O’Terry

By Victoria Gill. Images by Terry O' Neill

1 Year Ago

“It’s charisma. It’s personality. But it’s not beauty. It’s more than beauty.” Terry O’Neill is talking of star quality. Having dedicated a lifetime to capturing it, the veteran portrait photographer, whose canon of shots come as framed and famed as the stars of screen and sound he snapped,
rubbed shoulders with more Hollywood legends and music genii than a Valentino ballgown on Oscars’ night. His lens captured a bucket list of star-studded transatlantic mise-en-scenes: from The Beatles’ backyard to The Queen at Sandringham via Frank Sinatra curling the Miami Beach
boardwalk with bodyguards and body double in tow. A thousand suits swarmed the streets of Marble Arch as Terry and I arrived in tandem for this interview, at the doors of his art dealership one sunny, late Spring morning.

O’Neill was smart sports casual in sweatpants and spruce trainers, his grey T-shirt emblazoned with a portrait of Bridget Bardot, that one where the screen goddess’s gaze sweeps wistfully at the slant of her windswept locks, cigarette sloping south west, parallel to the hollows of those cheekbones, pointed to the direction of her scarf: the pout that launched a zillion posters. “I mean, I just put this on today because I didn’t have another T-shirt,” he quipped, gesturing to the garment featuring his most circulated print. The stars were as aligned over O’Neill’s career as they were before his Leica 35mm. The worst he ever worked with was Steve McQueen. “He turned out to be a pain in the neck.” The best was Paul Newman. “I used to love mixing celebrities, mixing them all up.” He recounted moonlighting between a movie set in Tucson by day and sitting in as a drummer in a jazz club by dusk.

Clint Eastwood would watch him there every evening. “I’m Terry O’Neill and I’m working with Paul Newman: I’d love to get a shot of you two together,” he proposed, successfully, to the Western actor one balmy Arizonan night. They were two of the best looking guys you ever saw, and the best guys you’ll meet.” There was Connery and Bardot. Bowie and the Great Dane. Bowie and Burroughs: “Christ. William Burroughs was mad about Bowie! Bowie was the nicest man you’d ever meet. Very quiet, very creative and really cared about what he did. He was very talented; very smart. He (Burroughs) was a bit weird. A wild one,” he told me, those famously sparkling blue eyes a glint as his eyebrows raised incredulously. Elizabeth Taylor and David Bowie got on “like a house on fire. Oh God, he was out of it at that time; I’m surprised she stayed,” he exclaimed, before ruefully shaking his head as the words “there are too many dying,” fall to the floor. It was quite a trajectory for the Romford-born, self professed “London boy” raised near Heathrow, in “an ordinary house. Actually, it wasn’t an ordinary house,” he backtracked characteristically.

A leitmotif of Terry’s tales was how they would somersault from the mundane to the sublime. He slept every night in an air raid shelter from the ages of two to nine at the end of a WWII runway. Underground, in the dark, Luftwaffe Doodlebugs droned overhead, aimed at the “bigwigs” landing at Heston military airbase, as his family sheltered a dozen or so neighbours. I proposed that this fashioned his ease with anyone and everything, fascination with the stars or love of the flashbulb: “Yeah, maybe…” he pondered, with the trademark affability that beckoned the little black book of every Hollywood mogul and London music impresario, before casting the notion like a dud negative to the floor with the strident self-possessedness that won the heart of every star. “No. I was shy: never used to talk to anyone. Terribly shy.

All my life, I’ve been shy.” I didn’t believe him. Terry’s byword is understatement. His first love was music: his trajectory into photography a happy accident, or twist of fate. The teenaged O’Neill held ambitions of becoming a transatlantic air steward, the flights’ stopovers portals to a shot at the big time as a drummer in the jazz clubs of New York. The airline only had a vacancy in its photographic department, so there he worked until, one day, he snapped a sleeping man in an airport, and somebody recognised the supine senior as thethen-Home Secretary Rab Butler. He was enlisted to the ranks of Fleet Street, to a newspaper named The Daily Sketch. “I got you here because you get on with other musicians,” the Editor told the young photographer. “We think that music is going to be big in the Sixties and we need someone to photograph all the groups.” His first assignment saw him sent to St John’s Wood where, one crisp January day, he shot the Fab Four, guitars in hands, for their inaugural group shot in the backyard of Abbey Road Studio

The story sold the newspaper out. “I was off and running: I started with the two biggest groups in the world and I never looked back.” The following day, another up-and-coming group’s manager called, asking if O’Neill could do for The Rolling Stones what he’d done for their rivals. He spent the next five years launching and capturing the faces of Swinging London alongside his friends David Bailey and Don McCullin, the trio lauded for being the photographic Holy Trinity. Jean Shrimpton was the best model he ever worked with, Audrey Hepburn “an absolute doll;” he snapped Michael Caine and Winston Churchill. Reportage was his signature; the melange of light and lines his calling card. By 1966, “The Beatles weren’t doing nothing and The Stones had packed up.”

Disillusioned, O’Neill was told: “If you don’t like it, you can walk out this door and your career will be over, because without The Daily Sketch, you’ll be nothing; good luck.” He “left in a total panic,” turning his back on Fleet Street to walk into the limelight of Hollywood and New York. “I met Frank Sinatra and I’d been introduced to him by Ava Gardner, and one thing led to another and I was off and running.” Again. This time to the stars of Tinseltown. The Daily Sketch wasn’t so fortunate.

Five years later, the tabloid would fold. “There was a time with Sinatra that we could have really been friends, because I was married to Faye Dunaway and we were going to the boxing matches together,” he remembered. “If you like the person then you immediately get the best side of them,” O’Neill explained of his alchemical ability to capture the spirit and expression of his A-list sitters. Audrey Hepburn: always impish and cheeky; Mick Jagger, cheerful in tails and furs; Bridget Bardot, ever-troubled and his now ex-wife, a panoply of Oscars headlines surrounding her on that morning they first met after the night before, head tipped to the Hollywood heavens, punch-drunk from her win at the Academy Awards, stilettos pointing to the golden statue prescient on that swimming pool table, that somehow portended the method to their marriage: “an actress is an actress, they always want to act.”

The only star he never shot was Marilyn Monroe. O’Neill was wooing her publicist, who forbade him from meeting the siren because, “she always takes all the young photographers to bed.” It was one of his few regrets. “Anyone who’s that complicated would be interesting to shoot. Because they think a lot about life, and a lot of things happen to them. It makes them a more interesting person, because she had quite a mind. Not just a dumb blonde, do you know what I mean?” The other femme fatale he never managed to photograph was Princess Diana. “I’d have liked to have done, it was all leading up to that.”

They were close friends: Diana would often steal away to O’Neill’s Mayfair home for conversations over cups of tea. “She just wanted to be liked by everyone,” he reminisced. “All the great ones die, don’t they? It’s sad.” I met O’Neill after he had just presented his most iconic photographs at The Stafford London hotel. I wondered, is there anyone left he wants to shoot? “No,” he smirked. “It’s staying at home.” At the time, O’Neill had bought a small house in Cornwall and his greatest wish, he said to me wistfully, was to be there, by the sea.

“The years are going by and I wish they weren’t. My biggest achievement is staying alive at the moment. I don’t know when it will all end…” he lamented, the words drowned in darkness. Whether an ordinary man who courted the extraordinary or an extraordinary man who craved the ordinary, Terry O’Neill’s shots gift life and immortality to some of the most iconic celebrity moments, meetings and stars with that “indefinable something that you recognise when you see it” of all time.