photos containing princes and polo players, the one he would make for his family in Katonah, and the one he was born into—which few know anything about. In the 2016 documentary Slim Aarons: The High Life, Mary and Rita reveal a surprising truth that was kept from them all their lives. Upon Slim’s death, a relative brought to light the fact that Slim was born to a poor, Jewish, Yiddish-speaking immigrant family in the Lower East Side. His mother suffered from a mental illness and was institutionalized, and his younger brother would tragically take his own life. It was a bleak reality that Slim scrubbed from accounts of his own childhood; he claimed to grow up an orphan in New Hampshire. To those who loved Slim, this revelation was not a happy one. Not because Slim painted a partly fictional picture of his youth, but because of the loneliness it must have instilled in him. Slim would always feel he was on the outside looking in, though, with his camera, he was productive not defeated, transforming his vantage point into one that the world could marvel at.