Life of David Hockney

by Catherine Cusset

  Later that spring he sold a few paintings and prints. In July he boarded a plane for the first time. He was just twenty-four, with three hundred pounds to his name. He landed in New York, where Mark was waiting for him.

  He had never experienced such heat and humidity; it was heavy, unbearable, and he sweat so much that his shirt was permanently glued to his skin. But it was the city he had dreamed of, luminous, noisy, vibrant, where you could buy beer or a newspaper at three in the morning. And there were so many gay bars! And so many vegetarian restaurants! So many museums, too, and of course he visited them all, but he hadn’t come for that. It was for Times Square, Christopher Street, the East Village—the movie theaters, sexshops, clubs, the piers on the banks of the Hudson where men weren’t wearing shirts—all the decadence of a stifling summer. He stayed with Mark, whose parents had a house on Long Island, and met one of his friends, Ferrill, who became his lover. His first lover, whom he didn’t have to hide. He now had two guides to introduce him to gay New York.

  One afternoon at Mark’s, a TV commercial caught their attention. There was a young woman with dyed, golden blond hair getting out of a plane and jumping into the arms of a man, another one playing pool, and yet another, running, a dog at her side, with a radiant smile, her hair flying in the wind, while a woman’s voice asked, “Is it true blondes have more fun?” Then a male narrator interrupted the music: “Lady Clairol blond is a way to live. So have a little fun, lighten up and shine the Lady Clairol way!” The three young men, who loved the film Some Like It Hot, the obvious inspiration for the commercial, looked at each other.

  Fifteen minutes later they came out of a drugstore with a bag containing the magic potion. Laughing, they read the instructions, mixed the solution in the bathroom, got undressed, and shampooed each other in the shower. The metamorphosis took place before their eyes. They became three tall peroxided blonds. They cried laughing, especially when Mark’s father, who came back from work at the end of the afternoon, saw the three blond creatures sprawled out on the sofa, and almost had a heart attack. It was true: blondes really did have more fun.

  David looked at himself in the mirror and couldn’t believe his eyes. It was like the taxi in London. Magic. You acted on a whim without thinking about the consequences, just for fun, and you won. That was the secret to life. He had just transformed himself into a blond like the models in Physique Pictorial. Up to then, he had considered himself neither handsome nor ugly—people told him he was “cute”—but suddenly he had become someone else, a man with striking blond hair, whom you couldn’t help but notice. He liked his new hair color, not because “blondes have more fun,” but because he had transformed himself. He was his own creation. He had been reborn. The color signaled his gay identity—his truest, most intimate self—and at the same time it was an artifice, a mask, a lie. Nature and artifice were thus not at odds, any more than were the figurative and abstraction, poetry and graffiti, quotes and originality, playing and reality. You could combine everything. Life, like painting, was a stage on which you played a role.

  It was an extraordinary summer. He left Mark’s parents’ house—they had become tired of the eccentricities of their son’s friends—and moved to Brooklyn, where Ferrill had a small, comfortable apartment with thick carpeting that swallowed your feet, a TV, and a real bathroom. David didn’t know anyone that young who lived in such luxury. But the way Ferrill lived surprised him even more. You went into his place as through a revolving door. You took a shower with him, you slipped into his bed, then you left. Free love, without ties, without jealousy, without guilt. Just pleasure to give and receive. It was the life David yearned for. So long, Bradford! Even London seemed grim in comparison.

  When he finally decided to contact the head of the department of prints at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, whose name Mr. Erskine had given him, another surprise awaited him. Not only did the man know who he was, and say he had been eager to meet him—he had received a letter from Erskine recommending his brilliant protégé—not only did he look at the etchings that David had brought from London, but he bought them! David couldn’t believe it. He was still a student and MoMA in New York was acquiring his etchings. What generosity, and how easy life was in America!

  The money came not a moment too soon, because he had run out. Now he could buy an American suit, one with a relaxed cut, light-colored, which was the height of fashion that summer. And a small transistor radio, to imitate the Americans who at first he thought were all deaf like his father, walking around with little devices in their ears, until Ferrill explained that they were simply wired day and night to music. A new man returned to London in September. A tall blond in a white suit. And he had brought back a few ideas with him. He was planning a very large painting, like those of the American abstract painters, so he would be given a very large space in the college studio; it wouldn’t be an abstract painting, though, it would have figures. Inspired by Egyptian antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum, by Dubuffet, and by Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” he painted a procession of three people that he titled A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style, writing the title on the painting so it would be very clear that he wasn’t taking himself seriously, and that it was all a game. A title that long had another advantage: since it took up several lines in the catalog of works exhibited at the college, it would be noticed. Clever like his father, David knew that success didn’t just fall from the sky. In New York he had admired what in England would have been considered bad taste: the ease with which Americans knew how to sell themselves, without getting bogged down in false shame and feelings of guilt. After attracting the attention of critics, you had to hold on to it. A tall blond man in a white suit who didn’t hide his deviant sexuality—that would intrigue them more than a painter from Bradford in West Yorkshire!

  He was having a great time. He painted two figures top to tail, replacing their penises with tubes of Colgate toothpaste (dental hygiene was a real obsession in the United States), and titled the work Cleaning Teeth, Early Evening (10 p.m.) W11. It was completely obscene and very funny. In the print department he undertook his own version of A Rake’s Progress, a series of engravings by the eighteenth-century painter William Hogarth, which show the downfall of a young man who lands in the big city and succumbs to vice. Referencing this classical work would enable David to recount his own New York adventures playfully: his arrival by plane, the sale of his etchings to the director of MoMA, the muscular Americans who jogged in Central Park in their sleeveless undershirts in front of the British weakling, the encounters among men in gay bars, the Clairol dye that changed the color of his hair and opened the doors to paradise, and even the ubiquitous little transistor radios all Americans were hooked up to, seemingly lacking any individuality…His perfect execution earned the praise of his professors.

  Everything was going his way. He even had the nerve to tell the Royal College administrators that he didn’t want the ugly, fat women in their forties who were sent to the students as models. Manet, Degas, and Renoir would never have become Manet, Degas, and Renoir if they hadn’t been inspired by their models. He asked for a man, and the school, worn down by his insistence, ended up giving in. Since no one else wanted to paint a nude man, David hired for his own use, with the Royal College’s money, a nice boy from Manchester he had just met. Mo introduced him to two of his friends, who soon became his own close friends, Ossie and Celia, who were studying fashion design. He had a fling with Ossie, a boy even wilder than he, who was also sleeping with Celia. Bisexual: another new concept. David was now living in London with the freedom he had discovered in New York. This was it, the bohemian life he had dreamed of ever since hearing the stories of Adrian and Mark: living with no fear of being who you are when you are different. Tolerance was the virtue of those whom social norms and moral reprobation had forced into hiding even when they weren’t harming anyone.

  He hadn’t yet finished with sch
ool when the young art dealer Kasmin, who had admired his work the year before, offered him a contract. The dealer would give him six hundred pounds a year in exchange for the exclusive right to show his work, and more if his paintings sold. David couldn’t believe his luck. All the other artists represented by Kasmin did abstract painting and were already known. He was the youngest and the only figurative painter. It had to be the effect of his blond hair and white suit. That summer, he didn’t need his job delivering mail. He went to Italy with Jeff, an American Jewish boy he had met in New York. In the autumn, he was finally able to leave the shed in the back of the yard and move into an inexpensive one-bedroom on the ground floor of a building in Notting Hill, close to his friends Michael and Ann. Ossie and Celia soon joined them in the neighborhood. It was a seedy area—the house across the street had been converted to a nightclub and a brothel, and there was constantly blaring music coming out of it—but it was the first time that David had his own place to live, work, and listen to operas at full volume in the middle of London. And his best friends lived nearby. His apartment quickly became the center of their social life. His door was always open, people were coming and going—as at Ferrill’s place in Brooklyn.

  When he received a letter from the director of the Royal College informing him that his thesis on fauvism had been judged to be inadequate, and that he would therefore not receive his diploma, he cursed angrily, then started laughing. It was a fact that he had done a half-assed job on that thesis, because he had had to get it in on time. In any event, Kasmin wasn’t asking to see an official school document. Such was the world. On one side were the administrators, the narrow-minded who judged and quickly condemned, all those who were afraid to live; and on the other, art, instinct, desire, freedom, and faith in life. He was quite right to ignore those administrative hassles, since the director of the department of painting, who wanted to grant a gold medal to his best student and couldn’t do it if he hadn’t received his diploma, forced the college to reverse its decision. David didn’t have anything against the medal; it impressed people and made his parents happy.

  When a gallery owner who was organizing a group show asked the artists to reveal the source of their inspiration, he wrote: “I paint what I like when I like, and where I like.”

  Anything could be the subject of a painting: a poem, something one had seen, an idea, a feeling, a person. Really, anything. That was freedom. Derek had once told him to get rid of his clown image if he wanted his work to be taken seriously. But no: you could be both a clown and a serious painter!

  The summer he turned twenty-six he returned to New York, this time on the Queen Elizabeth, to finish the etchings for A Rake’s Progress and to see Jeff, the American he had traveled to Italy with the summer before. One afternoon, at Andy Warhol’s apartment, where he had gone with his friend, he met a round, chubby-cheeked, bearded man who was the curator of contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum, and the funniest, liveliest, most sardonic man he had ever encountered. They saw each other again the next day. Another gay Jewish man, of course, like all his American friends, but of European origin. Henry had emigrated with his parents from Brussels in 1940 in the last boat to the United States. David wasn’t physically attracted to him, but had never felt so immediately close to anyone before. They talked back and forth, they finished each other’s sentences, and couldn’t stop laughing. They were about two years apart in age, liked the same poets, the same films, the same artists, the same books, and they had the same passion for opera. Across the Atlantic he had found his soulmate.

  When he got back to London, a young man who had started a business selling prints made him an offer: he would print fifty series of the sixteen etchings of A Rake’s Progress and would sell them for a hundred pounds each, which came to a total of five thousand pounds. It was the most money that David, or any other artist he knew, had ever made. Printing these series cost at most two or three pounds. There would be people who would pay a hundred for them? What madness! Of course, he wouldn’t get all the money, because the dealer would take a percentage, as would Kasmin. But this was real money, and a sizable sum would be his. He could finally have a shower installed in his Notting Hill apartment to take long showers with his friends. This was only the beginning. Two London galleries would soon exhibit his works, and the Sunday Times of London planned to send him to Egypt at the newspaper’s expense so he could bring back a notebook of sketches. And the money he earned with the series of etchings would enable him to fulfill a long-standing dream: to go to Los Angeles in January.

  He suddenly saw in a flash the moment when the director of the Bradford School of Art asked him, “Do you have private income, David?” That image was immediately replaced by one of a fifteen-year-old boy trembling with fear and excitement while he jerked off a stranger in the darkness of a movie theater. He had come a long way since then.

  SORROW LASTS THREE YEARS

  David had just passed the exit sign for Cheyenne, heading toward Las Vegas. After driving for four days, stopping only to sleep in motels along the way, he was on the last leg of his trip. He was tired but liked the long hours spent driving west in his Triumph convertible listening to music, his head empty or full of thoughts, traveling through vast spaces. At sunset the sky, like a huge canvas, was covered in shades of orange and pink as bright and vibrant as neon signs. The roads were deserted, and David passed only a few rare trucks. It was the ideal speed for contemplating the purple of the mountains, the pink of the sky, and that immensity of emptiness all around him.

  It would be his third teaching job. He wasn’t afraid now the way he had been two years earlier when, on the road into Iowa at the end of June 1964, he had stopped at an optometrist’s to buy a pair of enormous, thick, black frames to make himself look older and more professorial. That first experience had been a nightmare. Iowa City: what a misnomer! When he got there after traveling for two days, he had gone through what looked like a suburb and found himself in the middle of cornfields: there had been no city. He had rarely been as bored as he had been for those six weeks. When Ossie had landed from London in the middle of August, he was waiting for him as if he were the Messiah. They had rushed off to New Orleans before driving to San Francisco through the big national parks. And he would not soon forget the YMCA in the Embarcadero in San Francisco. You just had to take a shower in the common bathroom in the middle of the night for boys to run out of the dormitories like shadows, but shadows with glorious bodies, to immediately offer whatever you wanted. You couldn’t find such a paradise in Iowa City! Nor in Boulder, Colorado, where David had taught drawing courses in the summer of ’65, although conditions had improved a bit: the mountain landscape was magnificent and he had had a fling with a very cute student. But, in such a gorgeous place, the university had given him a studio without a window, not even a little skylight! That was when he had painted his quite imaginary vision of the Rockies. At least he had understood that the Midwest wasn’t for him.

  It would be different at UCLA, where classes started on Monday. He imagined his future students: tall, muscular surfers, blond and tan, resembling the models in Physique Pictorial. They would be quite surprised to discover that the professor of the advanced painting course was so young and so cute. David planned to take full advantage of the respectful admiration completely lacking in irony that American students showed toward their professors. In addition, they were all smitten with the English accent, and that accent which in his own country betrayed his provincial and working-class origins here became an advantage, adding to his charm.

  He listened to The Magic Flute and sang along at the top of his lungs while the sun sank below the horizon. After six months in London, he really missed the City of Angels. It had become his second home.

  He was no longer the naive boy who had landed in L.A. in January ’64, two and a half years earlier. Back then, on his second day, he had thought he would be able to conquer the city on a bike, since his legs alone, the da
y before, had taken him only as far as a gas station after walking for two hours from his motel! The distances didn’t worry an Englishman who had spent his youth traveling around hilly Yorkshire on a bike. On a map he had seen that a long boulevard went straight from his motel on the Santa Monica beach to the heart of downtown L.A., to Pershing Square, where all the action in John Rechy’s very sexy novel, City of Night, which had awakened intense fantasies in him, took place. Brimming with energy, he got on the bike he had bought that morning, a bit surprised all the same to discover that the boulevard went on forever. When he finally got to his destination at 9:00 p.m., the square was deserted. Where were the sailors and prostitutes from Rechy’s novel? David had a beer in an empty bar before tackling the thirty kilometers back to his motel, this time feeling his aching calf muscles. The next day, a motel employee exclaimed: “Downtown L.A.? No one goes there! It’s dangerous at night!” In short, he had ultimately understood what he had been told in New York when he had decided to come out here: “You don’t drive? You won’t be able to do anything in Los Angeles, David. Go to San Francisco instead!”