The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  ‘He was very witty and engaged about being “doomed”.’

  Freud liked Minton, who was six years older than him and streets ahead in reputation, though falling back into corrosive disillusionment as the style that he was associated with lapsed from vogue. He had arranged for Bacon to take over from him at the Royal College of Art in the autumn term, 1950, while he went off to Jamaica; Bacon was not prepared to teach, but it was felt that he would be good to have around. And so it proved. ‘John Skeaping said of Francis, “I don’t really like him, I don’t understand his work, but I’d back him on character alone.”’ In the College, in Soho, and beyond, Bacon was becoming the painter to watch, the reveller to follow.

  Robin Darwin, Rector of the Royal College, was set on improving the collegiate image, and to this end he promoted the idea of the staff room in Cromwell Road as a gentleman’s club to which he could invite the highest in the land. ‘Darwin said, “I’ve got the Duke of Edinburgh coming to lunch in the Senior Common Room: I would prefer it if none of you talk to me while I am in his company.” They sort of made me a member. But then something happened at one of the balls, I can’t remember what, and I was barred.’ Within a few years Minton too relegated himself from being a star of Darwin’s smart new Royal College to being miserably disaffected.

  ‘I saw a bit of him when I lived in St John’s Wood with Kitty. He lived then in Hamilton Terrace, not far away, in the same house as Keith Vaughan, who was anti-Semitic, very ashamed of Johnny, prim and bitter. (The best subject’s the human animal and Keith Vaughan used it as an excuse for the softest possible porn; he was so shocked by Johnny Minton’s life he asked him to move out.)

  ‘Johnny used to take us out, Kitty and me, as a couple, which never happened at any other time in my life. For instance to Goody Two Shoes. He was a sort of rather nice, rather lonely, avuncular figure, a bachelor taking out a married couple. Going to dinner at Venezia in Dean Street, Johnny would say, “How about a nice bottle of Chateau Hysteria?”’ In 1949 he had come into the Minton china fortune and spent his way through it, generously and despairingly.

  ‘A picture must succeed or fail according to its own nature,’ Minton said in Picture Post, in March 1949. His Jamaican Landscape, in 60 Paintings for ’51, was touristic; his Death of Nelson (1952) was stagily composed with a sorry crew crowded on to vertical planking. Unlike practically every new painting by Bacon, each new Minton was a disappointment and, worse, predictably so. ‘On the whole he didn’t lose himself enough in these things. On the other hand his Elizabeth David drawings are very nice.’ That was no comfort to Minton whose drawings of Mediterranean fruits and fish were visions of the unattainable in post-war Britain.

  The portrait – finished in late 1952 – is Minton the lost soul, gasping slightly. ‘He was forever dashing off,’ Michael Middleton wrote, ‘afraid he might be missing something round the corner – another party, an evening at the Jazz Club, a drink on the Soho circuit.’2 ‘What does it all mean?’ he would say.3 David Tindle, whose portrait by Minton represented him as a younger Minton and who painted a self-portrait in the style of Freud, said that Minton told him, ‘You’re the first to see something in Lucian.’ Freud had little time for Tindle and his paintings. ‘He started by doing Johnny Mintons then moved over to me and then tried to do MacBryde & Colquhouns. I did go out with one of his wives for a minute. Then he used to do various things to court me. He asked me to be godfather to one of his children.’

  Minton grew morose as Bacon’s star rose and this, Freud saw, smouldered into resentment. ‘He slightly minded his style.’ Minton jeered at Bacon in Ark, the Royal College magazine, calling him ‘Ferdie Ham’ and ‘Ferdinand Delicious’ and mimicking his volubility: ‘“I’m simply going to Monte to make a fortune. I simply am … You must all come but you must, we’ll all go and simply destroy one another.”’ Bacon responded with greater derision. ‘Champagne for my sham friends and real pain for my real friends,’ he cried, rubbing champagne into Minton’s hair. It was one of his favourite sayings.

  Freud had read on Poros George Millar’s copy of Henry James’ The Tragic Muse, in which a young English diplomat decides to become a painter and young Gabriel is sitting for him, splendid in a cloak. Looking at him posing, the former diplomat says, ‘I wonder what you will do when you are old?’ The Minton of Freud’s portrait sweats distress.

  Freud’s distraction throughout 1952 – beyond the completion of Girl/Woman with a White Dog, and over and above the portraits of Bacon and of Johnny Minton – was his other sitter, supplanting the rest: Caroline Blackwood, elder daughter of the 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and great-niece of Basil Blackwood, the original illustrator of Belloc’s Cautionary Verses, a connection that pleased him. He had first come across her, aged eighteen and a debutante, at a Rothermere party in 1949, an occasion when, he remembered, Princess Margaret tried performing Cole Porter numbers with the band, persisting until Bacon’s hisses from the back of the ballroom silenced her. (‘Princess Margaret sang and Francis heckled and Binky Beaumont said how dare he, and I said, “You are very lucky to be in the company of someone so talented,” and he said, “Pounds, shillings and pence will tell.”’) Because of this upset it wasn’t until late 1951 that Freud met her properly at White Cliffs, St Margaret’s Bay, on the Kent coast, a holiday house lent by Noël Coward to Ann Rothermere who held parties there for her O’Neill children. He fell for her, obsessively so.

  The writer James Pope-Hennessy recorded in his diary for 18 February 1952 a glum dinner with the smitten Freud. ‘He was so exhausted by the emotion of seeing a girl he is in love with in bandages after a motor accident (Lady C. Blackwood) that he collapsed, or wilted like a flower on its stalk, at nine, and I sent him home.’4

  Such ardour was striking and, to the Dowager Marchioness, Maureen Guinness, (the 4th Marquess had been killed in Burma in 1945), repulsive and alarming in that, to her, Freud was the embodiment of pretty well everything she most loathed: poor and spivvy, and Jewish, a painter too and married.

  Caroline Blackwood had been brought up to be eligible. Cutting off her allowance was the mother’s first resort. But that didn’t stop her; indeed the more her mother raged the better it suited her for, not unlike Lorna Wishart a generation or so earlier, she sought the freedom and escapades of upper-crust bohemian circles. Having been at school with Anne Dunn and at Queen’s Secretarial College in South Kensington at the same time as Wendy Abbott before she became Henrietta Law, she found herself among heady competitors if not rivals. Freud appreciated the complications. ‘When I started going out with Caroline, Henrietta was very excited; one evening Norman Bowler, Johnny Minton’s boyfriend, was dancing with Caroline and he said, “Henrietta, I think I’m going to fall in love with you.” Caroline had a fit.’ Norman Bowler went on to marry Henrietta, who was pregnant by Colin Tennant at the time. Yet Tennant was reported as being a possible husband for Princess Margaret. ‘He was sort of very well known and very style-conscious. I went out sometimes with Princess Margaret and him. (I certainly didn’t take her.) Princess Margaret was very pretty but she had a way of spoiling everything.’

  In what was for Freud a spell of ferocious attachment, he found himself newsworthy for the first time, uncontrollably so. He became not a playboy (he hadn’t the money) but a social climber, a reveller in a sharp suit (later to be dubbed the Teddy Boy style) regularly sighted in high society. ‘I had Fortnum suits. Delicately stitched. I wanted to be let into places and there was a pub in Shepherd’s Market I was turned out of. Why? “No reason given,” the man said. It was because all con men had suits on and went into clubs and took overcoats.’

  From suspected con man to accomplished dance partner (albeit impulsive rather than rhythmic) was achieved in two moves. ‘It was all one year when I was doing the deb scenes to see Caroline. There was Kitty at home and papers ringing up, saying was I the person with yellow socks dancing in the Café de Paris with Princess Margaret? I fell on top of her on a sofa at her sister Perdi
ta’s dance at the Hurlingham. “Would you care to dance?” I said. I’d had so much to drink: it’s exciting to test your balance then. She said it was the most terrifying thing that had ever happened to her. She got panicky once at the Café de Paris as she couldn’t find her comb. I used to have a comb in those days – long hair – and I put my hand in my pocket for it. “Is that it?” “Did you use my comb?” “No. But I may have.” Absolute horror.

  ‘When I first met her – about 1949 – Princess Margaret said would I do a picture of her and Elizabeth Cavendish, her lady in waiting? She would shine, and Colin said don’t ask anybody too pretty to be with her. Elizabeth Cavendish I did paint [Head of a Woman (1950)].’

  Caroline Blackwood, blonde with startled eyes and impulsively applied lipstick, looked, to him, the perfect ingénue. ‘When I first went to her room in Hans Crescent the only book she had was Lady Addle Remembers, a book of bogus grand memoirs like My Royal Past by Cecil Beaton. When I met Caroline the adjective she used was “heavenly” and I started using it to try and get used to it: my way of not jumping when she said it was to inoculate myself against it.’ With no thought at that time of herself becoming a writer, she was working as secretary to Maurice Richardson at the Hulton Press where he was Literary Consultant to Lilliput. ‘He and Claud Cockburn started a paper without Edward Hulton’s knowledge and I did horror comic sci-fi drawings for it, never used, but I did them to please Caroline. Maurice Richardson, very crazy, manic-depressive, a cousin of John Richardson, Picasso’s future biographer, said to Claud Cockburn how exciting it was to have both the paper and her. “You can’t take her out,” Cockburn said to him. Then Edward Hulton, pompous autocrat, found out about the magazine and stopped it.’

  Freud already knew that the best way of impressing a girl and ensuring that she devoted her time to him was to paint her. Hence the life-size, and surviving, representation of her left eye, intended as one of a pair. (The other was to have been sister Perdita’s right one but the whim blinked so to speak.) Having given Caroline a dead starfish – ‘I always liked marine life’ – strung on a thread, a more romantic adornment than any jeweller’s necklace, he set her sitting for a portrait. The resulting Girl with Starfish Necklace was a taster, testing the reliability of someone possibly rebellious, certainly impressionable. It had worked with Lorna and Kitty, so why not with Caroline?

  ‘I did it before I knew her. It was pretty overworked and it’s got that thing I slightly despise of people saying “You are so beautiful I must paint you.”’ Pin-up that it was, more image than portrait, he sold it to his younger brother as a pin-up to boast about. ‘I made Cle buy it. He beat me down to £40.’

  Needing more than that if he were to conduct his pursuit of Caroline successfully he decided to sell Fleurs, the Max Ernst that he had bought from the Redfern during the war for a bargain £50, and approached Roland Penrose. ‘I needed money badly and he said, “I can’t buy it from you; I’ll give you £50 or £100 and if you really have to sell it then sell it to me.” I rang him six months later but he was away, so I sold it to Gimpels and he was angry; it was hopeless making any excuse.’ With £120 from Gimpels he had enough to take him for a while to Ireland where Caroline was to be found. There he stayed with Ann Rothermere’s son Raymond O’Neill. ‘Raymond was way under twenty-one, so questions were asked. Why was I there, with Caroline, star of County Down?’ The O’Neills had been Kings of Ireland. ‘Raymond’s middle name was Clandeboye and he was very angry that these fucking Scots, like the Dufferins, were put in and given lands and houses. He was disdainful. He sold villages now and then.

  ‘Went to the North, to Belfast, new to me. I remember thinking how desperate it was. Clandeboye, where Caroline lived, was barred to me but Caroline took me there on a surreptitious trip when her mother went away.’ Clandeboye, a handsomely dilapidated country house outside Belfast, is stuffed with relics of the Raj accumulated by the 8th Viceroy and 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. It was a favourite weekend resort of John Betjeman who had been a bosom friend of the late 4th Marquess. Freud was not so much overawed as nauseated by the pressures of the place. ‘The gloomy lake. The library. The stuffed bear in the hall with a tray: it had been tame and it had scratched someone, so it was shot and stuffed.’

  He soon had enough of Ulster. ‘I got Caroline to come across the border too and fled to the South, first to Dublin, then to Janetta [the Dorchester dinner date from 1941] and Derek Jackson who were about to have Rose.’ Jackson was a distinguished but by all accounts fascistic spectroscopist, war hero and steeplechaser, chairman and part owner of the News of the World; he rode in the Grand National three times and had twice that many marriages. ‘He left her – Janetta – when he realised it wasn’t a boy.’ Then in August they stayed with Caroline’s aunt, Oonagh Oranmore – Lady Oranmore and Browne – at Luggala, a Gothic Revival shooting lodge where Rose La Touche (Ruskin’s too-young love object) had lived, in a house party that included new and old acquaintances, among them the writers Claud Cockburn and Francis Wyndham. It was the week of the Dublin horse show and Lord Powerscourt’s Ball, to which Freud went in his tartan trousers. ‘“You can’t come dressed like that,” the butler said. I assaulted Powerscourt on the race course as he had been rude to Oonagh. Huge great angry-looking thug and I said to him, “You were very rude to my hostess.” So I took his tie, very yellow, and pulled it very tight. A racing official came.’

  Freud persisted in his courtship, and relations with the Marchioness worsened to venomous farce. At the end of the year he stayed again with Raymond O’Neill. Ann Fleming, as she now became – she married Ian Fleming in March 1952 – wrote to Cecil Beaton giving Raymond’s account of how Freud played retriever at a pheasant shoot on the O’Neill estate, shocking the Governor and the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. ‘He was socially a disaster in that parish-pump border state and of course’, she added, ‘I am blamed for encouraging bizarre tartan-trousered eccentric artists to pursue virginal Marchioness’s daughters.’ There was scandal: O’Neill’s agent, himself an earl, discovered Caroline and her artist friend together on a hearthrug. ‘The agent’, Ann Fleming added, ‘is a pompous ass and he told R that that kind of thing would do him no good. Oh dear.’5

  By his own account Freud was relentlessly harried. ‘It was very sticky. Absolutely terrifying. On New Year’s Eve we went to a dance at Newtownards and Caroline said, “Do dance with Mum, if you can face it.” She was a dream in pale blue.’ They danced. ‘Just then midnight struck. Horrors. I wanted to be with Caroline, and so I shot away to Caroline. Maureen thought I was a ridiculous person.’ Then there were his table manners and eating habits. Once, at dinner, he came, piled up his plate, didn’t touch it and just disappeared. Table manners and eating habits were a contentious matter. Altogether she loathed him.

  ‘She used to quote Cole Porter (These Foolish Things) at me.’

  Noted for being a friend of the Queen (then about to become Queen Mother), for being the inspiration of Osbert Lancaster’s beady-eyed Daily Express pocket-cartoon character Maudie Littlehampton and for having a wayward, if not deranged, sense of humour, this parodic potential mother-in-law was said to have appeared at social gatherings – private ones, it must be said – wearing such accoutrements as a comedy penis nose, horror teeth and a fart device between her legs. She could not countenance Freud’s twitchy tenacity. His pranks did not appeal. Particularly the horns he drew one night on her portrait at Clandeboye, a normally anodyne Augustus John.

  Such sympathy as the romance attracted was provoked, in part at least, by the rabid hectoring to which the couple were subjected. ‘Cyril feels protective towards them both and is keen on Caroline,’ Barbara Skelton – then still married to Connolly – wrote in November 1952, describing Freud’s ‘sly bluey-green cat’s eyes’ and adding – she was at a house party at White Cliffs at the time – ‘if he is not there, he is invariably talked about.’6 The talk was often vicious. On sighting Freud at one of the Marchioness’s cocktail parties,
Randolph Churchill shouted: ‘What the bloody hell is Maureen doing? Turning her house into a bloody synagogue.’7 The next time he met him, Freud claimed, he knocked him down, for what was there to say?

  ‘At a party of the Hultons’, Reresby Sitwell saw me and said, “Fuck Freud,” and disappeared in the crowd and I walked after him and gave him a penalty kick but Reresby got his behind quickly out of the way and my foot landed in the behind of old Dowager Lady Dashwood. She rocked but didn’t fall. I apologised. “Lady Dashwood, sorry to have kicked you; I had no reason, never having met you.” Which I then realised meant that if I had met her …’

  On 18 May 1952, Kitty gave birth to a daughter, Annabel. Getting pregnant had been a final bid ‘to keep Lucian’8 she later said.

  ‘I left very soon after. Kitty stayed in the house. Then she went to Epstein.’

  Freud considered himself to be acting logically, considerately even. ‘I felt, as I wanted to be with Caroline, I couldn’t really stay at Clifton Hill; I couldn’t pursue my courtship of Caroline from home. It was under siege and Kitty was very upset. There was a column in the Evening Standard, “In London Last Night”, about parties and so on: Caroline and I were always in it. So I moved to Delamere. I remember lying on the couch there, first night, mice all round me, thinking this is the bachelor life.’