‘Debo took me to a party at the Dorchester for Dirk Bogarde’s boyfriend, Tony Forwood, who had been married to Glynis Johns. Judy Garland was there, very exciting – she looked rough and bloated – I put my hand out and got four of her fingers. “Do it again, you missed one,” she said.’
Freud had already painted the Duke’s sisters, Elizabeth Cavendish, whom he hardly knew, and Anne Tree, with whom he was more friendly, and who conducted investigations into bird sperm at Mereworth in Kent; he had met her through Epstein, who made heads of both her and her husband, Michael Tree – owner of Colefax & Fowler, the interior decorators – whom Freud also painted and with whom he used to enjoy staying. (He had a snapshot of his host naked painting himself.) They had a chauffeur called Waters formerly employed by Peter Beatty, the previous owner of Mereworth who had become blind and committed suicide in 1949 by jumping out of a sixth-floor window at the Ritz. ‘He liked Waters to wheel him up to people he disliked at the races and insult them, which he could do as he was going blind.’ Freud thought Waters indestructible, so much so that he took to calling himself Louis Waters (‘Louis as like Lucian’) in later years when occasion demanded, such as staying – ostensibly incognito – at the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue.
While sitting for Freud at Delamere, three hours a morning on and off for well over a year, posed in the same room as an old bath, the Duchess noticed that he was using an Epstein drawing, a drawing of his son, to shovel coal for the fire. She offered to buy a proper dustpan and do a swap. He agreed and the drawing was hers. She enjoyed the excursions to Delamere Terrace, driving there in what he described as ‘her small Austin canvas-roof car’, a car that she lent to him once, he having pawned the Alvis, only to get it back damaged. In October 1960 she wrote to Nancy that, ‘awfully jolly’, she would be in London all week ‘because of dear little Lucy & his picture’. Nine months later she mentioned the painting again to her: ‘Dear little Lu’s likeness of me is nearly done. I think it’s marvellous.’6
Indeed Woman in a White Shirt, unprimped, unflattered, intimate, a painting that began with one eye, lone on the canvas, was marvellously different from the previous portrait of her by Pietro Annigoni, whose painting of the young Queen, a Madonna of the House of Windsor in Garter robes, serene against a clear sky, had been widely hailed in 1955 as a flawless icon for the New Elizabethan Age and was destined to hang in the Fishmongers’ Hall. In similar spirit the Duke of Devonshire had been quick to propose a painting to celebrate the renaissance of Chatsworth. The Chatsworth Annigoni was completed in 1954. The artist boasted Renaissance draughtsmanship and an affinity with Leonardo, altogether loathsome to Freud. ‘I’ve never got anywhere with Leonardo. He tried so hard for that awful airless idyll in everything. And Annigoni – all he concentrated on is the foul glaze. He did it in a modern way, with a Horlicks mixing machine or something, and he certainly got it: the Leonardo look.’ Having told the Duchess that she was not the type he preferred to paint, Annigoni made her eggshell complexioned, her arched eyebrows complemented by the limp obeisance of distant trees.
‘Diana Mosley said to Debo, a blazing smile across her face, about Annigoni: “Did he let you put the lipstick on yourself?” Diana was a bit brilliant. In jail she read a lot. She said Hitler had fine hands. That famous story of her and Nancy Mitford, who was ill, and how she sent out on a Sunday for a doctor. “First the good news,” she said. ‘I’ve found a doctor. Now the bad news: he’s a Jew.” “Haven’t you had enough?” Nancy said. “Your friend Hitler killed six million.” “It was only three million,” Diana said. “And he did it in the kindest possible way.”
‘Jessica (“Decca”) was a friend of Sonia Orwell’s, and Nancy I never got on with – she said she never liked me – but I met the mother, Lady Redesdale, who lived in a large house in Rutland Gate. I went with Debo once or twice. Works by Unity on the stairs: Napoleon Crossing the Alps, with thousands of figures: it had madness to some purpose. Lady Redesdale was pouring tea and her hand was shaking and she had to hold it and she said, “Down vile limb,” with real fury. Debo told me she “used to adore Decca. Something terrible happened. We were so close, she eloped and never told me and I practically had a breakdown.” Odd.’
Freud’s paintings for Chatsworth joined the grand assembly of works of art in the house: Reynolds, Landseer, Ricci, Murillo – and Annigoni – but, more gloriously, with Hals and Rembrandt and Poussin.
‘One could ask for the key to the library and look through the Rembrandt drawings. Debo, when her monstrous sister stayed, put Van Dyck sketchbooks on the night table.
‘I’m always interested in family over a period. From first to last I painted them over twenty-five years. It didn’t seem like a plan. Andrew’s mother, the old Duchess, said, “Why have you got this interest in my family?” I said, “I’m not claiming I’m uninterested.” She told me that when Andrew’s uncle, Charles Cavendish, whom Rosa Lewis had been so in love with that she named her hotel after him, married Adele Astaire and brought her home from America to Devonshire House in Piccadilly where the Rootes car showroom now is, he came in with tiny Adele Astaire into this long room. “And there was my husband and she did cartwheels all down the room, and that immediately won his heart.”’ Adele Astaire was tough and rude, the 11th Duke remembered, where her brother, Fred, was unfailingly charming and polite.
The Devonshires had Freud to stay with them at Lismore, their estate in Ireland. John Betjeman (deeply involved with Elizabeth Cavendish) saw him there, starting on a watercolour of a salmon that got no further than the one dead eye before putrescence set in. Being a houseguest was no way to work. Aristocratic ways were seductive but, Freud felt, ultimately lowering. ‘Can the upper classes do art? They just don’t. Not since Rochester and Byron, who could at all? Dick Wyndham? Roger de La Fresnaye? When he had consumption in hospital and drew self-portraits they were pretty nice.’
When in the course of a chat Betjeman remarked that there they were, the two of them, outsiders to some degree, Freud wondered quite what he meant. Anti-Semitism? Or did Betjeman really regard himself as socially excluded, being lower class than the Cavendish family? Either way, he didn’t agree. For one thing he enjoyed the perks of being an artist, authorised to stare, to roam freely throughout society, to enjoy a freedom that his parents could never fully experience and his brothers barely. There was satisfaction to be had from weekends spent with Reynolds portraits and Rembrandt drawings and weekdays at Delamere, slipping from the world of Burke’s Peerage back into the circulation areas of the Evening Standard and the Police Gazette.
June Keeley, a twenty-one-year old from Wimbledon, ‘a little suburban girl with a strong Catholic mother’, as she later described herself, found herself splash-headlined in the Sunday Pictorial as ‘The Five-Hour Bride’ who, regretting her marriage to an older man, albeit a millionaire, escaped during the wedding reception. The groom sued her for desertion and the case was widely reported. In the heyday of My Fair Lady this jilting June Keeley was a real-life, bang-up-to-date Eliza Doolittle: a proper caution. She was even given a day in jail for contempt of court. ‘Being the Five-Hour Bride, I thought I might as well enjoy my five minutes of fame and met Tim.’ Tim was Tim Willoughby; he asked her for a weekend to a place near Henley but when passion flared, she said, she put on cold cream and curlers. ‘It was six or eight months before I’d actually sleep with him.’
Tim Willoughby de Eresby, son of the Earl of Ancaster and heir to parts of Lincolnshire and Perthshire and much else, including two of Hogarth’s Four Times of Day paintings, was also a grandson of Nancy Astor and, arguably, the leading rake of his generation. Through him Freud became involved with Jane, his sister, fifteen months older than he, who had been one of the maids of honour at the Coronation and had told Freud, when introduced at one of the O’Neill parties at Whitecliffe seven or eight years before, that her great-grandfather owned half New York. ‘And it has declined since,’ she added.
The two Willoughbys were intrigued by
June Keeley and titillated, she reckoned, by her line of work. She could tell them about dealings with punters and about life on the margins of show business. ‘I introduced Tim to Danny La Rue at Winston’s Club. People say I was with the Willoughbys for their money; they hadn’t any then: their parents were alive. When I didn’t want to go to work they’d say, “You have to go: we need money for the weekend.” I was the milch cow.’7 She became head hostess at Churchill’s nightclub in New Bond Street, skilled at wheedling lavish tips out of Greek shipowners. ‘They’d say, “Won’t you come home with me?” I’d say, “I don’t do that, but I’ll find you a girl who will if that’s what you want.”’
Freud, who knew June initially as Tim Willoughby’s attachment and a lively girl about Soho, took her to L’Escargot and ordered snails: she kept hers in her mouth, went to the loo, she said, and spat them out. ‘I couldn’t swallow them. But I wanted to be sophisticated. One of my best teachers was Francis [Bacon]. He sorted me out. Henrietta Tavistock (née Tiarks) cornered me at a party and said, “Which finishing school did you go to?” and Francis said, “Henrietta, June never did go to a finishing school and how glad we are, because if she had she’d be as fucking boring as you are.” Then he said to me, “Don’t ever be cornered like that again.” He taught me a lot of my bitchiness, I didn’t realise it at the time. He’d be at parties and keep an eye on me.8
‘Lucian would come in sometimes, arrive at the bar in his chef’s trousers and chef’s shirt – from Denny’s in Soho – that he painted in and Harry Meadows, who ran Churchill’s, would say, “Lucian Freud is here and he wants a drink with you. Don’t bring him out of the bar into the club.” So I’d say to the Greek I was with, “I’ve got to sort something out. Give me ten minutes,” and I’d go out to the bar and Lucian would say, “What time are you finishing? We could have breakfast in Covent Garden.” So we did, occasionally. I’d come home from Churchill’s at two or three in the morning with flowers, photos and five hundred fags, and there’d be Jane sitting in bed with Tim. “How much did you make?” Tim wasn’t a very pleasant person; but I’d retaliate even worse.’ Once she found him in bed with his lodger, ‘not even shame faced; like naughty schoolboys’. The lodger was Colin Clark, son of K. Clark, and he was later to shiver at the memory of Willoughby: ‘Timmy was very dangerous. He ran his life entirely according to his whims. Timmy never took his eyes off you while he was talking to you. He spoke quietly, even gently, but he expected to be obeyed.’9
Freud was dazzled by Willoughby’s Byronic shamelessness and quite envious of his capacity for dissipation. ‘Tim liked the idea of being a big-shot ponce and living off immoral earnings. I think he was queer and ashamed of it. Sodomy: quite keen on that. I know that some girl light-heartedly mentioned it and he was terribly angry. He had a nasty streak. I rather liked a ginger-haired nightclub hostess who never charged and he said, “Come and see my new girlfriend. Aren’t I lucky?” and I went in and it was the redhead from Surbiton, amazed at the place she’d woken up in.’ Willoughby introduced him into high-stakes gaming circles. ‘He took me gambling. I didn’t know how to play chemmie. These games were illegal, held in different places; odd flats round Eaton Square, Sloane Square. I got some money, then several hundred pounds. I never tried to keep any, because my father had the copyright money and I could generally get some.’
Until the 1960s gambling in Britain was more or less covert. As Bacon had done, but on a grander scale, John Aspinall organised games, renting houses – he used Tim Willoughby’s place in Wilton Row at least once – and sending in caterers and florists to lay it on thick. Aspinall’s first wife was known as ‘The Spirit of Park Lane’; she and his mother, Lady Osborne, used to play for the house. ‘Cheat: she’d push tokens forward and whip ’em back,’ Freud noticed. The law changed in 1962 partly as a consequence of the Willoughbys and others being arrested at one of John Aspinall’s floating crap games. ‘Aspers’ was successful because he could tell a punter’s capacity to pay up. The word was that Lord Derby sold off parts of Liverpool to meet his losses. Freud could not hope to match such resources, but the urge carried him on. ‘I was always in debt. Mildly stimulating. Bailiffs I was always on good terms with. Winning is like sex. Better than sex.’
The lure was the exposure, the yielding to abandon, not just the thrill of the risk. ‘A dangerous illegal world. Tim was terribly, terribly vain. Billy Hill – the gangster – was there once, interested to meet a rich, crazy, handsome young blade. Tim was flattered at the attention and Billy Hill suggested him taking one of his “people” to Aspinall’s: a most monstrous thing to do as Tim considered Aspinall a friend.’
Jane Willoughby differed fundamentally from her brother in that he lived for pleasure but she primarily, Freud felt, had an energetic social conscience. She happened to have been in Vienna in 1956 just over the border from the Hungarian uprising and, back in London, had helped set up British Aid to Hungary. Her participation was practical and imaginative; she recommended that cosmetics be added to the first vanload of relief supplies for the refugees, guessing that these would particularly and disproportionally boost morale. Freud was to appreciate and benefit from, over the years, her loyalty and practicality. ‘Tim turned against her when she went to Hungary, very ashamed that she did charity work or (something more ignorant, to do with style) it embarrassed him.’ In the course of this venture she met Dr Noel Moynihan, a newly qualified doctor who, in the seventies, was to become Chairman of the Save the Children Fund. ‘Dr Moynihan worked, being a Catholic, at the St John and St Elizabeth Hospital, where I had my appendix out. It was near my parents. Dr Moynihan was wanting to get in with the surgeons and he said, “I looked in while you were having your appendix out: your liver’s in perfect shape.”’
Moynihan’s solicitude extended well beyond medical concerns. ‘A spiv, good in some ways, he asked me, “Is there anything you are particularly nervous about?” “My motor car’s not insured,” I said. (No one would give me cover after the first year.) So I told him, and he said, “I used to be in insurance and I’ll take care of it.” It was, I found, a criminal offence not to be insured. I was banned every so often.’ Dr Moynihan was also happy to prescribe pills to Freud. ‘I used to have purple hearts. He’d dish them out. Didn’t have them much, liked staying up all night. I stopped and then got them just for Mike [Andrews]. Mike and Frank had them.’ He never needed much sleep. ‘I used to drink. I used to get into fights all the time out of drink and be sick – wake up in the nightclub lavatories upside down when the cleaners came round at three in the morning. But to drink you must be able to go on.’
Freud persisted where instinct drove him. One of his rivals talked about ‘his amazing intensity just to get his end away’. He could be violent when thwarted, going wild, pushing a girl out of a car when she would not go home with him, kicking a man in a pub for talking out of turn. There were scuffles in the Colony Room lavatory, a girl emerging with her mouth bleeding. Once Henrietta Law woke up to find him standing over the bed (she was expecting someone else) and taking his belt off, readying himself. His ardour needed frequent recharging. He took a girl to stay in a peculiarly drab hotel in Villiers Street that Jean-Pierre Lacloche, who had a nose for gloom, had discovered on a trip to London. They spent three nights there and when they left the man who took the key said ‘All good things must come to an end, eh?’
In Soho competition might be intense but turnaround was fast. ‘Frank Norman I knew through Buhler’s Café [also known as ‘the Swiss’]. A marvellous girl, an anarchic, brainy girl, always with Negroes, took up with Frank Norman, to my amazement. I said, as I fancied her – not a question of a very good horse refusing – “I thought you only went with Negroes.” “There you are,” she said. Frank was half black.’ He was also, after a spell of ‘corrective training’, about to become a celebrated writer of wide-boy memoirs. ‘She left him and I said to her, “Why did you go?” “I can’t do it when people get successful,” she said.’
Living b
eyond whatever means he might have, Freud dressed well and drove in style. Why have a motor car if not a good one? Why regard money as anything but ammunition? Serious-minded colleagues like Patrick George marvelled to see him drive into the courtyard outside the Slade in the replacement for the Alvis. ‘Artists never even dreamed of having a grand motorcar, not unless they were Sir Alfred Munnings, and here was Freud, as broke as any lord with ancestral credit, handling a Rolls like an MG.’ At the Slade he liked to be paid in pound notes, then he could go down the road immediately to the bookmakers.
Patrick George saw Freud in the life room one day ‘flicking open his cigarette lighter to more closely examine the pubic hair of a posing model’. Freud was surprised at this. He doubted that he had ever had a cigarette lighter (‘I rarely smoked’), but, coming from Patrick George, he said, the story had to be true.
The Lives of Lucian Freud Page 54