Читать книгу Mr Paparazzi - Darryn Lyons - Страница 8

I FIRST LAID EYES on my wife-to-be, Melanie, at the Casanova Club in Mayfair. It was after the Press Photographer of the Year awards ceremony and I was with my mate, Bruiser.

As well as having the sharpest elbows in London, he was a mad casino buff. I was twenty-two and it was my first time in a casino. I walked in and there she was – a gorgeous brunette with eyes to die for. I’ll always remember her long, flowing peach dress. She was the most beautiful thing there, and casinos are pretty glamorous. Her presence seemed to have taken over the whole place. She threw the chips to me at the roulette table, and I guess it was love at first sight. I won 1200 quid – the numbers were 4, 13, 15, 17, 27 and 36 – but I left the casino thinking only about Mel. We didn’t exchange a single word, but I was smitten.

As soon as I had seen this vision, that was it for me. I was back there every night. I got hooked on the gambling, too, and did well. Mel was known as the Hoover; she was the one they brought in to clean out the high rollers when they started winning too much. I should have stayed away from her! I recruited a friendly waitress who helped me pass my phone number to Mel. I think I was a blast of fresh air compared to the ageing, wealthy foreign clientele. I think she found me amusing – the funny Australian bloke who stood out a mile in a Mayfair casino. Gradually I managed to get into the after-hours social circle – for the usual £25 black chip, of course – which was very much against the rules. I left flowers on her car in the middle of the night, romantic notes under the windscreen wipers. For the first time in my life there was a serious possibility that I was in love – whatever the hell that word means.

Though she had my number, Mel didn’t phone immediately. When she did make the call, she turned up at a barbecue party at my place in Muswell Hill with a chaperone, Steve Ward, who wanted to hit me up for information about getting work as a pap. He was a real estate guy who had boomed in the good years and then gone spectacularly bust in the lean years, and now he wanted to get photography work.

I had to win Mel over. I guess it wasn’t love at first sight for her, but she was intrigued. She was from one of the nicer council estates in Bishop’s Stortford and I went up to see her in my XJS, a purple Jag with gold stripes down the side – a fantastic car, until I smashed it into a police car after hitting black ice on the way to a Cliff Richard gig. (Thanks, Sir Cliff. I didn’t exactly love your music, but I did love that car.) I was on my best behaviour and her father and I got on very well. Over the following months we enjoyed several days out together, either golfing or watching the cricket. He would often come down to arbitrate if Mel and I had argued about anything major, but in truth he usually seemed to side with me.

Three weeks after the barbecue, Mel had a key to my flat in Muswell Hill so that she could come and go as she pleased. She introduced me to the world outside newspapers, which was something of a novelty. We had a great social life. There was always something going on. We moved in together pretty much straight away, and Mel would say that – perhaps contrary to people’s expectations – I was easy to live with. I am a very laid-back character, good company and a good cook, which she said was a huge bonus. However, she did find me to be rather messy and used to joke that I would never be seen dead using a vacuum cleaner.

One evening, she finished her shift and headed back to Muswell Hill in her red Peugeot 205. I had been out on a late job in Trafalgar Square and we went straight to bed. That night we got burgled. I have a vivid recollection of it. Even though I was half asleep, I saw the whole thing – a guy with a knife by our bed lifting watches and camera gear. Thank God I didn’t completely wake up.

The minute Mel and I got together I stopped gambling, as she was very hot on observing professional niceties. I was fine with that; I figured I had hit the jackpot anyway. She and I weren’t allowed to converse much while she was working; the laws in the UK are very stringent. After we’d known each other about six months, Mel left the job, which made things easier. The casino had asked her to move onto blackjack, which wasn’t really her thing. She has always been a grafter, just like me. Her next job was selling cellulite-reducing machines, which she lasted a day at before applying for a job at the Shiseido counter at Harrods, which she got.

Just as Mel and I became serious, so did my work commitments. I was eager to learn and so, as well as my normal shifts, I tagged along with people like Bruiser in order to pick up tips. It was he who, after much cajoling on my part, took me to the Belvedere restaurant in Holland Park for the launch of film director Michael Winner’s biggest flop of all time. Starring Michael Caine, it was a horrible film called Bullseye! – though it became known as Bullshit. Bruiser snapped me with Caine, Winner and Roger Moore. I was always a huge James Bond fan and meeting Agent 007 was truly an ambition realised. I look back at that photo with some regret. Maybe I can get my tech guys to get rid of that pathetic little moustache I had …

As well as cutting my teeth on the night circuit, I was also shooting a lot of studio images for The Mail. I met some interesting people, but lining them up against a background was too boring for me. Innovation is my watchword. The pop group Right Said Fred came in for a shoot just as their huge hit ‘Deeply Dippy’ was charging up the charts, and I was struggling to produce something memorable. To the horror of the studio manager, after a lot of thought I ended up taking a knife to the background and slashing it into a huge star shape, open down the middle. I shot them emerging from the star, and it looked brilliant. This plumber and his mate who had suddenly become famous really looked like pop stars. I syndicated a couple of negs myself and made pretty much every teeny magazine. In fact, that picture was published all over the world.

‘If people relax and work with you, then the shot is always better’

Relating to the subject is important. If people relax and work with you, then the shot is always better. Many of the professional models really know how to work a camera, and shooting beautiful women has always been a passion of mine. I had the opportunity once to take pictures of Cindy Crawford on a freelance shoot. While we got some incredible images, I missed a huge scoop. Cindy kept disappearing into the back room of her suite and talking to someone. I could just see a grey-haired head and thought it was some old bloke. Later it became obvious that it had been Richard Gere. Shame we didn’t nail that shot. The story of their liaison wasn’t out at that point and it would have been worth a fortune.

Cindy is enormously tall and has quite a ‘horsy’ face, but she photographs amazingly well. There are lots of women like that: they just shag the camera. Look at Sophia Loren, Liz Hurley, Kate Moss and so on. They are real stars, but the problem with modelling is that if you have the looks, then other personality deficiencies are not important. That explains the success of models like Naomi Campbell. I’ve never taken a shot of her when there wasn’t an incident. For every person like her, however, there will be someone wonderful. I got to shoot Cheryl Ladd for The Mail; by then she had taken over from Farrah Fawcett-Majors as my main fantasy. I could hardly keep the camera still.

Simple jobs with lovely people were by no means the staple. I got myself into serious trouble at the High Court during the Jason Donovan libel trial that had resulted from The Face magazine claiming he was gay which Donovan contested and won. Perched above the masses on my longest ladder I had a brilliant view, but I ended up getting arrested on assault charges. A police superintendent was jumping around in front of me demanding that I get down and out of the way. It was a simple situation – I was either going to get the picture or not, and failure never really appealed to me. The situation quickly descended into farce as he accused me of hitting him. I ended up in the slammer for hours. I got the shot off, though. The paper sent a bike to the nick to collect the film. I was shitting myself, but The Mail had excellent lawyers and I ended up with a suspended sentence – and the front page. I wanted to fight the sentence, but in the end we lay down just to bring the affair to a close.

The Mail always looked after me. I was grateful and I respected them. David English and managing editor Brian Vine offered to sponsor me when it looked like my visa was going to run out. They thought I was important to the operation of the paper and would have been there for me, but in the end I married Mel and no longer needed the visa.