Jerome Zerbe

The Zerbe photographic archive was purchased by Frederick R. Koch, eldest son of industrialist Fred C. Koch, and gifted in 2013 to the Beinecke Rare Book Library.

Zerbe died on August 19, 1988, at his Sutton Place apartment in Manhattan. He was 85.

Zerbe got himself hired by the Rainbow Room – on the 65th Floor of 30 Rockefeller Center – to set up fashionable dinner parties and photograph the guests. Zerbe was shocked that at the height of the Depression, unemployed readers craved looking at photos of high-society types dressed in evening clothes and drinking champagne.

In the 1940s, Zerbe worked for the Hearst newspaper chain, and wrote a Sunday column for the Sunday Mirror for more than 10 years. From 1949 to 1974, he was the society editor for Town & Country. He traveled around the globe photographing big celebrity events.

Around 1934, Zerbe was in business in Manhattan. He was the staff photographer for both the Rainbow Room and a bustling nightclub, El Morocco. Zerbe said that from 1933 to 1938, he spent most nights from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. at El Morocco eating, drinking, and taking pictures.

Zerbe had several "coffee table" photo books published. Among them were People on Parade (1934), John Perona's El Morocco Family Album (1937), The Art of Social Climbing (1965), and with Brendan Gill of The New Yorker, Zerbe's greatest collection, Happy Times (1973).

In the 1930s, Zerbe was the partner of the society columnist and writer Lucius Beebe. Beebe made so many flattering references to Zerbe in his newspaper column, This New York, that rival columnist Walter Winchell suggested that Beebe should change the name to "Jerome Never Looked Lovelier."

Zerbe graduated from Yale in 1928, where he was an editor of the campus humor magazine The Yale Record with writer Geoffrey T. Hellman, writer and film critic Dwight Macdonald, and Hollywood art director Jack Otterson. While an undergrad, Zerbe had a knack for getting around the Prohibition laws, and was known as the guy who knew where the booze and parties were. (It helped that there was a speakeasy in the basement of The Yale Record building.) This paid off, and he became a supreme social networker. He gained important social prominence in New Haven, which would serve him well in New York City, Paris, and London.

Jerome Zerbe (July 24, 1904, Euclid, Ohio – August 19, 1988) was an American photographer. He was one of the originators of a genre of photography that is now common: celebrity paparazzi. Zerbe was a pioneer in the 1930s of shooting photographs of the famous at play and on-the-town. According to the cocktail recipe book Bottoms Up (1951), he is also credited with inventing the vodka martini.

Zerbe was born in Euclid, Ohio, on July 24, 1904. His father, Jerome B. Zerbe, was the president of a coal company and a prominent citizen in nearby Cleveland, where the family later resided. Young Jerry Zerbe was driven to public school in the family limousine, which got him beaten up by bullies. He managed to survive well enough to be sent East, to the Salisbury School in Salisbury, Connecticut. There he took an interest in art, drawing, and photography.