Terry’s All Gold

Despite recognition as a master of his art and mixing with the glitterati, the celebrated photographer Terry O’Neill is that rare thing: a legend with absolutely no side. Nick Foulkes talks to him about his career to date

The past, as dear old LP Hartley has been telling us for quite some time now, is a foreign country and, as countries go, it was not terribly well served by airports. Not so long ago, when people said “London Airport” they didn’t mean some far-flung spot halfway up the M1 or out near Cambridge, they meant Heathrow. And there wasn’t any confusion about terminals either – there was only one.

It probably wasn’t the most convenient of arrangements but, back in 1959, it suited the 21-year-old man with camera. The snappily dressed youngster was a trainee in the technical photographic department of BOAC (while the past only had one airport, it had two national carriers – the other was BEA). He didn’t really want to be a photographer. In fact, he was a rather accomplished jazz drummer and he had taken any job that was going at BOAC in the hope that he would be promoted to the cabin staff on one of the transatlantic Stratocruisers and be able to travel to New York regularly enough to play in the clubs there. But here he was, stuck at London Airport, taking photographs as part of his training. And then he saw it, or, rather, him: an immaculately dressed older man fast asleep surrounded by a crowd of African chieftains.

As soon as he had taken the picture, a newspaper reporter asked if he could buy the image: the sleeping man was Rab Butler, Home Secretary in the Harold Macmillan administration. And the jazz drummer with the camera? Terry O’Neill, whose life had just changed.

Terry O’Neill is a legend, which is a term we bandy about rather a lot at Finch Towers, but Terry has done it all – or, at least, most of it. He has married at least one beautiful Hollywood star, having photographed her the morning after she won an Academy Award. He has hung out with The Rat Pack. He photographed Bardot when she was beautiful, The Beatles before they had released Please Please Me, and snapped The Stones in moody colour when they were probably still too young to shave. He more or less invented the Swinging Sixties. All right, all right, he was one of the inventors of the Swinging Sixties, along with Burton, Taylor, Jean Shrimpton, Twiggy, Mary Quant and the miniskirt… all of them captured by his 35mm Canon.

But the most endearing thing about Terry is the lightness with which he wears it all: a trim, compact septuagenarian with all his own hair, it is still possible to see the young jazz drummer manqué who just happened to find himself with his camera in the right place at the right time – time after time. The England in which he had grown up, the England of Macmillan and Rab Butler, was a place where, as he puts it, “All the well-brought up people were in charge of everything, and all the Cockneys and Liverpudlians, we were the workers. And then, suddenly, we got a chance to have a say in a creative way, and that was the great thing about the Sixties.”

However, while he enjoyed the times, he could not bring himself to take them seriously. “You always thought, ‘This is all very nice, but it is all going to come to an end’. My mum was desperate for me to work in a bank.” And who knows, had Terry gone to work in a bank he might have been able to avert the global financial crisis. But instead he has bequeathed us some truly memorable images that could only have been taken by him at that time.

His work recalls an era before agents and marketing people determined who had access to whom and for how long. Do you think that he would be allowed to lurk around behind the arras in Dean Martin’s dressing room today? Not a chance… but what a great picture of a man and the tools of his trade lined up before him, an image of obsessive neatness that peels back the on-screen image of benign inebriation to reveal the obsessive professional. And the candid image of Sinatra – at the time the world’s biggest star – strolling down the boardwalk… Today there would be a cavalcade of SUVs with blacked-out windows and a phalanx of minders.

It would be impossible to have a career like Terry’s today. There are, of course, famous photographers, but today’s star photographers are all about elaborate effect and the controlled image: the Testinos and Leibowitzes. By contrast, Terry’s pictures were spontaneous, ad lib, which, by the way, was also the name of the club where he used to hang out with The Rolling Stones, and where late at night, after a few drinks, they would wonder about what they would all be doing when they reached 40….

Terry O’Neill: New & Unseen is at the Chris Beetles Gallery, 8/10 Ryder Street, St James’s, London SW1 (020-7839 7551; www.chrisbeetles.com) until March 10.

Tags: Photography, Terry O’Neill, The Beatles

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