Clive Arrowsmith - He May Be 69 But He's No Old Codger !!!

 

Clockwise from centre top: the make-up artist Pierre Laroche, Pierre’s boyfriend (in drag), Marianne Faithfull, Ossie Clark, Michael Roberts and Mickey Finn of T. Rex, in 1972 (Clive Arrowsmith) 

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Clive Arrowsmith was a ‘lunatic’ who photographed the fabulous and the famous. He talks about 1970s sex parties, his mate Paul McCartney and kicking his bottle-a-day habit

 

In the 1970s Clive Arrowsmith was as famous for being a great fashion photographer as he was infamous for being the bad boy of British fashion photography. In the foreword to a new book of his photographs, the veteran fashion editor and stylist Michael Roberts recalls being warned off working with the “notorious” Clive. “He was, they said, a wild man.”

He certainly looked the part, what with his big stetson hat, cowboy boots, long blond hair and patched Neil Young-style jeans. When he wasn’t doing shoots for Vogue or top designers such as Kansai Yamamoto, he was jamming the night away with rockers such as Boz Scaggs and Jeff Beck. One of his girlfriends at the time, the model and rock chick Bebe Buell, said of him: “He was more of a lunatic than your average rock’n’roll star.”

The former bad boy of fashion photography is now a mellow 69-year-old, a practising Buddhist who exudes calm and talks with a soft Welsh lilt.

“So, Clive,” I say, “how much of a lunatic were you in those days?” 

Arrowsmith’s photograph of Bebe Buell for Vogue Beauty (Clive Arrowsmith) 

He smiles and says: “At one point I was doing almost a bottle of vodka a day, and there was coke and lots of weed and acid, and parties that went on for days. Paul McCartney would call up at midnight and say, ‘Come on down, we’re having a party!’ and off I’d go. Or Tony Curtis would ring from his suite in Park Lane and say, ‘Clive, I’ve got a room full of women. Come over and bring your camera — but don’t put any film in it!’ Everyone was doing it back then. It was the 1970s.”

Born in Mancot, North Wales, Arrowsmith was destined for boring things. His father, Eric, wanted him to be an accountant, but the young Arrowsmith was interested only in rock’n’roll, Renaissance painting and girls. He escaped the drudgery of office work by enrolling at the Queensferry Art School and wound up crashing on the floor of the grimy squat of a band called the Quarrymen, who later became the Beatles. “George would never let me play his guitar, Lennon could be cutting, but Paul was lovely. It was the only place you could meet groovy, swinging, hippie girls,” he says. Years later, he would be asked to create the iconic album cover for Band on the Run, by Paul McCartney and Wings, and take portraits of Harrison with Ravi Shankar.

At the age of 19, Arrowsmith married the 18-year-old Leslie Love, a fellow art student, and they had three children — Chloe, Nicholas and Eugenie. While working as an art director for the ground-breaking 1960s television pop programme Ready Steady Go!, he decided to switch from painting to photography. “I realised I could do in a day with a camera what it took me a month to do with a paintbrush.”

After a brief spell at Nova magazine, he got a job at Vogue doing portraits and fashion shoots of everyone from the young David Bowie to Dame Sybil Thorndike. 

 

Donna Mitchell wearing Pierre Cardin for the Vogue Paris Collections in 1970 (Clive Arrowsmith)  

Four years later, in 1970, came wife number two, Rosemary Obank. “She was divine and we were desperately in love,” he says. They had two children — a daughter, Beth, and a son called Sam Cosimo Siddhartha. “It was a hippie thing,” Arrowsmith explains with a laugh.

By 1974 that marriage had ended. He had met the beautiful Scandinavian model Ann Schaufuss. Even now, after all these years, he is clearly moved by the memory of that first meeting. “I was at a party and saw Ann walking down the stairs, and it was a revelation. She became my muse, my favourite model, the love of my life.” Though they never married, they had five happy years together, travelling the world taking pictures, before she left him and the world of fashion to join the Hare Krishna movement.

He, too, came under the influence of Krishna — “thanks to George Harrison”, he says. “That man saved my life.” For a time, Arrowsmith was a weird mix of party animal and spiritual seeker. He would try difficult yoga and meditation postures while drunk and damage parts of his body.

I ask if his wild behaviour ever got him into trouble at work. Under the influence of various substances he could be outrageous. Once he burst into the office of the Vogue fashion editor  dressed like Jesus, complete with a long white robe, a crown of thorns and with his foot in a bucket of yoghurt. “I was crying out in a Fagin-like voice, ‘Why persecutest thou me?’ I didn’t work for Vogue for eight months after that!”

And what about the effects of his wild ways on his married life? He ended up marrying four times. Wife number three was the model Karen Holstein, whom he met when they worked for Vogue. “She was so beautiful, but wouldn’t have sex with me unless we were married,” he says with a grin. The marriage lasted only nine months. Three years later came wife number four, an American called Lynne Gurney. They had a son called Paris, who is now an actor. Since their split, Arrowsmith has been living in London with his partner, Olenka, for the past 22 years. 

 

Damien Hirst (Clive Arrowsmith)  

He refuses to blame himself or anyone for the high number of collapsed marriages. He is on good terms with his ex-wives and old girlfriends. As for his children — now grown-up — he admits: “I wasn’t as good a dad as I would have liked to have been. Who is? But we see each other all the time now.”

He has lots of funny stories about the great and the groovy he’s photographed over the decades. The notorious record producer Phil Spector was so smashed that every time Arrowsmith got ready to shoot, Spector would fall flat on his face. Then there was Arrowsmith’s encounter with the waspish wit of Gore Vidal. “When I told him I’d read all his books, Vidal dismissively said, ‘Really? Read them again.’” And there was the explosive Hunter S Thompson, who refused to be photographed unless Arrowsmith used real alligators for the shoot.

He goes through his collection of photos with me like a proud dad showing off pictures of his kids. “Look, the young Sienna Miller. I shot her for The Sunday Times Magazine when she was just about to be a big star. She was like a bottle of fizzy pop, so enthusiastic.”

Arrowsmith has never been one of those photographers interested in capturing the zeitgeist of a particular decade or its dominant trends. His book features Vivienne Westwood, but there’s no sign of punk. London’s more outré social scene in the 1970s was all about cultivating a style of self-conscious decadence. It was a time of druggy, bisexual, gender-bending, coke-fuelled fun. And yet his collection features a photograph of Ossie Clark, Michael Roberts, Mickey Finn (the bongo-playing part of T. Rex), Marianne Faithfull and the make-up artist Pierre Laroche, plus a man in drag, all draped around each other, that perfectly captures the spirit and look of those louche times. ”  


Overall, the work leans more to surrealism — he photographed the 1960s model Penelope Tree with a bird’s nest in her hair and a bird suspended in midair — than social realism. The classic Arrowsmith picture is a beautiful woman enveloped in billowing fabric, bathed in Caravaggio light. “I like ethereal, lyrical things,” he explains.
We tend to think that fashion photographers must make lots of money. But he says: “It’s the photographers who take pictures of food and cars that make the real money.” Over the years, he made his money in advertising, directing commercials for Hamlet cigars and doing the Pirelli calendars. He could have easily ended up another burnt-out 1970s basket case, but in the late 1980s something changed. “I was looking into the cot of my one-year-old son, Paris,” he says, “and I decided there and then to quit smoking, drinking and doing drugs. I haven’t touched a drink, taken a drug, smoked a cigarette in almost 30 years.”
He’s still doing fashion shoots and portraits and is making a film about the designer Kansai Yamamoto. Has the world of fashion changed much since he first entered it in the 1970s? “It’s always been very bitchy and back-stabbing,” he says. “Back then, when the knives came out, it was much more obvious and upfront. Now it’s, ‘Hello darling,’ and they quietly slip the knife in.”
   
 
 A self-portrait by Clive Arrowsmith

Clive Arrowsmith Home Page

Arrowsmith: Fashion, Beauty and Portraits (ACC Art Books £50) is published on Thursday. Photographs © Clive Arrowsmith 2015. To buy it for £45, inc p&p, call 0845 271 2135 or visit thesundaytimes.co.uk​ /​bookshop