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Look Again by David Bailey review – no reflection, no regret

“I think photography is all sex,” writes David Bailey. “That’s what happens when you’re close to somebody – you end up in bed with them.” He should know. Along with getting a good picture, “getting my leg across”, as he puts it, was his raison d’être throughout his career. In his memoir, he reveals how he bedded scores of young models and actors, as well as other people’s wives and girlfriends. There were relationships with the models Jean Shrimpton, who helped make his name, and Penelope Tree, who was 18 when they started dating. He had an affair with Anjelica Huston when she was with Jack Nicholson, and married Catherine Deneuve. Now he is married to the former model Catherine Dyer, with whom he has three children.

Bailey, who is now 82, professes to love women, but only if they’re thin and have small breasts – “I don’t like big udders,” he says. On meeting Deneuve, he wrote her off as too short and a “bit on the fat side”, though evidently revised his opinion later on. He grew apart from Tree at the same time that he perceived she was beginning to put on weight, and developed a skin condition that ended her career. In their final months together, he found consolation in the arms of a friend’s wife.

Bailey’s book is, in many ways, a document of a different era, written by a man reluctant to move with the times. He’s certainly not given to reflection or regret. A working-class boy from London’s East End, he spent his early childhood living in two rooms with his parents and sister in a Victorian house in Leytonstone. After the war, the family moved to a small council flat in East Ham that they shared with assorted aunts, uncles and cousins. He bought his first camera during a stint in the air force, landed a job at Vogue a few years later and made his name immortalising Andy Warhol, Michael Caine, the Beatles, Mick Jagger and the Kray twins.

Look Again isn’t short of juicy anecdotes. There was the time Bailey was in his Rolls-Royce and got stopped by the police, who suspected the car was stolen. When the policeman opened the boot, he was surprised to come face to face with a 15ft python that Bailey had borrowed from London Zoo for a photoshoot. There was also his shoot with the Krays, during which a man barged in and started harassing Bailey, prompting Reggie to punch him in the face and knee him in the balls, and Ronnie to bang his head repeatedly on a piano. Then Ronnie said to the pianist: “Else, play my favourite song, the one about when I leave the world behind.”

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Bailey was rightly scared of the Krays; perhaps only vicious killers can humble him. His stories can be entertaining and gossipy, but he mostly comes over as a narcissist and a bully. He made the Vogue editor Lady Rendlesham cry and delighted in upsetting Melanie Miller, another Vogue editor, because he didn’t like being ordered around. On a trip in Kathmandu, he found some rat droppings and put them on her pillow. He says the film-maker Jean-Luc Godard was like “a boring Swiss bank manager”, he didn’t like the Beatles apart from John Lennon, and Peter Sellers was “a fucking bore”.

He despairs of political correctness and baits readers with his unreconstructed language. Posted to Singapore during National Service, he was sent to work at Changi airport where, he notes, “I had six coolies working with me. Can’t call them that now.” He remembers a BBC documentary crew getting uptight when he addressed his old friend Kevin, who ran a Chinese restaurant in the East End, as “China”. “They didn’t realise that ‘my old China’ is cockney rhyming slang. China plate – mate … bunch of fucking wankers.”

The book was written with James Fox, the journalist and author who also worked on Keith Richards’s 2010 memoir, Life. The narrative is broken up with transcribed conversations between Fox, Bailey and assorted friends and ex-partners, which invariably provide greater insight into his character. We learn from an interview with Tree that Bailey used to hang pictures of his sexual conquests in the living room of his north London home, each of them in a gold frame all the same size. “It was,” she says, “like notching up kills on the side of air force planes.” There’s also an awkwardly inserted passage from Fox, clearly paying lip service to #MeToo, drawn from a conversation with Gilly Hawes who worked as Bailey’s PA from 1966. She says that Bailey “didn’t put himself unwanted on to anybody. I was there a lot of the time with models in the evenings, and there was never anything that wasn’t consensual. And they would have come out of the woodwork.”

The most illuminating parts of Look Again come when Bailey zooms in on his work. In fashion photography, it wasn’t the clothes that made an image great, he says, “it’s what comes across from the girl”. For portraits, simplicity is key – no props, just the closest of closeups. “The intensity comes from concentrating on them, nothing else … I fall in love with people when I photograph them for that 15 minutes or half-hour; they become the whole centre of the universe. On a superficial level. They get up and leave after that.”

Look Again: The Autobiography is published by Macmillan (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.