Terry O'Neill

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Gluckman Photography by Terry O’Neill O’Neill’s color portrait by Daniel Lynch/ Eyevine/Redux

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here is perhaps no better expression of Sinatra as king than Terry O’Neill’s 1968 photograph of the man in full, rounding the wood-slatted curve of the boardwalk at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. Sinatra, then 53, on his way to a movie set, strides past dazed holiday-makers, swimsuit-clad commoners suddenly witness to a procession. The entourage consists of a similarly besuited fellow in pole position and three

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Terry O’Neill Opposite Page: O’Neill at the White House taking photographs.

This Page: Paul McCartney playing piano at Ringo Starr’s wedding, 1981.

goons in sunglasses bringing up the rear. Sinatra doesn’t wear sunglasses. He squints into the light, as if daring the sun to shine brighter, as if to say you’re not the only star here.

O’Neill, then just 30, had already established himself as one of the era’s leading pop photographers; with his close, candid style he’d documented the emergence of the Beatles and the Stones when they were just coming up, when it all still felt

like a lark. “At that time they weren’t anywhere as big as what they became,” he says over the phone in his louche, East London accent. “The fact that I could get people’s picture in a newspaper at that time was sort of revolutionary.” They were cool but “I was cooler, really. They never thought it was going to last. Keith thought it would last two years. We used to talk about what job we were going to get when it was all over. Nobody had any idea of what would happen, the size of the Beatles, Stones, the ‘60s.

We all thought it would go back to normal in a couple of years’ time. We used to joke about Mick singing at 40, let alone at 70-odd.”

He was, by then, unfazed by famous folk, but Sinatra really struck him. Not literally, though that might have been the outcome of this encounter in Miami if, in addition to his camera, O’Neill wasn’t also holding a letter of introduction from Ava Gardner, to whom Sinatra had been married before their divorce in ‘57. The morning in question, Sinatra was heading to the set of The Lady in Cement. He was playing Tony Rome, a detective mixed up in a heap of trouble, some of it in the form of the ingénue Raquel Welch.

“He used to report for work every day at noon,” O’Neill remembers. “He was singing in the Fountainebleau at night, then filming from noon to six every day. So I just waited for him Winter 2014 lifestyles magazine 117

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Terry O’Neill

to come to the set. He came around the corner and I suddenly got who Frank Sinatra was. I wasn’t really that interested in photographing him, but I was blown away. You realized he was a world star.” Risking life—or at least limb—O’Neill took aim with his Leica and fired off a few quick shots. “He walked straight up to me and I gave him the letter. He read it, smiled and said, Right, you’re with me, and from then on I was. He let me go everywhere with him. I realized that he really loved Ava Gardner, and he was doing it for her, not me. But I was the beneficiary of it. And he was so kind to me.”

The fondness with which he recalls the notoriously mercurial Sinatra is no doubt a testament to O’Neill’s charm, but also to the approach he took with his subjects, one that contrasts markedly with the modus operandi of his modern incarnation, the paparazzi. “They deserve to be shot,” he says, diplomatically.

But wasn’t he part of the machine that transformed singers into celebrities, framing them, appealingly, as people—vulnerable, unvarnished—and not as mannequins in publicity stills. Isn’t he thus, in a sense, responsible? “Not for behaving like they behave,” he insists. “They’re like a bunch of wild animals today.

And they haven’t got a clue how to take a picture, a proper picture, at all. All I did was a candid look at stars, but I wouldn’t snatch pictures of them. And I wouldn’t publish a bad picture of them.”

It’s the same, almost antiquated standard of British decency by which he’s refused—despite multiple entreaties—to pen an autobiography. His subjects afforded him extraordinary access.

He’s seen the best at their worst. The stories he could tell. A

bestseller’s worth, to be sure. But he’s not prepared, he says, to cash in on “their secrets, or mine. To be honest, the idea disgusts me.”

The photographer, as subject.

HE

was brought up during the Blitz “in an air raid shelter, so I’m used to dark rooms.” Dark rooms and percussive flashes. Like another Blitz baby— the infamous Ginger Baker (ex of Cream and subject of the fascinating recent doc, Beware of Mr. Baker)—O’Neill started off as a jazz drummer. Practicing six hours a day, then playing small gigs at night, imitating the riffs and fills of Shelly Manne, Philly Joe Jones, Max Roach, Buddy Rich, Roy Haines. He wanted to play in America, where his heroes hit the skins in small, smoky clubs. So he enlisted as a transAtlantic air steward for BOAC—the forerunner to British Airways—with the idea that he’d play in New York during the three-day layovers, and in London on the returns. Except that BOAC immediately reassigned him to its photography unit. “They sent me to the airport to do reportage on people coming in and crying and saying goodbye and hello.”

He barely knew how a camera functioned.

(Of his contemporaries from the ‘60s, David Bailey and Terence Donovan, he says, “I used Winter 2014 lifestyles magazine 119

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Terry O’Neill

Faye Dunaway, the morning after her Oscar win for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Network. to look up to them. Really clever. They were what I called proper photographers. I didn’t think of myself as a proper photographer.”) But he had a musician’s eye for composition, and when he spotted a slumbering English gent amid a conclave of African chieftains, he knew he had a shot. The gent turned out to be the government’s hapless Home Secretary and the pic caught the eye of the papers. Before long, O’Neill had quit BOAC and was snapping pics for the Fleet Street tabloid, the Daily Sketch.

About nine months in, he was assigned a new beat: “We think pop music’s gonna be big,” he was told. “We want you to go photograph this group down Abbey Road, called the Beatles.

They’re recording a song called Please Please Me. Do a group shot of them.” O’Neill isn’t a fan of the result. “It’s so amateurish, this picture, but they published it and the newspaper sold out.”

They told him to find another group. He’d been following the Stones, so he shot them. His editors, he recalls, were horrified by them, but put that horror to good use; they had O’Neill photograph another group—the Dave Clark Five—and ran the story as Beauty and the Beast.

HE’S

not exactly agnostic about the shift to digital.

“I hate it all,” he says. “It sort of killed photography. I mean, photography is about capturing moments, and you can’t with a digital camera.” It’s not the technology itself that’s the problem so much as it is the way people use it. “That’s why all these shots are so boring today. In a studio, everyone’s looking at this screen and saying that I love that one and that

one, and everyone’s attention gets taken away.

It’s like you go to a premier and someone takes a picture and they stop and look at it. They should be taking pictures all the time, not stopping, looking at what they’ve done. It’s just not right.”

AND

is there a better expression of the ambiguity of success than O’Neill’s 1977 portrait of Faye Dunaway (later, briefly, his wife), poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel the morning after her Oscar win for Network, statuette on the table, newspapers scattered at her feet?

Still in heels, draped in a long silky nightgown, there’s no joy in her expression as she eyes the gold figure, as if trying to work out whether it’s the blessing it’s meant to be or an omen of something else. Despite appearances, the picture isn’t quite the reportage it appears.

O’Neill explains. “I was covering her for People magazine the week before the Oscars, because they figured, out of all the girls, she was possibly gonna win. I said, if you win, I’ve got this idea for a picture. Because I’d been to many Oscar shows and I always hated the pictures you saw of people smiling and holding it up and saying how wonderful it all is, because Winter 2014 lifestyles magazine 121

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Terry O’Neill

Frank Sinatra (second from right) in Miami Beach while filming The Lady In Cement, 1968.

I used to see ‘em the next day and they were in a sort of daze. I wanted to do a Hollywood picture that summed that up, and I thought about it for a while and I picked the Beverly Hills Hotel. And I talked Sven, who was then the guy who looked after the pool, into letting me in at 6:30 a.m. to set up the shot.” Dunaway had gone to bed at around three in the morning, but “I made her promise to come down at seven, to do this picture and then I just photographed what happened when she sat down. I just waited for that moment where she looked thoughtful and I took the picture. I only did a couple of rolls of film,” this time with his trusty Hasselblad, “and it turned out to be one of the most famous Hollywood pictures of all time.”

REGRETS,

he’s got a few.

“Everyone says they love all the work, but I often think I should have worked harder. For every good shot, I’ve got a load of duff ones.

Nobody ever sees the bad ones.” This from the man who caught the dove alighting on Audrey Hepburn’s shoulder, the wisp of hair in that

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The Rolling Stones in Hanover Square, London, 1964. shot of Bardot with a cigar. (“I love that shot,” he allows. “That was a one-off, the last frame in a roll of 36. I was waiting for this wind to blow and it suddenly blew and I took the picture and I never knew for three days whether I got it or not. I was out in the middle of Spain, in the middle of a bloody desert near Almeria. I couldn’t get back to a town where I could develop the film.”) However much more he wishes he’d done, he’s got enough good stuff to propel a steady series of exhibitions, recently in Toronto at Yorkville’s Izzy Gallery; thence to Vegas and L.A. He’s also slightly bewildered by a recent epiphany.

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Terry O’Neill

Nelson Mandela in London for the Nelson Mandela 90th Birthday Tribute in 2008.

Sammy Davis Jr.

“Funny thing is—and I only realized this when I sort of stopped working flat out—I never photographed any jazz people. I wouldn’t dream of wasting their time and taking their picture. It’s odd, isn’t it? The one thing I loved the most I didn’t photograph. I’d loved to have done Stan Getz and Zoot Sims. Oscar Peterson. I was in such awe of Oscar Peterson. I mean, movie stars were like everyday occurrences to me. But to be with Oscar Peterson or Zoot Sims or Stan Getz or any of those guys, I mean, I was with my idols. They were above reproach. I really regret it. I love Herman Leonard’s work. He’s a great jazz photographer. I’d love to have done what he did. I just never thought of it.”

HE’S

French actress Brigitte Bardot on the set of Les Petroleuses (The Legend of Frenchie King), 1971.

never taken pictures of normals, and he doesn’t do reportage as he goes about his day. “I’m a hired gun,” he says. “It means so much to me. If I’m taking a picture, it takes over everything. If I did it in my spare time I’d drive myself round the bend.”

The rake in twilight: silver hair, sparkling eyes, he has a bit of Double-O-Seven about him, the colonial jetsetter, shooting people in exotic locales.

Except James never had grandchildren. O’Neill has three. “I’m not big into the grandfather bit,” he confesses. “I still think I’m 30. It’s amazing. I mean, I’m 76, but you wouldn’t think it.” And he remains a gun for hire: after this conversation he’s off to Oslo, to shoot a commercial job “for a Swedish manufacturer with a famous Swedish movie star whose name I’ve forgotten. She was in one of the Bond films.”

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