Leslie Kark had been a writer and barrister before joining the RAF during the war. In 1949 he covered a fashion show for a magazine he was editing and had an idea he thought might be profitable. As London’s few model agencies were “fairly, let’s say, inefficient,” he recalls, he published a catalog called Model. He only made £500 on the project.
Fortunately for him Lucie Clayton decided to retire to Australia and offered to sell her school and agency to Kark. He bought the operation for £2,200 (less than $1,000), “and I thought I’d been robbed,” he says. Before sailing off into the sunset, Clayton confided that she made most of her money selling coffee to her students.
But there was no lack of world-class photography in London. Cecil Beaton had operated there for years. John Rawlings opened a studio for Vogue in 1936. Norman Parkinson joined the magazine in 1941. He was born Ronald William Parkinson Smith in 1913 and learned his trade at Speaight & Son, a past-its-prime society portrait studio on Bond Street, where he apprenticed for two years after school. Parkinson opened his own studio on Dover Street near Piccadilly Circus in 1934 with a partner, Norman Kibblewhite. They called their firm Norman Parkinson and he took that name when they parted company soon thereafter. Friends called him Parks.
Parkinson began his career photographing debutantes, who didn’t always pay their bills. He was running low on funds by 1937, when the editor of the British edition of Harper’s Bazaar, first published in 1929, saw his work and hired him. For Bazaar, Parkinson shot portraits of the famous: the Sitwells, the American couturier Charles James, and Rose Kennedy, then the wife of America’s ambassador to Britain. But fashion photography was the magazine’s focus. He tried his hand at it and liked it a lot.
That didn’t mean he was content to take pictures like everyone else. Photographers then showed women “standing in scintillating salons with their knees bolted,” Parkinson said. “I never knew any girls with bolted knees. I only knew girls that jumped and ran. So I just started to photograph these girls. Everyone said, ‘How bold!’” In 1939 he shot model Pamela Minchin leaping off a breakwater on the Isle of Wight in one of the first modern fashion photographs.
In 1943 he married one of his favorite models, Wenda Rogerson, who’d been discovered by Beaton. She, Barbara Goalen, Anne Gunning, Carmen Dell’Orefice, and Enid Boulting appeared in most of the photographs he took for Vogue in the 1950s, both in quintessential English locales like Hyde Park Corner and on unprecedented location shoots in exotic spots around the world. Once, photographing Wenda in the rubble of the demolished New York Ritz Hotel, both the photographer and his Mainbocher-clad model were briefly arrested.
At six feet five inches, topped by a Kashmiri bridal cap on a balding head, Parkinson dressed for excess in caftans and gold jewelry or a decades-old vanilla bespoke suit made for him by the British tailor Tommy Nutter. His eccentricities extended to his hobbies, listed in Who’s Who as “pig farming, sun worshipping, bird watching, breeding Creole racehorses.” He dabbled in them all on the Caribbean island of Tobago, where he and Wenda moved in 1963. Later Parkinson set up a sausage factory there and began marketing its products as “the famous Porkinson banger.”
By the time of his death in 1990 Parkinson was best known as the portraitist of choice of the British royal family. But long before he attained that privileged position, a new photographic royalty had emerged in London. Its source was the studio of John French. Born six years before Parks, French originally wanted to be a painter. But commerce called. He picked up a camera and opened a studio in 1948. At first he worked for England’s Harper’s Bazaar, but he soon became a pioneer in daily newspaper fashion photography, beginning on the Daily Express. French dressed his models in pearls, stud earrings, and white gloves, called them all darling, and treated them like Dresden china dolls, never touching them but giving them directions in a high-pitched, languid voice. Until his death in 1966 French was renowned for never loading his own camera, clicking its shutter, or setting the lights he was famous for. Among the assistants who did all that for him were Richard Dormer, who soon became the chief photographer of British Bazaar, David Bailey, and Terence Donovan.
The son of an East End truck driver, Donovan began shooting photographs at age eleven, studied lithography, and then went to work on Fleet Street, the center of London’s thriving newspaper business, making the wooden blocks that were then used to print photographs on newsprint. But what he really wanted was to be a fashion photographer. “I don’t know why or anything,” Donovan says. “It wasn’t for the women oddly enough. I just liked doing it. We were fashion photographers.”
After a stint as a military photographer in the army Donovan joined John French as an assistant in the late fifties. “He was the most important fashion photographer in this country at the time, an extraordinary man. Couldn’t actually open the lid of his camera. He was a marvelous sort of queen. He got married to a girl because somebody made her pregnant, and he thought morally he ought to help her. At that stage in England all fashion photographers were gay.” Heterosexuals were “unheard of apart from Norman Parkinson,” according to Donovan. Gay gentlemen dominated the field because “nobody else knew how many bangles to put on. I was an East End bloke. I remember thinking, ‘I’ll never be able to do that; I just don’t know how many jewels to put on.’ And then suddenly you realized that you didn’t have to know. All you had to do was make a strong picture of a girl. I was earning eight dollars a week, and so I borrowed ten thousand dollars off of a bloke who thought I had something going, and we were off and running! I paid him back in a year.”
The sadness and poverty that had enveloped England ever since the war began were finally lifting. “It was a spectacularly exciting time because everything was possible,” Donovan says. “A cheese sandwich never tastes so good as when you’ve just come off of a terrible situation like a war. Everything had an absolute crystal sharpness and clarity. The world was open. You did what you liked; you went anywhere. We were really the first people to think in a much looser way.”
David Bailey joined John French as his second assistant soon after Donovan departed. Born in 1938, the son of a tailor, Bailey grew up hoping to be an ornithologist. “But for a cockney in the East of London to look at birds through binoculars was very suspect,” Bailey said. “In my father’s eyes, I had to be queer as a coot.” He nonetheless took pictures of birds and processed them in his mother’s cellar, an old air-raid shelter. At sixteen his ambition changed. He put down his camera and picked up a trumpet. His new ideal was Chet Baker. “You had two ways of getting out in the Fifties,” he once said. “You were either a boxer or a jazz musician.” He started collecting modern jazz records and was intrigued by the cover photographs shot by William Claxton (who later photographed and married Peggy Moffitt, Rudi Gernreich’s topless swimsuit model). To pay for his records, Bailey sold shoes and carpets, worked as a messenger, and cleaned windows before he was drafted into the Royal Air Force in 1956.
Bailey served in Malaya and Singapore, where “cameras were cheap,” he said. “I bought a £60 camera for £20 and that was it.” After shooting a roll of film, he would pawn the camera to pay for processing, reclaim it on the next pay day, and start all over again. On his return to England he took a job sweeping floors at an ad agency and wrote to eight fashion photographers asking for work. “I didn’t even know what a strobe was,” he’s said. But John French hired him anyway, probably because he liked the way Bailey looked. “Six months later, everyone thought we were having an affair,” Bailey recalled, “but in fact, although we were fond of each other, we never got it together.”
Dressed in Cuban-heeled boots and a leather jacket, the tough but pretty Bailey reminded the effete French of the scruffy young photographer hero in Colin MacInnes’s 1959 novel Absolute Beginners, which chronicled the alluring new street culture of working-class England. In fact, young rebels were rising everywhere, from the Left Bank in Paris, where the existentialists reigned, to Greenwich Village in New York, where b
eat was growing out of bop. Author MacInne’s and the Teddy boys, mods, and rockers he depicted were the earliest British contribution to a cultural movement that was sweeping the Western world. Fashion, ever alert to the newest and the now-est, quickly picked up the beat. The marketing of international youth culture soon became a British specialty.
Designer Mary Quant and her future husband, Alexander Plunket Greene, had opened Bazaar, a boutique on the King’s Road, in Chelsea, in 1955. By 1960 Quant was designing for the shop. She is often credited with inventing the miniskirt. In fact, it started on the streets. But without doubt Bazaar was the launching pad that put the mini—and the whole youth-driven sixties look—into orbit. When Quant came to America in 1959, she was the advance guard of what was, five years later, after the Beatles, deemed the British Invasion. Following in her footsteps came more designers who ignored the directives emanating from the Paris couture and instead took their lead from London’s kids.
For his part, David Bailey had no intention of getting into fashion. “It was just a way of breaking into photography,” he explained. “I didn’t really mind what I did. In fact, my first portfolio didn’t have any fashion in it.” But during his eleven months working for French, Bailey began to be published in Woman’s Own magazine and, every Thursday, on the fashion page of the Daily Express, where French’s work had often appeared. Bailey had become a fashion photographer in spite of himself. Late in 1959 he signed on to shoot for Vogue’s front-of-the-book “shophound” pages.
If he hadn’t already discovered the perks of fashion photography, he did then. “The only reason I ever did fashion was because of girls,” he admitted in 1989. “It was the gates of heaven. But I only wanted to photograph girls I liked. I had to have some sense of being with them or it wasn’t interesting.” And it was particularly interesting when they went to bed with him. “A model doesn’t have to sleep with a photographer, but it helps,” Bailey said.
Photographers everywhere had already begun evolving the language of fashion photography, seeking a new reality and naturalism within its artificial confines. But by 1960 British magazines were leading the way. Queen, recently purchased by a brilliant editor named Jocelyn Stevens, was using Parkinson and Antony Armstrong-Jones, who soon married Princess Margaret and became Lord Snowdon. Meanwhile, Man About Town, a men’s fashion trade magazine also being revived by new owners, took on England’s new angry young men, Donovan, Bailey, and their third musketeer, Brian Duffy.
A graduate of London’s prestigious St. Martin’s School of Art, Duffy had spent the fifties in the antiques business, before becoming a fashion designer. He started taking pictures in 1959 and immediately became part of the “new group of violently heterosexual butch boys,” he said. “We didn’t just treat models as clothes horses. We emphasized the fact that there were women inside the clothes. They started to look real.”
While the Terribles were learning their trade, Jean Shrimpton was doing the same at Lucie Clayton’s modeling school. “I was as green as a spring salad,” she remembered, when she took the train to London for her first day there. She was seated next to Celia Hammond in class. For four weeks they and their classmates learned to sit, stand, walk, paint their faces, and do their hair. They also learned tricks of the trade, like what a model was still expected to carry to sittings in the early sixties: stockings in various shades; jewelry; strapless, flattening, and bust-enhancing bras; a waist cincher; slips; shoes; gloves; hair ribbons, hairpieces, and hairstyling tools; makeup and brushes; rubber bands and bobby pins.
On graduation day the top graduates of the class, including Hammond and Shrimpton, were photographed for the Evening News striding happily down Bond Street. The next day, armed with a new photographic composite and a list of thirty photographers, Shrimpton started her career. But she lacked both a look and confidence. In fact, by late 1960 she’d run through all her money as well as loans from her mother and from Lucie Clayton.
Finally the awkward, saucer-eyed Shrimpton was booked for a Vogue Patterns sitting after another model failed to turn up. Those pictures in hand, she climbed another rung on the ladder and got a job with John French. Late in 1960 Shrimpton was working with Brian Duffy in a London studio when a gorgeous black-eyed man in jeans introduced himself. David Bailey had left John French’s employ only three months before. But he was already acting superior toward “new” models.
“Come back in six months,” he told Shrimpton, she has recalled.
“God, Duffy, I wouldn’t mind a slice of that one,” Bailey once remembered saying after she left.
“Forget it,” Duffy replied. “She’s too posh for you. You’d never get your leg across that one.” Bailey bet he would bed her, and three months later, he’s claimed, they were shacking up.
Shrimpton has remembered what followed their first meeting somewhat differently. She recalls working with Duffy again, on a Kellogg’s cereal ad shot on the roof of Vogue’s offices on London’s Hanover Square. Bailey popped onto the set, supposedly to see if her eyes were as blue as advertised. “He rather fancied me,” she thought. He later agreed that he’d found the girl of his dreams in Shrimpton.
He was twenty-three. Shrimpton was eighteen. There was only one roadblock to commencing a relationship. Bailey had just married a typist. So Shrimpton held out for a month as their uncommon courtship commenced. Finally she succumbed, and they made love for the first time in a park up the road from Shrimpton’s parents’ house. The experience was “quite awful,” she recalled. “I was miserable…. But our lives seemed to be inexorably entwined. I was becoming his model….”
Later Shrimpton was called Trilby to Bailey’s sulky Svengali. “Bailey created the Jean Shrimpton look,” she admitted. “I owe everything that I am as a model to David Bailey.” She was a gawky urchin, the image of innocence lost sometime in about the last ten seconds. And in creating and propagating that look, she and Bailey became the archetypes of a new breed of fashion photographers and models. By letting the heat of their sexual relationship into their pictures, by letting their models seem touchable, indeed, by merely admitting the possibility of a sexual relationship between model and photographer, they transformed themselves into fashion’s first real celebrities outside fashion. Things were never the same again.
A new generation was taking over the world of style, not only in London but all over the world. Suffering in part from the supremacy of Harper’s Bazaar, Condé Nast’s company, owned by British financiers for decades and then sold to a British tabloid publisher, had been losing half a million dollars a year. In 1959 it was sold to S. I. Newhouse, an American newspaper publisher. Shortly thereafter he bought the oldest magazine publisher in America, Street and Smith. Newhouse folded its Charm magazine into Nast’s Glamour to cut costs and competition but decided to continue publishing its Mademoiselle, which had a different audience.
In 1962 Alexander Liberman was promoted from art director of Vogue to editorial director of all the Condé Nast magazines, and one of his first moves was to lure Diana Vreeland away from Bazaar. Hired as Vogue’s fashion editor for “a very large salary, an endless expense account … and Europe whenever I wanted to go,” she recalled, Vreeland rose to editor in chief in January 1963, replacing Edna Chase’s stodgy successor, Jessica Daves, who fought against Vreeland’s innovations until the bitter end of her career.
“Boy, was I in the greatest seat at the greatest hour of the greatest time,” Vreeland said. “The year of the jet, the Pill. A completely different social world was being created.” Although the Terrible Trio was in the lead, a new generation of photographers was coming into its own all over the world, most of them dancing to what Bailey called the sexual rhythm of snapping 35 mm camera shutters. Helmut Newton, a German who started working on Australian Vogue, settled in Paris in 1962 and began taking provocative and unsettling pictures for Queen and British Vogue. Jeanloup Sieff was flying in from France, where he’d begun working for Elle in 1955. Americans like Sol Leiter, Art Kane, Jerry Schatzber
g, Bill King, and Bert Stern were part of the movement, too. But the center of all the heat and light was London, and Bailey, Duffy, Donovan, and their models were the brightest of the city’s bright young things. The Terribles worked together (sometimes even secretly shooting one another’s assignments) and played together as well, at night spots like Héléne Cordet’s Saddle Room, where Shrimpton learned to do the twist, and at the Ad Lib, the center of pop society.
“There was always something happening after the day’s work was done,” Shrimpton has written. “None of the photographers went home to their wives.” When Shrimpton’s parents objected to her carrying on with a married man, she moved out and was taken in by photographer Eric Swain and his wife. Soon, though, Bailey, Shrimpton, and his twenty finches and budgerigars moved into a flat of their own on London’s Primrose Hill. Her father stopped speaking to her for a year, but that wasn’t the last shock the Shrimptons had to endure. Not long after Jean started seeing Bailey, her mother walked into her younger daughter Chrissie’s bedroom and found her boyfriend, Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger, sleeping there.
For young Terry Donovan, moving into an apartment of his own was one of the great moments of his life. “Nobody ever had a flat,” he says. “The only shagging that took place was up against a wall!” Now, suddenly, not only did he have a place to shag (cockney slang for having sex), but he had an endless supply of beautiful women who were eager to shag along with him. Fashion photography “was a good way of getting a crumpet,” Donovan recalls, laughing. “I mean, Bailey and I shagged ourselves absolutely senseless in those days. It was fun, but it wasn’t the kind of vicious scoring thing. It was like being a chocoholic in a chocolate factory. I mean, everywhere you went there were fucking women strobing past!”
Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women Page 19