Breakfast with Lucian
Page 16
What was unusual was that Emily actually moved into his Notting Hill house, which ran counter to his anti-domesticity agenda. He was completely smitten and asked that she give up her staff job at the Sunday Telegraph to go freelance. As always he wanted to pursue every aspect of his lover, and with her this involved making a double portrait with her father, the anatomist, Dr Joseph Bearn, almost a contemporary of Lucian, born in 1923, who lived in a chaotic house in St Luke’s Street, Chelsea. Lucian painted him there, separately painting his daughter for the same picture, Daughter and Father (2002). It was an extraordinary circle of sitters which covered his time with Emily. The rota included two sons of his Irish bookie, Kate Moss, David Hockney, the Queen, Henrietta Edwards (from the Queen’s Picture Gallery) and his son Freddy Eliot, as well as self-portraits and the perpetual sittings by David Dawson.
Double Portrait 1985-1986
The end to his time with Emily was wrought with pain when she moved out of his house at the end of 2002. She continued to sit for him until they finally split for good in the spring of 2003. It was sad and difficult. As Lucian often told friends, ‘the death of a friendship is sadder than the death of a friend’.
It was one of Lucian’s most tangled webs: in living with Emily, he had become deeply involved with a young woman who had had an affair with the husband of Susanna Chancellor, who was herself a perpetual thread in his life; and after Lucian and Emily broke up, Emily went back to Alexander Chancellor in 2004, and they had a child together the following year. Lucian told her he was glad to hear the news that she was pregnant. For Emily to go back to Alexander Chancellor was not exactly completing a circle, but was more like a figure of eight, as always Lucian’s lucky number.
Susanna and Alexander stayed married to each other, spending Christmas and some holidays together with their children but also living independently. Lucian and Susanna remained close right until his death, often being seen together in Clarke’s, and their relationship was as near as he got to having family outside of his children and their mothers. But, as was always the case, Lucian in part remained unattached, straying, seeking new conquests.
* * *
Although there were many lovers, work remained his main mistress. It often dictated the timing and length of his relationships. But when a relationship started, it lit up his life. It rejuvenated him. In 1977, Harriet Vyner was a young, impetuous girl from a landed Yorkshire family, who was exactly what he liked: spirited, wild and attracted to the danger and risk which he exuded. It was instinctive whom he chose, as Harriet discovered as a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl. She was talking to the painter Craigie Aitchison when she was targeted by Lucian. ‘He immediately zeroed in on me and made it quite clear that he was interested in me. It was the opposite of that English thing when you never quite know are they just friends or are they wanting more. He wanted more,’ she said.106 Harriet was doing A-levels at Queen’s Gate School. Lucian was fifty-four and at the height of his powers and at his most determined to do exactly what he wanted. ‘There was a sort of intimidation but not because he was trying to create it, but just because it just felt like that. I didn’t really have any sort of reference of dealing with someone that different.
‘I remember I didn’t really think he was that keen on me at first, but when I said I was going on holiday to Italy he said, “Well, don’t get too sunburnt because I’d like to paint you,” and I remember being so thrilled. I thought not only that I’d love to be painted by him but also I thought that meant he actually liked me quite a lot. Remember I was very young and I don’t think I have ever grown up out of that thing completely of thinking “Do they like me?” There’s always that element.’
His portrait of her, Sleeping Head (1979–80), reflected their rather chaotic time together. ‘I’d left school by then and used to fall asleep partly because I was already starting to take some drugs. I’d take a sleeping pill or something, which was always my favourite thing and sleep in the day and then he’d paint me.’ Lucian disapproved of drugs. ‘I did turn into a bit of nightmare for him because if anything disturbed his painting it made him very, very agitated and when I was behaving waywardly and spoiltly he would really mind. I remember him anguished,’ she said.
While painting came first, Lucian’s other desires and instincts took up much of his energy too. It was a life of hidden people, canvases turned to the wall, telephone calls made but not taken by him, and car journeys to destinations about which only he knew. Sometimes the divisions in his life broke down. ‘I think once we went out to dinner with somebody who he knew and this person kept mentioning another girl and then looking at me. Lucian was a bit upset because he liked to keep things private,’ said Harriet. They danced at Annabel’s, visited gangsters’ houses in Essex, swam, listened to Bob Dylan and read Byron. They laughed a lot but also fought; painting was more important than anything they did together. They also gambled, or rather Lucian did, and while her role as muse, model and lover was intense, Harriet always felt he was pushing her to her limits, even with his jokey asides. ‘One thing he did say to me, when we were discussing whether he’d find any man attractive, he did say the one man he would really like to go to bed with was [the jockey] Lester Piggott! He completely hero-worshipped him.’ Lucian’s conversation and conduct were never predictable or conventional for long.
His gestures of affection were startling. He gave her two rats, and offered her a wolf. She got jealous when she learnt that another girlfriend, Katie McEwen, had been given a monkey. He took Harriet shopping at Yves St Laurent, unnerving the staff as he entered the New Bond Street store in his splattered garments. It was then famously run by a redoubtable grand dame called Lady Rendlesham, a former Vogue diva, who glowered in disapproval at the older man and his teenage lover. ‘He used to come in looking very scruffy and, of course, she knew who he was and he used to buy me this, this, this, this, this and this! She didn’t quite know how to deal with him because he’d ignore her as he did with people he didn’t like. He could be very rude, but all the same it was quite gratifying to watch him with this rather bullying woman.’
Time with Lucian was never ordinary. ‘It is very rare for someone never to worry what other people thought but just doing what he wanted to do.’ For Harriet it was a rollercoaster romance. He was initially besotted. But she had gradually become addicted to drugs during their time together, which for Lucian made her erratic yet also enticing. Harriet certainly found sustenance in sitting for him but did go through a very difficult time, eventually being jailed for ten months for drug offences. Harriet remembers the slow breakdown between them before her imprisonment as dramatic and difficult. ‘He got low during this period and as I came in to his studio he was ranting on about something or other and there he was lying on the floor and he just couldn’t move. He was in despair because he couldn’t paint. By being such a nightmare, I was affecting him so much.’ It finished because in the end Lucian protected himself. ‘He did ring me to say, “I think we can’t go on. I find it too difficult seeing you.” I admired that he’d actually thought “no”, rather than just putting up with it,’ she said.
There was rarely a pause. Others filled the gap, some familiar but also always someone new. A year after meeting Harriet, he first saw Celia Paul, in the downstairs life room at the Slade in October 1978. It was another teenage crush.107 ‘I was eighteen and Lucian was fifty-five. He walked into the room dressed in a beautiful grey suit and white silk shirt with a white silk scarf round his neck. He was very, very pale and smoking a Gauloise. He stared pointedly at the naked model on the mattress. I went up to him and asked him if he was busy and he gave a half-laugh in reply, as if to say that the only real way to be busy is to paint.’
He invited her to his studio where he was finishing a picture called Two Plants. ‘He was working on it obsessively, leaf by leaf, almost as if they were growing at the plants’ own rate. He said that the important thing in painting is concentration; he stressed this as if it were a revelation.’
As someone else discovered, it was a wide, open sea.
* * *
Sophie de Stempel opened the studio door in Holland Park to see Lucian laughing and dancing naked to Blondie’s pop anthem, ‘Sunday Girl’. She had arrived to sit for a night portrait. It was the summer of 1982 and this was the last thing she had expected to find.
Here was an unexpected side to Lucian, the homme sérieux who would read his beloved Flaubert’s letters to her, explain the merits of Henry James’s short stories, or talk of more obscure figures like Adolph Menzel, the nineteenth-century court painter to the German emperor Wilhelm I, who did formulaic portraits but exquisite drawings. ‘For whatever reason Blondie got under his skin,’ said Sophie.108 He had been introduced to the band by both Harriet Vyner and his daughter Bella. While driving around London he would listen to Blondie cassettes. Another musical fad was Johnny Cash, whom he had seen play live, and Ray Charles, of whom he said, ‘That man knows how to wear a suit.’
Sophie had met Lucian at the French House pub in Soho in July 1980, when he was out for a night in the West End with his daughters Bella and Rose. She was then a nineteen-year-old art student, the daughter of Baron Michael de Stempel and a direct descendant of the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce. Aristocratic, articulate and ambitious, she too had a troubled time; after a sensational court case her father was jailed for his part in defrauding an elderly aunt. Sophie had spotted Lucian in the pub and introduced herself. He invited her to join them at Wheeler’s, where Lucian ordered oysters for everyone, paying with his usual roll of banknotes. That evening Sophie gave Rose her telephone number; one month later after she had returned from a holiday in Greece, Lucian called her and she found herself posing for him.
‘We had established at dinner that I would sit for him,’ she said, ‘but I still had an anxiousness and, to put it bluntly, I was stage-struck. He used to say that I was a bad model who became a good model. I am not sure that is true, but the first time I felt so nervous I thought I would have a heart attack.’ It was the start of a tempestuous decade as his muse, model and lover.
In the early days Sophie was nervous and eager to please. ‘I could not tell him “I’m freezing,” because he was so anxious when starting a painting. Part of the room was so hot under the lights but a little bit away from them was so cold. He never really understood that – he was so intent on getting what he did in the painting right.’
He could be erratic, even melodramatic. ‘I saw him stab himself with a paintbrush, wounding his thigh so that it bled,’ she said. ‘It was, he explained to me, like being the jockey and the racehorse, urging on with a manic compulsion, pushing to the limit, finding urgency. Lying beneath his feet where I sometimes was positioned, on that hard wooden floor, when he stomped about in his mountaineer’s boots, was unnerving,’ she said. In the middle of painting her, Lucian would jump up and, in mid-air, curse.
One of his other subjects in these years was Baron Heinrich ‘Heini’ Thyssen-Bornemisza, then the richest man in the world. Daylesford, his magnificent house in Gloucestershire, had once been owned by Viscount Rothermere, whose wife Ann (later married to Ian Fleming) had introduced Lucian to his second wife, Caroline. ‘Lucian said he tried not to jump up in a mid-tension tantrum when Thyssen was around, so as not to make him jolt, but he would often only remember too late when he was mid-air. It was painful for him starting a picture, to make something from nothing. He would pile the pressure on himself, saying, “I would rather lose all my hair than not do a good painting,”’ she recalled. This was at a time when his gambling debts were threatening to bury him, and he had rushed out in the middle of the night to persuade Thyssen to commission a portrait. It was a financial lifeline.
Although Sophie had met Lucian in a chance encounter, she had always been intrigued by his reputation as a rake. ‘I remember hearing a friend of mine had been having an affair with him and the inference was always: “Isn’t it shocking?”’ she said. ‘In the 1970s his paintings were widely considered absolutely hideous, the most ugly things you could have, but they were unarguably powerful.’ His reputation as a man without boundaries – artistically, physically and sexually – was by this time fully secure and widely known.
Lucian aimed for a higher truth through intense observation, as Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, pointed out at Lucian’s memorial service at the National Portrait Gallery. ‘Lucian saw the world more differently than most. There was an acuity and a penetration in his scrutiny of your face and in his search for the smallest details of appearance as a clue to character.’ It was echoed by what Lucian himself asserted. ‘I hoped that if I concentrated enough, the intensity of scrutiny alone would force life into the pictures,’ he said.109
Sophie experienced this when she sat for him. ‘I just assumed I was going to be a nude for the first picture. He started a drawing in the afternoon (I was pretty nervous) he was very patient and by the evening I was calmer,’ she said. It was exhilarating, and what impressed her most was his complete dedication to his art. ‘It was very exciting to know that someone was really marvellous at something and to be part of helping bring that about.’
She was mesmerised by his focused intent, the combination of a strict work ethic with an unstructured moral code. While his subject was before him, they were all-important. ‘The aura given out by a person or an object is as much a part of them as their flesh,’ he once wrote. ‘The effect they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their colour or smell. The effect in space of two different individuals can be as different as the effect of a candle and a light bulb.’110
Once Sophie had started an affair with Lucian, she too quickly realised that he was incapable of sticking to one sexual partner. ‘I was intensely involved but aware that other people were involved too. You don’t know things and just have to work them out. You’re not quite sure what’s going on. When Lucian was out of the room I would look at the paintings turned against the wall and see a bit more of someone’s breast. It would make me terribly jealous. He gave a lot of attention when you were there with him, but when you weren’t then you knew there was a whole other life happening. That was tough,’ she said.
What was also tough was the physical element of sitting for Lucian. ‘Like all his sitters it was hard as the hours were long, sometimes seven or eight at a time. In the beginning he would be in agony and torture, thinking he couldn’t do it. He would get in a terrible state. It was all about making it work,’ she explained.
Sophie committed herself to her relationship with Lucian until 1984 when she took a break, exhausted by the sittings and the complications of being one of his lovers. The dates of his paintings provide crucial statistical evidence but give no hint of the emotional upheavals he caused. A picture dated ‘1980–5’ suggests continuity but masks a painful hiatus in their relationship. Sophie returned, though, because she found his brightness and energy addictive. Few women wanted to let him go completely, even when they knew it damaged them.
Always there were others around, and awareness of this sometimes came from the art itself. ‘There was a long period when I remember seeing some woman materialise [in a painting]. I remember thinking, “Well well, there’s Janey Longman.” So things dawn on you; you have to w
ork them out. He had compartments for all of the different people in his life. There were people he was painting and then some he’d painted before and probably others he was going to paint. They were all in play. I don’t really know who was around but when the books on his art came out I would see the paintings and the dates and think, “Oh, was that when so and so was around,” but I never knew anything for fact,’ she said.
GG: ‘Did you mind Lucian having a relationship with other women?’
s de s: ‘Yes. I think so but by then I was really working as a model and so had sort of disengaged which was quite good as I could be more detached.’
GG: ‘So you stopped having a sexual relationship?’
s de s: ‘That was a good thing, actually, because it brought fewer complications. It was much easier to work just as a model, emotionally for me and also for him. It’s hard to work when people are fighting, when emotions are high. He had to balance between his addictions: love of women and gambling. He also had to be very focused as he worked such long hours. All the wild things he was doing were really on the fringe. Painting was always his centre.’
There were day paintings and the more sexually charged night sittings. There were pictures of members of his family – in 1982 his daughter Bella sat naked for a day painting – and there were paintings with male sitters: 1980–1 was when Lucian’s bookie Guy sat with his terrier Speck. Also at that time Angus Cook first modelled for him, standing in for Guy when Lucian concentrated on Speck. (Cook later sat properly for Lucian in his own right.)