DID JOHN LENNON NICK MY LINE?

LOOKING back, by 1964 the Sixties only had a couple of years to run before it became pastiche and tourism and a kind of parody. That was the year the Ad Lib club opened, in Leicester Place, London, and ran for two heady years. I always thought the Sixties was a small group of people, maybe not more than 150 at the outside, maybe as few as 15 when it started up. They were mostly my mates, and many were — or became — famous for what they did, including The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, ballet dancer Rudolph Nureyev, Mr Fish the shirtmaker, the model Celia Hammond and film director Roman Polanski. No one could get in, really, except us. It was a big party all the time, and a bit rough. I got into a punch-up there once. I remember Jean Shrimpton didn’t like dancing at the Ad Lib. She wasn’t any good at it, so she used to just sit there with her knitting. I had a joint with John Lennon there one night, and he said to me: ‘I guess I’ve made it. Here I am, on the roof of the Ad Lib, smoking a joint with David Bailey.’ He asked me: ‘How much do you work?’ And I said: ‘Eight days a week.’ I don’t know if the song came from that. I wasn’t particularly friends with John, but out of all The Beatles, he was the only one I liked. I would also see Princess Margaret in the Ad Lib a lot, and I got on great with her. Snowdon used to get angry because she used to write me letters. She was a big fan of my photography and not of Snowdon’s — that made him angry, too. I liked her wit. When she was introduced to Twiggy, Twiggy said: ‘My real name’s Miss Hornby but people call me Twiggy.’ And Princess Margaret said: ‘Oh, how unfortunate.’