Breakfast with Lucian

by Geordie Greig

  A fierce rivalry over Lorna arose between Laurie Lee and Lucian, which ended in violent recriminations and jealousy for both men. Lee described how Lorna always left an imprint, ‘a dark one, her panther tread, voice full of musky secrets, her limbs uncoiling on beds of moonlight’.62 They were both ensnared and helpless. Lee loathed his younger rival, describing him as ‘dark and decayed-looking’. He demonised Freud, writing in his diary: ‘This mad unpleasant youth appeals to a sort of craving she has for corruption. She doesn’t know how long it will last. She would like to be free of it but can’t. Meanwhile she says she loves me. Oh, I can’t express the absolute depths to which this has brought me … I pray she will get over it but I don’t know. I don’t know. She is tender enough towards me but devastating with her tender confessions. She goes to him when I long for her, and finds him in bed with a boyfriend. She is disgusted but she still goes to see him.’63 This entry was shown to Lucian when it was published and he was ‘tickled by it’. Valerie Grove, Lee’s biographer, said ‘clearly he liked to be seen as a louche young man and a true bohemian’.64

  The passionate affair between Lucian and Lorna almost pushed Lee to thoughts of suicide. On 12 September 1943 he wrote: ‘I took a razor blade to my throat. There was a dazzling burst of light, a sense of the good life calling. I put the razor down, put my head on my hands and sobbed as I have never done since I was a child.’65

  The feud culminated in a fight in front of Lorna at a bus stop in Piccadilly. Lucian won the fight, but it was Lee who took Lorna home that night. She asked a passing soldier to separate the sparring lovers, but he took one look at her and said, ‘I expect you’re the trouble,’ and walked on. Lorna later told a distraught Lee, as he sat on the bed with her, ‘The trouble is he’s falling for me. It isn’t fair of me I know.’66 Lucian had won her heart; Lee’s six-year affair was over.

  The end was painful for Lee, who was drip-fed mixed messages of hope and despair. Lorna seems to have enjoyed keeping both men in a state of uncertainty. Lee agonised at how she had changed and was now ‘light-headed, detached and heartless’. He had dedicated his first book of poems The Sun My Monument to her, and never lost his infatuation for her, wearing her signet ring on his deathbed.

  Lorna now went to stay with Lucian during the week at his flat in Delamere Terrace, and returned to Ernest at the weekends. Her son Michael, who was born in 1928, a year after her marriage, often accompanied her, sleeping on Lucian’s floor. She fed Lucian’s imagination by buying him a stuffed zebra head from a taxidermist in Piccadilly, which he then painted as a somewhat surreal object with red and cream stripes in The Painter’s Room (1944). The head stares out from a window into a room where a top hat and red towel have been abandoned on a brown carpet in front of a sofa that appears to have only two legs. There is a sense of Magritte migrating into this London room, but also a certain gimmickry. Lorna bought the picture for £50 at Lucian’s first one-man show at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944. She also gave him a dead heron which he made into one of his most extraordinary early paintings, Dead Heron (1945). Here he showed a new confidence and sense of adventure and experimentation. He used the stuffed zebra head again in Quince on a Blue Table (1943–4), where the zebra’s head pokes out from the wall, a strange oddity in war-rationed London where almost nothing exotic or even colourful seemed to exist.

  Lorna Wishart and Lucian photographed by Francis Goodman c. 1945

  Their affair ended as it had started, with infidelity – only this time on Lucian’s part. Lorna discovered love letters in his studio and became hysterical. In his memoir High Diver, Michael Wishart described the woman who had stolen his mother’s place, an actress Lucian spotted as she descended the stairs at the Gargoyle Club where he liked to take Lorna. (Michael loved this notorious nightclub. ‘One night I saw Dylan Thomas measuring his cock with a pocket ruler, eagerly watched by some lady poetry lovers.’) He wrote of the actress that she was ‘as beautiful as it is possible to be … in an irresistible scarlet dress, her blonde tresses flying’. He did not name her. Even in 1977, more than thirty years later, Lucian was fanatically protective of any knowledge of this affair becoming public. He hated Michael Wishart’s book, furiously dismissing it as fiction. In his last years, though, he confirmed that the woman in the scarlet dress was Pauline Tennant, one of the most glamorous actresses of her generation. Born in 1927, she was five years younger than him, and knew him through her father David Tennant, who owned the Gargoyle.

  The death knell was when Lorna telephoned Lucian’s studio. At the end of the call he failed to put the phone down properly and she heard Pauline ask him who had called. ‘It’s nobody,’ he said. On hearing that, Lorna abruptly ended the affair. Lucian was beside himself and determined to win her back, heading down to Sussex where he stayed with his friend and patron Peter Watson. From there Lucian went to Binsted, the village where Lorna lived, with a gun. He threatened to shoot her or himself if she would not return to him. He stood among the cabbages in the kitchen garden and fired the gun into the air. Later he rode a large white horse bareback into the field above the lawn and, like a 1930s Hollywood matinee idol, made the horse rear up in front of the house where she could see him. It was dramatic, but too late. Lorna was hurt by Lucian’s behaviour but, ever the game Garman girl, she had the perfect last word. ‘I thought I’d given you up for Lent, but I’m giving you up for good.’

  Shortly afterwards Pauline Tennant, aged just nineteen, married the anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers, cutting short her acting career when he became purser to the king of Iraq. Her most noted performance was as the young countess in the 1949 film The Queen of Spades. The newlyweds briefly shocked Baghdad when they went to a fancy-dress party as Oscar Wilde and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas. Their marriage ended in 1953. Lucian later admitted that he regretted his dalliance with her – ‘she was too actressy’ – because it had brought an end to his relationship with Lorna.

  All three in the original love triangle had their infidelity rebound badly on them. ‘Make me not want you so much I can’t get any peace always thinking about you so much – I want to be able to live in peace again,’ wrote Laurie Lee, who had thoughts of killing her as well as himself. Lorna had stained both lovers’ lives. ‘Lucian was genuinely in love with her, but she never went back to him,’ remembered John Craxton. ‘He said to me, “I’m never, ever going to love a woman more than she loves me,” and I don’t think he ever did again. He never really forgot her. He wrote letters saying, “I still love Lornie and miss her.” She was a muse, a true muse in the best possible way.’67

  Years later Lorna met Pauline and showed no anger or resentment. They talked about who had written on the wall underneath the raised bed in Delamere Terrace some lines from Shakespeare about being powerless and enslaved to those you love. Lorna admitted to having done it. When Pauline asked Lorna why she was being so nice, Lorna replied: ‘Because you saved me from a terrible obsession.’

  And she had. Lucian seemed to be unable to commit to any woman. He loved women, but never enough to stay solely with just one. The present was all-consuming, so that whoever he was with or whatever he was painting at that time, was all that mattered. But although he lived in the present, he never took on the responsibility of relating the present to the future.

  He insisted that no one question or know what he did, and never regretted his selfishness. ‘I have never wanted to share where I was or what I was doing with anyone,’ he said. One jilted lover said, ‘He had already sped off, left the scene when everyone was still talking about what he had done. He was on to the next thing. He never stayed to see the fallout, or dodged it if he could.’

  Some theorised that he was scarred by the family’s escape from an oppressive and frightening regime. Both he and his fellow émigré Frank Auerbach chose resolutely always to face forwards and never looked back to their escape from the Holocaust. (‘Of course I am in denial,’ admitted Auerbach readily.) Lucian too had to deal with the legacy of avoiding extinction ma
inly owing to his grandfather’s genius and fame. The sense of being an enforced outsider, an alien where Jewishness was sufficient to warrant a death sentence in Germany made him feel fundamentally different from most people he met in his adopted country. It reinforced his desire to be part of England, but also to remain separate while generally hostile to most things German. A further explanation for the selfishness that imbued many areas of his peculiar way of life is that he simply needed to escape his claustrophobically curious mother. Whatever the psychological cause, he continued to be obsessed by independence and privacy.

  CHAPTER SIX Lorna’s Legacy

  So much in Lucian’s life stemmed from his relationship with the bewitching Lorna Wishart. It triggered a pattern of overlapping affairs which repeated itself throughout his life. Like a farce, lovers, sitters, strangers and his own children went through an ever-revolving set of doors, often unaware of each other but with damaging repercussions when they did. He was the only person who knew the full cast of characters who sped in and out of his studio or bedroom. When the plot thickened too much, a little knowledge amongst them proved a dangerous thing, causing rivalries, jealousy, competition and violent rows.

  Shortly after the split with Lorna, he started an affair with her niece, Kitty Garman. They were introduced by Lorna in 1946, and married two years later. Kitty was the illegitimate daughter of Lorna’s sister, Kathleen, and Jacob Epstein, the American-born sculptor. Kathleen had been Epstein’s lover since 1921 and was the mother of three of his children. Epstein’s wife, Margaret, tolerated most of his infidelities but erupted in anger and jealousy over Kathleen, shooting her in the shoulder with a mother-of-pearl-handled pistol in 1923. The incident occurred after she had encouraged Epstein into multiple affairs in the hope he would tire of Kathleen and return to her. In 1955, eight years after Margaret’s death in 1947, Kathleen became Lady Epstein and his sole beneficiary, finally removing her from penury.

  Kitty was born Kathleen Eleonora Garman on 27 August 1926. Hers was a chaotic, unsettling childhood. Rather than sharing her mother’s primitive Bloomsbury studio, she was sent to live with her maternal grandmother Margaret in Hertfordshire, and later in South Harting, Sussex. Margaret and her companion, the former governess Toni Thomas, instilled a lifelong love of books and nature, while Kitty’s older aunts Lorna and Ruth became her mentors.68 In the 1940s she studied painting at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, which Lucian had also attended, but she temporarily abandoned her artistic ambitions when she met him.

  Up until then, Lucian had been known principally for his drawings, and he wanted to alter this perception. ‘People thought and said and wrote that I was a very good draughtsman but my paintings were linear and defined by my drawing,’ he noted later. ‘[They said] you could tell what a good draughtsman I was from my painting. I’ve never been that affected by writing, but I thought if that’s at all true, I must stop.’ As a consequence, he claimed he largely set aside the habit of drawing.69

  Kitty appears in Girl with a Fig Leaf, Girl in a Dark Jacket and Girl with a Kitten, all executed in 1947. She is also the subject of Girl with Roses (1947–8) and Girl with a White Dog (1951–2). In the last picture Kitty sits with a white bull terrier resting on her leg, a dressing gown slipping from her shoulders to reveal her right breast. This is a significant picture as it marks a change in style, so different from the naive, flat depictions of Lorna. This is the beginning of Freud as a painter of naked portraits, even though Kitty is mostly clothed, and it is a move into realism. Kitty’s breast is notable because it is so convincingly depicted, making the viewer feel we have intruded into a very private space. She seems tranquil and content, her wedding ring visible, as is her birthmark on her right hand. It was something she had once been very embarrassed about, but she later grew to appreciate it as a mark of her identity. This is a portrait of a grown-up woman and not the startled ingénue for whom Lucian had fallen. There is no amelioration of any of her features, her face has widened and wrinkles are beginning to emerge, while on her naked breast a dark mole is defiantly shown. There is a ripeness to this picture of the mother of his two children as if he is at last starting to understand how to depict the beauty and sensuality of a woman. The loose curl on her forehead makes her appearance seem informally realistic as the dog happily rests its head on her leg. It is also significant as Lucian’s first picture of a dog with a human, a leitmotif that was to punctuate his work right up until his final painting.

  Girl with a Kitten, 1947

  Lucian was showing considerable promise as a portraitist in his paintings of Kitty, after abandoning the lurking element of caricature in his pictures of Lorna. He was also developing an entertaining surrealist’s vocabulary, creating his own style, and was starting to gain access to the top levels of the artistic and social worlds. Because he was attractive and charismatic, wherever he went someone else wanted to know him. He played on his charm and looks, but it was far more his talent that seemed somehow magical. Spender, Cyril Connolly and Lady Rothermere were just some of the many powerful characters in the cultural elite who pursued him. At the same time, Lucian kept his connections to the lower, more criminal strata of society. In the high–low life he liked, one element made sense of the other for the alien Briton who liked to escape definition. The attention he attracted, though, was not always favourable. The journalist Quentin Crewe described him at this time as ‘a nervous man whose eyes dart around like fleas in a snuffbox’.70

  Lucian and Kitty lived mainly in Maida Vale, where they saw much of Cyril Connolly and Francis Bacon, and the complexity of his private life continued to be extraordinary. In 1948, the year that he married Kitty and also when his first child Annie was born, he met Anne Dunn, the daughter of the Canadian industrialist and financier Sir James Dunn. She was a stunning, charismatic eighteen-year-old artist with whom he would have an intermittent affair for the next twenty-five years. One time in Lucian’s studio, Anne was struck by some pictures she saw stacked up there, painted by Lorna’s son, Michael. Two years after Lucian started an affair with Anne, she married Michael, and Michael then confessed to Anne that he had had a brief sexual relationship with Lucian. To complete the circle, Kitty later revealed to her daughter Annie that she had had an affair with her aunt Lorna’s former lover and rival to Lucian: Laurie Lee. (And in 1950, Lee married Lorna’s niece Catherine Polge, the daughter of Helen Garman.).

  Of Lucian, Anne Dunn said, ‘He was completely unstoppable. He would go for anyone and anything.’ But she never had regrets. ‘He was so alive. He was like life itself, pulsating with energy. It was what I had always sought and never found again.’71 When I asked Lucian what he did in this period when not painting, he said with wry understatement, ‘Well, there were girls.’

  For Anne, the introduction to him started, as it did so often in those days, with a dance. She was picked up by him at the Antilles, another Soho nightclub, when he approached her to join him on the dance floor. ‘He was a wild mover, suddenly sinking to his knees, leaving you not knowing where to turn,’ she recalled, laughingly, more than sixty years after they first met. Anne herself, who lived with her mother in Belgravia, was then engaged ‘almost by accident to Jasper Sayer. I was so surprised to be asked that I said yes and then had great difficulty extracting myself.’72 Jasper’s sister, Honor, had been the first to mention a painter called Lucian, planting the first seed of interest. ‘I had been aware of him in the Gargoyle Club, watching his manoeuvres, and had heard about this tiger woman he was involved with, called Lorna.’

  Girl with a White Dog, 1950-51

  ‘Let’s meet tomorrow at the Café Royal,’ Lucian said to her in the Antilles. After lunch the next day they went straight to Delamere Terrace and consummated the affair.

  The extent of Lucian’s desire for privacy soon became apparent. ‘I had no idea Kitty was his wife when I met him, nor did I know Lucian was a father, until one night we were having dinner and someone came up and asked him how the baby was. I was ab
solutely astonished. “What baby?” I thought.’

  The affair appalled Anne’s mother, who did not think this tartan-trousered, married artist from Germany (the war had ended only three years before) was remotely suitable for her very eligible teenage daughter. ‘He would come round occasionally and my mother would say “Get that rat out of here,”’ recalled Anne. There were also harrumphings at White’s, the gentlemen’s club in St James’s. ‘My stepfather Morrow Brown heard in White’s about my affair and said he really couldn’t go there any more because of my terrible reputation,’ she said. Lucian did not care. Guilt was not an emotion which affected or restrained him. (More than fifty years later he would occasionally have lunch at White’s with the Queen’s private secretary, Robert Fellowes, brother-in-law to Diana, Princes of Wales, who helped negotiate for the Queen to sit for him. Lucian was the only man never to wear a tie there, and no one challenged him for ignoring the club’s strict sartorial rules.)

  Despite the feelings of her family, Anne was besotted and invited Lucian to stay with her in Ireland, which resulted in his portrait of her Interior Scene (1950). (Anne believes the picture has been wrongly dated and was painted in 1948 or 1949.) It suggests a hidden identity, as a half-revealed face peers out from between dark curtains while a thorny branch of a blackberry bush looms in the foreground, more prominent than Anne’s blue eyes.