The photoshoot that made history

OK, DAVID BAILEY, a little surprise quiz for you, because who doesn’t like a surprise quiz?

If you’re tired of surprise quizzes, Bailey, you’re tired of life. He just sort of grunts, which I take as assent, and so I go for it.

In preparation for today, I tell him, and the BBC’s forthcoming one-off drama We’ll Take Manhattan (which explores the love affair between Bailey and Jean Shrimpton via their dazzling Vogue photoshoot in New York in 1962), I’ve read Jean Shrimpton’s autobiography, and am going to read out some of the things she says about you to see if you concur.

“We were instantly attracted to one another and whenever we worked together this attraction created a strong sexual atmosphere.”

“That’s true,” he says.

“Bailey was cheerfully randy with randy little hips.”

“I can do that,” he says.

“He has a funny little self-important walk that is very endearing.”

“I don’t know about that. I don’t see myself walk!”

“It was a shock when I first saw his legs. For a small man he has awfully large legs, like a ballet dancer’s, with big calves.”

“Yeah, I do. Doctors used to say to me: ‘Were you a weightlifter?’ I think I come from the plains of Mongolia.”

“We first made love on Littleworth Common near my home.”

“I remember that. There was a frog nearby.”

A peeping frog? Fancy. He just laughs one of his Mutley-ish, wheezy laughs.

And is it true, I ask, that you made her as you wanted her to be, which is why she felt she had to go? “Probably,” he says, “but I was right.”

Probably, Bailey always is.

He is now 73 and, although he may well still be Mongolian of calf — I did not ask him to lift up his trouser legs; I am too well brought up — he is no longer quite as randy or hip. Instead, he is quite paunchy and grizzled, with grey hair that sticks up in wispy clumps. He was dangerously and devastatingly gorgeous back in the day, though. In the BBC drama, Karen Gillan plays Jean while he is played by Welsh newcomer Aneurin Barnard, who, he insists, is “too pretty”, but I don’t think so.

Nicky Haslam, who accompanied Bailey and Jean on that New York trip, has said not only that both were “utterly beautiful” but that Bailey, with his dark eyes and dark, unkempt hair, looked like nothing so much as “Mowgli setting out for the hills”.

Yet you never saw yourself like that? “I never thought of myself as attractive,” he says. “But I saw a bit of film of me the other day, from the 60s, and I thought: ‘Shit, if he were taking my photograph, I’d do what he wanted’.” And what do you remember most about that New York trip? “It was cold, cold like you wouldn’t believe. My hands stuck to the camera it was so fucking cold.”

Did Jean ever meet your mother, Gladys? The once, he says, “and she didn’t like Jean very much”. How so? “We were sleeping over [at Bailey’s childhood home, a little terraced job in East Ham, East London], I don’t know why, and Jean said: ‘Where is the other sheet?’ My mother thought that was such a snobbish thing. We only had one sheet. We had a sheet underneath and a blanket on top. She said: ‘Who does she think she is, asking for a sheet on top?’”

Who’s ever even heard of such a thing, I say. And whatever next? Did she ask for the toilet to be brought inside? An outside toilet isn’t much fun, as it happens. “In the winter, you had to break the ice to flush it,” he says.

He has a home in Devon now, but we meet at his studio in King’s Cross.

We sit on a sofa, opposite his photograph of the Krays, which has been blown up and hangs on the wall. Did the Krays frighten you? “Not really. I was careful with Ronnie. You were dealing with psychopaths, so you didn’t ever know which way it was going to go. I got on really well with Reg. Ghastly people, but of a time and place, which people don’t now understand.”

He is astonishingly tactile, and at one point has me by the wrist and is sort of massaging my inner arm. I’m so astonished, I nearly jump out of my skin, but it is not flirty, not a pass. Aside from the Shrimp, his lovers have included the beautiful heiress Penelope Tree and he has been married to Catherine Deneuve, Marie Helvin and now Catherine Dyer, a former model. So it would be like shopping at Prada all your life and suddenly, in a mad moment, deciding to pop into Primark (I know my place, shopwise). I don’t even think he knows he’s doing it. I think he just feels great affection for women, all women, perhaps because he was brought up by two women: his mother and her sister, Aunt Dolly. He adored his Aunt Dolly.

“She was a cockney straight out of central casting. She always wore a white turban with curlers underneath. I used to say, ‘Why have you got your curlers in?’. She’d say, ‘For the party tonight’. And then you’d go to the party and she’d still have her white turban on with her curlers in.” He laughs again. I laugh, too. He is very funny.

“She was the first female I really liked,” he continues. “She had that East End humour I always loved. She would say funny things even though she didn’t know she was saying funny things. When I married Catherine Deneuve, she phoned up and said: ‘Here, Dave, how’s your French floozie?’ When I married Marie, she said: ‘Here, Dave, I hear you married a chink.’” He then adds that when he went to Italy to do the Italian collections for Diana Vreeland, the legendary editor of American Vogue, “I sent Aunt Dolly a telex saying: ‘What do you want?’ And she cabled back: ‘Plenty of wop!’”

He is spectacularly unreconstructed, in all ways. When I ask if he can cook, he asks, “Why would I do that?” Catherine, who pops in and out, says the one time he had a go he put a tin of beans in the microwave and blew the whole thing up.

“I didn’t know you couldn’t put tin in,” he protests. His mother did cook, he says, but she was appalling. “She made Bisto, but never stirred it; there would be hard stuff in the gravy and, when you hit it, it would turn to powder. Yorkshire pudding? You could sole your shoes with it.”

He laughs heartily, if wheezily. He is very wheezy, generally. He contracted psittacosis when he shared a house in Primrose Hill, north London, with Penelope Tree and 60 parrots, and his lungs have been affected ever since.

He has always been a mad ornithologist. His first photograph, when he was a kid, on his mother’s Box Brownie, was of a fuzzy sparrow. Much to the disappointment of his father, Bert, who was never around very much (“always skallywagging”) and had a razor scar down his face (“from East End gang fights”), Bailey was never macho, and reviled all sport.

“At school they’d confiscate my shoes on sports day so I didn’t run away and go bird-watching.” Is fashion photography another kind of bird-watching, would you say? “Don’t know. Great way to get laid, though.” He still carries on like the cockney upstart he once was, although being cockney was not an advantage at first.

He can remember one woman putting a hand on his arm and saying, “Aw, don’t he talk cute”.

I ask if he minds always being associated with the 60s, the decade he did so much to memorialise. “I’m not crazy about it,” he says, adding Michelangelo probably felt the same — “Oh no, not another fucking ceiling” — but accepts this is the way it is. “You learn to live with it. The 60s were very powerful.” Do you recall first meeting Jean? “She was with Duffy [photographer Brian Duffy] and he was doing a Kellogg’s ad with her.

And I looked into the studio and she was against a blue background and it was exactly the same colour as her eyes; it looked as if I could see through her head to the background. And I said to Duffy: ‘Who is that girl?’ And he said: ‘She is too posh for you’.”

Did you see her photographic potential from the word go? “Straightaway. Same with Catherine. It’s a sort of mysterious elegance. A woman has to have mystery, and it’s usually brunettes. I think brunettes have more mystery than blondes.”

Was Jean posh? She was a Buckinghamshire girl, he says, whose father was a builder and had made a lot of money. He adds that the first time she invited him back, “I had to hide in the hay loft, over the pigs, because he came after me with a shotgun”.

They’d been together for just under a year when they went on that trip to New York. He was 24, she was 18 and, although they’d been peeped at by a frog, they were still unknown in wider, less amphibian circles.

What else does he remember about that trip? That they were chaperoned by British Vogue’s editor at the time, Lady Rendlesham, who was not as la-di-da as she made out. “Her husband was Lord Rendlesham, who owned a garage on the A1 somewhere, but they had all the graces. Nothing wrong with owning a garage, but don’t act like you own Buckingham Palace. She was a ghastly woman, always crying.”

Why? “I wouldn’t do what she wanted me to do. She would say: ‘We can do some pictures on the lions outside New York library’. They are little, teeny lions. I told her if we want to do lions, we should do them against Landseer’s lions in Trafalgar Square. They’re not very good sculptures, but they are big and imposing, and better than sitting on a little lion. She had no idea what we were doing. She had been used to doing girls in pearls.”

Girls in pearls had been the thing until then. Or girls with a gloved finger to the chin. Or aloof girls wafting aristocratically around some country house. And Bailey absolutely and thrillingly revolutionised all that. It was just him and Jean. There were no assistants, no stylists, no make-up people.

He raked his camera over Jean in phone booths, outside the pagoda-fronted restaurants in Chinatown, in the shooting galleries off Times Square. The result morphed street photography with fashion and art; a doe-eyed, beehived Jean with the gritty streets of Manhattan.

Did you know at the time you were doing something new? “I knew it was different but it was purely instinctive. I was so fortunate that I had no education. Education would have destroyed me. I had no preconceived ideas. Totally innocent.”

Lady Rendlesham may have been weeping, but Diana Vreeland, then fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar, understood completely. She proclaimed: “They are adorable. England. Has. Arrived.”

The photographs, published in April 1962, not only changed fashion photography, but also ensured the scruffy, cockney Bailey and the tall, Home Counties Jean captured the popular imagination. They represented a new youth, a new egalitarianism, and symbolised Swinging London.

More importantly, it’s time for another surprise quiz. Ready, Bailey?

“Bailey taught me to look good in clothes.”

“Maybe,” he says. “All good photographers who do fashion usually have an understanding of clothes that most men don’t. You have to have a gay side, like [Richard] Avedon or me, to understand women’s clothes.”

“Bailey was never alarmed by anyone or anything.”

“That’s true.”

“Bailey lived on egg and chips.”

“Not true. Don’t believe everything that’s ghostwritten.”

“It had been a wonderful relationship but we did not have the emotional maturity to sustain it.”

“I don’t know ... ”

Their relationship lasted until 1964, when Shrimpton left him for the actor Terence Stamp. In her book, she says Bailey was devastated and wept.

He will not have it. “I wasn’t exactly a good boy. I had three or four other girls on the go. I couldn’t complain.”

He then adds: “Losing Jean ... it was like losing my camera. I did make Jean into the woman I wanted her to be, and she was kind of perfect.

“It’s great when you can talk to somebody and just do a nod and they know. If you have a big relationship with a model, you don’t have to talk. They get what you are after, if they have an ounce of intelligence. Most models now can’t even work a dress.”

I say Stamp sounds like a difficult man. “And so conceited,” he exclaims. “But so was she. I’ve got a letter somewhere from Jean saying she and Stamp make the most beautiful couple in the world. It makes you want to throw up.”

Bailey has never been marginalised, and has worked constantly ever since.

There’s been advertising, commercials, more fashion, more celebrities, much photo-reportage, and he is currently putting together a book on his beloved East End. The 60s will always haunt him, though, and he shows some vulnerability for the first time when he says: “The awful thing is, my pictures are much better now than they were then.”

Jean? She withdrew to run a hotel in Cornwall. Why? “She just got a bit peculiar,” he says. They are on friendly terms, “although she’s always claiming I made money out of her.

“How? She was getting £500 a day and I was lucky to get £20 a day. How she ever thinks I made money out of it, I don’t know.” Are you interested in money, Bailey? “Not really. I’ve always been more famous than rich.”

And now, time to go. I know it is time to go because Bailey says: “What are you writing? Fucking War and Peace? You’re boring me now.”

This is probably true. I thank him for his time and all the arm-tickling. Did you know you were doing it, Bailey? “No. Not conscious at all. Just my way of communicating.” I liked it, I tell him. It was soothing.

Might I come back every day at this time for more? “You’d be very welcome,” he says. I could even put together another surprise quiz. It would be no trouble. “Great,” he says. And then he laughs. Wheezily.

* We’ll Take Manhattan is on BBC Four on Thursday at 9pm