Breakfast with Lucian Read online

  Breakfast with Lucian

  Greig, Geordie

  Random House (2013)

  * * *

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Preface

  1. Breakfast

  2. Stalking

  3. Early Days

  4. First Loves

  5. Obsession

  6. Lorna’s Legacy

  7. Caroline

  8. Paint

  9. Lovers

  10. A Daughter’s Tale

  11. Two Late Sitters

  12. Dealers and Gambling

  13. Offspring

  14. Finale

  Family Tree

  Notes

  Picture credits

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  For ten years Geordie Greig was among a very small group of friends who regularly met Lucian Freud for breakfast at Clarke’s restaurant on Kensington Church Street. Over tea and the morning papers, Freud would recount stories of his past and discuss art. It was, in effect, Freud’s private salon.

  In this kaleidoscopic memoir, Greig remembers Freud’s stories: of death threats; escaping from Nazi Germany; falling out with his brother Clement; loathing his mother; painting David Hockney; sleeping with horses; escaping the Krays; painting the Queen; his controversial role as a father; and why Velázquez was the greatest painter. It is revelatory about his art, his lovers, his children, his enemies and his love of gambling. Freud dared never to do dull, speaking candidly of dancing with Garbo as well as painting Kate Moss naked.

  Those closest to him, after decades of silence and secrecy, have spoken frankly about what life was like living, loving or sitting for the greatest figurative portraitist of the twentieth century. Partly based on hours of taped conversations with the artist and his circle, and drawing on interviews with those who knew Freud intimately – including many girlfriends, models, dealers and bookmakers – Breakfast with Lucian is an intimate portrait of the artist as a young and old man. Illustrated with many unseen photographs of Freud, it is a uniquely fascinating, personal and authoritative account of one of the greatest British painters of this century and the last, and a profile of a man who makes everyone else’s life seem less lived.

  About the Author

  Geordie Greig is the Editor of the Mail on Sunday. He was previously the Editor of the London Evening Standard and Editor of Tatler. He lives in London and is married to a Texan with whom he has three children. His last book was The Kingmaker, the story of his grandfather’s friendship with King George VI.

  For Kathryn, Jasper, Monica and Octavia

  What matter? Out of cavern comes a voice,

  And all it knows is that one word ‘Rejoice!’

  Conduct and work grow coarse, and coarse the soul,

  What matter? Those that Rocky Face holds dear,

  Lovers of horses and of women, shall,

  From marble of a broken sepulchre,

  Or dark betwixt the polecat and the owl,

  Or any rich, dark nothing disinter

  The workman, noble and saint, and all things run

  On that unfashionable gyre again.

  ‘The Gyres’, W. B. Yeats

  ‘Dull not to.’

  H. L. C. Greig (1925–2012)

  Preface

  In the mid 1990s Lucian Freud stopped publication of his authorised biography. Even though he had cooperated with the writer he paid him off with a substantial sum. When Lucian read the manuscript he was appalled that so many intimate details would enter the public domain. The idea that the book would be published in his lifetime was abandoned.

  When I was a news reporter on the Sunday Times in the late 1980s, another writer told me that East End gangsters had come round to his house, at Freud’s request, and threatened him with unpleasant consequences if he did not stop researching a biography. That book withered too.

  This book avoided his obstructions. We met for breakfast regularly over the last ten years of his life, and during our many conversations Lucian gradually opened up. Eventually he was happy for me to record what we said. We had an understanding that it was fine for me to publish what he told me in different magazines and newspapers. The resulting book, started after Lucian’s death, is a personal perspective on his life and work by someone who followed his career for thirty-five years but only gained his confidence and trust in his last decade.

  Walking home with David Dawson, 2011

  CHAPTER ONE Breakfast

  Scruffy, slightly stooped and silent, the two men looked like characters arriving for a dress rehearsal of Waiting for Godot. Breakfast with Lucian invariably began the same way, with the Grand Old Man of British art and his younger assistant, David Dawson, walking the few doors down from the painter’s home in Kensington Church Street in Notting Hill to Clarke’s restaurant. Lucian often wore a paint-flecked, grey cashmere overcoat, and black lace-up workmen’s boots, which gave him a sartorial edginess. The coat was from Issey Miyake, and his unironed white shirt was crumpled but expensive.

  Lucian entered Clarke’s before the curtain went up. He and David would slip through the delicatessen next door to the restaurant, via a side passage into the empty dining room. The shop does a brisk trade in almond croissants, pains au chocolat, organic cheeses, quiches, lemon tarts, sausage rolls and breads, but breakfast next door was a privilege that Sally Clarke – the eponymous owner of the restaurant and one of Lucian’s last sitters – only ever granted to him. In effect, it became Lucian’s private salon for himself and his guests.

  It is a small upmarket restaurant that has been a fixture in Kensington for more than a quarter of a century. Its customers often remarked that it felt more like going to a dinner party than a restaurant, as for most of that time Sally Clarke offered no menu choice, only what she had decided to cook that day. It has relaxed that distinction in recent years to give a choice of three or four dishes every day, always what is freshest on the market. It is a discreet and popular venue for top brass from the BBC, and people like Bryan Ferry, Salman Rushdie and Dame Maggie Smith. When the Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi came to the UK in June 2012 after a twenty-four-year exile, it was where she spent her one lunch in London, on her sixty-seventh birthday. Cashmered English ladies of a certain age enjoy its quiet atmosphere. A card on the table indicates that mobile phones are forbidden. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are customers. It is situated among estate agents and specialist antique shops, and is easily missable; but once through its wood and glass doors, its superiority over almost every other restaurant in the area is evident.

  Lucian had first started going to the tiny front café in Clarke’s in 1989 with Leigh Bowery, the flamboyant Australian performance artist whose pierced cheeks and blond wig or bald pate made Lucian fade into anonymity beside him. He became a sitter for Lucian and was paid to pose naked. Lucian loved the starched white tablecloths, the pretty girls in their chef’s uniforms, the light airy atmosphere and bright arrangements of flowers on the bar counter, the delicious food and, of course, his friendship with Sally. His shabby-chic style and hint of dishevelment masked a man of discernment and taste. Nothing was unplanned. Breakfast at Clarke’s was precious downtime for him. He had a never-ending work schedule, a round-the-clock regime, or ‘round the cock’, as one wag put it, since his libido never appeared to fade. Occasionally, he would mock-grab the thigh of one of his female guests, or the waitresses, or Sally, who would laugh. Somehow he carried off a gesture that might have seemed boorish or ill-judged in others. It was meant playfully, almost c
omically, and came with affection, originating from an era before political correctness. It was also evidence of a man who grabbed life; there were no rules, certainly not in playfulness. He was the man who got away with everything. But then, as his grandfather Sigmund once said, ‘there is no such thing as a joke’.

  Lucian and David walked to Clarke’s for breakfast most days, and for almost ten years, on and off, usually on Saturdays, I was part of a small cast of invited friends, although we were kept separate. He juggled past lovers and new ones, art dealers, his children, framers and friends. The range was wide: from a beautiful girl dying of cancer who worked for the Queen to a former heroin addict who had been to jail, his wine merchant, favourite auctioneer, bookmaker or the painter Frank Auerbach, his oldest friend. Freud was a great divider. He allowed few of us to see any of the others. The central crossroads in his later life were his painting studio and Clarke’s. Everyone important to him in his final years met there.

  Breakfast with Lucian became part of my weekend, although often it was arranged on the spur of the moment. He hated being pinned down, having to see anybody. My visits there had started with Lucian randomly calling to invite me, but in his last few years it became more of a routine and in the early mornings I would text David, who would reply on Lucian’s behalf: ‘Clarke’s in twenty minutes’ or ‘At Clarke’s, come now’. Because he hated intrusion, Lucian gave his telephone number to almost nobody apart from a few of his children, his art dealer, his lawyer, and, of course, David, who would drive from his own home up Ladbroke Grove and let himself into the Kensington Church Street house with the one spare key. Lucian’s black engagement diary lay open on the eighteenth-century mahogany desk in the grey linoleum-floored dining room. Written in his childlike script were the names of those he was seeing that day, economically annotated (‘Frank 9 Clarke’s’, ‘Jane 8.45’), as well as the name of a model who might be sitting for him later. David would gently rouse Lucian from bed on the second floor, wait until he had taken his bath and then walk with him down the street to Clarke’s.

  David worked for Lucian for twenty years; they spent more time with each other than anyone else in their lives. They had both grown to appreciate each other’s sense and sensibility, and were utterly at ease. David first met Lucian when he worked for his then art dealer James Kirkman who sent him round to help with some tasks. David organised all the daily necessities, from getting wads of cash from the bank (Lucian loved cash; when he died, wads of cash were inside two eighteenth-century mahogany wine coolers in his upstairs drawing room), to buying his Solpadeine, the painkillers he took addictively to maintain his energy and ease away any aches or pains. But David’s role as studio organiser, as someone who could think ahead about every detail to do with Lucian’s work, was the crucial one: at this he was ‘really, really good’, as Lucian would often say, the Rs slightly rolled and Germanic. They shared the same sense of humour, and David knew Lucian’s quirks and work requirements completely.

  A note written by Lucian to remind him about breakfast

  Born in 1960, David had trained as a painter at the Royal College of Art and was the one student in his graduate year whose work the London Evening Standard’s art critic Brian Sewell genuinely admired. An exact contemporary of Tracey Emin, he is an artist in his own right as well as having been Lucian’s model and constant companion for two decades. Besides some Auerbachs, his etching Talbot Road had been one of the very few pictures hanging in Lucian’s studio in Holland Park.

  For breakfast at Clarke’s I would park nearby and then walk past the private car park where Lucian’s brown Bentley had its own bay. As I neared, I could see David and Lucian silhouetted against the rear window. They would sit in the same chairs at the same circular table, the day’s newspapers fetched by David from a shop on Kensington Church Street. All the broadsheets, plus the Daily Mail, would be spread out. Lucian would order a pot of Earl Grey, which he poured before it had time to brew and would swamp with milk, while David had a cappuccino. Over the years Lucian’s breakfast varied from pains au raisin to porridge to scrambled egg and toast, Sally and David always wanting to make sure he ate sufficiently and healthily as he had a very sweet tooth. Lucian would often take a bar of home-made nougat from the shop’s shelves as he walked in, sometimes jokingly slipping it into his pocket like a shoplifter. With a murderously sharp black-handled kitchen knife, he would slice it bit by bit, offering up slivers.

  In the last three years of his life I drove to the restaurant from Holland Park, where I lived on the ground floor of the building in which he had a top-floor studio. The only unspoken rule was never to be late. Clarke’s was neutral territory for him, a respite from the bedroom or the studio. It was where he relaxed. Sometimes my young children, Jasper, Monica and Octavia, would join us for cheese straws and chocolate-chip biscuits, showing him what they were doing with their PlayStations or my iPad. Lucian did his only digital drawings there, for them, both of horses, one on an iPad and the other on an iPhone. He was enchanting with the children, amused when Jasper told him he had nice knees – ‘One of the finest parts of me’ – and laughed when Jasper told him he thought that the initials ‘OM’ after Lucian’s name stood for Old Man, not Order of Merit. Lucian would mock-drum on the table with a spoon or his clenched fist, pretend to take cherries out of the children’s ears, sing ditties or recite poems by Walter de la Mare or Rudyard Kipling. He was always delighted to talk and tease, and their interaction was often very moving.

  David Dawson and Lucian in Clarkes

  In conversation with Jasper Greig, September 2010

  In that quiet space, Lucian’s conversation ranged from dating Greta Garbo to the best way to land a punch without breaking your thumb, to how he had popped in to 10 Downing Street to see Gordon Brown, or had been to a nightclub with Kate Moss, or had sold a picture for an eye-watering sum. He was witty, caustic and curious. Recitations of Goethe, Noël Coward, Eliot and Yeats tumbled out. It was somehow always a performance and never a declamation, whether it was Nat King Cole’s ‘There’s Gotta Be Some Changes Made’ or nineteenth-century French verse. He could recall spats in the 1940s with Ian Fleming, who believed Lucian was cuckolding him (‘completely untrue, actually’), how Stephen Spender had stolen some drawings, or how Jacob Rothschild had taken him to the ballet at Covent Garden the previous night. Stories might go back to his twenties, perhaps recounting his time as a film extra in George Formby’s musical comedy Much Too Shy. (Lucian played a young painter at the ‘School of Modern Art’, while Formby was an accident-prone handyman who paints publicity posters for his local cinema. Asked by the manager to draw sexy women in silks and satins in his pictures, Formby enrols at the art school, being too shy to have anyone he knows model for him. ‘One day when I’m a famous painter they will sell like hot cakes,’ he boasts to his boy assistant, Jimmy. ‘I’d rather have hot cakes,’ replies Jimmy.)

  Lucian’s doodle of a horse, his only i-Pad drawing, November 2010

  Lucian with Monica and Octavia Greig

  Painters were often discussed, from Degas (whom he admired) to Raphael (who he felt never became truly great). Top of his list were Rembrandt and Velázquez. He would tell you how Chardin, in 1735, had painted ‘the most beautiful ear in art’ in a picture called The Young Schoolmistress. Conversation was chatty and informal and gossipy and sometimes profound. He might suddenly say how he hated the brightly coloured cupcakes in the fancy bakery that had opened a few doors down, or talk about his latest painting, or which of Flaubert’s letters he especially liked. He was never boastful about what he was doing or who he had known; both were spectacular and remarkable. He talked fondly of his time hovering in dark streets with criminals in Paddington, West London, and riding horses in the 1950s in Dorset, and more recently near Wormwood Scrubs prison in the noughties. His grandfather Sigmund was recollected with warmth.

  Lucian was scornful of any psychobabble link between him and Sigmund. ‘I just never think like that,’ he told me, believi
ng very simply that too much analysis led to paralysis.

  GG: ‘Did your grandfather have any of your pictures?’

  LF: ‘Yes, I gave him some things but my aunt Anna destroyed them.’

  GG: ‘Why?’

  LF: ‘I think because he liked them. But when I tried to borrow them back it was impossible. I was friendly with a maid in his house who told me that my aunt had destroyed them. She was absolutely ghastly.’

  GG: ‘Did you see much of Sigmund?’

  LF: ‘Oh yes, I liked his company very much. He was never boring. He told me jokes. I remember how nice he was to the maid. I loved seeing him. I remember I took a book by Norman Douglas out of his library and on the title page someone had written “Please do not show to Professor Freud”. Well, there was one limerick which went:

  “Those girls who frequent picture palaces

  Have no use for this psychoanalysis,

  But although Doctor Freud

  Is extremely annoyed

  They cling to their long-standing fallacies.’”

  Another lyric often recalled by Lucian had a humorous dig at other famous Jewish intellectuals, including his one-time father-in-law, the sculptor Jacob Epstein (who once referred to Lucian as a ‘spiv’):

  There was once a family called Stein,

  There was Gert,

  There was Ep,

  There was Ein.

  Gert’s writings were bunk,

  Ep’s statues were junk,

  And no one could understand Ein.

  An hour at breakfast would go by, sometimes two. Then it was time for work, and he gathered his bunch of keys and half-moon tortoiseshell glasses from the table; David would grab the papers. And so back to his Georgian town house with its perfect proportions, white sash windows, an iron gate at the front leading to the matt, dark grey front door, a bamboo hedge in the front shielding the house from anyone too inquisitive. No name was on the doorbell, and in any event the buzzer could not always be heard if Lucian was working upstairs. Unexpected visitors were discouraged.