EXCLUSIVE: Dafydd Jones first went to Hollywood in the 1980s to take photographs for Vanity Fair. He would lurk, unfailingly polite and unobtrusive, and take pictures of the rich and famous.
The parties were truly glamorous then. Wall to wall megawatt stars. Jack Nicholson and Elizabeth Taylor (never ‘Liz!’) at Swifty Lazar’s last hurrah at Spago in 1993 is what I’m talking about.
The hoards of advertisers and folk who had zero affinity with movies except to rub up against film stars and Hollywood players came later.
It somehow feels strange to be raving on about swell parties in Hollywood at a time when so many people we’ve known for decades have had their lives upended by the fires that scorched Los Angeles County, leaving thousands homeless, and at least 29 people dead.
Watch on Deadline
But Vanity Fair plans to go ahead with its Oscar-week events and will support two local organisations: the Motion Picture & Television Fund and Baby2Baby. Charles Finch will throw his annual filmmakers dinner with Chanel at the Beverly Hills Hotel as a fundraiser to help those displaced.
Jones, who laments that he never visited Los Angeles that often, has assembled a selection of photographs from his Hollywood years into a tome called ‘Hollywood Confidential‘, which has just been published. Full disclosure: Jones and I used to meet up on the trail, be it LA, New York or London, and we are friends. I penned the foreword for his book.
Jones says that his modus operandi “is not posing the pictures” so that he can “just show what it was like,” while also not deliberately seeking to shoot anything that’s “unflattering.” I love the way he stumbled upon Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson, literally gossiping behind Alex Kingston’s back at Steve Tisch and Vanity Fair’s Oscar-night party in 1997.
He did not seek permission to take a photograph, except, that is, when he was doing a restaurant column in the Evening Standard and was asked by managers at a club in Mayfair to ask every single table if they minded. However, as he didn’t tell them when he planned to snap, “they didn’t all freeze… They just sort of ignored me.”
What, I ask, are the Dafydd Jones rules of engagement?
“Just an interesting moment that’s not set up and that’s just happened,” he says. The thing is, I like to just hang out and not be too intrusive. I’m not trying to take an unflattering picture. It’s just a natural picture, and when it’s the Oscars, it’s fantastic — people are usually celebrating a big achievement. But I used to get sidetracked because also I just wandered around photographing everything, not just the celebrities. There are quite a few pictures of the press working [in ‘Hollywood Confidential’].”
Indeed, he shot a photo of this columnist chatting with Kate Winslet the night she won her Oscar, at Graydon Carter’s Vanity Fair Oscar Party in 2009, and I wasn’t aware of him doing so until I saw it published somewhere. “You were concentrating on getting a scoop from Kate,” he laughs.
It wasn’t always the happiest of times, of course. At parties, Hones would sometimes see people “freaking out about something,” adding, “I mean, at parties, I’ve seen people in tears.”
Because they lost? “No, they’re just upset about something.”
Jones recalls the late Prince coming into the Vanity Fair Oscar Party sucking a lollipop alongside two bodyguards, one of whom was his brother-in-law. “The guys with him were telling me ’no pictures’ the whole time. He kind of stood looking at the room and no-one dared go up to him… But I did just did that one shot.
“He knew I was taking it, and he didn’t seem to mind. And then I left him alone. I don’t think he stayed very long.”
Once in a while he’d have famous people throwing themselves in front of him to get their picture taken but his response was to simply “try and avoid their eye.” With a mischievous grin, Jones recalls: “If they had a PR with them, they’d wave me over. Or some people that I knew would want to be photographed, but they weren’t generally the ones I really wanted.”
His photographs, to me and his many fans, are endlessly fascinating, more so the further back in time they go. I wonder whether it’s because their monochrome lends them more a sense of time standing still?
“I think it’s something universal,” he answers. “Sometimes it’s not just people grinning at a party. It’s the one with Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson talking behind Alex Kingston’s back. Those kind of things.”
One of his favourites images, used on the front cover of ‘Hollywood Confidential’ is of comedian Kevin Meaney reporting for HBO at the Oscar night party hosted by Steve Tisch and Vanity Fair, at Morton’s in 1995.
Meaney’s face somehow encapsulates the panoply of frenzy with hundreds of photographers, cameras, lights and mics jammed outside the one-time celebrity hangout. It’s a study “of manic and wonder,” says Jones of Meaney, who died in 2016.
One of my prized photos is one that Jones took of Madonna with Mick Jagger and Tony Curtis seated on either side of her. Curtis is leaning heavily into the singer. It’s the intimacy of it that amuses me, plus Jagger’s face is, well, a picture. A copy adorns a wall in my basement home office.
There’s another of Curtis, who certainly likes it hot, as he’s captured with his arms draped around Jill Vandenberg at a Beverly Hills Hotel gala in 1995. The actor was to marry her three years later.
As we lunch in a corner table at Soho House in London’s Greek Street, we leaf through the book and a thought takes hold about longevity. How were great acting careers sustained?
“Well, some are fantastic. I think if they’re fantastic actors, they last,” says Jones simply.
What ‘Hollywood Confidential’ does is capture little moments in time. That’s actually what the movies do, too, as James Stewart articulated to Peter Bogdanovich in a book the Last Picture Show director wrote in 1973.
Jones resides in a beautifully situated arts and crafts-style house in East Sussex with his wife Linzi, a landscape artist and designer of jackets, cardigans and scarves. A previous owner housed her chauffeur in the house, while she lived in a bigger pile in the next meadow. But after World War II, the lady of the manor moved her driver out and moved herself in. To help make ends meet, her family turned the grounds into a camping site and built a shower and toilet block for the campers. The old lavatories were taken out soon after the Joneses settled in and the space is now a dark room. The garage is his studio.
Jones says he likes going to the dark room “because of the isolation“ — and “the smell of the chemicals.”
Does he ever get high from the fumes? “No,” he says, slightly affronted by the very idea. “They are poisonous and they’re not a pleasant smell, I suppose, but I got used to it,” he adds.
His darkroom reminds me of my very first job working for a news agency located in the vicinity of Fleet Street. John Rodgers, the owner, controlled a sports photography agency and I used to enjoy wandering down to the darkroom in the lower depths. The smell was dangerously intoxicating, but I never got high.
Jones says hand-printing helps the editing process. “A decent print can take me two hours and, because of the labor intensity of it all, it intensely narrows down the edit. It encourages me to look at the dark and shades. Black and white negatives aren’t very forgiving, so you spend a lot of time getting the picture to look how it should look.”
He’s rhapsodic about a print’s “rich black tones” and he likes nothing more to conjure up as many shades of black as he can.
I always say, ‘Black is beautiful, baby.’
‘Hollywood Confidential‘ is published by ACC ART BOOKS.
The post Breaking Baz: Hollywood Photographer Dafydd Jones On The Glamour Of Oscar Parties In Black And White appeared first on Deadline.
