Believe me, Bailey has done them all. He has done two Catherines, Penelope,
Marie, Grace, Jean, maybe Paulene, not Naomi or Kate or Christy (wrong
vintage). What we need to know today is: did he do Anjelica, the subject of
his new book? ’Course he did. Probably before she was being done by Jack, or
at least on a serious basis, which might have been tricky, but of course it
turned out to be cool. We are talking shagging, not snapping, by the way,
though he did that too.
There are no surnames in freewheeling Baileyworld, except his own, which is
more of a brand or byword: if you don’t know who these people are, you’re
too young and he’s too old, too tired, too bored to explain. Recently Annie
(he double-definitely hasn’t done her) assembled American Vogue’s venerable
photographers for a group portrait. Arranging her sitters, the great
photographer instructed Bailey to settle himself between the legs of the
fashion editor and former model Grace Coddington. “F*** me,” chortled the
Londoner to his peers, “I’m back where I was 46 years ago.” The room fell
into an appalled politically-correct silence. “Whoops!” he chortles,
relishing the story. I’m reminded that he once claimed to have slept with
350 of his models, which would now be diagnosed as an addiction, but which
he saw as a perk of the job, along with travel and the inside track on
trouser trends.
His new book, Is That So Kid, records a year photographing the raven-haired
goddess Anjelica Huston for Vogue; its title pays homage to her father, the
Irish-American director John Huston and a habitual saying of his. “With John
you’d say something profound about the fortuitous nature of the universe and
he’d just say” – Bailey sucks on an imaginary cigar and squints thoughtfully
– “Is that so, kid… Is that so?” It meant: “Shut up, stupid.” There isn’t a
question mark after the title because he thinks it wouldn’t look good, and
doesn’t care about the conventions. Indeed, there isn’t a question mark over
anything much he’s done in half a century, so why start now?
The pictures were all taken in 1973. While Watergate and the Yom Kippur war
erupted and Noël Coward passed away (taking the Cecil Beaton era with him),
Bailey and his young muse flew to Riviera beaches and art-deco hotel rooms
in a couture remake of Summer Holiday. “It’s boring for me to talk about,”
he complains, settling into the squashy leather sofa where he preps (only
talk, these days) his portrait sitters. “You get used to what you’ve done.”
He has published heaps of books; a collection of old images followed by a
book of new ones, “so people know I’m not dead. Or worse, that I’m living in
Chelsea”.
You find David Bailey down a cobbled mews in newspapery old Clerkenwell. His
downstairs office seems genially scruffy, nothing glam. His new assistant
has just arrived. He gave her the job after a five-minute chat, apparently;
where women are concerned, he goes with feeling. In the first-floor studio,
Ella Fitzgerald and Fred Astaire are playing. On the back wall hangs a blue
Damien Hirst studded with butterflies; next to it a vast print of Kate Moss
in a shoulderless minidress.
Once devilishly cute, its author is rotund and bearded, wearing a pair of the
good-natured jeans he buys in bulk and a voluminous red shirt. He laughs all
the time, seemingly in on a big joke to which you never feel quite privy.
Anjelica Huston likens him to her father in a good mood – “Like the cat that
got the canary.”
These days the former symbol of virile young London gasps and wheezes like an
asthmatic old labrador, but somehow – I’m not quite sure how this works – he
is still attractive. Maybe it’s the twinkly eyes, the silly jokes (“What’s
the Jewish dilemma? Half-price pork!”), or maybe it’s just the durable myth
of Bailey, the cocksure photographer and lothario immortalised in
Antonioni’s Blowup. The last of his beautiful wives (I think we can assume)
– the ebony-eyed former model Catherine Dyer, whom he married in 1986 –
surveys us, naked, from the wall, every inch of the 46-year-old body that
has borne him three children, smoothly youthful. Never has the gap between
the professional gazelles and the stumpy-legged civilian classes seemed
starker than when you are around Bailey, damn him. Does the business of
photographing her change as the years pass? “She gets older and I get
younger,” he giggles. Does she mind getting older? “She’s 25 years younger
than me, so she’s got the edge. At least I’ll die before she gets really
old. You can’t do sexy pictures of a 45-year-old like you did of a
25-year-old because it would look silly. Nothing worse than someone hanging
on.”
In the past, Bailey’s tributes to his muses have got him into fights with “fat
middle-aged feminists” who sniffed misogyny in the images of Marie Helvin
bound or covered in newspaper in Trouble and Strife, and Catherine on the
loo in The Lady Is a Tramp . “They were stupid. Especially the ones
complaining that I slept with two women at once. Oh, naughty boy! What’s
wrong with that? If I could go to bed with Michelle Pfeiffer and Julia
Roberts at the same time… F***ing heaven! That’s where I want to be when I
die. Any man who says he doesn’t is a liar.”
Bailey has always judged and sifted women, like a fruit grader in an orchard –
the best and the rest – but that doesn’t mean he despises them. Actually he
loves them, still counting his exes as mates. “Very Rod Stewart,” I tease.
“A bit more f***ing class than that lot, I hope,” he giggles. If Catherine
is his best friend, his old girlfriend Penelope Tree – who looks like “an
alien Jiminy Cricket” – comes a close second. Such enchantresses are central
to his life, the poignancy of their wrinkling and fading the only sadness to
which he admits. They have all redirected his work: Shrimpton’s Bambi
reticence; Helvin’s exotic sexuality; Huston’s patrician independence;
Dyer’s saturnine vamp. On RAF national service in Singapore in 1957, he
bought his first Rolleiflex and he slept with Picasso’s portrait of Dora
Maar instead of a pin-up above his bunk. “He loves girls young and old,”
Huston, 57, writes in this book, the favourite he still calls “Missy”.
“My fashion pictures are more like portraits wearing frocks,” he says. But
with preternaturally pretty women? “I don’t do pretty.” What about Marie
Helvin? “She was exotic.” Shrimpton? “Jean’s like Kate, democratic with a
magic you can’t put you finger on. They’re not breathtakingly beautiful like
Christy Turlington. They don’t scare people.” But with her strong features
and coat-hanger shoulders – Jack Nicholson’s pet name for his girlfriend of
16 years was “Big” – Anjelica can make no claims to girl-next-door
sweetness. Everything about her seems emphasised, legs, eyes, nose, and when
Bailey stretches her image using an anamorphic lens to make her as tall as
the room, she is towering but never intimidating. Actually, at the time, she
was a mess, vulnerable and insecure, hating her big nose and “raisin eyes”.
Bailey shrugs – “Everyone’s insecure” – and he is right. Modelling is hardly
the career of choice for the self-hating, but Huston had real issues: her
adored ballerina mother had been killed in a road accident; she had become
the scapegoat and carer of her schizophrenic boyfriend photographer, Bob
Richardson; she had fallen out with her father. She deserved some fun.
Before her mentor’s lens, she honed the duality of an obelisk scariness
and a vulnerability that she would use as an actress in Prizzi’s Honor, for
which she won an Oscar, and Grifters. “Her intelligence comes through in
pictures. If it’s not there, the girls just look like models. In a
partnership like that, you don’t have to explain all the time. She is giving
me respect and I’m giving it back. When you’re doing fashion, it’s the only
way to survive creatively. Anjelica got the mood immediately. She was not
someone you push around.” But to be of use, the muse must be eager to
please. For one picture, Huston, thankfully an experienced equestrian, is
persuaded to stand on a horse belonging to Jean Shrimpton on her father’s
Buckinghamshire farm. It looks a perilous arrangement, but then she had also
agreed to hunt side-saddle to please her father. You get the feeling Bailey
benefited from her early unresolved need to appease that master’s voice, to
be Daddy’s best girl, however spunky her backchat.
The lanky brunette first spotted Bailey when she was 12 at a Belgravia party
given by the parents of her best friend. He was accompanied by his then
wife, Catherine Deneuve (they were introduced by Roman Polanski, whom he
introduced to Sharon Tate), who was the more famous of the pair. Through her
teens she tracked his career and amorous interludes through the fashion rags
– Shrimpton, Penelope Tree with “no hips at all”. Finally, when she was 15,
Vogue asked her mother’s permission to photograph the coltish beauty. Bailey
shot her in spidery false lashes, scared of his camera. They clashed. She
thought it had been a disaster. He doesn’t recall her being as shy as she
might claim; or if she was, she was also sophisticated for her years.
“Growing up as John Huston’s daughter, she would think nothing of having
dinner with Liz Taylor. Like Penelope Tree, when she was 14 her best friend
was Truman Capote, and she remembers going swimming with Garbo. They all had
that kind of life.” Was the young upstart beguiled by his muse’s stellar
family – her father was his childhood hero, after all? He screeches with
laughter. “Of course not. They didn’t care where I came from.” Was he close
to the director? “No, I’m not really a friendly man. I’ve got acquaintances,
but not friends. I don’t drink, I don’t go to pubs and I don’t like
football. It wasn’t about him. I was mad about Anjelica. She’s intelligent.
She knows about art. There were always fights about which girl to use with
the magazine. I used to fight Vogue to use Jean, because some editor there
didn’t like her. But how could you not like Anjelica? She’s a bit like my
wife now.”
Duly, in 1973, at which time he had been a contracted Vogue photographer for
13 years, churning out cutting-edge pin-ups as they were literally going out
of fashion, the director’s daughter was invited to Europe by British Vogue.
He photographed her in Nice, with fresh orchids pinned to her hair by the
fashion editor Grace Coddington, lounging on a bed at the Negresco with a
“beautifully bored” Manolo Blahnik as the male model. The interior shots,
all veils, fans and an air of divine decadence, are pure 1970s fantasy. Does
she have a print framed at home? “I don’t know if she can afford it.” He
hasn’t given her a print? “No – f*** her…” Then he relents. “I usually give
’em a print.” Huston was 22. Bailey was 35 and smitten; he didn’t much want
to photograph anyone else.
“In those days you worked with the same girl for a long time,” he recalls.
“And Anjelica had been my girlfriend for quite a while.” Was it a grand
affair? He shrugs and laughs. “She was just a lucky girl.” Were you married
at the time? “Probably. It didn’t matter. I never minded getting married.
[Actually, in 1973 he was between marriages to Deneuve and Helvin, while
Anjelica was getting closer to a suspicious Jack Nicholson, who knew
Bailey’s reputation well.] The girls always said, ‘Let’s get married.’” They
asked you? “Usually.” You’re just putty in their hands, I laugh. “Well, that
wouldn’t be much of a compliment to them, would it? You’re young, you’re
just doing what God put you on Earth to do. Take pictures!” Is sexual
chemistry required for the alchemy? “I never had anything sexual with
Christy or Naomi. It’s just things that happen to you while you’re busy
making other plans. “Did the women mind about each other? “No, no, they’re
all friends. It’s life. It moves on. It’s like a flower: it grows and dies.”
What was his life like at the time? “Work and sex. Not much money.” To
remedy this, from 1979 to 1994 he directed commercials. The workaholism and
the bedpost quotient held steady, by all accounts.
In one picture, Bailey and Huston lie on the floor in a Milan hotel, reflected
in a ceiling mirror; she elegantly cocooned in a knitwear story, him
shorter, in stacked heels and flares, his camera his weapon and armour. He
told her around this time that she would be “mad not to marry him” – which
sounds like one of his well-worn lines. She answered that he was ridiculous.
But so was everything in their world, nothing taken too seriously. Their
fashion pages have their own cast of characters: Oliviero Toscani, who would
become the famous Benetton photographer, rides his motorbike at 75mph with
Huston on the back, billowing acres of Missoni; she lounges, legs protruding
like stilts, next to the “dizzy brunette” Yves Saint Laurent in his Paris
garden; romps with the olive-skinned Blahnik, who poses for a nude above the
waves with a parasol for scant cover, turning cartwheels on the beach. “I
told him he was going to be Buster Keaton,” recalls Bailey. “Manolo was a
real person, not a male model, because I hate them.” He laughs: “He was so
much trouble on the shoot. It would have been easier to work with f***ing
Garbo. Complain! I had to bury myself in the sand before he’d do it. The way
I got him to wear a white suit was by saying I wanted him to wear a black
one.”
Anjelica, by contrast, knew what he wanted before he wanted it. “She is a true
muse,” says Bailey, “someone who altered the way I saw things more than I
altered them. She sent me in another direction.” For a man accused of taking
the same picture for 50 years – “Some people look at my pictures and say,
‘F*** me, that’s an expensive passport photo’” – and of being in the job for
the girls and glamour, his seriousness about his creative development is
mildly surprising, albeit undercut with a parade of cackled obscenities.
When Bailey photographed Huston, I don’t think he was seeing the next
retainer fee or by-line or romantic adventure, I think he was seeking his
Lee Miller, his Kiki de Montparnasse, his Dorelia John. What about when
muses grow older? Whistler could always paint his mother, but fashion sets
rules. Bailey couldn’t put frown lines on the cover of Vogue. “Anjelica
never reached a point where she was too old for Vogue. She wanted to do
other stuff. With retouching, I think ‘too old to be in Vogue’ has gone. You
should see what I’ve just done with Veruschka, who’s 69, for Vanity Fair.
She looks fantastic. It’s not reality, but we’re not dealing with
reality. We’re not doing pictures of Iraq. Who wants to see the real
Veruschka? Breaking a Venus is just sad. Pretentious people will say it’s
not the truth, but she’s led a fantasy life. Why not keep the fantasy?”
David Bailey CBE, 70, is not clinging onto youth himself, thank heavens. He
doesn’t exercise, but he hasn’t drunk for years, never eats mammals, only
ate chicken once when he got drunk with Shrimpton in Tesco (the Texas silver
town, not the supermarket) when he was 26. He used to keep parrots, but now
the dust makes him wheezy. “I don’t give a monkey’s how I look. I’ve always
dressed exactly the same, never worn a suit in my life. Or only once, when
Michael Roberts wanted to do pictures of me as the worst-dressed man! Jack
Nicholson uses my quote – ‘We’re the new old.’ Twenty years ago I came out
with that.”
His inspirations for old age are Picasso in espadrilles and Georgia O’Keeffe
in her shar-pei wrinkles – artists always age better than followers of
fashion, because they mind less. He has young friends, kindred spirits like
Damien Hirst and Stella McCartney (he thinks she’s got a sexy “stand”
: “She stands like Judy Garland singing The Man That Got Away”), but I think
he feels his age keenly, not that his looks and dolly birds have flown, but
that he secretly frets he may have wasted time on other people’s projects.
Books about his former models are pleasant saunters down memory lane to weave
through the twilight of a career, but they are also a personal valediction,
a way of making the ephemeral enduring, not to mention useful
money-spinners.
Bailey’s main income comes from his art prints – he need never snap another
frock again if he so chooses. He has regrets, such as twice turning down the
chance to photograph Picasso for Vogue, always his passport to the stars. He
still feels rivalry. After the 91-year-old Irving Penn, he is the
second-longest-serving photographer for Condé Nast. Of all the greats, Penn
– the meticulous craftsman who wants all his pictures to be revered in a
museum – is the one who gets to Bailey. Recently he has been trying to
improve on Penn’s flower portraits, produced for American Vogue’s Christmas
issues between 1967 and 1973; Penn liked the ripeness of early decay on
flowers “on their way back to the earth”. Hung with pride on his studio
wall, Bailey’s varieties are strong, graphic, sculptural, a reassuring
measure of achievement for a man who blusters to the world but admits to
bitter disappointment with his work in the early hours of the morning. His
flowers are as close as he will get to tending a retirement garden. He still
loves bird-watching, though his brief decampment to his Devon estate was an
avian disappointment. He prefers the RHS gardens at Wisley, where he wields
the binoculars and Mrs B researches herbaceous borders.
It is a long time since Bailey rolled on the floor with his cameras in his
tight jeans and cowboy boots; barked at the skinny little misses to give him
“some life”; a long time since he lured a stunner from her restaurant table
to his waiting Roller as a bet. The decades of his life have been measured
by his women: models, wives, casual lovers, heroines (Lady T is one; he
called her “Toots” and she didn’t blanch). Without them he would have been
jobless, friendless, and though he likes to run the show, utterly lost. When
I ask how long he and Catherine have been married, he shakes his head.
“We’ve been bonking for 25 years! She’s the best thing that ever happened to
me.”
Bailey considers himself an artist. Anyone can take a picture, he shrugs: what
matters is the sprinkling of magic the real genius, such as he (false
modesty is not a big problem) imparts. “I did pick up a paintbrush, but it
just happened to be called a camera. People think somebody who draws good
likenesses is an artist – he’s just a Polaroid camera.” His art is stacked
up against the wall around the studio, strange alien heads that will be cast
in silver; a subversive series called Thanks for the Memories, in which he
is painting over his old Vogue covers. One is daubed with a skull and
crossbones, dripping red and black paint, and called When I Die I Want to Go
to Vogue. It is all joky, self-referential, never too far from the fabuloso
world that has been his life. But he worships those he considers true
artists, and briefly – very briefly – you feel sorry that the emblem of the
new classless post-war Britain never stopped scrabbling long enough to find
out if maybe painting was his real destiny.
“I didn’t know there was art schools. I didn’t know there was such a thing as
a museum. I thought there was just cinemas in the world. As a child I was
drawing all the time. I started developing films when I was 12. I’m
dyslexic, so I used to get the cane for not being able to spell.”
In 1960 he photographed the model Paulene Stone communing with autumn leaves
and a squirrel for the Daily Express. Terence Donovan (“the closest I had to
a buddy; he killed himself, the dickhead!”) called him and told him he’d
changed fashion photography for ever; the old, snooty, swan-necked poses had
to make way for doe-eyed baby-dolls in Mary Quant minis and Courrèges
shifts. A toy model of the revolutionary Tufty now sits on his shelf,
perusing its own fashion spread in miniature. “A sort of Bailey joke.”
His first wife was Rosemary Bramble, a working-class girl from Clapham he met
at the Flamingo jazz club in Soho, a secretary who later became a Playboy
bunny “mother” and taught the bunnies how to hop and dip at the Playboy
Club. “She was tough, that one,” he remembers. “She was quite beautiful.”
Does he find ordinary-looking women interesting? “If you want to sell a
dress, it’s no good putting it on some old dog. They have to have something.
I’ve done some great pictures of the architect Zaha Hadid. I wouldn’t stop
her walking down the street and say, ‘Can I take your picture?’ She wouldn’t
be interested. I wouldn’t be interested. Who would want to look at her? But
she’s got an interesting mind.” He also thinks Annie Leibovitz looks
fantastic; but I think it’s her spirit – and her cheek – he admires. Imagine
telling HRM to “lose” the tiara? He cackles: “You’d die, wouldn’t you? ‘Take
your knickers off while you’re at it, love.’”
Bailey was a working-class boy from Leytonstone with passions that set him
apart: Stravinsky, Picasso, Fellini. The son of an East End tailor and a
gypsy-looking mother – “She was tough, but she used to buy me books” – who
grew up with a bull terrier, a parrot, and Aunt Dolly, who called Deneuve
the “French floozy”. He got into trouble for refusing to drink milk. “When I
found out it came out of cows’ tits, it wasn’t attractive. I was sensitive.
My father thought I was queer. Not homosexual, just queer. I hated football
and wouldn’t eat meat. I was only interested in ornithology, though I didn’t
know it was called that.” His first picture was a sparrow taken with his
mum’s Box Brownie. He left school at 15; at 21 he won a Vogue contract (£600
a year) that gave him an entrée into a world he had only glimpsed in the
Hollywood movies he saw five times a week, cheaper than putting a shilling
in the gas meter for half an hour. Is it unsettling to come from that
background and send your children to Bryanston? “I spent all this money on
their education and they speak worse than I do,” he laughs of Paloma, 22,
Fenton, 20, and Sascha, 14. “Nobody wants to be posh any more, do they?
Everything changes. It’s good. I like change. There’s only three cockneys
left I know: me, Vidal and Laurence Graff.”
He has always been benignly detached from his family, never been on holiday
with them, or any holiday at all as far as one can gather. I think he sees
his kids when he bumps into them, rather as Huston has described her own
father’s irregular domestic appearances. The sometime model and film-maker
Fenton is his assistant. “One of them!” he corrects, chuckling and telling
me a story about when Fenton was 12 and Jack Nicholson gave him 40 signed
photographs, telling him not to sell them all at once because he’d ruin the
market. “Fenton took them to an autograph shop near the Ivy. The bloke said
they were fakes. Fenton said Jack was his godfather, and the bloke told him
to f*** off.” Paloma – “too short to model” – works in Damien Hirst’s
studio, and Sascha is the brains. “He’ll be a billionaire by the time he’s
20. He’s got dyslexia, a photographic memory and a brain like a steel trap.”
How old is he? “I don’t know. I think quite old. He got angry at me because
I said he was eight when he was 13. Or was he 12?
“My other wives never seemed to want kids. I didn’t ask them. Why’d anyone
want kids? It’s all right once you’ve got them, but I’ve got no genes I care
about, nothing to pass on, ‘One day, my son, East Ham will be yours!’ My
pictures or my paintings are my kids. Last year I made 15 big skulls and
they all sold in a week. I still miss them. When the kids leave home it’s
like, ‘Okay. Let me know where you are sometime.’” Three years ago Catherine
moved back to London from their country estate in Devon, but she still
spends more time than him there. “I couldn’t live in the country – I’d go
mad. Another f***ing tree – chop it down, make a magazine. Unless you’re a
dog, why do you want another one?”
Further tributes to his muses (soon to be glamorous grannies) will doubtless
be forthcoming: little thank-yous, love notes to the girls, a reminder to
himself that nobody had a better time earning a living.
“I could do 20 books with Jean,” he says. New pictures or old? He seems
momentarily staggered at the suggestion. “Old. I can’t do new ones, can I?
You don’t want to see Mona Lisa when she’s 80.” As for Anjelica, they still
laugh a lot, talk about painting, rib each other about being “so f***ing
old”. He last saw her two months ago, when she and Julian Schnabel presented
him with an arts award. I ask him if she is happy, reconciled, fulfilled in
a middle age spent with her sculptor husband in Venice Beach. He looks at me
as if I’d asked what sort of contraception she used to use. “I don’t know.”
But she’s your friend? “She’s all right, I suppose. I wouldn’t know. You
sound like my wife. I’m not interested in why she didn’t have kids, or what
her house is like. All I know is that it’s always great to see her. I mean,
she’s Anjelica. I love her. I love them all, actually.”
Is That So Kid, by David Bailey, is published by Steidl later this month.
Visit: www.steidlville.com
