Bono writes: Hollywood has never been as potent as it was in the ‘20s and ‘30s.... Its golden age was its silent age, and that’s where the mysterious power of its stars came from.... Silence... Supermodels were our era’s silent-movie stars... omnipresent in magazines... the last face you saw before Novocaine let your teeth get drilled ... in videos, the only thing you'd want to watch....advertisements...where you didn’t mind having your buttons pushed ... beauty and acquiescence...

Then some girls started to puncture the silence with their personality and point of view. These girls became my friends in the '90s.... We weren't exactly wearing the same shoes, be we were traveling the same roads, staying in the same hotels.... I met Helena in the south of France one dank, humid night in a villa taken by U2's drummer, Larry Mullen.... She was colder than his AC... it was the hottest coldness ... her boyfriend Michael Hutchence played Cary Grant to her Lauren Bacall... When she finally cracked open, the quick lip and guff revealed an almost Irish stamina for talking... her head even then was about to explode.... Ideas about music film, sex, and honesty ... all poured out of a violet mouth.... We drank wine and our families started to disappear into one another, her father Flemming a study in fifties elegance, her mother, Elsa, a Peruvian beauty with temperate, piercing eyes.... My Ali laughing tears at Michael's attempt to defend himself from the Viking longboats moving upriver into his life.... We would all become the best of friends and share some of the best and worst of times.... Michael was found dead in his hotel room in Sydney in November of 1997....

Helena, unusually, loved the process of fashion but hated its outcome... loved the lens but hated the image.... She was plotting her revenge on beauty and acquiescence even then ... framing the people in the room with her words.... The hottest coldest eye.... Years later she sent me one of her early great photographs of a burnt-out sky ... and I wrote a poem for her.... Here you are....