A Margaret Thatcher painting hangs in the corner, only noticeable when a certain light is on, so when he wants to piss off his socialist ‘acquaintances’, he can.
Sir Roger Moore
A bloke comes into the room. A German, I’m told, though he’s very silent. A cup of tea follows, in a Union Jack mug.
The man behind all of this is a certain Allan Warren, first actor, then photographer of the stars. We’re sitting in his garden in Hammersmith, in view of a full wall of his favourite portraits of people he has shot. Born in Wimbledon he moved to Central London at 14 in the great pendulum of the Swinging Sixties where he found work as a child actor, getting his break in Alan Bennett’s first play, and then becoming a young Marc Bolan’s first manager.
His philosophy, epitomised in his repeated “Photography was good to me. I was never good to it”, belies his true interest, that being the subject of the photo. But his skill – separate from his career – is that of storytelling.
The stories come thick and fast. A meandering day out with Salvador Dalí, for example, is recounted: when Warren was in Paris for the opening of Jesus Christ Superstar and went to Hotel Meurice to photograph the man himself. He knocked on the door, and Dalí’s head popped out.
“And he looked left. And he looked right. And he looked straight at me. And he said ‘toooday is Spanish-speaking day. Noooo inglese no. Inglese day is toomorrow.’ When I told him I didn’t speak Spanish he replied, ‘That is why!”’ Madame Dalí invited him into an enormous Rococo room, insisting on giving him an English high tea, with cucumber sandwiches and lashings of fruit cake, and where for the rest of the afternoon Salvador ran around the suite, bouncing off the walls, swinging from the chandeliers, and babbling away in Spanish. “As I left he came back out in the hallway and said in perfect English ‘Come back tomorrow and there we speak English. It will be English speaking day’”.
All sorts of people would populate his first light-filled flat near the Royal Albert Hall: James Baldwin, Alan Bennett, Tennessee Williams. As well as a retinue of young actors with whom Warren was involved in – professionally or otherwise.
Dalí ran around the suite, bouncing off the walls, swinging from the chandeliers, and babbling away in Spanish.
Tennessee Williams would sit by the fire in the small hours, on a Louis XIV sofa listening to Marlene Dietrich records on loop, never speaking very much apart from to ask Warren if he gave the young actors 20 quid each “would they go to bed with me”. ‘Why don’t you ask them?’ came Warren’s response. And then Tennessee Williams pointing to Warren’s agent: “And if I gave him 20 quid, would he leave?”
The agent took the 20 quid and fled. In the same flat James Baldwin would do readings and discuss things that “were far too erudite for me. After all, I was still in my teens and it was the swinging sixties.”
ArrayOne day, an unknown American telephoned Warren and asked him to photograph his wedding. Unbeknownst to him he arrived at the quiet ceremony – no press, no frills – to realise it was Judy Garland’s. And with his first second-hand Rolliflex twin lens (“I didn’t know whether to look up, look down, look sideways into it”), and twenty guineas richer, he captured the moments that the entire global press at the time was thirsting for.
After that, the offers of photography came thick and fast. Actors would tell their agents and directors that they’d been shot by ‘Judy Garland’s personal photographer’, which of course wasn’t entirely true. Alec Guinness came next, then Sophia Loren and Peter Sellers and Sammi Davis Jr.. Then Prince Charles and Enoch Powell and Cary Grant. A veritable Who’s Who of the twentieth century.
An actor alone with a mirror is perfectly happy, I think.
“The thing is that I realised with photography, it’s the one profession in the world, where you need never leave your home.” I can think of one or two others but his point still remains.
Warren is the least passionate photographer and most passionate speaker I’ve met. It seems like hobnobbing with members of high society is both his dream and his duty. He embarked on a decade-long project across the UK to photograph all 26 living dukes, lengthy not least since one would always die before the end of the project, leaving him to chase up the next one – sometimes estranged from the family and living in the lap of luxury in Monaco or Italy.
Duke of Edinburgh
He would drive his little racing-green Mini up and down the country staying in the sometimes austere, sometimes welcoming, ducal ancestral homes, building connections as he went and building a clear admiration of Britain’s institutions.
“Actors usually are performing. Aristocrats are born with confidence” – so they both must lend themselves well to being photographed. “They both sort of love themselves as well. What did Mel Brooks say to me once, though? ‘Actors, they’re animals, aren’t they’. Are they Mel? What do you mean? ‘Have you ever eaten with one?’”
Sammy Davis Jr.
Yet Warren prefers the actors – maybe because they made his decadent Soho parties swing, “they’re not wallflowers they will come out with anecdotes, they will talk, they will carry conversation. And you’re safe with actors. Because if you’re politically incorrect actors will never be because they’re terrified of losing a job.” But clearly one should never invite them for dinner, “they’re too busy talking about themselves, an actor alone with a mirror is perfectly happy, I think.”
Some of the photographers my age have very little interest in the technicalities, lighting and art of photography, and rather use their cameras as a key to enter into rooms they are not usually invited into.
Henry Moore
But very little of that applies to Warren. The countless times he has stood up subjects in favour of lunches or traipses to Studio 54 reveals that pleasure, rather than networking, is his passion. Joan Collins was stood up three times because the mimosas would turn into wine, the wine into brandy, the brandy into an early morning return to wherever he was staying.
(It must be noted that regardless of his modesty on his technical skills, he was part of a photographic generation where he had to know and understand light, film canisters and film settings, the right chemicals and times for developing. His photography is a matter of taste – but is nevertheless revealing of the personalities behind these now – mostly dead – legends.)
Dionne Warwick
Once, walking down Broadway in New York he took refuge from a downpour in the stage door of a theatre Gloria Swanson happened to be playing at. Charming his way into the dressing room, listening to the applause from the wings as she descended from the stage to the dressing room, she promptly ignored him and sat at her dressing table, next to a glass vase of what looked like cocaine.
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Staring into the mirror and taking no notice of him until she turned to meet his gaze in the mirror, her eyes channelling her very own Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. “‘Can I help you?’” came the icy words. “‘I’m just doing my first book. And I’d like to put you in it.’ And then the big mistake: ‘I’d like to photograph you’”. She turned and with both hands smashed the jar to the floor, a powdery smoke erupting through the small dressing room. “‘I’d rather you shot me than photograph me!’”
They became good friends. And he photographed her several times.
Gloria Swanson
“Really I feel sorry for young photographers who, one, are in an age where anyone can take pictures, there’s no point in starting – unless its motorcars they’re going to photograph – and two is the fact that given the same circumstances, these youngsters who live photography would have taken much better pictures than I ever did and would have loved staying with these people.”
His conversation swings from hilarious to sombre, gently inflammatory to entirely unprintable. He is kind, interested and open – and a brilliant storyteller. The stories keep coming: his Mini breaking down in the main gate of Buckingham Palace while going to photograph a prince and having to be pushed in by the Grenadier Guards, standing up Groucho Marx, Joan Collins, W.H. Auden, Bette Davis or being caught with the Earl of Mountbatten’s pants down his legs while helping him out of a military outfit.
But the most striking thing about this man is his deep, sometimes flagrant, reverence for the country he is from.
“If there is a God,” he tells me with a wry smile, “well, he lives just above the Union Jack.”
Robert Morley
For more of Warren’s photography, see his archive at Wikimedia Commons.
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