David Hockney

by Christopher Simon Sykes

  On his return, Hockney had to face the deadline for his portrait of Sir David Webster. As usual, Powis Terrace was full of people coming and going and for the first time they became a distraction. Hockney told everyone to leave—Schlesinger went off to Paris for a few days—and locked himself in the studio, working on the picture for eighteen hours a day until it was finished. He later admitted to Anthony Bailey that he actually spent longer on the tulips in this picture than he did on Webster. It had been an unhappy experience: he didn’t like the finished work, in spite of the fact that it was considered a great success by both the sitter and those who commissioned it. “I was also terrified then,” he says, “of being asked to do a hell of a lot of portraits … I didn’t regret doing it afterwards, but I certainly didn’t want to do any more, otherwise they’d be turning me into a society portrait painter and I didn’t want that.”31

  The Webster portrait was completed at the same time that Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy went on show at the National Portrait Gallery, in an exhibition called Snap which explored the idea of likeness, and it vexed Hockney that the Webster was generally thought to be a better picture. Writing in The Times, Guy Brett found the portrait of the Clarks “unusually bland and lacking in tension,”32 while Marco Livingstone has described the surface of the picture as being “murky and uninviting.”33 Henry Geldzahler’s pertinent comments about it got right to the root of Hockney’s fears. “If David, aged 32, 34 or 36, had decided to devote the rest of his life to painting pictures like this, he would have become a latter-day Pre-Raphaelite—an English painter really of very local interest. He would have been a mystifier, a prestidigitator, somebody who could do the impossible with paint—and yet something would have fallen out of the content. And that something is the element of risk, of doubt.”34

  He decided to take a much-needed break from portraiture. He found his new inspiration in a hand-tinted postcard that Kasmin had given him depicting a small island in the Inland Sea in Japan, a country he had a strong desire to visit. Just as Domestic Scene, Los Angeles had been based entirely on preconceived ideas, so in The Island Hockney wanted to see how close to the mark he might be about Japan, before actually going there. “The postcard attracted me for many other reasons: the problem of depicting the sea because of the inlet, the connections with landscape (or seascape) painting and with Monet, and, not least, that it looked like a piece of cake.”35

  Scarcely had he started work than he received a call from Jack Hazan, a young cameraman and film-maker, which was to be of immense significance in his life. Ever since filming the paintings in Hockney’s Whitechapel retrospective show, Hazan had been trying to convince Hockney to be the subject of a feature film. “I was immediately wowed by this show,” Hazan recalls, “because of the double portraits. I’d never seen any of his canvases before, and I thought the possibilities were enormous. I got very excited because the subjects were alive, and I could possibly gain access to them, and maybe, I thought straight away, I could film them in the same poses. I could possibly make something dramatic out of it and produce some kind of mystery. The paintings are very compelling. The film was never intended to be a documentary. I wanted to make something cinematic.”36

  A few months previously, Hazan had persuaded Hockney to view some earlier films he had made for the BBC, one about an artists’ colony in Camden, and the other about the Liverpudlian artist Keith Grant. He made it quite clear that this was with a view to Hockney possibly participating in a film himself. But though polite and civil about it, Hockney did not like what he had seen. Not quite straight documentaries, Hazan’s films required the participants to act a little, rather than just talk to camera. “David recognised that,” says Hazan, “and the first thing he said to me when he came out was, ‘I’m not going to act, Jack,’ and then I heard nothing from him. So I just kept ringing him and ringing him and he was never encouraging.”37

  One day, however, he suddenly said yes. “Jack started nattering me,” Hockney remembers, “and I was always putting him off, and then he came back to me and nattered again, and finally I agreed to do it to get rid of him.”38 Hazan turned up at Powis Terrace the following day with two assistants, a couple of lights and a 16mm Cameflex movie camera, a type much favoured by the French nouvelle vague film-makers because of its portability and unforbidding appearance. “When I arrived there,” he recalls, “he was rebuilding Powis Terrace and there were a lot of Irish builders around. I filmed him painting the Japanese island picture a bit, and because I’m fairly skilled and confident I did it very fast. I think he liked the light I provided as well, which was daylight done by using redheads with blue filter paper. I was excited when I left, and the next day, when we got the rushes, it looked marvellous, and he was very photogenic, with his bleached blond hair and his rugby shirt.”39 For his part, Hockney was only too glad to see the back of Hazan, and had few worries about having agreed to take part. “There were three people with one camera,” he remembers, “and I just kept thinking, ‘Well, this will be slightly out of focus, and it will play one or two nights at the Academy Cinema in Oxford Street with the Polish version of Hamlet, and then it’ll be gone.’ ”40 He could not have been more wrong.

  Since the return from Morocco, things had begun to unravel between Hockney and Schlesinger. In Paris in February, Schlesinger had met Fred Hughes, Andy Warhol’s young business manager, a keen Anglophile and stylish dresser who bought his suits and shoes in London. When Hughes came to London with Picasso’s daughter Paloma to see Death in Venice, which hadn’t yet opened in Paris, and invited Schlesinger and Hockney to join them for dinner at the fashionable Chinese restaurant Mr. Chow in Knightsbridge, Schlesinger accepted the invitation. On the night, David didn’t want to go. “He said he was going to stay home and work,” Schlesinger remembers. “He told me to go, saying, ‘I’m not interested in meeting Paloma. If it was Pablo, I’d go.’ ”41

  The evening turned out to be more significant than Schlesinger could ever have imagined. He turned up at the restaurant to find Paloma’s guests already there, the Spanish designer Manolo Blahnik, who designed shoes for Zapata, a trendy boutique, and Eric Boman, a strikingly beautiful young Swedish illustrator and fabric designer. Hughes and Paloma had misjudged the length of the film and were an hour late for dinner, giving Schlesinger plenty of time, over a number of Screwdrivers, to get acquainted with the two strangers. Schlesinger was almost instantly infatuated with Boman, and the attraction was mutual. “It was a coup de foudre,” says Boman, “or certainly lust at first sight. We had a huge attraction to each other. It happens, and from then on we saw each other every day.”42

  With the Webster portrait completed, the builders about to break through the wall to complete the lateral conversion, creating chaos and dust in the flat, and his relationship with Schlesinger rocky, Hockney decided to take off to California for a couple of weeks “for some adventure.”43 He stayed with Nick Wilder, and hung out with their mutual friend Arthur Lambert, whom he had met in 1968. “When I first went to see Arthur,” Hockney recalls, “Nick Wilder had told me he was a banker, which immediately put me off a bit. When I went to his house, however, and he opened the door and I saw this unbelievably dishy boy standing behind him, I thought, ‘Well, he’s no ordinary banker.’ ”44

  Lambert was a 34-year-old financier, who had moved down from Washington to take over a company that ran answering services, much used by Hollywood stars, and the dishy boy was his much younger lover, Larry Stanton, a painting student. “I remember the night David came over,” says Lambert, “because I was wrestling with a very complicated recipe, a French dish with goose and beans called Cassoulet, and making it was practically causing me a nervous breakdown. But David was immediately obviously very attracted to Larry, so things went really well from that point, and our friendship began.”45

  In the days before there were exclusively gay bars in LA, Lambert’s house off La Cienega Boulevard, which had a vast living room on the first floor with great views over the cit
y, became a focal point for the gay community. “The police were very aggressive then,” he says, “and were constantly arresting people for touching each other. You couldn’t dance, or anything like that, so we used to have dances at my house and it was always full of the most beautiful young boys.”46 It was not long before word of Lambert’s lifestyle drifted back to his employers in Washington, who immediately fired him, their excuse being that they needed a “family man” to run the company. He kept Hedges Place on, however, and when Hockney arrived at the end of March 1971 he was able to spend blissful hours there drawing and enjoying the company of boys such as Paul Miranda, of whom he did two fine line drawings, one of him stretched out on a sofa, the other, which is signed “for Arthur,” of him seated on the edge of a table.

  “David was going off to LA,” Schlesinger recalls, “and having little affairs, which I wasn’t aware of until I saw the drawings he had done of the various boys.”47 These dalliances meant nothing to Hockney, however, who still believed he and Schlesinger had something strong enough to be able to overcome their difficulties. He told the journalist Gordon Burn: “I have a relationship with this boy that’s as complete as two people could have.”48 Even when Schlesinger admitted to carrying on an affair, which Hockney must have suspected, since Boman was coming round to Powis Terrace every day, he convinced himself that it was just a fling that would soon be over. “At first I was a bit hurt,” Hockney wrote, “and then I thought, well there’s nothing I can do about it really. After all, I’d just been to California to release myself, as it were. And I thought it’s probably temporary …”49 He retreated into work, specifically on Sur la Terrasse, a picture tinged with a curious melancholy as the remote figure stares into the middle distance.

  Resisting the demands of others was becoming more and more of a problem as Hockney’s fame increased. Nikos Stangos, for example, with whom he had worked on the Cavafy project, was trying to revive Sir Kenneth Clark’s Penguin Modern Painters series, which had run from 1944 to 1959, and aimed to bring the work of modern artists to a wider public outside the art galleries. “I get nattered to death here,” Hockney wrote to Henry Geldzahler in June, “and just wish at times that only a few people liked my work. Still it’s made me get a bit tougher. I actually refuse to do things that people ask now, and just sit and paint. If I allowed everybody with some scheme or other to take up my time, I would never get anything done at all. I’m sure Nikos will be a little disappointed but the real truth about those little books is that they are not that interesting. When Penguin originally did there [sic] modern painter series … nothing like the books existed. Now my catalogue from the Whitechapel is really better and more interesting … than the Penguin book format will be, so I don’t care about it, and I suspect nobody else does other than Nikos …”50

  By the middle of June, Schlesinger was spending more and more time alone in his studio and it was becoming increasingly clear to Hockney that the affair with Boman was serious. Jack Hazan noticed the tension between them when he went to film in Powis Terrace for a second time—no mean achievement, given Hockney’s new tougher stance on his time. “The fact that I’d had my foot in the door,” Hazan says, “did not allow any further entrance. Every time I actually gained access to his studio or to him, I had to negotiate specially, which was very wearing on my nerves.” Hazan turned up at the studio and after a very short time, Hockney suddenly said, “Let’s get Peter.” “I had no idea who Peter was. Anyway, Peter came, and arrived looking very angry, and he looked at me in a very hostile way. He sat down on this stool and David painted him. You could have cut the atmosphere between the two of them with a knife, as Peter plainly did not want to be there, and I realised then that David had got him there on the pretext of drawing him just to have him in front of him. There was huge tension and David was furiously painting and he knew he had to do it rapidly because Peter’s patience was wearing thin.”51

  When Hazan showed the rushes to his business partner, David Mingay, an assistant editor at the BBC, he saw at once that the key to the film lay in the story of the break-up between Hockney and Schlesinger. Unbeknown to Hockney, that is the road they decided to go down. Because they had no script and no agreement with Hockney, it was a question of making it up as they went along, shooting any footage they could get which might possibly be relevant: Ossie Clark’s fashion show at the Royal Court Theatre, a glamorous event at which Twiggy, Amanda Lear and Alice Ormsby-Gore were among the models who sashayed down the catwalk in Manolo Blahnik’s first collection of shoes, Hockney and Celia Birtwell in the front row, with Schlesinger and Boman turning up wearing identical sailor suits; Kasmin in his gallery, pretending to ring Hockney to complain that he had forgotten to turn up to a meeting; and endless shots of Mo McDermott in Powis Terrace. “The story was slowly evolving,” says Hazan. “We had scores of scenes all marked out on the glass partition in the editing room, small scenes, which we’d shot. There were no computers then and we didn’t know where the scenes fitted, so we would just scrub one out and put it higher or lower on the glass partition, or wherever it seemed to fit.”52

  Work on Powis Terrace was completed in the early summer, and the small flat was transformed into a large, light and airy space with lots of room to breathe. There was a library panelled with cedarwood, a state-of-the-art bathroom featuring a circular shower lined with Celia Birtwell’s dark blue tiles, and, at the end of the main corridor, an open-plan dining room in which stood the table and fourteen chairs bought in Paris. The truth was, of course, that this beautiful place had been created with Schlesinger in mind, and now that it was finished, he was leaving. There was a sadness and a sterility to it, which was picked up on by the artist and film-maker Derek Jarman, who dined there one night. “The Art Deco blight has taken over David’s home. Lemonade is served in precious Lalique glasses. There’s a dining-room table that would seat the boardroom of the Chase Manhattan bank and David has the food brought in from Mr. Chow’s. The flat now parodies his painting. There are huge bunches of tulips in yet more Lalique vases dotted around like wreaths. The place is antiseptic, a waiting room for the good life … When I first came to Powis Terrace you could lounge around, but now the decoration dwarfs and depresses … David, who seems the same on the surface, has become a tortoise within a decorator’s shell.”53 Hockney felt his life unravelling and made desperate attempts to pull things together, taking Schlesinger off on a trip to Le Nid de Duc, for example, though this was hardly the best atmosphere in which to give him attention. When Hockney was lonely and miserable, there was always Bradford to escape to, and thinking about his parents took his mind off himself. “Yesterday I had a delightful day with my parents in the English lakes,” he wrote to Henry Geldzahler, “visiting Wordsworth’s cottage and house by the lake at Grasmere. I’d forgotten how beautiful it really is. The drive from Bradford is through bleak moorland scenery, and quite spectacular. Although it’s June the weather was like November. It’s all very Gothic up there—and I love Gothic places. We must go when you next come to England—it’s only five hours drive and in my new car with steario (forgive my atrocious spelling) it should be very pleasant.”54

  Everything came to a head in the high summer. “David went to LOT in France for a month,” wrote Laura on 28 July, “with his friends and John Kasmin.”55 The holiday was to be spent with the Kasmins at Carennac, and the group consisted of some of his inner circle—Clark and Birtwell, who was six months pregnant and working hard to make her fractured marriage work, Mo McDermott and Maurice Payne—together with George Lawson and Wayne Sleep. Hockney had pleaded with Schlesinger to come, and to begin with everything was calm. The weather was warm and sunny, the food was delicious, and everyone lazed around reading, swimming in the river and sunbathing and falling under Carennac’s magical spell. Hockney worked, having arranged before he left London for Payne to bring down a carload of etching plates, and among the drawings he completed was a particularly charming one of Birtwell sitting in a green garden chair, exuding
feminine beauty and grace. A postcard he sent to Ron Kitaj on 18 August—“The weather is beautiful, I am working slowly and Peter is reading Proust”—makes everything sound idyllic, but the truth by then was somewhat different. “In Carennac,” he later wrote, “Peter and I hadn’t been getting on well at all, and I was getting very miserable about it. We’d had one very pleasant day when we drove down the Gorge de Tarn …”56

  This scenario is supported by George Lawson’s version of events. “Peter was already going off on his own,” he recalls, “… on long bicycle rides in the countryside and we wouldn’t see him throughout the whole day. He was just wandering around on his own. He just didn’t want to be with David.”57 Not even a trip to Barcelona to visit the Museum of Modern Art and the Picasso Museum could calm things down. Eventually Schlesinger said he would like to go to Cadaqués, a town on the coast of Catalonia, famous for its associations with artists like Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí. Richard Hamilton had a summer home there, and through him Mark Lancaster had rented an apartment from “Teeny” Duchamp, Marcel’s widow, and invited Schlesinger and Hockney to stay.

  Unfortunately Lancaster was not up to speed on what was going on between them, and had also invited Eric Boman. “Mark had invited me and David to visit him in Cadaqués,” Schlesinger recalls. “David said no, but I said I was going anyway, because I wanted to meet Eric there. When I said this, he said he would drive me there.”58