So there was the time he crossed paths with a pre-007 Pierce Brosnan on a Croatia movie set. He convinced a hydrophobic Tina Turner to pose in the middle of her infinity pool. He was also there the moment David Lee Roth and the Van Halen brothers reunited in 2006 for the first time since disbanding after their classic 1984 album.
Some photographers have shot a celebrity or three and called it a people career. Since age 18, Richard McLaren has been capturing a galaxy’s worth of stars, across four generations; including The Rolling Stones, Halle Berry, Jennifer Lopez, Pamela Anderson, Rachel Weisz, Orlando Bloom, and late actors Patrick Swayze and Heath Ledger… and a clutch of his iconic images have traveled worldwide and are stuck in the public’s collective memory.
The son of a bookie and a homemaker, McLaren became the only professional artist to emerge from his working-class, South London family (his other brothers are a pilot, restaurateur and optician, respectively). “I stumbled into this business straight out of school,” he said, thanks to a connection through his cousin, a Daily Sun art director.
After finishing England’s equivalent of high school, McLaren joined Scope Features photographic agency, initially as an assistant. As a photographer, McLaren cut his teeth on his first celebrity photo call: Danny Kaye, in England promoting 1976 TV adaptations of Peter Pan and Pinocchio. As a freelance commercial photographer, McLaren traveled all over Europe.“It was just great fun,” he remembered. “We got to meet the models. You’re having lunch with Jaws.”
McLaren does not mean Bruce the shark. During the making of the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, “[Richard Kiel] shook my hand,” McLaren recalled, smiling. “It was like five shovels shaking your hand.” McLaren’s resulting celebrity images were disseminated to top magazines worldwide: Esquire, GQ, Rolling Stone, Vogue, Hello. While he didn’t shoot any of the images, McLaren got to hang out with Bob Marley during a photo session. “He had a joint this big,” McLaren said, gesturing wide. “He passed it to the photographer. A really nice, down to earth guy.”
Also nice and down-to-earth: the late Phil Lynott, whose band, Irish rockers Thin Lizzy, he photographed at Bray Studios, where many Hammer horror movies were filmed. Through the 1980s, McLaren photographed everyone from Sarah Jessica Parker to Leslie Neilsen, in London to promote a Naked Gun movie. “I shot him pulling his coat over his head,” McLaren said of Neilsen, who was easy to improvise with. “You just point the camera and let him do this thing.”
Perhaps surprisingly, McLaren said he’s never really had any negative experiences with prima donna celebrities …not even on his Miami shoot with J-Lo, who some have depicted as a diva. “They’re going to give you 110 percent,” McLaren said. “They may turn up with a hangover but they still give you 90 percent.”
Particularly dramatic: Being in the room the moment vintage Van Halen (without bassist Michael Anthony) reunited. It was the first time Eddie and Alex Van Halen had decided to perform again with David Lee Roth in 21 years. “The guys were great,” he said. “I got a great picture with [Eddie]; with his guitar with the cigarette burns.”
As a precursor to his move to Los Angeles from England, McLaren often rented a Beverly Hills house for photo shoots, including Mike Tyson’s and Tommy Chong’s.
“The kids were young so we can travel,” he said of his two daughters, now 25 and 22 and both Manhattanites. As they got older, McLaren decided he was done with London.
“We went to New York, it was fantastic,” he recalled, but said to himself, “If I am going to move, let’s move where there’s some ocean, they can have some fun.”
In 2000, he relocated to a Mandeville home. “It was just sheer luck,” McLaren recalled. “Very country like. The kids went to school in the Palisades.”
He soon moved to a Paseo Miramar home and in 2006 moved to another part of Pacific Palisades. He loves it here. “It’s safe,” he said. “People are pleasant. It’s very family-oriented. It needs more restaurants but hopefully [Rick] Caruso will change that.”
Getting celebrities to trust him has been the key to his success.“Anyone can take a picture but when you’re in front of celebrities, you have to make them feel comfortable,” McLaren said. “They know my reputation.” It’s that reputation that has posited him within Sharon Stone’s new Malibu home for a lifestyle shoot; taking risqué shots of Halle Berry for HFM circa 2000’s X-Men; shooting Gwyneth Paltrow back when she and Brad Pitt were an item; placed him on a Santa Monica roof top in 2003 with Heath Ledger for a GQ Australia shoot.
Most amazingly, he convinced a water-fearing Turner to pose in the middle of the pool at her France villa; and a cut Jean Claude Van Damme to strip completely naked and pose holding baby lion cubs inside a South Africa hotel suite. “The cubs had ripped up the furniture,” McLaren said, laughing.
In 1987, McLaren was covering supermodel Linda Evangelista, a judge at an Emirates Airlines-sponsored Miss World contest. While staying at Sun International Hotels, McLaren chatted up a table of friends, one of whom knew President Nelson Mandela’s right-hand man. It was dicey request, yet two days later, McLaren found himself in the Elephant Room, where the history-making South African leader read his morning newspapers.
“It’s just classic,” McLaren said. “It’s him having a cup of tea in his favorite room in the presidential palace and me just being a fly on the wall.” Staring at the image again inside the Village Starbucks where this interview was conducted, McLaren added. “It just brings back a lot of memories. Mother Theresa, Gandhi and him, there’s no three bigger people.”
McLaren, a Canon camera loyalist, didn’t mind having to cross the digital divide from celluloid. In the film days, he used to lug around 28 cases when he traveled —18 cases of cameras, 10 cases of lighting. Now he just ports a couple of cases. Digital makes his entire process easier and faster. The downside? : “It’s brought more people into the business who can’t shoot pictures. With film, you have to be a talent because you didn’t know what you had until you got it back from the lab.”
Currently, McLaren shoots print ad photography for such clients as BBC, Emirates Airlines and NASCAR. A few weeks back, he snapped Bo Derek. Given McLaren’s abundance of riches in A-list neighbors, the Steven Spielbergs, Tom Hankses and Ben Afflecks of the community don’t have to lose sleep at night fearing McLaren is lurking in their topiary. McLaren is no paparazzo nor did he ever aspire to become a long lens-armed bounty hunter. They’re a whole other species of photographer, he said. “I don’t want to be pushing and shoving and intruding on people’s lives, that’s not me,” he said.
McLaren is surprisingly liberal about the way writers and artists—including photographers—have found their intellectual property poached from the worldwide web. “I find my images all over the Internet,” McLaren said.
There’s no point trying to stop the hemorrhaging: “You don’t get anywhere. They’ll just close the company down. You’re paying $20K to get into court. You’re not taking anyone to court. You’ve got no one to go against because the company’s gone.”
Years ago, while shooting Swayze dancing inside Pinewood Studios, a member of the paparazzi beat him to the punch. “He was shooting over my shoulder,” McLaren recalled. “It wound up in the paper. I hadn’t even processed it for the Italian magazine.”
The magazine’s editor thought McLaren had purposely leaked the image.
“Paparazzi can be a hindrance if you’re doing something exclusive. But it could be good promotion as well,” said McLaren, who does allow that today’s selfie-driven celebrity culture has undercut his business. “Now they do their own [pics]. All the exclusives they post themselves. Timberlake posted his baby the other day. [They do it] because they can control it.”
It’s simple math. “Kim Kardashian has 50 million followers. She has more followers than the magazine’s sales. She can control it.” Yet having established himself in the pre-Internet age, McLaren continues to trade professionally on long-established good will. He still loves what he does, “meeting all sorts of people; doing a celebrity shoot one day and then a shoot for UNICEF in India the next day.” Or, as he did on one trip, literally stumble from supermodel to civil rights icon. “I can meet Mandela,” he said, still smiling.
Michael Aushenker
