Breakfast with Lucian

by Geordie Greig

  GG: ‘To expose the nipples?’

  AF: ‘Yes, and not because of any sexual impropriety or forbidden eroticism … This is something I have talked about with my sisters. You would think it would have a bad effect on your feelings, your sexual feelings or your body feelings but it didn’t. There wasn’t any question in my mind of a lack of trust of Dad. It did involve me requiring a particular strength: it was full exposure. The issue was about someone having dominion over you. It was all quite shocking.’

  The morality of family life was a subject about which Kitty minded a great deal. Annie remembers Kitty looking down on people with illegitimate children, despite the fact (or perhaps because of it) that she was illegitimate herself. She tried to keep Annie’s childhood going for as long as possible, and monitored what books her daughter read.

  In 1955, after Lucian and Kitty had divorced, Kitty married Wynne Godley, the younger son of Lord Kilbracken, a much-loved stepfather to Annie and Annabel. He was an oboist whose chronic stage fright forced him to change careers. He turned to economics, becoming a professor of applied economics at Cambridge. Kitty and Wynne had a daughter called Eve, and with Annie and Annabel they all lived at 128 Kensington Church Street, just a few doors down from where Lucian eventually lived and died. It was comfortable, secure and tidy, the opposite of Delamere Terrace. Kitty created an Arcadian calm in her home, in contrast to her own brittle disposition. Friends remember buttercups in old jars, William Morris wallpaper, tapestries, seashells and her love of the Italian Renaissance painter Carlo Crivelli, one of whose Madonnas she resembled. And always she maintained a love of Proust.

  There was inevitable fallout in the wake of Kitty and Lucian’s divorce and the children suffered from their unpredictable upbringing. ‘I was sent to boarding school to free me a bit from Annabel’s illness at home and Dad,’ she recalled.114 Most stressful was having her father in the same room as her mother and stepfather. ‘The two men I adored appeared to me to be in competition and conflict when together. Lucian would come to the house in Kensington Church Street and have these surreal games of table tennis with my stepfather Wynne. The tension in the room was palpable. Dad would have a fag in his mouth and he would often serve the ball under the table and lose spectacularly. I did not want them to be together. They had a different set of beliefs, languages, preoccupations.

  ‘The only good thing I discovered through psychoanalysis much later on was that my stepfather and father were both in different ways committed to see that I would actually grow up one day. I still find that enormously useful because their contempt, fear and loathing of each other was so completely felt.’

  In the evening Kitty would sometimes sit between these two men in her kimono, ‘silent, beautiful, tense and consumed with rage, rage against the world, artists, husbands, the past, the future,’ said Annie.

  There was also luxury and an extravagance in her childhood, at the homes of Lucian’s long-term girlfriend Lady Lambton, the wife of the former Tory Cabinet minister. Life became exotic for the Freud sisters during the Lambton romance. Bindy Lambton was rich and characterful, and Lucian’s portraits such as Figure with Bare Arms (1961) show a large-boned and angular beauty. ‘God, it was a funny household. We would be on her bed with Dad, who would be picking horses, grabbing the phone, talking to the bookie and also watching the races. Then we would watch the wrestling and Top of the Pops and have marvellous tea and cakes. All this while we all lay in bed.’ Bindy had been abandoned by her mother and brought up by her aunt Mrs Freda Dudley Ward, a famous mistress of the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII. Bindy was wild and unpredictable. She had been expelled from eleven schools. Through her marriage she was rich, and able to pursue her idiosyncrasies at will. Her last words, when she died aged eighty-one in 2003, had been the lyrics of a 1940s song, just exactly the sort of thing that Lucian liked and recited:

  Bindy Lambton, Lucian Freud and John Wilton in Nice, c.1960

  Cocaine Bill and Morphine Sue

  Strolling down the avenue two by two

  O honey

  Won’t you have a little sniff on me

  Have a sniff on me.

  While they were together Lucian lived in palatial splendour with Bindy in her haunted Georgian house in South Audley Street in Mayfair while keeping his independence (and feeding his fondness for high–low contrasts) with his pied a-terre and studio in Delamere Terrace. ‘They were so damned rich; Bindy had floor-length mink coats. If she asked you to get a pair of gloves for her there were hundreds, each on a sort of cardboard hand to keep them glove-shaped,’ said Annie. When she wasn’t in London Bindy lived at Biddick Hall in County Durham where young lions and leopards roamed the garden, occasionally being seen in the bedrooms too.

  Freud’s double life created inevitable tension with Annie’s mother. ‘Lucian and Kitty together just brings memories of anxiety, Kitty desperately anxious when the little girls were dangerously whisked off by Lucian in a car,’ revealed their friend the painter Janetta Woolley. Hedonistic holidays were deeply disapproved of by Kitty. Annie revelled in the ‘great tribe of Lambton children, Beatrix, Rose, Anne and Isabella and the nanny and maid, all eating our way across France, driving from hotel to hotel ending up in the Ritz in Paris’.

  ‘My stepfather Wynne, egged on by my mother, took Lucian to court saying that my relationship with the Lambtons was corrupting me,’ she said. ‘Often when I got home I used to lie to Mum about where Dad and Annabel and I had been because I feared her envy. She and my stepfather thought the high life was going to bring me the worst kind of false expectations of what my life was going to be like. I remember being severely punished for saying something about us not having servants and I was very much taken to task about behaving disrespectfully about our way of life compared to Dad’s way of life. Anyway, they took Dad to court to try to prevent my relationship with the Lambtons.’

  It was a childhood beset by many emotional explosions. Annie would find hate letters lying around his studio that Lucian was about to send, ‘saying the most critical things he could think of to say about somebody he had been in love with, intricate things about their dishonesty, vileness or beastliness’. Annie was aware throughout her childhood of unresolved conflict. Her mother had become pregnant with Annabel ‘to bring dad to his senses, not a nice thing to do’. It was to no avail.

  Lucian’s ever-roving eye had an upsetting effect on Annie. ‘There were many experiences of meeting his girlfriends, becoming besotted with them, and then I would never see them again,’ she remembered. To her delight, from the 1960s onwards the beautiful and loyal Jane Willoughby would float back and forth into Lucian’s life. ‘Above all the other women, Jane had a huge basic sanity, perhaps to do with her class. She is different from most people and more sanguine. She was not like, “Oh, he’s hurt me and then he went and met someone else.” Nothing could stop his great feelings of respect for her.’

  Lucian stained not only others’ memories with his moods, voice, opinions but also the rooms where he lived and worked. ‘The bedroom was knee-deep in dirty clothes, letters, bills, cheques, books, paint, personal objects, works of art. Dad was a manic buyer. He shopped and he shopped and he shopped. Boer War bedspreads, for instance, made by English prisoners of war using old pieces of their uniform. They were often in poor condition, with threads unravelling, but he piled them up. The stairway had no steps visible – the newspapers were like a kind of river, piled up deep,’ Annie recalled.

  She wrote a poem called ‘The Ballad of Dirty Del’ which described his scruffy bohemian existence in Delamere Terrace. It seemed to be simply part of his nature; part of him needed a sense of decay, and of course he was dealing with flesh, its immediacy and how it was fleeting and temporal. ‘It was simply a fact of my life, all the chaos: food, pans of oil in which chips had been fried. I accepted it because it was part of my dad who I loved absolutely and completely. I adored him. My mother was worried my poem showed a lack of respect, but yet she used to tell me harsh things
about him. It was all confusing.’

  Her father’s relentless work schedule and his way of life affected his health. ‘He would complain about awful boils on his bum. Work, relentlessly pursued, took a terrible toll on top of endless love affairs going wrong, lack of money, terrifying gambling debts, conflicts with galleries and the odd fight,’ said Annie. Despite this, he insisted that his daughters should have beautiful manners. ‘We used to go to see his friends for lunch, often in very grand houses or amazing restaurants, and he wanted me to hold out my hand to our hosts and say, “Thank you for a lovely lunch, that was delicious.” He wanted me to be the politest English girl, not muttering “Thanks” but clearly saying, “Thank you, that was really lovely.” He used to stand behind me jabbing me with his fingers to make sure I did it properly.’

  Large Interior, w11 (after Watteau), 1981-83

  When Lucian caught Annie smoking outside he was cross. ‘He told me that prostitutes smoked in the street and wanted me to know that if I did it again I could be regarded as a prostitute.’ He asked if she knew why he was being so adamant. ‘I replied, “Because you are my father,” and he said, “That’s completely irrelevant. It is because I care about you.” I found that statement of objectivity incredibly hard to bear. I wanted his love because of the nature of our relationship, not because of his feelings. I probably cried, certainly inwardly. I found that so hard because he is my father, that is what he meant to me. Everything he said, did, the way he looked, the way he behaved, his friendships and his paintings, everything was the fact that I came from him. I was of his blood. That is what mattered.’

  Annie identified with him, almost obsessively. ‘We looked alike. We even sounded alike in the way he slightly rolled his Rs in words like “free” or “restaurant”. And I loved his assertions … how he would say, “I take bribes but they never influence my judgement: that’s true incorruptibility.” I was one hundred per cent part of him.’

  That closeness was to be shattered in 1975, when Annie was twenty-seven years old, and she discovered that Lucian had fathered other children. It had never crossed her mind that she and her younger sister Annabel might have other siblings. At Wheeler’s in Old Compton Street in Soho where Annie had gone to meet Lucian, a young man stretched his hand across the table and said: ‘I am your long lost baby brother, Ali.’ He was one of four children Lucian had fathered with Suzy Boyt. At lunch nothing further was discussed. She had no idea that her father had at that time at least seven other children. He had hidden this from her, which left her feeling betrayed, depressed and astounded. ‘I simply didn’t know about Ali, Rose, Susie, Ib, Bella or Esther at all – none of them. I had no idea that they existed. Or who their mothers were. Not the slightest idea. At the time, I hadn’t understood that you can be, indeed that you have the right to be, angry with your parents, so I felt that I couldn’t be angry either. I had been brought up to think that whatever Dad did was perfect,’ Annie said.

  The discovery of secret siblings was disturbing enough, but even more so was the fact that they all appeared to know about each other and about her and Annabel. ‘I then started to assume that almost anybody I met was a child of Dad’s. Even if I met someone with an Australian accent I wondered if it was some brother or sister of mine,’ she said. It provided the key to the door of his many secret lives. ‘I had no way of acknowledging my feelings of betrayal until later on when I had a nervous breakdown.’

  His children were hungry for his attention. Sitting for him was really the only guarantee of seeing him. During her pregnancy in 1975 Annie returned to England and Lucian painted her with Alice Weldon, a young American artist. He was as addictive and mesmerising to his children as he was to others, and Annie also confirmed the physical conflict on which he claimed to thrive: ‘Dad used to hit taxi drivers and punched people in the street if he didn’t like the look of them. Sometimes he had cut marks on his face. He might have made a pass at someone’s girlfriend or something. When he was restless he would go round cursing and somebody would take a swipe at him. He was very odd,’ said Annie.

  For a while she changed her name to Robinson, much to Lucian’s consternation. Her mother insisted she change it back, which she did, and Annie is proud of her reputation as a successful poet and scriptwriter under the name Freud.

  While Annie and Annabel, Lucian’s only children born in wedlock, may have inherited an extraordinary pedigree, any empowering sense of identity diminished as they faced their father’s parallel private lives. Highly unpredictable parenting took a heavy emotional toll. Annie sometimes funnelled her anxieties into her poetry, often humorously. In her collection The Mirabelles there is a poem about being with Lucian, called ‘Sting’s Wife’s Jam has Done you Good’:

  You pass me some nougat

  on the point of your knife

  that looks like the one I used to have

  that I bought in France, that never went blunt

  and was lost in the debris of a moules marinières.

  Was that the bell? I hear you inquire

  No, I reply. I think it’s a bird

  You are painting a restaurateur

  More nougat is cut

  What was that noise?

  It’s a bird in the garden

  Having a squawk.

  The model’s upstairs.

  We kiss and we part.

  Although he had never been a predictable father, Annie was jolted when Lucian was no longer the father figure solely for her and Annabel. He was suddenly someone who cared for other children besides them, or, even worse, simply didn’t take his paternal responsibilities as seriously.

  ‘Somehow the person I thought I had as my dad was no longer the person I had known. I was anchorless. Dad had brought me up to be fantastically correct and polite, but then in the 1970s he was suddenly buying into punk where you had to be as rude as possible. What was all that bloody well about?’ said Annie.

  ‘Bella and Esther knew all of these dangerous heavy-duty people who would tell you to fuck off as soon as they looked at you. My marriage broke up and I became a ferocious feminist and Dad took a dim view of my unhappiness. He didn’t want to know.’

  Although he carried on calling her Hunnington, a long nickname for Honey (or sometimes an even longer more whimsical term of endearment, Hunnington Herbert), something fundamental had altered. Hers had always been a childhood full of bewildering contrasts. ‘To break one’s addiction for continuity was an essential way of dealing with him,’ she concluded.

  Annie’s eventual independence and courage to pursue her career as a poet, writer and mother forced her to stand up to Lucian with dramatic repercussions. They clashed in 1981 just before he started Large Interior, London W11 (After Watteau), the hugely ambitious painting based on the eighteenth-century rococo painter’s picture of four figures in an imagined garden playfully listening to music. Lucian asked Annie if her daughter May would sit as one of the figures. Annie was nervous of the idea, as she knew that Lucian’s sittings were long and arduous. The day before the painting was due to be started, Annie and May were harassed by some youths on the Tube. ‘I was angry but Dad told me not to talk about it in front of May because I might frighten her. And I thought right, right. That’s it. This is too much.’ The next day Annie told her father she had changed her mind and that May would not be in the picture. He was furious and immediately told her to leave. ‘It was the worst mistake of my life because we for ever lost our intimacy. I did try with a huge amount of effort to rebuild our closeness, but it could never be remade.’ (The picture shows Celia Paul, Bella Freud, Kai Boyt, Suzy Boyt and a child called Star, the daughter of a girlfriend of Ali Boyt.)

  Annie wrote letters asking forgiveness. ‘I was very frightened of him after that. I had lost my way with him. If I told him I was writing poems he wouldn’t say anything. It was just terrible.’ For five years they did not see each other. ‘It was like suffering an assault for being a mother,’ she said. She survived as a poorly paid secretary and started a
relationship with another woman who helped her to bring up May. When she did meet Lucian again it was at awkward, stiff lunches where hardly anything was said. ‘He would write to me saying I mustn’t go on about being so sorry about the past and that everything was fine. I stopped writing eventually as everything got back to an even enough keel, but at a huge cost.’

  But it was not the same. For instance, Annie was never given her father’s telephone number although some of his other children had it. ‘It was very upsetting. It really screwed me up for a long time,’ she said. Annie is candid and courageous. She has been through a lot of therapy to process her upbringing and writes witty, bold poems. At her father’s funeral, she read ‘The Most Beautiful Bottom in the World’, about a photograph in his house. It ends:

  You kissed me. I drove away.

  And all that’s left is what you said about the photograph,

  And me going through a red light

  on the Bayswater Road

  and the shiny touts on Queensway

  trying to get you to eat

  in their Lebanese restaurants.

  David Hockney, 2002

  CHAPTER ELEVEN Two Late Sitters

  Hockney

  David Hockney calculated that he sat for Lucian for more than a hundred hours over four months in the summer of 2002, amid dozens of Lucian’s torn white rags flecked with paint. Dressed in a spattered white ‘apron’ over his trousers, Freud looked like a worker in an abattoir, next to the dandyish younger artist. Hockney was sixty-five, Freud was seventy-nine. The sitting was the high point of a long, episodic friendship that had started forty years before.

  The portrait shows a close-up of a face in thoughtful repose. It is unsentimental but reveals Hockney’s warmth and curiosity. Lord Rothschild told Hockney it showed him very much as a Yorkshireman. He wears a jaunty red and black checked jacket and blue shirt. The professional observer is minutely scrutinised and recognises the process with a combination of fascination and impatience, as any poacher-turned-gamekeeper might. ‘With Lucian being slow, taking such a long time over painting a picture, it means you can talk. If you do a picture in just an hour you can’t, there’s no time. He got to really know and watch the face do a lot of things, and that is what he did. He came close to my face to see the subtle differences. He was looking and looking and coming closer and closer. He has a startling energy, almost electric, which comes across. No way are you going to fall asleep with him,’ Hockney said.