A Cloud of Pink Chiffon
The story of David Bailey's early life and career would
come to sound a cliche: Scruffy East End (or maybe
northern) boy aspires to a field normally reserved for
the posh and sets the world on its ear without bending
his personality to fit the long-established model. But
like the jokes in Shakespeare or the Marx Brothers, it
was only familiar because it was repeated so often
from the original. All the pop stars, actors,
dressmakers, haircutters, club owners, scenesters,
satirists and boy tycoons who exploded on the London
scene in the early sixties did so after Bailey, often in
his mold and almost always in front of his camera.
Before mod and the Beat Boom, before Carnaby Street
and the swinging hot spots of Soho and Chelsea,
before, indeed, sex and drugs and most of rock 'n' roll
there were the laddish young photographers from the
East: Bailey, Brian Duffy and Terence Donovan, "the
Terrible Three" in the affectionate phrase of Cecil
Beaton, an iconoclastic snapper of another age whose
approval of the new lot made it that much easier for
them to barge in on what had been a very exclusive and
sedate party.
The trio and a few others who came along in the
rush dressed and spoke and carried on as no important
photographers ever had, not even in the putatively
wide-open worlds of fashion magazines and
photojournalism. They spoke like smart alecks and
ruffians, they flaunted their high salaries and the
Rolls-Royces they flashed around in, they slept with
the beautiful women who modeled for them, they
employed new cameras and technologies to break
fertile ground in portraiture and fashion shoots. They
were superstars from a world that had previously been
invisible, perhaps with reason. "Before 1960," Duffy
famously said, "a fashion photographer was somebody
tall, thin and camp. But we three are different: short,
fat and heterosexual."
Duffy could enjoy such self-deprecating boasts
because, recalled Dick Fontaine, who tried to make a
documentary about the trio, "He was really the kind of
architect of the guerilla warfare on those who control
the fashion industry and the press."
But it was Bailey who would bring the group their
fame and glory. Bailey was the first bright shiny star of
the sixties, a subject of jealous gossip, an inspiration
in fashion, speech and behavior, an exemplar of getting
ahead in a glamorous world, and, incidentally, the
great, lasting chronicler of his day.
Bailey was born January 2, 1938, in Leytonstone, east
of the East End, a block over, he always liked to brag,
from the street where Alfred Hitchcock was born.
When Bailey was three, the family home took a hit
from a Nazi bomb and they relocated to Heigham
Road, East Ham, which was where Bailey and his
younger sister, Thelma, were raised.
Their father, Herbert, was a tailor's cutter and a flash
character who dressed nattily, ran around on his wife
and like to have a roll of fivers at hand; his wife,
Gladys, kept house but also worked as a machinist,
especially after Bert finally split on her. The family
wasn't rich, but they were comfortable they were
among the first people in the block to have a telephone
and TV set, and Bailey was made to dress smartly, to
his chagrin ("What chance have you got in a punch-up
in East Ham wearing sandals?" he later sighed). But
they weren't entirely free of money worries, and one of
their ways of dealing with them was, to Bailey, a
blessing: "In the winter," he recalled, the family
"would take bread-and-jam sandwiches and go to the
cinema every night because in those days it was
cheaper to go to the cinema than to put on the gas fire.
I'll bet I saw seven or eight movies a week."
Bailey fell, predictably enough, under the spell of
rugged (and mainly American) actors at around the
same time that his parents' marriage was foundering.
But Bert Bailey was nonetheless a little worried about
his son's fancy for birdwatching and natural history,
which loves led the boy into vegetarianism. "My father
thought I was fucking queer," Bailey said, "but queer
didn't mean homosexual. In those days it just meant a
bit of an oddball."
Part of Bailey's queerness was taking and developing
photos of birds he preferred the latter process, as it
involved playing with chemicals. But he didn't think of
taking pictures as a career ambition "photography was
something you did once a year on Margate beach" and
he had enough on his hands at school, where his
learning disabilities (undiagnosed at the time) made
for a hellish routine. "I can't read and write," Bailey
said. "Dysgraphia, dyslexia I've got them all. I went to
the silly class the school for idiots and they used to
cane me when I couldn't spell. It was quite tough
knowing that you're smart and thinking you're an
idiot."
At fifteen, he dropped out of school altogether and
started a series of unpromising jobs: copy boy at the
Fleet Street offices of the Yorkshire Post, carpet
salesman, shoe salesman, window dresser,
time-and-motion man at the tailoring firm where his
dad worked and debt collector. He developed a taste
for jazz and spent nights checking out the music and
women at the handful of venues the East End offered
someone his age. His musical interests were
underscored in his oft-quoted quip about his roots:
"You had two ways of getting out in the fifties you
were either a boxer or a jazz musician." So perhaps it
was inevitable that he followed an artistic muse,
especially as he quickly learned how ill-suited he was
to make a living with his fists: "The Krays, the Barking
Boys and the Canning Town Boys were the three gangs
at the time," Bailey remembered. "They weren't
gangsters, they were just hooligans. They just went
around beating people up if you looked at them wrong
in a dance hall. I got beat up by the Barking Boys
because I danced with one of their girlfriends. They
left me in the doorway of Times Furnishing."
Bailey's dreamy aimlessness was finally punctured by
the call-up: In the spring of 1956, he was ordered to
report for a physical for the National Service. He tried
to duck it he stayed up two nights straight and
consumed a huge quantity of nutmeg ("Someone said
it made your heart go faster"), but it didn't work. He
might have requested assignment to a photographic
unit, but that meant a longer hitch than he was ready to
sign for. In August, he reported for basic training in
the Royal Air Force, and by December he was
stationed in Singapore as a first-level aircraftman with
duties such as helping to keep planes flight ready and
standing guard on funeral drill.
On the whole, Private Bailey found the situation
pleasant enough. "I had a good time in the National
Service," he confessed years later. "I hate to sound like
a right-wing middle-aged man, but I think it was very
good for me." There were, he admitted, drawbacks:
"The snobbery! They had a toilet for privates, a toilet
for sergeants and a toilet for commissioned officers, as
if all our arses were different. It made me angry, the
way we were treated, almost like a slave. You were
dirt compared with an officer."
Indeed, it was a run-in with an officer that would
prove pivotal in shaping Bailey's future. He was still
on his jazz kick his "Chet Baker phase," as he later
deemed it and trying to teach himself to play the
trumpet. But when an officer borrowed his horn and
failed to return it, he was forced to seek another
creative outlet. Cameras could be gotten cheap in
Singapore, so Bailey who'd been as enamored of the
photos of Baker on the trumpeter's album jackets as by
the playing inside bought a knockoff Rolleiflex. He
was sufficiently hard up for money that he had to pawn
the camera every time he wanted to pay for developing
his film, but he caught the bug.
The camera suited Bailey's growing bohemianism. He
had begun to read, and where his barracks mates had
pinup girls hung over their beds, he had a reproduction
of a Picasso portrait of Dora Maar. His pretensions
didn't go unnoticed: "I did used to get into fights," he
said. "But because I was from the East End I could
look after myself. I also had the best-looking WAAF
as my girlfriend, so they knew I wasn't gay."
When he demobbed in August 1958, Bailey acquired a
Canon Rangefinder camera and the ambition to make a
living with it. He applied to the London College of
Printing but was rejected because he'd dropped out of
school. Instead, he wound up working as a second
assistant to photographer David Olins at his studio in
Charlotte Mews in the West End. He was a glorified
gofer not even glorified, actually, at three pounds, ten
shillings a week and was therefore delighted a few
months later to be called to an interview at the studio
of John French, a somewhat better-known name and a
man who had a reputation for nurturing his assistants'
careers.
French, then in his early fifties, was the epitome of the
fashion photographer and portraitist of the era:
exquisitely attired, fastidious, posh and gay (although,
as it happened, married). "John French looked," Bailey
remembered, "like Fred Astaire. 'David,' he said, 'do
you know about incandescent light and strobe? Do you
know how to load a ten-by-eight film pack?' I said yes
to everything he asked and he gave me the job, but, at
that time, I didn't even know what a strobe was. We
became friends and after six o'clock Mr. French
became John. One night I asked him why he gave me
the job. 'Well, you know, David,' he said, 'I liked the
way you dressed.' Six months later everyone thought
we were having an affair, but in fact, although we were
fond of each other, we never got it on."
In fact, French "a screaming queen who fancied East
End boys," according to documentarian Dick
Fontaine was the first person to really recognize
something special in Bailey. Partly it was his
bohemian style--Cuban-heeled boots, jeans, leather
jacket and hair over the ears, all before the Beatles had
been heard of; party in was his aptitude for the craft.
French liked to compare his young protege to the
unnamed hero of Colin MacInnes's cult novel about
bohemian London, Absolute Beginners a savvy
insigh and he was perfectly willing, as he had with
many previous disciples, to see Bailey get ahead in his
own work.
"He was an incredibly decent type of man," Bailey
would say of his mentor after French died in 1966. "I
don't think he was very good as a photographer, but he
had a good attitude. His photography sort of slowed
me down a bit, because I had to break away from his
way of doing things, but I benefited from his attitude."
Even more, he would say years later, "I owe my
success to two gay men, really, who told me I was
wonderful and pushed me. Being a Cockney and
working class, I was an outsider, and in those days
gays were outcasts, too. So we felt an affinity.
Anyway, John French introduced me to the picture
editor of the Daily Express, and John Parsons, the art
director of British Vogue the second gay man saw
my pictures in the newspaper and offered me a job at
the magazine."
It was in the Daily Express, in fact, that Bailey
published his first really important photo an image of
the model Paulene Stone wearing a dark knee-length
skirt and a bright turtleneck mohair sweater and
crouching on the leaf-strewn ground to commune with
a squirrel, who was nibbling on an ort. Terence
Donovan, who didn't yet know Bailey, was among the
people who reacted strongly to the image, pronouncing
himself "disturbed by its freshness and its oblique
quality." On the strength of that shot and a few other
striking pictures, Bailey found himself hired in May
1960, as a full-fledged photographer at John Cole's
Studio Five, earning thirty to forty pounds a week.
The money came in handy, as Bailey had in February
of that year married Rosemary Bramble, a typist whom
he'd met at Soho's Flamingo Club a few months
previous. The couple lived in a small apartment near
The Oval cricket ground in South London. Bailey's
salary wasn't grand, but it was good, and when John
Parsons of Vogue called on Bailey later that year to
ask him about joining the staff of the magazine, Bailey
refused because he was doing so well with Cole.
"They were offering me less per week than Woman's
Own was paying me per picture," Bailey remembered.
"I didn't realize that Vogue was different from any
other fashion magazine. . . . I thought it was just
another magazine that used pictures. I wasn't that
interested in fashion and preferred reportage and
portraits, but fashion gradually took over because of
Vogue." The next time Parsons asked, though, Bailey
agreed. His first small piece appeared in the magazine
in September 1960, followed by full-page work the
next month and, in February 1961, his first cover. The
Bailey legend was about to be made.
Bailey's arrival at deluxe fashion magazines couldn't
have come at a more perfect time to suit his ambitions.
The media business, so long a stolid presence in
English life, had grown increasingly itchy in the
preceding years. English magazine culture was in the
throes of an invigorating shake-up that had begun in
the least likely of places. The Queen, a hundred year
old society magazine, had undergone a radical change
at the hands of its new owner/editor, Jocelyn Stevens,
who transformed it from a dry lifestyle report for the
upper classes and those with a passion for following
their lives (Stevens sniffed that the old Queen was all
about how to "knit your own royal family") into the
most vital publication in the country, with fresh
concepts in photography and layout and a wry new
attitude toward its putative subject: British tradition.
Queen began branching out into areas that had never
before been within the purview of a society magazine:
articles about the Cuban revolution, a four-issue
photo essay about Red China by Henri Cartier-Bresson
(who was then hired by Stevens to cover the annual
Queen Charlotte's debutante ball "like a war") and a
series of articles and features that tried to capture the
changing mood of Britain. In one, a parody of the Eton
College Chronicle (Stevens had attended the school),
the establishment of the day, insofar as The Queen saw
it, was sent up as a bunch of schoolboys. In 1959, an
entire issue was dedicated to the "Boom . . . Boom . . .
boom"--the new decorators, dress designers, cars, art
treasures and overall lavish living ("When did you last
hear the word austerity," the lead article asked, and
then went on to chronicle England's rise as a producer
of advertising, a consumer of champagne and a
piler-up of consumer debt); surveys were published on
the New Thinkers (including fashion designer Mary
Quant, satirist Jonathan Miller and interior designer
Terence Conran), the Challengers (including actor
Terence Stamp) and New Faces; charts of Who
Revolves Around Who were run. Within three years,
the magazine nearly tripled in size to accommodate all
the advertising its heat had drawn.