Wild About Harry
If I don’t take a photograph, I’ve made a terrible mistake. I photograph what I see, and what I see should inform.—Harry Benson
I can’t remember what first brought me to Harry Benson, an exceptional photojournalist and sublime human being. It was years ago when I was a junior reporter. Surely it had to do with some celebrity he’d taken a picture of.
The subject may have been the Queen, Frank Sinatra, or Michael Jackson. It could have been anybody famous in the last century and the knotty first act of this one. He has a wicked tale about nearly all of them.
This month, Harry is being showcased at a special exhibition in Washington D.C. The event, sponsored by sports mogul Ted Leonisis and his wife Lynn, will feature more than 150 Benson shots of Beltway power brokers.
Harry will turn 95 in December. A scrapper from Glasgow, he paid his dues in Fleet Street, then crossed the pond to capture images for Life, People, and Vanity Fair. Along the way, he documented Beatlemania, the civil rights movement, and the Troubles. He was a few feet from Robert F. Kennedy when he was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968. His photo of Kennedy’s stricken widow, Ethel, who died on October 10, is still startling. When history happens, Harry is already there.
I didn’t know all this when we initially crossed paths. But before I picked up the phone, I got a wry warning from a photo editor. “Oh, that Harry,” she said as if she were his exasperated aunt. “He’s a rascal, but you’ll come away with a tale to tell.”
That panned out. I rang Harry at his apartment in the East 70s. When he picked up, a tabernacle of canines yapped in the background. Harry and his indefatigable wife, Gigi, have run herd over generations of impudent little dogs. Presumably, they have names. I just know that there always seems to be a dachshund in the mix.
That makes telephone conversations tough because Harry is a soft talker. It’s one of his great tricks: You lean in to hear him in a clamor and wind up hanging on every word. Meet him at a party, and you’ll wind up squirreled away in a nook, captivated.
“Now, you must tell me if I’m boring you,” he’ll say, knowing that he’s the least boring person in any room. The eye of an era is never dull.
Harry baits a conversational partner with innocent questions. When we first spoke, I mentioned I’d lived in Edinburgh. Which, among other things, is not Glasgow.
“How nice,” he said. “How did you find it?”
Lovely, I replied.
“No, it’s shit,” he said flatly. “Oh, I’m only joking. Really, you mustn’t pay any attention to me.”
Harry James Benson, Commander of the Order of the British Empire, has been to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, the Vietnam War, and the wedding of Charles and Diana. He’s a dervish with a camera, but his genuine talent is for sorting what is worthwhile from what is, more or less, excrement.
Politicians? Well, you won’t be shocked. Movie stars? Only the ones who come to play are worth your time. Dogs? Never let the curs know you adore them in public. The Queen? Harry once asked if she let her Pembroke Welsh corgis into the royal bed. “No, Mr. Benson,” she said. “They snore.” Now, that lady was all right.
When you chat with Harry about his adventures, a twinkly granny from Troon, the Ayrshire town where he was raised, tags along. She’ll interrupt the story of how he cajoled Ronald and Nancy Reagan into dancing to Sinatra’s "Nancy (With the Laughing Face)” with a coo of approval: You want to dance? Ooh, have at it, darling! It made the cover of Vanity Fair.
That impish character is Harry, too. It’s the silly voice he affects to express giddiness at having pulled off another caper. Like the time he snapped Jack Nicholson with what looked like a fine dusting of cocaine about the nostrils. Or the moment he caught reclusive Greta Garbo taking a dip in the sea. Have it, darling! Because no opportunity lasts more than a few breaths.
When Harry is working, the wee voice chatters away like a magpie under his breath. The double act puts even the prickliest subject at ease. He knows how to flatter and soothe before another moment darts away, never to be snared again.
It reminds Harry of a cherished boyhood poem, “From a Railway Carriage,” by Robert Louis Stevenson:
Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.
Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And there is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart run away in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone for ever!
Harry made an extraordinary life, stealing flickers of time. As a kid, he picked up a camera because at school he was good at art and not much else. “The camera will do what you tell it to do,” he says. It gave him “the life of a millionaire, one I could never have afforded otherwise.”
He left school and elbowed his way into journalism, shooting for Glasgow papers. His first big break was a jailhouse interview with Scottish serial killer Peter Manuel. To guard his exclusive, he befriended the guard who kept the prison visitor’s register. When other reporters requested time with Manuel, the fellow crossed out their names but kept Harry’s on the list. “I’m so grateful to you,” the killer told Harry. “You’re the only one who bothers to come round.”
That story landed Harry a gig with London’s Daily Express. In the Fleet Street scrum, he took assignments nobody else wanted. One was an assignment in Paris, covering a little-known band from Liverpool. He was with the Beatles at the Hotel George V when they learned “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had topped the U.S. charts, and photographed their celebratory pillow fight.
The Beatles loved Harry, and in 1964 he followed them to America. He arrived in time for the country’s most tumultuous and glamorous decade.
From there, Harry never stopped hustling. He had a knack for working with the most difficult subjects, gentling the shy, the prickly, and the scary. Chess master Bobby Fischer was impossible, but he relaxed around the photographer, who snapped him communing with Icelandic ponies. The Imperial Wizard of the KKK showed off a pistol he claimed killed civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo. Muhammed Ali gamely pretended to punch out the Fab Four.
Faster than fairies, the great and terrible figures of the era whizzed past his lens: Richard Nixon resigning his presidency, Andy Warhol photographing Bianca Jagger, Jackie Kennedy in a ski mask, Charles and Diana’s wedding, Donald Trump hoarding casino money, Dolly Parton putting on lipstick, Bill and Hillary Clinton snuggling in a hammock, Kate Moss in the buff.
Harry met Gigi early in his American odyssey, at a Texas gala for Prince Philip. They raised two daughters together, even if he was forever leaping up from the dinner table to fly off to places his girls struggled to pronounce. What never let up was his burning need to chase time. “A good photograph can only happen in that one moment,” he says. “Then it’s gone.”
These things have never failed him: Tell a tricky person they are wonderful and they will soften. Ask them to try something they haven’t dreamt of doing since childhood—jump in a pool with their clothes on, gambol among wild horses, do a pirouette—and they may give in to fancy.
Catch a glimpse before it’s gone forever.
Yours Ever,
Harry Benson: Iconic Photographs for the Nation’s Capital, can be viewed at 707-709 7th Street NW, next to the Capital One Arena, in Washington, D.C.
We Live in Time (Theaters). Such a gossipy fuss is being made over Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh! Here’s the source of all that digital heat: John Crowley’s gooey morsel about lovers who meet in an auto accident (she hits him with her car). After that, there’s no stopping the pair, until somebody gets hit with a terminal diagnosis. Remember, love means never forgetting to buckle your seatbelt.—Ollie Barrett
