David Hockney

by Christopher Simon Sykes

  About a month after he had started work on Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, Hockney began a second double portrait, of the wealthy art collectors Fred and Marcia Weisman. Marcia Weisman was the daughter of Meyer Simon, of Portland, Oregon, the creator of the Hunt Wesson Foods empire. In the early 1950s she and Fred began to build up what would become one of the best contemporary art collections in the country. Their first purchase was Self Absorbed, a sculpture by Jean Arp, which they followed up with works by Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Ed Ruscha and others, until they owned over a thousand major pieces, including Jasper Johns’s iconic Map. On meeting Hockney, she asked him if he would paint her husband. He declined, since he did not like taking on commissions; but after seeing their house he offered to paint them as a couple.

  American Collectors is a characteristically witty portrait in which the Weismans are portrayed, rather like Betty Freeman, as further objects in their collection. “In the Weisman portrait,” he wrote, “there’s a Turnbull sculpture, a Henry Moore sculpture, other things, all part of them. The portrait wasn’t just in the faces, it was in the whole setting.”45 On the left Fred stands bolt upright as if carved from a piece of wood, his hand clenched so tight that an accidental drip, which Hockney chose to leave on the canvas, almost appears to have been squeezed out by him. To his right stands Marcia, echoing a huge totem pole behind her, her mouth frozen in the same rictus grin as the face on the pole. “It really had a similar look,” wrote Hockney. “I couldn’t resist putting that in.”46 Marcia was not amused. In fact, the Weismans hated the picture so much that they decided to take it out of circulation by buying it and donating it to the Pasadena Museum, with the stipulation that it should be kept in the basement.

  Hockney completed one more large painting, California Seascape, which depicts a window and sea view in the home of the artist Dick Smith, in Corona del Mar, before returning to London with the unfinished portrait of Isherwood and Bachardy. Had it not been for Schlesinger starting at the Slade, though, he would almost certainly have remained in California and travelled back and forth. His mother was delighted. “David is back again in London,” she wrote at the beginning of July. “He came home just for a few days. Met the people who are to judge the ‘First Biennale of Prints’ in Bradford at Cartwright Hall. My washer has broken down—but David went in to town with me and bought a brand new Servis Super Twin. He is so kind to me, indeed to us. He gave Ken money, but he never spends it wisely.”47

  His return home turned out to be timely, as in September, on a trip to Bradford to judge the work sent in for the Print Biennale, he was able to see at first hand just how ill his father was and what Laura had to cope with. “… in the odd hour we had together we talked of Australia. Dad was late in and David kept going to bus stop to meet him and back again to find he had not come. We started our meal but could not enjoy it. Had just picked up phone to call Infirmary when Mr. Holloway came to back door. He had picked Ken up in Harrogate Road. Again in coma—he had kept on the bus to the terminus at Ravenscliffe and walked back half dazed—dared not cross road and slumped by wall. David tried to impress the fact he must come straight home—or there would be no Australia … I was getting so ill with worry night after night.”48

  Schlesinger arrived in London in September, ready to take up his course at the Slade. Foreign students were not given their own painting area on the premises, so one of his first moves was to buy himself a bike in order to cycle each morning to the school, in Gower Street, Bloomsbury, and from there to Regent’s Park, where he had temporarily rented studio space off Kitaj. As a result, Schlesinger never quite fitted in, because he would have to leave after classes, while the other students hung around to paint. It didn’t help either when word got out that he was David Hockney’s boyfriend, and he was considered a bit of an oddity. “I would flit in and out of the Slade,” he recalls, “but I had this whole other life with David, a very un-studenty life. I raised a few eyebrows at the Slade, especially when I arrived in my Ossie Clark snakeskin jacket. I didn’t really take part in the student life there.”49

  At least Hockney was supportive. “He certainly took an interest in my painting,” Schlesinger remembers. “He was respectful of my work without critiquing my pictures. He didn’t like to carry on in a professorial way, but he certainly encouraged me, and he hung some of my work up on the wall in Powis Terrace.” The closest he came to giving Schlesinger any kind of tutorial was allowing him to watch and draw alongside him while he worked on a portrait. “I drew Cecil Beaton a couple of times with David,” Schlesinger recalls, “and I drew while David was drawing John Gielgud and Rudolf Nureyev.”50 On another occasion, Lindy Dufferin had managed to persuade Sir Frederick Ashton to allow her and Hockney to draw the Royal Ballet in rehearsal. They took Schlesinger along, but since only two of them were allowed in the rehearsal room at once, he had to stand and watch from the door. Here he caught the eye of Wayne Sleep, one of the company’s up-and-coming young dancers. “During my breaks, I chatted to him there,” Sleep wrote later, “and he asked if I would be willing to be drawn. This led to an invitation to join them that day, with Sir Fred, at Lindy’s house in Holland Park for lunch. Sir Fred and I posed together for the artists, he in a chair with me (naked) sitting at his feet.”51

  While Hockney’s sitters usually had no objection to Schlesinger being brought along, there was one notorious occasion when the subject was extremely unhappy about it. In October 1968, the music critic of the Observer, Peter Heyworth, suggested to Hockney that he might like to do a portrait of W. H. Auden, who happened to be staying with him. Since he longed to meet Auden, Hockney cast aside all his usual doubts about commissions, and said he would love to. Without asking, he decided to take Kitaj and Schlesinger with him, reasoning that Auden was probably not unlike Chris Isherwood, who was always cheered up by the sight of a beautiful young boy. How wrong he turned out to be. “Auden was a bit grumpy about having three people there,” wrote Hockney, “and my impression of him then was that maybe he was playing a role, the grumpy man, because he complained all the time about pornography. He talked all the time. He said every time he went to the railway station in New York to make a journey and he wanted to read detective novels, it was all pornography now, all pornography. He gave me the impression of being rather like the headmaster of an English school.”52 The documentary maker and author Peter Adam, who was involved in filming Auden at the time, put it more strongly: “Auden was furious … he kept on about ‘the manners of people who have no manners’ and the invasion of his privacy.”53 In spite of the bad atmosphere, the drawings Hockney made were a success, beautifully capturing the craggy lined landscape of the poet’s face. “I kept thinking,” Hockney said, “if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?”54

  In between putting the finishing touches to Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, and planning a new double portrait, Hockney was typically industrious, going on a trip down the Rhine in September to take photographs of castles, as references for a new illustrated Grimm’s Fairy Tales, as well as paying a visit in October to a friend who had a house in the south of France, the film director Tony Richardson. Hockney had first come across the flamboyant and complex Richardson while working on Ubu Roi at the Royal Court and they had struck up an instant friendship. They had a Yorkshire background in common, Richardson, the son of a pharmacist, having been born and brought up in Saltaire, just outside Bradford, and educated at Ashville College, a minor public school in Harrogate. By the time they met, Richardson had had a distinguished career, firstly in the theatre with the English Stage Company, putting on the first productions of Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer, and latterly in films, as the director of two successful social realist productions, A Taste of Honey and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. Having made a fortune from his latest film, Tom Jones, to which, along with John Osborne and Albert Finney, he owned all the rights, he had used part of the money to buy an extraordina
ry property in the mountains above St. Tropez, just outside the town of La Garde-Freinet.

  Le Nid de Duc, “the nest of the night owl,” was a hamlet in which two or three families had once eked out a living harvesting cork from the cork-oak forest, which was the only real source of revenue in the area. Abandoned since the 1950s, it was almost entirely in ruins when Richardson first came across it, and he fell instantly in love with it, seduced as much as anything by the profusion of wild flowers that flourished there throughout the seasons, “the wild mimosa … the wild tree heather, white and purple; the scarlet poppies; the violets and blue periwinkles; the purple and yellow flags; orchids of every colour; white starwort and daisies; gold celandine and ragwort; green spurge; and the red and orange berries of the arbutus.”55 By the time Hockney paid his visit—the first of many over the next few years—it had been restored with the help of local craftsmen. There were six houses habitable and, precariously cantilevered out of the sloping hillside, a brand-new swimming pool, which was later to form the setting for another of his most iconic paintings.

  Richardson was a wonderful and generous host who mixed and matched his guests regardless of class or sexual preference, so long as they amused him and were prepared to bend to his whim. “When you are at his mercy,” wrote Christopher Isherwood, “he can drive you absolutely nuts. You have to do exactly what he says every moment of the day. If you refuse he asks ‘Are you alright?’ as much as to suggest that your refusal is the first sign of an oncoming mental breakdown.”56 The six houses could accommodate twenty or thirty people, usually artists, musicians, actors and writers, with any children sleeping in one huge room, and everybody gathered together for meals, which were taken outside on a long table set beneath a huge tree, around which ducks and peacocks wandered. Delicious Provençal food was provided, while wine flowed, loosening tongues and encouraging gossip. Guests needed their wits about them, especially if Richardson decided to play one of his “truth” games. “He once asked a man,” wrote Isherwood, “ ‘How long was it after your marriage before you started sleeping with boys again?’ And the man hesitated and then replied, ‘Four months,’ and his wife cried out and got up and left the room, and soon afterwards they were divorced.”57 After years of experiencing similar behaviour, John Osborne, his partner in Woodfall Films, used Richardson as the model for the character of KL, the tyrannical film producer from whom the three couples are escaping, in his play The Hotel in Amsterdam.

  Richardson loved games, not all of them quite so sadistic. He “organised games, picnics and theatre evenings; treasure hunts could last the whole day. He would always make sure that the most unsuitable couples or the most unconventional ones were teamed up together. One never knew what one would find: bottles of champagne hidden in a stream with glasses, or a book with pornographic photographs.”58 In the evenings there would be charades, or murder in the dark, and sometimes elaborate theatrical productions put on by Natasha and Joely, Richardson’s children from his marriage to Vanessa Redgrave. The one thing that was expected of the guests was that they should join in, and woe betide those who didn’t. “He could be cruel or incredibly charming,” Schlesinger recalled, “directing the house party as he would one of his plays or movies, and he loved guests who performed well. No extrovert, I failed the audition and he took a great dislike to me.”59 Hockney, who refused to join in the games, was told by people, “Well, he’ll never invite you again,” but because he was always seen to be drawing and observing, he got away with it and was asked back many times.

  *

  On his return to London, and with Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy finally completed, Hockney was preoccupied with thinking about a new double portrait of his close friend Henry Geldzahler and his partner Christopher Scott, whom Hockney had drawn once before, in 1967, in the lithograph Henry and Christopher, which shows Henry seated in an armchair and Christopher lying on a sofa in the Chateau Marmont. Each print in the edition of fifteen was customised: one, for example, has hand-painted multicoloured lines connecting their mouths, as if to signify a conversation taking place between them even though their mouths are closed. Hockney was intrigued by what made the relationship work between the gregarious and witty Geldzahler and the younger and rather dour Scott and, believing them to be perfect material for a new large oil, he flew to New York in November to stay with them, in the Wyoming Building on Seventh Avenue. In his role as curator of twentieth-century art at the Metropolitan Museum, Geldzahler was putting the final touches to New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970, a landmark show that was to open the following year, and give the Museum of Modern Art a run for its money.

  Geldzahler was a man Hockney truly loved, who made him laugh more than anyone else, and who introduced him into the New York art world where, as well as the Warhol crowd, he encountered artists such as Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly. With a great eye as well as a vast knowledge of art, Geldzahler was not afraid to criticise, and he became one of the few people from whom Hockney got critical feedback about his work. But like many a man of formidable intellect, Geldzahler could also be temperamental and difficult, and he had a voracious sexual appetite in which not even Hockney’s boyfriend was off-limits. “I first met Henry,” Schlesinger recalls, “when I was in the little house in Santa Monica. He was a little chubby thing, but very amusing. At one point David had to go out to get some cigarettes, and at that moment Henry pounced on me. He literally did it in a matter of seconds. Once he’d established that I wasn’t interested in going along with his desires, he immediately lost interest in me entirely. Of course that didn’t apply to David, because he was famous. To get on with Henry you had to be useful to him and you had to serve his ego in some way.”60 Geldzahler’s wit was legendary. On one occasion he managed to browbeat Andy Warhol into painting his portrait for free. When Warhol had completed it, he delivered it to Geldzahler, who had a good look at it before handing it back. “You’ve left something out,” he told him. “Whaaat?” drawled Warhol, in his soft, barely audible voice. “The art!” replied Geldzahler.61

  He could also be quite cruel. “There was this old society lady called Violet Wyndham,” Hockney remembers, “and she used to give lunches in Trevor Square. When I took Henry to lunch with her, I told him that she was a rather marvellous old lady whose mother was called Ada Leverson and was a very loyal friend to Oscar Wilde. She met him when he came out of prison and he said to her, ‘Only you, Ada, would know what hat to wear on an occasion like this.’ This was all explained to Henry before we went to lunch. Violet was pretty deaf, and when we arrived at her house and she greeted us, Henry turned to me and said loudly, ‘Now let me get this straight. Oscar Wilde was her mother.’ Of course I couldn’t stop laughing, and Violet was saying, ‘What? What?’ and I thought, ‘You are cruel, Henry, but you are very, very funny.’ ”62

  In New York, Hockney began the portrait of Geldzahler and Scott by doing some preliminary sketches. “He did a few drawings on the spot,” Geldzahler later recounted, “—of my face, of Christopher and of the scene out of the window behind the couch, which was a scene out of the window in another room of the apartment. That was something he decided to do in order to let in more air, I suppose, more space to the picture.”63 Scarcely had he started work, however, than Hockney was struck down with flu at a time when Geldzahler’s doctor was on holiday in Florida. “For the last four days of his stay,” Geldzahler recalled, “he tried every home remedy in patent medicine that he had ever heard about. He also made the point over and over again that in England you can reach a doctor over the weekend. That has not been my experience.”64

  In spite of being ill, Hockney still managed to get enough drawings done, and the painting was completed once he was back at home in Powis Terrace. It was on this return journey to London, however, that he became involved in an incident which was to have profound significance, and which was to gain him almost heroic status within the homosexual community.

  CHAPTER NINE

  PETER 1969r />
  Peter, 1969 (illustration credit 9.1)

  Before his return to London at the beginning of December 1968, Hockney had been down to 42nd Street to stock up on the latest male physique magazines. With titles such as Golden Boys, Teenage Nudist and Champion, they were among the first American magazines to feature naked men full-frontal. As he passed through customs at Heathrow, a very young officer stopped him and asked him to open his bag. “I’d put the magazines on top of my clothes,” Hockney recalls. “They weren’t very sexy. They were pictures of naked men posing in sylvan glades, that sort of thing.”1 The customs officer took the magazines out of his bag, had a good look and told him he was confiscating them because they were pornographic. “I said, ‘You’ve got the wrong person today. I’m not a little businessman who’s going to run off. I’ll see you in court if necessary.’ ”2

  When Hockney told Kasmin that he was prepared to fight the case, Kasmin suggested that it would be cheaper to fly back to New York and buy some more magazines. “ ‘That’s maybe what you’d do, Kas,’ I told him, ‘but I’ve got some principles.’ ”3 Hockney’s first step was to telephone HM Customs and Excise’s head office, where he was passed from official to official, each of whom told him that the magazines certainly qualified as pornography. “Finally I got to the top guy,” he recalled, “and he said, ‘Yes, we’re seizing them, they’re pornographic … in one of the pictures the boys have painted their genitals with psychedelic colours.’ I cracked up laughing on the phone and thought, if he doesn’t think it’s funny, I can’t communicate with him at all … I told him I would see him in court.”4 Hockney’s confidence that he could win a court case was bolstered by his knowledge that in the U.S.A., as a result of a series of Supreme Court rulings passed in 1962, similar photographs of nude men were not considered pornographic.