Look Again

By David Bailey

Published by Macmillan

The fortysomething David Bailey made one thing clear when he began dating 19-year-old model Catherine Dyer from Winchester in 1980.

“He said, ‘photography, parrots and pussy’ were the most important things to him. Not necessarily in that order,” Dyer, the fourth Mrs Bailey, says in her husband’s memoir, Look Again. It comes as no surprise when he later tells the reader that marriage and children are “nothing to do with me”.

Bailey is now 82, and his narcissism makes for colourful reading for those interested in late-20th-century pop culture, when Britain’s best-known photographer was at his most powerful. Every page of Look Again reeks of testosterone. His most used adjective is “f***ing”, his favourite noun “c***”. No sane parent would have let their teenage daughter anywhere near his studio.

Bailey’s perverse character can be traced to his “rough” childhood in Forest Gate during the Second World War, when Hitler’s bombs rained down on London’s East End. “I think about death every day, all the time,” he writes. “It started with the war. I’ve had nightmares on and off ever since of buildings falling down on top of me.”

To the young Bailey violence was “normal”. His mother once hit him so hard he fell down a flight of stairs. He recalls watching a girl he knew use “eyebrow tweezers to pick a bloke’s teeth” out of a gang member’s fist.

Thrown out of school aged 14 (he suffered from undiagnosed dyslexia and dyspraxia), Bailey was the boy least likely to seduce the world’s most beautiful women.

“My mother used to say: ‘You’ll end up like all of us, driving the 101 bus.’ I thought, I f***ing won’t,” he writes.

Three experiences saved him. On an annual trip to Selfridges, he remembers, he watched his mother try on a dress, “twirling around in the light… that was the moment that changed my life”. At 16 he discovered Pablo Picasso, whose pictures “showed me there were no rules”. And at 18, undergoing national service in Singapore, he was taught by some “anoraks in the Air Force” about photography.

Returning to London in 1959, he got a £4-a-week job with the fashion photographer John French, who showed him how to produce the high-contrast photographs on white backgrounds that were to become Bailey’s trademark. Within a year he had married a typist from Clapham Common called Rosemary Bramble, mostly because “she was good in bed”. The marriage did nothing to contain his prodigious appetite for sex.

Hired by Vogue, in whose offices he met his next conquest, the teenage model Jean Shrimpton, Bailey also befriended the Old Etonian man about town Nicky Haslam.

According to Haslam, Bailey’s “innate good manners and a sense of style” opened doors. But what else did women see in the diminutive photographer who kept 60 parrots in his basement? For Shrimpton, it was his “complete disregard for what people thought”. His second wife, the actress Catherine Deneuve, whom he married in 1965 to win a bet, says he was “a romantic”. “He saw things in a way that other people didn’t see.”

Bailey’s life became head-spinningly glamorous. On his first trip to New York for Vogue with Shrimpton, he got picked up in a lift at the St Regis hotel by the artist Salvador Dalí, who took him up to Harlem to see Ella Fitzgerald. Thursday nights in New York meant dinner with the Vogue editor Diana Vreeland and photographer Cecil Beaton.

In between flying to exotic locations, he spent his money on fast cars, drank a bottle of whisky a day and hung out at the Ad Lib club in London, where he taught Rudolf Nureyev to do the twist and where John Lennon once asked him, “How much do you work?” to which Bailey replied: “Eight days a week.”

Bailey’s work ethic is undisputed — he has published 30 books — but was he really the source of one of the Beatles’ biggest hits? The reader may find it difficult to believe some of his more outlandish stories, including his claim that he unwittingly instigated the murders of two men by the gang leaders Ronnie and Reggie Kray, whose portraits he took for The Sunday Times.

Bailey’s words are challenged by those who shared his life, interviews with whom are interspersed between the memoir’s chronological chapters. Shrimpton, in a rare 20-page Q&A, asks bluntly: “Why are you writing this book? Is it because you want to stay famous?” No, Bailey replies disingenuously, it’s just “something to do”.

When another former lover, the model Penelope Tree, questions his recollection of their affair, Bailey responds: “Have you ever known me to be dishonest?”“I’ve known you to change the subject,” she replies. Tree concludes that Bailey has remained in a narcissistic bubble “that completely denies the reality, basically, of anybody else’s existence”.

Nevertheless, it’s his unfiltered view of the celebrities he met and photographed over 60 years that provide some of the book’s best lines. Peter Sellers? “A f***ing bore.” Yves Saint Laurent? “Stoned most of the time, on smack.” Anjelica Huston? “A great mimic.” Mother Teresa? “A tough old bitch.” Marie Helvin, his third wife? “Best body I ever saw.” Princess Diana? “No great beauty” with “terrible posture”.

After 295 pages, the reader is likely to agree with the present Mrs Bailey — who slowly tamed him and with whom he has three children — that her husband’s lifelong passions require reordering.

Photography and sex take joint first place. Parrots come a poor third.