The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Freud regarded Tennant as a good ready buyer and companion about town. ‘I went with Colin Tennant to see Nina Hamnett. She was living behind Delamere and I was friendly with her. I knew her first in pubs. The Fitzroy Tavern. Among other things Colin did was publishing – Max Parrish – and Nina wanted to publish a version of her book Laughing Torso about her affair with Modigliani – “best tits in Europe” she said he said – and she had a manuscript and I said, “I’ve got a friend in publishing, bring him round, shall I?” She said, “If you come round to see me you won’t find any rubbish with me.” (She had a drunk merchant seaman, forty years younger – she was seventy – who used to come home on leave; I asked her why did she like sailors? “Because they go away.”) So I took him round to her flat. It was sparse: grubby not dirty. She had broken her leg and was in bed and she said, “I’ve made tea,” and threw the cover off. “I’ve kept it warm,” she said and “it” was a pot of tea and she was curled round it. Colin was impressed at this bohemian behaviour and published her.’

  Christmas 1954 was spent at Luggala. Freud’s contribution to the festive stint was a bunch of friends, notably Patrick Kavanagh the poet and Brendan Behan. He had been photographed by Dan Farson a year or so earlier with Behan, lounging outside the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, scratching his neck while Behan railed at him. Behan was married now and swollen with drink. Each night at Luggala Freud had to haul him upstairs to bed.

  ‘I was most of the time in Delamere. Getting up to things to do with girls, chasing around a lot and dancing and nightclubbing, dice games and parties and Soho. And we used to go abroad quite a bit in the summer.’ It was not a domestic life. The Delamere Terrace room being no marital abode, a possibly more accommodating alternative presented itself: Bacon’s room at 19 Cromwell Road, a house belonging to the Royal College of Art. The painter Vic Willing remembered seeing them there. ‘L slim and beautiful as a knife and a pretty blonde girl with enormous blue eyes who looked straight at you. Sylv lived below or above.’26 (‘Was Sylv’, Evelyn Waugh asked Ann Fleming around this time, ‘the fat man dressed like an American Soldier lunching in the Cromwell Road?’)27 Bacon had left the Cromwell Road to be with Peter Lacy, someone whom Freud came to regard with dismay mostly. ‘When Peter Lacy came along it was love: some people’s lives are fucked up by this very thing, but with Francis things started to get very good. It was when imagination coincided with subject matter.’ Lacy was a former fighter pilot. Debonair and a drunk, he could be violent. ‘Peter Lacy threw Francis out of a window and he was very badly cut and I was very upset and violently abusive to him.’ Freud hadn’t appreciated that, to Bacon, Lacy’s violence was welcome – ‘a sexual thing’ – and his own behaviour upset Bacon and alarmed Lacy. ‘He wouldn’t speak or come near me, though obviously I saw Francis. And when Peter Lacy was in Italy we gave Francis money to go there – to Ostia. I didn’t see Francis so much at that time. Peter Lacy would summon him to the Imperial Hotel Henley-on-Thames where he worked, terribly well, in a shed.’ There, in what Freud described as a ‘little medieval prefab’, Bacon produced his finest take on a Muybridge photograph, a ghostly yet substantial conjuring of wrestling into copulation: Two Figures in a Bed, a painting they used to refer to as ‘The Buggers’. ‘Francis said, “I sometimes think I’m the figure underneath.”’

  ‘I grandly bought The Buggers and sent £80 (£20 off £100) to Sylv, who did quite a lot of dealing then – Francis said he always gave him half at least, sometimes more – and was selling it to Freddie Mayor at the Mayor Gallery, but it was indecent, so cheaper. Freddie Mayor said it went too far.’ Buying a Bacon was a commitment, a sort of bet placed, a complicit gesture like seizing a baton in a relay race. Each acquisition was a provocation to be entertained, a challenge even, for how could he live with such vigour and panache and not attempt somehow to match it? The paintings accumulated. They included Figure with Meat (1954), the wedding present from Bacon, which ended up in the Art Institute of Chicago, Two Americans (1954), declared unfinished by the artist, and Pope (1955): the Holy Father figure, largely derived from a photograph of Hitler making a speech, pulling the cord of a blind as though it were a lavatory chain or remote shutter release. They and the rest, nine altogether, came and went, all but ‘The Buggers’, which Freud kept hold of, on and off, over the years and which used to hang where he could see it best, just beyond the foot of his bed.

  Living with Bacons was demanding; after all they needed wall space as well as attention. Ferociously precarious, they dramatised the rooms they occupied, railing against security and indeed domesticity. Freud saw them as calls to extremity. The same as Bacon he loved what Balzac said about the arousal factor in losing everything, being cleaned out: ‘The sensuality of debt. Basking in it. It wasn’t so much that I was broke, which I always was in a way, it never bothered me, but I got some credit through being married to Caroline, to buy things. Not that I’m a great buyer of things. Once you’ve got money it’s easy to fix things.’ Ready money was there for the losing. It was, he often said, ‘ammunition’. Caroline maintained that, to him and Bacon, it was litter to scatter. ‘Like paper or Kleenex.’

  She bought him a car, an Alvis – ‘it was quite expensive; she paid’, he explained – and he taught himself to drive, idiosyncratically so, treating the steering wheel like reins and bridle. No driving instructor for him. ‘I drove a bit during the war when you could buy a licence from the Post Office.’ For some years he made do with provisional licences and then was helped to a full if dodgy licence by Ted, a Delamere neighbour, with the assistance of a professional getaway driver.

  ‘I was incredibly ignorant because when anything was wrong I rang up the Old Burlington Street shop – I bought the Alvis new – and said, “I can’t find my car.” “Where did you last leave it, Sir?” “Near Berkeley Square or Grosvenor Square.”

  ‘The showroom rang back. “We found it, but I’m afraid the wing’s awfully damaged: nowadays people are so careless.” I couldn’t get insured after the first year.’

  ‘Francis had a friend, a cousin of Ian Fleming’s, at Scotland Yard, and we went to look at photographs of a body under a rhododendron bush. The photographs were so beautiful, Francis thought; he wanted to use them but the man wouldn’t let him. He came round and talked about how this woman didn’t deserve it at all, as though other women did. Pure sadism.’

  After the Cromwell Road there was a month or so living over the Venezia restaurant in Great Chapel Street, between Dean Street and Wardour Street, an address that invited misunderstandings typical of darkest Soho. ‘People asking for the Ladies were always shown up to Caroline’s room and she got very annoyed.’ A stay in a suitable hotel seemed the best alternative. ‘Staying down with Anne and Michael Tree they said, “You can never get into the Cavendish Hotel without connections,” but Michael said, “I could get you into the Cavendish because Rosa is in love with Anne’s Uncle Cavendish [the 10th Duke of Devonshire],” and so we stayed some months there.’ Over several generations the Cavendish Hotel, an Edwardian survival in Jermyn Street, labyrinthine behind a private-house façade, had been owned and run by Rosa Lewis. ‘She was long dead. I used to go in there towards the end of the war. She’d sleep in the downstairs lounge on a chair with broderie anglaise behind, beautifully dressed, and American soldiers would be there and she’d get ladies down to entertain them – upper-class daughters who didn’t know what to do. “Thank you very much, boys, for winning the war for us,” she would say, and I’d be irate. We lived there when her servant Edith ran it. She talked to you via her dog: “I don’t think these people are very nice, do you?” I was teaching at the Slade still and we had a dog with us in the hotel, a red setter called Tanis: Tanis III, actually.’ He took Tanis to a dance at the Slade. The novelist and playwright David Storey, then a student there and in charge of organising the annual Slade dinner, was asked by Freud if he could bring his dog instead of his wife, who couldn’t come. Storey said yes, and Freud arrived with the dog on a rope.
‘Can you control it?’ Storey asked. ‘No.’ Tanis sat on the chair next to him at the dinner table and ate off a plate the same as the other guests, who refrained from complaining as that would have been deemed unsophisticated. The occasion degenerated, with fires started and fights breaking out. By that time Freud had left.

  ‘“I’m not going to dance with you and that dog,” a woman said – it could have been [the sculptor] Liz Frink: wonderful neck and shoulders, at every party she was – so I rushed down to put it in the car, fell over the lead, sort of broke my leg, limped back, couldn’t dance and drove home with one foot, hitting a lot of things on the way.’ Disingenuity, he liked to think, could deflect blame. Coldstream banned further student functions and asked Storey to leave.28

  24

  ‘Idyllic, in a slightly maddening way’

  After months of peripatetic lodging Freud and Caroline Blackwood moved into a flat in Soho with a controlled rent at only thirty shillings a week, previously occupied by Edward Williams, the composer whom Zoe Hicks had married. They paid Williams £1,000 to get it: 86 Dean Street, Soho, a formerly elegant town house owned by Townsends, a firm of builders. ‘It was above a radio shop in St Anne’s Court on the corner of Dean Street, a lovely seventeenth-century house, panelled. It had been a brothel with the rooms divided. Henrietta [Moraes] had been sort of living there. She had a go with Colin [Tennant]; he was a grandee and she was keen on that.’ It was handy for the Gargoyle and the Colony Room.1

  ‘It was a large room, quite dirty, and had room on the rooftop for drinking. It was not nice, waking in the morning, because it was opposite a synagogue. And the neighbours were neighbourly, which I’ve never liked.’ Their predecessors, Edward Williams and Bill Howell, architect, who had shared the flat since 1948 and kept open house on Sundays, had once heard, Williams said, ‘a peg-legged visitor clumping upstairs at night’ and discovered it was a rat dragging a potato. A young solicitor’s clerk, Jeremy Gordon, sent to serve a writ on Freud for non-payment of rent, remembered him opening the door to him and appearing even more nervous than he. Freud disputed this when I mentioned it to him many years later. ‘Maybe he was delivering something for Townsends, but I feel it’s unlikely that a writ was for the house rent, for a few pounds. It wasn’t a lease – it was on a weekly basis – but we could only be evicted for enormously long non-payment or, obviously, something completely disgraceful.

  ‘Too many people on the run from the police knew I was there and would ask if they could stay a couple of nights.’

  Freud’s range and variety of potential, if not necessarily willing, sitters broadened a little with the move, the prerequisite being that they could spare the time, the snag being that some needed paying.

  Joan Rhodes, the strong woman, previously encountered in Madrid, reappeared in Soho. ‘I sometimes took her out to a club or to dance and would take her back to Swiss Cottage where she lived.’ She came upon Freud once having a bath in her dressing room. ‘Didn’t talk about her life: she was with someone quietly for a time. Later on the only people she knew were people she’d known. I said, “Have you ever used your strength for something?” “Once there was a man who was groping me,” she said. “He gave me a push. I got angry and hit him and he went right down and I burst into tears.” Her main thing was tearing telephone books in half. I saw her in music halls; she’d say, with a nice shy smile, “I’m not much good at singing or dancing; not much I can do,” and absent-mindedly pick a phone book off a table say, “Oh dear I can’t find the number,” and rip it in half. In her memoirs, Coming on Strong, she wrote how King Farouk would send for her for birthday parties and she lifted him. Quite a feat.

  ‘She told me she was having driving lessons and when suddenly the man said, “Put your foot on the brakes” she did, and his head went through the windscreen. “That will do,” he said. I liked her, and she would have sat, but she didn’t quite interest me enough to paint. There are a couple of ink drawings. An amazing thing happened: an offer from Hollywood to be the first female Tarzan. But she had to sign up for seven years and therefore didn’t; I was terrifically impressed. Fame takes a bit longer than the performance. Her parents, who had kicked her out at twelve or thirteen, tried to contact her. She was not ambitious, always put money away and saved it. Later she got a coffee stall outside London somewhere.’

  Napier ‘Napper’ Dean Paul, whom Freud knew from Coffee An’ days, came from ‘an ancient family with some spectacular black sheep in’ that had even been mentioned, Freud was pleased to note, in the text to Gustave Doré’s London. (‘One of the family is Dean Paul’: not every inmate of debtors’ prisons, Blanchard Jerrold remarked, is from noble families.) ‘Napper was drunk and druggy, full of hate, and he had quite a lot of inherited money. He would become Sir Brian, when he inherited. He was called “Napper” because he dropped off to sleep all the time, stayed outside cafés and dossed. He used to sell gossip to Patrick Kinross for his column in the Evening Standard. He loathed the lower classes; he said, “Without homosexuality there wouldn’t be a link between lower people and myself. All we have in common is the arse.”

  ‘Napper’s father was an arrogant upper-class gent who married a Polish musician who was very wilful, loved her children, and didn’t want to deny them the great things in life, so she gave them opium.’ Napper’s sister, Brenda, was an actress who in her heyday had been engaged to Anne Dunn’s uncle, Sir Philip Dunn, and hardly ever worked because of her opium habit. ‘Once – in 1956 – when she was in a private theatre off Leicester Square, in a one-person performance of Firbank’s The Princess Zoubaroff, I took Clarissa [Churchill] to see it and took her backstage after – Clarissa might have been married to Anthony Eden by then – and while we were talking to Brenda she was changing her stockings and her whole thigh was a map of scars, very extreme. More than I’d ever seen, even when I used to go and draw at Rowton House and in shelters under Charing Cross.’ The portrait of Napper [Portrait of a Man, 1954] breathes grievance. ‘It’s very like,’ Freud commented. ‘He’s in a misery position, in a zip-fronted jacket, almost exhausted. It’s before my discovery of Naples Yellow.’ Sour-faced in mustard and grey, an Old Etonian down and out and feeling his age – he was in his fifties – is as Orwellian as you could get. ‘I paid him to sit. I was working at the Slade then and they had a staff show and I put it in and people loathed it; I was conscious of that Winsor & Newton texture of canvas which I loathe too.’ Afterwards he sent the painting to Andras Kalman’s gallery in Manchester where it sold for £50.

  Portrait of a Man (‘Napper’ Dean Paul), 1954

  As a rule Freud did not identify his sitters in the titles of paintings. ‘The reason for not naming is to do with discretion, chiefly protecting people, not bothering people who are alive.’ To name fellow painters such as Bacon and Minton ‘seemed relevant’, he said. ‘Because they did something.’ Other portraits were given descriptive titles. Man in a Headscarf for example was initially called The Procurer. ‘And it was quite a bit bigger. I used to have a lot cut down. The paint went on over the edge so to make sure I put undercoating on to prevent anyone painting over.’ He cropped it to pressurise the furtive air of a portrait that involves both an assumed and a mistaken identity.

  Man in a Headscarf (The Procurer, aka David Litvinoff), 1954

  ‘I was in a club in Wilton Place where there used to be a theatre and the Berkeley Hotel now stands: Esmeralda’s Barn. I was taken there – never been in there before – and it was very lively, full of exciting people like the very young Mary Quant and lots of rather grand girls. And as I went to the bar I heard the barman say, “Is that on your bill, Mr Freud?” and the person said yes, and I looked and I saw what was, I thought, the most repulsive person I had ever seen in my life. When I got to the bar I said, “Excuse me, who was that just buying a drink?” and he said, “Oh, that’s Mr Lucian Freud.” So I said, “Oh, thanks.” So then, understandably, I took some trouble – though none was needed – to get to know this horrible man. And
I thought, well, I can do a self-portrait without all the bother of looking in the mirror.’

  The Procurer, shrouded with a scarf like a suspect bundled from a police van, was David Litvinoff. ‘Which wasn’t his name either. He could be funny. Walking along, he’d say, “Did you see the photograph of Mussolini and Claretta hanging from a lamp post?” and, chin up, he’d do the pose of both of them. He was always trying it on. He spoke rapidly and excoriatingly, lived without possessions and with a degree of fearlessness. He walked into St James’s Club in Piccadilly, waited, saw an old gent reaching up for his coat and helped him into it. “Extremely kind,” said the old gent. “Anything to help a fellow Jew,” he said.

  ‘Everything about him was fake,’ Freud reckoned. ‘“Isn’t there anything straight about you?” I asked. “Even your name is false.” “What do you mean?” he said. “Who told you that?”

  ‘Levy he was really called. His mother had married a Litvinoff. His half-brother was Emmanuel Litvinoff the writer. He worked for [Peter] Rachman as a rent collector and then for the Kray twins, a wrong move and real trouble as he kept procuring girls for Ronnie. Then he procured people to do with the film Performance2 and supplied lines of criminal argot such as “Puttin’ the frighteners on flash little twerps”.’

  ‘David was the whole film,’ the film historian David Thomson said. ‘He knew the Krays. Very naughty boys who’d cut you up with a sword. And so David was the catalyst – he just brought the whole thing together. And that’s why David gets a credit on the picture as dialogue coach and technical adviser. And well deserved.’3