As it happened, Shirley Goldfarb and Gregory Mazurovsky was causing Hockney problems, once again because of his fears about finding himself turning into a portrait painter. Rescue came from an unexpected quarter, in the form of a letter from John Cox, an opera director who was about to start work on a new production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress for Glyndebourne Opera House in Sussex. Glyndebourne had had a considerable success with their previous production, designed by the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, and it had occurred to Cox that a young contemporary artist such as Hockney, who had the same strong feeling for graphics as Lancaster had, might be just the right person to create a new production, especially since he had already done his own take on Hogarth’s paintings. What he did not know was that Hockney had been an opera lover since he was a boy, when his father had taken him to see La Bohème at the Bradford Alhambra. It also occurred to Hockney that to work in a new medium was perhaps a way out of the rut he was in. “When you’re working suddenly in another field,” he said, “you are much less afraid of failure. You kind of half expect it, so therefore you take more risks, which makes it more exciting.”17
The Glyndebourne Picnic, 1975 (illustration credit 13.2)
The weekend of 14 June, Hockney, Yves-Marie Hervé and Gregory Evans went to Glyndebourne to watch a production of Richard Strauss’s Intermezzo, directed by John Cox and starring the great Swedish soprano Elisabeth Söderström. It was only Hockney’s second visit, his first having been in the sixties to see Massenet’s Werther, and he loved it. “We stayed in the house,” he recalls, “and we were having dinner with the owners, George and Mary Christie, in the dining room and I remember hearing Gregory saying to a woman sitting next to him that he didn’t know a thing about the opera. And I thought, ‘Good for you Gregory admitting that.’ Later he used to tell me how he used to be quite intimidated by some of the Opera Houses I’d taken him to, but he said, ‘Backstage it’s just show business.’ ”18
Despite falling under the Glyndebourne spell, Hockney still had reservations about taking on the job. “I felt I didn’t know enough technically—the only thing I had ever designed for the stage before was Ubu Roi.”19 John Cox immediately put him at his ease. “I told him we had plenty of people at Glyndebourne who would help him with the working drawings and with colour. I also told him it was a process of development, rather than anyone just saying, yes, that’s lovely. Having finally accepted it, he then asked me what I wanted, and I told him that by asking him I was looking for something a little out of the ordinary, which he would initiate and between us we would then develop.”20
As soon as Hockney read the libretto, by W. H. Auden and the American poet Chester Kallman, he was transfixed. “I loved that straight away,” he wrote. “It was … a wonderful, witty, very literate libretto—which not all operas have.”21 The music he found more difficult, though he was charmed by Baba the Turk’s “Chatterbox” aria in the second act when she sings, “As I was saying, both brothers wore moustaches” and breathlessly lists all her favourite treasures—among them snuffboxes, statues of the Twelve Apostles, mummies and the Great Auk. The more he listened to the score, however, the more beautiful he began to find it, and his discovery within it of an element of eighteenth-century pastiche made him decide to return to Hogarth’s paintings for inspiration.
That the Glyndebourne commission had come about at exactly the right point in Hockney’s career is reflected in a review of an exhibition of some of his recent drawings, which opened in July at Garage Art in Earlham Street, Covent Garden. Though the critic Paul Overy admired the skill with which he captured the “foibles and eccentricities” of subjects such as Kasmin, Warhol and Geldzahler, and was impressed by “a surprising understanding of the way a woman projects her sexual personality through her clothes and poise” in the coloured drawings of Celia Birtwell, he sensed that the artist had come up against a wall. “… as with much of Hockney’s recent work, one feels he has become too wrapped up in this world in which he moves … Hockney’s talent needs themes (literary, usually) which extend it beyond the immediate circle of his personal world.”22
Before he could give The Rake’s Progress his full attention, there were pressing problems to deal with. One was his rapidly deteriorating relationship with Clark, whom he was now desperate to remove from Powis Terrace. Their friendship was compromised because Celia was threatening Clark with divorce owing to his heavy drug-taking, his promiscuity and his violence towards her, and Hockney, now nicknamed “Mr. Magoo” by Clark, had, not surprisingly, taken her side. “Mr. Magoo whining from Bradford,” wrote Clark in his diary on 5 July, “—move out by the end of this month etc,”23 and two days later, “It’s a lovely day but at 11:30 David came in on the warpath and played all his old songs again including two new ones: he’s going to store the furniture and cut off the telephone.”24 Having finally got Clark’s agreement to leave by the end of August, Hockney told Mo McDermott, “Do make sure he doesn’t pinch anything,”25 a sensible precaution as it turned out, as Clark confided to his diary on 29 August: “11 o’clock the big move to Cambridge Gardens. Ordered a telephone to be installed. The beasts won’t put in the pink thirties phones. Dare I take them from Big Brother Hockney?”26
On 2 September, Clark noted, “Organise my bed, work-room and laundry and final exit from ‘Doomsville’ Powis Terrace.”27 For Hockney, however, this was by no means the end of the story, since he was inextricably bound up with the Clarks and their unravelling relationship. There were times when he muddied the waters, rather than pour oil on them. On a visit to London four days later, for example, he took a gang of friends including Celia to Odin’s for dinner. “At one point the conversation came round to what we might all really like,” Birtwell recalls, “and I said, ‘A diamond ring,’ and David, who had had a few drinks, said, ‘I’ll buy you a diamond ring, love. Come round tomorrow morning and we’ll go and buy one.’ So in the morning I went round to his studio and he’d quite changed his mind. I felt quite embarrassed. Obviously he wasn’t lit up any more when he thought about it. Anyway, Maurice Payne happened to be there and he said, ‘Come on, David, if you don’t go now you’ll never get there before the shops close’—it was early closing on a Saturday—so we tootled off to Kutchinsky in the Brompton Road. They kept bringing out these modern settings and I said, ‘Well, I want one that looks like it came out of a Christmas cracker,’ and David said, ‘Well, why don’t you tell them, lovey?’ So I got this lovely three-carat ring. Of course he didn’t want me to tell Ossie as he felt guilty on his behalf that he’d bought me a diamond ring.”28 When Clark found out, it did little either for his self-confidence or for his feelings towards Hockney, who, he was now convinced, was pushing Celia to divorce him.
Things eventually came to a head in October, around the time of the opening of David Hockney: Tableaux et Dessins, Hockney’s first retrospective in Paris. This show, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in the Louvre, consisted of thirty paintings and seventy-five drawings, the majority of them from 1970 onwards, and they included the three paintings and most of the drawings he had completed in the Cour de Rohan. Hockney chose the pictures himself, and there was only one that he had to fight for, which was Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy. This was because the Tate Gallery claimed it was too fragile to ship. Hockney was furious and demanded a meeting with the chief conservator, a Hungarian called Stefan Slabczynski. “He was in the cellar,” says Hockney. “I said, ‘Where are the cracks?’ He said, ‘They haven’t occurred yet.’ I went up to see Norman Reid, the director, and I said, ‘The conservator doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with it yet. If something happens to it, I’ll repaint the whole bloody picture for you. Really, it’s not fair—you won’t lend a picture for a British artist having a big show in Paris—I’m appalled.’ ”29 The fuss he made was worth the trouble: Reid finally relented, and the picture went to the Louvre.
Stephen Spender wrote the introduction to the catalogue. The celebrated English poet had been an early colle
ctor of Hockney’s work, buying etchings from him while he was still at the Royal College, and had been responsible for introducing him to Christopher Isherwood. They had subsequently formed a friendship and had collaborated on the Alecto edition of the Cavafy poems. Spender compared Hockney and his contemporaries to the irreverent and antisocial tradition of art that emerged after the Industrial Revolution, as exemplified by the Pre-Raphaelites, such as Samuel Palmer and, particularly, William Blake, an artist who “remained outside the main tradition all his life, mocking at the religious and artistic institutions of his time, and producing his own totally original poetry and art.”30 Also included in the catalogue was an interview with the influential French art critic Pierre Restany, in the course of which Hockney talked about his experience in Paris. “It’s very British,” he said, “to go abroad to see something unusual and paint it … I need constant stimuli of all kinds, visual and others, that is why I travel a lot and enjoy working in lots of different places … in the paintings and drawings I’ve done here there is much more of Paris than there is of London in all I’ve been able to do in London. The reason is simple: it is easier for me to get the necessary detachment in Paris because I don’t understand much of the French character or the language. But on the other hand I know how to use my eyes and I like the sensation of detachment I can experience in Paris and which stimulates my work.”31
The show opened to the public on 11 October, and the night before, Hockney’s friends flew in for the private view. Clark was not among them. “Celia goes to Paris tomorrow,” he wrote in his diary on 9 October, “and I thought of going myself—but got very negative vibes from Mo who I spoke to on the phone—David is very off me (I hope he doesn’t brainwash Celia too much).”32 The private view was a glamourous affair, with a dinner for sixty afterwards at Maxim’s, which was paid for by an American socialite, Barbara Thurston. “She had bought a painting of mine,” Hockney recalls, “and she was one of those rich women with quite a bit of money and not many friends who thought that if they bought a painting they could take you over.”33 Kasmin remembers her as being “dotty about David. She wanted to be in the game both as a patron and a friend, and in the end she was pleading on her knees to be allowed to give the big dinner for the opening, and she forked out for a pretty grand dinner … The thing was that everyone was competing to capture a bit of the Star. It was rather like having Elvis Presley around and people asking, ‘Who is going to hold the autograph album?’ The show was a big deal for David.”34
“To stand in a clear space,” wrote the Times critic, Michael Ratcliffe, “with the sleeping nude of The Room, Tarzana to one’s left, the arrested sensations of A Bigger Splash to one’s right, with the parquet floor underfoot ending in four high windows and beyond them four stone arches of the Rivoli arcade, the eye finally resting on the scrawled announcements of Bar Mona Lisa and the Tentation du Mandarin boutique, is to feel for a moment the astonishing effect of actually standing inside a painting by David Hockney.”35 Out of everything on show, Ratcliffe selected the crayon drawings as his favourites. “The exuberance and economy,” he noted, “with which he has taken the child’s scribbling toy and transformed it—particularly in the portraits of Mark Lancaster, Mo McDermott, Peter Schlesinger, Ossie Clark and, above all, Celia Birtwell, make these in some way the crowning, sophisticated glory of the Paris show.”36
When Birtwell returned home, Clark made one last attempt to persuade her to have him back, telling her he was working hard on a new collection and had been four weeks without drugs. But to no avail. “Celia remains firm,” he wrote, “—she rubbed it in about Paris: wonderful party, photos with St. Laurent etc … I left Linden Gardens in tears.”37 Things came to a head the following day when Clark, who had been drinking heavily, went to see his lawyer to discuss the divorce, and discovered during their conversation that Celia had had a secret affair some years previously with the illustrator Adrian George. On hearing this he became, as he wrote in his diary, “like a bull with a red flag … So I split to Linden Gardens and was so furious I beat her and kicked her and her nose was a bloody mess—then I forced her to speak to her lawyer lady, and it was she who sent the police round and told me to leave …”38 A few days later he was in Paris on a working trip and went to a party given by Hockney’s French dealer, Claude Bernard. Among the guests, he wrote, was “big-mouth Shirley Goldfarb, who said to me, at the top of her voice so everyone could hear, ‘You can break your wife’s nose but you’re still very sexy to me.’ ”39 Hockney had made sure that everybody knew what Clark had done.
For Hockney, there was one downside to the success of this show: the publicity around it alerted people to the fact that he was now living in Paris. Then, a few days after the opening, Jack Hazan’s film opened in a small art cinema near the Étoile. “The film became a great success in Paris,” Hockney wrote. “… people kept stopping me in the street: loved your film. My film!…They would go to the film, then go to the exhibition to see the real paintings. People say it was a marvellous experience to watch the film and then be able to go and see the real paintings.”40 But for Hockney, now wanting to throw himself into working on his designs for The Rake’s Progress, which he had promised to deliver by Christmas, life and art were converging uncomfortably. “A lot of people were coming over and coming to see me,” he says, “and I thought, ‘This won’t be very good,’ so I took Mo and we went to LA and took a suite in the Chateau Marmont hotel.”41
Hockney’s research for the Glyndebourne project had led him back to Hogarth’s engravings of The Rake’s Progress from his original sequence of paintings: he felt that Hogarth’s precise cross-hatching technique, in which shading is achieved by the drawing of closely spaced parallel lines set at an angle, perfectly suited the jagged, linear character of the score. Stravinsky’s music, he thought, “was a pastiche of Mozart’s, and my design was a pastiche of Hogarth’s.”42 He was also convinced that the setting must remain in the eighteenth century. “I thought you couldn’t put it in the twentieth century,” he said. “The story would seem a bit too ridiculous. Even in the nineteenth century it would seem ridiculous. Instead of being at first a kind of innocent, you’d have just thought [the Rake] a fool straightaway, and therefore less interesting. I told John Cox this before I began. I said…‘Somehow we have to look at the eighteenth century and give it a twentieth-century look,’ which of course is easier than one thinks anyway. You can stylize it.”43
Apart from wanting to get away from what he would have called the “natterers,” there was another, more emotional reason why Hockney wanted to do the designs in Hollywood. Stravinsky himself had lived at the Chateau Marmont from March to April 1941, had first seen the Hogarth paintings at an exhibition in Chicago in 1947, and had written the opera in Los Angeles. Hockney left for LA on 25 October, with a penitent Mo McDermott. McDermott was in trouble on two counts, the first being that he had been plundering the Powis Terrace wine cellar. “I used to go to Burgundy with Kasmin to buy wine,” Hockney recalls, “not Rothschild-style wine, but good quality. I must have had about two hundred bottles. Then I went away to Paris, and when I came back, it was all gone. Mo had been saying to people, ‘Have a glass of plonk,’ and he’d been pouring them my nectar.”44
Worse was his heroin addiction. There are references in Ossie Clark’s diary to McDermott being “smacked out,” a situation which Hockney had only just discovered. One problem had been that McDermott’s whole life had revolved around Hockney, and with Hockney away in Paris, there had been nothing to occupy him. “I had left Mo in London and he had moved into the basement of Powis Terrace,” Hockney recalls, “but the moment I wasn’t there, there was nothing for Mo to do, and he didn’t keep asking me what he should do. Then I found out that he’d got hooked on heroin … people were quite prepared to let him have the drugs and pay them later, because they knew he would somehow get the money from me. Of course, I didn’t know this was going on. When I was told about it, I came over and threw everybody out—the ba
sement was full of about twenty people. I then got Mo into some clinic, the first of many times I dried him out.”45 The heroin addiction also explained a number of missing drawings. “I used to see people with drawings on their walls which would say ‘For Mo With Love.’ I gave Mo a lot of drawings if he liked them, to put up on his walls, and then as soon as they got to be worth a hundred quid, he’d start selling them. Then he used to steal drawings and sell them. I just wish he’d asked.”46
Along with a newly clean McDermott, Hockney also took with him to Chateau Marmont the original recording of The Rake’s Progress, directed by Stravinsky himself, and a set of very expensive pens, with red, blue, green and black inks, sourced in Germany. They borrowed a record player to listen to the music, and, working in a small apartment at the hotel, they completed sets for more than half of the eight scenes that made up the opera, making meticulous scale models in cardboard, each one 16 × 21 × 12 inches in size, the cross-hatching done in the colours that would have been standard for printing inks in the eighteenth century—red, blue, green and black. McDermott turned out to be an invaluable asset. Having once worked for the celebrated theatre designer Ralph Koltai, he understood the process by which ideas on paper become reality. “Mo advised me straight away to make models,” Hockney wrote, “because, he said, if you only make a drawing, somebody else then translates it into the space. The moment he said that I thought, I don’t want anybody else to do that, I want to do that myself. So I thought, I will make scale models. I wanted pictorialism, I wanted to bring my own attitude to sets.”47
David Hockney Page 35
