David Hockney

by Christopher Simon Sykes

  Next, he contacted the National Council for Civil Liberties who put him in touch with the prominent civil rights lawyer Benedict Birnberg, an outspoken defender of the rights of homosexuals. “I had a call from Martin Ennals, the general secretary of the NCCL,” Birnberg remembers, “asking me if I could help this young artist, David Hockney, who then came to see me in my office at London Bridge. He was artistically dressed, and he smoked prolifically. The legal atmosphere of the 1960s was still pretty repressive, with a lot of archaic legislation being enforced, so it was no surprise to me that Customs and Excise had seized these perfectly innocuous little magazines which they alleged were pornographic. They were just pictures of nude young men. So what? Quite frankly it was a ludicrous case. All I could really do was to raise hell over it, which I did as best I could.”5

  Birnberg wrote to Customs and Excise threatening legal action if the magazines were not returned. Simultaneously Hockney was marshalling his own big guns, first persuading Sir Norman Reid, the distinguished director of the Tate Gallery, to write to them explaining that Hockney was an artist with a renowned international reputation who needed the magazines for his work, and then getting the art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, author of The Nude, to agree to testify for him should the case come to court. As the fuss intensified, the press took up the story. “The wicked censor strikes again,”6 wrote a correspondent for the Guardian under the headline “POP CUSTOMS,” which led to Laura Hockney getting wind of it. She was supportive. “Isn’t it awful,” she said in a telephone call, “when you need them for your work?”7 Before long the story had reached the ears of the Home Secretary, James Callaghan, who, having more pressing problems to deal with, such as the emerging conflict in Northern Ireland and the passing of the Race Relations Act, decided that prosecuting David Hockney would be more trouble than it was worth and instructed HM Customs and Excise to return his property. This they did, though without apology.

  “I remember they were delivered back in a large brown envelope,” says Hockney, “that had OHMS written on it. There was a list of everything they’d taken, which had all been written down by the customs man in this incredibly repressed handwriting. I think they were frightened that if I took it to court I would win. I defend my way of life. I was prepared to defend myself because I thought, ‘If I don’t do it, who will? And if nobody does it, they just rule.’ ”8 It was an attitude that won him many admirers and made him something of a hero to the blossoming gay rights movement. “It really was quite an important little case,” says Birnberg. “It was a blow for liberation for David Hockney himself and it all contributed to the wave of emancipation that was going through at that time.”9

  While Hockney was fighting Customs and Excise, he kept himself grounded by working on the portrait of Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott. The American poet and art historian David Shapiro, closely following the progress of this picture for an article he was writing for Art News, gave an atmospheric description of Hockney’s studio in Powis Terrace, which, he wrote, “serves as both beehive, arsenal and coffee-mill: a few oils, finished and un- against the wall (…photos taped to the canvas); T-fluorescents above; three windows to the west; a draftsman’s desk; copperplates; radio; Rowney stacking palettes; cans and rags; Vibo French curves; electric heater; Black and Decker finishing sander; The Splendour of Brass (Telemann Overture in D Major); Lyons pure-ground coffee filled with pencils; Eagle prisma colour and other acrylics; on the floor, telephone, stapler and knives; Rowney bristle series, photos of Henry Geldzahler, Christopher Scott and the work-in-progress against the wall; also pliers, paper, palettes, rubber rollers; on another wall a photo of the New York skyline, and the Duchess of Kent arriving to open St. Thomas’s; Richard Hamilton’s poster of the Stones; Hokkers green Liquitex; an Ashai Pentax; Lepage’s gripspreader; a jar of pennies …”10

  With the recently finished Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, Hockney had broken new ground. His use of perspective draws the viewer into the picture, creating a triangular relationship between the subjects and the spectator. Isherwood frowns rather worriedly at Bachardy, reflecting his real-life concern that he had gone off to London for two months, while Bachardy smiles directly at the spectator, as if in some conspiratorial dialogue with the artist, a man of his own age. Though he preached a philosophy of sexual freedom between partners, once telling Hockney, “I have the greatest respect for lust,”11 Isherwood was prey to the fear that one day his much younger lover might leave him for someone else.

  Hockney was developing the portrait as drama, and this is no-where better realised than in Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott, a picture that is awash with tension. In the middle of the canvas, on a huge pink sofa, sits Henry, jacketless, his formal waistcoat and tie suggesting that he has just returned from the office. Staring straight ahead at the spectator, he looks relaxed, and brimming with confidence, the very image of the important museum curator. To his left stands the slim figure of Christopher Scott, dressed in a raincoat and standing stock-still, gazing into the distance in a rather vacant fashion. Hockney liked to joke that it was “St. Henry radiating light, visited by an angel in a raincoat,”12 and it has often been compared by critics to traditional Annunciation scenes. “Christopher looks rather as if he’s going to leave,” Hockney later told Mark Glazebrook, the director of the Whitechapel Gallery, “or he’s just arriving. He’s got his coat on. That is how I felt the situation was … that’s all intended in the picture.”13

  The involvement of the viewer in this picture is made all the more real by the sense that one is seated in a chair behind the glass table in the forefront. This was complicated to achieve. “It took me about two or three months to paint,” wrote Hockney. “To draw the floor I laid tapes from the vanishing point, which is about two inches above Henry’s head, to the bottom of the canvas. At one point in the work there were twenty or thirty tapes radiating from his head. I photographed the picture then—it looked like an incredible radiant glow from a halo round his head.”14

  Though his large double portraits are among his greatest work, there is a glaring omission in the oeuvre. No painting exists of Hockney himself with Peter Schlesinger, the love of his life, though a drawing does exist depicting Schlesinger sitting cross-legged on a sofa with Hockney in profile walking towards him from the right. “The closest we ever came to a double portrait featuring myself and Peter,” Hockney recalls, “were photographs we took with each other in the photograph. I might have been thinking about doing a painting but we broke up, and it would never have happened after that.”15

  Paris, December 1967 (illustration credit 9.2)

  For the time being, however, life was rosy. “We set ourselves up in Powis Terrace in quite a domestic way,” wrote Hockney. “It was very happy, very nice. I painted away there, and Peter had a little studio round the corner in Notting Hill where he did some very big paintings; they were quite ambitious.”16 This domestic harmony was a big change in London lifestyle for David, who had been used to going out almost every night with Patrick Procktor.

  Powis Terrace was being transformed by Schlesinger from the “dirty and messy and cold” flat that Don Bachardy had found when he had stayed there the previous April.17 His efforts did not go unnoticed by Ken and Laura, when they visited in early October. “David’s flat is beautiful,” wrote Laura, “—newly decorated in white walls and carpeted—large wall wardrobe with mirrored doors all around one bedroom. Kitchen modernised and very pleased I was to find he had a ‘help,’ a Mrs. Miller who is to come in three times a week.”18 There is no mention of their having met Peter, though they did meet on other occasions. “I met David’s parents several times,” Schlesinger recalls, “but we didn’t talk because they didn’t know what to say to me and I didn’t know what to say to them.”19

  The new “help,” Mrs. Miller, was a Jamaican, a little older than David, who, when she wasn’t cleaning, worked as a film extra. She was interested in art—as a young girl, she told them, she had modelled for
Jacob Epstein—and Schlesinger thought she was probably too elegant for cleaning. She spent much of her time sitting cross-legged on the kitchen table drinking endless cups of tea and smoking. “We were always hanging out,” he says, “smoking joints and discussing the paintings with Patrick, Ossie and Mo.”20 Hockney doted on her and never failed to ask her opinion on his work, while McDermott and Clark liked to tease her after Clark claimed to have found her in the kitchen putting talcum powder on her face in order to lighten her skin. She was a valuable addition to Powis Terrace, which, thanks to Schlesinger’s influence, was beginning to acquire some new furnishings, including a glass table from the über-fashionable contemporary furniture store Aram, on the King’s Road, and a huge new leather sofa bought from Harrods for the princely sum of £750. “I had never paid anything like that for a piece of furniture,” Hockney recalls, “so Peter went to Kasmin, who said, ‘Oh, David could afford three sofas like that.’ It was a terrific sofa and people could sleep on it.”21 Though his attitude to money was that he was rich if he had sufficient to do what he wanted, it still pricked Hockney’s conscience that the sofa cost more than his father earned in a year.

  Schlesinger also enjoyed combing the antiques stalls on the Portobello Road on a Saturday morning. “We had very different tastes,” says Schlesinger, “because I liked finding old things in Portobello Market, while he just preferred things that were all new. I would buy a vase for a pound. He considered a lot of the stuff I bought as being junk.”22 Among the antiques he bought were a Charles Rennie Mackintosh chair, some Lalique lamps and a rococo sledge, which were interspersed with a small forest of coloured cut-out trees, made and painted by Mo McDermott. With all the surfaces painted white, the room looked very striking. “Peter made that lovely big room really beautiful,” Celia Birtwell remembers, “with the Mackintosh chair and the glass table, the big leather sofa and the Lalique lamps. He had a hi-fi system in three sections with speakers on either side of the wall, very expensive, but really the business then. It was his way of making his mark. He pulled the flat together and transformed it.”23

  Birtwell was one of the first close friends that Schlesinger made in London. Her father was an estimating engineer in the textile business, and her mother a seamstress, making wedding dresses in Manchester; they brought up three daughters in a house full of books and flowers. She was the eldest and arty, and she always knew that what she wanted from life was new experiences. At Salford Art School, studying textile design, she met the rebellious young Mo McDermott, who in turn introduced her to “this really mad boy” called Ossie Clark, who was a student at Manchester College of Art, and another friendship was born. When Birtwell took him home, her mother immediately recognised his genius. “He liked my mother very much,” recalls Birtwell, “because she was extremely patient (unlike myself); she’d show him how to sew a collar or put a seam in. She had hours and hours of patience. She used to say to me, ‘He’s really special,’ or [of his clothes] ‘It’s a work of art, Celia.’ ”24

  When, after Salford, Birtwell came down to London, her job as a waitress at the Hades coffee bar soon reunited her with Clark, since it was one of the favoured hangouts of the students from the Royal College. “D’ya like my fucking frills?” he remembered her saying to him. She was “dressed like BB, blue jeans and Victorian blouse, boots with a lavatory heel.”25 It was not long before they became an item, bound together by creative brilliance, her talent for textile design and his for cutting, not to mention a certain physical attraction. From the start, Birtwell’s friend and fellow lodger, Pauline Boty, warned her against him. “He could be a lot of trouble for you,”26 she said.

  It was Boty who first pointed out Hockney to Birtwell while they were walking near Hennekey’s pub on the Portobello Road one Saturday morning. “I saw this extraordinary-looking guy with long hair wearing a maroon corduroy jacket,” Birtwell remembers, “and I said, ‘Who’s he?’ and she told me, ‘He’s one to watch and he’s at the Royal College and he always gets up in the social studies class and gives a lecture to the other students. He’s really smart.’ ”27 She finally met him when Hockney took up with Clark, though at first, probably out of shyness, he had little time for her other than the occasional “Oh, hello, love” when he would visit their flat in Blenheim Crescent. But this all changed in 1968. “One day we were round at Patrick Procktor’s,” says Birtwell, “and David came round and he had this rather attractive boy with him called Peter Schlesinger who was quite a gentle character, and he and I immediately got on really well. It was Peter that brought me and David together as friends because he couldn’t ignore me any more.”28

  Schlesinger’s friendship with Birtwell blossomed because they were two of a kind, gentle, artistic and rather shy: Birtwell even thought that they looked alike. They were both less gregarious than their respective partners. “I moved to Linden Gardens to a first-floor flat in 1968,” she remembers, “and that’s really where I first began to see Peter a lot … Peter would come round and visit me in the evening and we’d sit and chat while David was out at parties, and then David would come round to pick him up to take him home.”

  At weekends the two couples established a tradition of holding tea parties, invitations to which quickly became sought-after. “I like tea parties because they’re not like dinner,” Hockney used to say, meaning that people would leave after tea, allowing him to get back to work. Organised by Schlesinger, they had to be done in Hockney’s style, a throwback to his mother’s teas when he was a child, with a proper china tea service, and cakes and sandwiches. Invitations would go out to between ten and fifteen people, of whom there was a core group consisting of Patrick Procktor, Mo McDermott, Anne Upton, Maurice Payne, Kasmin and his wife Jane, Lindy and Sheridan Dufferin, Mark Lancaster and the Clarks, to which was added a cosmopolitan mixture of people Hockney might have run into during the week or was working with at the time, or who just happened to be cruising the Portobello Road on a Saturday. “Powis Terrace tea parties,” wrote Clark in his diary in 1969. “EVERYBODY THERE.”29

  It was not long before these gatherings got out of control. “What happened later,” says Melissa North, a girlfriend of Tony Richardson, “was that after the flat was enlarged and all glammed up, it became a destination for collectors and smart American hostesses and people like that when they came to London. They would go to David Hockney’s for tea, and as the tea parties had always been very open, they suddenly went from being the same twelve people to being forty people and he didn’t like it any more.”30 “… the last one I gave,” he told Gordon Burn in 1971, “I invited about … well I invited thirty-two, but you know, people bring other people, so about sixty turned up. Well it was chaos! Not everybody could have a cup of tea, so I stopped giving them.”31

  As they saw more and more of one another, Hockney and Birtwell gradually became friends too. “I soon discovered the great thing about her is that she is very funny,” he recalls, “and within ten minutes of meeting each other we were always laughing, and that’s what I loved about her. They say that laughing clears the lungs and I said to Celia, ‘That’s it. People who shouldn’t smoke are people who never laugh.’ So we became great friends.”32 It also suited Birtwell to have two kind gay men in her life at a time when life with Clark was becoming increasingly difficult. Clark’s career had taken off in 1965 when Alice Pollock, the owner of the fashionable boutique Quorum, on the King’s Road, had signed him up exclusively, and he was soon dressing the rich and famous at a time when London was seen as the most swinging city in the world, as well as designing stage costumes for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He had no qualms about throwing himself full pelt into the lifestyle that accompanied fame, but he had no backup, and this was to be his downfall. “Ossie was a terrific person,” says David, “but his tragedy was that he needed somebody to organise him, like I had Kasmin. But he didn’t have anybody who could do that for him at that point. The problem was simple, in that he used to work very hard to produce an incredible col
lection, and the moment he had some money, then he would stop. He was a rock ’n’ roller and he always wanted to go off to the rock ’n’ roll parties.”33 As the fame and the money went to Clark’s head, he started taking too many drugs, became sexually promiscuous, and was often violent to Birtwell, who leant on Schlesinger and Hockney for support.

  When Hockney went home for Christmas that year, he left Schlesinger, who couldn’t afford to go home to America, behind in London. Though Hockney was only away for two days, they were not happy ones for Schlesinger. “The first Christmas I spent in London I spent on my own,” he says. “I wasn’t invited anywhere, and it was rather bleak.”34 Meanwhile, Laura recorded: “David came Christmas Eve and we had Pork and Christmas Pud etc.” He arrived home with a welcome and generous gift: the money for their trip to Australia. “Ken and I received a cheque for £800, with more to follow promised … What a day we had!!!” When he left Bradford on Boxing Day to return to London, she wrote: “Always feel flat when David has gone—but it has been lovely … I did ask if the trip was to cost him more than he expected, but he said not to worry—‘money is to use.’ ”35

  By this point in his life, Hockney could easily afford to send his parents to Australia. Since his first show with Kasmin, his work had fetched more year after year, and his large pictures were now fetching between £1,000 and £2,000, at least a fivefold increase since 1963. “I had to keep adjusting the prices,” Kasmin recalls. “They never stayed still. There were many more people wanting paintings than there were paintings, and not just people who came to me as clients asking to buy one, but also people who had art galleries who wanted to have shows. Trying to work out how to ration out the paintings was one of the hardest jobs I had as an art dealer.”36