‘Everyone is v. penniless,’ Minton told Michael Wishart that January. ‘Including Lucian, especially Lucian … I feel a certain alarm for him, for what can he do now? Photography?’8
The Hanover Gallery was prepared to pay Freud a retainer of £2 a week more than the London Gallery, which, by 1950, was so reduced that Mesens resorted to hiring it out; by then Surrealism was no longer even intellectually modish: Max Ernsts and Magrittes remained unsold in the cellars. An extra £2 was little help. Ahead of his first Hanover show Freud needed at least a dozen suitable frames and, being resourceful, he went foraging along the Fulham Road. ‘[Jacob] Mendelson the drug dealer, who used to be around in the Café Royal (always alone, and the waiters said he’d been coming every night for forty years and never left a tip) and who had been married to Lilian Bomberg (by then David Bomberg’s wife), had a huge emporium of junk on the corner of Fulham Road. I thought the prices were daylight robbery so I put frames I liked near the back door, went with Kitty to get them and was caught by Mendelson. He began screaming as I ran down the street. People did nothing, but he got hold of Kitty’s hand. She was wearing gloves. I pushed him and he fell back with one of her gloves. She was very upset and I dropped the frames.’
On the night of the opening, 18 April, they held a party in Clifton Hill. William Coldstream took William Townsend with him and Townsend, scenting haut monde bohemianism, wrote it up at some length in his journal. Paolozzi – being the lodger – showed them into the drawing room. ‘A large red-plush carved settee, two screens, one of them covered in tiger skin’. Champagne and whisky were served. Francis Bacon was there, ‘fantastic enough, but charming and immensely intelligent’. Townsend felt awkward. ‘This was a company in which Bill and I were like strangers, matter of fact and banal. There was Lucian’s exquisite silent little wife and the only other woman the wife of a huge bearded man. The rest of the men were beautifully hairless, smoothest of all a young man so preciously and delicately turned out, a pupil of Cedric Morris’s, whom it would be impossible to caricature.’9 That would have been Michael Wishart. He was attending the Cedric Morris School, as was Anne Dunn, briefly, before being asked to leave.
The exhibition, occupying more than half the gallery – the Parisian printmaker Roger Vieillard showed three dozen etchings in the remaining space – was a demonstration of Freud’s virtuosity. His stippling and highlighting were immaculate, chillingly so. Father and Daughter and Sleeping Nude, the main exhibits, showed him to be concerned more with the look than the feel. This was painting not so much to order but, possibly, to ingratiate. Boy with a White Scarf, a painting of Charlie Lumley was, Freud conceded fifty years later, ‘a bit soppy: cigarette-card glamour’ (Kenneth Clark bought it for the Art Gallery of South Australia), and Boy Smoking, a painted variation on the drawing of Charlie as Narcissus, without the reflection, could have been bait for Arthur Jeffress. Four of the seventeen exhibits were the rejected drawings for Rex Warner’s Men and Gods.
In his New Statesman review Patrick Heron harped on the ‘eccentricity’ of Freud’s approach and his ‘remarkable capacity for sustaining the craziest minutiae’. At the time Heron himself was painting loose-knit Braques, so he laboured the point. ‘Freud needs a magnifying glass, one would say, to complete his incredibly tight and intricate surfaces with their fantastically minute details of touch and design.’ A painting of strawberries, on a four by four and three-quarter-inch copper plate, was precisely that: each fruit shiny, blemished and unblemished, pores flecked with seed, nestled in a box. Heron’s conclusion was unenthusiastic. ‘It is good that Freud is abandoning what he could do to perfection. But as yet he is barely the master of the new realism he has invoked.’10 Such paintings could be seen as provocatively exquisite. Ann Rothermere, leading society hostess, bought the strawberries: such a clever little picture.
Cecil Beaton’s disapproval notwithstanding, Freud saw more of Garbo in London. He being in his mid-twenties, she in her early forties, they were a generation apart but the cachet was none the less for that. There was a predictable and enjoyable stir when he accompanied her to clubs where the male clientele were apt to dress up as her (or, failing that, as Marlene Dietrich) and there was he, nervily escorting the real thing. ‘I took Francis [Bacon] out to lunch with her and he said, “That marvellous director Pabst: do tell me about him”; and she said, “Oh I was so young I don’t remember.” Francis got up and walked out. She was very flirtatious and funny and friendly and denying. Driving over a bridge over the Thames she said – she was Swedish, after all – “Let’s get out and stand in the rain.” I was wearing my best suit. Fucking hell. She looked wonderful but was extremely silly: when she saw Wallace Heaton (camera shops) adverts on the back of buses she said “Wallace??”’
She had confused Heaton with Beaton: ‘I asked Cecil Beaton about their romance on the Queen Mary. He said, “I suddenly realised I was absolutely in love with her.” “What did you do?” “I took off all my clothes and danced and danced and danced.”
‘The story goes that she had glandular reasons for carrying on as she did. If it’s some time since you had sex, you must have a romance or your skin dries. I saw her once when someone approached her in the street and her face twisted up in a terrible grimace and her body shrivelled. She just became old, like everybody else. She wasn’t remotely responsive but she had a strong effect. Old boys all over the world would leave their money to her.
‘Ann Rothermere asked Garbo to dinner and she dressed in a trouser suit, and she wanted to have her hair cut and went to Selfridges boy department and had it cut sitting on a rocking horse. She looked marvellous. Esmond said she was a dreary old wreck.’ Esmond Rothermere owned the Daily Mail. His wife was a connoisseur of politicians, socialites, artists, writers and film stars, indeed anyone who appealed to her as worthy of the attentions of a consummate society hostess. Freud got on well with her after being asked to paint her portrait, a formal one, her face tightly composed, topped off with a tiara.
Portrait of Mrs Ian Fleming (Ann Viscountess Rothermere), 1950
‘It was done through Cyril Connolly. I was asked to meet Ann with a view to doing her as Lady Rothermere. Evelyn Waugh later said the tiara wasn’t painted straight. He was right.’ The portrait became a relic of her period as Lady Rothermere. ‘Being very intelligent, and unpretentious, Ann took an interest in the paper, which he didn’t like. She noticed that people got TB there rather a lot. She found that the people who got it worked in a damp underground room and she told Esmond and he lost his temper and told her never to go into the building again.’
She had married Lord Rothermere in 1945, a year after her first husband, Lord O’Neill, was killed in the war and a year or so before her involvement with Ian Fleming (whom she was to marry in 1952) led to pregnancy and a miscarriage.
‘I took Kitty to Warwick House – the Rothermeres’ town house – to some parties. Ann was head of a film something and once Kitty sat next to Lex Barker –“Tarzan” – and I was next to Vivien Leigh – awfully nasty – and we talked about my friend David Kentish who worked for Olivier. “Such a pity he got married,” she said.’
‘There was a fancy-dress party. I wore 1820s Lord O’Neill, out of the costume basket. It was winter, foggy and cold. Ann said, “Would you like to drive home?” I hadn’t really driven before and when I got to Hyde Park Corner I hit a van and an ambulance, both at once, got out in these amazing clothes – and drunk – and saw people being bundled into the ambulance and I said, “Can I help?” And they shouted, “Fuck off,” so I drove home to Clifton Hill and when I looked out in the morning I could hardly recognise the car, it was so bashed; and so I drove – I didn’t know about gears or anything – to Delamere, sobered up and rang up Ann and said, “It isn’t quite as you gave it to me.” A chauffeur was sent to collect it. I was rather nervous, so I tried a conversation with him about cars. “Do you have TV in cars?” I asked. Rothermere cars had never had accidents, so the case came up without mentioning the Rother
meres. Since I wasn’t licensed or insured I was fined £100, which took most of the money I got for the picture.’
In tartan trews and dinner jacket and a top hat with implanted tulip, Freud played the salon Surrealist at a Headdress Ball at Warwick House, and was photographed there listening to Freddie Ashton (famous for his Queen Mother imitations) and his hostess. Dancing he enjoyed – ‘dancing comes out of frenzy, not energy’ – particularly with Margot Fonteyn. He liked being a waspish firefly in such social circles and performed accordingly. Once he was spotted eating orchids from a bouquet.
His reputation travelled. In New York the Anglophile Fleur Cowles featured ‘Freud the Younger’ in the February 1950 launch issue of her lavish, and short-lived, magazine Flair. It involved a double spread, an inset reproduction of Girl with Roses, a photograph of the stylish young artist in profile and a disclaimer: ‘Unaffectedly addicted to privacy, he wishes to be known only through his pictures.’11
Freud’s social activities, hotly pursued when opportunity arose, were more wilful than impromptu. What were driving licences actually for? He had no time for regulations, taking them to be interference, particularly those that threatened his freedom of movement. Marriage, he assumed, was no impediment and law was best ignored if it failed to suit the immediate purpose.
A monkey, for example, died in Paris (it had belonged to Olivier Larronde) and since he wanted to draw it the obvious thing to do was to smuggle it through Dover customs in his coat pocket. The consequent drawing, Dead Monkey, was bought by Lincoln Kirstein, a touchy and intermittently wealthy poet and impresario. Kirstein had lured George Balanchine to New York in 1933 where, together, they had founded the New York City Ballet. He brought the company to London in June 1950 for a season that, to his displeasure, was not well received.
The visit had begun with good prospects. A drawing of Balanchine by Freud, done that August, appeared in Buckle’s magazine Ballet. Kirstein acquired it and there was talk, when he and Buckle paid a Good Friday visit to Delamere Terrace, of Freud designing a ballet and possibly going to America with him and exhibiting there as the British adherent of what Kirstein called the ‘Symbolist Realist School’ involving, Stateside, paintings of jail-bait sailors by his brother-in-law Paul Cadmus and of keen-eyed Brandywine Valley folk by Andrew Wyeth. To Kirstein, who disapproved of Léger and Matisse for their lack of ‘stable technical processes and rational craftsmanship’, Symbolist Realism, an exhibition of which he arranged at the ICA, was a timely modernisation of fifteenth-century Netherlands painting, the greatest masterpiece of which he himself had liberated in 1945. As a Private First Class in the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives unit of the US Third Army, he had acted on a tip-off from a German dentist and gone to a salt mine near Salzburg and there discovered eight panels of Van Eyck’s Ghent altarpiece, The Adoration of the Lamb.
Looking at Dead Monkey (such a wise little face) and contemplating being painted by Freud, Kirstein decided that he had discovered a Symbolist Realist in London, possibly the Van Eyck of the mid-twentieth century. Young Freud was worth cultivating. He began sitting for him. ‘Posing was calm,’ he later wrote. ‘Public encounters became stormy. Psychotic it was not but prone to hysteria.’ There was, he added, a fight in the crush bar at Covent Garden and another at Ann Rothermere’s party at Warwick House after the first night of the New York City Ballet production of Benjamin Britten’s Les Illuminations.12
‘Kirstein had a ludicrous side,’ Freud said. ‘He made me into an enemy.’ By his account, one evening they and others piled into Johnny Minton’s car for a trip to the Prospect of Whitby pub in Limehouse. It was raining. ‘Johnny’s friend Rick was driving; the car skidded and Kirstein had a panic attack and jumped out, much to our amusement. And then he never turned up to sit and I sent him a rather stupid telegram:
He who after a sudden skid
Jumps out into an East End street
Before his portrait is complete
May from posterity be hid.
‘This, understandably, drove him absolutely mad with fury.’ As Kirstein recalled: ‘Our sittings ended violently with fisticuffs in the crush bar of Covent Garden.’ Freud concurred. ‘He tore my shirt front out in Covent Garden and didn’t sit again but wrote to Erica Brausen saying that he had paid for the portrait – probably he’d given me an advance – and would she send it.’ She despatched the head to him and that was that: a thin-skinned portrait, the haircut sharp, the back of the head singularly abrupt, the eyes ready-focused, suspicion hardening into disdain. ‘He was hysterical, really believed in Gurdjieff. He took offence at very odd things. Balanchine managed him well by keeping quiet and counting until it was over. If he thought people’s work was no good he never bothered again. Rather mad, but he certainly minded very much and he got that famous (megalomanic) illness: he thought he was Diaghilev.’
Charlie Lumley, writing to Freud in blunt pencil from his army billet in North Wales, asked how things were. ‘Have you heard anything about your trip to America or has Kirstein definately changed his mind.’ He had.
Kirstein bought Woman with Carnation (Mrs Milton next door), but within a few years, when Freud’s exhibits in the 1954 Venice Biennale were being selected, he wrote to the organisers saying that it was probably unavailable, belonging, as it did by then, to ‘people with a new house in the country’. As a painting, he added, it was ‘by no means an important one’.13
Freud’s domestic life, erratic and hardly connubial, was set about with entanglements and disengagements. At Clifton Hill Michael Wishart found one of Pauline Tennant’s earrings in the bed. ‘He rescued them so Kitty wouldn’t see them,’ Anne Dunn said. ‘How Lucian fitted so much in I cannot imagine. Nerves of steel. Rotten nerves.’ She knew Pauline from dancing classes and child modelling sessions at the Gargoyle when they were six and Pauline had recited, ‘I wonder I wonder if anyone knows, who lives in the heart of this beautiful rose.’ She was competition. ‘She kept popping back in again. I always remember mimicking her movements and I never knew we would find ourselves in a slightly antagonistic situation later on.’14
There were further complications for Freud when he took off to Paris. ‘I was living in this hotel with Helena for a little bit. I had a Tyl Ulenspiegel change: I came with Caryl Chance then went off with Helena.’ Helena Hughes had caught his eye in Dublin when he went there with Anne Dunn; her father – Herbert Hughes, music critic of the Daily Telegraph – had written the title song for the Powell and Pressburger film I Know Where I’m Going, a song that suited her. ‘I had met her first as a great friend of Kitty, they were at the Central together and she was engaged, briefly, to Michael Wishart. Kitty gave her the Ill in Paris etching and was very upset when she sold it. She married an Irish actor, Liam Gannam, in Paris and later married Mr Crackanthorpe, a North Country squire. She drank a lot; she was very reactionary. The involvement was quite a slight thing for her. She was quite a hard little thug.’
Freud’s portrait of Helena Hughes, Girl in a Beret, done in London in 1951 was bought for the Rutherston collection of paintings and drawings circulated in Northern schools as educational props. The beret, the cropped hair, gold earring and jersey of the stylish gamine suited the role she was to assume a few years later in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger: Helena the substitute girlfriend. She had a daughter who, many years later, got in touch with Freud. ‘She wrote something slightly odd: she asked about the portrait and said she was born “not long after”.’
In the summer of 1950 Helena Hughes was in Paris working with Orson Welles who, between bouts of raising finance and shooting sequences for his film Othello, devised ‘An Evening of Theatre’, a pair of plays showcasing himself. The Unthinking Lobster, a skit on Hollywood producers, involved a miracle on a studio lot and Time Runs was a version of Faustus for the atom-bomb age in which he played six roles. For these he had the stage of the Théâtre Édouard VII in the rue de Rivoli decked out in black velvet and he persuaded Duke Ellington to compose the music. Welles h
ad as his assistant Hilton Edwards, who also played Mephistophilus, a role later taken by his friend Micheál MacLiammóir, the Iago to Welles’ Othello. ‘The real link was with Hilton Edwards at the Abbey Theatre Dublin. Helena being an Irish actress, Hilton Edwards must have asked her to be there, in Paris.’ The rehearsals, over three weeks, were reported as going badly, with false starts and setbacks and no one to gainsay Welles who decided to pad out the programme with magic tricks performed by himself.
‘Helena used to leave the side door open so I’d slip in and watch rehearsals. She was a maid or something and did a lot of dogsbody work. Her letting me in came about slowly; it was my night’s entertainment; I even took other people in. I used to be in a box quite often, but I got bored watching and went to the dressing rooms and in Orson Welles’ dressing room I started reading his letters. One from a schoolgirl – “Girls say you are a big fat slob but I think you are wonderful” – he came in and was furious and said get out. As I got near the door I cocked my foot round a lighting wire on a spool and walked with it through the door and the wire got further and further, forty yards long, it went on and on: it was a theatrical gesture. Then I went and sat on a horseback in the square behind the rue de Rivoli and Hilton Edwards came and apologised profusely. He didn’t need to. I’d be furious if I found someone in my room.
The Lives of Lucian Freud Page 38
