Flash, Snip, Smile: the Making of Celebrity
The contemporary cult of celebrity was born in the sixties too. All developed societies lavish attention on a small number of favoured people, rich, beautiful or talented. In eighteenth-century Europe it might be duchesses and court composers, in classical Rome orators and gladiators, in nineteenth-century Japan, warriors and courtesans. Details of their clothing, personal lives, foibles, family successes and disasters are gossiped about and vicariously enjoyed. They form a fantasy extended family, prettier and wickeder and more brightly coloured than the rest of us. What has changed in recent decades is the scale of celebrity devotion, this cargo cult of modern Britain. It has elbowed aside rival forms in television entertainment, invaded and occupied popular newspapers and produced racks of magazines breathlessly following the face-lifts, marital break-ups, boob jobs and births of celebs. All of this originated in the mid-sixties. The cloying, ingratiating tone of contemporary magazines such as Hello! and OK! when interviewing or describing some frozen-faced doll can be found in the write-ups of the young set in British newspapers, supplements and the arch glossies of the sixties. The origins of ‘Big Brother’ television exhibitionism are buried in game shows and agony aunt columns half a century old. The raising of footballers and musicians from being tradesmen-servants of the public to misbehaving gods began then too.
Celebrities are often mocked for being talentless. Some are, some are not. A tribute paid to the young and beautiful by the rest of us, the circle of celebrity is paradoxically both very small and very open. From the outside the celebrity world seems to be a closed, charmed place, a marquee guarded by men with shaved heads and sunglasses inside which rock stars and footballers, actresses and princesses, all magically turn out to know one another. Yet what the sixties discovered was that celebrity must be open too in the sense of letting in new people from the streets, or it congeals into a resented elite. Modern celebrity has no time for a Samurai class or for haughty duchesses – it must be a fantasy island we could all paddle our way to, at least in theory. Cultural democracy rules, even while parliamentary democracy struggles.
What was called Swinging London, or the Scene, was simply a small number of restaurants, shops and clubs where a small number of people were repeatedly photographed and written about. In Chelsea, Biba, Granny Takes a Trip, Bazaar and Hung on You were honeypots for the fashionable. In the evening it might be Annabel’s or Showboat or Talk of the Town. When in 1969 the Private Eye journalist Christopher Booker published his drily hostile look back at the decade, The Neophiliacs, he found that by the summer of 1965 there were a mere twenty or so people who seemed to be at the heart of Swinging London. They included the Beatles and Mick Jagger (the other Stones had not yet quite cut through), the model Jean Shrimpton, the designer Mary Quant, the painter David Hockney, the actors Michael Caine and Terence Stamp, the photographers Lord Snowdon, David Bailey and Terence Donovan, the cartoonist and editor of the Sunday Times colour magazine Mark Boxer and the interior decorator David Hicks.
All these ‘New Aristocrats’, Booker pointed out, were in some way concerned with the creation of images. This list, though it would lose and gain constantly at the edges, had some validity. Bailey himself would pump the publicity machine with his ‘Box of Pin Ups’ designed by Boxer. Booker takes up the story:
The list, which was virtually a Debrett guide to the New Aristocracy and their circle included: 2 actors, 8 pop singers, 1 pop artist, 1 interior decorator, 4 photographer/designers, 1 ballet dancer, 3 models, 1 film producer, 1 dress designer, 1 discotheque manager, 1 creative advertising man, 1 ‘pop singer’s friend’ and the Kray brothers from the East End who could only be described as ‘connected with the underworld’.
The contours of all this had been sketchily apparent a few years earlier, in the Profumo affair. Old money, big business, the traditional arts and politics were edging out of the spotlight, now only to be seen at the side of the stage. Instead working-class upstarts were arriving and stealing the show. Among the photographers, Bailey was an East Ham tailor’s son, Donovan a lorry driver’s son, also from the East End of London – indeed, the East End did very well with photography because it also produced Terry O’Neill who made iconic images of Shrimpton, Stamp and the Beatles, and the key British war photographer of the sixties and seventies, Don McCullin. Michael Caine was a Billingsgate fish porter’s son, Stamp the son of a tug-boat captain. The female pioneer aristocrats included that Polish asylum-seeker’s child, Barbara Hulanicki; Lesley Hornby of Neasden, better known as Twiggy who was the daughter of a carpenter and a Woolworths shop assistant, and Priscilla White, better known as Cilla Black, from one of the rougher ends of Liverpool.
Few of these people would have made it in the London of the fifties, forties or thirties. The same goes for the Beatles, Kinks, and innumerable others. (Jagger would have made it anywhere, any time, as a successful businessman.) The intertwining of Booker’s ‘New Aristocrats’ was as sticky and sinuous as the old Tory cliques of the fifties or New Labour’s Whitehall in the nineties. A few were there entirely because of their looks, such as Jean Shrimpton, the supermodel waif (the word ‘supermodel’ was, inevitably, first used in 1968). But the important thing was the great sucking-in of working-class talent, a transfusion that the old Britain badly needed. The incomers were fascinated by images and they were colonizing the new media opportunities – music, fashion, colour magazines, hairdressing, radio, television, advertising – that were not the property of the City and old money.
There was a DIY spirit that has not been recovered since. Quant had been cutting up lengths of cloth bought over the counter and selling them at Bazaar since the mid-fifties. Her iconoclasm matched and outpaced a Pete Townshend or Keith Moon, as she drew, sliced and sewed up a uniform that mocked the pleated, padded extravagances of the Old New Look designers. Taking on the fashion industry of Paris and the West End from a bedsit and a tiny shop was at least as bold as taking on American rock from a Liverpool basement. Quant’s shockingly short mini-skirts (named after the car, which she loved) were offensive enough for her window to be rapped by umbrella-toting male protesters and even the occasional brick to be lobbed. She always maintained she was trying to free women to be able to run for a bus, and to show off the beautifully fit, skinny bodies that post-war rationing had given young womanhood. But the sexual allure was what shocked. Michael Caine later recalled taking his mother down the Kings Road to see what all the fuss was about: ‘I said, here’s one now, and this girl walks by with a mini up to here. She goes by and my mother looked at her. So, we walk on a bit. She never said a word. So I said, what do you think, mum? She said: If it’s not for sale, you shouldn’t put it in the window.’