Terry O'Neill: Life through a lens

There are a few photographers, who by dint of a combination of talent, tenacity and an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time, end up just as famous as their subjects. David Bailey is certainly one; in America, the likes of Annie Leibovitz and Helmut 33Newton achieved a similar level of recognition. Perhaps today, it’s only Rankin who has such rock-star status. Yet Terry O’Neill was the exemplar of the Swinging Sixties photographer. Friend  and confidante of anyone who was worth knowing at the time, he knew the likes of ‘Britt’, ‘Michael’, ‘Frank’ and ‘Mick’ on an intimate and informal basis that would be unthinkable today, with the omerta of publicity agents and management swarming around ‘the talent’ and preventing them from doing or saying anything indiscreet.

Not, that is, that O’Neill is anything but respectful about the people he’s known. We meet on a warm summer day in a park round the corner from his Mayfair offices, on the pretext of discussing his new exhibition, ‘It Girls And Boys’, which is on at Chelsea’s Little Black Gallery. For O’Neill, describing what makes an ‘it’ girl or boy is a curiously tricky phenomenon.  ‘Oh gawd...I guess it’s just people who’ve got it. Some people just jump out at you. One girl can stand out amongst all the others, and that’s why you want to photograph them.’

Of people who he’s met before, he cites Sinatra – ‘a one man show’ – as the exemplar of the ‘it’ man. ‘He’d go somewhere, and it’d be like the circus was in town. Everything revolved around him. He was the ultimate one man show. I used to tag along as part of his entourage. He just saw me one day, smiled, said ‘You’re with me’, and I was invisible to him for 3 weeks. The great thing about being a photographer was making yourself invisible, letting them get on with their job.’ He pauses, and smiles. ‘What charisma.’ From a British perspective, ‘Terry’ Stamp, so frighteningly beautiful in his Sixties heyday, is mentioned. ‘He’s had his rises and falls, but he’s come back every time, right to the top. That’s the ultimate ‘it’ factor, right there.’

If any decade epitomises Terry O’Neill’s career, it’d have to be the Sixties. As he says, ‘To be English was the best prize imaginable. All the world’s eyes were on English music, fashion, society, you name it. 1963 made everything explode, really. And I was just fortunate to be young at the time, and part of the scene. I was the recorder of the scene, and I guessed that people would be interested in my depictions of the life.’ Of course, O’Neill is now a household name, but back then he was just a jobbing, if very lucky photographer. ‘Young people didn’t want anyone else to fail back then, though. We were like a team. There weren’t any selfish thoughts, you’d help everyone else who was trying to get ahead. It was a great time, with the East End taking over from the West End.’ (O’Neill, it should be noted, is a proud East Ender, with inimitable Cockney tones that make him sound like Ray Winstone’s elder brother.) ‘The toffs ran everything, but we started to overthrow all that. Everything changed.’

Including, of course, the role of what the photographer actually did back then. As O’Neill puts it, without a hint of false modesty, ‘we were the head of the pecking order. It’s like celebrity chefs now, I guess. We used to go to clubs and people would ask our opinion about who was going to be big and who was worth following. But I always thought it had a sell-by date on it, fame. It was only when I went to Hollywood that I realised, ‘hey, this is going to last’. Unfortunately it didn’t in Britain. It couldn’t.’ He grimaces.

He speaks particularly fondly about his involvement with The Beatles. ‘Now, it’s impossible to imagine a band like that having the impact that they did. They just came from nowhere and conquered the world. I can’t see them winning The X Factor, or anything like that.’ Terry was one of the first people to wise up to the potential of the band, and indeed an early photograph of his is the first photo of a pop group. ‘I’ve got Ringo holding the drums, the others strumming their guitars...but it was all brand new. We were making things up as we went, because there weren’t any rules. Bailey was photographing Jean Shrimpton while he wore a vest and Cuban heeled boots. It all made for great pictures.’

You might expect that there’d be a certain element of rivalry between David Bailey and Terry O’Neill -  both East End boys, both associated with the most glamorous figures of their time – but O’Neill denies anything of the sort. ‘Oh no, we were always great mates. He actually helped me quite a lot along the way in my career. Course, it didn’t hurt that we were following quite different paths. He was doing all the Vogue and high society stuff, and I was getting my hands dirty. There wasn’t any competition. If anything, I was the one capturing his life, and he was flattered by that. I’ve photographed him, but he’s never got round to photographing me. Funny, that.’ He chortles, generously. Indeed, there’s very little preciousness or vanity about O’Neill.

He’s spent a good deal of time in Hollywood as well, famously becoming part of the scene for a while when he was married to the Oscar-winning actress Faye Dunaway from 1983-7. (‘I swore I’d never marry an actress, and I did. More fool me. But I hated that set of people, it’s not my world at all. It’s a company town.’) Asked about the differences between London and Los Angeles, he looks nearly incredulous. ‘It was like a whole new world for me. I couldn’t believe it. All the Hollywood photographer types were old-fashioned, and I was straight in with my 35mm, so I became very popular. All the young people worshipped – literally worshipped – the Beatles and Stones, and getting work was like falling off a log for me. For a while, I had all this to myself. Then things started to change in the Seventies. The people just stopped being as interesting. Bowie, sure, but apart from that it just seemed a bit bland. You weren’t ever going to get another kind of Beatlemania.’

Except, that is, for the legendarily flamboyant Reginald Dwight, aka Elton Hercules John, someone who O’Neill  has worked with throughout his career, even publishing a 2008 book of his pictures, Eltonography. ‘When I came back to England, everyone knew I was good at finding new people, and I’d heard a record by this young guy, Elton, and thought ‘Blimey, he’s good, I’ll take his picture when I go back to America. Then I find out that he’s this skinny little English kid with glasses! But he was so great.’

These days, O’Neill is pretty much retired from mainstream photography, spending most of his days organising exhibitions of his work in increasingly far-flung places, including an eagerly anticipated show in Beijing later this year. The last piece of mainstream work he did was photographing Mandela on his 90^th birthday. ‘I was hired to work for a week with him, photographing him with Clinton, Will Smith, Oprah Winfrey, you name them. But when I was saying goodbye to him, I felt really moved, because he was a truly great man, and there aren’t many of those around anymore.’ He’s cynical about contemporary star culture, saying ‘it’s entertainment, but people don’t have the graft any more. They don’t realise that you have to work hard to be famous, and that it doesn’t just appear on a plate.’ He’s equally unimpressed by modern photography. ‘Oh, it’s all digital these days. I don’t really understand it any more. And all the PR control...they get to control the words and the pictures, which shouldn’t be the way it works. You need mutual respect, and trust.’

Is there anyone these days who he still rates as having the ‘it’ factor? Terry pauses for a moment, apparently weighing up who should be given the imprimatur of cool. Finally, he smiles knowingly. ‘Yeah, I know one. That guy who plays Luther. (Idris Elba). I was watching it on TV the other night, and it was really good. He was really good, I should say. He could be a big screen star. He radiates the feeling that you want him to be your mate, that sort of charisma. I’d love to photograph him.’

And with that, we shake hands and part. As I walk away, I catch a last glimpse of Terry O’Neill sitting in the park where we’ve met. He’s smiling, and I can’t help wondering what it must be like to have all those memories, to have spent all those years with all those legends. At least the photos give as good an insight as to what it would have been like as any memoir. And, whatever his reservations about it now, how many ordinary mortals end up married to a film star? A pretty special one, that’s what.

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