WEEKEND BIG READ: The man who shot the world
FOR a photographer who made his name working with some of the most famous names in showbiz history, to say “There’s nobody I want to photograph these days,” is a startling admission.
But as Terry O’Neill sees it, today’s stars aren’t of the same calibre. And when you see some of the portraits in his upcoming Cork exhibition, it’s hard to disagree: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Frank Sinatra, Brigitte Bardot, Faye Dunaway, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor — the list goes on.
O’Neill’s personal archive is an unrivalled look at fame in the 20th century, the fruits of a career that began, with impeccable timing, in 1960s London, as a distinct youth culture for the first time began to attract mainstream media attention.
Yet O’Neill was an accidental arrival into that world. Born in London shortly before the Second World War, he grew up listening to jazz, rather than pop, and dropped out of school to be a drummer, playing in clubs at weekends and at American air force bases during the week.
“My mother and father used to go out Saturday night,” he says. “And I used to have the radio on looking for all different stations. I used to tune into AFN, the American Forces Network, which was in Germany. I found this jazz programme and I really liked the music. After that I started listening to a British DJ called Jack Jackson who had a late-night show as well, so I grew up on that much more than pop music.”
O’Neill’s grand plan was to get a job as an air steward flying between London and New York, something that would give him time to work the jazz clubs of both cities. But instead he wound up working in the photography unit of BOAC, the forerunner to British Airways. “Forced to be a photographer,” is how he puts it.
In his work at Heathrow, O’Neill snapped a well-dressed man in a suit asleep in a waiting lounge surrounded by several other men in traditional African dress. The sleeping man turned out to be the home secretary, RA Butler, and the photograph was picked up by several newspapers. Soon O’Neill was the youngest photographer on Fleet Street, landing a job at the Daily Sketch in 1959 at the age of 21.
“I couldn’t wait to get to work,” he says. “I’d get in at eight in the morning, do four or five different jobs. I might be taking Mary Quant in her new mini skirt, or down at the law courts, whatever. All the older photographers, they just wanted to play shove ha’penny or whatever they did, they hardly went out at all, so I was flashing around doing everything.”
When the swing began to arrive into 1960s London, a lot of press coverage was of the reactionary kind, suspicious of this new species, “the teenager”. But at the Daily Sketch, itself a fairly populist publication and a forerunner to the Daily Mail, there was an associate editor named Ker Robertson. He hosted a music programme called Cool for Cats, the first of its kind on British television, and so had an awareness of the growing influence of pop music.
“He wanted a young photographer who could relate to young people and take pictures for his column,” O’Neill recalls. “They were predicting that pop groups would be the next big thing. At that time there were all single singers like Guy Mitchell, Frankie Lane, Jo Stafford — there weren’t any groups.”
It turned out to be a pretty accurate prediction. “The first job I was sent to do was to take this group who’d just made a record called Please Please Me. They turned out to be the Beatles. And that was the first pop group I ever photographed. The next day, the paper sold out, so they saw they were onto a good thing.”
Please Please Me went to No 1, and Beatlemania was born; soon papers like the Sketch couldn’t get enough of London’s bright young things. “English newspapers, once they see something sells a paper, they go mad on it,” says O’Neill. “So, everything was suddenly pop music, charts and record deals.”
O’Neill remembers being asked who he thought might be the next big thing. “I said I was watching the Rolling Stones, and I went to photograph them. I brought the pictures back and they nearly fainted: they thought they were five prehistoric monsters. They made me go out and find a good-looking group, I did, the Dave Clarke Five, and they ran a spread called ‘Beauty and the Beasts’. That was really the start of pop pictures in newspapers.”
At this time, O’Neill was still working a regular news beat, but he grew increasingly disenchanted with the work. “I got tired of the paper’s attitude. I’d go and photograph some poor people being evicted, for example, and I’d say I’d like to go back and see how those people are getting on; we should follow the story. But they’d point to the spike, where all yesterday’s pictures went, and say, ‘That’s yesterday’s news’.”
Things came to a head with coverage of the Holtaheia accident in 1961. A flight from London was taking a school group on a camping holiday to Norway when it crashed near Stavanger, killing all 39 people on board, 36 of whom were boys aged between 13 and 16. “I had to cover the funeral at Crystal Palace cemetery,” says O’Neill. “I went there, but I just couldn’t do it. I thought, what am I doing here, intruding on these people’s grief? I said to the picture editor, Len Franklin, I said, ‘Len, I can’t do this anymore’. He said, ‘Well, you better go and tell the editor’. So, I walked in to the editor and said, ‘Sir, I have to leave, I want to go on my own’. The editor looks at me and says, ‘Right, this paper made you. You’ll be finished now. Without us, you’re nothing, so get out’. So, I left. Within a week I had loads of spreads in other papers. Fate sort of took over and I’ve never looked back ever since. It just sort of grew. I worked flat out.”
For O’Neill, there will never be another time like the 1960s. “They were the best times, I promise you. All us kids had a chance to express ourselves for the first time. I was only 23 by the time I was doing all this. And people listened to you, because up to then it was a world where what we called the toffs ran it all. Now, a young kid could get his chance to say something, or create something. It was incredible. I became the unofficial photographer to the sixties people, but I never thought it would last.”
That, says O’Neill, was a commonly held view. “We used to be in the club talking about what jobs we would do when this was all over. Ringo Starr wanted to own a chain of hairdressers, and funny things like that. We used to laugh about the idea of Mick Jagger still singing at 40.”
It took a trip to Hollywood for O’Neill to realise that the London scene was really the start of something big and lasting. “I met people like Fred Astaire and all Fred used to want to know was about the Beatles, the Stones, the fashions, Twiggy. I thought, ‘Christ, if he thinks this is for real, it must be for real’.”
O’Neill describes his life then as a 24-hour party. “They all used to drink. Burton used to drink, O’Toole used to drink, Richard Harris used to drink. They were big drinkers, there’s no doubt about that. They weren’t rolling around drunk — they just really enjoyed life, expressing themselves, talking. All that’s gone now, all those wild men have gone.”
Drugs, however, were never O’Neill’s thing. “They were a big no-no for me. When I came back from Hollywood, when the Beatles were breaking up, I noticed they’d gotten into drugs. Whereas during the day and the early evening I was doing what needed to be done, they were living at night and sleeping all day. It wasn’t a way of life that appealed to me. It’s just senseless. I didn’t like being out of control. Suddenly something takes over and you’re not even there. I couldn’t even contemplate that.”
O’Neill puts his success down to a mixture of access and respect. Without today’s PR machines in place controlling access to stars, it was easier to get the time to do proper work, he says. Unlike now. “If a movie star comes to London now you go and do it in their hotel suite. It’s all set for Hello!. It’s all rigged, set up and acted out. It’s not real. You’re not really photographing them as they really are. They want it all over and just pose for this, that and the other.”
There was also mutual respect, he says. “Now the stars would as soon punch you in the eye”. O’Neill blames the paparazzi for this. “They’re terrible,” he says. “They’ve brought photography down to a pitiful level. They’re just a load of monkeys with cameras as far as I’m concerned.”
Frank Sinatra has been a key figure in O’Neill’s career, and the foundation of that long relationship, spanning 30 years, was the result of some more good timing. Sinatra’s ex-wife, Ava Gardner, moved to London in 1968, where O’Neill got to know her. “I told her, ‘You won’t believe it, I’ve got an assignment to photograph your ex-old man’. She wrote a letter introducing me to him. I don’t know what she said. I wish I’d opened it now! I walked onto the set of Lady in Cement, handed him the letter and said, ‘This is for you Mr Sinatra’. He opened it, read it and said, ‘Right, you’re with me’. Then he totally ignored me for three weeks.
“But I got the best pictures I’d ever got. I realised he’d given me a gift by pretending I didn’t exist. I could go anywhere with him. I didn’t realise at the time what an honour that was. Whatever Ava said opened the door for me. He still must have loved her to do that. ”
O’Neill was soon immersed in a golden age of photography: glossy magazines and colour newspaper supplements arrived, with massive budgets to go along with big spreads to fill. Far from mere celeb-snapping, O’Neill had to build picture stories. He cites a Life Magazine shoot with Paul Newman that lasted three weeks. “That’s all changed now,” he says. “They pump people up in the papers and they’re forgotten in a year. I mean, how many X Factor winners can you remember?
“These were huge stars, but they were the nicest people. These were great people with great talents and I just recorded their lives. They are always working to create something new themselves, so I’d just try and photograph that. There’s nobody I photographed who I didn’t like. Even if I didn’t know about people, I read up on their life story so when I met them I could have a decent conversation with them.”
Extraordinary talent is the shared characteristic of O’Neill’s subjects. These were people famous for a good reason, not because they floated up through reality television. Yet, underneath it all, he says, they were ordinary people.
“I remember doing a job at Paramount Studios. It was their 75th anniversary, where they got all these stars together who’d been in their movies. Once I’d done the group shot outside the Paramount gates, I had to go into the studio for two shots and four shots and all that kind of thing.
“And I’m looking around for Elizabeth Taylor, so I head to her dressing room to see if she’s there, and I find her standing outside the door of the studio trembling. I asked her what was the matter, and she said, ‘There’s all those famous people in there’. Now, at the time this was the most famous star of all. I thought, ‘Christ, even she believes in all this movie star stuff’. I said, ‘Come on then, who don’t you know?’ She said, ‘Well, I’ve never met Robert De Niro. I’ve never met Harrison Ford.’ So I took her on my arm and swanned back into the studio and started introducing her to everyone. Here’s the world’s most famous woman, and she’s petrified of all these people. I thought, ‘What a sweet thing’.”
O’Neill’s life in Hollywood was not merely professional. He had a long-term relationship with Faye Dunaway, to whom he was married for four years in the 1980s, and who is the subject of one of O’Neill’s most famous portraits, showing her the morning after winning an Oscar for her role in Network [see below]. The couple have one adopted son, Liam Dunaway O’Neill.
“I didn’t really enjoy the film world,” says O’Neill, who admits being married to an Oscar winner can have its difficulties. “It’s difficult when you’re married to someone that famous because you can lose your own identity. I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen to me. It makes life harder, I found, because there’s two of you doing the same thing. I just wish I’d never got into that situation, so I got out in the end.”
During his marriage to Dunaway, O’Neill toyed with a film career of his own. He got his introduction to the film business as a producer on Dunaway’s 1981 film Mommie Dearest. “I packed up the photography for a couple of years because she wanted me to be a director, but I never really wanted it enough,” he admits.
O’Neill recalls a breakfast meeting (“They have them at 6.30 over there”) at the start of the project. “I was told, ‘You’re in for the hardest three months of your life’. And he was right. There’s no satisfaction in it either for me, so I just got out of it all. It’s all deals, and people thinking the movie business is the best thing in the world; it’s not actually. The music world is much better, and the sport world.”
O’Neill now makes his living selling prints from his extensive back catalogue. “I’m always finding new pictures,” he says. Travelling to shows worldwide and expanding his business into new markets like China is, he says, “as much fun as taking pictures”. After such a successful and charmed career, does O’Neill have any regrets? Only, he says, that in all his time spent in jazz clubs, he never thought to photograph some of the legends, like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, that he saw playing. “It’s only in the last couple of years,” he says, “looking at what an enormous library I have, that I realise what a great life I’ve had. I’ve photographed everybody, you know.”
“My return to Cork.” That’s how O’Neill describes his upcoming show — his first in Cork, and only his second ever in Ireland — at two venues in the city, CIT’s Wandesford Quay Gallery and City Hall. It’s been over 20 years since he was last in Cork, and that was for the funeral of his father, who grew up on Blarney St before moving to London when he transferred there from Ford’s Cork plant.
“I used to go there every summer, when my father and mother were alive. My father’s brother owned a house at the top of Wyse’s Hill [Sunday’s Well] and I remember those as the greatest holidays of my life. I just loved Ireland. It’s a fantastic country; every time I’d go there, I’d fall under its spell. So, I try not to go there too much, in case I never leave! I don’t want to fall into its clutches just yet. But I honestly feel I could happily spend the rest of my life there, no trouble. The people are wonderful, they talk great and I just love their whole attitude to life. It is a different world; it truly, truly is.”
O’Neill’s mother was from Waterford and he says he was conceived on the couple’s honeymoon in Dingle. Early memories of his father are wartime ones. “I grew up during the war, I was bombed every night,” he says. “We bought a house where at the end of the street was Heston Airport, which was used to land all the people they didn’t want people to know were coming into London. Churchill would leave out of there, so they used to hammer it every single night. I was brought up in an air-raid shelter. I remember my father when the doodlebugs came, he used to take me out of the shelter. We used to watch them fly over. Because it was only when they fell silent you knew you were in for it. The noise cuts out and then they drop.”
O’Neill says he considered himself more as a “true Londoner” than as of Irish descent when he was growing up, although he was identified as priest material while at school. That phase didn’t last very long, and, though he was a talented grammar school boy, O’Neill left school at 14, “without taking GSCEs or whatever you have to take”.
By 16 he had left home, and was playing in jazz clubs and living in west London. “My mother died when she was 63, my father when he was 65. My mother had cancer — it was awful. When she got ill, I wasn’t there. I was always travelling. But when I came back and saw the state of her from cancer I couldn’t believe it.
“My father had a stroke. He’d moved back to Ireland then, and when he had the heart attack I spoke to him from New York and he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to get over this, don’t come back for me’. But two days later he died. So, to come back to Cork is fab for me but it is very emotional.”
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
