The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Ernst Freud advised Caroline on improvements: a new staircase, restoration of the attics and a studio of sorts. ‘Caroline and my father went down to do the house and they met John Betjeman on the train (he had been fond of Caroline’s father) and he said to Caroline, “What big eyes you’ve got. Doesn’t it hurt?” Caroline let me build on a kind of studio shed just outside the kitchen door.’

  Not having anticipated the social obligations that went with country-house ownership, Freud became fretful. ‘People left cards and they were angry as we didn’t return their calls. Lord Croft or something. It seemed awfully interesting in London, going into very odd houses and flats and rooms, but in the country it was limited, very limited.’ Tim Nicholson remembered his mother EQ taking him and his sister as teenagers to renew acquaintance. It was not a success. ‘We called in one afternoon on spec: I remember how overshadowed the place was: dark and claustrophobic.’ Cecil Beaton, living two valleys away at Broadchalke, brought his mother to see the Freuds in their ‘new grey stone house’.23 He photographed them in the drawing room, innocent occupants but with a Bacon on the wall behind them flagging up unconventional tastes. A new, as yet unused, easel was to be seen. In some shots Beaton put Caroline in the background, complicit, mischievous even. Then he photographed Freud solo, posed with near-life-size bronze stags, with bay trees in tubs and with the cyclamen mural, three leaves and a single bloom (which is as far as it ever got) haloing his head like flying laurels. As it filled with acquisitions, a mansion complete with aviary, the house became reminiscent of Clandeboye where the hallways were replete with massive Indian Raj relics. Chessboard table, buttoned sofa, converted oil lamp and Empire chairs: these were all too obviously set dressings for Beaton portrait sessions. In which, lastly, Freud wore military dress trousers with a stripe down the side. It seemed he was emulating Clandeboye taste from days of yore.

  The house, complete with housekeeper, was too ordered for him. He couldn’t settle. ‘I drove down from London in the Alvis, once twice in one day. I was never there for more than a day or two at a time. I liked planting trees and I liked the idea of the horses – I always loved fields and horses – but not the idyll aspect. Nights were difficult. I rode at night a lot.

  Lucian Freud at Coombe Priory, Dorset c.1957

  ‘After dark we used to go to a drinking club in Blandford Forum, not far from Bryanston, in the gatehouse of a Vanbrugh house – at Tarrant Gunville – where a queer called Farquharson lived: not many there, women in trousers. Lady Julia Duff’s queer companion Simon Fleet, who helped Beaton, and Rattigan with his plays, and drank an awful lot, gave me a membership of the club.’

  Coombe became little more than a weekend place for Freud where, needing company, he could entertain. Peter Watson came down, also Charlie Lumley (‘Me and Lu used to drive down in the car’)24 and Michael Wishart and Ted, a Delamere neighbour, of whose safe-breaking skills Freud was not yet aware, and also Caroline’s admirers Cyril Connolly and David Sylvester. ‘Cyril and Sylv were courtiers.’ Two Bryanston boys, connections of Caroline’s, came for tea. ‘I did a horrible thing to Sylv. Caroline made a huge cake and Sylv took three-quarters of it and the boys’ faces fell and I said, “I refer you to Mr Sylvester if you want cake,” and he went red. Terribly unfair.’

  When Michael Andrews, ex-Slade student and by then a friend, was there he promptly busied himself painting a tree in the garden and drawing Caroline’s shoes left on the doorstep; he was conscious of the two little daughters being around and the housekeeper being ‘very weepy and sniffy, as Lucian had behaved atrociously to “poor Lady Caroline”’.25 Freud drew Annie with a soft toy, but never managed to work much there. As for Annie, she found staying at Coombe uncomfortable: ‘I remember there being lots of strange furnishing things in their entrance hall: circus carousel horses, carpets in weird colours. The strangest memory there: Caroline’s mother had sent her a black velvet matador outfit with sequins on and they decided sequins were disgusting and they sat there together giggling and snipped off the sequins.’ It was, Annie thought, no place for real children, namely herself and Annabel. ‘Caroline was young and gaga. Annabel was sleepwalking and sick. A nurse or the au pair came once or twice with us, but this time we were on our own and Caroline was useless.’26

  The nearest thing to an unconventional stimulus was the Augustus John household fifteen miles away. Freud went over to Fordingbridge a few times to see the aged doyen of British painters at Fryern Court. ‘When I went for a meal I’d hear roaring sounds of fury and frustration from his studio in the garden where he had a painting he had been working on for years, an awful huge thing. (It went to Dowager Lady Melchett; she had been fast and pretty and was, I think, still carrying on with the window cleaner and people doing up her flat off Sloane Square.)’ Once, just the once, he drove Augustus John up to London. ‘Dodo [Dorelia John] said, “Stop every now and then and get a drink at a pub,” so we did and in one pub they said, “Would your father like another one?” He was furious. He couldn’t hear very well and was very funny and melancholy. He talked about speaking Romany: “There’s not many Romany-speakers left. Nor many Romanies.” He was very lame: he’d fallen out of a tree chasing a girl.

  ‘We had dinner in Sloane Square, the Queen’s Restaurant, quite dingy. “Tell me, do you think I’m on my last legs?” he asked as we were walking to this restaurant. It was raining and he said, “Let’s dodge the drops” – old-fashioned words – and pulled me into a shop doorway. He was certainly likeable. I think that he was heroic. He and Epstein were forgotten, in a sense; Ep was making money but he was hardly doing anything. Dodo was terribly good to all the children.’

  A night on the town with Augustus John was still a possibility. ‘This girl, she was a burglar from Chelsea, an illiterate sort of one that people with car showrooms used to hire to savage rivals; I didn’t draw her, only saw her a few times, didn’t know where she lived. But after I saw Augustus he said, “This girl keeps ringing, asking where you are.” She was quite exciting: semi-gypsy, living in Chelsea, doing all kinds of guilty things.’

  Soon afterwards Freud handed Spender an article that Augustus John had given him. Would he care to publish it in Encounter?

  Samuel Beckett, writing on Jack Yeats in Les Lettres nouvelles, said ‘The artist who stakes his being comes from nowhere and has no brothers.’27

  ‘Magnificent at night the view of floodlit Battersea Power Station from the bar,’ the Architectural Review guide London Night and Day, published in the early fifties, said of the Royal Court Theatre Club in Sloane Square. ‘The inspiration of [Clement] Freud whose witty news letters are worth reading in their own right.’ It was a dinner-dance venue and it became the scene of yet another Freud-on-Freud conflict.

  ‘I found that, having been amused, quite, by his servility and “sweet” manner, he became cloying and ghastly. Beckford had a person called “Kitty” Courtney, Lord Courtney, whom he persecuted. I felt that my turning against him was almost physical. When he stopped being a waiter there was a time when Clement ran the Royal Court Theatre Club above the theatre and I was turned out of it for being improperly dressed (no tie). He said there was royalty present, which would have been Princess Margaret and Rory McEwen in tartan. He would play and she would sing. I wrote to him:

  Dear Cle,

  We are told not to trust appearance and to look beyond them for the real depth and value of the nature of the person. But in your case, try as I might, I cannot avoid concluding that you are a prize cunt.28

  Clement’s recollection was that Lucian had come to the club to borrow money off him. It was, he said, ‘Lucian’s last social call on me’.29

  Another incident that forever festered was the occasion, some time earlier, when the brothers raced along Piccadilly and Clement, falling behind, shouted ‘Stop, thief!’ Hideous discomfiture. Clement used to claim that Lucian was the one who shouted. Either way, there was enmity and a brandishing of long-held grudges.

  ‘Early in the war C
lement had a girlfriend. I read a letter from him that he’d left around about a visit somewhere, saying they had rather nice pictures: “Not Lucian’s kind”.’ Around then, their cousin Wolf Mosse remembered with incredulity, he heard the brothers in the road discussing the girls they had had. Lucian thought this an exaggeration. ‘I think I once went with a girl who said she’d been with him,’ he told me. ‘A girl from Trinidad, very simple.

  There was a rivalry in his head: appropriating them mentally. I said to my mother, “Why’s he so awful?” “It’s entirely your fault,” she said. “Because you bullied him so much.”’ He asked her if she could think of any precedent for Clement in the family. ‘She said, “Yes, there’s a great-uncle who had a similar personality.” When the Kaiser decided to tax the population he sent round to find out everyone’s earnings and he, being what he was, gave a most enormous sum for his income, had a huge tax demand and thereupon killed himself.

  ‘A conversation I had with Sylv long ago. He raised his eyebrows in misery. “I’m often taken for your brother,” he said. “I’m not,” I said.’

  25

  ‘Mad on heat and running round, pissing all the time’

  David Sylvester’s profile of Freud for the British artworld fortnightly Art News and Review in June 1955 – the first attempted characterisation of him on the printed page – was cogent and deft. He noted that his work had softened and thereby been deprived ‘of most of its intensity’.

  ‘Lucian Freud has succeeded Dylan Thomas as the legendary figure of the younger generation. It is partly his patronymic that intrigues, partly his physiognomy, but chiefly his knack of making the outrageous appear commonsensical and his refusal ever to disclose why, at any moment, he is behaving as he is and not in some other way … Freud has a genius for bringing out the worst in people.’1

  He also brought out the worst in Queenie, an Alsatian bitch belonging to Joe Ackerley, Literary Editor of the Listener. In December 1955 Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip, a moving account of his passion for Queenie, was about to be published and he asked Freud to do a drawing of her for the dust jacket. ‘I used to go and have lunch with him and E. M. Forster at Chez Victor, early on. I hardly knew him.’ He knew though, as the world was later to learn in Ackerley’s My Father and Myself, that Ackerley’s father, a banana baron, had not only managed to conduct an elaborate double life involving a second family but had also had, Ackerley suspected, indeed was pleased to think, homosexual inclinations. Ackerley, who made no secret of his orientation, took John Minton out to a restaurant once, Freud had heard. ‘Johnny was wearing jeans and he suddenly realised that Ackerley thought, because he was in jeans, that he was a boy. And he was thirty something. He couldn’t think what to do. Probably said he’d got the curse.’

  Ackerley wrote to Freud giving him directions to his flat in Putney. ‘I hope Queenie will not baffle you … If you are content to sit by the window and draw her she will present a fairly steady picture, I think, staring watchfully at you. But if you are a mover about, I’m afraid she will be noisy. It is her ineluctable way. But she does not bite people – at least she has never done so in ten years; she only speaks her mind, rather deafeningly, I fear.’2

  One session was enough to make Freud discontinue. ‘He left me there and I was in this room trying to avoid this crazy dog. Mad on heat and running round, pissing all the time. It was absolutely impossible.’ Other such jobs for publishers could be accomplished without fear of injury. For example the jacket for Cards of Identity, a novel by Nigel Dennis, published a few months earlier, had presented no difficulties. He had treated it as The Glass Tower revisited: a line drawing of a face in a shaving mirror balanced on a trestle of playing cards. He also supplied the drawing and lettering for Dennis’ Two Plays and a Preface, published in 1958: two male faces peering through a gap in a curtain.

  Lucian Freud book jacket for Nigel Dennis’ Cards of Identity, 1958

  Such designs were strictly cash, whereas Portrait of a Writer (1955) was done with the idea of producing a clear image of a consummate man of letters: James Pope-Hennessy, Assistant Editor of the Times Literary Supplement, whom Freud had known since the beginning of the war when, being a painter, he had painted his name on his trunk for him. Pope-Hennessy, who was primarily a travel writer, asked Freud to provide a frontispiece for The Baths of Absalom: A Footnote to Froude and this he did: a Jamaican face peering from a mass of tropical fronds, a drawing based on the snapshot of himself working in Ian Fleming’s garden at Goldeneye and the closest he ever came to matching the mannerisms of Edward Burra. (He hoped that the publisher, Mark Longman, would give him £12 for it, but he got half that.)

  Behind the immaculacy of the portrait Pope-Hennessy’s private life was turbulent. A tussle one night at the Gargoyle involved commandos and ‘James’s sort of boyfriend’ as Freud put it: Len Adam, an ex-paratrooper whom he had met in the lift at Holland Park tube station in 1948. That didn’t stand in the way of his being appointed the official biographer of Queen Mary. In 1974 he was murdered: someone he knew brought two mates to rob him, tied and gagged him, became enraged and went too far. Freud’s portrait has the disdainful poise that in the end was to be no protection. ‘His oriental look came of his great-grandfather, a governor of Malaysia, marrying a native. He was very brave, so self-deceptive; he wasn’t able to defend himself physically.’

  Freud happened to be with Pope-Hennessy, among others, in Harold Nicolson’s rooms in Albany, off Piccadilly, to hear Anthony Eden’s broadcast on Suez in August 1956; Nicolson went to bed leaving them to discuss the crisis, one that skewed into focus a whole range of issues from the management of post-imperial decline to the covert exploitation of Middle East divides. Unusually for him Freud found himself talking politics and, contrary to the flow of events, defending Eden’s actions. ‘Then at Ann Fleming’s I was talking very strongly – without being a Zionist, I felt strongly – about Suez and Boothby walked out of the room, and that later Labour minister, Tony Crosland, walked out in disgust too. They were so pompous. High Tory knives were out for Eden.3 Everyone walked out except Gaitskell [leader of the Labour Party] and he put his arm round me and said, “I absolutely understand.” He was nice, not pushy, but so careless: in love with Ann and married to dumpy Dora, he put notes through the letterbox. “He’s crazy,” Ann said. “He leaves letters, quite open.” She wasn’t at all like that, not tremendously monogamous, and she loved Ian, who was well known as unfaithful, and she said “If he’s going to do that as prime minister he’ll be finished.” Ian was sadistic and Gaitskell wasn’t, so not so exciting for her.’ At Ann Fleming’s Freud savoured, and was beguiled by, the frailties of prominent figures. His instinct was to disregard the public face (unlike Richard Hamilton who, with his 1963 Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland, made him a pop-eyed embodiment of B-movie villainy); for him the curious thing was that political identity – the recognised mask – bore so little relation to the person maintaining it. ‘I asked Gaitskell, “Do you see yourself as prime minister?” “I always look at the step immediately ahead,” he said. Didn’t seem the strongest man in the world. Delicate.’

  Gaitskell died in 1963, a year before Labour took office. ‘Even though a true-blue Tory, Ann was more interested in people when in power.’ Her soirées were occasions for taking up with, or getting in with, those who amused or mattered, for example the philosopher-turned-novelist Iris Murdoch in her first flush of celebrity and her husband John Bayley: a strikingly odd couple, Freud thought. ‘I used to take Francis and met Mr and Mrs Bayley and Francis told me that next thing he had a letter from Iris: “Could you meet me in a park beyond yonder tree?” He didn’t answer of course, and this went on for eighteen months, more dates, more trees in the park. He never went. Then the letters were every four weeks and then none. I thought he’d be mocking about it but he just looked puzzled. Her publisher wrote to me that she was publishing a new novel and would like you to do a drawing for the cover. Two months later she came to An
n’s and I said, “I had a letter about a drawing: a jacket for your novel,” and she said, “Are you telling me in a roundabout way that you want me to ask you to do one?”’

  In November 1955 Professor Isaku Yanaihara, of the University of Osaka, translator of L’Étranger into Japanese, visited bohemian Paris. He met Giacometti, posed for him, had an affair with his wife, Annette, and then met Jean-Paul Lacloche and Olivier Larronde, now living in the rue de Lille. Freud, who occasionally stayed the night there with Caroline, helped them twit the professor.

  ‘I had some copies of my grandfather’s books in Japanese, which I took from my father as a joke. The Japanese professor came to see Jean-Pierre and Olivier. We left copies of Grandfather on the hall table and Jean-Pierre said to him, “Here are the works of Freud.” And he said, “I so much prefer to read them in the original.”’

  Jean-Pierre was friendlier than he had been ten years before and no less ostentatious. He had an Alsatian, Otello, which he used to throw off a bridge into the Seine. He and Freud went out into the street with a gun: Jean-Pierre would fire blanks, Freud, acting shot, would stumble into an appalled passer-by and Otello would go into a frenzy of excitement. Some time later Jean-Pierre came to London and proposed seeing how Londoners would react to this same stunt. ‘Impossible,’ Freud told him. ‘It’s absolutely different here.’ Jean-Pierre disagreed, fired, and Freud fell across the pavement, bumping into a passer-by who instead of reacting with gratifying alarm told them to piss off.

  The apartment in the rue de Lille was stocked with monkeys and opium. The monkeys liked opium but, incapable of handling the pipes, contented themselves with sniffing the smoke. Giacometti though was adequately proficient. ‘He used to go to their apartment for the odd pipe; they had an opium table and things and he smoked to clear the clay from his lungs. He did lovely drawings of the apartment for Olivier’s Rien, voilà l’ordre.