THE DEATH OF SGT. CARTER

THE DEATH OF SGT. CARTER

Burt Kearns

April 29, 2019

Frank Sutton, who played the gruff sergeant foil to Jim Nabors’ country bumpkin Gomer Pyle, was a talented actor on screen, tube and stage. He lived and died, quite literally, for his profession as an actor, but there was a side that few outside celebrity circles knew—Frank Sutton the cultured Ivy League grad and serious student of theatre history.

by Burt Kearns and Jeff Abraham

Funny how in the turbulent, anti-authority, Vietnam War-torn 1960s, many of our favorite and long-lasting television comedy characters were military men. Army Corporal Randolph Agarn (F Troop), Navy Ensign Charles Parker (McHale’s Navy), Army Colonel Robert Hogan (Hogan’s Heroes), Air Force Captain Tony Nelson (I Dream of Jeannie), and Marine Private Gomer Pyle were only some of the uniformed defenders whose antics keep us laughing to this day. 

Gunnery Sergeant Vince Carter from the series Gomer Pyle – USMC may have been the greatest and funniest of them all. Portrayed by Frank Sutton over five seasons on CBS beginning in September 1964, the character evolved from the cigar-chomping, gasket-blowing, slow-burning and mugging antagonist to the father figure and best buddy of Pyle, the naive, bumbling country boy with the incongruously booming baritone singing voice.

Sutton’s Sgt. Carter was a parody of, or at least a take-off on, Jack Webb’s Gunnery Sgt. Jim Moore in the 1957 film The D.I., and surely influenced R. Lee Ermey’s over-the-top Parris Island Gunnery Sgt. Hartman in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket thirty years after Webb’s movie.

In real life, Frank Sutton was never a Marine (not that he hadn’t tried).  From an early age, he was a thespian. Born in in 1923 in Clarksville, Tennessee (destination of that train in the Monkees’ classic antiwar single), he was acting onstage in student and community theater productions while still in high school. “The first time I walked out on the stage, I had a warm feeling,” he said. “I wanted to be an actor.”

After graduation, he worked as a radio announcer and did indeed attempt to enlist in the United States Marine Corps.  The man who’d become a living recruiting poster for that branch of the Armed Forces was rejected because he was colorblind.  He was good enough, however, for the United States Army.  Sutton served in the Pacific during World War II, participated in fourteen assault landings, and was awarded a Bronze Star and Purple Heart.  After the war, he attended Columbia University in New York City.  That’s where he met his future wife, Toby Igler.

“The first time I saw him he was reading a monologue from Hamlet,” she once recalled. “I never expected to be so impressed by a young actor.”  

Frank Sutton was, and remained through his life, in his words, “starved for knowledge.”  “I never thought Frank would get through school,” a former classmate told a Hollywood columnist. “He was always reading books that had absolutely nothing to do with the courses he was taking. The only time I ever saw him studying anything that seemed pertinent was when he was preparing for a part in a play.”

Even before he graduated cum laude in 1952, Sutton got a taste of success with a role in television’s first sci-fi series, Captain Video and his Video Rangers.  Stardom beckoned in 1955, when he was cast in the film Marty (starring Ernest Borgnine, future television Navy lieutenant commander Quinton McHale).  The film won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.  More movie roles followed.  Sutton would appear in plays as diverse as The Andersonville Trial and The Barretts of Wimpole Street.  He worked in many television dramas, including “The Dummy”, a classic episode of The Twilight Zone.

In 1964, he took on the Sgt. Carter role in an episode of The Andy Griffith Show.  It led to the spin-off, Gomer Pyle – USMC.

During the run of the show, Sutton cashed in on the popularity of his character with public appearances, including starring roles in circuses, in character as Sgt. Carter.  A 1969 newspaper article about his appearance with the Zembo Temple-Hamid-Morton Circus in Pennsylvania, promised: “He will arrive at center stage in a jeep ‘in command’ of a group of Harrisburg Area Marine Reserves.  After some precision drills, the gravel-voiced TV sergeant will close his act with a monologue to musical accompaniment.”

Sutton footed the bill when he performed one-man shows for Marines stationed in Vietnam (according to the Clarksville website, “he performed… fifty-six shows in just eight days in cities like Da Nang, Chu Lai, and Phu Bai”).

 Sutton on the Jim Nabors Comedy Hour.

After the Gomer Pyle series ended in 1969, Sgt. Carter and Pvt. Pyle stayed together when Sutton (along with Pyle regular Ronnie Schell) joined The Jim Nabors Variety Hour.  One television writer at the time described Sutton as the show’s “singing, dancing, buffooning costar,” while pointing out that “there is another side of Frank Sutton that few people know about…. That hidden side: Frank Sutton, the intellectual.”  The show lasted two seasons, until it was canceled in CBS Television’s “rural purge” (which also claimed The Beverly Hillbillies, Mayberry R.F.D., and Green Acres).So where would an intellectual with 3,000 volumes in his personal library, an Ivy League drama degree and an unquenchable appetite for knowledge turn? For Frank Sutton, aside from Love, American Style and a couple of television movies, it was the stage.

Valley Times, April 1969 

 

City Record, July 1971

In this case, the stages were inside dinner theatres. The concept of live entertainment served up with a restaurant-quality meal and hopefully, a full bar, was developed in the 1950s, but really hit its stride and became part of pop culture in the 1970s, as many current television personalities, along with aging former movie and theatre stars, made good money bringing popular plays and musicals to cities and towns far from Broadway.

Sutton played dinner theatres all over the country. He portrayed the wronged husband George in No Hard Feelings and major slob Oscar Madison (to Patrick Baldauff’s Felix Unger) in The Odd Couple.  In May 1974, he arrived in Shreveport, Louisiana to begin rehearsals for Luv, Murray Schisgal’s 1964 absurdist comedy about a guy who tries to foist off his wife on a down-and-out college buddy so he can run away with his mistress.  Mike Nichols directed the original Broadway version.  Alan Arkin, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson were in the original cast. Jack Lemmon, Peter Falk and Elaine May starred in the 1967 movie.

In this production of Luv at the Beverly Barn Dinner Playhouse, Sutton was starring with regional theatre actress Elizabeth Ives.  Sutton’s wife Toby Igler, now a soap opera writer, and their ten-year-old daughter Amanda were with him in Shreveport.  His twenty-year-old son, Joseph, was a student at Dartmouth.

Shreveport Times June 1974

On Friday night, June 28, 1974, Luv was heading into its third weekend at the Beverly Barn, busboys were clearing plates from the tables, and the audience was ready for a show.  Frank Sutton was in his dressing room.  Moments before taking the stage, he suffered a heart attack and died. He was 50 years old.

Elizabeth Ives made the announcement to the audience. “It was to have been my privilege to appear with Frank Sutton tonight, but I am sorry to have to tell you that last evening was his last performance. He has taken ill and died,” she said most eloquently.  “He was an actor and a professional, and he said — and I know it sounds corny, but he said ‘if any actor has to die, that a theatre is the place for him to die’.

“He was a lovely man and would all of you take just a moment of silence for Frank.  There will be no show tonight.”

The audience, already stunned, went silent, before filing out of the theater.

Elizabeth Ives said later that Sutton had made the remark about dying in the theatre twice during rehearsals.

“I’m really shocked,” Jim Nabors said from Honolulu, where he was able to live as a gay man, far from the prying press.  “He was a very great man as far as I’m concerned. A great talent and a great human being.  He was a fine person and a very dedicated actor and a terrific family man. We worked together every day, fourteen hours a day, for eight years.”

Luv, which had been scheduled to run through July 13, was canceled. It was replaced by a one-week run of the play Beginner’s Luck, starring another television comedy military man, Bob Crane. (Coincidentally, Crane was appearing in Beginner’s Luck at the Windmill Dinner Theater in Scottsdale, Arizona in June 1978, when he was found bludgeoned to death in his apartment.)

After memorial services in Los Angeles, in accordance with his wishes his body was transported on at least a metaphorical version of the last train to Clarksville, and buried in its Greenwood Cemetery. 

In 2009, comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff founded The Frank Sutton Appreciation Society.  Nesteroff wrote on the WFMU blog: “Sutton produced a richly hilarious body of work that deserves to be remembered…. Without Sutton’s blustery and explosive reactions to Pyle’s relentless stupidity, (Gomer Pyle – USMC) would have been lifeless and dull.  But Sutton was nothing if not versatile within the limited confines of the Sgt. Carter role.”

Frank Sutton statue in Clarksville, Tennesee.

A bronze statue of Sutton as Sgt. Carter, was unveiled in downtown Clarksville in May 2017.  

Had Frank Sutton managed make it from his dressing room to the dinner theatre stage before expiring, he would have earned a place in Jeff Abraham and Burt Kearns’ new book, The Show Won’t Go On: The Most Shocking, Bizarre, and Historic Deaths of Performers Onstage, published on September 3, 2019 from Chicago Review Press’ A Cappella Books, and available for preorder at DiedOnstage.com.

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Burt Kearns wrote the book TABLOID BABY and produces nonfiction television and documentary films. His new book, THE SHOW WON'T GO ON, was written with Jeff Abraham and will be published by Chicago Review Press' A Cappella Books in September 2019.

SIDEWINDER: THE MURDER OF LEE MORGAN

SIDEWINDER: THE MURDER OF LEE MORGAN

Burt Kearns

March 12, 2019

 

The jazz trumpeter extraordinaire was a prodigy who inherited the musical mantle of Clifford Brown, as well as the latter’s untimely and tragic end. It’s a story of drugs, redemption, jealousy and rage that came to a head next to the stage at New York’s Slugs’ in the Far East nightclub.

 

by Burt Kearns & Jeff Abraham

 

February 18, 1972: New York City is in the grip of a brutal snowstorm.  A car is racing through the streets, at least trying to, working its way in traffic through Manhattan to Alphabet City, the far East Village neighborhood of abandoned buildings, lowlifes, street dealers, and drug fiends. A jazz trumpeter named Lee Morgan is behind the wheel, aiming for a hole-in-the-wall jazz club called Slugs’ in the Far East that just might be his salvation.

 

At one time, Lee Morgan was regarded as one of the greatest trumpeters of the 20th century. He was a bebop prodigy out of Philadelphia. At age 15, he was gigging on weekends with his own group while joining Tuesday evening jam sessions at the Music City performance space on Chestnut Street, trading riffs with the likes of Miles Davis and mentored by the undeniably brilliant and influential young trumpeter Clifford Brown.

 

When Lee Morgan was 17, Clifford Brown left one of those Tuesday night jams and hopped into a car with his pianist Richie Powell for a ride to Chicago and a gig with his Clifford Brown & Max Roach Quintet. Powell’s wife Nancy was behind the wheel so the two men could get some shuteye. She was barreling through the rain on the Pennsylvania Turnpike when, just west of Bedford around 1:15 AM, the car skidded out of control and crashed. All three were killed.

Clifford Brown was only 25 when he died on June 27, 1956. With his death, everyone on the jazz scene seemed to be seeking the new Clifford Brown. That player turned out to be Lee Morgan, who had even taken some lessons from Brown. When he finished high school, Morgan won a spot in the trumpet section of Dizzy Gillespie’s Big Band. He even soloed on Diz’s signature, “Night in Tunisia.” In 1959, he joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Drummer Blakey showed him how to work a crowd, expanded his musical horizons, and opened his arm to heroin.

 

Moanin’  – Lee Morgan with Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers

 

The junk hit hard, and wound up sidelining the young horn player for two years. In 1963, he began picking up recording dates again. Four days before Christmas, he recorded a long (over ten minutes), bluesy track at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. “The Sidewinder” was the centerpiece of an album that became the fastest-selling disc in Blue Note Records’ history. Somehow, almost inexplicably, it became a pop hit, too. By January, “The Sidewinder” was number 35 on the Billboard chart. Some Madison Avenue hipster used it on a Chrysler commercial that ran during the 1964 World Series. The song was also used on television shows. Record companies kept pushing the new trumpet star back into the studio after that, hoping for a “Sidewinder” sequel — in vain.  Or, we should say, in vein. Lee Morgan shot up most of his money and even hocked his horn.

When he met Helen More in 1967, Morgan had been sleeping in bars and even outside on the curb, often stealing to support his habit. Helen More was a hard-luck angel from North Carolina — or at least she seemed to be. She lived on West 53rd Street between 8th and 9th Avenues, around the corner from what was left of the jazz club strip on West 52nd Street. She met many of the musicians in after-hours joints and invited them all to her apartment to hang. “Helen’s Place” was known as a haven where jazzmen could chill and get a good meal. No drugs allowed.

 

When Lee Morgan showed up, “I looked at him and he didn’t have a coat,” Helen recalled. “I asked him why didn’t he have a coat. He just had a jacket. I said, ‘Child, it’s zero degrees out there and all you have on is a jacket. Where is your coat?’ And he told me he didn’t have a coat ’cause it was in the pawn shop. He had pawned his coat for some drugs.”

 

When she asked about his axe, he replied that his trumpet was in the pawn shop as well. She replied, “How is a carpenter going work without tools?” Helen More felt sorry for Lee Morgan. She went and got his trumpet and coat out of hock. After that, she said, Lee Morgan “hung on to me.”

 

Lee Morgan and Hank Mobley inside Slugs’

 

Helen helped Lee Morgan regain not only his horn but his health. She got him into an outpatient drug treatment center and the two of them set up house on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Helen took over Morgan’s career, and kept a close eye on him, making sure he stayed on the straight and narrow. She became his manager. She also became his lover. Though they never married, she began calling herself Helen Morgan. She was thirteen years older than he.

 

By the 1970s, Lee Morgan’s musical style had evolved from the hard bebop of his early years to more dark, contemplative sounds. He was active politically in the Black Power and artists’ rights movements. He was among the jazz musicians who disrupted The Merv Griffin Show and other television tapings, marching onstage blowing horns and whistles, demanding more television time for black musicians.

At this point, Morgan had traded heroin for methadone. The opioid, taken by mouth not needle, eased him off the horse, lessening the withdrawal pain and blocking the high. Sometimes it caused him to nod off on the bandstand, so he was also snorting and shooting cocaine and, to be real, probably chipping a bit of heroin here and there. There were fights with Helen. She didn’t approve of the coke. He’d stand up to her, defiant with the confidence she helped build. The fights were public, and loud. She stopped coming to his shows.

 

He moved in with another woman. Helen responded by swallowing poison. She survived. Lee Morgan went back and forth between the two women. Helen booked his final week at Slugs’ in the Far East, and Lee Morgan was determined to make it to Slugs’ that Friday night. As he wound his way downtown and worked his car closer to the East Village, he rounded a corner, saw open road, hit the gas, and lost control on a patch of ice. The car jumped the curb and crashed.

“Goddamn it!” Morgan reached over and grabbed his horn, left the wrecked car steaming on the sidewalk, and started walking, past the trash can fires, sniffling junkies and strung-out hookers on the way down Avenue B, turning left on East 3rd Street to number 242.

 

Site of Slugs’ today

 

Donald Ayler, Albert Ayler, Lewis Worrell, Ronald Shannon Jackson, and Michel Sampson outside Slugs’, 1966

 

Slugs’ in the Far East had been called “Slugs’ Saloon” when it opened in 1964, but changed its name to reflect its far-East Village location because New York City regulations prohibited the use of the word “saloon.”  The joint was longer than it was wide, with a bar stretched along the left side and a stage at the back. It had been a hangout for the street dealers before it began attracting the jazz crowd. Avant-garde jazz artist Sun Ra and his Arkestra had a regular Monday night residence from March 1966 through late 1967, and continued to appear there, along with free jazz musicians like Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman. The official capacity was probably around 75, though the place often heaved with twice that number.

 

When Lee Morgan opened the door and entered along with a gust of wind and snow, he was shaken. “Man, I almost died,” he told sax man Billy Harper, who’d arrived earlier. “We were making this turn and the car slid, and I thought we were gonna die.”

 

“Well, you’re here,” Harper replied.

 

Inside Slugs’

 

Talk turned to Clifford Brown, who was killed in that car wreck on a rainy Pennsylvania Turnpike back in the summer of ’56.

 

Morgan and his quintet went on stage for the Friday night show. They finished their second set around 2 AM Saturday with a tune called “Angela,” dedicated to activist Angela Davis. At around 2:15, Morgan’s girlfriend was there, and he and the cats in the band were again talking about Clifford Brown, when Morgan noticed that Helen was in the place. Morgan and his quintet had performed all week at Slugs’, and this was the first time she’d shown up.

 

Morgan walked with her to the bar and they argued. Helen said she knew the “other woman” was in the room, and made what witnesses called “the usual threats that women make in a situation like that.” Ultimately, she struck him.

Much later, journalist Larry Reni Thomas got Helen’s side of the story for his book, The Lady Who Shot Lee Morgan (in recordings later used in the 2016 Swedish-American documentary I Called Him Morgan):

 

“We was talking and the girl walked up and she said, ‘I thought you wasn’t supposed to be with her anymore.’ And he said, ‘I’m not with this bitch, I’m just telling her to leave me alone.’  And about that time I hit him. And when I hit him, I didn’t have on my coat or nothing but I had my bag. He threw me out the club. Wintertime. And the gun fell out the bag. And I looked at it. I got up. I went to the door.

 

“I guess he had told the bouncer that I couldn’t come back in. The bouncer said to me, ‘Miss Morgan, I hate to tell you this, but Lee don’t want me to let you in.’ And I said, ‘Oh, I’m coming in!’ I guess the bouncer saw the gun because I had the gun in my hand. He said, ‘Yes, you are.’”

 

Four-fifths of the quintet were already on stage and Lee Morgan was just stepping up to join them when he heard Helen call his name.

 

He turned around. She fired one shot from a silver-plated .32 caliber pistol.

 

The bullet pierced Lee Morgan’s heart.

 

The only person who seemed more surprised than Lee was Helen herself. She fainted.

 

When Helen was revived, Lee Morgan was on the sawdust floor, bleeding out with each beat of his heart, but still alive. She recalled running to him and saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

 

“Helen, I know you didn’t mean to do this. I’m sorry too,” she said he replied.

 

Lee Morgan’s life may have been saved if not for the snowstorm and difficult driving conditions. It took a long time for police and an ambulance to arrive to take him to Bellevue Hospital. Lee Morgan bled to death on the floor of Slugs’ in the Far East on February 19, 1972. He was 33.

 

Helen More was arrested, pleaded not guilty to second-degree manslaughter and spent some time in prison before being released on parole. She returned to North Carolina and died there from a heart condition in March 1996. When Larry Reni Thomas interviewed her a few weeks before her death, Helen told him, “I ain’t never seen that girl since. I think she thought she was next. But she never entered my mind. You know, it’s a funny thing, she didn’t enter my mind. When that gun went off it snapped me back to reality to what I had done. I didn’t have a coat. I didn’t have a bag. I didn’t have nothing. I was just sitting there, you know. Seemed like it hadn’t registered. I said, I couldn’t have did this. I couldn’t have did this. This must be a dream and I’ll wake up…”

 

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Had Lee Morgan managed to walk a few more steps and make it to the bandstand before turning toward Helen More, he would have died onstage and earned a place in Jeff Abraham and Burt Kearns’ new book, The Show Won’t Go On: The Most Shocking, Bizarre, and Historic Deaths of Performers Onstage, coming in September 2019 from Chicago Review Press’ A Cappella Books.

 

 

BURT KEARNS

Burt Kearns wrote the book TABLOID BABY and produces nonfiction television and documentary films. His new book, THE SHOW WON'T GO ON, was written with Jeff Abraham and will be published by Chicago Review Press' A Cappella Books in September 2019.

 

BEATLES, STONES, SINATRA & BEYOND: TERRY O’NEILL TALKS ABOUT HIS COOL ICONIC IMAGES

BEATLES, STONES, SINATRA & BEYOND: TERRY O’NEILL TALKS ABOUT HIS COOL ICONIC IMAGES

 

BURT KEARNS

 

FEB. 19, 2019

 

Legendary British photographer Terry O’Neill started out shooting the Beatles and the Stones as struggling young bands in the early 60s, and went on to create iconic portraits of Frank Sinatra, Elvis, David Bowie, Brigitte Bardot, The Who, Eric Clapton, Faye Dunaway and so many more. He talks to Burt Kearns about the secret of great photography, the Swingin’ 60s scene in London (which he helped create), and the generosity of Frank Sinatra.

 

They’re tearing down the SLS Hotel & Casino at the north end of the Las Vegas Strip, and that got me thinking about Terry O’Neill.

 

They’re tearing down the SLS from the inside, renovating the casino and rooms and turning the place into something called the Grand Sahara Resort. The new name’s a nod to the old name. For more than half a century, since 1952, the building held the real Sahara Hotel & Casino. This was where Frank Sinatra and Buddy Hackett and Wayne Newton and Jerry Lewis packed the showroom, and Louis Prima, Keely Smith & Sam Butera made show business history in the Casbar Lounge. The Sahara is where the Beatles stayed when they played the Vegas Convention Center in 1964 (the Beatles have been Strip headliners since 2006, in a Cirque du Soleil show at the Mirage).

 

The Sahara closed in 2011. Which is where Terry O’Neill, the greatest celebrity photographer of our time, comes in.

 

 

Terry O’Neill at Abbey Road Studios

 

A few years after the Sahara sign was carted off to the Neon Boneyard downtown, some hot shots from Los Angeles came in with the idea of turning the old joint into a hip retro casino. They designed the decor around the iconic Rat Pack photos taken by Terry O’Neill. You know Terry O’Neill. He’s the suave British photographer who married Faye Dunaway. He also helped create London’s Swinging ’60s scene with his photos of its young movers and shakers before taking iconic shots of stars like Sean Connery, Brigitte Bardot, Paul Newman — and Sinatra in his Tony Rome period.

 

O’Neill’s Rat Pack photos were blown up supersize on the walls, and even imprinted into the carpets of the casino. The centerpiece of the new SLS was the Iconic Images Gallery — featuring big, expensive iconic images shot by Terry O’Neill.

 Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr – © Terry O’Neill / Iconic Images

 

The SLS, isolated from the action on the Strip, never caught on. It was sold a few times, until the new owners gave up on the concept and sold it to someone who’s turning it into the Grand Sahara.

 

But back when the SLS promised to be a swingin’ yeah baby return to Vegas cool, a pal and I were part of the push, producing spots for the Iconic Images Gallery. The short video clips featured Terry O’Neill. That’s when we got to speak to him about his work, the people whose images he made iconic, and the pop culture his work defines.

 

Amy Winehouse © Terry O’Neill / Iconic Images

 

PKM: So what makes the perfect photograph?

 

TERRY O’NEILL: Oh God, I wish I knew. Every photographer would tell you there’s no such thing as the perfect photograph, ’cause you never get it. There’s always something wrong with it, and it could be the most infinitesimal thing that’s wrong, but you’re never satisfied as a photographer. When I look back at all my work, I always think, “Oh, I should’ve stayed on longer, I should’ve done this, I should have done that,” so I don’t really get the full enjoyment through what I’ve done.  Do you understand what I mean? I always feel I could’ve done much better.

 

PKM: The fact that you can’t get satisfaction — is that the secret to success?

 

TERRY O’NEILL: I mean, I’ve got friends like Eric Clapton. I’d say, “God you were great tonight.”  He’d say, “Yeah, but I coulda done this here, I coulda–” And I thought, God! It teaches you that anybody who’s any good is never satisfied. Ever.

 

PKM: You’ve shot so many photos that are considered iconic. When you approach a subject, do you work to create a mood?

 

Frank Sinatra © Terry O’Neill / Iconic Images

 

TERRY O’NEILL: As far as getting moods and things in my pictures, whatever’s happening, I photograph. I don’t try to make a false mood or something. If someone’s angry, or someone’s happy, whatever it is, I try and capture it. I just seem to blend into the background, you know. That’s the secret of great photography.  People forget that you’re a photographer. I learnt that from Frank Sinatra.

 

PKM: How’d that happen?

 

TERRY O’NEILL: I became friendly with Ava Gardner on a film called Mayerling. We became really great friends, and I said, “I’ve got a chance to shoot your ex-husband.” She said, “Oh, I’ll write you a letter.” So she writes me a letter and I don’t know what it said, but it must have been something really complimentary, because I handed Sinatra the letter and he read it, and said, “Right, you’re with me.” And for the next three weeks, totally ignored me. And I realized at the end of the three weeks that he gave me the greatest gift someone could ever give someone, ’cause I could go anywhere with him. He never questioned anything, nothing. And I realized what that was the secret of great photography. Of being there but just totally being in the background. And that set me up for the rest of my life, really. I mean, when people ignore you and forget you’re a camera, that’s the whole secret of everything, and that’s all I ever wanted to be. There’s a great shot, I’ve got Sinatra. I’m right on top of him, he’s sitting in a chair thinking and you’d never know I was even there, it was like a magic, magic shot.

 

The whole secret of photography is to be anonymous and be invisible and don’t open your mouth unless spoken to.

 

I go down to the Abbey Road, go in and there’s this group in there singing ‘Please Please Me.’ It turned out to be the Beatles. And that was the very first job I had on a national newspaper.

 

PKM: So how did this all start for you?

 

TERRY O’NEILL: Funny enough, it was jazz drumming that got me into photography. Because modern jazz wasn’t making it. Trad jazz was taking over, which I didn’t want to play. Mink Mulligan, The Crane River Jazz Band, Acker Bilk. And all us modern jazz players were getting driven out. Getting to America was the thing, and most people used to go on the boats, like the Queen Mary, and take a job in the band. But I found out that British Airways were flying to New York. It took fourteen hours, and you had three days off in New York, flew back — three days off in London. And I saw this as the way to be the new transatlantic jazz drummer. So I went to BOAC, and they said, “Well, you’ve just missed an intake. If you take a job here in the meantime, you stand a better chance of being taken on next time.” So I took a job in the photographic unit, and hence was the start of my new career. Unbeknownst to me, because I  thought I was going to end up in New York being a famous jazz drummer.

 

Frank Sinatra © Terry O’Neill / Iconic Images

 

As a kid, I had a definite normal upbringing. I stumbled into photography literally. I took that up and then I was teamed up with somebody and he died in a plane crash and I got offered his job on a paper. So there I am twenty, twenty-one, working on a national newspaper (The Daily Sketch).  And then the next youngest guy was thirty-one. I mean it was like a ten-year gap in the whole of Fleet Street! And you know how competitive Fleet Street is. And I said to the guy, “Len” — that was the picture editor, Len Franklin —  “I don’t really know what I’m doing.” He said, “Don’t worry, I’ll look after you. I’ve got you here because we’re interested in young people. We wanna beat this Daily Mirror” — which was their competition — “and we wanna get hold of the young people. And we got a big feeling for music and musicians and that’s why we gave you the job.  So I want you to go down and photograph a group.”

 

So I go down to the Abbey Road, go in and there’s this group in there singing ‘Please Please Me.’ It turned out to be the Beatles. And that was the very first job I had on a national newspaper. And I took this really amateurish picture of them holding their things, ’cause I didn’t really know what to do. There really were no pictures of pop groups around at the time. So I got them with their instruments — the picture is so amateurish I can’t tell ya — but I took the picture, went back and the newspaper published the picture three months later when the record came out. ‘Please Please Me’ went to Number One, and the paper sold out that day. The paper turned out to be right. And then Len said, “Right, who else do you want to do?” And I said. “Well, the Rolling Stones are a big group. They’re better because they play the blues.”

 

 The Beatles © Terry O’Neill / Iconic Images

 

What happened was I’d got rung up by their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, who said, “I’d like you to take the Stones’ photos.” And I said, “Well, I can’t, I’m really busy.” “So we’ll come to you.” So I said, “Right, okay,” and off the top of my head, I had this idea to take them down to Tin Pan Alley (the center of London’s music biz). Because I didn’t like the Beatles shot. I know it’s a great shot, but I hated that shot of them holding all the instruments. So I said, “Let’s go down to Tin Pan Alley where all the songwriters are and we’ll do you like the kings of Tin Pan Alley.” So that’s what I did. I took them down to Denmark Street and all that, walking around London with their instruments and stuff to make them look cool.

I wanted to do the picture different than the Beatles shot, so I got them all standing there outside the Tin Pan Alley club in Denmark Street. They showed up looking like five ragamuffins, which suited me right down to the ground, because most of the bands wore suits, mohair jackets, all the ties and all the rest of it, and yet they looked boring. And this lot looked the real McCoy!

 

You’ve got to remember that they were a pop group who played in a little club down in Richmond (in southwest London), just a street band, a little rock ‘n’ roll band, and I wanted to give them some strong presence. At the time, they didn’t actually have a recording contract, but I wanted to make it look they had. And that’s why, as opposed to the Beatles shots, I shot them very strongly. So I shot them outside this club, and it went down a storm!

 

You can see that they had something from the way they stand. I mean, they were five individuals. The Beatles, they all looked different, but you just knew they were a quartet, where the Stones looked like five individuals. I always remember that. I remember when I took the pictures in, the picture editor said, “God, they look like freaks! They bloody look like wild men!” I said, “Well, that’s the way they are.”

 

So anyway, I knew about another group called the Dave Clark Five, and I went to photograph them, and they ran it as “Beauty and the Beasts.” That was the first double-page spread ever on pop people in newspapers, and that was start. The whole ’63 thing and everything just took off.

 

 

Chuck Berry © Terry O’Neill / Iconic Images

 

You can see that they had something from the way they stand. I mean, they were five individuals. The Beatles, they all looked different, but you just knew they were a quartet, where the Stones looked like five individuals. I always remember that. I remember when I took the pictures in, the picture editor said, “God, they look like freaks! They bloody look like wild men!” I said, “Well, that’s the way they are.”So anyway, I knew about another group called the Dave Clark Five, and I went to photograph them, and they ran it as “Beauty and the Beasts.” That was the first double-page spread ever on pop people in newspapers, and that was start. The whole ’63 thing and everything just took off.

 

PKM: Those photos not only captured, but helped create, the Swinging ’60s scene in London.

 

TERRY O’NEILL: I wanted my pictures to tell a story. Most of the groups in those days were shot in studios and they’re all boring, like the shots of the old-time movie stars. I had a 35 mil camera and I could take it anywhere, and I could take pictures in any light and I was really ahead of the game. And that’s what got me to where I was.

 

PKM: You were photographing a revolution.

 

TERRY O’NEILL: I came along at a time when young people were given a chance. I mean, Fleet Street and the whole world was run by fifty-year-old men, and suddenly I’m a kid given a chance to express myself! And I went and I photographed the Beatles, the Stones, and then I photographed David Bailey, Mary Quant, Jean Shrimpton. And I was photographing all these people who made the Sixties. And we all worked together. We had no idea the effect on the world and where the Beatles were gonna go.

 

 

David Bowie © Terry O’Neill / Iconic Images

 

We used to go out every night. And at that time, a photographer was like the king, like the chefs are now! It was all photographers, because I could get them into the newspaper. (David) Bailey got them into Vogue and (Terence) Donovan got them in magazines. Having the access to people like that, you wouldn’t get it today. Then, they were crying out to have their pictures taken, and wanted their pictures in newspapers. There’d never been a picture of a pop group in a newspaper, so I was a big deal. I could get them into newspapers! And I was around their age, I could converse with them. Plus, I was a musician myself.

 

And we used to sit around talking, saying, “What are we gonna do when this is all over?” Because we’re all convinced that one day in the next year it was all going to grind to a halt. I mean, Keith Richards thought the whole thing would last two years and that was it. And look at the Stones now! They’re still rocking away. Ringo, for example, wanted to buy a chain of hairdressers for his wife and things like that. And we all thought we’d have to get a proper job and we used to laugh our heads off at Mick Jagger singing at forty, the old man. It was a joke and he’s still rocking it out now!

 

 

Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin by © Terry O’Neill / Iconic Images

 

That time was the best time ever. There’ll never be another time like it. It was just a freak of nature, that everything came in that way of the young. And we didn’t misuse it, either.  In fact, this was the first time young people were ever given any credence at all. We created fashion, we created new models, because everything was always very “gloves on” and all that. And everything just loosened up. It was an incredible time. I wish it would come back.

 

I’d got rung up by their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, who said, “I’d like you to take the Stones’ photos.” And I said, “Well, I can’t, I’m really busy.” “So we’ll come to you.” So I said, “Right, okay,” and off the top of my head, I had this idea to take them down to Tin Pan Alley…

 

PKM: You went on to create some of pop culture’s most iconic images of stars, from Sinatra to Elton John, Brigitte Bardot to David Bowie —  I know you married Faye Dunaway (1983-87), but did you become friends with any of the others?

 

TERRY O’NEILL: I never get too friendly with artists and people I work with, because if you get to know them, you’ll be the one ending up sitting having a drink with ’em, and someone else is taking the pictures! And I’ve learned that with Frank Sinatra, because when you’re around somebody a lot, naturally, you’re with ’em after hours and all that. And I realized with him that I don’t wanna be the one sitting and having a drink with him and having a laugh. I want to be the photographer. So we sort of went our own way for a couple of years, because if he extends this friendship to you, it looks like you’re rebuffing him. But really, I was just being smart. It’s best for him and it’s best for me. I didn’t want to become part of the entourage because I wanted to keep my own opinion and unbiased eye on whatever I saw. That’s my game.

 

I think an important part of my work is that I didn’t look at the fame of the person. I always looked at the person. For example, Harrison Ford was a carpenter, and that’s the way that I looked at him. And Sinatra was a waiter. And different things like that. I always realized that people, before they were famous, had ordinary jobs. I mean, fame is a nothing thing, you know. You wouldn’t like to be famous, believe me.  Because everyone’s looking at you.  You walk into a shop —  I mean it would drive me mad.

 

Fleet Street and the whole world was run by fifty-year-old men, and suddenly I’m a kid given a chance to express myself! And I went and I photographed the Beatles, the Stones, and then I photographed David Bailey, Mary Quant, Jean Shrimpton. And I was photographing all these people who made the Sixties. And we all worked together.  We had no idea the effect on the world and where the Beatles were gonna go.

 

PKM: So you’re retired from the game. Do you ever get the urge to follow any of today’s celebs?

 

TERRY O’NEILL: To be honest, I don’t have much interest in taking pictures now. That’s mainly because no one excites me. You know, when you’ve done people like Sinatra, Paul Newman and Barbra Streisand, Faye Dunaway, Brigitte Bardot, where do you go? All today’s lot, they all seem the same to me.

 

Terry O’Neill

 

When I look back on my life I feel I’ve been lucky. I have really been lucky and you know, as far as thinking I’m talented, I don’t even think of myself as a talent.  I just think I was somebody who met the Beatles, who met the Stones, and I did this and I did that and something and something and something, and it was just my way of life. I just did something different every day. It was just natural for me to take pictures. I didn’t really think of talent or ability or something. In fact, I hate cameras. I know this sounds funny, but I hate cameras. I have to use them to get the image, but I’m not really into it all.

 

And when people tell me I’m an extraordinary talent, I find it hard to believe. I just look at all my pictures and I think, “I coulda done that better, and if I’d only done this, and if I’d waited until he’s moved another six foot forward or something.” I see all sorts of faults in them, but people see them as something different. I don’t think any true artist is happy. In fact, I haven’t really met one. They all drive themselves mad along with me, so join the club.

 

Find Terry O’Neill’s work at IconicImages.net

 

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Terry O’Neill:

Photographs:   iconicimages.net

Instagram:  instagram.com/terryoneillofficial

Twitter:   twitter.com/terry_oneill

Facebook: facebook.com/terryoneill

 

BURT KEARNS

Burt Kearns wrote the book TABLOID BABY and produces nonfiction television and documentary films. His new book, THE SHOW WON'T GO ON, was written with Jeff Abraham and will be published by Chicago Review Press' A Cappella Books in September 2019.