by Don McCullin
I never saw her in action in a courtroom, but I figured she must have been a pretty good judge. It was entirely true that I was beginning to acquire a renewed appetite for some fun and frivolity in my life. Romance even, but nothing too serious. I wasn’t looking for a replacement for Laraine who, since leaving me, had moved in with Terry O’Neill, yet another photographer, whom she later married. I had got to be rather fond of living on my own, and the thought of another full-on partnership did not appeal. In fact, it filled me with alarm.
For a good while my friendship with Loretta Scott suited me perfectly. Loretta lived in Bloomsbury, worked as a model for Laraine’s agency, was wonderful company, and almost exactly half my age. With her sultry good looks and raven-black hair extending down below her waist, she was an undoubted head-turner.
We would meet when I came up to London on advertising assignments, one of the most lucrative of which was for the Metropolitan Police. And she would often come down to stay with me in Somerset at weekends. We didn’t do anything much of a spectacular nature but we had many pleasant small-scale adventures, sometimes with Claude who we’d pick up at Laraine’s new address. He would be handed over and received back by the nanny; Laraine never came to the front door. Basically, Loretta and I just hung out, doing mundane everyday things, though we did make one trip together to India, the country I most loved to photograph.
I think I reached my highest point in Loretta’s estimation on a drive with her around the West End one evening. I happened to find myself proceeding the wrong way down a one-way street, and a policeman flagged us down. I had ignored a ‘No Entry’ sign, he said. He was going to give me a ticket. I pleaded for mercy. None granted. ‘Bit ironic,’ I said, ‘you giving me a ticket, when I’m doing the ads for the Metropolitan Police.’
Suddenly interested, the policeman said, ‘Did you do that one about racial prejudice? You know, the one where a white copper seems to be chasing a black guy who, it turns out, is also a copper, but in plain clothes. So it wasn’t racial at all—just two coppers involved in a chase together. That was a good one.’ I confessed that it was indeed my handiwork. The policeman then proceeded to fold his notebook and dismiss us, unticketed, with a kindly ‘Go on. Get yourselves out of here, the pair of you.’
Despite this high moment, things drew to a close. Relationships need to progress, while ours bumbled along at much the same level, always pleasantly but without any great purpose. The parting was amicable, with Loretta seeking out company perhaps more suited to her age, and me easing my way back into the middle-aged emotional marketplace. I’m probably more grateful to Loretta for our romantic interlude now than I was back then, because then I had no inkling of the ordeal that was to come.
The town of Arles in the south of France stages a photography festival every year that is always popular with both amateur and professional photographers around the world. In 1992, I was invited to put in an appearance. A major feature of the festival that year was a retrospective of my work, mainly of the war variety. As the exhibition opened, and people came flooding in, I happened to notice a tall, beautiful blonde lady with an imperious look about her. A little later, my agent, Mark George, came over to me and said, ‘That beautiful woman over there. She’s American, and I heard her say, “I’ve got to meet the man who took these photographs.”’ And I said, rather chauvinistically, ‘Well, if she’s the one I think you mean, she’s in luck.’
We did meet up and it turned out that this woman, whose name was Marilyn Bridges, not only was stunning to look at, but also had a list of accomplishments as long as my arm—as a professional photographer. After she graduated in photography and archaeology at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, the Guggenheim Foundation financed her first field trip to the Mayan temples in the jungles of Yucatán. She then went on to become one of America’s leading aerial photographers of archaeological sites, achieving her images by dangling out of low-flying aircraft, one of which was her own. The sacred and secular sites over which she flew, at frighteningly close to ‘stall speed’, came under the protection of many countries, each of which had to grant permission for her work. These included Peru, Mexico, France, Greece, Turkey, Australia, and Namibia. Examples of her photography had been exhibited in more than two hundred museums and galleries. A review of one of her exhibitions said that her work ‘testified to a combination of artistry, technical competence, and gung-ho tenacity’.
A more exhaustive CV would have to include that she had been a Bunny Girl in her youth, and maintained her shape in later life by running six miles every morning.
So she was beautiful, tough, brave, competent, widely travelled, and as obsessed with photography as I was. What more could a man want? We were in mutual-admiration territory almost immediately.
A whirlwind romance ensued. In next to no time, we were flying over the Okavango in Botswana with Marilyn hanging out of the door of the Cessna 172, training her lens on the herds of elephants below. We were flying high. And higher than ever when, a few months later, I was awarded a CBE in the 1993 Honours List, which, I was informed, was the most exalted honour ever accorded to a British photo-journalist. Still, there was a stage at which we had to assess whether we were just having a great, ego-massaging fling or embarking on a more enduring relationship.
This was about the time I arranged to meet Marilyn in Seville where she was then working on an aerial project. A funny thing happened to me on my way there.
I was driving out of Batcombe, en route to Heathrow, when I saw a woman lying in the road, clearly distressed, clinging on to the reins of two horses. She had broken a leg after being thrown while taking both horses out for exercise. I got her to the side of the road, made her as comfortable as I could, and explained that I was in a rush to catch a plane, but that I would get assistance to her as soon as possible. I knocked on a neighbour’s door to ask for help. The man agreed to call an ambulance and urged me to get off quickly and catch my plane.
I caught the plane, met Marilyn in Seville and we got on well. It did look as if our relationship had some staying power. On my return to Batcombe, I found a letter from the lady who had been unhorsed. It said: ‘You were such a gentleman that day, I’ll never be able to repay you . . . ’ I wrote back and said: ‘If I had been a proper gentleman, I would have stayed by the roadside with you and not rushed off to catch a plane.’ In the years that followed, I often thought that if I had been lucky enough to have missed that plane it might have derailed the romance with Marilyn and saved us both a whole load of grief. I really should have been ‘a proper gentleman’.
Marilyn and I got married in Batcombe on 14 October 1995. My best man was Mark Shand who had become a much closer friend after our adventures with Indonesia’s most primitive tribes back in the 1980s, which Mark had subsequently written up in an engagingly eccentric travel book called Skulduggery. Since those days, of course, he had become rather better known as the brother of Camilla Parker Bowles, the then girlfriend and now wife of Prince Charles.
It was Marilyn’s third marriage and, if I count my common-law arrangement with Laraine, Marilyn was my third wife. She was forty-four, and I had just edged past sixty. So we were both old enough to have known better. The big unresolved problem between us was identifying where we could exist as a couple.
Marilyn lived in upstate New York in a little town of the style immortalised in Norman Rockwell’s paintings—just the one high street, little white church, tidy little houses with American flags protruding, picket fences, neat gardens. Nice enough in its way, but not really my scene. It also emerged, after a while, that Batcombe was not really Marilyn’s. My proposal of marriage was designed to give us the incentive to do something that would free us from the tyranny of forever commuting across the Atlantic to have any time together. In reality, it made matters worse.
Essentially, Marilyn thought that our optimum route to togetherness would be for me to sell up in Batcombe and go and
live in America. I had no wish to uproot from Somerset, and still less any desire to put another 3,000 miles between me and my children. I naturally, therefore, favoured her moving in my direction, rather than vice-versa.
The only times when this issue was in abeyance was when Marilyn and I were actually travelling the world together. And we did travel a lot of the time, to Botswana, Bali, India and Cambodia. Not all these trips could be classed as romantic interludes. In Cambodia, for example, I was able to slip away on a photographic tour of Security Prison 21 (S-21), a converted school premises in Phnom Penh that had been the Khmer Rouge’s most infamous torture and murder house.
There can be no doubt that these expeditions had the effect of easing the central pressure on our relationship. However, it was a highly expensive form of relief, and more importantly, when combined with all the transatlantic commuting, ultimately very fatiguing even for two seasoned travellers. Travel deferred the problem, but could never solve it.
Two strong-minded, physically tired people grappling with an intractable mutual problem are rarely at their best, and we were about to prove it. With the cohabitation issue seemingly incapable of resolution, the arguments between us became more and more ratty and bad-tempered. It could be said that I did not miss war zones in this period mainly because I had a perfectly adequate one in my own home. The situation had its comic aspects, but these could be more easily appreciated in retrospect than at the time.
One of our major bust-ups escalated into a smashathon of the stuff in my living room—lamps, antique plates, anything breakable that came to hand. The episode climaxed with my tossing all Marilyn’s cameras out of an upstairs window. It seemed like a good idea at the time, though it wound up costing me £5,000 to replace them.
Our times together at Marilyn’s home in upstate New York tended to be less openly combative, but were often not much better in terms of mood. When things got too chilly and unfriendly in Norman Rockwell country, I would make a premature exit by jumping on a Greyhound bus and heading for New York City and the warmer comforts of the Gramercy Park Hotel.
Our farcical attempt at a marriage lasted less than three years, though it took several more years to secure a divorce. By the beginning of the new millennium, I was back to complete hermit status again and mightily relieved to have rediscovered it.
In terms of work, I didn’t achieve anything worthwhile during the Marilyn period. My photography went nowhere. I was too drained of energy to summon up the attention required for any original work. I managed to get out a book, Sleeping with Ghosts, which I followed up a few years later with an exhibition, with the same title, at the Barbican Galleries in London. But both of these efforts featured work I had done years previously. There was nothing original in their content.
I kept the advertising work going—indeed I had to in order to pay for all those air miles—but I never counted that activity as having any importance. It was all just for the money. And I could have raked in much more of the stuff if I had not imposed a strict rule on myself against promoting anything that smacked of militarism or warfare. So when the Pentagon waved a six-figure sum before my eyes to take the photographs for a recruitment campaign for the American army, I had to decline its most kind offer.
It has to be said that Marilyn’s creative work output held up much better than mine. One of her great achievements while we were together was to conduct an aerial survey of the Egyptian Pyramids. This was at a time when the Egyptian authorities were totally paranoid about intrusions into their air space, always afraid that any unknown objects in the sky could be manifestations of Israeli espionage. But Marilyn, with her combination of chutzpah and charm, blitzed her way through the Egyptian bureaucracy to get the requisite permissions and, ultimately, the raw material for an excellent book, Egypt: Antiquities from Above. I don’t think anyone else could have done it.
In what was left of the twentieth century I contentedly combed my archive on my own for my best prints and negatives of India, which I continued to regard as the most visually exciting country in the world after visiting it many times, first with Eric Newby and latterly, of course, with Marilyn. These were assembled in a book, entitled India.
43. AIDS IN AFRICA
The millennium had a special significance for me, mainly because it was the year in which I started to draw my old-age pension. As it looked as if my impending divorce from Marilyn was likely to prove expensive, it was very much a case of every little helping.
The important aspect of the settlement for me was that I retained full ownership of my beloved Somerset long house and its surrounding twenty-five acres. I might have become cash-skint, but I was as comfortably placed as I had been before. No domestic upheaval was required, just some modestly profitable occupation or assignments that would enable me to maintain my property in a manner to which it had become accustomed. I could still plunder my archives for more travel and war books but I felt a need to do something that would get me out and about. The last thing I wanted to do was vegetate in old age.
War was out of the question. It’s true that I had felt a couple of twitches in the Nineties, thinking that I really should have got involved in Bosnia and Chechnya. But these feelings had subsided, and I still took some pride in my claim of being a cured war junkie. So what was I to do? I spent some time brooding on this matter without getting anywhere. But all speculation ceased early in 2001 when I got a surprise call from Christian Aid with an even more surprising request—would I help out with the organisation’s Aids campaign?
They had in mind a two-month-long assignment taking in three of the worst afflicted countries in Africa—Zambia, Botswana and South Africa. I accepted like a shot. Like most people, I was concerned about the Aids epidemic, but I have to admit it was the anti-vegetating potential of the job that made it very appealing to me. I also had a notion that this was an area in which my photographs might have a positively beneficial effect, by raising consciousness and awareness. This was not something that could be said about my war pictures, which demonstrably had not impaired the popularity of warfare.
At that time almost twenty-two million people had died from Aids since the epidemic started, the vast majority from the Third World, with Africa suffering the most. Of the thirty-six million adults and children with HIV/Aids, twenty-five million were African. Inertia in the face of such devastating numbers amounted almost to a kind of genocide. And in Christian Aid’s opinion the response of the West to this crisis was nowhere near adequate.
It was a grim job. Photographing people at death’s door in the last stages of cruel illness could not be otherwise, although I was constantly touched by the reception I received even in the poorest homes, which were often no more than shacks. Sometimes I thought the poverty I encountered was as great an affliction as the disease itself.
The stench of poverty was present even in the once-prosperous copper town of Ndola in Zambia. After the collapse in global demand for its metal, thousands of workers had been laid off. Government attempts to persuade migrant workers to go back to their villages had, to a large extent, failed. In Ndola’s teeming Nkwazi township, where most of the migrants lived, a third of the population was said to be HIV-positive. Visiting there tested the limits of my self-control, even with the support of local volunteers and Christian Aid’s Judith Melby, who had been assigned to write up our journey. I met one young mother, so ‘slimmed’ by Aids that her hip bones stuck out almost at right angles. I could have photographed her alone but I did a portrait of her with her two young children. I wanted to show that Aids was not just a personal tragedy, but a blight on the whole family.
Many, perhaps most, people did not bother to get tested for HIV. The powerful stigma attached to the condition was part of the reason. But there also seemed to be an attitude of why bother when there was little or no medicine or care on offer. A similar fatalistic attitude extended to having unprotected sex. Another Ndola woman with Aids told me, in a re
signed way, that she believed her husband had infected her because he always ‘moved around’—local code for infidelity. In fact, few women had any choice in the matter. The main worry for most of them was how to buy enough food for their children today, not the more distant possible consequence of unprotected sex in the future. Thus poverty and the disease gathered strength together as natural allies.
A sixteen-year-old boy whose father has just died of Aids, Zambia, 2004
Regardless of the fact that my mission was clearly designed to assist Aids victims, support from the authorities could not always be guaranteed. After I had been taking photographs in the hospital of another of the Copperbelt towns, I was visited at my hotel by the health minister. Unbeknown to me, it appeared that a senior figure in the Zambian government had a nephew being treated for Aids in the hospital, and wanted it kept quiet. Politely, but insistently, the health minister said that my photography had been unauthorised, and that I had to turn over all my film to him immediately.
Luckily, I did not have the film on me as our meeting had been set up in Judith Melby’s room at the hotel. But I told the minister that I would nip up to my own room and bring it back for him. So I went to my room and located twenty rolls of unexposed film, pulled the ends out to make it seem as if the film had been exposed, and hid the genuinely exposed film behind the curtains. I then returned to the minister and presented him with the twenty rolls of slightly defaced unexposed film, while feigning great distress at the need for such a cruel handover. He thanked me and left, but suggested that Judith and I should go across the street to the local nightclub and have some fun.
I knew the deception had worked fairly well, because Judith commiserated with me after the minister had gone, saying how sorry she was that I had lost the fruits of all my hard work. I told her not to worry.