—
“CAROLINE WAS THE GREAT love of Lucian’s life,” said Anne Dunn, who was intermittently involved with Freud throughout this period. “With Caroline he behaved terribly well. Very unusual. He didn’t love any of us. He must have known that she loved him,” she added, “which was a great thing.” Strangely, however, and despite their five-year love affair—including four years of marriage—Freud conceded later that Caroline remained to some extent impenetrable to him. “It sounds ridiculous in a way,” he told me, “but I never really knew Caroline that well.”
Freud cherished what was unknown and unknowable about people, even as he was constantly drawn to greater and greater extremes of intimacy. “When you find something very moving,” he told Feaver, “you almost want to know less about it. Rather like when falling in love you don’t want to meet the parents.”
—
CAROLINE’S MOTHER WAS THE brewery heiress Maureen Guinness. Her father, the fourth Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was killed in action in Burma in 1945. The widowed marchioness had just taken over as director of the Guinness brewery when her daughter’s affair with Freud began.
Smart, shy, and verbally adroit (she went on to be an acclaimed author), Blackwood worked as a secretary and occasional writer at the Hulton Press, which published Picture Post, a gossip-and-glamour magazine with a political bent. Still in her teens, she was delicate and mercurial, with a hint of quick-witted street urchin under the inviolate veneer of her good breeding. “She wasn’t easy socially—everything was in little jerks and silences,” said her friend, the magazine editor Alan Ross. “She was a louche, skittish sort of girl…She wasn’t usually wooed by people.”
Freud, despite his strain of theatricality, was just as shy, just as skittish, but he did woo her. They had first met at a formal ball given by Ann Rothermere. Ann, who had sat for a portrait by Freud in 1950, led a privileged and provocative life. She had married the second Viscount Rothermere—Esmond Harmsworth—the owner of the Daily Mail, after her first husband was killed in action in 1944, but she had been conducting a long-running affair throughout this period with Ian Fleming, a stockbroker who had worked in naval intelligence during the war and was on the verge of creating the fictional character James Bond. From about 1948, Ann spent part of each year in Jamaica, ostensibly staying with her friend Noël Coward, but for the most part taking up residence with Fleming. The affair was discovered by her husband in 1951; they divorced, and the following year, Ann—now pregnant by Fleming for the second time (their first child was stillborn in 1948)—married Fleming in Jamaica. In the meantime, she had established herself as a society hostess at Warwick House, off Green Park in central London. Seemingly immune to the privations of the postwar period, she threw glittering parties where aristocrats mingled with selected representatives of the new bohemian crowd, including Freud and Bacon.
She had taken a particular shine to Freud, despite Fleming’s distrust of him (he suspected, wrongly, that Freud and Rothermere were having an affair). She “asked me to one of those marvelous parties,” remembered Freud, “semi-royal, quite a lot of them were there, and she said, ‘I hope you find someone you’d like to dance with,’ and that sort of thing. And then suddenly there was this one person and that was Caroline.”
More than half a century later, when asked what had caught his eye about Blackwood, Freud said: “She was just exciting in every way and was someone who had taken absolutely no trouble with herself, looking like she hadn’t had a wash. But then someone actually said that she hadn’t. I went up to her and I danced and danced and I danced and danced.”
Soon after, early in 1952, Freud began dropping in on Blackwood at the Hulton Press offices. Behind the scenes, and despite Freud’s marriage to Kitty, Rothermere encouraged the liaison.
Bored, restless, enfolded in a fraying aura of childhood privilege and damage, Blackwood was susceptible to Freud’s lawlessness. She had a self-centered streak that made her indifferent, and often actively opposed, to others’ expectations. That included her mother, who did all she could to sabotage the relationship.
Blackwood recognized a similar trait in Freud. She “had never met someone as exotic and dangerous-seeming as Lucian,” wrote Ivana Lowell, her daughter by the British screenwriter Ivan Moffatt. Blackwood herself described Freud as “fantastic, very brilliant, incredibly beautiful, though not in a movie-star way. I remember he was very mannered, he wore these long side whiskers, which nobody else had then. And he wore funny trousers, deliberately. He wanted to stand out in a crowd, and he did.”
The world Freud now entered was new to him. If he was intoxicated by Caroline, he was also slightly intimidated by her milieu. When he accompanied Blackwood and her mother on a shooting trip in Ulster, the other guests included Lord Wakehurst, who had just ended his stint as the (last) British governor of New South Wales and was now the governor of Northern Ireland, and Viscount Brookeborough, the prime minister of Northern Ireland. On that trip Freud struck Caroline’s sister, Perdita, as “so shy he couldn’t look anyone in the eye. He stood with his head down, eyes darting from side to side.”
Freud was not merely an artist and bohemian, of course; he was Jewish. And this—even if his name was Freud—was not to his advantage in the highborn circles in which he now began to move. At one point, early in the relationship, Blackwood brought him to a party at her mother’s house. Winston Churchill’s son Randolph saw them enter the room, and yelled, “What the bloody hell is Maureen doing, turning her house into a bloody synagogue?” The young couple chose not to react. But the next time Freud ran into Churchill he knocked him down with a punch.
—
FREUD’S AFFAIR WITH BLACKWOOD soon caught fire. They were harassed by Blackwood’s mother, who was doing everything in her power to obstruct the relationship. So they ran off to Paris. They stayed in the run-down Hôtel La Louisiane on the rue de Seine. Freud painted Girl in Bed [see Plate 4], one of several beautiful portraits of Caroline he made that year. Another was Girl Reading. In both pictures—and Girl Reading especially—you feel artist and subject could not get closer. Blackwood’s brow blushes purple, as if bruised by Freud’s ardent proximity.
“I felt that the only way I could work properly was using maximum observation and maximum concentration,” he later recalled. “I thought that by staring at my subject matter and by examining it closely I could get something from it. I had a lot of eye trouble, terrible headaches because of the strain of painting so close.”
The strain would get to him, forcing him to seek new paths forward. But for now what mattered was that Freud’s youthful mannerisms were dissolving in a potent new solution: amorous intimacy. He was in love—obsessively so. He later said that he remembered “the obsession more than the person.” But Caroline was under his skin, and taking up so much of his mental and emotional life that it was hard for him to work. “I couldn’t think about anything else.”
It was an intimacy that had something of the secret garden, or the locked hotel room, about it. But it couldn’t be prevented from spilling over into other lives. Blackwood had been cut off from her family’s money and Freud had also run out. Finding themselves unable to pay the hotel bill, they tried to get Cyril Connolly and his wife, Barbara Skelton, to buy Girl Reading when it was finally finished. Connolly, a contemporary of Blackwood’s late father, had been one of Freud’s earliest supporters. But he had also developed an older man’s crush on Blackwood and seemed to want the painting as a kind of talisman. So, against his wife’s initial objections, he bought it. He also confessed his infatuation—which, although it had been persistent and inconvenient, was never going to be reciprocated—to his wife. This precipitated the unraveling of his marriage to Barbara, who left him for the publisher George Weidenfeld. It also contributed to the outside pressure that now began to build on Blackwood and Freud.
—
THAT PRESSURE INCREASED ANOTHER notch after a disconcerting episode in Paris that Freud liked to recount later in life.
Having met Picasso on previous trips, he now took Blackwood to the master’s studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins. “Caroline’s nails were always bitten down, as much as possible,” he explained. When he introduced her to Picasso, he continued, “Picasso looked and he said, ‘I’m going to do some drawings on your nails.’ He did black ink drawings on them—heads and faces and things. Then he said, ‘Would you like to see the flat?’ There were at least two floors in the rue des Grands-Augustins. So Caroline went off and shuffled back maybe a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes later. I said to her afterwards, ‘Tell me what happened.’ She said, ‘I can never, ever tell you.’ So I never asked her again.”
Blackwood remembered it differently in a 1995 interview with Michael Kimmelman. She claimed it was Picasso who made the initial contact, inviting Freud through an intermediary to come and see his paintings. Freud accepted, and brought Blackwood with him. After a while Picasso invited her to see his doves on the roof, which were reached by an exterior spiral staircase. So “off we go,” she recounted, “winding round and round to the top, until we reached these doves in cages and all around was the best view of Paris, the best. Whereupon immediately, standing on this tiny, tiny space, way above the city, Picasso does a complete plunge at me. All I felt was fear. I kept saying, ‘Go down the stairs, go down.’ He said, ‘No, no, we are together above the roofs of Paris.’ It was so absurd, and to me Picasso was just as old as the hills, an old letch, genius or no.”
Blackwood’s own recollection was inflected by a sort of comedic dismay. “What were we supposed to have done if I accepted?” she wondered. “There was no space to make love, with all those doves. And think how many other people he had up there. Did they go through with it? And technically, how did they go through with it? And with the husband downstairs?” Later on, she continued, “Lucian got a call out of nowhere from a mistress of Picasso’s who asked him if he [Lucian] could come round and paint her. She wanted to make Picasso jealous. Lucian very politely said maybe he could paint her portrait later, but not now because he happened to be in the midst of doing his wife’s portrait.” (In fact, they weren’t yet married.)
The picture in question was Girl in Bed.
—
FREUD WAS ABOUT TO turn thirty. His emotional life was in turmoil, as were the lives of those closest to him. Kitty was pregnant with their second daughter, Annabel, who was born later that year. But their marriage had fallen apart. Girl with a White Dog would be the last picture he made of her.
And so now, as if wanting to come to grips with the person who was at the center of so much turmoil, so much ardor, such confusion, he embarked on a self-portrait. Over a rough sketch in charcoal, he began painting in oil paints, working from the inside of the image—the eyes, nose, and mouth—out. He showed himself with one hand held up to his mouth—a gesture of thoughtful hesitation, one that Edgar Degas had favored in several self-portraits and portraits of others at a similar point in his career.
The paintwork is looser, less evenly distributed than in almost all his pictures up to that date. But it is hard to tell if Freud meant it to stay this way: He abandoned this exercise in self-scrutiny before it was finished.
In December 1952, just before his thirtieth birthday, Freud took up an invitation from Ann Rothermere—now Ann Fleming (she had married Ian Fleming in March that year)—to cross the Atlantic. It was Freud’s second crossing: The first had been during the Second World War when, as a volunteer teenage sailor in the Merchant Navy, his convoy had come under attack by Germans. This time, instead of Newfoundland, where the wartime convoy had ended up, he took a boat to Jamaica and stayed for several months at Fleming’s villa, “Goldeneye.” He took to painting banana trees and other outdoor plants while Fleming worked inside on his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale.
“I noticed I switched away from people when my life was under particular strain,” he later explained. “Not using people is like taking a deep breath of fresh air.”
While he was away in Jamaica, Blackwood’s mother, still trying to thwart the affair, and also wanting Caroline out of the country for the coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth II (Caroline had been snubbed as a maid of honor), had sent Caroline to Spain. She took up work as a tutor teaching English in Madrid, and her address was kept from Freud. But he was not to be deterred. He went to Madrid and began looking, with very little to go on. “All I knew was she was in Spain and I had the number of the door but not the street name. I knew I would find her.”
The divorce from Kitty came through, and Blackwood and Freud were officially married at the Chelsea Register Office on December 9, 1953, one day after Freud’s thirty-first birthday. FREUD’S GRANDSON WEDS announced the notice in the newspaper.
“We got married because Caroline said she would feel less persecuted,” Freud explained, decades later. “And there was a technical reason. She had a bit of money from her father and she couldn’t get that if she was living in sin.”
For a time, all seemed intoxicating, incandescent. The two were in love. Freud was succeeding as an artist, earning recognition and admiration from many who mattered, in both London and Paris. Under the spell of Bacon and his gusting sociability, life was rich, unpredictable, fraught with poignant hilarity. The war and its long aftermath were receding as society was swept up in change. Freud and Blackwood were the most beautiful, alluring, enigmatic couple in town. They lived above a restaurant in a run-down Georgian house on Dean Street in Soho, from where Freud would go to his Paddington studio at the crack of dawn. Caroline, who had access once more to her family’s money, bought Freud a sports car as an engagement present. They also bought an old priory near Shaftesbury in Dorset—“a beautiful old building beside a large black lake,” as Michael Wishart remembered it. Freud kept horses at the priory. He bought a lot of marble furniture. He embarked on a mural of cyclamen, and—his most ambitious picture yet—a double portrait of Caroline and her sister Perdita. Both paintings—an ominous sign—were abandoned at an early stage.
Blackwood’s wealth, combined with her independence and unpredictability, were all part of her attractiveness. Freud had been financially dependent on Bacon for so long, and now very much liked the idea of reciprocating—with her help: “I know I asked her for some money to give to Francis to go to Tangiers,” he recalled. “I explained I had a friend who was always giving me money whenever I wanted it and that now I would like to do the same for him as he’s met someone special out there.” Not only did she give it, she then said, “Is there anything else you really want?”
Bacon’s “someone special out there” was Peter Lacy.
—
IN 1952, THE SAME YEAR that Freud fell in love with Blackwood, Bacon met an ex–RAF Spitfire pilot called Peter Lacy. He had fought in the Battle of Britain. His nerves, Bacon later claimed, were shattered as a result. He was “terribly neurotic—hysterical even.”
They met in the Colony Room. Dashing and stiff-jawed, with dark circles under his eyes, Lacy played George Gershwin and Cole Porter tunes on a white piano in a nearby bar, the Music Box. Bacon fell immediately in love. He adored Lacy’s looks (“the most extraordinary physique—even his calves were beautiful”), his piano playing, his innate sense of futility (the product, believed Bacon, of his having inherited money), and his humor: “He could be wonderful company…He had a real kind of natural wit, coming up with one amusing remark after another, just like that.” But above all, he sensed danger in Lacy; the possibility of being with someone who might utterly dominate him, as no one since his father had done.
Bacon was already over forty, but he claimed that for the first time he had fallen in love. Lacy “really liked” younger men, he said, and didn’t seem to realize that he, Bacon, was actually older. “It was a kind of mistake that he went with me at all.”
The two men drank heavily together, goading each other on. Lacy could put away three bottles of spirits in a day. He had a house in Barbados, which Bacon painted from a photograph, at Lacy’s r
equest, the year they met. The style of the rendering, as dictated by Lacy—who had no time for Bacon’s painterly distortions—is blandly conventional. (Bacon actually had to ask a painter friend for advice on the rules of perspective.)
For four years, from 1952, Lacy rented a house called Long Cottage, in a small village near Henley-on-Thames. He invited Bacon to stay with him. When Bacon asked him how the arrangement might work, he replied: “Well, you could live in a corner of my cottage on straw. You could sleep and shit there.” According to Bacon: “He wanted to have me chained to the wall.” Lacy also had a collection of rhino whips—props in a theater of sadomasochism that frequently tipped over into chaotic reality.
Although Bacon spent a great deal of time at Long Cottage, he never fully moved in. The “arrangement” proved too heady and destructive even for him. Lacy, he said, “was so neurotic that living together would never have worked.” In his rages, he would move on from doing horrendous damage to Bacon’s person to destroying his clothes and even his paintings. For significant stretches, Bacon was immobilized. Unable to paint, he was overwhelmed by despair.
—
THROUGHOUT THEIR RELATIONSHIP, Bacon was with Blackwood and Freud more than they quite grasped. Blackwood later claimed that she and Freud dined with him “nearly every night for more or less the whole of my marriage to him. We also had lunch.” Bacon’s charismatic high spirits and his tragic, vulnerable aura tinted relations between his friends even when he was absent.
And he was never, it seems, entirely absent. One of his most brilliant and audacious paintings was hung prominently in the priory in Dorset. Titled Two Figures, but more commonly described—with wry affection—as The Buggers [see Plate 5], it was Bacon’s first painting of a couple, and it was produced in 1953, during the second year of his affair with Peter Lacy. It was based directly on Muybridge’s stop-motion photographs of wrestlers. At first, it resembles a mound of mangled bodies. But the setting is no wrestling arena. It’s a bed, with white sheets, pillows, and a headboard.
The Art of Rivalry Page 7