Breakfast with Lucian

by Geordie Greig

  GG: ‘Was this all a mask for anti-Semitism on Maureen’s part?’

  LF: ‘Perhaps that came into it. But I had never really seen myself as a Jew in any absolute identifying way, although of course I was and am.’

  Caroline was equally resolute; she felt it was a matter of her survival, mentally as well as physically, that she should leave him, and much later she confessed to her daughter Evgenia, and also to her oldest friend Lady Anne Glenconner, that her body had somehow mysteriously and intuitively changed to prevent her having his children long before she had consciously calculated in her mind that Lucian was not good for her mental well-being. She was a subject to which he returned in our conversations, as it was a central relationship in his life, and she was the last person he married.

  GG: ‘Have you ever been obsessed by anybody?’

  LF: ‘Yes, long ago. I remember the obsession more than the person.’

  GG: ‘How driven was the obsession?’

  LF: ‘I couldn’t think about anything else.’

  GG: ‘Did you get her in the end?’

  LF: ‘I had married her by that time.’

  GG: ‘Oh, this was Caroline.’

  LF: ‘Yes.’

  GG: ‘You were very obsessed by her, you crossed continents to find her.’

  LF: ‘Yes, all the time, but on the other hand, I can’t pretend if I’d met someone very exciting on the train I wasn’t led astray.’

  GG: ‘How did the obsession make you feel?’

  LF: ‘Demoralised. Because I always thought, whatever happened with the obsession, I could work and when I got terribly obsessed I couldn’t really work.’

  GG: ‘That’s interesting. That brings us back to the sexual urge.’

  LF: ‘Yes, but if it was just a sexual urge you could have a sexual wank and get on with your life. But if it’s the person, if you would rather have a horrible time with someone you are obsessed with, rather than an exciting time with someone you’ve just met, that makes you realise how different you feel, doesn’t it?’

  GG: ‘I suppose that’s being in love.’

  LF: ‘Quite.’

  GG: ‘Caroline was incredibly beguiling?’

  LF: ‘If there is such a thing, I suppose so, yes. The timing was always so bad. When Caroline was looking for me I was gone, or away, or ill and when I looked for her she had disappeared. And her mother was monstrous and paid some people to have me killed.’

  GG: ‘How did you find out?’

  LF: ‘Because I knew the people. You know where I lived in Paddington. It was full of villains. She asked some people who were linked to the people who knew me. She said, “I don’t especially want to know how you do it. I just want to read that it has been done.”’

  GG: ‘Did you ever challenge her about this?’

  LF: ‘It was very difficult because she had bodyguards and crooked servants. I mean, it sounds like a really bad book.’

  GG: ‘You never had any children with Caroline.’

  LF: ‘No.’

  GG: ‘Would you not have liked to have had some?’

  LF: ‘I think anyone you like very much you want any kind of link with them, and in a way a child is an obvious one, isn’t it? I’ve never been concerned with babies or anything.’

  GG: ‘Why is that?’

  LF: ‘Must be my upbringing. You know how lots of people say how lovely a baby is and I think, “Can’t you put it down and we can have a dance together?”’

  GG: ‘And so it ended.’

  LF: ‘If there’s such a thing as fault, putting it mildly it was completely my fault.’

  They divorced in 1959 and rarely saw each other again. At the start of their break-up, Lucian was devastated. His young Paddington neighbour, Charlie Lumley, recalled how Francis Bacon was worried that Lucian might attempt suicide after having been dumped by Caroline. ‘He was a right mess and Francis told me to make sure he did not top himself,’ Lumley remembered.83

  The relationship left other difficulties in its wake. Anne Glenconner, who had been at school with Caroline, remembers appalling conversations that Lucian had with Caroline. ‘He behaved very badly towards her and said things which were cruel and it physically affected her. It was mental pain; he was very unpleasant the way he talked to her. As a result I decided I would not see him,’ she said.84

  Born Lady Anne Coke, daughter of the Earl of Leicester, she had been a Maid of Honour at the Queen’s Coronation alongside Jane Willoughby. Anne’s husband, Colin Tennant, who became the Baron Glenconner and was later famous for buying the West Indies island Mustique and turning it into a playboy resort, was completely swept up by Lucian’s charm and sat for him and bought many of his pictures. (They fell out later when Colin sold them.) One consequence of their friendship was that he met yet another of Lucian’s lovers and muses, Henrietta Moraes, whom he painted three times, notably in Girl in a Blanket (1953). She was also famously a model for Francis Bacon, who painted her at least sixteen times and whose 1963 Portrait of Henrietta Moraes sold for £21.3 million in February 2012. Colin and she started an affair and more than forty years later he had to confess to his wife that he was the father of Henrietta’s child. ‘It was not exactly what I had hoped Colin’s friendship with Lucian would bring,’ said Anne Glenconner.

  Being with Lucian in the early 1950s was a tangibly sensual experience, according to Vassilakis Takis, the Greek kinetic sculptor, who first met him at the Hotel Louisiana in Paris in 1954 when Lucian was painting Caroline’s portrait. ‘He had invited me for a cup of tea early one morning, but was tremendously awkward and dropped his brushes on the floor, then quickly picked them up in a darting movement. I had arrived early, surprising him. The whole atmosphere was sensually and electrically charged. We didn’t speak for a few moments. The shock for me and for him and Caroline didn’t pass quickly; there was a long silence. Thinking of Epicurus, I can only describe the meeting as intensely sensual,’ he said.85

  Takis was three years younger than Lucian and also working his way up in the art world. He had been a member of the Greek resistance and spent six months in prison. Charismatic, handsome and forceful, he was in Paris to further his artistic career. He later lived in London where he and Lucian shared a friendship with Francis Bacon, but more importantly, according to Takis, they shared several girlfriends. Like Lucian, Takis was a serial seducer. ‘I have had at least 500 women as lovers; that would not be an exaggeration, probably the same as Lucian,’ he told me from his ninth-floor suite in the Athens Hilton almost sixty years after he first met Lucian. With a white beard, dressed in baggy pink-red jeans, Prada sandals, smoking Rocket ‘24’ cigarettes and drinking tumblers of Johnnie Walker on the rocks, his memory was sharp, still struck by the physical potency of Lucian. As well as being a legendary womaniser, Takis also had various homosexual experiences. His sculpture of St Sebastian, made in 1974, shows a naked man with a very prominent erection, taken, he explained, by putting a plaster cast on a well-endowed peasant boy from the island of Samos, where Pythagoras had lived. ‘One of my assistants turned pages from pornographic magazines to keep him ready. It is the most erotic sculpture of the twentieth century,’ stated Takis. The Russian dancer Rudolph Nureyev, a friend of Takis, fell for the twenty-two-year-old model.

  Openly candid about his own sexuality, he describes a tangible frisson between him and Lucian:

  When he saw me I was very attracted. He understands men. He was very erotic with me in one way or the other. It was an Epicurean connection, a sensual one, but not physical. You can be very erotic without having sex. I have been attracted to men and women. All is very similar, one sexuality. Lucian had this penetrating dynamism in an erotic way. I was the opposite to him. He was so quick; I was more silent. He had a beautiful physique and face with a small frame. Why didn’t we have an affair? I don’t know. I have no reason to tell lies, but we didn’t. We had been very close. Same clubs, same girls, but he was more expressive than me in his behaviour. I have had male sexual experiences so w
hy not him, he was so erotic. He could not discard that part of him. Lucian closely scrutinised me while Caroline appeared in a world of her own. His grey eyes sharply focused on me before they both asked me to go with them to a gay club for women called Feneo. Caroline complimented me on my jacket before we went out and I told her it had been lent to me by a friend. They both then again stayed silent. I waited for my whisky, looking at some of his pictures.

  The portrait of Caroline appeared to Takis to be ‘somewhere between nice and creepy at the same time’.

  Key to their relationship in London was Bacon, but also the Cumbrian painter Sheila Fell, who had a child by Takis, and who Takis believes also had an affair with Lucian. She had been a protégée of L. S. Lowry and was also a close friend of Frank Auerbach, who greatly admired her and her paintings of landscapes.

  ‘I remember Francis always wanted to find out what Lucian was doing. I remember Lucian was very happy that I said I liked Lucas Cranach. He was smiling and happy about it. We never talked about girls we had been seeing. David Sylvester [art critic and friend of Francis Bacon] was also in love with Sheila. She was very beautiful. He hated me.’86

  * * *

  In 1992, forty years after Lucian painted Girl in Bed, I found myself standing with Caroline looking at the picture, which she still owned, in the dining room of her house in Sag Harbor, Long Island, east of New York. I was there because her daughter Ivana, aged twenty-six, was my girlfriend. She was strikingly beautiful, exactly as Caroline had been, with the same luminous eyes, quirky wit and hesitant shyness. Caroline was then aged sixty-one, thin and grey-haired, her face ravaged by too little care and too much drinking, the skin no longer pale, unblemished and marble-like.

  I had first met Ivana at a dinner party on the Upper East Side of New York City in 1989, after I had been dumped by a girlfriend in London and had flown to America for ten days to forget her. On my last night in Manhattan I had sat next to Ivana and was enchanted. She was funny and very beautiful, but I also sensed something fragile. I did not realise she was vulnerable and somewhat damaged by her own dysfunctional family life. She told her story with great candour in her own memoir, Why Not Say What Happened? Like Caroline she was shy and drink made her loquacious and witty, sometimes corrosively so. Her upbringing had been chaotic and unstable, its greatest tragedy the death of her eldest sister, Natalya, from a drugs overdose aged seventeen.

  She was left confused as to whether her biological father actually was Israel Citkowitz, a Polish composer whom Caroline had married after her divorce from Lucian. Her mother mischievously suggested it might be Robert Silvers, the editor of the New York Review of Books, with whom she had had an affair. An added confusion was that Ivana then changed her surname to Lowell, after Caroline’s third and final husband, the American poet Robert Lowell. When Lowell died in 1977 in the back of a taxi in New York, he was clutching Lucian’s portrait of Caroline which he had bought for £28,000 from Lord Gowrie, one of his close friends and an art dealer who later became Mrs Thatcher’s arts minister.

  Only after her mother’s death did Ivana discover, with the help of DNA tests, that her father was in fact Ivan Moffat, an English film producer (Giant with James Dean was amongst his credits) who coincidentally had been at Dartington Hall school in Devon with Lucian. ‘It was so obvious that Ivan was her father. Just look at what he’s called and what she’s called,’ Lucian told me, perplexed by the fact that Caroline had never revealed the identity of Ivana’s real father to her.

  When we first met at that dinner in 1989, Ivana and I chatted and laughed continuously, and at the end of the night I took her telephone number before flying back to London the next day. I kept the piece of paper with her name and number in my wallet for two years until 1991, when I moved to live in New York as the American correspondent for the Sunday Times, and then I called her. We started an affair, which was to last two years. And with Ivana came Caroline, with whom we spent most weekends at her house in Sag Harbor.

  So Caroline became part of my life in her declining years. Drink emphasised her warped waspishness, her aperçus piquantly observant. Lucian’s picture Girl in Bed was above the mantelpiece. Well, sort of there, because it was a copy. The original was considered too valuable to leave in a seaside holiday house with virtually no security. Many a flatterer would coo to Caroline about the tiny, subtle brushstrokes of a genius, barely visible to the eye. She laughed at their folly.

  Caroline had a dark side, emphasised by the tragedy in her life; her brother Sheridan Dufferin, the 5th marquess, was a victim of AIDS in May 1988, ten years after her teenage daughter Natalya died. She battled in court over money with her own mother, her three marriages failed and as a mother herself she had mixed success. Where she triumphed was as a writer, producing some sharp and brilliant books such as Great Granny Webster, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1977. It was a gothic comedy seen through the eyes of an orphaned girl and her relationship with her great-grandmother, and was interpreted by some people as a roman-à-clef about her monstrously bullying mother and her own dead daughter.

  Never dull, she could indeed be unsettling. I remember hearing how she once found some baby blackbirds in her wellington boot and crushed them with her foot. ‘It was too awful, really awful, but I just did it,’ she told the biographer Victoria Glendinning.

  Caroline’s use of language was quirky. ‘Shall we go to the cunt?’ she would ask Ivana or myself when she wanted to leave Manhattan, abbreviating the word ‘country’, relishing the impropriety; or ‘Shall we have some shamp?’ as she eyed a bottle of Bollinger, in a similar vein to Francis Bacon’s famous line ‘Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends.’ (Although, as Lucian would point out, real pain was part of Francis’s sexual kicks, and so actually for his real friends too.) In her last years Caroline’s smoky, throaty rasp could be heard in many a Manhattan bar ordering a vodka, ‘with tonic on the side’, the emphasis on the word ‘side’ as that was where it remained, usually untouched. Armed with her conversational tic of eyeing a detail, isolating, repeating, exaggerating and then playing with it over and over, she was at times outrageous. Someone would be so, so fat, or have such a bad sense of humour, or write so terribly. A smoke-tarred laugh would follow, the light side which followed the dark. It was School for Scandal gossip from a steely, untrained mind. Like Lucian, she was mainly self-taught. She instinctively knew that her strongest suit was candour and ruthlessly pursued her version of the truth in her writing. Her final unfinished book was about transvestites, and she conducted her research in strange bars and clubs downtown.

  Her daughter Natalya also crossed Lucian’s life. As if he was trying to retrieve some strange echo of his relationship with Caroline, he met her after she had left Dartington, which she had also attended, and he had asked to see her. Caroline was alarmed but was too neglectful as a mother to do much about it. Natalya had her own flat and was spiralling down a path of addiction. It was a tragedy waiting to unfold on many levels. Evgenia at one time complained to Lucian when he was seeing her sister that she feared that Natalya had a serious drugs problem. Lucian dismissed this as nonsense. Evgenia could never understand why a seventeen-year-old would be allowed to have her own flat and live apart from the family and yet be so transparently unable to look after herself.

  Neither Caroline nor Lucian showed Natalya wisdom, kindness, responsibility or much decency. It was a shameful episode. Natalya confessed to her sister that she had slept with Lucian. She was seventeen; he was fifty-five. It was almost incestuous in spirit, sleeping with his ex-wife’s daughter. Shortly afterwards, she was found dead. It added a strange and unsettling coda to Caroline and Lucian’s story which left them all very uncomfortable.

  Lucian took an instinctive and unwarranted dislike to Caroline’s surviving daughters. It was something that Evgenia accepted with generosity. ‘I first met him when I was fifteen. I had dinner with him and his daughter Bella, and saw him from time to time over the years. He would never look
at you directly, but sideways and he’d quickly look away when you turned to face him. This gave him the appearance of being slightly furtive, but I believe it was because he was only interested in the truth of the unguarded moment, when a person hasn’t had a chance to put up a front, or rearrange their face. That didn’t interest him as much as emotional and physical candour.’

  Caroline often expressed a harsh view of Lucian and would provocatively tell friends that Lucian should have foreseen her abandonment of him. She had a theory that all his paintings were in some way prophetic, outlining her views in an article called ‘Portraits by Freud’, commissioned by Robert Silvers for the New York Review of Books. It was ostensibly a review of ‘Recent Works’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, but it was also psychological payback. She seemed strangely mystified and hurt as to why he had aged her unnecessarily in her portraits. The involvement with her daughter left her disgusted, but this was clearly just the surface of her resentment.

  Caroline wrote: ‘His portraits have always been prophecies rather than snapshots of the sitter as physically captured in a precise historical moment. In the past this was not so obvious because his prophecies had not yet become so dire and grim. When I used to sit for him nearly forty years ago the portraits he did of me in that period were received with an admiration that was tinged with bafflement. I myself was dismayed, others were mystified why he needed to paint a girl, who at that point still looked childish, so distressingly old.’

  She pulled no punches as she turned the tables on her former husband, and castigated his portrait of himself naked, aged seventy, with a crushing analysis, describing him as a ‘naked and paranoid Mephistopheles, crazily smashing around, evilly waving his palette knife as if he sees it as a wand or sword or sceptre. In this powerful self-dissection, Lucian Freud allows himself to be seen as wearing nothing but a pair of embarrassing unlaced boots.’