The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Willoughby conducted himself as a neo-Regency buck; his dissipation so extravagant that, marvelling at it, Freud felt moved to compete. ‘I used to go with Tim to Aspinall’s on Thursday nights. “Let’s go and play cards,” I said, “I feel really lucky.” Ludicrous behaviour; I always lost; I’d lost £100 or so before; anyway, I’d go halves with Tim. He said, “I’m feeling incredibly unlucky; oh, OK, I’ll be lucky.” We went to the Clermont Club and I, amazingly, won £980, a huge amount in the fifties (I remember Aspinall saying, “It’s the first time I ever wrote a cheque for £980”), and gave Tim half, and bought the Rodin Crouching Woman, for £200 or £400, amazingly modest. I thought this is the life and went back a few weeks later. The only genuine players were Lord Derby and me, the others were house gamblers, phoney.’ These were known as ‘the good furniture’: bait for the big money. Freud was neither bait nor prey. He would push his fellow gamblers aside, avid for action, manners be blowed. ‘I hadn’t got any money. I started losing and after, maybe, £2,000 I might have had £150; John Derby kept winning: winning £10,000 [worth £300,000 now], and they reckoned I was out of my depth, £10,000 down; I felt dizzy and stopped. And so then everybody knew about it, and people said Aspinall should be struck off for losing my money.’

  Ann Fleming told Evelyn Waugh that she had asked ‘poor Lucian’ if he really had lost this amount and he had replied, ‘Not strictly, for I haven’t ten thousand to lose.’

  ‘Aspers’ Aspinall now discovered that Freud had no money whatsoever. Eventually a deal was worked out, not least to sustain Aspinall’s reputation: Freud would pay him off in paintings. ‘Pictures at £400 a time.’

  Freud became accustomed to dealing with losses. ‘If a huge amount, I have settled over a long time, but then the person has taken a lot off.’ On this occasion Aspinall became muddled, which helped. ‘He was so stupid. He said, “I hope you don’t mind me asking, but your pictures, is it £400 or £4,000?” He said, “Could you pay £100 a month?” As I certainly didn’t make £1,000 a year, I thought that was too much.’

  Aspinall had a private zoo near Canterbury. ‘So I did drawings of his tiger, but he lost them all. His mother, Lady Osborne, was his zookeeper and she came to Delamere in a taxi with a gorilla in her lap. She was fat and around fifty and the baby gorilla would piss – when frightened they piss – and try and bare her charlies under a sweater. “Here’s my daughter,” she said.’ Aspinall wiped off the debt, but he went on about Jews. Later, going to dinner at the Clermont with John Wilton, they said – and I was really furious – I couldn’t come in. Naturally, I was put on a list.’

  Being barred from clubs was as irksome as being banned from driving, but such penalties were insignificant obstacles to anyone inclined to run risks. Losing and winning exercised his nerve. ‘It’s the quickness which is very nice.’ To hazard was to override inhibitions: the vicissitudes were testing, the stresses were rapid entertainment. Ultimately the jeopardy was a pastime whereas painting, slow, unsure, was a process of devotion; yet of course in neither art nor recreation could success be willed or forced.

  ‘I have to say I never linked painting and economics in any way. For instance, when I went to crooked card and roulette games they asked if I’d like to work with them. Though I’d lost all my money, I really didn’t want to, because the exciting thing about gambling was the risk; also I was very conscious of getting money from the punters if I did that.’ The aim – if the itch to gamble one way and another could be so described – was to venture, to cut a dash, and Freud was careful not to subsidise risk, or diminish it, by making up for losses with paintings that he would not otherwise have let go.

  ‘I was very aware of never selling anything that I didn’t like; though I was in very serious debt I thought it out of the question. From very early on I had the professional attitude: that it’s the only harm you can do yourself.’ Freud remained resolute about this, though when most pressed he did occasionally let trivial drawings help him get his way at the bookie’s. Gambling, after all, is largely about self-deception laced with the undeniable thrill of loss. ‘Gambling is one of the few activities that quite honest people lie about. And dishonest people, God knows …’

  The pressures of work and the other pursuits were readily accommodated. Freud had no domestic ties to speak of and no concept of unsocial hours. He never needed much sleep and he liked the idea of working at all hours, as Giacometti did. ‘He did that day and night working, rather. Always in that studio.’ That presupposed not living with anyone, still less being answerable to anybody. ‘I had a period when I’d go and sit all night playing cards and then work in the morning till the first race at two in the afternoon, go to the betting shops, play all afternoon and someone would say, “If you’ve got any money left I know a really good dog at the White City.” I’d go along and have just enough to see me back. I did sometimes spend really long hours.’

  Jeffrey (‘Jeff’) Bernard, a fellow student of form and brother of Bruce Bernard, went into a betting shop in the Portobello Road one day with Freud who put £500 on a horse called Whipsnade ridden by Lester Piggott. ‘The beast was left in the stalls and was last to three-quarters of the way,’ Bernard remembered. ‘Then he began to make up ground.’ After a photo-finish and a fifteen-minute wait the stewards awarded the race to Piggott and Freud’s thrill was over. ‘During the running of the race never have I seen a man so adrenalin-filled. Not white, he looked almost transparent with nerves.’ Besides admiring Freud (‘nerves and a mind of steel’), Jeff Bernard, speaking as one of the most celebrated spongers in Soho, admitted to envy. ‘I have spent endless afternoons with him in betting shops, but then Lucian goes home, puts on the flannel suit, shaves and bathes, then appears pristine and lovely, standing toe to toe with Andrew Devonshire.’15 In the Devonshire box at Epsom, Andrew Parker-Bowles remembered, he was seen cowering from sight, scruffy where everyone else was in morning dress. ‘My Aunt Kath was doing his bets for him.’16

  Terry Miles, who worked at the Marlborough, watched Freud take a wad of money – over £4,000, he guessed, others said more like £2,500 – from the gallery to the betting shop and lose it in the minutes it took for him to order and pay for cups of tea for the two of them; this at a time when Miles made perhaps £500 a year.17

  When heavily pressed Freud pawned car or Bacon. ‘“The Buggers” (Two Figures) I pawned to Keith Lichtenstein, for quite a few years, and I kept on getting more money for it: £4,000 or £5,000. When I got it out – my father gave me the money – I tried to sell it and failed.’ It was the only Bacon he kept. ‘I lent “The Buggers” everywhere for twenty years after that. Francis said, ‘Would you lend it?’ and I said I’d never lend it again.’ Eventually Jane Willoughby had it but left it with Freud. It hung opposite the end of his bed until he died.

  His own early work was potentially saleable if not valuable by the late fifties and worth tracking down. For example he discovered Clement to be hoarding some and a ferocious clash ensued. In 1951 Ronald Searle and Kaye Webb had moved into Ian Phillips’ house in Newton Road where, during the war, Freud had left a stash of pictures. Searle happened to know Clement so, having found the paintings, he passed them on to him, assuming that he would return them to his brother. Some years later Lucian found out that he had them. ‘Guy Harte, who was a jockey, heard Cle at a race-meeting saying to someone that he’d got a better collection of my things than anyone. When I asked him about it he said that “in due course” they would come to me. Nothing happened. I went round and his wife was there and she burst into tears and said, “You can’t take them because they are behind some wine, which is very rare and can’t be moved.” So I took them.’ Back at Delamere Terrace he went through the paintings – there were ten or so – with Tim and Jane Willoughby picking out those that might be saleable. But as quickly as the Willoughbys set aside those that they thought worth something he returned them to the pile. Village Boys, Memory of London, Evacuee Boy and Woman with Rejected Suitors went to Jane Willough
by: two he gave her, two she bought.

  ‘Clement can’t stop boasting and lying; if he hadn’t done so, I wouldn’t have got the paintings back.’ And not long after, in 1964, came an opportunity to extract payback. ‘Clement had a cookery column in the Observer and wrote things like “As Socrates said (wise chap, Socrates)”, and he wrote: “As my brother Lucian said, before he abandoned poetry for painting”, and quoted from my “Ode to a Fried Egg” (“On a chalk white plate you lie …”). How appalling that he used something without permission, something private that my mother had.’ Freud tried to sue the Observer, for breach of copyright. This didn’t work, so he decided to settle old scores, involving debts, by letter. ‘Luckily I owed him the £200 France money. So I put “I am fining you £185 for this offence. You may wonder why my fine is so modest. The answer is, however serious the offence, prisoners always have some remission.”’

  Drawings could be exchanged for cash with compliant dealers such as Andras Kalman whose gallery in the Brompton Road was two steps from a William Hill betting shop. But reckoning that winnings were bound to exceed losses he preferred to borrow. He borrowed off his cousin Wolf, his brother Stephen, off anyone he could prevail upon, even Helen Lessore at the Beaux Arts Gallery. ‘Obviously I tried when the chance was that I’d get it. And I always paid her back. One day I borrowed some money and it transpired that Mike or Frank asked urgently for some and she refused. She was capricious and, I think, valued her own caprice. I questioned something once and she said, “You must remember I’m a frustrated artist.”’

  Capricious himself, and foolhardy, blind to obligations and regardless of risk, Freud even touched the self-styled King of Soho for a loan: Billy Hill, the gangster who lived over Gennaro’s restaurant in Dean Street and was big in the fifties. The Krays had worked for him in their heyday as protection racketeers. ‘They all worked for him. I knew him and would play in his clubs. I tried to borrow money off him once. I went to see him in Moscow Court. “A lovely flat you’ve got,” I said to him. “It’s an upholstered pisshole,” he said. He lent money to people he frightened but he wouldn’t lend to me as I wasn’t frightened. When I played at his crooked games, Charlie Thomas – who I knew later – would be standing there with huge boxes of money. Charlie – whose father was a tic-tac man – thought my betting was terribly funny. Such as when I got some money to pay a debt and took my car, the blue Rolls, to the betting shop. People like Charlie thought of betting as serious where I thought of it in a completely different way. If you’ve never been in a very bad way your attitude is different and I sometimes won a lot. I don’t like “That was a nice little win.” I want to change things with the bets. Either be dizzy with so much money or otherwise not have my bus fare. As I used to when I was at Villefranche and would go to the casino in Nice: I sort of winged my way home, I felt so light. What Francis used to refer to as “that wonderful feeling of purge”, when you’ve lost everything. I knew it well.’

  The distractions of gambling and ‘amorous pursuits’ affected the circumstances of painting, the hours spent, the concentration achieved, the sitters involved. The urge to drive furiously or, as the charge sheet often said, ‘without due care and attention’ also had consequences. There was, for example, in May 1958 a smash in Lower Sloane Street. ‘Little girls crying on the pavement,’ Ann Fleming reported. ‘Blood-stained father being shoved in an ambulance.’18

  ‘I’d been up all night,’ Freud explained. ‘But they wanted to go to the Battersea Fun Fair. Coming back to Sloane Square I fell asleep at the wheel for a second and hit the back of a bus. It took off my nose. Chipped sinuses. I was in hospital two days; no nose came off and I had to have my sinuses done; Annie had a cut on her face.’

  ‘If you want to know what Lucian is like,’ Caroline Blackwood told Cecil Beaton, ‘just see him drive.’ ‘Mercifully,’ Beaton added, ‘Lucian has now been forbidden to drive, for he is reckless at the wheel.’19 Bans were imposed every now and then, but he went on getting into trouble. A policeman thought he had spotted Freud, the defendant, in charge of a vehicle but the case was dismissed on the grounds that Freud claimed that he was the passenger, Jane Willoughby the driver.

  ‘I got off the one with Jane. “I’ve seen a lot of cases,” the magistrate said, “and when you go inside.” But I had a jury: you could then, in some cases, because the police told worse lies. I had lots and lots of offences and then, suddenly, I changed my driving technique. I was quite excited once: a magistrate said, “I don’t doubt your brilliance as a driver but it is not relevant.” I had been going at a huge speed down the King’s Road, incredible I didn’t have a crash. I was in this Alvis, which was good for that.’

  The Alvis bought for him by Caroline was succeeded by a blue Rolls (‘The name of the colour was “blue over special blue”’) and then, from the mid-sixties onwards, Bentleys. Whatever the make, Freud drove like a jockey, spurring the car, overtaking and cutting in, provoking angry scenes at traffic lights. Auerbach noticed that he kept an iron bar beside the passenger seat for emergencies. Once, when they were out together and there was an incident, a man came from the car behind, took a look at them – Auerbach was unshaven, Freud glared – and backed off.

  Kitty wrote to Freud after the Lower Sloane Street accident on 6 February 1959 objecting to his driving Annie and Annabel around town. ‘Fifteen car incidents in the recent past. I’ve not known a moment’s peace of mind when you’ve taken the little girls out.’ He and Annie had to go to St George’s Hospital to have stitches put in. ‘I thought that your love for the children would have been strong enough for you not to disregard my request that you didn’t drive the children yourself.’ There had been a ‘torrent of abuse’ when she raised it with him in front of them. ‘Which was very hard for them, apart from being distressing for me.’ She asked her solicitors to get a ruling that he should not have the children until he gave her an undertaking not to drive any car with them in it. Wednesday afternoons and Sundays were the usual days. ‘They both enjoy going out with you,’ she said, cancelling a plan for them to go to Ireland with him in the Easter holidays unless she received ‘a satisfactory undertaking’.20

  ‘It took me a while to realise that the tenacity of memory isn’t necessarily correct, and that touching “Ah, I remember it well” even less. I’ve got a good memory, but whole areas I’ve slightly, subconsciously, left uncharted.’

  In October 1958, Erica Brausen was dismayed to learn that Bacon had signed up with the Marlborough. Freud was partly responsible for this. ‘I persuaded Francis to leave the Hanover. He’d done a painting of birds, two owls, very nice, not a million miles from Cedric Morris (which Francis would have been sick at). Erica had paid him £37 10s and Ann [Fleming] said, “Do you think that it’ll be very expensive?” I said I thought £60–£70, and Ann went the next day and it was £120–£140, which she thought a little much. And Francis was furious.’ To profit out of her artist was one thing, to profiteer, as it appeared she was doing, was quite another. So I said he should leave, and he left, and Erica said she’d see I never showed anywhere again. I wasn’t worried very much.’ Bacon himself was seen weeping over what he had done, seeing it as necessary treachery.21

  Since the Marlborough settled Bacon’s gambling debts as a sweetener Freud felt that he deserved a tangible thank-you. ‘When Francis had his first show at the Marlborough – 1960 – I wanted to buy a picture and Fischer said, “This is embarrassing,” and offered it to me at cost price.’ However, David Somerset, good friend that he was, persuaded his colleagues that in the circumstances the painting should be a gift. ‘Worth £400. A good one. Green figure. Soutine-like.’ Bacon became, over forty years, the Marlborough’s most valuable artist. He told Helen Lessore in 1960 that they wanted him to do sixty paintings a year and that if he did so they would make him ‘a Really Big International Figure’.22

  X, a quarterly review of the arts, launched in November 1959 and backed by the elderly Mary Hutchinson – a Bloomsbury associate – was e
dited by the deaf poet David Wright and Patrick (Paddy) Swift whose studio Freud had shared in Dublin and who, calling himself James Mahon, wrote on ‘Official Art and the Modern Painter’, taking as his text Rimbaud’s ‘Il faut être absolument moderne.’ He complained about the American ascendancy, widely perceived and promoted as a New Deal, and called for plain old individuality. ‘It may be that it is the odd, the personal, the curious, the simply honest, that at this moment, when everyone looks to the extreme and flamboyant, constitutes the most interesting manifestation of the spirit of art.’23

  Bacon, Freud and Michael Andrews were enrolled with Giacometti and Kokoschka in a roster of admired painters to tally with admired writers: Pound, Pasternak, George Barker, Hugh MacDiarmid. The first number included Samuel Beckett’s L’Image, a 1,000-word sentence in French covering two pages and ‘Fragments from a Conversation’ in which Frank Auerbach, edited into a monologue, said, ‘the thing is to get other people’s rules and destroy them and get one’s own.’ He talked about energy, discipline, practicality and vision. ‘Rembrandt and others seem alive because they are reaching out for something.’ He stressed the use of intimacy. ‘One paints the things one loves because one is aware of all the relevancies; maybe, it’s the only way to get power over the things one loves … that’s why in the Jewish religion it’s forbidden to make images …’ And he glorified information. ‘What I like to know about painters is where they live, what time they get up in the morning, and all these things …’24

  Auerbach had admired the de Koonings in the ‘Abstract Expressionists’ at the Tate the year before; he had been drawing heads, painting naked figures and building sites in Oxford Street and on the South Bank. His ‘conversation’ was a spate of ambitious sayings, theatrical in tone, ending with: ‘The only possible progress is to destroy … then one’s left with nothing one began with but a new fact.’25 Conversationally, he and Freud were close, as Freud was with Bacon.