The man with the golden lens

Lucy Davies recalls photographer Terry O’neill’s iconic images

Fame, beauty, untold riches and insecurity – photographer Terry O’neill captured the ‘real story’ of Oscar winners, models, singers and world leaders. Now, a year after his death, a new exhibition takes stock of his iconic images. Lucy Davies looks at how he was the last of his kind – and brings together his thoughts on his most famous shots

Faye Dunaway was still glassy with sleep when Terry O’neill persuaded her to sit by the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel in a satin dressing gown and heels, the morning after she’d won Best Actress at the 1977 Oscars for her performance in Network.

A timeless photograph. I’ll lay my neck on the line and say that it’s one of the best photographs ever taken. Why? Partly the dawn light, spilling its milky blue cast. The hint of a sunny day ahead in the bright gold flashing off the palm fronds. The Oscar statuette is almost the last thing you notice, next to a cigarette lighter, the breakfast tray, its pot of tea.

Of course, it’s Dunaway too. Not because the then 36-yearold actor was one of the great beauties of the age (those

cheekbones!), but because of how she is posed. Her power here comes from her odalisque-like slouch, her luxurious expression. What is it? Disbelief ? Rapture? Ennui?

O’neill later said that his idea for the picture had been to try to capture the ‘real story’ of what Oscar winners experience, whereby they go to bed thrilled – in Dunaway’s case, just three hours earlier – ‘then it dawns on them that, overnight, everything in their careers, their lives, just changed.’

He caught it, and more besides. Because distilled into that one picture is fame, beauty, untold riches, a little bit of insecurity, even sadness. It’s so intimate – so real, in fact – that you feel as if you’ve stumbled into it, after drawing back a curtain.

Many of O’neill’s photographs have this quality – not all of them, but more than was perhaps fair to his competitors. His style was a world away from the god-like grandeur of George

Hurrell’s photographs of Golden Age Hollywood, or the frothy sheen put forward by Cecil Beaton in his pictures of stardom, but it went hand in glove with the rakish, spirited, fleeting-but-who-cares celebrity that characterised the 1960s and ’70s.

O’neill, who died last year aged 81, was one of a gifted cabal of celebrity photographers who emerged at that time, when the Hollywood machine was purring and fame was anyone’s game. Especially if, like O’neill (and

Michael Caine, Twiggy et al) you were from the aitch-dropping side of the tracks.

The relationship between photographers and stars back then is unrecognisable from the one we know today. O’neill, David Bailey, Terence Donovan, Eve Arnold, Douglas Kirkland, Irving Penn and Richard Avedon were lords of the game: given whatever time, access and space they required. The stars were often their friends, quite happy to be photographed without make-up, or strapped to a crucifix or squeezed between two studio backdrops. The entire system ran on trust, without a stylist or a publicist in sight. O’neill often referred to it as ‘a golden age’.

Thirty-eight of his photographs are about to go on show at Maddox Gallery, Gstaad, accompanied by his recollections. Reading them, it seems the words, ‘Listen, I’ve had this idea’ prefaced most, whether this related to Pete and Dud on lilos, or Peter Sellers painting Roger Moore’s toenails.

He got to everyone. Mick Jagger, Brigitte Bardot, Laurence Olivier, Albert Finney, Frank Sinatra (lots of Frank Sinatra), Marlene Dietrich, Audrey Hepburn. It would be easier to name the people he didn’t photograph, in fact. He spent so much time flying back and forth on Concorde that they gave him a watch.

O’neill told me that his fluency came from chasing ‘the bull’, as in bullseye – the centre spread. ‘I thought, I’ve got to get that spread, and it was always in me. I’d plan one image, down to the last detail, and it all worked from there.’

But there’s more to it than that. I met him twice, and liked him enormously. He was a ray of uncomplicated sunshine in an

He was a ray of uncomplicated sunshine and his enthusiasm was infectious

industry known for its dark corners and his enthusiasm was infectious.

Here’s a good example. ‘A photographer called I think Terry O’neill has been on set for days, taking snaps for some article or other,’ reads the entry for 9 October 1968 in Richard Burton’s diary. The actor was in

Paris filming Staircase at the time and in a filthy temper – ‘black as a dirge’ he said. His first impressions of O’neill are ‘very little, very scruffy’. The 5ft 7in photographer wore ‘stupendous lifts’ in his shoes, Burton scoffed.

Within 24 hours, though, the two are gossiping over jockey

Lester Piggott’s rubber sweatsuit and footballer Bobby Charlton’s intake of beer. O’neill knew that Burton loved sport, and won him over with apposite tidbits. It clearly worked, because the photograph he took later that day was of Burton in the bath, his shag carpet of a chest on full display.

Burton, the famously cantankerous Sinatra – O’neill must have been privy to all sorts, but he was known for his diplomacy. Not averse to a little gossip, true, but never malicious. I once asked him who his worst sitter had been. He said, ‘I never wanted to stay around to see the bad side.’ Catching people at their most golden, and keeping them in amber, was his MO.

It’s telling, too, that though he gave many interviews over the years, he never wrote a memoir (despite being offered a rumoured half a million to do so). And that while he kissed, among others, Dunaway (the two were married for four years and had a son, Liam; O’neill later

married model agency head Laraine Ashton), Jean Shrimpton, Martha Stewart and Priscilla Presley, he never told. ‘Everyone would do somebody over today sooner than help them,’ he told me. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to the world.’

What happened, as O’neill himself acknowledged, was a gradual paring away of the world he knew. First: mass-circulation gossip magazines, the inexorable rise of which, from around the mid-1980s, created a hunger for a different, brasher, schadenfreude-infected celebrity photo. Suddenly, those images commanded higher fees than the good ones.

‘We didn’t leap all over people and jump on their motors,’ O’neill said. ‘I remember seeing Hola! [the Spanish version of Hello!] – all those styled, set-up pictures – and I knew it was

He bemoaned that women no longer had their own look: ‘I can’t tell one from another’

the beginning of the end. Life folded, Look folded, Paris Match changed.’

In fact, if there’s one thing that crops up in every interview O’neill gave in the last two decades of his life, it’s a version of ‘I’d hate to be doing it today’. He bemoaned that women no longer had their own look: ‘I can’t tell one from another.’ He thought digital cameras had made some photographers lazy. Celebrity photography, he says most often, is suffocating today. ‘Everything has to be approved by everyone – except for the photographer. In that sense, we’ve lost a lot; a lot of great pictures will never be seen, let alone even taken.’

As for his favourite shot, it changed every time you asked him, though he often mentioned Nelson Mandela, or Audrey Hepburn. ‘Now, she was a fabulous woman, a beautiful movie star,’ he would say, along with ‘they don’t make them like that any more. There’ll never be another Audrey, another Sinatra, another Bardot.’ There’ll never be another Terry, either. Terry O’neill: Every Picture Tells a Story: A Retrospective is at Maddox Gallery, Gstaad, 30 July to 29 Aug; maddoxgallery.com

Terry O’neill photographed in 2007