Breakfast with Lucian

by Geordie Greig

  GG: ‘Were you affected by your father’s failure to become an artist?’

  LF: ‘I was aware how aesthetically my father embarrassed my mother, but what I didn’t know then was that my father had wanted to be an artist or had started to be an artist. When he met my mother – she came from sort of a grand family … well, rich, anyway – she was on a hospital visit during the First World War where my father was in hospital. I think that’s how they met.’

  GG: ‘Did she prevent him from becoming an artist?’

  LF: ‘I wouldn’t have thought that at all, but my grandfather, who had six children, was naturally worried because that’s not how to make a living. I know my father was absolutely horrible about my work very early on. I looked at my mother when he left the room in the hospital and she said not to take any notice as he had wanted to be an artist.’

  GG: ‘Did his criticism of your work hurt?’

  LF: ‘Yes, I thought “What a bastard,” only because he never talked to me and he was always distant. Yes, I did mind and he was offensively rude about them. I did mind. My subject matter was always to do with my life, who I saw, who I was thinking about. I wouldn’t consider painting someone unless I was interested in them.’

  GG: ‘Do you learn about them in the process?’

  LF: ‘Sometimes yes. If the picture works that’s exactly what does happen.’

  GG: ‘But not about yourself? You were always very protective of information about yourself?’

  LF: ‘Yes, that’s quite true: devious and secretive. I was described as that.’

  GG: ‘Was that accurate?’

  LF: ‘Yes. I’d have thought so. But you know you don’t really think of yourself in that way.’

  GG: ‘Is it important to you what happens to your pictures?’

  LF: ‘If my pictures have a life then I am pleased. But from early on I was aware that I didn’t want to think anything of mine that I didn’t like was out and on the market, so I used to go to rather elaborate lengths to stop that and one was stealing them and destroying them. Another was setting light to the place where they were. I took a lot of trouble to get rid of them and I knew professional thieves and got them to steal things of mine.’

  GG: ‘Can you give me an example?’

  LF: ‘No. I would have to say places and names and shops and galleries but even those details were unknown. Rather deliberately people were afraid to deal with my things because they knew something funny was going on. Say, for instance, that I gave a picture to someone and then they heard something of mine sold for a lot of money, they would put the other things of mine up for sale in an auction and I would have then stolen things like that. I wasn’t ideal to deal with.’

  GG: ‘Was it upsetting when people sold things?’

  LF: ‘Yes, if I had given things and then they ended up in a horrible gallery surrounded by things I loathed. Yes, I did mind. I felt a cunt and also minded it looking treacherous.’

  GG: ‘Were you aware of the war?’

  LF: ‘I was very stimulated by it.’

  GG: ‘In what way? Did it seem frightening or exciting?’

  LF: ‘Glamorous.’

  GG: ‘And did you have family or friends in the war?’

  LF: ‘Well, my family came to England because my mother didn’t like the Nazi Party getting stronger and the consequences of that.’

  So smothered was he by his mother’s claustrophobic affection and inquisitiveness that he felt an urge not to be controlled by or obliged to any woman, perhaps to recast his relationship with his mother in such a way that his was the controlling role in all relationships. He sidelined his father, although he would still ask him for money. The sweet relationship with his parents he had enjoyed when he was a child, with letters written in German full of affection, ended in his teenage days.

  He had a sense of his own destiny, with a towering ambition to be an artist. He was reckless and absolute in his personal judgements, and from early on got away with the selfishness that he never abandoned. His steel core of ambition was matched by a magical ability to charm. Both were ruthlessly marshalled in his aim to compete with the greatest artists of all time, and to lead a life unrestrained by moral scruples.

  Lucian holding a kestrel in Delamere Terrace, by Clifford Coffin for Vogue, 1948

  CHAPTER FOUR First Loves

  Lucian made an extraordinary impact as a young artist with his lithe, feral presence, sharp intellect and waspish wit. His reputation as a wild child who had burned down his art school preceded him, and it was instantly clear that he was in thrall to nobody. He was taken up by London’s intellectual elite – middle-aged moths to his youthful flame. Part of his allure was being the grandson of the man who had changed the way sex and psychology were understood, but also as someone who had escaped almost certain death if he had remained in Hitler’s Germany. Unlike Cyril Connolly, the cultural grandee of his generation who became obsessed by Lucian, and of whom so much had been expected but who had delivered so little, Lucian from his earliest years was set on achieving greatness. He was never idly to waste time. He had an obsessional work zeal which made him very distinctive from most promising youths who attract attention.

  At the same time as the intelligentsia and certain aristocratic grandees wooed him, his life was driven by his libido as much as by artistic ambition. Very quickly women became a defining essence of Lucian’s life. He was not to be deterred from what or who he wanted. ‘He was never wired for fidelity or fear,’ said Mark Fisch. Most women in his life were to some degree betrayed because he was never faithful, and he never seemed to feel a scintilla of guilt. His aversion to monogamy started in his teens at art school in Suffolk, and never left him.

  The dates of his pictures document his infidelity, as lovers overlap. But during his lifetime Lucian’s women were nearly all discreet, and did not complain at his two-timing of them or at his serial sexual opportunism. At times he was also complicated, even contrary, towards women. ‘I didn’t like girls being forward and there was a girl who when I was quite young was very friendly, she was called Diane Gollancz, [the publisher] Victor’s daughter. I minded that she was forward with me. Having had no sisters it didn’t seem right,’ he told me (displaying the chivalrous attitude towards women that existed alongside his chauvinism). All his relationships were kept separate. The central planet was Lucian, like an energy-giving sun around whom the minor planets revolved.

  There was a high expectation of secrecy and censorship. ‘I cannot even tell you where his house is, no one is allowed to know,’ John Richardson told me in the 1980s. But after his death, that silence, the extreme confidentiality that he insisted upon and which surrounded him, started to break down. Two very early girlfriends, both in their nineties, felt released from the unspoken code of silence that he had seemed to impose.

  Felicity Hellaby was a seventeen-year-old art student with chocolate brown eyes, who features in one of his earliest full-scale portraits, Girl on the Quay in 1941. She was a year older than the boy-painter she first met in 1939. She remembers him standing out in rural Suffolk with his German accent, sharp tongue, piercing blue eyes and gamin looks.

  ‘He was very, very funny, incredibly charming, and there was something about him that made me think, even then, that he was going to do extraordinary things,’ she remembered at the age of ninety-one, recalling their time together at Cedric Morris’s art school. Every day Felicity bicycled eight miles there from her parents’ home in Dedham. As their romance developed, they painted each other’s portraits.

  In the portrait, Felicity is depicted almost as a cut-out figure, standing on a cobbled quay. A single-funnelled boat comically puffs out steam on the horizon, and another docked vessel has a gangplank leading to shore. Unsmiling, she stands tall in her yellow and green-striped T-shirt and short-sleeved brown cardigan. The painting suggests pinched, wartime Britain. The colours are autumnal, an early example of his muted palette. ‘I sat for him on and off for quite a long time in the studio at
the school; Lucian added the sea and boats afterwards. They were made up,’ she said. Primitive in style, the picture shows little perspective or depth. There is a playful enjoyment in the painting of pebbles and the yellow and brown parts of the ship making it seems almost like a patchwork. Realism and fleshly reality have not yet been attempted, nor the mastery of concentrated observation which was key to his development. The artist seems in search of a style.

  Girl on the Quay, 1941

  Felicity’s father, Richard, was a New Zealand-born shipping merchant who had met her mother, Ruth, while they were in France on an art course. After studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, Ruth sold paintings to Homes & Garden magazine for their covers. With a comfortable private income Richard liked to ride and play polo, and in the late 1930s they moved to Dedham.

  Cedric Morris established the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing there in April 1937. The school was moulded by its charismatic, pipe-smoking teacher who lived in a farmhouse with his married but gay boyfriend, Arthur Lett-Haines, known as ‘Let’. Felicity Hellaby remembers Morris excitedly telling his students that they were being joined by Sigmund Freud’s teenage grandson, a wild boy who had never stayed long in any one school. ‘He was small, scruffy-looking and not the sort that young girls would automatically have a crush on, but he was confident and incredibly focused on painting and drawing. It was all he did,’ she said.

  Felicity Hellaby, 1940

  In July 1939 the school went up in flames, after which it was re-established at Benton End. Many of the students believed Lucian was responsible, careless with one of his cigarettes. ‘I don’t know if he did do it, but we sat on the side of the road afterwards all of us painting the ruins. The school burned right down. I can still see the timbers in flames and the glowing embers,’ she said. The day after the blaze the East Anglian Daily Times published a photograph of all the students at the scene, including Lucian. ‘We are shown going through the rubble trying to retrieve things, looking for our belongings. The saddest person was Cedric, who lost so many paintings,’ she recalled. From the wreckage Felicity grabbed a picture of two ducks by Morris. Still in its charred frame, it hangs today in her home on the Isle of Sark. Lucian revelled in his role of suspected arsonist, enjoying the aura of being dangerous. He did admit responsibility for the fire to me, but some friends wondered if this was wishful thinking.

  Felicity was very taken by Lucian and they kissed and canoodled in a hay barn near the school, but nothing more. Yet for seven decades she preserved his letters and postcards. Lucian gave her a drawing of sailors, which many years later she exchanged with the art dealer Anthony d’Offay for his pen and ink portrait of her from 1941. The affair was short, playful, and – unusually for Lucian – unconsummated. ‘He would sometimes send saucy Victorian postcards of bathing belles and would draw on top of the images. Neither of us had a telephone so writing was the only way to arrange to meet up,’ she said. A favourite gift from him was a scarlet military jacket with brass buttons. ‘He wrote to me about a zebra’s head, a stuffed bird and a cactus that he had been given,’ she remembered. These details indicate that he was already seeing other women because Lorna Wishart, the first woman with whom he seriously fell in love, had given him the zebra.

  It was a refreshingly uninhibited time for the students at Cedric Morris’s, according to Felicity. ‘Everyone was homosexual or lesbian at the school, or so it seemed, except someone called David Carr and his girlfriend. I remember Lucian being very close to some other older people like Peter Watson [the margarine heir and arts patron] and Stephen Spender.’

  Like Greta Garbo, whom he dated and admired, Lucian wanted to be alone, ruthlessly controlling who he saw and who saw him. ‘She was the most famous person in the world at that stage. I used to take her out. She was very nice, apart from paying, which was then a help. I remember her saying, “I wish you were normal, I think you are very attractive,” meaning something erotic, which I suppose she had not had with a young boy as I then was. I did not know what to say: “I AM on Thursdays!” was the kind of thing. I was very young. She was in her late thirties. The people in the clubs could not believe it. Cecil [Beaton] used to say “Come along Garbo, old bean, you will enjoy it when you get there,” I never forgot it. The queer tarts in Soho clubs all used to dress as Garbo or Dietrich and here I was actually taking Garbo to the clubs where these young tarts dressed as Garbo were.’

  Lucian was drawn towards bohemian, intellectual circles. Felicity remembers seeing him with Dylan Thomas at a pub in Soho (‘a sad figure propping up the bar on his own, but quite friendly’). ‘Lucian used to shift around. He used several flats, one being in Abercorn Place in St John’s Wood which he shared with his painter friend John Craxton,’ she said.

  The war was a strange time for Lucian with his parents as immigrants, and his newly adopted country locked in combat with his former homeland. He avoided getting conscripted by turning up when requested in flamboyant clothes and painting his boots pink, or so he told Victor Chandler more than thirty years later. He was thus never called up, instead going to Liverpool in April 1941, signing on to the merchant ship SS Baltrover. The ship crossed to Nova Scotia on an uncomfortable journey in a North Atlantic convoy. He remembered the vessel behind him being hit. ‘Two lifeboats got away and then the whole thing blew up. Bits of the ship and bits of people rained everywhere.’

  Lucian in his studio in Delamere Terrace

  After three months Lucian was invalided out of the merchant navy with tuberculosis, bringing back with him a pair of blue jeans, in Felicity’s view probably putting him ahead of the biggest fashion revolution in Europe. ‘No one had ever seen jeans before. He was the first person to wear jeans here,’ she said. His time as a sailor was far from plain sailing, but according to his friend the Duke of Beaufort, it was where he learned to fend for himself. ‘The worst thing on the trip was that he was then young and presumably rather nice-looking, that some of the older sailors on the boat took rather a fancy to him, and that’s when he said he learnt how to defend himself.’44

  Felicity joined the Wrens in 1943 and they never met again. ‘It had been a very happy time. We were quite fast in some ways. I can remember double whiskies down at the pub, everyone smoking including Lucian and myself. Lucian was often rather catty, but also terribly sweet. He was great fun to be around, but had a reputation for quarrelling. We managed to avoid that happening,’ she said.

  At the same time as he was seeing Felicity Hellaby, Lucian was also involved with Bettina Shaw-Lawrence, another young art student who he met in 1939 at the Café Royal in Regent Street. She was a year older than him. ‘My mother said she knew some nice boys that I’d like to meet, ‘she told me. ‘I had come back from studying in Paris and the war had just started when she took me there. There were about five boys from Bryanston including Lucian and someone called David Kentish.’45

  Lucian was impressed that she had studied under Fernand Léger in Paris. Her father, Laurie, was a First World War Royal Flying Corps pilot with an MC for gallantry. Her mother was a commercial artist for Vogue and Selfridges. With her and Kentish, another art student who later became an actor, Lucian shared a sexual competitiveness.

  Lucian liked Bettina’s brazen confidence and sometimes liked to play fast and loose with the truth, downplaying his father’s professional status by telling Bettina that Ernst was a toothpaste salesman. ‘He could say anything and often did,’ Bettina recalled. The unlikely threesome of Bettina, David and Lucian became close-knit, dubbed the ‘infernal trio’ at art school by Morris and Lett-Haines. It established his liking for complex relationships, playing people off against each other and grabbing what he wanted. Officially Bettina was David’s girlfriend, but Lucian seduced her. ‘He was exceptionally good-looking and had this slightly foreign accent which was rather attractive,’ she said. The two boys ended up in a fist fight over Bettina. The spark was a blue jersey given by David to her but which was worn by Lucian. ‘I said, “Give me my swea
ter,” and Lucian said, “No, I am keeping it,”’ recalled Bettina. David then stepped in, which resulted in a punch-up. ‘David and I were then both thrown out of the school, somehow leaving Lucian triumphantly with the sweater and still a place.’ It was even more bitter for Kentish, according to Bettina, as his father – a school governor and an admirer of Lucian’s famous grandfather – subsidised Lucian’s school fees at Bryanston.

  Bettina Shaw-Lawrence, 1939

  Their friendship survived this fallout, and in late 1939 all three travelled to Capel Curig in North Wales, to escape the wartime bombing. They stayed somewhat tensely for some weeks in a small cottage. Kentish wrote to a friend that he was ‘terrified of being alone with Lucian for any length of time’.46 By seducing Bettina, Lucian had made him feel insecure. At art school Lucian and she had become secret lovers. ‘Cheeky Lucian’, as she called him, left notes under her pillow with instructions to meet for ‘secret assignations’ in the silo tower at Benton End. ‘I may have been Lucian’s first proper girlfriend. It was funny because after the jealousy over the sweater he could not bear to be left out. He put himself in the position where he was the outsider so that he could break in and be the winner. He was very alluring, sometimes reading me poetry, some in German. It is very possible that I was the first girlfriend because the boys had all just come to London from Bryanston. It was very brief and intense. If there was any other relationship it was with another boy, and that was one of the things, other affairs were going on as they do,’ she said.

  Stephen Spender joined them in this Welsh interlude, which took place in what his second wife Natasha Litvin called his ‘homosexual phase’ that ended, she would always firmly insist, with his marriage to her in 1941. In the period between his marriages to his first wife Inez Maria Pearn and then Natasha, Spender had considered becoming a teacher, a ‘reserved’ occupation which would exempt him from military service. With this in mind he had given occasional lessons at Bryanston and became friendly with the senior boys, including Lucian and David Kentish.