Schlesinger was thrilled to arrive in England to a welcoming committee of friends, including Patrick Procktor, fresh from a successful show at the Redfern Gallery, John Kasmin and Ossie Clark, all eager to meet Hockney’s new lover. They drove off to Powis Terrace, which did not particularly impress Schlesinger. “It then really only consisted of two big rooms, and I remember thinking it was kind of filthy. Of course David smoked heavily, and I had never smoked, and I didn’t particularly like the cigarette ash in the bed.”21 Hockney’s first big sacrifice for Schlesinger, a demonstration of the strong feelings he held for him, was to give up smoking. It was a privation that also delighted his mother. “I am so glad about that,” she confided to her diary “—he is a good boy, only different … he has his own ideas of life but I’m so happy about him and very thankful.”22
Once they had settled into Powis Terrace, the unsophisticated boy from Encino had to deal with the enormous social circle in which Hockney moved. “It was a little scary,” Schlesinger recalls, “because I was only nineteen and shy and I didn’t know anybody. Swinging London was in full swing and I was a little suburban Californian.”23 Hockney may have been little-known in America, but in London he was a star, one of the glittering group of young artists, musicians, designers and photographers that had put London on the cover of Time the previous year. Antonioni had come to London to film Blow-Up, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles ruled the world of popular music, it was a must to be seen in the pages of Vogue, and the Scotch of St. James, Sibylla’s and the 100 Club lit up the night scene. Society revelled in its new “classlessness” and its leading hostesses fell over themselves to invite Hockney and Schlesinger to their houses. “There was a big garden party at Lindy and Sheridan Dufferin’s,” Schlesinger remembers, “and Princess Margaret was the guest of honour. Nothing could happen until she arrived, and when she arrived she had to go around and shake everybody’s hand, and somehow, being the least important person there, I was the last person for her to meet and I didn’t have a clue what to say. I was left speechless. Everyone was wearing silver, and I was sitting at a table with Lord Snowdon, and at one point in the evening he threw a glass of wine at Princess Margaret.”24
Hockney’s fame was well attested when he was one of the sixty-four signatories of a full-page open letter in The Times on 24 July, paid for by the Beatles, calling for the legalisation of marijuana; others included Jonathan Miller, George Melly, Tom Driberg MP, David Bailey and David Dimbleby. Though this letter was to achieve nothing, other than to elicit a few splutterings of horror from Middle England, a few days previously a far more important piece of legislation had been passed by Parliament that was to transform Hockney’s life and the lives of countless other homosexuals.
On 21 July 1967, royal assent had been finally granted to the 1965 Sexual Offences Bill, which gave exemption from prosecution for homosexual acts committed between consenting adults in the privacy of their own home. It was a huge step forward, even though outside this exemption homosexuality continued, technically speaking, to be a punishable offence, a situation that was not to change until 2003. “The Earl of Arran,” reported The Times, “… said that because of the Bill perhaps a million human beings would be able to live in greater peace. ‘I find this (he said) a truly awesome and a truly wonderful thought.’ ”25 Cecil Beaton wrote, “A great event in history that this should have been achieved.” Had it happened a century earlier, he mused, “Oscar Wilde could have given us half a dozen more Importances and early life for so many of us made less difficult.”26
At the end of July, Hockney decided to whisk Schlesinger away from the social whirl and take him and Patrick Procktor on a tour of Europe. Hockney loved to drive, and this was the first of many similar trips, dubbed “Mr. Whizz’s Tours” by Christopher Isherwood, and done entirely on Hockney’s terms. The drive to Paris passed without event, though it was a little slow, since Hockney’s brand-new Morris Minor convertible, which he nicknamed his “district nurse’s car,” had a 900cc engine and was incapable of overtaking. In Paris they stopped at a little art materials shop on the corner of Boulevard Saint-Michel and Rue Saint-André des Arts to buy watercolours and paper, as the most practical painting medium for travelling.
The next stop was to be Uzès, near Nîmes, where Douglas Cooper, the celebrated collector and friend of Picasso, lived in the Château de Castile. Famously obstreperous and a cultivator of quarrels, he was not a man who took kindly to people turning up uninvited at odd hours. “He wasn’t expecting us,” Schlesinger recalls, “and we just rang his bell and the servant came out and said, ‘I’m not waking him at five in the morning,’ and we had to sleep in the car until Mr. Cooper could be awakened and he was not pleased. David just used to arrive at people’s doorsteps with three other people thinking they would be pleased to see him … Douglas did actually allow us to stay one night there.”27
From Nîmes they headed to Italy, stopping off in Lucca to visit the American art critic Mario Amaya, and visiting Ferrill Amacker in Florence. After a short spell on the beach in Viareggio, they ended up in Rome. As they travelled, they painted, but while Patrick discovered a true love of the immediacy of watercolour, Hockney could not persevere with it. “It was the first time I properly tried watercolour, but in the end I preferred coloured pencils,” he says. “With watercolour, you have to follow certain rules otherwise you are in the soup. For instance, you have to move from light to dark because you can’t put a light colour on top of a dark, and generally you can’t put more than three coats on otherwise the colour would begin to get nondescript and muddy. There are techniques you have to follow and I got into it a bit but I didn’t get into it enough for me to want to carry on.”28
After Rome, they drove back to France to stay with Kasmin who had rented a house for the summer, the only actual invitation they had. For Procktor and particularly Schlesinger, the trip had been a steep learning curve. “There was no plan; there was no map,” he remembers. “We didn’t know where we were going. There were no reservations anywhere. If you stopped somewhere and the inn was full, you’d have to spend the night sleeping in the Morris Minor. That wasn’t too comfortable even for me but for Patrick, who was so tall, it was an absolute nightmare.”29
Their destination was Carennac, a medieval village of breathtaking beauty that lay right on the banks of the River Dordogne. John and Jane Kasmin had first visited it in 1961, taking rooms in the chateau, which had been turned into a hotel. Carennac’s romantic history appealed to the poet in Kasmin, its ancient priory having been for many years the home of François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century Catholic theologian, who was said to have written there his famous work Télémaque, a saga of the adventures of the son of Ulysses and Penelope. When the chateau finally shut up shop as a hotel, the Kasmins decided to rent it every August during their sons’ school holidays. The painter Howard Hodgkin and his wife Julia joined them in this enterprise, and over the next few years, Carennac was to be the setting for a number of idyllic summer holidays for them and their families and friends.
On this first visit, Hockney and Schlesinger coincided with the Cornwall-Joneses and Jane Kasmin’s mother, the fabric designer and painter E. Q. Nicholson. The long, carefree days, filled with sunbathing, sightseeing and reading, were immortalised in drawings such as Carennac, Vichy Water and “Howards End,” Jane in a Straw Hat and Kasmin in Bed in His Chateau in Carennac, while the evenings generally passed in a haze of delicious food, wine and marijuana. “It was a lovely place, with loads of bedrooms,” Hockney remembers. “In the evenings we played word games. I remember one game where somebody said a word and the next person had to say a word that either rhymed with it or made sense with it … It got interesting as it started to get faster because the words seemed to get quite revealing and if people kept it going, it was very good. Mo [McDermott] was good at it because he simply said the first word that came into his head, even if it had no relationship to the word that was spoken. I never remember him stopping the game.
It was Kasmin who was the one who usually stopped the game because he was trying to think up something clever.”30
This European tour convinced Schlesinger that he “was born on the wrong continent in the wrong century,” and that he had to move to London. However, when he applied for a place at the RCA, Hockney’s connection with the college did not work in his favour. “I took along a portfolio of drawings I had done at UCLA,” Schlesinger recalls, “and I was turned down. I heard later that it was because they thought David had done the drawings for me.”31 Disappointing though this was, Patrick Procktor then suggested that he should apply to the Slade, which eventually accepted him, to begin his course in September 1968. As it turned out, being a much smaller school, it was to suit Schlesinger better.
Both Hockney and Schlesinger were prolific photographers and they returned to England with rolls and rolls of film. Hockney’s prints and negatives usually ended up being chucked haphazardly into a box, never to be looked at again. On this occasion, however, after Schlesinger had returned to UCLA, Hockney had a clear-up and came upon several boxes of his own photographs from the previous five years. “I realised then that if you put them away in boxes and you can’t see them, they just get lost and you have to be able to see things. So I made a decision to just stick everything into books.”32 He immediately went to Harrods and bought a large green photograph album into which he stuck all his snapshots from the previous five years. Inspired by this, and by the belief that he could take photographs just as well as anyone else, he also bought his first good camera, a 35mm Pentax. From the moment he started his next album, the quality of the images got better and better.
After Schlesinger had returned to UCLA, Hockney turned his hand to another portrait, this time of his old friend Patrick Procktor. It was the first of a series of portraits he was to paint over the next ten years, in which he sought to re-educate himself as a draughtsman and test his powers of observation. In The Room, Manchester Street he further developed his use of perspective, to create an illusion of space, and used backlight effectively to show off the figure of Procktor, standing, campily holding a Sweet Afton cigarette in his left hand. The shadows on the floor and the patterned carpet created by the cool silvery light pouring through the venetian blinds are also beautifully subtle. Made from a mixture of drawings, photographs and life, the painting depicts Procktor’s London home and studio at 25 Manchester Street, which the artist André Gallard described as being “rather like going into a film set: as if you had stepped back into 1880.”33 In fact, as Hockney described it, you never really knew what you were going to find there. “In 1967 Patrick’s studio looked clean, neat and office-like. The next year it looked like a den in the Casbah—it seemed to change as often as Auntie Mame’s.”34 In the portrait, which brilliantly captures Patrick’s theatrical bearing and extravagant hand gestures, it has the former appearance. Though honoured to have been the subject of such an important painting, Procktor never really liked the portrait, which he considered to be unflattering.
While Hockney was still working on this painting, one of his other portraits won him the most prestigious art prize in England, the publicity for which took his fame to a new level. The John Moores Prize for Contemporary Painting was held biennially at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. First awarded in 1957, when it was intended to be a one-off event, it was the brainchild of John Moores, the founder of the Littlewoods department store and the football pools company, who was a keen amateur painter, and who wanted to celebrate the best of modern art in Britain. Open to all, its subsequent success ensured that it was soon regarded as the country’s leading showcase for avant-garde art. In its tenth year, Hockney won with Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool. “Preview at John Moores Exhibition at Liverpool,” wrote Laura in her diary. “We were very proud and pleased to see David on Television he being first prize-winner at the Exhibition. Almost all the papers had write-ups with photos of both David and his picture. We had many congratulations around.”35 In a typically generous gesture, Hockney put half the considerable prize money of £1,500 towards a trip to Australia for his parents, to visit his brother Philip.
The Room, Manchester Street was completed in January 1968, just in time to be included in his fourth one-man show at the Kasmin Gallery, a striking exhibition of seven large canvases, which he called A splash, a lawn, two rooms, two stains, some neat cushions and a table … painted. It hung alongside A Bigger Splash, The Room Tarzana and four other new pictures, Two Stains on a Room on a Canvas, A Neat Lawn, Some Neat Cushions and A Table. “David’s exhibition is wonderful,” wrote Laura of her and Ken’s visit to it, “—only 7 huge pictures—but he does improve and his work is so perfect in detail. It seems a huge success and there have been more than 2000 visitors in 9 days.” Writing in The Times, Guy Brett described “images which are permeated with Hockney’s feeling for Los Angeles. These new paintings are sharper and neater and broader in scale than earlier ones; the brittle subject matter and Hockney’s dry shallow paint surface are very elegantly matched.”36
With the show over, Hockney flew to New York with Kasmin, staying at the Stanhope Hotel on Fifth Avenue, across the street from the Metropolitan Museum. The plan was to return to LA to spend six months with Schlesinger prior to his course at the Slade, but not before undertaking another epic road trip across America, this time in a Volkswagen brought over from Europe by a friend of Schlesinger’s. After much cajoling Hockney persuaded Schlesinger to take a few days off school and fly up to join them. He arrived at the Stanhope soon after midnight and at five in the morning the three of them set off, driving through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado and Utah, everything recorded in hundreds of photographs taken by Hockney with his new Pentax camera. “… it was like an Easy Rider in a Volkswagen,” he wrote. “Nice pictures of Colorado when it was snowing.”37
While Hockney had been in London, Schlesinger had moved in with friends who lived on 3rd Street in Santa Monica. In a 1934 art deco apartment building across the street—which in LA was considered historic—there was a tiny penthouse for rent, where Schlesinger and Hockney could live, while using a small spare room in the friends’ house as a studio. It was a perfect arrangement. “It was like being on the Queen Mary,” wrote Hockney, “with the mist in the morning, in Winter … and it was very nice. They were very happy times; once we were in the house, I didn’t care if I went out to see anybody or not, whereas before that … I was a roamer, I had to go out. It was because of Peter. Why should I go to a bar and roam around? There was no need for it.”38
Again Hockney was to prove that an artist does not need a large studio to paint a big picture, for in the very small room in this old wooden house he produced three seven foot by ten foot paintings. In the first of these, he challenged himself to attempt something he’d never done before: his first double portrait. The painting was quite different from any of his previous works containing two figures, such as the marriage pictures and the domestic scenes, in that those were painted from his imagination rather than from life; and the subjects he settled on were Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, two of his most intimate friends who also happened to live conveniently close by.
Hockney was fascinated by the dynamics of their relationship and began by hanging out with them and working up preliminary drawings. “The trouble with drawing people you don’t know,” he told the art historian Anthony Bailey, “is that you never really know what they look like. You spend a lot of time just trying to get a likeness. Whereas if you know them well you know there are several faces there. You can draw one of them, a face that belongs to a certain day.”39
He also took lots of photographs of the two men, observing that when he asked them to relax, Isherwood would always sit with his right foot across his left knee looking at Bachardy, while Bachardy would look straight at Hockney. That gave him the pose, and the “story”—in this case an older man’s worries about his much younger lover. “If a picture has a person or two people in it,” he said,
“there is a human drama that’s meant to be talked about. It’s not just about lines.”40 Though the setting for the portrait is the living room of their house, Hockney never took his easel and paints down there, preferring to work on it in his little studio. While Isherwood would often come and sit for him, he relied mostly on photographs for the figure of Bachardy. “I remember that when the painting was almost finished, he was still dissatisfied with the painting of my head,” Bachardy remembers. “If you look at the painting you can see that the paint on my head is much more built-up than it is with Chris, where the paint is very fresh, very first time, whereas he really laboured over me.”41
Part of the problem was that just when Hockney was quite far into the portrait, Bachardy left LA to go and live in London for two months, a situation that did not make Isherwood particularly happy. “Three-thirty in the afternoon and raining hard in heavy gusty showers,” he wrote in his diary on 1 April. “… Just the right weather for the situation in this house, which is that Don took off at noon for London. We neither of us quite knew why he was doing this. Chiefly because David Hockney has lent us his apartment and since I still have no reason to go there it seemed as if Don had better use it.”42 Since he was lonely after Bachardy had left, Isherwood got into the habit of dropping round to Hockney’s studio most days, either to sit for him or just to talk about books, California or life. “He’d talk about Don being in England,” Hockney recalled. “I do remember he said, ‘Oh David, don’t ever get too possessive about your friends; let them feel free.’ Later I think he was a bit hurt that Don stayed away a long time. Still, it was good advice.”43 Eventually, dissatisfied with not being able to paint from life, Hockney rolled up the canvas and took it to London, only to find that Bachardy had left the previous week. The result was that it was completed without another sitting. “When I saw the picture,” Bachardy remembers, “it was quite clear that Chris looked much fresher, and I don’t think that David was ever satisfied with the version of me. I know better than to complain, and in the end what does it matter? We were flattered and pleased to be among the subjects for those wonderful double portraits.”44
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