HAVING ALL ACCESS

O’NEILL: The only other person like him who is great to photograph and gave me all that access was Frank Sinatra. That was mostly because I was friendly with Ava Gardner and she wrote a letter to Frank to introduce me. If Bowie had something interesting going on in his life, he’d ring me up and say, “I’ve got somebody coming to the office, I’d love if you could take a picture.” That’s how I took a picture of him with William Burroughs. I didn’t know who Burroughs was when I took the picture, but I soon found out when it was published in Rolling Stone [laughs.]

BACKSTAGE BOWIE

It’s a small club, the Marquee, it’s not a big place. So I could just do what I liked there. It was packed with people, so I had to work through the people. I had a lot of help from Angie, his wife at the time. She was a big influence on him at the time. She always helped me when I was working with him. She didn’t push him around but she used to keep everyone away from him and organized everything. She kept the show going, so to speak. She was like a stage manager. Backstage, Bowie was very quiet, kept to himself. He spent a lot time thinking about what he was doing, that was his whole persona, to put over what he was thinking, and he did.

BOWIE & MICK

O’NEILL: Bowie loved Mick Ronson and he was a big part of that whole Ziggy Stardust set up. It was his music and his sound that carried it through. I never really saw them arguing, but apparently he used to argue a lot with Mick over the music and other things, so it wasn’t always that hunky dory relationship that I thought it was. It was news to me, because I never saw any of that.

PHOTOGRAPHING GREATS

O’NEILL: There’s nobody I want to photograph anymore. I’ve done everyone who’s great in my book. The last person I photographed who I thought was going to be great was Amy Winehouse, and she died—it’s a shame. I think Lady Gaga is really talented, I’d be interested to see how she ends up, and you never know, maybe I’ll shoot her one day. She’s like a female Bowie a bit, isn’t she? She’s not bad.

IMMORTALIZING BOWIE

O’NEILL: He was so great to photograph. Bowie made pictures. When we used to talk, we used to talk about pictures and the power and the influence of images. That’s what he was really interested in, putting an image of himself that would last forever, and he succeeded.

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