The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Freud regarded the house plant as a green memory. ‘I’ve always liked Zimmerlinden; my father used to grow them: he used them in winter gardens. The stems were held up by the windowpane. If I moved it, it would collapse. This one had huge leaves and so it took on a life against the light.’ The jacket hung on the shutter and catching the light was a torn and rumpled presence somehow. (He had used such a jacket before, in the stable at Benton End and in the room across the street in Hotel Bedroom.) ‘Hang your hat up, your coat up: a sign of possession.’

  Did he intend a slight incongruity?

  ‘I never put anything anywhere odd (except obviously I used the zebras as if they were more native to the room than they were). But the coat: no. It’s a plant (that is to say, I planted it) insofar as it’s not where it lived.’

  The Goncourts in 1871, witnessing the siege of Paris and Commune: ‘I was forgetting a dramatic detail: in front of the closed doors of a carriage entrance, a woman was lying flat on the ground, holding a peaked cap in one hand.’12

  While Large Interior was the main day picture, Night Interior (1969–70), a reverse set-up at the other end of the room (‘You see right through from the studio to the bathroom’) had Penelope sprawled on the chair beneath the distracting reflection of a naked light bulb in the window. Set between bathtub and cupboard (door half open, revealing the ubiquitous jacket) she was, all unconsciously, positioned as Edvard Munch had been in the cramped purgatory of his 1940 Between the Clock and the Bed. Harry Diamond was similarly placed for Paddington Interior, Harry Diamond (1970) immediately afterwards. ‘I sat him in this doorway. It was done at night, in this case because he finds it so hard to get up in the morning. He tries and tries to get up and he can’t. He sort of misses the day. A tenacious sponger.’ The cupboard behind him was now bare and with his fists clenched he appeared ready to spring to his feet the moment he was told that this stint was over. ‘It was somewhat exhausting,’ he said. ‘Afterwards one felt depleted, but also invigorated, because he has a stimulating personality.’ For Harry Diamond any stimulus was provocation.

  Freud couldn’t but be stimulated by Diamond’s style of conversation. He came out with astounding remarks. ‘At one time there were a lot of whores murdered in Portobello Road, four or five of them, and Harry said, “I don’t want to embarrass you, but those whores: did you do that?”

  ‘“I never have anything to do with whores,” I said. What else could I say?’

  Twenty years had now elapsed since Interior in Paddington and Diamond had developed a captivating new interest. ‘He took up photography. Like someone finds Jesus. He was desperate before then when I painted him. Long after that, I arranged for him to show at d’Offay and d’Offay paid him to photograph painters and gave him addresses, Coldstream and so on, but then he went and sold the photographs to the National Portrait Gallery. Anthony [d’Offay] was very upset and angry, Harry said he’d smash up the gallery and I felt rather responsible. I once said, “I’m disappointed, I thought you were going to do a comédie humaine: better than Deakin,” and he was furious. He knew I was well disposed but I thought he really would glass me.’ Harry was one for immediate reactions. One evening in the French Pub he took offence when a man came up and said something to a girl he had his eye on, followed him outside and hit him on the head with a hammer.

  Diamond photographed Freud, perched on a stool in front of closed shutters, wincing at the exposure. One of the photographs was used as the frontispiece for the catalogue of Freud’s first exhibition at the d’Offay Gallery, a couple of years later; another was among ‘Some London People’ in the London Magazine in June 1973: Freud in smirched chef’s trousers, as anonymous as any Mayhew character, the first in a suite of toff, busker, undertaker, dustmen. ‘It’s so odd: the character of the photographer enters into things. I think you’d find Harry had more scope than Deakin. He walked four or five hours a day from district to district. He does weddings now.’

  By this time Freud was out of touch with all but one or two of his former Delamere neighbours. Once Charlie Lumley had married he no longer figured. A photograph of him, a labourer standing against a brick wall, turned up in the plan chest in Freud’s studio: part of the debris of his past. ‘After he was married it was sort of drifting apart. He did building jobs, plumbing jobs, drove a bus. Someone in Paddington said, “He used to be our hero.” He was a good driver, but he wasn’t gang league. No longer a force to be reckoned with. He got these children: parents always want to know what children want to be, and when the eldest son, Doug, was a boy of five he said he wanted to be a witch.’ Freud saw nothing of Charlie and heard from him only once. ‘I know his wife Audrey moved out and took in cats. He wrote, “I’m in trouble, Lu. Light and gas cut off: this isn’t a con.” Never had any money. I heard that he decided to destroy his car and get the insurance. Everyone knew this dodge. He set it alight all right – rather badly – just outside his house. The police were alerted and then it turned out that he’d forgotten to insure it.’

  Another Charlie, Charlie Thomas, was now around. Freud had known him by sight since the fifties when he used to see him at Billy Hill’s. ‘Charlie would be at the games, standing with huge boxes of money. I knew him quite a number of years. He wanted a friend. He was very nice-looking. Broken nose. We went betting. Charlie loved ligging about, going to Wheeler’s, and Muriel quite liked him.’ A painting of Charlie Thomas’ sister, the unfinished Head of a Woman (1970), has an affronted look. ‘Married to a car salesman. She was hard, Charlie wasn’t: not at all pushy, hated fighting. He came round every morning and said, “Anything you want done?” Charlie loved his nephews and nieces and had very nice manners. I took him up to Glenartney; he taught Ali billiards there.

  ‘Charlie helped me rather than the other way. He sold a few pictures of mine to a man in the City, a picture of him, and the Glenartney picture of George Dyer. Charlie only knew about pictures from the saleroom; he bought what he called “speccy” pictures from Sotheby’s and Christie’s, took them in vans to Herefordshire and places, and clever people came down and paid more for them there.’

  Charlie Thomas had been married to the wife of Claude Bornoff, an antique dealer in Westbourne Grove. ‘Then there were incidents to do with a girl, Alex Mayall. When he took up with her, he took my father’s house in Walberswick, as my father had a heart attack and wanted to sell it. Charlie and Alex lasted a while. Then he got terribly keen on girls and couldn’t do anything with them: some form of impotence. He had to have terrific encouragement. But he was marvellous at picking up people. He’d go to Victoria station and see someone. “What you waiting for?” he would say. “Wish I was waiting for you.” (I’ve never tried to pick anyone up because I wouldn’t want to start like that, remembering I’d said anything banal like that.) He’d sometimes ring me up and say, “I’ve got this marvellous girl.” I got clap once or twice.’

  In the summer of 1968 Charlie Thomas met Alice Weldon, a young American recently arrived in London from California, escaping from family and intending to paint perhaps or work with children. (‘She wanted to get a job with my Aunt Anna, as she had looked after children.’) To start with she decided to find her way around town on foot. ‘I’d walk as far as I could and take a taxi back. At the end of the day I got to Hyde Park – Speaker’s Corner – and there was a man there, dodgy, arty, interesting, who started to chat me up and asked me out to dinner. He said, “Guess who I had dinner with last night: Francis Bacon. I’ll show you my flat in Ebury Street.” He was a crook, a small-time picture restorer. Had a good eye and many art books including one on Francis, which was open at The Wrestlers, which, he said, belonged to Lucian Freud. I’d only heard of Sigmund Freud of course and I’d come to London with an ambition to work with Aunt Anna! Lucian? Marvellous name. I was with Charlie for weeks only. He punched me. Hit me.’

  Freud soon took up with her. ‘Aunt Anna wanted her to sign a piece of paper vowing eternal loyalty. She didn’t want to sign.’ (In fact she only had an
interview with Anna Freud’s friend Dorothy Burlingham.) ‘She drew and painted and worked a bit. Once I went with her to Walberswick to see my father; he said, “Your friend has an amazingly good figure.” I was amazed.’ Beautiful, American, confident enough, with just enough money to have her independence, she was the sort of girl he could take to see his parents, unlike most of the others, what with their babies or other complicating circumstances.

  Annie Freud too was impressed with Alice. ‘She was very Jamesian: an American in London, an autodidact, and conducted her own artistic, culinary and literary education on her own, copied out vast passages of great poetry in her beautiful handwriting in order to acquire culture. And she went to cookery school. Being American, Alice had fantastic knowledge about male and female sexuality. She told me what the idea of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers was about: she saw the top hat was the cock and the sequinned gown was the wet cunt. The real allure is that, unconsciously, what you are watching is unbelievably sexy.’ To Annie there was danger for Alice in becoming too involved. ‘Alice had to find a life not with him [Lucian] because she did a lot of looking after our family; at one stage, when Annabel was still very ill, after she’d been to Leeds University, Dad arranged for her to live with Alice.’ This was to have been for six weeks but ‘following the anorexic years’, as Alice put it, Annabel’s behaviour became frightening and uncontrollable. ‘She was sixteen when I met her, beautiful like an Eastern princess. She was a talented painter.’ For Alice, who too was drawing promisingly, much as Freud had begun, there was his degree of concentration to aim for. ‘If Lucian hadn’t valued my work I wouldn’t have pursued it,’ she admitted. However he said to her, tacitly holding himself up in comparison to her: ‘I think you’re selfish but not selfish enough.’13 By ‘selfish’, needless to say, he meant ruthless.

  He liked taking her around with him. ‘Lucian would say, “Let’s see the Killer,” who lived quite close, in Westbourne Grove.’ That is, 16 Westbourne Park Villas where Thomas Hardy wrote the poem ‘1967’, ending with: ‘new woes to weep, new joys to prize’. The Killer, Eddie Power, had started picture dealing and wanted Charlie Thomas to buy expensive things for him. ‘There was a terrible accident outside his house,’ Alice Weldon remembered. ‘And the police came and knocked on the door not to enquire but to ask if he’d seen anything: there was blood around and the Killer was really upset by the blood.’ She was told that this quiet little man, ‘seemed so trustworthy, like a civil servant’, would go to see a cheater, shoot him in the kneecaps and weep when he had done with him. Among his associates were Freddy Whitney (‘a respected burglar’) and Charles de Silva who had a non-existent fishing fleet.

  In 1974 Charlie Thomas left the scene. ‘Charlie said he would die young, and he did.’ Caffeine and purple hearts did for him, Freud said. ‘He’d take some downers and uppers and go to the Greek café in Charlotte Street and have coffees. He said to me, “Me mind’s gone, me body’s gone.” I think he knew he was going to die soon. I gave him one or two things and he gave them away, desperate not to be left with anything. When Charlie died – choked on his vomit – I had to go and see him dead on a slab. I and his sister, and Penelope, went to the morgue and the attendants were pulling him about, seeing his body didn’t fall off the slab, trying to cheer things up. And his sister said, “Lu, why can’t you bring my Charlie back to life?” I didn’t want him brought back to life. I’ve never seen her since.

  ‘I didn’t go to the funeral – don’t ever want to go to them – but people were very upset, especially Penny.’ She rang June Andrews up and said ‘He’s so fucking selfish.’ Freud shrugged at that. ‘When they are dead they are dead.’ He told Alice Weldon that when he went back to the studio he wept. He said that he had known Charlie wouldn’t last long as he had talked about killing himself.

  ‘There was a terribly nice girl Charlie was with, sort of county girl. I went out with her once or twice, took her to Camden Road when Charlie died, or just not. I said, “I don’t really understand what I’m taking you out for.” “Trying to rub my unhappiness off on you,” she said.’

  In 1969 Freud visited a mental hospital where Sonia Orwell’s brother, a doctor, worked and gave a talk. This was by way of a thank-you to Sonia’s brother for being helpful with Annabel. ‘Art therapy isn’t art,’ he told the staff, who assumed otherwise. Introduced to a hulking great patient who painted, he asked him why he did so. ‘To deal with pernicious women,’ he growled.

  ‘Lucian always had a struggle,’ Anne Dunn said. ‘Everything has to be found, discovered, worked for. I know very few painters who can sustain concentration for so long.’14 He remembered her former husband, the easygoing Rodrigo Moynihan, saying to him once, ‘You can try too hard, you know.’

  In 1970 Anne Dunn bought from Cyril Connolly Portrait of a Girl, Freud’s indelibly intimate painting of her from 1950. ‘I always feel mixed up, with the great attraction or affection or whatever it is,’ she said many years later. ‘He gets one because, though I don’t see him, he has always remained very important in my life. He takes one’s life over in a way that one can never quite expunge.’

  Her marriage was none of his business. Rodrigo Moynihan, to him, was someone who liked bankers, he said. ‘I was always on formal terms with him. He looked after Anne’s money and Anne had these terrific affairs, chiefly in New York. She told me, “He doesn’t put his foot down, he only puts them up.” She had complicated tastes to do with third parties and a lot of forgiveness and making it up. There was Mrs Skirting Board the cleaner. Rodrigo had been having an affair with her for years: they could have been married. “Mrs Teacosy”. Anne had rows with her children for them not telling her about it: she could have had such fun.’ He took up with her again. ‘He asked to be in the magazine I and Rodrigo (and Sonia Orwell, for a while) edited: Art and Literature. John Rothenstein wrote a bit, not a good article, but Lucian was very insistent that something should be written. We had another interlude. It was when he was with Penelope Cuthbertson, so we saw each other quite a lot for a bit. It wasn’t very serious, I felt there was a lot left to be resolved but it never was. Sometimes, instead of counting sheep, I count Lucian’s children.’15 She sat for him and was sporadically involved with him well into the 1970s.

  ‘Lucian’s justice and morality was present throughout his life really and he never, never, made any sort of moralising remark,’ Frank Auerbach stressed. ‘He never moralised, he never suggested that there was a code, he just behaved well. Well, he had his own code of behaviour. There were certain rules, which he told me, which were news to me. He said that if you went to bed with somebody, the thing to do the next day was to take them out to lunch so that they wouldn’t feel badly about it. As I didn’t have as sophisticated a life as Lucian I didn’t know that that was the form. I was focused on sloshing around, doing the paint.’16

  One day Freud mentioned to the doctor that he would be going to the hospital to see Annabel, ‘if work permits’. The doctor was shocked and Freud – as he himself told Auerbach – was only belatedly aware that it was the wrong thing to say; but he said it anyway because it was the thought – the priority – that prompted him. He had no idea of the correct thing to say in such circumstances. ‘Lucian asked him how he would recommend him to kill himself. “What’s the best way?” The doctor told him the best way was to inject air into a vein. That way he, the doctor, couldn’t be culpable of, for example, supplying drugs.’17 It wasn’t a serious question, more a matter of him wanting to control things.

  A play was staged and Freud drew Annie aged twenty for the flyer: Encarnation in the Square, never performed: just rehearsed. But he attended some of her rehearsals, with advice. He told her off once about smoking outside. ‘Only prostitutes smoke in the street,’18 and told her she’d be one if she did.

  ‘Lucian told me that he often had girls who had had “trouble” with their fathers,’ Alice Weldon said.

  If a mistress has acquired a veneer of breeding, art or literature, and
tries to talk to us on an equal footing about our thoughts and our feeling for beauty; if she wants to be a companion and partner in the cultivation of our tastes or the writing of our books, then she becomes for us as unbearable as a piano out of tune – and very soon an object of dislike.19

  The supremely condescending way the Goncourt brothers talked about their relationships with the opposite sex tickled Freud. It wasn’t so much their attitude, more the shamelessness. His own approaches to women were apt to be abrupt not for lack of manners or self-possession but from an inability to be relaxed about getting to the point. ‘I can’t do courting. It makes me so nervous. I want an immediate intimate situation with a stranger I do like, but the fact that it involves sex, obviously that’s where the intimate part comes in … With someone you are already intimate with, you go on making things more intimate.’

  Incorrigibility was part of his tenacity: his stubborn pursuit of a course of action without recourse to advice from anyone. Painting could only be fully accomplished by an investment of effort amounting to a siege assault. Eventually, with any luck, the place would be taken, the object accomplished, the need satisfied.

  Such painting, so assertive, so ardently demanding, was now plainly within his capacity and grasp; so much so that he came to regard it as more the stuff of life than anything else that affected him, stimulant or fancy. Nearing his fifties, he found himself of an age to be increasingly conscious of time dwindling and painting therefore being all the more his most intimate concern.