The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  It wasn’t just that the marriage hadn’t suited him. It had fallen away. It had been nothing like the domestic containment enjoyed by his parents, not that he wanted such a restrictive felicity anyway. Guilt over the children was inescapable, however, and the need to provide for them in some way was pressing.

  ‘When I left Kitty my father said, “OK, you left your wife and children; she may be very attractive, but she has no income and her only chance is to contract another marriage, so make the royalties money over to her.” It varied quite a bit. Royalties got more and more.’ The income from his share of these became larger than anticipated – ‘something like fifteen hundred a year’ – as the Sigmund Freud cult grew through the fifties and, as the only regular income he could rely on, it seemed that this was the only settlement possible.

  A picture postcard of Southwold from Kitty:

  Darling darling Please forgive gloomy letter. I do love you & the children just have this wretched nature. Doctor’s bill for Annabel’s eczema and will have asthma when she is older poor little lamb, inherited from you I suppose, and must never be in the sun. Wire some dough quickly please.9

  ‘I find it difficult to be optimistic about Lux and Kitty and your grandchildren,’ Lucie Freud wrote to her husband. ‘All the thought that I may see little even less than before saddens me deeply. I do not only love this child [Annie], her presence never fails to make me happy for days. Perhaps one can make an arrangement with Kitty that we do see the children. One could of course post the [royalties] cheque only after the event but that does seem neither fair nor to my taste and would entirely spoil or at least endanger any friendship she might have for us.’10

  Looking back, the adult Annie Freud saw her grandmother as reliably admirable. ‘The distressing adult circumstances never were transmitted to me by her. Like most children do, I felt somehow at fault,’ she added. She was just four when the marriage ended. ‘When you marry somebody you are prepared to give up some of the things that you want for the other person. I think she [Kitty] had to give up too much. As fable has it – but fable happens to be the truth – Dad was spectacularly unfaithful to her the whole time but she minded more his pushing after the aristocracy because she came from a bohemian culture that loathed the aristocracy – uneducated, fascistic, narrow-minded bastards – and for her the thought of running after dukes and duchesses was disgusting. And then Dad got terribly, terribly excited about titles – Lady this and Lord that – and I think Mum lost patience and it was not going to last.’11

  She remembered her father doing handstands in the park. ‘Always throwing me around.’ Her grandmother, by contrast, was simply reassuring. ‘I remember a very particular thing was she asked me how long I wanted to stay at her house in Walberswick and I said, “Sixty days and sixty nights,” because to me sixty represented an eternity. Another very important aspect of who she was to me was that she was a foreign person and she spoke with a very pronounced German accent: “Sousvold” (Southwold) and “pooty”? And the way their house was set out and decorated was to do with a kind of Austro-German aesthetic. Chinese things, reeds, a kind of very European informality: beds in every room (this was at Walberswick). Indeterminate colours. A complete absence of anything like chintz.’12

  While Lucie Freud concentrated on the wellbeing of the children, ‘the spiv Lucian Freud’, as his estranged father-in-law referred to him (‘who turned out a nasty piece of goods’),13 was variously distracted.

  ‘When Kitty and I split up I used to go and stay opposite where Kitty was living, in Hyde Park Gate, with Pandora. She was Mrs Jones. Mr Jones was away. I wasn’t spotted though there was the Joneses’ doorman sort of asking names and I had to … It was such a curious circumstance. Enid Bagnold [Lady Jones, Pandora’s mother-in-law, author of National Velvet] let the house to the Churchills. She said, “We are all friends here, we have no keys here.” They scrapped them, except for hers. Pan was married to Lady Jones really, not to Timothy. I worked from her a bit in 1953. Nothing survived. She was very beautiful and when Brigitte Bardot first appeared she looked exactly like her.’

  From Who’s Who came the invitation to be listed among the 30,000 people deemed to be ‘everyone who’s anyone in Britain and beyond today’. Submitting his details for publication in 1953 he gave his address as 20 Delamere Terrace and did not mention being married.

  Richard (Wulf) Mosse took over 28 Clifton Hill and Freud would call there from time to time. ‘I had a cupboardful of drawings and scraps and occasionally came in and took some. Cousin Jo had seen the painting of Pauline Tennant on the mantelpiece and told me. Hooray: money, I thought. Wulf was very upset when I asked for it. He said it had just been left in the cupboard. But when I heard of it being there I thought I must have it.’ Passing the house one day he saw that the surviving bay tree of the pair he had planted in former days had been felled.

  22

  ‘A marvellous chase feeling’

  In the New Year of 1953 Ann Fleming pressed Freud, not for the first time, to come and stay in Jamaica where Ian Fleming wintered. It would be a respite for him, she thought and a relief for her, given the tedium of winter months cooped up in a small house that Fleming had designed for himself, basically a three-bedroom bachelor bungalow perched above a coral beach.

  Freud took ship on a banana boat, the SS Cavina, with reluctance and foreboding. ‘I was in the middle of this very emotional romance; I’d been asked two years before and said, “Of course I’d love to come,” and so then – having no money – Ann got me a ticket.’

  He did not expect a welcome, for Ian Fleming took a dim view of arty types. As Noël Coward, a neighbour in Jamaica, wrote in ‘Don’ts for my Darlings’, on the occasion of their marriage:

  Don’t Ian, if Annie should cook you

  A dish that you haven’t enjoyed,

  Use that as excuse

  For a storm of abuse

  At Cecil and Lucian Freud.

  ‘Because of not getting on with Ian, I knew very well that if I didn’t go he’d go on at her (“typical of your friend, you know”), so if I hadn’t gone I’d have really let her down. And so I went.’

  During the five-day voyage (so much quicker than in 1941) Freud was disturbed to find himself up on a list as a co-host on a Brains Trust. He protested to the purser’s office and the purser said, ‘Oh be a sport,’ but he refused, telling him that he had never been one for sport. He began a painting of himself, caught in the cabin bathroom mirror. ‘Self-portrait on copper, biting my thumb.’ This he gave, unfinished, to his hostess, who had arrived by air a few weeks before. His own disembarkation in Jamaica was blocked for a while. ‘I had five or ten pounds which they took off me because it was English money which wasn’t allowed into Jamaica. So I didn’t have any money and Fleming had to stand surety for me.’ Fleming was not pleased at this, nor was he overjoyed to see his father-in-law, Guy Charteris, a gung-ho John Buchan type (‘ornithologist and one of the best shots in England’), who was on the boat too. ‘He didn’t change his clothes a lot and Ian didn’t like this.’

  Freud found Fleming ‘ghastly, phoney, depressing, snobbish’. His first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, was about to be published and he was engaged on the follow-up, Live and Let Die, a title that reflected his attitude to an unwelcome houseguest.

  ‘He said, “You’re just like my hero.”’ Which surprised Freud, in that Fleming wasn’t being sarcastic, for once, and obviously Bond was more the Ian Fleming type. Some years later Ann Fleming introduced the illustrator Dickie Chopping to her husband and consequently (as Freud said, ‘You could get Dickie to do anything. Five things beginning with …’) Chopping designed the dust jackets for the British editions of the novels: a rose and sawn-off Smith & Wesson, for example, for From Russia with Love in 1957, the pin-sharp detail of which – virtual trompe l’oeil – was not unlike the rose stems and utensils of early Freud and indeed the two small banana-plant paintings that he completed during his stay. ‘I’d have made a killing the
re: me and Fleming linked,’ Freud said, mock ruefully, had they become friends.

  The dislike was mutual. If Fleming disliked Freud, Freud loathed him. ‘He was a cunt and horrible to the locals. He was jealous. It was to do with Ann whom I was not having an affair with, whatever he thought.’

  The routine at Goldeneye was oppressive, Freud found. He noted Fleming’s taste for Viennese Riding School prints: sure sign of a disciplinarian. Days were short and dull. Ann Fleming did watercolours – ‘shells, in a way people do in Jamaica’ – and Ian fussed. ‘The first night I was sitting in a chair reading, about eight-thirty, nine, and Ian said, “One goes to bed rather early in this part of the world and gets up at four,” and left the room and turned the light out with me reading. I got up and put it on and he looked at my book. ‘Kafka’s Diaries: no wonder you’re in such a state.’ Which I was. I was waiting for letters from Caroline. They arrived by boat, by banana boat probably. I got four of them. Ordinary but funny. Well expressed.’

  Among the island’s distractions was Paul Crosse, of Crosse & Blackwell soups, who had bought Benton End for Cedric Morris, his former lover, and lived partly in Wiltshire with his friend Angus Wilson (‘not the novelist but a tough who died first’) and with two of Matthew Smith’s models, Eve Discher and a friend of hers, housekeeping for them, cooking food flown across for them from Cuba. ‘His house in Jamaica was amazing, full of Impressionists, faded in the sunlight. They lived in great style with lots of black house boys.’ Crosse, calling himself Odo Cross, had written a children’s book, The Snail that Climbed the Eiffel Tower, illustrated by John Minton, published by John Lehmann and part-inspiration of the John Lennon song ‘I Am the Walrus’.

  Noël Coward appeared. ‘When Noël said, “I had a letter from Dickie,” I said, “And what did Dickie say?” (Dickie being Lord Mountbatten.) And Ian said, “Ann, you and Lucian are destroying poor Noël.” Noël attacked my painting. He wanted to attack me and I couldn’t help liking him. I was doing bananas and he was looking and Ann said, “Don’t you think that’s lovely.” He went on looking. If you look hard enough you can always find a face among bananas. “Why did you do that face?” he said.’ Graham Greene was around – Noël Coward telling him that his play The Living Room wouldn’t succeed – and Rosamond Lehmann. ‘Fleming was having an affair with her. Huge woman. She made the running always. So vain, these men, so how could they refuse?’

  In mid-March 1953 Ann Fleming, following her usual migratory routine, flew back to London and Ian Fleming to New York. Catching up on faraway events, Freud read about the Christie murder case (‘Three women found walled up in the house of Murder Unlimited’, Daily Express) at 10 Rillington Place, no distance at all from Delamere Terrace. When Notting Hill was described in the Daily Gleaner as ‘a district of low huts’ he felt faintly homesick. ‘I thought gosh, I must go there.’

  Left to his own devices he worked outdoors, seated in the garden, set about with exotic foliage. He wrote to Ann Fleming:

  I am still sitting in the banana wood in almost the same place and am now such a fixture there that birds sit on me and spiders use my head to hold up their new webs … The clouds appear only when I need them.1

  He painted in sharp yellows and greens, bananas springing upwards, deliciously fresh, and, in another small painting, ground cover and the foot of a banana tree, a realisation of what, on the balcony at Delamere Terrace, was the smallest oasis in West London. Suave leaves, crispy leaves, heart-shaped leaves, feathery leaves: this was the Scillies again, but properly tropical.

  Lucian Freud painting bananas at Goldeneye, Jamaica, 1953

  ‘When are you bananaring back?’ Caroline wrote. ‘Mummy asked me suddenly at lunch yesterday and her blue eye nearly fell from its socket with disbelief when I quite truthfully said I had not the faintest idea.’2 She added that Stalin was dead (‘definitely means war within the year’) and that she was about to go to Spain. Then from the Ritz in Madrid she wrote to say that life in Madrid was village life. ‘Not that I’ve ever had it – everybody sees everybody every day, and everybody is everybody’s brother in law etc and everybody is waiting for news all the time and waiting with baited [sic] breath for the scandal which can really only be provided by foreigners as no Spanish woman thinks of leaving her house as that constitutes a scandal in itself.’3

  Eventually Freud made his escape. Goldeneye had become solitary confinement, but he had no money for the fare home. ‘I was in rather a state and I couldn’t face the journey on the banana boat and Ann bought me a ticket to London which meant I had to stop in Miami for two hours and even though I never wrote to my mother I did send her a postcard from Miami, because I thought it was such an incredible place to find myself: I’d like her to think I was in Miami. I jumped off at New York for a week.’

  The airline put him up in a hotel and he did New York in five days. ‘I went to Harlem, to the Baby Grand. Joe Louis was doing cabaret there and I shook his hand; I was the only white person in the club. I went to Third Avenue, which still had the El railway, and to the Frick. And I saw a de Kooning show on the thirtieth floor of some building, which I thought sort of good, just about, and some Pollocks. Absolutely horrible, I thought.’

  At the Museum of Modern Art he was particularly struck by Kokoschka’s Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat (‘That thing of the couple holding hands’) and he showed Alfred Barr the paintings he had done in Jamaica. ‘He said, “one of the best techniques of anyone working today”, which meant he loathed them, I would say. Alfred Barr was one of the three people in New York I’d met. He was very kind, showed me round and then said, “Would you like to go to the cinema?” An Anna Magnani film was showing at the MOMA cinema so I saw that.

  ‘People said “look me up” so I did. Auden was away but Chester Kallman was there. We went to a bar in the Bowery, called the San Remo. A man walked in, the biggest man I’d seen in my life: he lifted people up by the collar and put them down, to make his path. A girl said, “Are you on my possible list for me to sleep with tonight?” I didn’t speak: I never liked being approached. “Pretty weedy for an Englishman,” she said. I was sunburnt from Jamaica. Then an odd-looking man in an Etonian tie came up. He was called Patrick O’Higgins, a former Guards officer and Helena Rubinstein’s secretary. He said, “I last saw you at a Cecil Beaton party. Would you like to have dinner tomorrow night?” So I went and had dinner with a family – Claude Herson. He was absurd, she was sinister and grand; Balthus painted them, very rich.’ Explaining that he needed some money to buy clothes for his fairly new-born daughter, Annabel, he tried Fleur Cowles, she having given him a good write-up in the launch issue of her magazine Flair. ‘I had no money so I borrowed some, £20 or £30 from Fleur Cowles, who was with American Vogue. And I rang up [Iva] Patcevitch at Vogue and saw all the models changing and went out to a place called Voisin with huge, polite and grand waiters. I knew Patcevitch through Ann Fleming; he was a Scott Fitzgerald type and had a Monte Carlo look: everything was blue, his hair, his suit, his shoes, his tie. He had been the lover of Mrs Condé Nast and had been left Condé Nast, or perhaps it was just Vogue.

  ‘Curt Valentin, the dealer, took me to the opening of a studio that he’d built for Jacques Lipchitz. A boy, Johnny, who worked for Curt Valentin (who had left Germany in 1936 for New York, where he dealt in paintings seized from German museums) and whom Francis said was a blackmailer and a tart, whom I’d known slightly in London, took me to his apartment and there, in a small room, over the bed, was the worst man-in-boat-with-a-crown Max Beckmann triptych: knights in boats. In the end it’s not about anything. He had the drawing from The Equilibriad of the girl with a spoon.’

  Every night there was somewhere to go. ‘I went to a strange party in the Chelsea Hotel with Mary McCarthy. It seemed amazingly sinister, going up in the lift. This famous musicologist who had lived in Paris – Virgil Thomson – was there; he had precious things he’d bought in Paris, drawings by Berman and Bérard. Lincoln Kirstein refused to speak to me
. Terribly rude, it upset me rather. And James Agee was at another party in the Chelsea Hotel; I really liked him. He was very drunken, went to the telephone and dictated this scene of Van Gogh and Gauguin, Lust for Life.’ [The Agee screenplay, in fact, was Agee’s adaptation of Gauguin’s Noa Noa.] ‘Amazing: he described their movements and the whole thing, over the phone.’

  In London the Coronation of Elizabeth II, on 2 June 1953, was marked by outbreaks of bunting and window displays throughout the land. Freud put a little painting of daffodils and celery in a Coronation exhibition at the Redfern and, more to the point, went along to Clarendon Crescent and drew the tatty cheer of slum dwellings decked out in red, white and blue. Looking down from a first-floor balcony he traced the fluttering shadows of washday bunting cast across a hopscotch pitch, children squatting on doorstep and pavement and, framed by a window, a diminutive sulky image of the Queen. He thought this would do for Fleur Cowles, who had arrived in London as President Eisenhower’s representative at the Coronation: just the thing to repay the dollars she had given him in New York. Cowles, who as a painter herself was particularly drawn to tiger and sunflower motifs, did not appreciate his idea of a Coronation souvenir and returned it to him some years later with a covering note: ‘You can have your rotten drawing, in filthy condition …’4

  Clarendon Crescent, Paddington, 1953

  While he was away Lilian Somerville of the British Council had written to Freud inviting him to exhibit in the British pavilion at the 1954 Venice Biennale and asking him to suggest works for the selection committee to vet. The idea was that he would show with Ben Nicholson, Gwen John and Francis Bacon but, being junior to them, would be allowed only twenty or so paintings at most (compared to Nicholson’s fifty plus) to be hung in one of the four small side galleries. That said, being chosen for Venice was an accolade; it made him an official candidate for international recognition. In the absence at that time of much in the way of overseas exposure for British art this was a rare opportunity.