Keeping secrets is what this particular family does best. Theo, who died in 1875, was the great-grandfather of the photographer Michael Ward, born in 1929. Theo’s last three words, handed down from father to son, are entirely in keeping with this most hush-hush of households. Yet Ward, a former actor and Sunday Times photojournalist, has now broken with tradition, opening the cupboard to the clatter of more than one skeleton. In his memoirs, Mostly Women, family secrets explode like lobbed grenades. There is a grandmother who turns to drink, a father who collects mistresses, a wife who takes lovers, children who are abandoned. But most explosive of them all is that Ward, aged 15, enjoyed a sexual relationship with his mother. “I didn’t know her as a mother at all,” he says. “She was sexually voracious. She was very attractive and she seduced me.” In the book he explains:?“Secrets are parts of our lives we keep to ourselves for reasons of shame or practicality. When we’re young, we share them with nobody, but as we get older and more able to understand them, we start sharing them with others, sometimes to relieve our anxieties, sometimes to celebrate achievements in our lives… I think of my five marriages and mother, and our long-kept, shaming secret.”
That revelation sets the tone for this tale of fast cars and faster women, infidelity and incest among the upper-middle classes. People leap in and out of bed with a sense of 18th-century abandon, as if they were characters in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Christopher Hampton’s story of intrigue and seduction. Mia Farrow, Elizabeth Taylor, Sir John Betjeman, Marianne Faithfull, Michael Caine, Sir John Gielgud, Dirk Bogarde and Jane Asher, all have walk-on parts in this drama, but do not participate in any of the above activities.
And, along the way, Ward took some very fine pictures, but when you examine his seven or so engagements, five marriages and the countless love affairs crammed into his 77 years, you begin to wonder when he had the time.
He wrote the book not only to lay ghosts to rest but also for his two daughters, now grown up. “I wanted to do it for them, to say, ‘Look, this is what Daddy did.’ I didn’t want them to have to look through dog-eared prints in boxes.” And the incest? “There is no point writing any kind of autobiography if you’re not going to be completely honest.”
The pictures were mostly taken for The Sunday Times, in a career that spanned 30 years, Ward retiring in 1994. He wasn’t like other photographers. They would arrive on jobs in company Fords, whereas Ward would roar up clad in leather on his BMW bike, or turn up in his Rolls-Royce. Always jovial, he would coax and charm his subjects, calling everyone “Number One”. It was a throwback to his film role as first officer in Yangtse Incident, and was a useful sobriquet when he couldn’t remember anyone’s name.
Much of his work was done in the 1970s, under the editorship of Harry Evans, now Sir Harold, who has penned a preface to his book. Evans pays tribute to Ward’s searing honesty. “Michael’s greatest gift in surfing through life is he doesn’t take himself too seriously. He got into photography persuading the racing star Stirling Moss to have his picture taken… then had to borrow Moss’s Rolleiflex because he had no camera of his own.” As Evans points out, the book comprises Ward’s adventures on the way to the darkroom. To which we could add a codicil: via the bedroom.
Evans failed to realise, and says he could kick himself now for not exploiting him better, that Ward’s life was so much more fascinating than many of the stars he photographed. That he kept so many secrets, for so long, is astonishing.
As a former actor, Ward was intimately acquainted with many of the celebrities. If he hadn’t slept with them, he knew someone who had. Priapic, with the looks of a matinée idol, he enjoyed countless dalliances with budding actresses. But his friendships could backfire. The writer Philip Norman recalls going to interview Joan Collins at her house in Little Venice, west London, in 1982. Ward arrived to take the photos. “They knew each other from being starlets,” recalls Norman, who played gooseberry as Ward and Collins began their luvvie-ish reminiscing. “How’s Max?” asked Ward. Max was her first husband. “He died in 1974,” Collins replied. Ward carried on snapping. Norman heard her add: “He deserved it, the bastard.” Norman wrote up the interview, bastard quote and all. Collins was furious and has not spoken to Ward since.
He also fell foul of Joan Crawford. One summer in 1969 he went to shoot her at Bray studios, Berkshire. “I loved her lines. She was 63, still beautiful,” he says. “Her lines gave her a radiant calmness.” La Crawford disagreed. In a letter to the writer, Philip Oakes, she called the results “horrendous… Had I been Michael Ward, I never would have presented the lousy pictures to The Times [sic] or anybody”.
Ward was the only son of two actors. His father, Ronald, appeared on the West End stage opposite Sir John Gielgud and Dame Edith Evans, among others. His mother, Peggy Willoughby, was a dancer and actress. Starting as a chorus girl, she moved in similar circles, appearing in a Broadway revue in 1924 with Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence.
As Ward says, his parents were talented, beautiful and “spectacularly careless”. He describes his father as a “partial alcoholic” who married three times and took many lovers, including the actress Tallulah Bankhead. His mother is dismissed as a “nymphomaniac”. She married five times.
But for Ward, “father” and “mother” are perhaps misnomers. Ronald and Peggy split up soon after he and his sister, Patricia, were born, the children shuttling between grandparents and willing aunts. Aged three, he and Patricia, two years older, were sent to boarding school. Between the ages of 3 and 15, he saw his mother only twice when she joined him in two seaside holidays. He would write “Dear Mummy” letters to her from boarding school, talking about rugby fixtures. She would send affectionate replies. “I don’t remember her being tactile or cuddling me. She was busy leading her own life.” The physicality would come later.
