Читать книгу Mr Paparazzi - Darryn Lyons - Страница 7

WORKING AT THE MAIL made me into a complete photographer. Experiencing the terror and emotion of war brought me some of my most memorable days. My war experiences began in the company of a reporter called Geraint Jones, with whom I headed into Romania in 1989 to cover the revolution. Before leaving London we converted our white Kennings hire van into an ‘ambulance’ using rolls of red electrical tape to make it look like we were with the Red Cross. Sorry about that, Mr Red and Mrs Cross, but we needed to borrow your image. (It wasn’t as bad as it sounds because we were actually carrying medical supplies for various hospitals.)

‘As I was saying goodbye, all the windows in my room were blown out’

We drove that van right across Europe. The night before entering Romania, we stayed in Szeged in Hungary. It was Christmas Eve, I was twenty-three and it was my first experience of war; Geraint’s, too. We were in a hotel right on the border and I remember the sound of sniper fire and falling mortar shells as I lay under my bed talking on the phone to my mother. She and Dad were just about to open their presents, due to the time difference. I wished them a happy Christmas to the sound of sporadic gunfire. As I was saying goodbye, all the windows in my room were blown out. I thought this was great – a boyhood dream come true. Now I was a real war photographer. I tried to pass the noise off as the TV and the boys partying and told Mum not to worry and to have a great Christmas – that’s all, folks!

As we prepared to enter the country, there was a huge queue of aid and media vehicles at the border. Amazingly, we got in with them. I had been convinced that we would be turned away. There’s a picture of me at the border with a Romanian soldier posing with his Kalashnikov. It was about minus 10 degrees. Fucking freezing! It was only later that I realised I had been standing there with a Daily Mail cap on; I couldn’t have made our status more obvious, but I guess they didn’t read English.

A German TV crew in front of us was travelling with a German charity. Taking the wheel of our van as we cleared the border, I heard a shot and saw a little puff of dust. One of the German guys had copped a bullet in the head. It could have been any of us – we would all have been in the sniper’s sights. Thinking back, I know that I had my window up and that the German’s was down – perhaps it was a clearer shot for the sniper.

Though that was a scary experience, I had no fear for the duration of the trip. I genuinely believed I wasn’t going to get shot, that something would save me. Perhaps it was the confidence of youth; I don’t know. I wanted to continue in the tradition of the great war photographers, people like Tim Page and Donald McCullin. Donald covered the Vietnam War and on one occasion his camera stopped a bullet. I figured the same would happen for me. My dream at the time was to work for the Magnum agency, a gritty war and real-history picture agency that employed the world’s best photographers.

We headed towards Timisoara, which had been one of the strongholds of the Securitate (secret police). Snow had begun falling gently, and looking ahead on the road we saw a quite surreal scene. A guy with a huge, frozen handlebar moustache was driving towards us in an enormous horse-drawn wooden cart with stone wheels, complete with a wooden chuck on the axles. His whole family was on board; it was like something from The Flintstones. I felt like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future, but instead of a DeLorean I had a Ford Transit. The family wasn’t far from the border, but whether they got out of the country I don’t know. I guess that’s why I felt invincible. I couldn’t get shot, because I was dreaming. For the boy from Geelong, it was like walking onto a movie set; the problem was that it was, in fact, all too real.

I drove on for a couple of kilometres before being forced to brake abruptly as there was a child in the road. He was around nine or ten and was pointing a .303 at me. We were prepared for most eventualities and were equipped with the main in-demand items for bribery – namely alcohol, cigarettes and sweets. The kid came up to the window and started shouting, ‘Bonbon!’ (sweet). I translated this as ‘Boom boom’ and figured we were in big trouble. Luckily Geraint’s grasp of foreign languages was better than mine and he reached for the sweets. We hurled bags of Mars Bars towards our would-be killer and he wandered off, sat by the dusty road and put his gun down. His mission complete, he started eating happily. Had we not handed over the goodies, he would certainly have shot us. I don’t know where his mum and dad were; they were probably dead.

The whole country was extremely dangerous and I don’t know how we managed to blag it. Before we left London we had learned a few stock phrases in Romanian and that certainly helped. There were checkpoints every five kilometres and the only way through was by bribing the guards with cartons of cigarettes or mini-bottles of Tullamore Dew whiskey.

After hours of driving, we made it to our destination. The Intercontinental Hotel became our base of operations, but it was very primitive. The top three floors had been the Securitate’s headquarters. We had rooms there, but the hotel was basically a concrete shell and we lived rough. Occasionally the power came on, but it was sporadic at best. We travelled with a neg scanner and I had my darkroom kit with me. Those school photography lessons really came in handy. I developed my own film and transmitted black-and-white images via our wire machine. The maximum that could realistically be sent was around four or five images a day, and the chances were very high that the line would cut out.

If you weren’t in the hotel you were fucked. There was a camaraderie among the media who were based there. Everyone was looking for three things: a reliable phone line to get copy and images out, the next big story, and a stiff drink. All the journalists sat together on the roof at night and got smashed on looted bottles of red wine or whatever we could find. We would place the empty bottles on the ledge and wait for them to get smashed by a flying piece of ordnance or a sniper’s bullet. After nothing to eat for days, and too much drink, we went crazy. I danced around, playing chicken with the snipers – poking my head up to invite potshots. Everyone else had fucked off. There were no rules; it was like the Wild West. All around us was the most amazing pyrotechnics display as gunfire and tracers lit up the sky. It was like a press room crossed with a borstal, a beehive with a death buzz.

The Securitate had left in a hurry; the rooms were filled with files and high-frequency surveillance equipment. By that stage the whole town was full of snipers, but I was still fully gung-ho. As well as danger, there were great pictures everywhere. The hotel’s basement held a torture chamber; one poor guy had been left to die there on a concrete butcher’s block. A huge knife protruded from near his genitals, and piano wire was tightened around each of his fingers. Appallingly, the wire had been used to drag his body over the block so that the knife sliced through him. It was horrifying, but I took the picture. This was the first time I truly smelt death. Once you have experienced that, it never leaves you.

I coped in this environment better than I thought I might. There’s a parallel of sorts between a sniper tracking down his target and a paparazzo chasing his. Though of course our object is not murder. I hate guns, let alone shooting people for real.

There was no real plan to our travels around Romania; we had to use our initiative. Our brief was just to do what we could do. We were there for about a month, though at times we thought we were never going home. I think the office forgot about us. The classic command from the desk to the team on the ground was, ‘Stick with it!’ The number of times we heard that … It was also true that, to an extent, we concealed from the office the real level of danger unfolding around us because we didn’t want to be pulled out early. We wanted to get stuck in. I was John Wayne with a camera in a world of complete lawlessness, and for a boy who liked danger this was everything – the real deal.

One problem was that at the time no one at home really knew what was unfolding there. I don’t think the desk knew what they were sending us into. They were more worried about who’d won Lotto than our safety. We were among the first journalists in, though, of course, we were Red Cross, not journalists! We did in fact have a fairly significant cargo of aid items that we distributed to hospitals and orphanages for The Mail’s charity.

Geraint was an excellent writer and had a cool head – though we were both pretty scared at times. I was able to deal with the overload by going into a kind of professional trance. By operating almost as a robot I lost touch with the passion and care within me. It sounds bastard-like, but it was the only way to cope and keep my sanity. I certainly didn’t sleep. Adrenaline is the most incredible drug and when you’re on it all the time you can do anything. It kept me alert to what was unfolding around me. It was exciting and exhausting.

The irony was that the only picture I got into the paper was a head shot of Geraint to accompany his daily foreign feature page. I was taking the greatest shots of my career, we were recording history, but I couldn’t get a fucking picture in the paper to save my life. It became quite demoralising. The only real avenue for my work was through news features. I got a Romanian guy to pose with a ripped-up copy of The Mail to try and get something in, but even product placement failed me. Nothing got syndicated elsewhere; Solo, The Mail’s syndication arm, was so useless I’d be surprised if they ever sold a picture. In many ways it was easier for The Mail to get hold of Reuters stuff for the news as they were wiring all the time.

In the end we were pulled out. Geraint left first and then I was off. We dumped the van, which was wrecked by now, and headed off – I guess we lost our deposit at Kennings. My destination was not London but Berlin, where I arrived just in time to miss the Wall coming down but in time to catch the euphoria of it all. I was in and out in a couple of days.

I had the war bug now, and in 1989 when the Czech revolution happened I was on the first plane to cover it as a freelancer. Andy Kyle just told me to go for it and we’d work something out later. I flew Aeroflot and the plane was like a converted troop carrier. The flight was very scary; the crew were celebrating and as drunk as skunks. The flight attendants were enormous women who tottered down the aisles handing out jugs of beer to everyone as the plane lurched from side to side; at one point it was almost upside down.

I arrived in the Czech capital on the night of the regime change. History was unfolding and the atmosphere was unbelievable. The Iron Curtain had fallen and everyone was ecstatic. I was there for a week, and for some reason I got more pictures into Time magazine than into The Mail. I had some wonderful colour transparency stuff and syndicated it to loads of titles through Rex Features.

The Daily Mail cricket team featured some of the paper’s big-hitters – in every sense – and was a real social affair. There were plenty of characters, and I got on with some better than others. Hal Austin was our dynamite West Indian fast bowler, and I also enjoyed spending time with Stewie Payne and Paul ‘Cros’ Crosbie. Despite not having a great deal of natural talent, Stewie and Cros loved the game and were the heartbeat of the team. Both took some unbelievable catches. They made a major contribution to the social side of the team – especially Stewie, who was a real party animal. Ian Walker was also part of the drinking hard core and we would always be up until God knows when. The landlords of the pubs would often just leave us to it and go to bed. We would calculate what we’d drunk and pay up the next day. Our bar bills were enormous.

Bill Greaves was a big part of the team, a real posh old-stager. He would turn up in his blazer and whites, smoking a Hamlet cigar. Being more laid-back, he didn’t really approve of my bombastic approach to the sport, but I guess he appreciated my contribution to the scorecard. Generally I would bat at three and either make nothing or a lot. I admired Bill for getting out there and doing it at his age. He never missed a match and we had some good nights together, though Dave Williams was forever acting as mediator between us. I played to win and sledged like hell. I enjoyed fielding at silly mid-off, a great sledging position. Talk to anyone who plays polo with me now – nothing has changed. I’m sure that on occasion I pissed off the whole team, and I know that Dave sometimes struggled to arrange the fixture for the following year due to my outspokenness and constant sledging. Once we got to the pub, though, everything was forgotten. In fact, I regularly became the life and drunken soul of the party.

There was always something to amuse us on those trips. In one game, all of the opposing team had the same surname! I remember one legendary match in particular that took place in Somerset. The Friday was fairly typical. We had lunch in the local – a ploughman’s lunch and a few pints – and then took to the field for the twenty-over match. I was on fire and bowled my heart out. The Saturday match, coming as it did after a heavy night of drinking, was truly exhausting. The pitch was on a plateau at the top of a massive hill. It looked like Robin Hood’s hat with the top cut off and you felt like you were playing in the clouds. If anyone really got hold of a delivery, an unlucky fielder – usually me – was looking at an 80-metre run! I went up and down the hill a few times that day. It was more like mountain trekking than playing cricket.

On the Sunday we were in illustrious company. The celebrated British author of Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee, owned the pitch at Sheepscomb on which we were playing, and he turned up to watch. Laurie had built a wonderful pavilion and pitch, all for the love of the game. I had no idea who he was at the time. It had been pissing with rain and was a really sticky wicket. When it was our turn to bat, I made a combative eighty while the others dropped like flies around me. As I left the field, Laurie kept hailing me as ‘The champion!’ and told me he was going to write a book about me. I loved that guy, he was fantastic, so eloquent – a real eccentric, loving life, with his cane and his young-looking girlfriend hanging off his arm. By the end of the evening people were claiming that his next novel would be called ‘XXXX with Darryn’.

Being at The Mail gave me the chance to witness the greatest tournament of another, very different sport. I had covered plenty of football matches since arriving in the UK, but getting sent to the Italia 90 World Cup was a real coup – and a bit of a fluke. Jim Hutchison and Brian Bould were initially covering the event, but Brian had to come back to the UK as his father was ill. As ever, I was the first guy to pick up the phone in the photographers’ room. I was told to get the next flight to Italy and couldn’t believe my luck. Giddy up!

This was it – the pinnacle of achievement for a photographer, as far as I was concerned. It was a privilege to be trusted to cover such a massive event. I’d covered a lot of big sports events in Australia – VFL (now AFL) grand finals and the like – but this was huge. The passion aroused at the World Cup is amazing. I don’t think even winning the Ashes compares to its power, and I’m a cricket nut. The first match I covered wasn’t exactly the greatest in the World Cup’s illustrious history – Argentina became the first team ever to fail to score in a final and were beaten by West Germany due to a late penalty converted by Andreas Brehme. But the buzz was unbelievable.

As well as covering the matches, we were there to cover the England camp. Everywhere they went, we went. There was a press conference or story every five minutes around this team, which boasted some truly great players and characters – Lineker, Gascoigne and Shilton among them. It was very much a news trip, not a ‘Let’s stitch up the players’ trip. Though England played well, the only thing they won was the Fair Play trophy, which was no big deal in my eyes. There was only one trophy that counted, after all. The team’s final match was the third and fourth place playoff, and they went down 2–1 to the host nation.

I was the packhorse on that trip, the ‘dev and wire’ man (developing film and transmitting the images). My role was to make shuttle runs from the press room to Jim at pitchside and send stuff out to the paper as fast as I could. There was a lot of pressure. Everything had to be perfect, and we tested everything twice. I had an enormous amount of gear to carry with me. There were some consolations – the women were unbelievable. The World Cup hostesses were everywhere and they were stunning, breathtaking and, above all, willing!

Our brief gave us the opportunity to travel around Italy and to see its cities. Over there, going to a football match is like going to a royal ball. The stadiums were stunning, some even featured marble stairs, and the crowd were elegantly turned out and classy – not something you associated with British football fans. Some of the women were wearing ball gowns! In Bari, a couple got married in the centre circle before the match. The atmosphere in the stadiums was always electric; I would get chills up and down my spine just from plugging into that excitement.

Of course, the ultimate experience was the final. Being in Rome for a World Cup final: what could be better? I felt like Caesar in the Colosseum watching that match. They used to feed Christians to the lions here, and now the Lyons was a photographer there! The roar of the crowd was unbelievable. After the final whistle heralded the West German victory, I just slumped back in my chair, worn out by the sheer emotion and intensity of it all.

‘Under the coat I had a metre-long 600 mm lens with a doubler’

At The Mail I had access to the top news events and celebrities, and my work began to be recognised. On one of the most memorable nights in my career I witnessed the lights going out for one of the world’s greatest-ever performers. The paper had received a tip that Rudolph Nureyev, the legendary ballet dancer, didn’t have long to go and I was sent to Paris in October 1992 with Rebecca Hardy, a real go-getter, great foot-in-the-door merchant and brilliant writer. Another Mail photographer was with us, Brian Bould, who opted to be the processing man. The show that was Nureyev’s true swan song, La Bayadère, was to take place at the Palais Garnier theatre.

Luckily it was a cold night when I strolled up to the theatre in my trench coat, because under the coat I had a metre-long 600 mm lens with a doubler. My excitement faded a little when I discovered that Europe’s most feared paparazzo, Daniel Angeli, was already there on the job, but I kept going and got past security somehow. I walked up to the private boxes at the back, from where I could see the auditorium. Over to one side, Nureyev was slumped in the box nearest the stage, surrounded by close friends.

Needing a vantage point, I seized the nettle and, after knocking politely, barged into the box opposite Nureyev’s. It turned out to be filled with a Japanese delegation from Toyota who spoke not a word of English between them. Courteously they all got out of my way, bowing madly and chattering excitedly as I set up my gear. It was like National Lampoon Goes to the Ballet. They must have thought I was very important. The way I pulled the lens out, though, it could have been a bazooka!

There was no light at all in the theatre, so I was using 1600 ASA film pushed to 18 000. Brian was going to need to be on top of his game to get anything from the shot I was attempting to pull off. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing through the lens, and kept shooting. Just as I decided to leave, Nureyev left too. Expecting security to get me on the way out, I rushed off and palmed the film to Rebecca. She managed to get it out to Brian, who processed it in our hotel room. As I left the theatre I walked out past Angeli (who had missed the shot) and into the street. I realised that Nureyev’s car was about to come past me and, with clinical precision, whipped my camera out and nailed him again with a perfect car shot. That was the last picture ever taken of him.

In photographic terms, getting any image at all that night was a miracle. Not only did the film have to be pushed to the end of extremes, but I was shooting on a 600 mm lens, hand-held, on a 15th to a 30th of a second shutter speed. Any photographers reading this will realise just how hard that is. I’ll never forget that job. It was one of the pictures I hit against all the odds.

It was a shame to see the great Nureyev pass, but I won a hatful of awards for my images. The shot inside the theatre was voted into the top of Time Life’s Pictures of the Decade award and I won the 1992 News Photographer and Press Photographer of the Year for the photos, too. Brian did an amazing job on the processing – I owe him those awards. Incredibly, The Mail’s editor of the Night and Day magazine, Christina Appleyard, didn’t use the pictures in the next edition. They have certainly been used a lot elsewhere, though.

Despite the fierce pressure, there were plenty of perks. Probably the cushiest job I ever handled for the Daily Mail involved a trip to the fantastic Eden Roc hotel in the south of France. At the time, it was the most opulent hotel I’d ever seen, and now it’s my hangout when BIG Pictures works the Cannes Film Festival. I don’t know whether the gig was ever intended as a story for The Mail or whether it was an attempt at getting a bargaining chip or even revenge. The renowned British QC George Carman was staying with a woman on Sir Donald Gosling’s boat, Leander, which was moored at Antibes. Sir David English had sent me to cover this.

I spent a month tailing Carman, watching him on the yacht through binoculars from my sun-lounge. Tough gig! None of my material was ever used, and at the end of the month I had to pay a gigantic bill – in cash, which was the only method of payment accepted by the hotel. It was about twenty grand, sterling.

You never know when a great shot is going to appear. On one of my last nights at Eden Roc, I noticed that Sting and his wife, Trudi Styler, were at the table next to me at dinner. Always with my eye on the bottom line, I took half an hour off from Carman the following morning and got some sensational shots of Sting performing his yoga routine. Those pictures got picked up everywhere. It’s important to focus on the job in hand, but I always look for the bonus, the icing on the cake, whatever you call it. I call it cash, or ‘Ka-ching!’

The Mail liked to play a little dirty at times and I covered quite a few undercover jobs that were motivated by shady politics – both internal to the paper and national – as much as by the quest for a great page lead. I was involved with a team that checked out the infamous beauty Pamella Bordes, who was linked to many important people in Britain.

The celebrity side interested me and I wanted to know more, so I befriended the night pap guy on The Mail, Alan Davidson, or ‘Bruiser’ as he was affectionately known. He was the ‘elbows man’ and looked like he’d walked off the set of The Godfather. He was a nightmare, always getting in there, getting in the way and giving everyone the shits. The opposition hated him, but he always got the picture. I used to go around with him in the evenings and just watch, listen and learn. He used to bully and bribe the back bench to get his shots in the paper – in those days he was paid by usage – and would always be either berating them or bringing them gifts.

I became Bruiser’s protégé; perhaps he thought he could take me under his wing and make something of me. Although I was interested in the celebrity side, it wasn’t the kind of thing I ever thought I’d seriously work in. I was a news man, a features guy. The modern celebrity market didn’t really exist at the time, apart for pics from night paps like Bruiser. Most of the images of famous people were wooden, posed-up shots taken at parties. The photography was not at all creative or intrusive and never upset the celebs – they had the upper hand then.