In the early 1990s, the English photographer Dafydd Jones was in New York shooting penthouse dinner parties and galas. And he was good at it. According to AIR MAIL Co-Editor Graydon Carter, “the best party photographers, and their numbers are few, are like snipers. Dafydd Jones is the sniper’s sniper—the best of the best.”
In 1992, Jones entered new territory: Swifty Lazar’s Oscar party, at Spago, a fashionable Beverly Hills restaurant. He was nervous. This was the Oscar party, where stars such as Elizabeth Taylor, Barry Diller, Warren Beatty, and Jack Nicholson mingled over hors d’oeuvres.
“In 1993, the second time I covered his party, [Lazar] was marching around shepherding guests,” Jones says. “He poked me quite hard with his cane to encourage my picture-taking.” It would be Lazar’s last party. He died months later, leaving a void in the Oscar-night circuit.
In 1994, Carter, then the editor of Vanity Fair, decided to step in with a party, the first of what would become the Vanity Fair Oscar party. By 10:30 P.M. on Oscar night, the scene was set: cigarette girls, biscuits embossed with V.F. covers, a towering Oscar-shaped topiary. Carter stood outside Morton’s on La Cienega Boulevard, smoking anxiously. Would they come? Dolly Parton, Ralph Fiennes, Nancy Reagan, and Lee Radziwill soon filed in—as did Prince, sucking on a lollipop. Jones circled the room, sniper at the ready.
For the next two decades, the Vanity Fair party was an institution, and Jones its institutional photographer. When Babe, the movie about a brave pig, won an Oscar, a crasher tried to sneak in with a piglet. Jones captured the squealing before security ushered out the pair. He photographed other parties, too: in 1995, Tony Curtis, his hand on Jill Vandenberg’s waist at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s reopening gala; in 2000, Courtney Love posing at the Golden Globes.
Jones’s new book, Hollywood: Confidential, compiles black-and-white snapshots of timeless Hollywood glamour. “These pictures were all taken during the glory days of magazines,” Jones writes in his introduction. “Most were never published, but thanks to generous editors and deep-pocketed publishers, they were possible.” —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL
