Hockney encouraged Procktor to come up and have a look at Gemini, resulting in him producing his first lithograph, Seated Crowd on the Grass, featuring portraits of himself, Hockney and Rolf Nelson, whose gallery on Santa Monica Boulevard was at the cutting edge of the avant-garde. He also introduced him to Barney’s Beanery, and to his friends Ed Ruscha and Dennis Hopper. When Joan Cohn and Laurence Harvey left on a trip to Europe, Procktor had to move out of the guest house, so Hockney arranged for them both to stay at Jack Larson’s. With A Hollywood Collection finished and delivered to Gemini, he was preparing to return to London for his second show with Kasmin, when he got involved in a fateful distraction. Hanging out in his favourite gay bar, the Red Raven, he was introduced to a boy called Bob, known locally as “Princess Bob.”
“Ten days before leaving for London,” Hockney remembers, “I met this kid who I thought was Mister California Dish. His name was Bobby Earles and I said I was just going back to England, why not come back with me? He was an incredibly sexy boy. He was everything that California was about. But the thing is, it was simply lust on my part, and lust doesn’t work for too long.”54
That night he told Procktor that he was in love, and that he was taking Bob back to England with him. This beautiful blond Californian boy, Hockney’s perfect fantasy made real, had never left California before, so the first thing they had to do was get him a passport. Then the three of them drove to New York, with Procktor and Hockney arguing all the way. “He said, ‘You’ve gone mad,’ ” wrote Hockney, “ ‘you’re crazy.’ I said, ‘Never mind, we’ll make up for it at night, it’s all right.’ ”55 When they reached New York, Earles thought it was a terrible place, but Hockney told him that he was going to love Europe. Leaving Procktor to get to know New York a little better, they boarded the liner SS France, the flagship of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, to sail to Southampton. With an interior designed and built by the finest French craftsmen and artists, and eighty chefs on board, giving its Grill Room the reputation of being the best French restaurant in the world, the France was the fastest and most luxurious ship afloat. All this was wasted on Princess Bob, however, who only wanted to sleep and have sex, a memory of which was beautifully captured in the patently erotic post-coital study Bob, France 1965.
In a postcard to Mo McDermott from LA in early October, Hockney had written, “I will be back in London about noon on November 1 at Waterloo Station from the S.S. France. I am bringing back a marvellous work of art, called Bob.”56 So McDermott, Kasmin, Clark and a few others knew what to expect when they formed a welcome-home committee at Waterloo early that morning, a meeting that was captured on camera by the film director Henry Herbert, who was shooting a film about Kasmin for the BBC.
Unsurprisingly, Earles was less than impressed with London. He thought Powis Terrace was a “dump,” bemoaned the fact that there were no gay bars, and showed no interest in anything other than having sex, and wanting to meet the Beatles and the Queen. “He’s a dumb blonde bleached whore,” said Clark, who gave him the nickname “Miss Boots.”57 The only thing that excited Earles in the ten days he spent in London was sitting at a table next to Ringo Starr at the Scotch of St. James’s nightclub. “He was very dumb,” wrote Hockney. “He’d no interest in anything … After a week I said I think you should go back … And I put him on a plane and sent him back. There is a drawing … of a marvellous pink bottom, and that’s all he had in his favour I suppose.”58 The story of Princess Bob did not end happily. Hockney saw him two years later working as a go-go dancer on Laguna Beach, and a few years after that, he heard that he had died from a drug overdose.
Hockney’s second show at the Kasmin Gallery opened in December 1965, with the title Pictures with Frames and Still-Life Pictures, the prints being shown simultaneously at Alecto Editions. There was the usual opening party attended by the cream of society, and this time enlivened by the arrival of Sheridan Dufferin’s flamboyant mother, Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, and her third husband, Judge John Maude, a notoriously old-fashioned and right-wing judge. “He was famously anti-homosexual,” Kasmin recalls, “and was always sentencing gay people to hard labour. There was a lot of activity going on in the back room, boys kissing all over the place and people smoking dope, and he came up to me and asked, ‘Those people down there, aren’t they homosexuals?’ He was in a state of some nervous interest at watching all the forbidden actions going on.”59
The show was a sell-out, the average price for Hockney’s work having risen to £500, with the largest canvas in the exhibition, Rocky Mountains and Tired Indians, going for £750 to the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation.
The critics were unanimous in their praise. “Most of David Hockney’s latest paintings … are the outcome of a trip to California,” wrote John Russell in The Times. “They are certainly among his best so far.”60 Writing in the London Magazine, Robert Hughes noted that “Hockney’s art has lost its exotic heroes. The magicians, generals, hot-gospellers and Ku Kluxers of his earlier paintings have now disappeared; what fascinates him is the face of Los Angeles, which he paints … as a flat, glaring, overlit, antiseptic madhouse in which nothing happens.”61 In Studio International, Edward Lucie-Smith wrote: “The paintings, drawings and prints in the new exhibition are the product of a much longer residence in and around Los Angeles, and are a great commitment to America itself. By comparing them to Hockney’s earlier work, it is possible to see how astonishingly sensitive he is to atmosphere. Chameleon-like, he has become a Californian …”62
Robert Melville, in the New Statesman, pinpointed the swimming-pool painting as being of particular merit. “The best picture in the exhibition is about the best he has ever done. Called Two Men in a Pool, LA, it depicts two sun-bronzed figures with pale bottoms at the far end of a rippling, sunlit pool that is treated as an intricate curvilinear pattern in blue and white, and it is far and away the most imaginative and pictorial use to which Art Nouveau has been put since its revival. I doubt if any artist of his generation has produced a better picture.”63
Once again Hockney waited till after the opening was over to invite his parents to see the show. They arrived on Laura’s birthday, 10 December. “I had asked David on the phone,” she wrote in her diary, “to have his place clean—& it was—but I had a lovely surprise, on turning bed covers down to find new sheets and new blankets. Now! I said it feels like home & hugged him. They were tomato red sheets and p. cases—& next morning David asked if I would like some for my birthday—well of course—so off we went to Barkers & I was presented with two sets.”64 Laura was happy to be introduced to “many artist friends,” who included Patrick Procktor, Michael Upton, Peter Blake and his wife Jan Haworth, and Dale Chisman, who had come over from Colorado, and the show filled her with pride. “I think David’s exhibition was very pleasing & very wonderful,” she wrote, “—some of the drawings I could understand & more so after reading the many write-ups in several papers. I’m glad it is a success—there were many people there when we went. He has done very well indeed.”65 Her joy at having him back in England was, however, to be short-lived.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IN THE DULL VILLAGE
In the Dull Village, 1966–67 (illustration credit 7.1)
“POP ARTIST POPS OFF” ran the headline in the Atticus column in the Sunday Times on 9 January 1966, followed by the story that “David Hockney, Britain’s brightest young artist, has decided to leave Britain.” It described him wandering around his flat deciding whether or not to sound off about his feelings in a letter to the Daily Mirror.
I want to know why the Government is trying to get everybody into bed by eleven o’clock. Why else do all the pubs close at eleven and the telly shuts down at twelve? It makes me fed up, so I’m going to America. Life should be more exciting, but all they have is regulations stopping you from doing anything. I used to think London was exciting. It is compared to Bradford. But compared with New York or San Francisco it’s nothing. I’m going in April. I’m goi
ng to teach for two months in Los Angeles, then I’ll just stay on and paint. I’ll come back now and again to see my dealer and my parents, but I doubt if I’ll ever stay here again. I feel more lively there so I work better. That’s all it is.1
That Hockney’s outwardly sunny nature concealed a streak of rebellious anger did not come as a surprise to his mother, though she confessed to having been “rather shocked” by this outburst when she read it. “I know it is the side of David we do not see,” she wrote, “but he does not hide it. So different from our way of life. I should like to talk with him about it.”2 In spite of the fact that he was living in a period when class barriers were beginning to break down among the young, when fashion designers and pop stars, photographers and artists, largely from the working class, were mixing freely with the upper and middle classes, dining with lords and ladies and partying with royalty, Hockney felt a strong solidarity with his working-class roots. He was angry for the workers. “It’s … to do with the class system; it’s still to do with the fact … that drinking after eleven costs more because you have to join a club,” he wrote. “The poor workers, they’re supposed to go to bed and get up to work. It’s very undemocratic.”3
It was this sense of righteous indignation that Hockney put to good use when it came to propaganda on behalf of gay rights. In September 1957, Sir John Wolfenden’s famous report had recommended that homosexual behaviour between two consenting adults should no longer be considered a crime, a suggestion that had earned it the nickname the “Pansy’s Charter” from the Daily Express. Yet the Macmillan government had chosen to ignore its advice, despite a plea in a letter to The Times signed by thirty-three eminent public figures from the worlds of politics, the Church and the arts, including Lord Attlee, J. B. Priestley, Bertrand Russell, the Bishops of Birmingham and Exeter, and Stephen Spender, that the government should “introduce legislation to give effect to the proposed reform at an early date.”4 Even Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party, and Harold Wilson, the man who was to succeed him, were nervous of supporting the Wolfenden Committee’s recommendations, believing that to do so would cost them six million votes. They may have had a point. When a proposal was made in Burnley, Lancashire, that the town should allow the opening of a club for homosexuals, a leading Labour activist commented, “There’ll be no buggers club in Burnley.”5 On the whole in 1966, public attitudes to homosexuality were still largely hostile, and sex between men was illegal and punishable with a prison sentence, which made David’s openness about his sexuality all the more courageous. He just didn’t care. “I don’t think,” wrote Roy Strong after first meeting him, “that I’d ever before encountered anyone so overtly homosexual.”6
Among the young, however, whose attitudes to sex were becoming more liberal, tolerance was generally more widespread, as it was among the upper echelons of society where it was often openly tolerated and defended. Indeed, it was the House of Lords which first declared in favour of reform, when in October 1965 it passed the Sexual Offences Bill, introduced by the Liberal peer the Earl of Arran, though not without some opposition from peers like Lord Dilhorne, who thundered that such a bill would not only legalise sodomy, but encourage male prostitution. It was a brave move on Arran’s part, who, like many social reformers before him, was to be the victim of abuse, contempt and ridicule. The bill suffered a stormier ride through the Commons, steered by the maverick Labour MP Leo Abse, and it was to be nearly two years before it passed on to the statute books.
It was against this background that Hockney began work on his next project, a series of etchings based on the work of Constantine Cavafy, whose poems had previously inspired several paintings—Waiting for the Barbarians, Kaisarion with All His Beauty and Mirror, Mirror on the Wall. Ever since his Egypt trip in 1963, Hockney had harboured a secret desire to illustrate a series of Cavafy’s poems, an ambition he mentioned to Paul Cornwall-Jones, who immediately encouraged him to go ahead. Discovering that Cavafy’s translator, John Mavrogordato, was still alive and living in London, Hockney went to visit him in Montpelier Walk, behind Harrods. A pacifist, like Hockney, he was described as “a generous, courteous, charming, and modest man … a philanthropist, genial companion, conversationalist, connoisseur, talented amateur artist … and collector of books and art.”7 It was a fruitless trip, however, because by the time of the visit the former professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature at Oxford was eighty-four years old, suffering from dementia and had completely lost his memory.
When Hockney recounted this tale to Stephen Spender, asking for his advice, he introduced him to a young Greek poet called Nikos Stangos, and it was decided that the two of them should provide a new translation of the poems to go with Hockney’s drawings. A year younger than Hockney, Stangos had studied philosophy at Harvard University and was working as a press officer at the Greek Embassy in London; as a fellow homosexual who shared Hockney’s socialist principles, and who spoke perfect English, he was the perfect collaborator.
On his Egypt trip in 1963, Hockney had visited Alexandria, the home city of Cavafy, who had lived in a second-floor apartment above a brothel in the Rue Lepsius. From the balcony Cavafy could see both a hospital and the Church of St. Saba, which had prompted him to comment, “Where could I live better? Below, the brothel caters for the flesh. And there is the church which forgives sin. And there is the hospital where we die.”8 Hockney’s mind had been alive with the descriptions he had read of Alexandria in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, but instead of the bustling cosmopolitan and bohemian city of his imagination, where generations of immigrants from Greece, Italy and the Levant had settled to take advantage of its position as a centre of commerce, he found a dull modern port almost totally devoid of any Europeans. Realising that he would get no inspiration there, he decided instead to travel to Beirut, then considered the Paris of the Middle East. “I didn’t know anybody there,” Hockney remembers, “but I thought I’d just go there to get atmosphere. I went for about a week. I carried a sketchbook wherever I went, drawing the buildings, the Arabic signs and exploring the seedy parts. It was a good destination then, a stopover if you were heading to the east, and a very cosmopolitan city, much more cosmopolitan than Cairo or Alexandria, and it also had a reputation for being rather racy.”9 On his return he called his mother to tell her about it. “David phoned in the evening,” she wrote in her diary. “He has had a marvellous time as usual and done a lot of work. Visited Damascus and Lebanon. Lucky boy! How wonderful.”10
Cavafy’s poems can be divided into two categories: the poems about historical Alexandria and mythology, and the sensual poems set in modern Alexandria, lyrical musings on love and eroticism, mostly concerned with furtive and often doomed love between young boys. “I suppose that because I know more about love than about history, I chose to do those,” says Hockney. “Of course they are about gay love, and I was quite boldly using that subject then. I was aware that it was illegal, but I didn’t really think much about that at the time. I was living in a bohemian world, where we just did what we pleased. I wasn’t speaking for anybody else. I was defending my way of living.”11 In creating the illustrations for the book, Hockney worked from three sources: his own drawings, photographs which he had either taken or bought, and drawings which he etched straight onto the plate from life. Two Boys Aged 23 or 24, for example, is based on a photograph of Mo McDermott and Dale Chisman lying in bed, while According to the Prescriptions of Ancient Magicians was copied onto the plate from Boys in Bed, Beirut, an ink drawing made in London using two more friends as models.
The etchings made for Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from C. P. Cavafy, rather than being exact illustrations of the contents of each poem, were largely intended to parallel them, suggesting to the reader an experience similar to that described. Whereas Cavafy’s young men were often tormented and fugitive, David’s had a defiance about them, a feeling of indifference to what the world might think. As they climb into bed and prepare to make love they
look the viewer straight in the eye. With “his etchings for the Cavafy poems,” wrote his contemporary Derek Jarman, “he produced vital new images that pulled away the veil behind which the work of older painters had had to hide. The Cavafy etchings were particularly powerful. With his fine line he produced images of boys in bed that resembled Cocteau—but without a trace of the sentimentality which so often bedevils gay art.”12
In October 2010, Neil McGregor, the director of the British Museum, included in his radio series A History of the World in a Hundred Objects the Hockney etching In the Dull Village as an example of art as propaganda. The figures, he commented, “could be American or British, but they inhabit the world of the poem, which is about a young man trapped by his circumstances, and who escapes his dreary surroundings by dreaming of the perfect love partner … a boy imagined rather than actually present in the longed-for flesh. Cavafy’s poem reads as modern verse, but looks back to an ancient Greek world in which love between men was an accepted part of life. They are poems of longing and loss, of the first meetings of future loves, and of intoxicating passionate encounters and they were exciting fodder for Hockney, material that he could use for his own art as an example of how an artist could make a public statement out of such private experience.”13
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