by Craig Brown
Ginsberg likes to shock convention, but Bacon prefers to go one step further, and shock the shockers. He bashes away at the halo of sanctity that hovers over artists, and takes to goading Ginsberg and Burroughs with provocative statements about abstract art. ‘It’s never meant anything to me. To me, even the best of it is just decoration. Jackson Pollock’s paintings might be very pretty but they’re just decoration. They look like old lace ... I always think marvellous painting will come out of America, because it should, a country with an enormous mixed race. But it doesn’t, it’s so dreary, those super realists, the abstract expressionists, all so very dreary.’
‘What about Jasper Johns?’ asks Burroughs, when they recreate their Tangier discussions years later.
‘I try never to think about Jasper Johns. I hate the stuff and don’t like him either.’57
Bacon plays the philistine, pour épater les beats, sticking pins into anything that smacks of the self-indulgent and the self-important. Ginsberg, on the other hand, sees art as a sacred calling. Still searching for common ground, he talks about editing The Naked Lunch: how, he wonders, can Bacon tell when a painting is complete? Bacon says that he can’t orchestrate or predict it – he simply finishes with a chance brush-stroke that locks in the magic. In a gesture of friendship, Ginsberg offers Bacon a drink out of an old tin can he has picked out of the garbage. This is a further misjudgement; Bacon, horrified, refuses it.
Ginsberg hopes to be immortalised on canvas by Bacon, preferably in the nude; he has never been slow to strip off. Perhaps by way of an advertisement, he hands Bacon some photographs of himself and Orlovsky naked in bed. Would Francis like them to sit for him?
‘That might be awkward, Allen. How long can you hold it?’ asks Bacon, saucily.
Bacon pockets the photographs, though he has no interest in the naked Ginsberg or his boyfriend. Something else has caught his eye: the clapped-out old mattress. ‘Those photos were terribly useful,’ he explains later. ‘The lovers weren’t interesting, but there was something about the way the mattress spilled over the metal spindles of the bed that was so despairing. So I decided to keep them and use them.’
FRANCIS BACON
HECKLES
HRH PRINCESS MARGARET
Warwick House, St James’s Place, London SW1
1977
Brought along by his fellow painter Lucian Freud to a ball thrown by Lady Rothermere, Francis Bacon clings to the champagne bar. He is not one for mingling, and would certainly never dance. At the furthest corner of the ballroom, Princess Margaret, emboldened by champagne and egged on by her fellow party-goers, decides to put on a bit of a performance.
Traditionally, members of the royal family are granted a special licence as entertainers. Their efforts at sparkling, however dim, are greeted with enthusiasm; their repartee, however pedestrian, sets tables aroar; their musical forays, however painful, are hailed as delightful. This conspiracy of sycophancy has, over the years, led one or two of them to gain an inflated notion of their own talents.
From an early age, Princess Margaret has been encouraged to believe that she is blessed with a heaven-sent knack for playing the piano, singing and mimicry. ‘She has an impeccable ear, her piano playing is simple but has perfect rhythm and her method of singing is really very funny,’ swoons Noël Coward in 1948.
Occasionally, a guest might come a cropper, misdirecting the gush. The biographer Michael Holroyd was once placed on the right of Princess Margaret at dinner. The Princess began a series of terrible impersonations, adopting a heavy Irish brogue for the author Edna O’Brien, who was also present. Holroyd laughed dutifully at the first two, which he vaguely recognised, then continued to laugh at a third – a high-pitched, nasal squeak – which he did not. ‘If I may say so, ma’am, that’s your funniest yet!’ he remarked. The moment he did so, it occurred to him that the Princess had, in fact, reverted to her own voice.
‘What happened next?’ the Princess’s biographer asks him some years later.
‘I seem to remember,’ Holroyd recalls, ‘that she spent rather a lot of time talking to the person on her left.’
As a house-guest, Princess Margaret is allowed exceptional leeway. Hosts bend over backwards to satisfy her every whim. One hostess has the guest bedroom rewired so that the Princess can employ her Carmen rollers. Another swims out to her in a pool, fully clothed, bearing the glass of gin-and-tonic she has ordered. Lights in dining rooms are always kept bright, in accordance with the Princess’s professed belief that ‘a dark dining room upsets my tummy. I can’t see what I’m eating.’ When the Princess finally departs, her hosts invariably take a masochistic pleasure in recounting her more outrageous demands to their friends and acquaintances. If the Princess were aware of the pleasure afforded by her haughtiness, she might feel less inclined to make such a display of it.58
On this particular evening at Warwick House, she has the wind behind her. She strides up to the stage, adroitly removes the microphone from the hand of the singer and instructs the band to strike up some Cole Porter. ‘All the guests who had been waltzing under the vast chandeliers instantly stopped dancing,’ recalls Lady Caroline Blackwood, the former wife of Lucian Freud. ‘They stood like Buckingham Palace sentries called to attention to watch the royal performance.’ Francis Bacon, however, stays rooted to the bar.
Princess Margaret bursts into song. She sings off-key, but with ever-increasing gusto, egged on, as always, by her jubilant fellow guests, who shout and roar and beg for more. Consequently, she grows fearfully over-excited and starts, in the words of one observer, ‘wiggling around in her crinoline and tiara as she tried to mimic the sexual movements of the professional entertainer. Her dress with its petticoats bolstered by the wooden hoops that ballooned her skirts was unsuitable for the slinky act but all the rapturous applause seemed to make her forget this.’
She has just embarked on ‘Let’s Do It’ when ‘a very menacing and unexpected sound came from the back of the crowded ballroom. It grew louder and louder until it eclipsed Princess Margaret’s singing. It was the sound of jeering and hissing, of prolonged and thunderous booing.’
Everyone looks round aghast, as though drawn by H.M. Bateman. It is Francis Bacon, barracking the Princess from the bar. As Lucian Freud remembers it, ‘People became extraordinarily angry about it. Binkie Beaumont, the promoter, was one of the angriest. Because I was the one who had brought him, they turned on me, blaming me. Of course, in response I was fiercely defensive of Francis.’
Princess Margaret falters and screeches to a halt mid-song. ‘Mortification turned her face scarlet and then it went ashen. Because she looked close to tears, her smallness of stature suddenly made her look rather pitiful.’
The Princess rushes offstage. The band stops playing, unsure what to do next. A furious red-faced man comes up to Caroline Blackwood and splutters, ‘It’s that dreadful Francis Bacon! He calls himself a painter but he does the most frightful paintings. I just don’t understand how a creature like him was allowed to get in here. It’s really quite disgraceful!’
Bacon complains afterwards: ‘Her singing was really too awful. Someone had to stop her. If you’re going to do something, you shouldn’t do it as badly as that.’
Caroline Blackwood is one of the few present to be impressed by Bacon’s refusal to kowtow. ‘I can think of no one else who would have dared to boo a member of the royal family in a private house. Among all the guests assembled in Lady Rothermere’s ballroom, more than a few were secretly suffering from Princess Margaret’s singing, but they suffered in silence, gagged by their snobbery. Francis could not be gagged. If he found a performance shoddy, no conventional trepidation prevented him from expressing his reactions. Sometimes his opinions could be biased and perverse and unfair, but he never cared if they created outrage ... He had an anarchic fearlessness which was unique.’
Thirteen years later, Lord Rothermere is introduced to Francis Bacon at a Daily Mail party, but fails to recognise him. ‘And what do you
do?’ he asks.
‘I’m a nancy boy,’ replies Bacon.
HRH PRINCESS MARGARET
WATCHES A BLUE MOVIE WITH
KENNETH TYNAN
20 Thurloe Square, London SW7
Spring 1968
Princess Margaret is a regular guest at Kenneth and Kathleen Tynan’s risqué parties. Tynan, who has made his name as an iconoclastic theatre critic, is one of the most flamboyant figures in town. His parties are formed from a combustible mix of pornography, snobbery and revolution. ‘A new kind of man is being evolved in Castro’s Cuba,’ is just one of his beliefs, yet at the same time he has been known to upbraid guests for failing to curtsey to the Princess. He is at the cutting edge of both left-wing politics and high society, and refuses to acknowledge any contradiction. Swanning around his own party in a deep purple suit, he causes a gatecrashing member of the Workers Revolutionary Party to ask, ‘Who’s the antiques dealer?’
The Tynans’ guests dress in the latest beads and bobbles, consuming Kathleen’s turbot monegasque or lamb Casa Botin, drinking fine wine and, when they feel like it, taking drugs. Tynan runs his parties as though they were theatrical productions, with Kathleen as his stage manager. His choice of cast members is determined by their capacity for friction. He grows bored if no row is brewing or in progress, and fills any vacuum by plotting ever more outlandish diversions.
‘I remember very clearly at one of our parties somebody suggesting a Pee-In at Buckingham Palace,’ Kathleen recalls. ‘On another occasion, to emulate the students who had occupied the Beaux Arts, we planned to take over Covent Garden opera house. An argument started among the prospective occupiers over what we would present on stage. Was it to be propaganda or art? Readings from Shelley or from Freud? And on that note of aesthetic discord the plan was dropped. Instead we wondered whether it would not be better to burn down the Old Vic.’
Mary McCarthy, Germaine Greer, Mike Nichols and Vanessa Redgrave are regular attenders. One evening John Lennon is sitting on their stone stairs in a white suit, talking about his idea for a sketch in Tynan’s forthcoming production, Oh! Calcutta!: ‘You know the idea, four fellas wanking – giving each other images – descriptions – it should be ad-libbed anyway. They should even really wank, which would be great!’ Meanwhile, Sharon Tate, newly married to Roman Polanski, is sitting cross-legged, doling out hash brownies she has just baked.
Tynan is forever on the lookout for new forms of sexual adventure. In July 1961, after Jonathan Miller tells him of a group of motorcyclists who wear masks, drive at breakneck speeds, have orgasms and then throw themselves off their bikes to their deaths, he takes his guests in a taxi (‘costing fortunes’) to the spot where the ritual is supposed to take place, but they find nothing happening. ‘It was deadly respectable and the only crazy people around were us,’ remembers Christopher Isherwood.
On this particular evening, Ken has decided to show avant-garde films as an after-dinner entertainment. There are just eight for dinner: the playwright Harold Pinter and his actress wife Vivien Merchant, the comedian Peter Cook and his wife Wendy, and Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret. Within the next few years, all their marriages will end in divorce.
The dinner starts badly – or perhaps well, given Tynan’s preference for fireworks – when Ken attempts to present Vivien Merchant to Princess Margaret, and Merchant cocks a snook by simply carrying on talking to Peter Cook. ‘I put out my hand which was refused,’ recalls Princess Margaret, ‘so I sort of drew it up as if it were meant for another direction.’
At dinner, Merchant is placed next to Lord Snowdon, who recently photographed her playing Lady Macbeth at Stratford. ‘Of course, the only reason we artistes let you take our pictures is because you are married to her,’ she informs him, stabbing a finger in the general direction of the Princess.
At this point, ‘everyone began to drink steadily’, observes Kathleen Tynan.
After dinner, they settle down to watch the pornographic films. Tynan prides himself on being at the forefront of the permissive society. Nevertheless, he has taken the precaution of warning Lord Snowdon that there will be ‘some pretty blue material’. But Snowdon is relaxed, even excited. ‘It would be good for M,’ he replies.
The films start. ‘The English bits were amateurish and charming, with odd flashes of nipple and pubic bush,’ writes Tynan in his diary, ‘and the American stuff with fish-eye lens and zoom was so technically self-conscious that the occasional bits of explicit sex passed almost unnoticed – eg a fast zoom along an erect prick looked like a flash zoom up a factory chimney.’ The atmosphere, hopelessly awkward over dinner, is settling down into something more relaxed and playful.
But then a film by Jean Genet, Chant d’amour, begins. It is set in a prison, and features male prisoners getting up to all sorts of adventures. ‘It contained many quite unmistakeable shots of cocks – cocks limp and stiff, cocks being waved, brandished, massaged or just waggled – intercut with lyrical fantasy sequences as the convicts imagine themselves frolicking in vernal undergrowth,’ reveals Tynan.
Silence descends on the party. It is as though the sixties had just reverted to the fifties. Society suddenly seems a lot less permissive. But Peter Cook saves the day by starting to speak over the images. Tynan is thankful: ‘He supplied a commentary, treating the movie as if it were a long commercial for Cadbury’s Milk Flake chocolate and brilliantly seizing on the similarity between Genet’s woodland fantasies and the sylvan capering that inevitably accompanies, on TV, the sale of anything from cigarettes to Rolls-Royces. Within five minutes we were all helplessly rocking with laughter, Princess M. included. It was a performance of genius ... I hugged Peter for one of the funniest improvisations I have ever heard in my life.’
Sex has been skilfully filtered for comedy, relieving everyone of embarrassment. The Tynans’ guests all leave content, except, perhaps, for Harold Pinter. He is so drunk that ‘having solemnly taken his leave’, he falls all the way down the stairs.
KENNETH TYNAN
IS CUT INTO LITTLE PIECES BY
TRUMAN CAPOTE
United Nations Plaza, New York
1970
Kenneth Tynan and Truman Capote have much – perhaps a little too much – in common. They share an epigrammatic style of writing and a love of high society, and are both a combustible mix of affectations and afflictions, Capote with his high-pitched baby voice, rolling eyes, tiny stature (just over five foot two inches) and effeminate hand gestures, and Tynan with his stammer and facial contortions (lips puckering, eyes squinting shut). Tynan has also developed a louche way of holding his cigarette between his two middle fingers.
Both men have been dandies since their youth. At Oxford, Kenneth Tynan – middle name Peacock – wears a purple doeskin suit and gold satin shirt. At the same age, Truman Capote – middle name Streckfus – dresses, according to one friend, ‘as though he were going to a costume ball’. Both have offbeat sexual preferences – Tynan is a sado-masochist with a love of pornography, Capote a homosexual attracted almost exclusively to heterosexuals. Both are iconoclasts, favouring artistic overstatement.59 Furthermore, the two are born – and due to die – within four years of one another.60
For a time, they are distant friends, each amused by the other’s bravura. But then in 1965, Capote writes In Cold Blood, a so-called ‘non-fiction novel’ about the murder of a Kansas farming family six years ago. Before publishing his book, Capote has been forced to wait for the execution of the two murderers, as the tale needs a suitably dramatic ending. Published in 1966, it becomes an instant bestseller, extravagantly praised on both sides of the Atlantic.
But not by Kenneth Tynan: early signs of his disapproval emerge when he encounters Capote a year earlier, in the spring of ’65. According to Tynan, Capote has just heard that the execution day has been set and is hopping up and down with glee, clapping his hands, saying, ‘I’m beside myself! Beside myself! Beside myself with joy!’ Tynan is shocked. They have an argument, and Tynan ends up
calling Capote’s behaviour ‘outrageous’.61
The following autumn, Capote is staying at Claridge’s in London, and asks to drop in on the Tynans, just around the corner in Mount Street. The Tynans suspect that Capote, knowing Ken is planning to review his book, is intent on buttering him up. He is notably deferential and effusive. The next day, Capote sends Tynan ‘a small, rather miserable little plant’.
The review is printed in the Observer. It is a stinker. Tynan suggests that, by refusing to testify in support of the murderers’ pleas of insanity, Capote let them die, just to give his book a dramatic ending. It is a view corroborated, he says, by a ‘prominent Manhattan lawyer’. He adds, ‘Where lives are threatened, observers and recorders who shrink from participation may be said to betray their species. No piece of prose, however deathless, is worth a human life ... In cold cash, it has been estimated that In Cold Blood is likely to earn him between two and three million dollars. It seems to me that the blood in which his book is written is as cold as any in recent literature.’
