The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Freud’s broods were disparate, whether recognised or not and recognisably his progeny or not. Whether relationships developed depended very much on what he saw in the various children as they grew up, if indeed he saw them at all. ‘A lot of children are not of their parents. We don’t know. People say, “Have you noticed?”’

  ‘I like the anarchic idea of coming from nowhere. But I think that’s probably because I had a very steady childhood.’

  30

  ‘He was rather nice and repulsive’

  In January 1960 Freud, accompanied by a journalist, went to Stockholm to draw Ingmar Bergman. This was a commission from Time magazine. He did not like the idea of being obliged to deliver, but gambling debts left him with little choice. Anyway, he told himself, there was not necessarily any great difference between a task imposed and work self-imposed. ‘As Auden said “You either get commissioned or commission yourself.”’ Besides, the money was good. Time magazine offered first £500 then £900 for a cover picture, which he accepted on the understanding that he would be paid half the fee if it were not used. He wondered if his suing them thirteen years before might be held against him. ‘They said, “We know you’ve had some trouble with us but don’t worry about that.”’

  Time covers usually consisted of a portrait in a red surround overprinted with title and headlines, a design little changed since their Sigmund Freud one in 1924. The layout had advantages, Bacon suggested. ‘Francis gave me this idea: prepare the canvas dark blue and then you’ve got the ground. Less work. After all, it was what he did always.’ As for the artwork, a positive emphasis was required, for impulse sales at the news stand depended on each week’s face being attractive or arresting with probity wrinkles on elder statesmen. To make the cover of Time was widely considered ultimate recognition. The accolade however did not impress Bergman who, having recently made Virgin Spring with Bibi Andersson, was still in the first flush of international reputation. He didn’t feel like putting himself out for the cover artist.

  ‘Bergman was terribly unpleasant, offhand, very much why need you bother the great me? He wanted to fuck Bibi Andersson that afternoon so kept me waiting. His excuse was that he had “family” and “music” at the weekend. I would have stayed two weeks but I left. “Some people go to the cinema just to hold hands,” I told him. My real difficulty was turning the journalist against Bergman and persuading him too to leave after a few days. He had a crush on Bibi Andersson, and so I said, “Look, he goes off to have Bibi first thing in the morning, they leave the studio and that’s it.”’ The studio was in a converted ostrich farm outside Stockholm with Crittall steel windows and flies.

  He brought back to London a small dark glimpse of Bergman on navy blue, an image verging on the Baconian. And given that Bacon used to dismiss literal-looking portraits by saying that they were like Time covers, it was imperative, Freud felt, not to please the art editors awaiting his submission. ‘I told them I hadn’t done the painting. I did a sort of profile. But I hated the idea it would be reproduced and sold four million times. Since I never gave them the cover, it was a slight scam.’ Instead he gave the preliminary sketch to Sir Oliver Scott, a cancer specialist, whom he knew through Joan Bayon from Cambridge. It was a repayment. ‘He had lent me a bit of money. I did a portrait of his wife Phoebe and a daughter and he admired Bergman.’

  The trip to Stockholm proved memorable not for Bergman but for a Rembrandt: The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis: The Oath, in the National Museum, intended for Amsterdam Town Hall but not paid for and returned to the artist, who cut it down, removing the setting, reshaping it into a profane Last Supper in which the one-eyed chieftain presides over befuddled heads and lambent sword blades, his passion setting the table eerily aglow.

  ‘My favourite Rembrandt. I’ve been terrifically affected by it. It’s the largest painting he ever did. He cut three or four feet off it and put a crazy figure across the bottom in the foreground. And he made it night.’

  Cecil Beaton spent an evening with Bacon shortly after Freud’s trip to Stockholm and they discussed what had happened. ‘There had been too many interruptions for Lucian to produce any result, and he now hated Time magazine, Bergman and Sweden.’ Freud had returned to England ‘fuming’, he wrote.

  We then talked of Lucian’s latest painting – how he seemed, in an effort to paint quicker, to have lost some of his intensity. Lucian was intelligent enough to know that his painting up to now was not a complete expression of himself. He now found himself in the awful predicament of having to try and discover himself again. That, for someone of Lucian’s vanity, was a difficult thing to do.

  We discussed Lucian’s intellectual brilliance, his complete independence and strength as a man who knew exactly what he wanted out of life. But we admitted that Lucian is no angel.

  Beaton told Bacon – a Bacon grinning at him no doubt – that, to him, in some respects, Freud really was impossible. ‘I admitted I found it difficult to be loyal to Lucian all the time. I could not understand the mentality of gamblers and it worried me that Lucian should lose so much so readily.’1

  To Freud this diary entry, which he read when Beaton’s Selected Diaries were first published in 1979, showed the ageing photographer bent on keeping in with a younger set – ‘his being with-it’; but it was true, of course, that gambling programmed him and propelled him, willing the win and stomaching the losses. It was a draining routine. Lunching at Wheeler’s once, with Auerbach and Bacon, he fell asleep, head hitting the table top, then woke up suddenly and proceeded to an evening’s activity.

  After 1960, when the Gaming Act legalised gambling, there was chemmie or roulette to go for at the Clermont Club above Annabel’s in Berkeley Square or at Siegi’s in Charles Street, at the Playboy Club in Park Lane, Apron Strings in Chelsea and anywhere else where his credit held. But he preferred the horses. ‘Horses are the most sympathetic way of losing money because it’s done without other people. Baccarat is OK as it’s against the bank.’ Frank Auerbach, whom he took to the Playboy Club, marvelled at his ability to keep three games of chemmie in play simultaneously. Yet the consequences were often awkward. (‘There were lots of streets I couldn’t go through.’) Not so much the losses, which he liked to think of as spent ammunition, but the retaliation over sudden debts. ‘Bailiffs came quite often. Not for gambling debts: you couldn’t send the bailiffs for those; that’s why they build up this code of honour, this “gentleman’s word” nonsense. Heavies came. They realised I ran into money every so often and they knew I couldn’t be frightened. (You can tell from people whether they can or can’t.) I always minded being threatened.’

  He usually tried reasoning with the enforcers. ‘I actually went round once. “Look,” I said, “I haven’t got any money but I’ll come on Thursday afternoon.” When I went round to the court in Marylebone Road, the heavies were there and one said, “Look who’s here. You’re supposed to say you’ll come and then not come and then we’ll chase you.”’ His experience of bailiffs and their demands prompted a habit of parking works with friends so that he could swear they weren’t his. Auerbach felt that his opportunistic feel for a deal or gambit was fundamental. ‘Lucian was keen on that business life. He knew exactly how to operate. He was very good at all that and he had a sort of awareness of the art market.’

  Certainly similarities between the operation of criminal or dodgy concerns on local turf and transactions in the equally localised art world were not lost on him. In Paddington, Mayfair or Soho, at the Marlborough or in the car showrooms of Berkeley Square, close connections were a safeguard and local convention the rule. ‘In Paddington the violent gangs were locals, who had been boys together. The more skilled ones were brought together. They weren’t gangs: rather like in the art business, they’d form a team to do a particular job and afterwards, if successful, they’d disband, dissolve, like an art movement or syndicate or ring. It was a way of operating and they all had “jobs”. They had “Profession: florist”. They lived quite well:
very good Indian restaurants, clothes and girlfriends. With cars they had to be careful, as it wouldn’t do to be too noticeable. No drugs: none of the people I knew took drugs. Sometimes they raided chemists for things, but to sell them only. They had funny stories about the watchmen in some places. “Sorry, mate, got to tie you up, don’t want to hurt your wrists,” and the watchman saying, “You got to do it harder.” They despised gambling and kept well away. They knew punters were mugs.’

  This was thriller territory extending from literature to identity parade. Much of the Paddington of Margery Allingham’s 1952 crime novel The Tiger in the Smoke, ‘winding miles of butter-coloured stucco in every conceivable state of repair’ scheduled for slum clearance, was only the length of a street or the width of a canal from districts infiltrated by venturesome members of the upper classes such as Patrick Kinross and Diana Cooper, who settled in Little Venice in the early sixties. By then other cultural shifts had occurred and prejudices were inflamed, leading to racist agitation and brawls.

  Verlaine had discovered London to be, for all its vastness, really ‘only a group of little scandalmongering towns in rivalry’ and, Freud found, so it remained in Paddington, though with changes in the populations involved. ‘When the Negroes came in the fifties it changed very much. Even burglars. People who snatched wallets and broke into cars said Negroes would cut the finger off a woman with rings. “D’you know what they do? It’s absolutely disgusting, they live all together, five to a room, in a house given them by the council.” They were terribly anti-Negro.’ They were not the only ones. One night he took the Everly Brothers to a club. ‘They were amazed that I was friendly with “all those coloured people”, being Southerners.’

  The biggest slum landlord in the area was Peter Rachman, an ex-concentration-camp and Siberian-detention-camp inmate five years older than Freud, who played cards with him occasionally in a basement club off Old Compton Street. ‘Mandy Rice-Davies used to be on his lap. He was rather nice and repulsive. “Millionaires: that’s a word people use a bit freely these days,” he said. I was walking once with Ann Fleming from Delamere to Diana Cooper’s, in Warwick Avenue, and we saw him, red in the face, in this pale-blue open Bentley and, Ann said, “straight out of Ian’s book”. A Bond villain. He met Negroes and gave them flats and said “make yourself at home” to them: rooms already let to Paddington natives. Poor families from Paddington thought this terrible really.’

  Rachman was driving along Lower Wardour Street one day in the open Bentley and somebody said something, or made a rude sign, or flicked the paintwork. Freud saw Rachman stand up in the car screaming at the man and a gang outside a club turned on the man and roughed him up.

  In 1960, two years before he died of a heart attack, Rachman came under pressure from Ronnie and Reggie Kray, the gangster twins, who had previously operated mainly in the East End. They did protection for Rachman, Freud learned. ‘Reggie said “His rent collectors were big, but our boys were bigger.”’ Hoping to divert them or placate them, Rachman brought to their attention the possibility of taking over Esmeralda’s Barn in Wilton Place, Knightsbridge, a gambling club patronised by Guards officers and the like. Through his ‘violent landlord operation’ as the Met put it, Rachman was connected to Stefan de Faye who ‘owned’ it and Rachman gave it to the Krays. The Gaming Act had opened up the West End to clubs so this was their entrée into the classy world.

  Freud knew Esmeralda’s Barn from the days when David Litvinoff had masqueraded as him there. Once it became a casino operated by the Krays he went more often. Litvinoff still hung around there and irked the new owners with his lip and his sarcasm. ‘They didn’t like that. He worked for Rachman. Rats painted with fluorescent paint were put through letterboxes to flush out tenants.’ It was rumoured that the Krays each stood to make £40,000 a year from the tables but their East End practice of enticing punters into debt then leaning on them for favours proved inappropriate for what Ronnie described as ‘a real posh West End club’. Those who wouldn’t pay up could be thrown downstairs but, in Belgravia, this was not the way to handle such matters. Worse, the tax inspectors began making demands.

  Freud would often call in at Esmeralda’s Barn after staying overnight at Wilton Row. ‘I’d get up at 4.30, summer mornings, and go there for an hour or so on my way to Delamere: the Yahoos gambling, crazy, and Ronnie Kray in evening dress. “I suppose you think they’re a real lot of cunts,” I said to him. “They lose a lot of principle this way, I know,” he said.

  ‘At the club a smooth, pleasant, absolute crook oily businessman – Lesley Payne – said, “I know your work is valued, but could you give me someone to paint my wife?” So I suggested Mike [Andrews], who was broke and delighted, and he worked from her. Then Lesley Payne told him to stop and so Mike left it; he would have finished it and asked for money, but he couldn’t go on as the wife was ill. And so the smooth con-man manager stole it. I felt badly about it.’

  ‘It became amusing to be seen with the twins,’ Auerbach added. ‘Francis [Bacon] quite liked a villain. I remember him saying, “I’ve got to go and get some chrysanthemums because the Krays are calling. And I want to fill the studio with chrysanthemums to soften their hearts.” They would come round and suggest he gave them a picture. Francis managed to charm them off.’ He and they established, Freud gathered, mutual interests: boys, sadism and so on. ‘Francis met the Krays and Billy Hill in Tangier. They were there on some rackets and they discovered about Francis’s work: how he could do this magic.’ When the Krays, or their associates, heard how much money his paintings fetched some were stolen and he had to pay a lot to get them back.

  ‘Both can be overwhelmingly hospitable,’ Francis Wyndham wrote, tongue in cheek, in his note on the Krays for David Bailey’s Box of Pin-Ups, published in 1965, three years before they received life sentences. ‘To be with them’, he added, ‘is to enter the atmosphere (laconic, lavish, dangerous) of an early Bogart movie, where life is reduced to its simplest terms and yet remains ambiguous.’

  Under the same roof as Esmeralda’s Barn was the Cellar Club. ‘The lesbian club downstairs was pretty nice,’ Freud recollected. ‘When I went there it was run by this girl Patsy Morgan-Dibben, fearfully attractive, so I asked her out and said, being polite: “Like to come to Annabel’s?” She said, “No, let’s go to bed straight away.” I hardly knew her at all; she was married to Horace Dibben, an antique dealer from Salisbury, a long-sideburn man, a fetishist. In her flat there was a kind of replacement person in the next room, called in before I left. It was fairly nasty because she was having amyl nitrate. Smells horrible. “What are you doing?” I asked. She said, during what might be called a poignant moment, “You’d like a man – or boy – on top of you.” “No I wouldn’t.” It was not a memorable success.’

  Patsy Morgan-Dibben went off to the mountains of Bavaria with an Argentine millionaire. ‘She was glamorous, started a hotel in Venice and had a huge success with that.’ Esmeralda’s Barn – Cellar Club included – closed in 1963, the year some of her regulars (Michael Astor, Stephen Ward, Christine Keeler) achieved extreme notoriety.

  ‘It was a terribly muddy pool Lucian was in,’ said Michael Andrews. ‘The Kray twins’ henchman called him in one day. He’d lost a great deal of money and he was told what he was going to have pulled off and broken and he said, “Well, you’ll have to do that, but if you do, and kill me, you won’t get the money.” They found it very amusing.’

  Freud himself remembered that encounter as a touch more conciliatory. ‘I said, “I’m going to pay you when I’ve got the money and if you kill me you won’t get the money,” an argument that impressed them; in fact the Krays never had any money and no one ever got paid. Other gangs had big things going; the Richardsons – Charlie and Eddie – actually had investments, but the Krays never had big funds. They had protection money, but I doubt if they ever had £100,000. They were thieves’ ponces, unsuccessful villains; they would appear at a share-out and would say, “Well done, boys, we�
��re collecting for the widows.” The only heroic thing they did was long before I met them: Ronnie couldn’t bear being in jail and Reggie didn’t mind much and so Reggie went in over the wall and took Ronnie’s place. People were impressed. They talked about the twins as having hearts of gold. The only people they did things to were their own. I kept out of their way. I took the precaution of not going to boxing matches, where bullies show their front, or going down certain streets. I didn’t want to anger them. When they were amongst their own people, in the East End, the police left them alone, as they were brothers and friends of the villains. In the West End it was out of the question for them to be left alone.

  ‘Bill Lloyd – friend of Tim Willoughby’s, in love with Jane and wanted to be one of the boys – paid my debt to the Krays. It was two or three hundred pounds. “I thought it would be better to,” he said. I didn’t say how dare you. I’ve got this thing I could never do anything under pressure.’ Yet Kray pressure did have its effect. David Somerset remembered one particularly urgent call. ‘He rang me up at four in the morning. “Dave, can I come round?” “What’s it about?” I asked. “Fifteen hundred pounds and if I haven’t got it by twelve o’clock they’re going to cut my tongue out.”’

  At one point Freud was rumoured to have owed the Krays half a million. ‘I can’t be threatened,’ he claimed, but he took care not to infringe Kray taboos. ‘It was all no swearing. If anyone said, or was rumoured to have said, one was queer – which Ronnie was – their life was in danger. Ronnie said, “I’m not a poof, I’m homosexual.”