Peerless visions

When I ask if he photographs many politicians, he says no, they too are grand beyond belief; he hadn’t even had a reply to his offer to do a portrait of the new Conservative leader, David Cameron. Extraordinary, didn’t I think? Moreover, the word “portrait” itself is “much too pompous, they are just snaps”. As for photography being an art form, “Bollocks!” he says. “One became a photographer because one drew badly.” He has no framed photographs in his house, he announces; except that there is a row of them ranged before us in his tiny basement studio – below stairs and maybe therefore not counting – among which a glamorously smoky 1956 Marlene Dietrich, inscribed by her with the words, “Still looking at you.” She told him that she liked her face on one of the prints but preferred the smoke on the other, so he must combine them. “‘But Miss Dietrich,’” I said, ‘that is terribly difficult to do.’ She said, ‘No, it isn’t, dear boy. You print the one I like, then you get the negative of the smoke and print that.’”

In his apricot shirt from India, chinos and pink socks, he looks youthful. A dazzling smile greets you as he swivels round in his chair; he does not rise, however, because he cannot do so easily without pain in his legs. We are here to talk about the overflowing archive of his career, though the subject seems to bore him stiff. Asked about his former royal life, he feigns a distracted air, shuffling some papers, changing the subject in such a pleasant way that it is hard to mind. Yet his royal history is so present, he might as well have corgi wallpaper. On the wall is a snapshot of Snowdon with Prince Charles, both men creased with laughter. What was so funny? “Oh, something, can’t remember.”

On his desk sits a silver-framed picture of the Queen looking like an apple-pie granny, and one of her sister with luminous eyes and lustrous hair fading into a background of black velvet; the sort of photograph taken by a man determined to make his subject look eternally beautiful, a labour of love in this case. Somewhere, maybe stashed in one of the desk drawers, is a photograph shown to favoured picture editors, of his first wife in the bath wearing nothing but a tiara. “She was very, very beautiful,” he says dreamily. They separated in 1976 after 16 volatile years of marriage and two children, their differences seeming irresolvable as she clung to her status and he felt stifled by it. One wonders if his antipathy to anything grand is the legacy of that painful mismatch.

Asked how the bestowal of an earldom impacted on his work, he entertains two possibilities: that it had no effect, or that it had a damaging one. Early in his marriage the paparazzi made a couple of his sittings impossible; the job of photographing the stars of the film Billy Liar in Manchester was ruined by their arrival.

What doesn’t seem to occur to him is that his elevation gave his career a glamorous boost. He continues to use his title, liking to be known by one word in the manner of ’60s photographers, but never playing down the “Lord”. Were the royal family harder to capture than other famous faces? “No easier or harder.” He says he first photographed the Queen in 1954, when protocol was strict and nobody had contemplated the relaxed portraiture at which he would excel. “There was a frightening private secretary. But then there was a lovely one called Martin Charteris, who later worked for Anthony Eden.” Together, they planned a session with the royal family. “The children [Anne and Charles] were to be fishing by a stream with the Queen and Prince Philip looking down on them from a bridge. A soppy idea, but quite nice.” Unfortunately a “darling person” called Mrs Peabody, who did for young Tony at his Pimlico flat, ruined the plan on the morning of the shoot. “‘Ooh, Mr Tony,’ she said. ‘I thought you needed feeding up!’ She’d cooked the fish I’d bought for the children’s rods for my breakfast. In the final picture they’re reading a book.”

Was it true that when he became engaged, palace courtiers wanted him to stop working commercially? He shakes his head. “That’s not right. It was Cecil Beaton, who was a dreadful snob and a frightful shit, who said to Princess Margaret, ‘Oh, thank you so much for ridding me of my fearful rival.’ She just said, ‘What makes you think he’s not going to carry on?’ which was wonderful of her. She was very encouraging and made one go off and do one’s thing.

“She loved people coming into the house all the time, she thought it opened things up. We had a thing called the YaYa club, after my daughter Sarah whose nickname was YaYa. You were sworn in and had to say, ‘I swear that I will obey all the YaYa rules and regulations,’ but there were no rules and regulations. It was about getting people from different walks of life to meet David and Sarah – architects, engineers, writers – when they were young, maybe six or seven.” So their childhood wasn’t too remote? “Yes, exactly.”

With his uncle Oliver Messel’s portrait of his beautiful mother looking down on us and the cuckoo clock chiming, Snowdon begins his standard interview tricks. Instead of answering questions, he likes to test your powers of deduction and laugh at your slowness – a diversionary tactic. “Tell me what date that is,” he smiles, pointing to a picture of a man dressed from centuries ago. Eighteen hundreds? “No, look harder, it’s me, it’s me! It’s me! It’s a montage done by Anthony Powell, who was a great friend.” He isn’t in the mood for questions about people he has photographed – “hardly know them anyway” – but today’s touchstone to remembrance is his 1958 book London, a battered copy of which he produces for us to leaf through, its images of a grimy, sharp-witted town fresher to him than the pop star he photographed last week.

His camera offered the perfect excuse for sorties into the louche and toffee-nosed extremes of an era riven by class: the stripper in the Bridge House Hotel in Canning Town; severe-looking nannies pushing Silver Cross perambulators on Rotten Row; the exclusive Albany building on Piccadilly where he rented a £2-a-week room; a crowd watching the trooping the colour through shards of looking glass stuck onto sticks. “They made them. Everything is made for you now.” He laughs at the 1950s socialite Lady Docker: “She had a butler who doubled up as a chauffeur, and I remember her saying, ‘Come on, George, get off your greens and put on your reds.’" And he frowns at a dingy tattoo parlour. “There was a girl being tattooed because she had very bad toothache and it took the pain away.”

Later, in his velvet jackets, Tony Armstrong-Jones was at the heart of the sexually adventurous (and ambiguous) 1960s, the Windsors’ breath of fresh air at a time when speaking informally to one’s servants was considered peculiar. In his old Pimlico studio he employed 15-year-old Keith from Battersea. “I was photographing the Kabaka of Buganda,” he recalls, “and I said to Keith, ‘When you open the door, would you mind wearing a jacket and tie and giving him a little bow?’ and he was very excited. In the end, the doorbell rang and I heard him shout out, ‘Hey, Tone, there’s a couple of niggers outside to see you.’”

Unlike Bailey and Donovan, whom he adored, and Parkinson, whom he couldn’t stand – “he always pretended to be such an upright military figure, but he was a conscientious objector” – he never took to photographing frocks or squiring the girls who wore them for a living.

“I was no good at fashion.” He once designed a collection of ski smock tops and knickerbockers, but then he also designed a wheelchair for the late writer Quentin Crewe, a hearing aid, and an aviary for London Zoo, of which he is proudest. Most personal of all in the London book are the photographs of Rotherhithe, in south London’s docklands, and the rented room where he courted Princess Margaret, the only place where she did the washing up, and where the Queen Mother came to tea. “You could hear the barges from my room,” he says. “It was so romantic. The houses have all been pulled down now. A rather tiresome left-wing lady said they were slums. I adored it. I climbed down a chain onto the beach and walked down to the pub, I still go down there.” Anyone there from the old days? “A gay priest I saw the other day who got frightfully pissed in the pub.”

For an upper-middle-class Etonian who married the Queen’s sister, the son of a leading QC and a mother who would become the Countess of Rosse, Snowdon has insisted on an unstuffy life. He has worked, enjoyed his own crowd: theatrical, fast, swinging – “most of my friends are gay” – artists, writers, men who flirt with each other while worshipping beautiful wives and daughters. He has been an adoring father to his three eldest children, and may prove to be one to his youngest son, Jasper, the result of an affair that ended his second marriage to Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, though they remain good friends.

Things are not perfect in this enviable life. The creeping invalidity bequeathed by boyhood polio means that a once daredevil motorbike rider – he completed the Isle of Man TT circuit on his Twin Triumph 650cc in 1965 – no longer drives, and has therefore sold his cottage on the old family estate in Sussex. “I do regret having sold it,” he says plaintively. But we shouldn’t worry about him. In his leafy street he is living the most comfortable sort of old age. If he needs a book fetching, or an arrangement confirmed, he hollers for his assistant Dylan, who arrives from down the hallway with unfailing helpfulness. His housekeeper Paula is toiling in the utility room next to his studio. “Paula!!!” he bellows when he requires a mid-morning glass of white wine. “Yes, my Lord,” comes the reply, which sounds odd when addressed to the rebel of the royal family. Since the passing of his wives and mistresses from death or suicide (his mistress Anne Hills killed herself in 1997), separation or disenchantment, Paula is no doubt the most important woman in his domestic realm, and I wonder if he has thought about taking her photograph. Probably not.

The house she cares for is a treasure trove of beautiful things, beloved paintings, polished heirlooms, which, for all his contemporary, minimal tastes, reveals a heritage of quietly opulent wealth, of collecting, and impeccable taste. The royal dynasties of Europe were sniffy about his 1960 wedding, many declining to attend the celebrations – the king of Belgium claiming “concert tickets” as an excuse – where the groom’s Pimlico charlady was a guest. But in old age the “commoner” seems to have reverted to type, a mischievous toff who looks at you and asks, “What exactly is Ikea, darling?” At one point he sends me up to his top-floor bedroom to look at a painting of Rotherhithe, but I am far more struck by the ordered dignity of the room, monogrammed silver brushes, four-poster overlooking a garden studded with classical busts, half jokey, a bit camp, but still perfectly fitting, a bit like the 76-year-old himself.

You get the impression that for all their finery and antiques, Snowdon and his family are careful about money. The sale of Princess Margaret’s jewellery and her Mustique home made one wonder, as does his first commercial exhibition, later this month. “I think this lunch can be on The Sunday Times, don’t you?” he asserts with perfect charm. A heritage of luxury and the need to earn one’s crust while maintaining standards can be a challenge – one solved in the novels of Henry James by marriage to American heiresses stuffed with cash and short on breeding. Alas, the Armstrong-Joneses are also keen on beauty.

Snowdon is an aesthete of the old school, not prone to quivering sensitivity but revering the look of things. At lunch he is mesmerised by the nasty orange trousers of a fellow patron, muddy at the bottom, ill-fitting; to him they are actively, wilfully offensive. “Just look at them, too awful, the worst I have ever seen.” His eyes are fixed in horror as their owner rises from her table and he cranes to get a better view. He is equally blunt on the subject of women’s looks, decades of scrutinising faces having conferred an absolute confidence of opinion. When I mention a famously beautiful television newsreader, he stops me in my tracks. “No, not a beautiful face, quite dead.” A young woman, attractive, slim, long hair, regular features, brushes past our table. “No life in that face,” he comments in her wake, vaguely disappointed. I ask him about Princess Diana, and his reserve is telling. “She had beautiful hair. We did pictures of them at… where does Princess Anne live?”

He has always been surrounded by loveliness: his mother was known as the most beautiful woman in London, her brother was the theatre designer Oliver Messel, a seminal influence on young Tony; gay, arty, kind. “We would wander around Venice and end up in a gay club at five in the morning. Quite wonderful.” When Snowdon contracted polio at Eton and spent a year recuperating in Liverpool’s Royal Infirmary, Messel organised for Marlene Dietrich and Noël Coward, who were playing at the Adelphi, to entertain him. After a spectacular recovery, he returned to school – his school friends, such as Simon Sainsbury and Jocelyn Stevens, are still his best friends. Then on to study architecture at Cambridge, though he didn’t sit his finals. But he did cox the winning team in the 1950 boat race, and is keen to tell that he coxed again at Henley last week. “I didn’t know if I’d remember the words, but it all came back. I didn’t have a megaphone. I can still get a taxi by shouting.”

The black cab that whisks us to lunch is on account, and entered only after a triumph of will over physical limitation, walking stick hurled in first, then an exercise in hoisting and body-swinging. Two minutes later we arrive at a Danish restaurant, Lundum’s, on Old Brompton Road in southwest London, where he dotes on a “sweet little waitress”. He is crestfallen when told it’s her day off, but the young staff cosset and tease him in just the way he likes, not seeming to mind when he sends back two drinks – “My bloody mary’s boiling hot. Take a sip!” – and complains that his ice cream is too sloppy. The escape to lunch, with its cocktail, wine and Danish liqueur, is about company rather than sustenance or business; he flirts with the waiter (“Isn’t Jasper wonderful, darling?”), toys with his shrimp, comments on other people with a disregard for being overheard that makes my neck prickle. “How does one tell a lesbian?” he asks me. “Do you think that woman at the next table is one?” I turn to find a meaty Scandinavian matron looking back at us. “And did you know that Cecil Beaton made people say ‘Lesbian, lesbian’ to get them to smile?”

There is something touching about a man about town stalled by age and ill health, a poignancy I think he quite enjoys, and employs. Before long I am looking in the back of his shirt for a label he wants read, inspecting an injured paw held up so that I might guess the origin of a red mark. He is going to New York the next week, but claims not to know why “they” are just sending him. But don’t be fooled. Snowdon is still travelling the world, assisted by Dylan, with his camera and a jar of Marmite (with a silver top made by the society jeweller Theo Fennell), eaten when in the slightest danger of food poisoning. His last big trip was to India: “I decided not to do any pictures of poverty. There are too many faces gazing from windows.” Before that came Russia in 2002 for his 23rd book. At a time of savage entrepreneurialism, his images revived a romantic notion of the country: dance classes, ruins, churches; a mournful beauty. “I never know what I’m after. I take anything that moves, or doesn’t.” Will he do more travelling? “Oh yes, I’m not quite dead yet, you know.”

He seems less keen on the celebrities he is asked to photograph for glossy magazines. “What are they?” he asks. “In my day, people were either painters or writers; now they are just celebrities.” One feels tempted to reply that they are the democratic version of the aristocracy whose daughters once graced the pages of Country Life and were among Snowdon’s first subjects. But none of them would have behaved like the singer Macy Gray, who left his studio for three hours, got drunk and “went berserk” when asked if her entourage would mind leaving the sitting.

Old age has sharpened his intolerance for modern shoddiness, mobile phones, vulgarity, nasty clothes, self-publicists. The faces he loved were the culturally important ones, art stars such as Dame Barbara Hepworth and Dame Elisabeth Frink, or Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud; or David Hockney walking down a London street in a gold lamé jacket and a Mickey Mouse watch. Modern artists leave much to be desired. “I hated Damien Hirst, very conceited, and I don’t like pickled herrings all over the place.” He shows me a gold trinket, a “pre-Inca” bird given to him by Dame Margot Fonteyn. Nureyev was a friend, too, one he photographed many times, once for Vanity Fair, when he asked the journalist to ask the star to remove an unsightly bulging handkerchief from his pocket. The Russian’s nostrils flared with indignation. “That is no hanky,” he growled. “That is my cock.”

Lord Snowdon belongs to an era and a class in which the sulks and pouts, the innocence and the dutiful cheerfulness of the Edwardian nursery were allowed to spill over into adulthood and a pampered old age. In some ways he is still “Master Tony”, needing an occasional firm hand from nanny, but brave and delicate after his illness, and terribly lovable. He reminds me to visit his now listed aviary, and to stand on the bridge with three or four people and jump up and down. Why? “Oh, it wobbles. Great fun.”

At the end of our lunch he is asked if he would like more herring. “No!” he squeals in mock disgust. “And do take the rabbits doo-doos away,” he adds, prodding the garnish of capers.” Do the waiter and I know what the definition of a debutante is? “Someone who returns to her mother and says, ‘Oh shit, Mummy, I’ve trodden in some dog’s doo-doo.’”

I deliver the merry milord home to his front door still joking. He won’t bother to eat again today, he says, momentarily conjuring the spectre of the lonely single man, but a glint of mischief is never far from his eye. “Do you see that new little dog on the roof of my garage,” he smiles, pointing to a white stone figure. “Do you think you could get up on the roof and turn it around so it faces the other way?” Sometimes you get the feeling that he is secretly laughing harder than any of us know.

An exhibition to mark 50 years of Snowdon’s photography will be held from September 18 to October 31 at the Chris Beetles Gallery, 8 & 10 Ryder Street, London SW1. Tel: 0207 839 7551