Hockney was blissfully unaware of all this, either struggling with the problems presented by Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, during which time he would scarcely have even noticed Peter, or travelling with him and various other companions around the spas, museums and picture galleries of Europe, which made Schlesinger feel he was just part of the gang. In fact, when Schlesinger wasn’t around, such as on a trip to Vichy in August when he visited his parents in California instead, Hockney missed him dreadfully. He just didn’t tell him. “I am here getting cured again with Wayne, George and Mo,” he wrote to Henry Geldzahler on 7 August. “I must admit I can’t stand Peter being away much longer. His absence has made me very melancholic. It’s so pretty and he complements the surroundings so that it seems worse here than the more familiar Powis Terrace. Anyway he will be back in fourteen days. He sounds as though he quite enjoyed California. I thought he might, as this is the first time he could use the bars and night life.” After asking Geldzahler to telephone Schlesinger to give him his love and kisses, he added a PS: “I can’t phone him as his mother may answer.”7
When Hockney returned home from Vichy on 3 September, it was to face some worrying news about his own mother. Laura’s health had been poor for most of the year, starting with attacks of rheumatism and arthritis that had caused her constant pain and left her feeling tired and depressed. While Ken had done his best to persuade her to try acupuncture as a cure, Hockney had taken her to Harrogate to enquire about spa treatment, unfortunately to no avail. “I thought it had closed down,” she wrote in her diary on 20 May. “Found I was right … no spa waters on sale now. The pond room is turned into a Museum where we visited & also went down to see the well where water springs, which used to be used for healing. Had a glass of it which just tasted salty.”8 When an abdominal pain was diagnosed as a tumour on her bowel, she had an operation on 1 September; Hockney rushed up to Bradford to find her tired and sore, but on the mend, and living on a diet of soup and junket. He presented her with a bottle of spray perfume, which cheered her up immensely. His visit was short but sweet. “David came again and has now gone back to London & his travels,” she reported on 5 September. “His exhibition in Belgrade opens this week.”9
The exhibition, at the National Gallery in Belgrade, was the final stop on a European tour of his Whitechapel retrospective, which he and Schlesinger followed, first to Rotterdam and then Hanover, travelling by train, boat and bus—“getting about that way,” he said, “was much more fun than flying.”10 Writing to Henry Geldzahler, he described how beautiful the trip had been, in particular Marienbad and Karlsbad, both spas in which they took the waters. In Karlsbad he loved the “pine forests on the steep hills above the town. We took a little railway ride up one hill and walked back down through the pine forest in a marvellous rain storm. It really gave the place some Gothic gloom which I’m sure I’ve told you before, I love.” Schlesinger, however, seems to have got somewhat on his nerves. He “was a little disappointed at the lack of pretty trinckets [sic] and merchandise. Anyway on the drive back to Prague I gave him one of my sermonettes that seemed to put things right in his pretty little mind.” For the final leg of their trip, they took a Russian boat from Bratislava to Belgrade. “It was quite fantastic,” Hockney reported. “You must do it one day. It glides along the Danube at about 15 miles an hour. We had a cabin with a large window on the deck with the water only about three feet below. The whole experience is so placid you really get a rest.”11
The last three months of 1970 saw Hockney spending more time than usual in Bradford. Laura’s recuperation was a slow and painful process. She spent three weeks in hospital, then came home, to find Margaret had cleaned the place from top to bottom, much to her delight. “It just looked lovely,” she wrote in her diary on 19 September. And there was more: “Ken had a VERY BIG SURPRISE—a coloured Television. He has wanted one for a long time & thought I would like it too. It is a lovely piece of furniture and the colour is good.”12
Hockney didn’t see her till the beginning of October because he was working to finish a commission: to design a poster for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Out of twenty-nine international artists approached by the organising committee to produce posters representing the intertwining of sports and art worldwide, he was one of five from Great Britain, the others being Allen Jones, Ron Kitaj, Peter Phillips and Alan Davie. He chose water as his theme, and his design showed a diver breaking the surface of a typical Hockney swimming pool, its surface a myriad of swirling dappled ripples.
On his return from Munich to deliver his design, he drove up to Bradford for the day and took Ken and Laura to Ilkley for a short blow on the moors, followed by a quiet meal together. “It was good to see David,” she wrote. “He is so anxious to arrange for a holiday and recuperation.”13 A fortnight later, on 14 October, he was back, bringing Celia Birtwell, who was staying with friends nearby, and the following day they all went on a trip to Fountains Abbey, one of Laura’s favourite places. After that, work kept him away till December when he came up for his Aunt Audrey’s wedding, bringing Laura a beautiful Ossie Clark blouse as a gift. He then, wrote Laura, “suggested we should go & buy a dress I had seen & liked but too expensive. He bought dress, coat and hat for my birthday. I’m thrilled with dress and hat … felt like a Duchess.”14 A few days later, on 10 December, her seventieth birthday, he sent her two dozen red roses, as he had on every one of her birthdays since he had left home.
Work on Powis Terrace progressed slowly, but it was an excuse for Schlesinger to start shopping again, which kept him involved in David’s life. Before Christmas they went off together to Munich, where Hockney had to sign an edition of his Olympic posters. “We came back through Paris,” wrote Hockney to Ron Kitaj on 2 January. “… I really like it more and more indeed I think Paris is going to have a great revival. People look so beautiful there. They either look chic, which is nice, or scruffy in a marvellous ‘La Boheme’ way … Of course Peter always loved Paris … Work is progressing slowly on the flat. In Paris we bought a table and fourteen chairs for our dining room, made in 1925 for a Mme de Courcel who had a lot of classical sculpture in her house. Its [sic] quite beautiful …”15
Laura was well enough to come to London at the end of January to see off her daughter-in-law Alwyn, John’s wife, who was on her way back to Australia, where they, following in the footsteps of Philip Hockney, had emigrated in 1968. Hockney booked her and Ken into the Strand Palace Hotel and took them for dinner at one of the most fashionable restaurants in London, Odin’s in Devonshire Place. “Met David’s friend,” wrote Laura, “who cooks all the food himself, & getting our order left us to go and cook it … Ken had steak and fried onions & David a foreign dish!…Brought back souvenir menus which David and Patrick Procktor had drawn. Later our friend the cook said he would toast Alwyn in Champagne.”16
Alwyn got off lightly with just a toast, as “the cook” was the renowned restaurateur Peter Langan, who had taken over and turned round the fortunes of Odin’s after its original owner, James Benson, was killed in a car crash in 1966. Langan was a legendary drunk, and lecherous with it. “He was a womanizer,” said the artist Bruer Tidman, who worked at Odin’s in the late sixties. “He would go round asking the girls to get their tits out—but there wasn’t much he could do most of the time because he was so out of it.”17
Odin’s was run as a restaurant in which the proprietor would have liked to dine himself, and woe betide anyone Langan took a dislike to. “When my old brown bitch, Susie, was recovering from a hysterectomy in 1968,” the art critic Brian Sewell recalled, “he invited her to dinner, wore a jacket and ate with her. She sat on the opposite chair confronted by all the panoply of a place-setting, and ate a dish of diced steak, very slowly, savouring each cube, and gazing about her as though she wished to see and be seen. At a neighbouring table four boisterous Australians objected; their complaints began indirectly, with such remarks as ‘Jesus, now we’ve seen everything,’ and grew to a grumble about not payi
ng the bill in such a filthy, unhygienic restaurant. Peter ignored them for some time … but at last he could bear it no longer and, without rising from his chair or raising his voice (and taking care not to disturb Susie’s poise), he addressed them with, ‘I own this joint. I don’t care a damn about hygiene. I’d rather have this restaurant full of dogs than Australians—as you can see for yourselves, they have better manners.’ ”18
Langan was also a genuine lover of art and artists. A close friend of Patrick Procktor, he encouraged artists to trade art for food, a mutually beneficial arrangement he called “eating it down.” “To find a restaurant close at hand,” wrote Procktor, “which was not only welcoming but extremely good, and, to boot, that bought one’s paintings in exchange for food, was a thrill both for David and for me. David introduced Ron Kitaj … and Peter’s career as the most successful restaurateur of our time began. Odin’s became quite a place for artists and their friends … and some of those ate their way through the price of pictures acquired by Peter.”19 In this way Langan procured the services of Hockney and Procktor to design his menus, and Procktor’s watercolours and Hockney’s drawings and prints were soon among the dozens of works of art, hung like postcards, which adorned the walls. One of the first pictures Hockney traded in this way was The Enchantress with the Baby Rapunzel, an early pull from the Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, made before the set went on sale officially. There are many drawings of Langan himself in the tiny airless kitchen, wearing his stained bum-freezer chef’s jacket, with knife in hand or cradling his favourite large brandy glass filled with Löwenbräu lager, as well as a delicate portrait in coloured crayons of him seated wearing a blazer, nursing a glass of wine.
There was a period in the late sixties and early seventies when Hockney went to Odin’s almost every night with a group of his friends, among whom were usually Schlesinger, Procktor, Kirsten Benson, who was James Benson’s widow, Wayne Sleep, the brilliant young ballet dancer, and his boyfriend, George Lawson, a highly intelligent and very amusing antiquarian bookseller who worked at Bertram Rota Booksellers on Long Acre in Covent Garden.
Hockney met George Lawson through Kasmin, who had taken him into the shop, and they immediately hit it off because his camp, rather wicked sense of humour made him laugh. Likewise, George fell easily into David’s milieu, taking a particular liking to Ossie Clark and Mo McDermott. “I liked Ossie enormously,” Lawson says, “because David had this entourage who just waited to see what he was going to do or say, so if he said, ‘Look, the sky is very green today,’ then everyone would say, ‘Yes, the sky does look a bit green,’ or if he said, ‘I’m going to the cinema,’ then they would all go to the cinema. But Ossie never did. He would do the opposite, and that is what I liked about him.”20 Lawson took to McDermott because he was so funny and quick-witted. “I remember once David and I were running down the stairs at Powis Terrace, and Mo knocked on one of the doors and ran away, and David said, ‘You shouldn’t have done that, Mo, because the lady who lives there is blind,’ and Mo said, ‘Well, she’ll never know we weren’t there.’ This kind of thing used to make David crack up.”21 It was Kasmin who had introduced him to Wayne Sleep, who soon moved into Lawson’s flat in Wigmore Place, behind Harley Street. It proved to be the beginning of a long and happy relationship. “We all became inseparable for a while,” Lawson recalls, “and would see each other every day. Because we didn’t have a kitchen, every meal was in a restaurant. We would all go out to dinner every night, usually to Odin’s where we would have the back table. Wayne, David, Peter, Patrick Procktor and me more or less lived there.”22
The morning after their dinner at Odin’s, Ken and Laura went to see Chassay’s renovations at Powis Terrace. “Looked around David’s flat,” Laura recorded on 26 January, “which is going to be very beautiful & hopes to be ready in six weeks, tho now it is chaos.” Celia was there discussing the bathroom tiles, which she was designing, and she took Ken and Laura to her shop to try on some shirts and blouses. “David got some too,” Laura wrote, “and we were most amused when Dad tried on ‘with it’ coats nearly to floor shaped & no pockets!! He did look comical. Poor dad was like the dog with the bone—but tho the cupboard was full, he got none.”23
If there was ever an annus horribilis in David’s life, then it was this year, 1971. He was struggling to finish Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, there was the constant noise of the builders next door, and he had compounded his problems by breaking one of his own golden rules, which was not to undertake portrait commissions. Yet when Sir David Webster, the general administrator of the Royal Opera House, had asked him personally if he would paint his retirement portrait, Hockney initially said he might consider doing a drawing, then ended up agreeing to a painting. Sir David, often referred to as “Daisy” by those in the music world, was a Scot with a background in the retail trade, who since the war had succeeded in turning Covent Garden from an impoverished venue with no permanent company and a rather provincial image into one of the leading opera houses in the world. He approached Hockney because he knew that he loved opera.
“A lot of pressure was put on me by Dickie Buckle and a few other people in the opera world,” David recalls, “and I explained that I didn’t really want to do it. There are problems painting portraits of people you don’t know and I didn’t really want to spend time doing that.”24 He ran into problems even before he started the painting, unable to decide what the setting should be despite endless visits to Webster’s house off Harley Street. “Then they began to natter me,” he wrote, “when will it be ready, he’s retiring on this date, and so on. And in the end I thought, all I can do is paint him in my studio. So that’s the setting; the table and chair and flowers are in my studio.”25
As soon as he was settled in the tubular chair that Hockney had chosen for him to sit in, Webster would fall asleep, making it tricky to capture his personality. No longer the vibrant energetic man he must have been when young, Webster was a sick old man, who, it turned out, was at death’s door. While he was sleeping, Hockney did lots of drawings of him, and when he was awake, he took as many photographs as he could. He just couldn’t get the mood, and his problems were compounded by the fact that the painting had been commissioned by a major institution and had to be completed by a deadline, something he was not used to and which filled him with fear.
Before he could begin, however, Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy had to be finished, and on the day he completed it, 15 February, the first person he called was his mother. “David phoned—he has finished his picture,” she wrote. “Takes his first driving test in England tomorrow—do hope he passes. He is so kind—in spite of depression went to bed with a thankful heart for his thoughtfulness and generosity—we are certainly blessed in our family, even if we ourselves are difficult.”26
Hockney was also facing a much more significant difficulty: after nearly five years together, his relationship with Schlesinger was beginning to founder. “I met Peter when he was eighteen,” he says, “and we had certain things in common. We could travel around museums together, for example, but I realise now that there were a few things we didn’t quite have in common. I don’t think he ever had much of an ear for music and I probably took him to too many operas. Then he always wanted to stay in London, whereas I wanted to be in California. Another thing was humour. He could be quite funny, but only a little bit, whereas I would tend to mock things more.”27
Sexual boredom had also set in, and in order to try and inject a little romance into their life, as well as to get away from the Webster portrait for a while, Hockney took Schlesinger and Birtwell to Morocco for a fortnight. They stayed in Marrakech at La Mamounia, famed for its twenty acres of lush gardens and its decor in a mixture of art deco and Moroccan styles. The hotel’s many associations appealed to David. Churchill and Roosevelt had stayed there during the war when they attended the Casablanca Conference. Josef von Sternberg filmed Morocco there with Marlene Dietrich, while Alfred Hitchcock not only used it in The Man W
ho Knew Too Much, but got the inspiration there for The Birds, when he opened the door onto his balcony and was assailed by a flock of pigeons.
“The Hotel in Marrakech,” Hockney wrote to Henry Geldzahler, “was rather like the Beverly Hills Hotel only of course more Moroccan … When we arrived we bought some high quality Kief and every evening we sat on our large wooden balcony completely stoned. Each afternoon I did a large coloured drawing of a scene in the hotel or Celia or Peter (with a Palm Tree in the background). And in between I took the usual 300 photographs.”28 Hockney and Schlesinger had a large bedroom with a beautiful balcony and view, and one of the drawings he did was a rear view of Schlesinger standing on the balcony “gazing at a luscious garden and listening to the evening noises of Marrakech.” This drawing, inspired by The Balcony, Macao by the nineteenth-century artist George Chinnery, was later worked up into a painting, Sur la Terrasse, which Hockney began work on when he returned home.
While Schlesinger found it hard to control his mounting irritation that all Hockney wanted to do at the hotel was to arrange him in poses to draw and photograph, Hockney was equally irritated by Schlesinger’s demands that they should indulge in some social life. “There was a terrible row,” Celia recalls, “and David said to Peter, ‘The trouble with you, Peter, is you just want to be in Marrakech, Kensington, and I’ve come away from all that,’ and they had to take a pile of Valium to calm down. Peter was getting excited by the fact that ‘the Gettys were living just over there!’ ”29 Things improved a little when they made a detour to Madrid on their way home to visit the Prado, David’s first trip to Spain. They arrived in a blizzard, and the snow-covered city reminded him of Berlin and Vienna. His agenda had been to look at the Velázquez pictures, but he ended up being much more impressed by the Goyas. “All those rooms full of Goyas,” he wrote to Geldzahler, “they’re fabulous; about six rooms in the Prado, beginning with the early works, when he painted pretty pictures of people dancing in sylvan glades, happy pictures, beautifully painted … and finally those marvellous pictures he did in his old age, almost like Bacons. Marvellous!”30
David Hockney Page 27