He made 150 collages in a week. Then he started photographing people and painting portraits at the same time, inspired directly by his photomontages, of Ian, Celia, and Gregory, portraits that looked like cubist paintings. His addiction only became stronger when he bought a small Pentax camera and was able to make collages without the white Polaroid print borders that interrupted the spatial flow of the images. He imposed only one rule on himself: he couldn’t cut the photos. But he wasn’t obliged to respect the straight edges of the page. A feverish excitement prevented him from sleeping. He woke up Ian or Gregory in the middle of the night so they could admire his new collage. On the phone with Henry he talked about nothing else and had trouble pretending he was interested in the professional concerns of his closest friend. Henry told him he had gone crazy, and renamed the house on Montcalm Avenue “Mount Hysterical.” David admitted, laughing, that Christopher had compared him to a mad scientist. The floor of his studio was littered with thousands of photos. He couldn’t stop. He had just finished a composition using 168 photos. The technology fed his exaltation: you could now develop photos in an hour! The only difficulty was in convincing the employee at the lab to also print shots that seemed to be duds.
Compared to the joy he felt in experimenting with this new, fun process, nothing was really important—except, perhaps, the letter he received from his mother in July for his forty-fifth birthday, in which that wonderful, beloved woman brought up for the first time, in a series of choppy and convoluted sentences, the subject of homosexuality, confessing that she didn’t know anything about it, but a few years earlier had bought The Reverend Leonard Barnett’s book on the subject, Homosexuality: Time to Tell the Truth, in the hope that she would be able to understand her son better. She expressed her fear that she hadn’t been a good mother, wondered if parents were responsible for this “particular creation,” and thanked her son for never having held it against her. She wished him all possible happiness. This naive letter contained so much love and generosity, came from such a beautiful soul, that David read it laughing and crying at the same time.
As for the rest…The Stravinsky opera at the Met wasn’t well received, as Henry had predicted. That didn’t prevent David from accepting another proposal from the Met, this time for a ballet. Gregory was drinking too much and was becoming aggressively jealous when he was drunk. It was a shame, but he would ultimately understand just how much he meant to David and would settle down. His friend Joe McDonald got such serious pneumonia that he had to be hospitalized. David went to visit him in New York, shocked to see how the illness had changed him. But he was being well taken care of, he would get better. Ian told him that he was going back to live on the East Coast to be closer to his father, who had just been diagnosed with cancer. David accepted the departure of his young lover philosophically—at least it would make Gregory happy.
Henry came to visit. David had just one desire: to show him his photomontages and share his excitement with him, but his friend was only half listening. He was getting ready to quit his job as commissioner of cultural affairs for New York City, a position to which he had been appointed by Mayor Koch five years earlier, an exhausting job that had made him ill. When he mentioned his fear that he wouldn’t be able to afford his medical expenses, David realized he had come to borrow money. His best friend was hoping to take advantage of him! They got into an argument. Henry accused him of being a miser and an egocentric, and left sooner than planned. In the twenty years that they had known each other they had never had such a serious quarrel.
In August Ann and Byron returned to spend their holiday in California for the first time in more than two years. As promised, David took the teenager to see the Grand Canyon. Byron adored the desert. David snapped hundreds of photos. He wanted to create a collage that would give the viewer the impression that he was contemplating the landscape with eyes all around his head, enabling him to see everything at the same time, the dry grass at his feet, the orange and yellow of the rocks and their cracks, and the mountains on the horizon. While he was sitting with Byron on a cliff, looking out at the infiniteness of the sky and the rocks reddened by the setting sun, he thought about the letter he had recently received from Henry, in which his friend told him how disappointed he had been. He reminded David that he had supported him in his most difficult moments, when Peter left him, when his father died; and the one time Henry in turn needed an attentive ear and support, the person he thought was his friend hadn’t listened. His single-minded passion for his work made him selfish and deaf. David told Byron about the quarrel, and the boy responded without hesitation: “You should say you’re sorry.”
“But he’s the one who insulted me! He wasn’t interested in me or my new work. He just came to get my money!”
“It’s because he needs it, right? It can’t have been easy for him to ask you. Can you imagine?”
David sensed that Byron had caused the scales to fall from his eyes. He understood that Henry had humiliated himself and that he, David, had rejected him. A boy not yet sixteen had spoken with the wisdom of a sage—or the clarity of childhood. He thanked him.
He sent Henry a letter of sincere apology and offered to help. He also wrote to Ian to say that his door would always be open and to ask his forgiveness for having been so absorbed in his photomontages. They were no doubt less instructive for a student than seeing a painting in progress.
He had adopted the right attitude. Henry reconciled with him. Ian, two months later, returned to California.
DEATH IS OVERRATED
One evening in November, when he was having dinner with Gregory and Ian, the phone rang. The person on the other end, David Graves, had been David’s assistant in London and his friend since he had met him seven years earlier at the premiere of A Rake’s Progress in Glyndebourne. He was also the partner of Ann, whom Graves had met at some mutual friends’ home. When Graves said, “David?” the softness of his voice conveyed something David recognized right away, something almost metallic that he had heard in his brother’s voice one February morning three and a half years earlier, like an absence of resonance: the voice of tragedy. Byron. Byron, who had just turned sixteen, Byron whom just last summer David had taken to see the Hot Springs, the ghost town of Calico in the Mojave Desert, and the Grand Canyon, and who three months earlier was in this very house next to him, laughing, playing cards and Scrabble, telling jokes, helping him choose seventy-six photos for his photomontage, Byron, who had given him the best advice. His cries of joy and fear at Disneyland when he was fourteen still rang in David’s ears. Dead. Byron had eaten hallucinogenic mushrooms—which weren’t illegal in England—and had gone onto the subway tracks in London, where a train had crushed him.
David flew to England. He didn’t know what to say to Ann. There weren’t any words. If his mother had been the living image of sorrow at his father’s death, Ann was but a silent cry. He took her in his arms, they clung to each other like two drowning people and sobbed. She had lost everything. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what a woman who had carried a child in her womb, who had given birth to him, who had raised him—so well raised!—who loved him with all her heart, all her body, all her soul, and who hadn’t been able to protect him from himself, must be feeling. There was nothing sadder than the burial at the Kensal Green cemetery the afternoon of November 11. All his friends from his time at the Royal College were there, including Byron’s father, Michael. That sadness David expressed in the photomontage he did immediately afterward. It showed his mother in the rain in the ruins of the Bolton Abbey, wearing a long, dark-green raincoat with a hood, all the sorrow of the world on her wrinkled face. He invited Ann and Graves to come to Los Angeles—and to stay there, why not? There would be fewer reminders of Byron than in London; the heat, the sun, and the ocean might help Ann survive.
On the way back to California he stopped in New York to see Joe McDonald, who had gone home after a long stay in the hospital. His condition had
scarcely improved and he stayed in bed; his mother was taking care of him. At thirty-seven, he looked eighty. His flesh had melted away, leaving his body emaciated and gaunt, his sunken face skeletal. Nothing was left of his beauty. It was now known that he didn’t just have pneumonia, but what was being called “gay cancer,” a sexually transmitted disease that attacked the immune system. There wasn’t yet any treatment for it. David talked with Joe about his new work to distract him and, with his permission, took photos of him for a photomontage.
David’s mother, Ann, and Graves spent the holidays in Los Angeles, as they had done three years earlier, during that Christmas that had followed the death of David’s father. Now it was the oldest that took care of the younger. While he worked with Graves on the set for a ballet that the Metropolitan Opera had commissioned him to do, Ann walked with Laura and cried on her shoulder. Tony, their filmmaker compatriot who lived in L.A., invited them to spend New Year’s Eve with him. He had two daughters, the younger of whom was Byron’s age. Ann had to leave the party with Graves. In the evening, on the terrace of the Montcalm Avenue house painted in Prussian blue, they all played Scrabble, while David took their photos. He made a collage to which he gave the irregular shape of the words on the Scrabble board. On the right he superimposed a dozen images of his mother concentrating on the game (she excelled at it, won all the time), her serious profile, her arthritic hands knotted under her chin or moving the letters; in the middle, eight photos of Ann, partly overlapping, and showing her reflecting with an absorbed air, her hand on her forehead, or laughing because she had finally found a word that would give her barely six points; on the left were photos of Graves, turning toward her tenderly, his face full of compassion, and smiling when she seemed happy; farther to the left the cat was playing on his side or was watching them, imperturbable. The harmony of the colors was astounding. The gray of his mother’s dress and hair mirrored that of the game board; the red of Ann’s hair was the same red as the painted table, and the blue of her dress and the yellow of her collar went with the blue, yellow, and red jacquard of Graves’s sweater. Thanks to the photomontage, there would forever be the memory not of a fixed moment in time but of a chain of moments during which the Scrabble games had distracted Ann from her pain.
He continued his photomontages in England when he took his mother back home—he brought Ian over for the first time—then in Japan, where he had been invited to give a lecture. On that trip, Gregory went with him. While he was photographing the Ryoan-ji Temple Zen garden in Kyoto, he noticed that his new work technique enabled him to alter the perspective. A normal photo of the garden would have transformed it into a triangle, whereas the photomontage gave it back its rectangular shape, the one experienced by the meditative stroller as he walked around. After leaving Japan he stopped in New York to attend the final rehearsals for the ballet whose set he had created with Graves’s help, and every day he visited Joe McDonald, who was once again in the hospital, so ill and weak that you had to put on a mask and gloves when you went into the room. It was the end. Ann joined him in New York to say goodbye to Joe, who had become a friend.
On April 17, Joe died. All of gay New York attended the funeral, the same crowd that filled the bars, the clubs, and the gay baths, which were now closed, and who danced all night long on Fire Island. People laughed when they remembered the hot moments with sexy Joe, and a moment later they became solemn and anxiously wondered who would be stricken with AIDS next. By one of those quirks of fate that life creates with indifference and that makes you think you’re schizophrenic, Joe’s burial took place the same day as the dress rehearsal for the ballet at the Metropolitan Opera. David went from one to the other. That afternoon he had given the eulogy for Joe that he had not had the strength to give for his father or Byron, and shuddered when he saw the casket being lowered into the grave; that evening, in a dark mood and with a sharp gaze, he verified that everything was perfect on the theater stage.
Like all his gay friends, every day he inspected his body and his back in the mirror, terrified that he would find a little black spot which would be the first sign of the plague. He hadn’t been with as many men as Joe had, but he had had his share of flings and one-night stands—thank God, he had made the most of his freedom ten years before the epidemic appeared.
Joe, six months after Byron, four years after his father. The three ages of life stricken one after the other. Joe’s death made no more sense than Byron’s did. How could something as good, as healthy, and as liberating as sex cause death? And in the gay community, no less, which had fought tooth and nail to obtain its basic rights. How could that horrible illness strike them as if God had cast down another rain of sulfur on them?—something the abominable religious conservatives were quick to proclaim.
Shattered by sadness and fatigue, David needed a vacation. He took Ian, Graves, and Ann to Hawaii. Ann and Graves on a whim decided to get married after seeing an ad for a kitschy ceremony in a grotto, and David photographed them for a photomontage. When they got back, an exhibition of his new photographic works opened in New York. He was happy to read in The New York Times that he had “liberated photographic perspective from the tyranny of the lens.” Yet the same exhibition in London in July was essentially ignored. No English critic could see the interest of his work with a camera. They thought the great draftsman was wasting his talent and his time.
He had recently had a studio built next to his house on Montcalm Avenue, on land where there had once been a tennis court, and he was eager to get back to painting. When the director of a museum in Minneapolis offered to organize an exhibition of his opera sets, David was going to turn him down: showing his drawings and sketches seemed boring to him. But then he thought of making paintings inspired by those sets, and of animating them with characters and animals. He threw himself completely into this new project. He had only a few months to create huge paintings and figures. He worked from dawn to nightfall with his assistants. Every day a new challenge consumed him. How could he represent figures in a way that wouldn’t be boringly realistic? In a corner of his studio there was a pile of little empty canvases that he had never used. What if he assembled them—like his photos—painting on each of them a different part of a body: head, torso, legs? What about the animals? He wasn’t going to go out and buy some stuffed animals in a toy shop! He cut them out of large pieces of thick polystyrene which he then painted. The work, very physical, had the added benefit of exhausting him: at night he collapsed and fell into a dreamless sleep.
While creating this fairy-tale universe through sheer hard work with the help of his assistants, he also drew and painted portraits—of himself, of Ian—inspired by the photomontages. In one of them he superimposed two versions of Ian, one showing his lover sleeping like an angel under the tender gaze of David, the other showing him sitting up, his hair disheveled, poking him in the eye, furious at having been woken up by caresses when he didn’t want to make love. Ian burst out laughing when he saw the drawing: “Am I really as mean as that?” It was clear that he had come back to L.A. to have fun, not for David. David was no longer of an age to accompany the young man to the parties he attended every night, especially since he had never really been a party animal, even in the days when he followed Joe to the Ramrod or to Studio 54: his pleasure consisted above all in watching. Ian would get home at dawn, shortly before David got up.
At forty-six, he was feeling old for the first time. That’s how he depicted himself in his drawings and paintings. He was no longer the eternally youthful blond boy with his mismatched socks and his striped polo shirt, but a naked man with an erect penis and a desire that he couldn’t satisfy, or a tired man sliding slowly but surely toward an age that neither Joe nor Byron would ever reach. When Ian told him one evening that he was going to move out, David wasn’t surprised. There was no scene. He had always known that Ian would leave him. It wasn’t the end of the world, really, even if it hurt. He couldn’t complain. He wasn’t dead, and Ia
n wasn’t either. He wasn’t even alone, since Gregory was there, his loyal and faithful Gregory who worked, dined, smoked, drank, and talked with him late into the night. Gregory wasn’t easy, drugs and alcohol could make him violent, and David had several times driven him to the hospital in the middle of the night, but he fought his demons. Sober, he was the best of friends, lovers, and assistants.
At the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where David had gone with Gregory for the opening of the exhibition of his opera sets, a book with a black cover titled Principles of Chinese Painting, by a Professor George Rowley, caught his eye in the museum shop. He had traveled to China a year earlier and was not very interested in Chinese painting, which seemed fairly uniform to him. He opened the book, however, without knowing why, and looked at the table of contents. A chapter called “Sequence and Moving Focus” piqued his curiosity. He bought the paperback and began reading it as soon as he got back to the hotel room.
Life of David Hockney Page 10
