Breakfast with Lucian

by Geordie Greig

  LF: ‘For me, yes. I’ve always liked being on my own part of the time or feeling on my own. When I was sort of married I always said, “Delamere is a place of my own where I work and occasionally have people staying there.” Communal life’s never had much appeal.’

  At times, Lucian was an adorable father, the clown who did headstands, the entertainer who swirled toddlers round the room. He had a real playfulness that lit up their lives when they did see him, but of course as none of them lived with him this was intermittent.

  When any child of Lucian’s was born, the complication for the mother was immense as he never made any secret of the fact that he did not do conventional family life. In 1961, for example, he became a father to three children (Bella, Isobel and Lucy) by three different women (Bernardine Coverley, Suzy Boyt and Katherine McAdam). Lucian had met Katherine when she was studying fashion at Central St Martins and he would drop by to sit in on life-drawing classes. In the interconnected life he led, it was no coincidence that she had also been a babysitter for Annie and Annabel, his children by Kitty.122 Some of his children took his surname, others mixed it with that of their mother, or never used it at all.

  Most of Lucian’s children loved him unreservedly, despite all his obvious failures and complications as a father. There was anger and resentment at his absences and neglect but his life force and charm made them wish they could see more of him. He managed to make them forgive him almost anything. The four McAdam Freuds, who he barely saw for a gaping twenty years after their mother Kathleen left him in 1966, were the most angry. When Lucy got married, aged twenty-two, ‘to have a family, be a proper family’, he never responded to the invitation to her wedding and did not attend.123 He never met her two sons, Peter and James, his grandsons.

  John Richardson saw Lucian’s casual attitude to producing so many children almost as if he was deliberately putting down roots in his adopted country by having them. Lucian’s former assistant Rebecca Wallersteiner, with whom he had a brief affair, believes it was psychologically connected (even if unconsciously) to his survival after escaping the horror of the Holocaust. Although some of his relatives were murdered, it was not something upon which he dwelt; the more obvious truth is that he simply slept with a lot of women and never took any precaution to avoid having children. The other obvious truth is that neither did they.

  Lucian’s aversion to living with any of the mothers of his children, was also possibly linked to his love-hatred of his own mother. He needed room. Lucian’s friend Cyril Connolly famously wrote that the pram in the hallway is an enemy to art, but it was more than this – Lucian could not bear a pram anywhere in the house. His daughter Jane believed he saw womankind as very separate: ‘They were another species for him. This is connected with his mother and her suffocation of him. I asked him about her in the 1990s and he grimaced and said she had been too intrusive. I said I loved her although she did ask a lot of questions. He said she was easier to deal with when she “didn’t care” any more towards the end of her life.’124

  Lucian’s second daughter, Annie’s sister Annabel, suffered much anguish in her childhood. His portrait of her in his studio sleeping, lying on her side wearing a blue dressing gown, shows her in a state of deep sleep, almost as if sedated. It is tender and loving, her face hidden from view. It is extraordinary how he can make a girl whose face is not visible seem vulnerable and moving. There is a sense that this may be the best that he can do: her resting, him observing, finding a way to make their worlds come together.

  Painting his children was very important for him – and for them. Annie, Bella, Esther, Rose and Freddy all sat for him naked. Jane McAdam Freud was never herself asked to sit, but thought hard about what it meant to have a father who painted his children naked. ‘We understood that he lived by his own rules. Sometimes this appeared defiant, childlike or childish even. His feelings were his philosophy. He was allowed to be rather childish in relation to responsibility. However, as he appeared both frightened and frightening, interrogating this would have been rather like questioning the Wizard of Oz because his frightening demeanour masked his fear.’125

  Another important woman in Lucian’s life, Bernardine Coverley, was just sixteen when she met him in a bar in Soho in 1959. Born to Irish Catholic parents who ran a pub in Brixton, she had been evacuated during the Second World War and sent to a boarding school from the age of four. When she was fifteen her parents moved back to Ireland to buy a farm, but she headed to London, where she met the man who would become the father of her two daughters, Bella (who she had when she was eighteen) followed by Esther two years later. When they met, Bernardine had a menial job for a national newspaper but told her parents she was in journalism. Lucian first painted her aged seventeen when she was pregnant. He was thirty-seven and had been married twice. They never lived together but were close to each other.

  By the time Esther was born, Bernardine had moved to Camden and the relationship was unravelling. ‘She was very independent and didn’t want to play the game she felt she’d have to play to stay involved with him, accepting he had other women, pretending not to mind,’ said Esther.126 When Esther was four Bernardine showed her independence by taking both her daughters to live in Morocco. It was a momentous eighteen months, and Esther based her novel Hideous Kinky on the bohemian escape to a souk in Marrakech. It was the ultimate way for Bernardine to distance herself from Lucian, and also a fierce reminder of her not wanting to rely upon him or dance to his faithless tune. Kate Winslet played Bernardine in the film version.

  Bella remembers seeing very little of her father until she was about eleven. She and Esther lived with their mother in East Sussex, and Lucian would turn up randomly without warning. ‘I’m sure he didn’t tell my mother and my sort of stepfather, who I didn’t like – and nor did he. I just remember that he arrived in a dark blue Bentley with his girlfriend Jacquetta and her eldest son Jago. Dad showing up unexpectedly was a revolutionary gesture and his unapologetic manner was so exciting. It made us feel like he was breaking us out of prison. He looked around a bit and then drove off. He felt like an unshakeable ally, and that was how I felt towards him from then on.’

  When Bella was sixteen she left home and Lucian organised for her to share a flat belonging to one of his friends with her half-sister Rose. Almost straight away she began sitting for a portrait, and she was given a code when calling him – ‘ring twice and then ring back’. ‘I couldn’t wait to get started and spend time with him. He was such good company and so irreverent. I felt terribly proud going out to dinner with him at Wheeler’s in Soho. He dressed almost like a tramp in blue-checked cook’s trousers covered in paint (taxis often wouldn’t stop for him) but the waiters gave him the best table as he left such enormous tips.’127

  Lucian was very close to Bella and Esther, painting both of them clothed as well as naked, and seeing as much of them as he did any of his children. He painted Bella as an infant and then more than a dozen times. According to Esther, her father and mother remained on good terms: ‘Dad always spoke admiringly of her. And they’d often see each other at Bella’s [fashion]shows or my first nights when I was an actress. They were both always interested in hearing about each other, and talked very little about the past and what their relationship was like. But that’s how they were,’ she said.128 In her own way Bernardine was as imaginative and sprite-like as Lorna Wishart. A skilled gardener, she played the Irish drum, and travelled widely; aged sixty, she went to live in Mexico to work in an orchid nursery in the mountains. It turned into a book about her wanderings, Garden of the Jaguar: Travel, Plants and People in Chiapas, Mexico. She passed away in Suffolk aged sixty-eight, just four days after Lucian died.

  Lucian Freud standing on his head, with daughter Bella c. 1985 by Bruce Bernard

  * * *

  Lucian had met Suzy Boyt when he was a part-time teacher at the Slade, where she was a student. Born in 1935 to an army officer, she had been educated at home by a governess before going to boarding
school in Wiltshire. Her childhood was mostly spent at Walcott Hall in Shropshire. At the Slade she won several prizes and three of her pictures are now in the art collection of University College London. Lucian’s best-known painting of her is as one of the models in Large Interior, W11 (After Watteau). Lucian painted all of his and Suzy’s children.

  One of his strongest and most successful portraits is Rose (1978–9), as exposing as any nude painting can be, both physically and psychologically. She lies back on a sofa, her legs spread, her right hand draped across her forehead, naked save for a sheet covering her left calf and the toes of her right foot. ‘I can remember getting undressed, lying down on the sofa and shielding my eyes from the very bright bulb that was hanging from the ceiling above me,’ said Rose, who was nineteen when the painting was begun. ‘I did not realise that from where my father was standing by the easel the pose I had assumed would look quite so indecorous! I imagined that he would be looking down at me, rather than at me from all angles. I learnt then that his eyes gathered information not in the way the camera sees, in straight lines, but round corners. I think he had a moment before starting work of wondering whether he should save me from myself, but thought better of it.’129

  They only had night sittings. ‘Each lasted from when I arrived at dusk until he could not go on any more or when it got light, whichever happened sooner. Sometimes I would go home after the sitting, often at four in the morning, taking a taxi to my flat by Warwick Avenue via the all-night supermarket in Westbourne Grove, not feeling tired as I stocked up on cigarettes but treasuring the sense that some of my father’s power had rubbed off on me. Other times he would just chuck a blanket over me where I lay and let me sleep until breakfast.’

  It was educative as well as intimate: ‘He was very interested in Nietzsche, particularly Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which chimed in with my adolescent craving for absolutes and did not seem absurd at the time; I was much less critical than I am now.’

  Rose went through her own transformation from rebellious schoolgirl to drug experimenter, voyeur of both the punk and club scenes, to writer. Sitting for her father was a catalyst for change. ‘I sat more or less every night for about a year, during which I made the decision to go to university; my father had inspired me to read voraciously. It was my idea to wrap the piece of sheet round my leg when it became clear my foot was going to be amputated by the edge of the canvas.’

  Her views on the painting changed over time. ‘Crew cut, open legs, naked. It’s a great painting, now in Japan, thank God. No, I was not at all embarrassed, though, looking back, I don’t know why. Perhaps I’ve become a bit of a prude in my old age.’130

  Rose’s elder brother Ali, born in 1957, went through various stages of anger towards his father as a result of his erratic parenting, but ultimately forgave and never stopped loving him. His view was both rose-tinted and realistic about the absences in his formative years. ‘Though it troubled me for a while, the degree to which he was absent seems largely irrelevant now. His sense of family, which by his own admission was limited for much of his time, grew into a thing of substance in later life. I apologised to him for any worry I caused him during my wilder years. He replied: “That’s nice of you to say, but it doesn’t work like that. There is no such thing as free will – people just have to do what they have to do.”’

  Lucian’s words and presence were extraordinarily potent to his children. To feel his warmth was life-enhancing and to be absent from him coldly hurtful. He was closer to some rather than others and that too was not easy. Bella at his memorial service spoke of his great capacity to show love and give her time, describing both of them writing a poem together, as she shared happy memories of a father who relied upon her increasingly in his final years.

  Sometimes their time with him took on a magical narrative, and Ali remembers many otherworldly stories Lucian told, such as ‘his friendship with the opium-addicted, illegitimate son of the king of Egypt, who was so rich and handsome that he would look at Hollywood magazines and if he saw someone he liked, he would go and get them, once simultaneously having an affair with both Marlene Dietrich and Johnny Weissmuller. I believed every single word.

  ‘He also gave me advice when I owed money to villains: “Don’t bow to their threats.” We shared stories about women; he told me about the whores in Shepherd Market [in Mayfair] during the war who gave a “twopenny upright”. He told me once that what he knew about love was that he would “rather have a miserable time with someone he loved than a nice time with someone he didn’t care about”.

  ‘My memories of childhood with him were of handfuls of sixpences for the one-arm bandit in the Colony Club, playing spoof with the bar staff, Dad saying “This is my boy” to gangsters and artists, real blind black piano players performing in the smoky haze. Someone once told him that I was addicted to obsessive love, and he answered with conviction, “But, surely, obsessive love returned is the finest thing a man can experience.”’

  In his last decade he saw more of his children and in the immediate aftermath of Lucian’s death, the children talked to each other and met more than they had ever done during his lifetime. It led to a dramatic gathering at his burial, and seven months later at his memorial service in February 2012 in the National Portrait Gallery, to coincide with the retrospective exhibition of portraits.

  There was no predictable pattern with Lucian. Lucinda Lambton, for instance, remembers Lucian being a loving, attentive father to his two oldest daughters, Annie and Annabel, when they spent time with her family. Yet despite this bonding with his own children, she felt that Lucian, who was almost a stepfather to her, loathed her. ‘He told me I needed a dog handler to look after me rather than a human handler. He was malign and magical. I adored him but he was also very cruel,’ she said.131

  When Lucinda was living in Bath Road, Chiswick in her late twenties she had an encounter that was macabre and unsettling. ‘Lucian asked me to perjure myself over a driving offence. He had some girlfriend who had been in a car and wanted me to take the rap. I cannot remember the precise details but I refused. I knew it was not right. He was furious,’ she recalled. The next thing she knew her doorbell was rung late at night and a letter posted through the door. It was a piece of paper with letters cut out from newspapers to form the words ‘I am going to kill you’. Lucinda then opened the door to see who had delivered this psychotic note. She saw a car with its engine running and a man inside holding a torch beneath his chin deliberately and sinisterly to light up his face. The car drove slowly by and she saw that it was Lucian. ‘It was so frightening but there was a side to Lucian which was indelibly cruel.’

  In the next breath Lucinda explained how she would have walked across coals for him. ‘He was magical and extraordinary, but that was the point; there was a dark side to his magic which was partly why he was so attractive to everyone. The fact that he disliked me intensely and would give me long, disdainful looks was no deterrent for my wanting to be near him and to please him,’ she said.132

  Victor Chandler once boldly questioned Lucian about his role as a parent. ‘I asked if he ever felt any guilt about his behaviour towards his children, hardly seeing them. He said, “None at all.” We talked about guilt and conscience and he said he felt no guilt about what he had done, even though he must have done a lot of damage to many of them. God knows how many there were.’

  Lucian simply never examined his conscience. He also genuinely believed he gave a lot by painting them, giving them his most intense, precious time, doing what he did best – with them.

  Lucian in his bedroom in Notting Hill, May 2011

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN Finale

  In his last years Lucian went out more often. The different people whom he had kept so separate started to converge. He saw more of his children and grandchildren. His obsession with privacy diminished.

  He still loathed being snapped by the paparazzi, especially when flash was used. At Buckingham Palace he inadvertently spoiled an official photograp
h of the Queen and other recipients of the Order of Merit by stepping forward and shielding his face when the flash went off. In the picture he looks as if he is trying to do a runner, or deliberately ruin the picture. The truth was he was simply fearful that the flash would hurt his eyes and so affect his painting.

  But while he mellowed, his appetite for work never diminished. Testimony to that is his final portrait of David and his whippet Eli, the two most constant companions in Lucian’s life. This was a picture he seemed not to want to finish. Portrait of the Hound took up every morning, after he and David had met someone for breakfast in Clarke’s, or had sat and read the papers there together. It was never completed, yet somehow it seems as complete as it was ever intended to be.

  Any talk of retirement was quickly dismissed. ‘What does that mean? Not doing what you have always done so that you have to find something to do. That is what so-called hobbies are for. If I am asked about them [i.e. hobbies] I say, “Wanking,” just to stop talk of a boring topic,’ he told me.

  At the beginning of the twenty-first century he could remember his friendship with the poets Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden and also Cyril Connolly, who published his first self-portrait in the April 1940 issue of Horizon magazine when he was only seventeen years old. It was essentially his first exhibition, albeit within a magazine, and, typically of Lucian, it was in grand company and made an immediate impact among the cognoscenti. This launched him into the world of those with cultural power or money. It would remain thus. Another contributor named on the cover of the same issue was Laurie Lee, who two years later would become a bitter rival in love over Lorna Wishart. Inside was a review by George Orwell of Finland’s War of Independence by Lt. Col. J. O. Hannula, but strangely there was no mention of Orwell on the cover. Lucian later had an affair with his wife Sonia, following on from her previous lover William Coldstream, the leader of the Euston Road school of painters, who had invited Lucian to teach at the Slade and also painted his portrait.133 Lucian’s world was always populated by many of the most interesting people of his time.