The Lives of Lucian Freud
Page 64
‘Jane couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to get married. The situation of her houses and things – she takes trouble about tenants and farms etc. – and being a nominal dauphin: the element of duty to it, foreign to my nature. Obviously after Tim died they were thinking of the line not dying out. I thought how odd that people think like that. Jane said, much later, “I’m glad we didn’t. It wouldn’t have worked.” There would have been bad feeling.’
Frank Auerbach admired Jane Willoughby’s ‘very particular temperament, very controlled, very fastidious. Her mews flat had a whole bookshelf of those green cover dirty books [Olympia Press] and a painting that Lucian had discovered at a sale: an ancestor of hers that looked remarkably like her. Lucian once said to me, “I realise I have really never been able to talk to her at all.” I think that had more to do with her soldierly, stoical reserve than Lucian’s.’3 Her support for him was undeviating throughout his later life.
For Freud the disappearance of Tim Willoughby was somehow a contrived ending. ‘One interesting thing in retrospect: Tim Willoughby was suicidal in a frivolous sort of way. He was begged not to go out in the boat.’
Bigger news in the week of that Shelley-like death was the suicide of Stephen Ward, chief scapegoat in the Keeler affair, and bigger still, the Great Train Robbery, in which a gang seized millions in used banknotes off a Glasgow-to-London mail train. ‘It had a terrifically heartening effect. Bargees by the canal talked about “Don Charlie”. Villains are bigger snobs than anyone.’
Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief, the tender murderer.
Lines from ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ by Robert Browning, who every afternoon, a century earlier, had walked along from Warwick Crescent to 7 Delamere Terrace to call on his sister-in-law, Arabel Barrett, an enthusiast for Ragged Schools and slum improvement. As another former resident, a boxer-turned-taxi-driver, once told me, the district behind the canal was, and always had been, a complete mix. People were attracted to it by its extremes, contained within so confined an area.
Freud’s interest in the dangerous edge of Paddington was far from voyeuristic; he regarded the neighbourhood as a place of spirited enterprise. ‘I was friendly with those burglars and they did spectacular things to do with banks. One I had to do with liked children; when I realised what he was up to it added to the painting. Rather like when children say, “What’s that person for?” – they do it in Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget – it keeps your interest going; and if you’re aware of what they are thinking about, or what you think they are thinking about, that affects the way you depict them.’
A Man and his Daughter (1963–4) harked back to the 1949 painting of Bo Milton and his daughter, without the fuss of the bead curtain and, instead, white hair-ribbon and open collar reminiscent of Hals. The girl has a pigtail and the look of someone keen to be a school-leaver as soon as possible; the parent, defensive behind a tough front, has scars like spent fuses running down his forehead and cheeks.
‘This was Ted, the spiv who lived downstairs at Delamere. He must have moved into the ground floor at number 4 perhaps a year or two after me. I had known him a number of years: he used to come and stay with me and Caroline in the country. I always rather liked him because I couldn’t work out what he did. I was fascinated with his appearance, and when I realised what he did, it suddenly made more sense to me. He’d got that odd thing of a criminal mind, con tricks really. “I can’t really afford his work,” he said of me, and I got him to buy a Tim Behrens (who always complained about having no money, though he did have it) and then he didn’t pay him. I minded and thought he let me down. He used to get furniture off the pavement displays. Petty thieves have the romantic idea that if something’s stolen it’s more valuable.
‘Ted did banks. He was a power in the district, a very good safebreaker, completely non-violent. He was cut up by the husband or boyfriend or brother of who he was going with; it was that thing of glassing, a drunken thing in a pub. He had a very thick skin and was well stitched up and I suddenly thought, good. It’s an interesting face. In the picture the scar was recent; it became fainter; I’ve always been interested in scars and everything.
‘There was a Mrs Ted. I remember going out with Ted and his girlfriend, who was very nice. Sylv met him and he had a name of a footballer [that he connected with him]: Bert Addinall of Bolton Wanderers or Huddersfield Rangers.’ (In fact, Queens Park Rangers, Brighton & Hove Albion and Crystal Palace.) David Sylvester boasted an encyclopaedic knowledge of footballers and football form and Ted was impressed. ‘Ted said, “Fancy him being my fucking uncle.” He’d got an aunt who’d spent the last nine Christmases in Holloway. She tried to go in for Christmas: nice times there. Ted was completely non-violent. He said when they did security boxes in a Baker Street bank, “If any of your friends have got anything in there they might take them out, Lu.” They did the Burlington Arcade and I was rather pleased when it said in the paper “Only a perverted foreigner could have done it,” and it was Ted. When I was paying the police to try and tear up some offence (Charlie was on a charge) the CID man knocked on Ted’s door to see if he could put up some houses he could rob. Ted didn’t do it. Ted was highly professional. He wouldn’t work with the police.
‘Round the time I painted him, Ted was had up for murder. “The Bus Murder”. Dr Moynihan came round one night to see me, as I was in bed, and Ted let him in and so I had this proof he couldn’t have been in Deptford then: he was with me at the time. I got hold of Ludovic Kennedy to help. I knew him through Cyril [Connolly]. He gave me good advice, as I was being pressured by the police. He was helpful and practical.’ Kennedy had published Ten Rillington Place, an account of the Christie murders and the miscarriage of justice that followed with the aim of securing a posthumous pardon for the innocent Timothy Evans.
‘Ted got off. The police loathed him, as he was so successful. They know who’s got away with things and accuse them of things they are believed never to have done – “So give us a body” – and Ted was set up for this. Ted sorted matters.’ Driving licences, for example: who better than a getaway driver to sit the necessary test?
‘I got a licence, a real one, through someone’s help.’
For Freud every aspect of driving was hazardous. Being out on the road all too often meant court appearances at a later date. ‘When I was painting Ted I was driving in the fast lane when a lorry swung over and crushed my car and I found, in that position, it’s impossible to get a witness. (I’d stopped having insurance: with my first car I had smashes every day.) Ted said to me, “You know, these cases where you have to have a witness: when you’re in the wrong naturally you can get them, the usual ones, no problem. It’s when you’re in the right you need a witness, Lu.” I was not often in that position: I think a philosophical one.
‘Ted went on to legitimate business, the way criminals do. He had car-body factories. I didn’t fall out with him exactly, but I saw him less.’ An art racket put a distance between them. ‘After the war,’ Freud explained, ‘there were German hoards of paintings and he thought he’d get hold of old masters and he tried, not very hard, to get me involved. “Invest in a rare Leonardo sculpture: a few thousand and you’ve got your share.” Not in itself wrong, it was that the rare thing itself was so bad.’ More than once there would be an urgent request. ‘“Look after this, Lu.”’ This being a suitcase full of money.
Freud painted Ted twice. ‘I was going into hospital and Ted said could he have one of the two pictures of himself to “look at” and I knew it would have been stuck there in his house in Bushey Park and I got awfully depressed as it was worth possibly a thousand pounds and so I went up there and took it back, saying I needed it.
‘I remember his daughter, Sharon – obviously copying her mother the way a child of ten does – saying about some woman whose husband had died, “She’s going out with a man and ’e’s only just been buried.” Probably a grandmother now.
By the time that Ted began sitting for him, Freud had moved from Clarendon Crescent. (Ted had refused to set foot there: it was too squalid for him, he protested.)
‘After Clarendon I had various alternatives. What I wanted was nothing more slummy; whatever was most desirable and potential, somewhere facing north.’ Having displaced him again, the council were obliged to rehouse him but they did not take kindly to being quibbled with. ‘I wanted a north light and I asked them for that. “Don’t overdo it,” they said. “You’re not a unit,” they pointed out. “Not too young, or so old, or with a family, so go easy.” But I got a place, looking north.’
The new address was 227 Gloucester Terrace on the other side of the railway from the canal, a grand terrace of bedsits and theatre digs scheduled for renovation extending a good half-mile of increasing desirability to Lancaster Gate on the edge of Hyde Park. The street front faced north; at the rear the windows overlooked the back of a similar terrace, also bought up by the council, and a patch of rubbish dump. The first-floor rooms were a considerable improvement on Clarendon Crescent, spacious enough for larger paintings and good enough for Ted.
Freud’s second Marlborough show, in October 1963, consisted mainly of the paintings done at Clarendon Crescent, together with Woman Smiling and the painting of Bernardine pregnant (listed in the catalogue as Nude with Dark Hair), priced at up to £1,000. ‘You seem to have trebled in stature – if that means anything to you!’ his parents’ friend Jimmy Stern wrote, congratulating him after the private view. ‘As far as I could make out, a picture was being sold every few minutes,’ he added. ‘The whole exhibition bursts with boldness, and you are still the master of hair. Charlie’s head is a masterpiece.’4 John Russell in the Sunday Times was more mild but little less positive: ‘The signs of strain, effort, crisis and doubt are not covered up, as they would have been by a lesser artist; in the figure paintings, especially, the problems involved are as naked (and this is saying a great deal) as the models themselves.’ Once again, however, most of the reviews were dismissive. Eric Newton, in the Manchester Guardian, talked about ‘compelling nastiness’, adding: ‘Gulliver’s first impression on arriving in Brobdingnag must have been similar.’5 In The Times David Thompson spoke of Freud’s ‘obsessively detailed realism. A rather facile cleverness of brushwork that puts one in mind of Stanley Spencer at his most literal somehow crossed with Sir Alfred Munnings.’6 The Peterborough column in the Daily Telegraph reported Freud as being ‘a shade put out’ about this; nonetheless there were ‘many red stars on the £1000 canvases’.7 Ann Fleming bought Woman Smiling which she sold ten years later for £5,000.
One afternoon in November 1963, shortly after settling into Gloucester Terrace, Freud was at work painting Harry Diamond (Man in a Mackintosh) when the woman from the flat downstairs knocked on his door and told him that President Kennedy had been shot. ‘I said, “That’s terribly good of you, really thoughtful of you, to let me know,” and went on and on because I didn’t know what to say.’ To disregard the news from Dallas was not a problem, but Harry Diamond somehow was. This, his third painting of him, lacked edge. Another French Pub regular, trickier but less determinedly resentful might, he thought, be more worthwhile.
‘I met Deakin during the war when he was an officer, very maudlin and self-pitying in the transition between pretty boy and monster. He’d been in Egypt, and was dark, scarry, rather drunk in clubs.’ Before that he had been a window dresser in Dublin, had been kept by Arthur Jeffress and had worked in Tahiti and elsewhere as a primitive painter. Christian Bérard introduced him to Michel de Brunhoff, the editor of French Vogue; consequently he had worked for British Vogue on and off until 1954, doing fashion shoots and portraits, Picasso at seventy in 1951 for example. Photographs of Soho figures were his forte: Dylan Thomas, George Barker, Elizabeth Smart, Bacon of course, Isabel Rawsthorne and Muriel Belcher, who gave ‘the little bastard’, as she put it, a bollocking for pointing his camera at her without permission. Freud, ‘such a strange fox-like person’, as Deakin described him, submitted to being photographed by him at Bacon’s behest, wary in Golden Square, and also sprawling in his chef’s trousers on the brass bed at Delamere Terrace, head up, head in hands, legs crossed, legs akimbo: poses possibly demanded by Bacon himself standing unseen to one side.
Shortly before Freud started painting Deakin – it took two attempts – Michael Andrews pulled off a telling portrait of him, seated in shirtsleeve order (quite the cashiered officer), pleased to be so appreciated despite often arriving late and not in good shape. Once, before settling into the corner of the Andrews sofa, he demanded half a pound of butter to rub into his skin. Freud in turn warmed to the play of light on Deakin’s greasy complexion, ‘working deliberately in a very free way’, on this not unsympathetic character – ‘The Ugly Sisters and Cinderella rolled into one,’ he said; raddled, melancholic, Freud’s Deakin stands comparison with the court dwarves and other poignant freak characters of the Spanish Habsburg court whose portraits were reproduced in the book on Velázquez seen lying among the scattered racing pages of the Evening Standard on the studio floor in photographs taken by Deakin four or five years previously.8
One morning Deakin complained of the cold. The next day, without ceremony – typically considerate – Freud presented him with a camelhair coat, as befitted a certain type of ex-officer. Not bothered that it was too big for him, he went off to the pub and flaunted himself as the self-anointed ‘Mona Lisa of Paddington’.
Freud sold the Deakin painting straight off the easel to Dan Farson who, by 1963, had become a TV celebrity living beside the Thames in his own pub in Narrow Street, Limehouse. A good quick sale but, as he knew, it should have gone through the gallery. ‘There was some trouble. (Farson was in the right.) I said, “Very sorry, I should have given the painting to the Marlborough and I must have it back.” I gave him the money back though.’ When he went down to Limehouse to reclaim the picture Freud bumped into Teddy Smith. It was a doorstep encounter best avoided. ‘Teddy worked for the Krays as a debt collector. Wrote poems. “The best writer among us,” Ronnie Kray said.’
When, a couple of years later, the Krays sent him and a colleague to Devon to pick up Frank ‘Mad Axeman’ Mitchell after his escape from Dartmoor and deliver him to a safe house in London, Smith composed letters from Mitchell to the press saying that he would give himself up provided he was given a date for release. The Krays decided otherwise, Freud heard. ‘They got a girl for him from Winston’s Club (the rival to Churchill’s) and he liked her, so they started taking her away so he told them he’d go to their mother. They’d thought of giving him up after letting him have Christmas outside (unusual for him) but they got rid of him instead. Because of their mother.’ Nobody messed with the Krays’ mother. Mitchell was shot, wrapped in chicken wire and dumped from a trawler into the English Channel. Smith was to vanish similarly.
‘Dan Farson had no idea about people at all; the Krays got hold of him and took the pub he ran; everything they took off him. He had four chauffeurs and no car: that can’t be right. The Krays gave him the “chauffeurs”. Deakin said to Dan Farson, “When you go round the pubs looking for sailors and you look and look and get back to Narrow Street and have your high jinks, what do you do the morning after, when you see what you’ve got? Isn’t it odd it’s always the pastry cook?”’
Deakin’s arresting mug shots of Barker, Bacon, Freud, Paolozzi, the actress Prunella Scales and others were as head-on as Freud’s 1952 Bacon portrait, obviously so. It followed that, had Fre
ud resorted to using such photographs as aide-memoires, he would have overlapped with Bacon. Painters prompted by photographs saddle themselves with photo characteristics and where Sickert, like Degas (and Bacon), turned to advantage the stilled qualities of photographic focus, tonality and optical distortion, Freud told himself that he had to have his subject in the clear, every time, right there in front of him. Nothing came of a suggestion that he might paint, from photographs, the former Prime Minister Anthony Eden, married to his friend Clarissa Churchill; however, he did make use of photos occasionally when pressed for a fleeting image or when circumstances persuaded him that a photograph could serve. Accordingly he produced a quick little painting – for Bernardine – from a snapshot of himself tending baby Bella on the towpath behind Clarendon Crescent.
Deakin’s close-ups were startling and look startled, Freud’s meditative looking and meditated; both had the virtue of direct approach. Unlike, say, Bill Brandt whose ‘Perspective of Nudes’ series of 1961, patently indebted to André Kertész and Henry Moore, demonstrated a fondness for shapely cliché. When Brandt photographed Bacon in 1963 he cast him in a black mood on Primrose Hill and proceeded to augment the gloom in the darkroom in an attempt to make a ‘Bacon’ of Bacon, whose reaction was gleeful scorn. Primrose Hill had been the photographer’s idea not his, he told Freud. ‘He’d never been there before. All Art. The terrible thing of naked women sitting on the bed: pleased with himself that he has managed to get that far. I wasn’t going to be photographed by him.’ Deakin, on the other hand, was acceptable to Bacon because generally he did what he was told. Even his most contrived photographs, such as the one of Dylan Thomas waist deep in a grave and those he took for Vogue in 1954 of Bacon stripped to the waist and beset with beef carcasses, were tolerable in that they catered to the sitters’ fancies.