Focus

by Michael Gross

  Liberman asked him to shoot trapeze dresses by Dior and emphasize that they had a particularly original shape. “I’d spend two or three nights a week at the Palladium Ballroom on Broadway watching people dance,” Schatzberg says. At the so-called Temple of Mambo, a dancer named Killer Joe Piro played MC. Celebrities flocked to learn the latest dance steps. Inspired by how the dancers moved doing the cha-cha-cha, a Cuban dance step that was then the rage, Schatzberg hired two dancers from the Broadway production of West Side Story and had them dance in his studio. “When I saw something I liked, I stopped them” and had models dressed in Dior copy their moves.

  Schatzberg began traveling to London after meeting a contemporary, the young British photographer Terence Donovan, when Donovan called him while visiting New York for the first time. “He booked me a room in the YMCA on West Thirty-Fourth Street!” Donovan recalled. “He’s thinking I’m a penniless Englishman, and I booked into the Y with ten thousand dollars in my pocket.”

  “We were equivalents,” Schatzberg says. “I would show him New York and we became instant friends.” Through Donovan, Schatzberg would later meet Brian Duffy and David Bailey; the three Brits would soon be dubbed the Terrible Trio, or just the Terribles.

  Born in 1936, the son of a truck driver, Terence Donovan started taking pictures as a child, “photographing the girls in the street where I lived,” he said. “I thought, ‘Oh, this is good. I like this.’ ” After studying lithography, apprenticing in the printing business as a teen, and a stint as a British military photographer, he began his career as an assistant, ending up in the studio of John French, a London fashion photographer who was “a marvelous sort of queen,” Donovan said. David Bailey, a bit younger, followed Donovan as a French assistant.

  Brian Duffy, three years older than Donovan, was a self-described “thuggish child of war,” who grew up on the streets of North London during World War II. He studied fashion at art school because “the most attractive lot were those girls doing dress design,” he said, and became a designer, but turned down a job at Balenciaga in Paris when his new wife got pregnant and he took work as an illustrator instead. Duffy started taking pictures around the same time as Donovan, after seeing his first contact sheets while dropping off some fashion drawings at the English edition of Harper’s Bazaar. “Gawd, this looks dead easy compared to the drawing lark,” Duffy thought to himself. “I’ll give this a whiz. Take up photography as an easy way to make money. Just my sort of thing—women, gadgets, clothes—I must have a go at it.”

  He got a job assisting celebrity-portrait photographer Adrian Flowers, who had a studio in London’s Chelsea district, just off the fashionable King’s Road. “Shit, this is the game,” Duffy said to himself. “This is it. This is for me.” His first pictures appeared in the Sunday Times in the late 1950s. He took his first photo for British Vogue for its Shop Hound what’s-in-stores section in 1957.

  “I was at the very bottom of the snappers,” he later wrote. “First of all, you start doing the dregs because there are hundreds of little photos that had to be taken all the time . . . horrible little pictures that no one else wanted to do.” But he was spotted by Claire, Lady Rendlesham—wife of the Eighth Baron Rendlesham, a landholding member of Ireland’s peerage—who’d joined Vogue in 1952. Lady Rendlesham was unlike the typical British Voguettes, who “nearly always had double-barreled names, it was very elitist,” Duffy thought, “girls with fruitcake voices and thick legs, quite sweet, but not very bright.” Rendlesham promoted young designers and photographers, and clothing designed for the young. She launched a Junior Bazaar–like section in British Vogue called Young Idea. Duffy thought she “had great taste and style” and “was an instigator for the new wave of change.” And she loved Duffy and Bailey, bringing both to prominence.

  The three stood in stark contrast to the prevailing image makers, who “had a slightly effeminate approach,” Duffy recalled. “The way to be a photographer was to be tall, thin, and camp—you were seen to be inside the tent, and we were not. I’m not saying they were all homosexuals, but a lot of them were. . . . We would just talk to the girls and make them laugh. . . . ‘All right, love, hold your bristols up more, that looks good.’ Before that it would all have been obsequious toadyism, but our way seemed to work, and we were backed up by people who liked it. . . . I didn’t have any affectations so I believe I was slightly brutal, maybe just straightforward, with the girls. . . . You want to get a response, a look, to make her feel she has some potency, other than just being a model stand, so that’s why one imbued in them a sort of sexual tension, to make them think they were desirable.”

  To Bailey, all that required was making them look human. “I made girls look like people,” he says. “I photographed portraits of girls wearing clothes rather than fashion being the most important thing. The edge was getting something out of people.”

  To the Terribles, change meant more than clothing. “People like myself, Terry, a whole clique,” Duffy wrote, “were not deferential and said, ‘No!’ ‘Why?’ ‘What?’ ‘Who told you so!’ ‘Go on make me!’ The sort of chippy oiks like me and Bailey . . . were not prepared to roll over. There was a breakdown of society, not a lot of aggression, just people questioning everything, and wanting to change things. . . . It was the beginning of what I call ‘Attitude.’ ”

  By 1959, Duffy had his own studio and had begun shooting for a landmark men’s magazine called Man About Town, renamed Town after it was bought in 1960 by the future British politician Michael Heseltine. Bailey and Donovan would later work for it, too, in “pre-swinging London,” Duffy wrote, “before anybody knew it was actually swinging.”

  None of the three could recall how they met. “We’ve all got different versions,” Duffy said. Bailey, the only one still alive, recalls meeting Duffy at Vogue. “Within a year, we all got very known very quickly,” Donovan said. His breakthrough came with shoots for Town characterized by a street-smart, reportage style. “It’s dressing women so someone can come along and undress them,” Donovan said. He was the last of the trio to go to work for Vogue, publishing his first photo there in 1963, two years after Duffy had a slow falling-out with the magazine and began doing what he later considered his best work for a Swiss art director, Peter Knapp, at the French weekly fashion magazine Elle, another force driving fashion photography out of the ghetto of haute couture and into the streets.

  All three of the Terribles were known for their abrasiveness—no surprise since they defined themselves in opposition to the prevailing fashion culture—but Duffy took that to extremes, earning a reputation as angry and epochally difficult. One fashion editor later described him as “a bit of a bastard, really.” The film producer David Puttnam, briefly Duffy’s and Bailey’s agent, said, “You risked death being his assistant.” Bailey found Duffy’s quirks endearing. “He was always winding people up, Duffy,” Bailey says. “Just a troublemaker. If you said it was Thursday, he’d say it was Friday. That’s why I liked the Irish git. He was one of the cleverest men I ever met.”

  Duffy pushed everyone’s limits, including his own. He was twice fired from Vogue. Though he continued to shoot fashion for Elle, and two influential magazines in London—Queen, a magazine for young society and its aspirants, and Nova, an avant-garde publication—he increasingly turned his attention to portrait work, technically impressive advertising photography, and, for a brief spell at the end of the sixties, film (he coproduced Oh! What a Lovely War, the first film directed by Sir Richard Attenborough and starring Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and Vanessa Redgrave). Among Duffy’s other credits were the covers of three David Bowie albums, beginning with Aladdin Sane in 1973, and two Pirelli calendars. In 1977, he embarked on an ad campaign for Benson & Hedges cigarettes that was as famous in its time as Bert Stern’s Smirnoff ads in the fifties, depicting cigarette packages in surreal scenarios. One showed a pack inside a newly hatched egg. By 1979, though, he was fed up. When an assistant asked him for some toilet paper, he suddenly deci
ded he had too much on his shoulders and took loads (though not all) of his negatives into the rear yard of the house he used as a studio and burned them.

  “In a flash, I decided to end it,” Duffy said. “My career went down the bog with a piece of paper. Bailey watched. That’s the sort of turd he is. . . . Keeping a civil tongue up the rectum of a society that keeps you paid is an art that I was devoid of.”

  “I never had any education at all,” remembers the youngest of the Terribles, David Bailey. His father was a tailor’s cutter, but also “a bit of a wheeler and dealer. He had a little club, a little drinking bar, and he was always duckin’ and divin’. With the girls, too. He got slashed by the Krays [East London criminals Bailey would later photograph]. I didn’t know him much.” But because of his father’s job, “we always looked better than other people because we got free clothes.”

  Dyslexic and dyspraxic, Bailey did badly at school and dropped out at fifteen. “They thought I was a fuckin’ idiot. They put me in the silly class, but I was at the top of it.” His childhood influences were Walt Disney and Pablo Picasso. He remembers his mother, a machinist, as “tough, like a tough Diana Vreeland.” She had a Brownie box camera, and he learned to develop photos in their coal cellar. “I liked the technical side of it” more than taking pictures. “I wanted to be an ornithologist. I tried to do pictures of birds in the backyard. I didn’t know about telephoto lenses. I always wondered why they looked like little black dots, why I couldn’t get closer to them.”

  Briefly, he played trumpet and thought of being a jazzman. “I like the blues,” he says, and in his first self-portraits shot at age seventeen, he poses like the jazz musician Chet Baker. Another hero was Hoagy Carmichael, “the first cool white man,” whom Bailey spotted in the Howard Hawks film To Have and Have Not. The desire to take photos hit Bailey when he saw an image of four women in the Himalayas by Henri Cartier-Bresson. “I couldn’t believe it was a photograph,” he says, “and I thought, ‘Shit, there’s more to this photography than I thought.’ ” A year later, he was serving in the British air force in the Far East when his trumpet was stolen “by an officer and a gentleman,” but he’d already come to prefer his camera and books and magazines about photography. He shot “the usual,” he says, “Edward Weston tree stumps. And I had the best-looking WAAF in the Far East and I shot her, yeah, and I fucked her all the time.” He’d pawn his camera to pay for film and processing, “then I’d get my twenty-four shillings a week, get the camera back,” and start all over. “I’ve still got a Chinese pawn ticket.”

  Back in London, he tried to enroll in a printing and graphics arts school and, when told he was underqualified, became an assistant. He started with an advertising photographer, running errands, then wrote to the top twenty photographers in London. Only Anthony Armstrong-Jones (the future Lord Snowden) and John French bothered to reply. Armstrong-Jones gave him tea out of a silver pot and asked if he was good at carpentry. “I want to take pictures,” Bailey replied, thinking, “I don’t want to build sets for you, you fucking cunt.” Fortunately, he didn’t say that until over a half century later.

  He joined French and stayed for eleven months. “He looked like Fred Astaire. There were always three assistants. I was the middle one. I had to press the button on the camera.” French was renowned for never, ever, touching cameras himself. Eventually, French offered Bailey the first assistant’s job. “He offered me the moon; I didn’t want the responsibility.” Also, Bailey says, “I think he was sort of in love with me. I was pretty dynamic and a bit rough. They liked a bit rough, all those middle-class people.”

  Like Duffy and Donovan, Bailey had married young—a “marriage of convenience,” he says. By 1960, he’d begun taking weekly portraits for a newspaper, the Daily Express. Assigned a fashion job, he shot a model named Paulene Stone “on the ground, talking to a fuckin’ squirrel,” he remembers. “Real intellectual pictures. Donovan phoned me up and said, ‘Was that an accident or did you do it on purpose?’ ‘No, I did it on purpose, you cunt.’ Those pictures changed everything for me.” Three months after he left French’s studio, “Vogue gave me a contract.”

  Actually, first, Vogue’s art director offered him a staff job. “I was working for cheap magazines then. I didn’t care,” he says. “I just wanted my pictures published. But Condé Nast is so fuckin’ cheap, he offered me twenty-five pounds a week, what I was getting for a picture, and I said no.” Three months later, Vogue offered him a contract. “I didn’t know what a contract was. I didn’t realize it involved copyright and all that shit, so I said, yeah, and once you sign a contract with them, they’ve got you by the short and curlies.” Like Duffy, he started taking Shop Hound pictures. “He was angry because he was a staff photographer and I got a contract. Duffy was older and had been to art school.”

  Within a year, Bailey was shooting covers. Six months after that, he wandered into a Vogue studio where Duffy was shooting a neophyte model for a Kellogg’s cereal ad.

  “Who’s that girl, Duff?” he asked.

  “Ah, she’s too posh for you,” Duffy answered.

  “I asked if she wanted to do some tests, and that’s how it started.” Her name was Jean Shrimpton, and once they came together, they were poised for stardom. In January 1962, Lady Rendlesham brought Bailey and, at his insistence, his new girlfriend, to New York to shoot a Young Idea spread. Declared the new Prince of the Glossies after that, he was shooting two thousand frames a week and was reportedly making £10,000 a year. “At least that, yes,” Bailey affirms, “but I was paying eighty-six percent tax when I was making that kind of money. The Beatles wrote a song [called “Taxman”] about it.” A new British society was emerging, and membership in it was consecrated by a portrait by Bailey, Donovan, or Duffy. “I just photographed a group of stroppy blokes and I think they’re going to get very famous,” Bailey told Donovan one day. They were called the Beatles. Few had ever heard of them. “It seems incomprehensible, but it’s true,” Donovan said. “And then, off we went.” The Beatles and the Rolling Stones became subjects as well as friends of the Terribles.

  In years to come, the Terribles would become most legendary for their sexual exploits—a reputation that began when Bailey hooked up with Shrimpton. “David Bailey makes love daily,” Mark Boxer, a British editor, quipped. “Bailey and I shagged ourselves absolutely senseless,” Donovan would later recall. That reputation was warranted but exaggerated. Duffy stayed married to his first wife all his life, even if he strayed at times (hairdresser Harry King remembers a Duffy shoot during collection season when “every time a dress arrived,” he and the model would emerge from a back room, with him “pulling up his pants with an erection and she’d need her hair done again”). Donovan had relationships with two models, Jacqueline Bisset and Celia Hammond, before marrying a second time in 1970; and Bailey also had lengthy relationships: “Every five years, he had a recast, hoping one or two would come quietly,” Donovan joked.

  But regardless of their sexual box scores, all three insisted that beneath their roguish exteriors, they were deadly serious about their work. Their hypersexed images may have made them celebrities, but they wouldn’t have become the first fashion people truly famous beyond their little realm if the work hadn’t been worthy of attention. “Everyone gets the wrong idea, like I was only doin’ it to get a fuck,” says Bailey. “It wasn’t that. I had no problems getting fucked. It was, I thought, the only way to be creative and get paid for it, to do fashion pictures. I never really liked taking advertising pictures because they always wanted to tell you what to do, and I thought that was pointless.”

  Donovan agreed: “It wasn’t calculated. It was just magazines and we took photographs and our names appeared on them. I used to do four assignments a day, work, work, work, work, we were out every day, year after year, London, America, Paris, Rome, photographing.”

  Said Duffy, “We were just workers. We just wanted to be good at it. We spoke [about photography] for hours and hours, ad nauseam.�
�

  On his first trip to New York, Bailey met Alex Liberman, and the art director asked him to shoot for the flagship Vogue. “I did pictures that were a bit pop-arty for the times, lots of signs on garages and things, and then he offered me a contract,” Bailey recalls. “And then, I got caught up with Vogue, and suddenly I had French, Italian, American, all the fuckin’ Vogues.” He was already entrenched in Vogue’s stable the next year when Vreeland arrived. “I thought she’d drop all of us and bring all the Harper’s photographers, but she didn’t,” Bailey remembers. In fact, she and Bailey became such “good mates,” as he put it, that he felt free to call her a “fucking old bag” when she rejected some of his photographs, and on another occasion, after a night of drinking, he and Jack Nicholson stole the knocker off what had been the front door of her house in London, pre-Bazaar, while Vreeland waited in a limousine nearby.

  Chapter 13

  * * *

  A FASCINATION WITH MOVEMENT

  One of the photographers Vreeland worked with before leaving the Bazaar was among the last of the greats to appear in its pages while Alexey Brodovitch’s aura of excellence still clung to the enterprise. “Diana saved me on almost every shoot,” Melvin Sokolsky told Vreeland’s biographer. She saved him, he went on, from Carmel Snow’s successor, Nancy White, whose appointment marked the beginning of the magazine’s decline. “Some great photography still took place because she didn’t know how to say no yet,” recalls Ila Stanger, then a Bazaar editor. “It became gradually more ordinary.”