Interviewing David Bailey’s former wives and girlfriends for this book I was impressed that most of them, despite the turbulence and the overlaps, didn’t have a bad word to say about him.
I went to Paris to see Catherine Deneuve and showed her this photograph taken in August 1965, the month they were married, in London two weeks after Bailey had proposed. She hadn’t seen it since.
‘How sweet he looks,’ she said. ‘He was so thin I used to wear his jeans. I still have a pair that I kept.’
In their first days together she was often alone in his house Primrose Hill, while he was working, faced with his aggressive collection of parrots who once blocked her way to her room, as in a scene not far from Repulsion.
‘They were the residents. I was definitely the guest.’
It was the year Deneuve made Repulsion with Roman Polanski, the year before she became immortal in film terms with Luis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour.
Francoise Dorleac, Deneuve’s sister was the only witness at their wedding. Her death in a car crash in 1967 changed everything; that and incessant work drifted them apart. After their divorce, she told him, ‘Now we can be lovers.’
Bailey was the only man Deneuve married.
You can read further extracts from ‘Look Again’ in The Times here.
Release date: October 29th 2020. Preorder here.