Breakfast with Lucian Page 10

  The Irish visit, however, was overshadowed by her horrific rape, which Lucian was never told about. When he arrived at Galway station, Anne, who had come to meet him, somehow ended up missing him. ‘I thought he hadn’t come and I was heartbroken. He had actually been so swift, typically of Lucian, that he had managed to get a taxi to the Zetland Arms in Roundstone near where we were living in Cashel Bay, Connemara, before I saw him. I got drunk in Galway station and was raped by a porter. I was devastated. Only the next day did I manage to get to Cashel Bay. I spent the night on a bench, drunk because I had been so disappointed. I never told Lucian about the porter. I don’t think he would have been sympathetic at all. Discretion was needed at that time,’ she said.

  Once they did meet up they stayed almost a month together, paying for a hotel room with some money Lucian had once again been lent by his ever-generous benefactor Peter Watson (painted by Lucian in 1941), who always had an eye for beautiful young men. ‘He told Peter he needed money for paint,’ said Anne. They headed to Dublin where they met Helena Hughes, wife of a prominent Irish actor, to whom Lucian was instantly attracted. ‘It was a fraught time. We also met a dealer called Deirdre McDonagh, who had been interested in Lucian’s work, and I took mine. She said about mine, “Oh you have improved, Lucian.” He was so angry.’ Her work had been mistaken for his, and Lucian never liked rivals.

  Lucian’s obvious attraction to Helena Hughes was the first realisation for Anne – even though she was his lover and Lucian was married – that she was far from immune to his infidelities. ‘It was terrifying. You couldn’t take your eye off him for a second,’ she said. (To muddy the waters further, Helena had been the first girlfriend of Michael Wishart and had stayed with Lorna at Marsh Farm, at Binsted. Later, in 1951, Lucian had an affair with her and painted her.)

  Anne was out of her depth and became even more so when she fell pregnant. ‘I was curiously innocent about the facts of life. My mother had never instructed me, and so I got pregnant very easily. Any form of birth control Lucian considered “terribly squalid”. And he wasn’t very helpful when I had to do something. A friend called Derek Jackson provided £100 because my mother refused and Lucian naturally couldn’t. It was done in Harley Street. I was eighteen. Lucian really didn’t want to know about it but, mind you, I didn’t really want to talk about it much. Really, it was: “You get on with it.”’

  The complicated connections within Lucian’s world continued in another mind-boggling merry-go-round of liaisons with him at the centre. Anne’s friend Derek Jackson was a leading physicist who had inherited co-ownership of the News of the World. He was married to a beautiful, talented painter called Janetta Woolley. Janetta had a very brief dalliance with Lucian, as well as a long affair with Cyril Connolly, who in turn fell for Lucian’s second wife, Caroline Blackwood (whom Lucian married in 1953). Janetta later had an affair with the Duke of Devonshire, a great patron of Lucian’s (he painted six members of the Devonshire family), while Lucian intimated to friends that he had had an affair with the duke’s wife Deborah ‘Debo’ Mitford, whose sister Pamela had been Derek Jackson’s wife before his marriage to Janetta. Forty years after Janetta’s brief affair with Lucian, her daughter Rose had an affair with him and sat for him.

  In 2008, Debo gave a fond recollection of her old friend Lucian. ‘Very attractive, an original. As well as his prodigious talent, he is delightful company, can be very funny, always unexpected. He was a will o’ the wisp, appearing and disappearing in a disconcerting way, day and night were the same to him. Scathingly critical of those he does not like, he is a real friend to his loved ones. Admittedly he does discard them sometimes, but Andrew [her husband] and I were lucky in that we remained friends for more than fifty years.’73

  After her abortion Anne lived in Ireland for several months on her own to try to establish some sense of separation, but Lucian returned for her nineteenth birthday. On the day he was supposed to arrive she was informed a man was waiting for her downstairs but was appalled to see another friend, Philip Toynbee, with whom she had earlier had an affair, and quickly sent him away. A little later she was called again but this time it was Cyril Connolly. ‘I said, “This is terrible, Lucian is coming. You must go.” Cyril wanted an affair with me but I was not interested.’ Lucian eventually appeared about four days later.

  By now, according to Anne, his wife Kitty had realised that she had essentially lost him and had started an affair with the novelist Henry Green. Anne remained drawn to Lucian, and moved back to London to a flat near to him, in Alma Square in St John’s Wood. Then she got to know Lorna’s son Michael and decided that if she couldn’t have Lucian permanently, Michael was the next best thing. The fact that Michael was gay didn’t deter her.

  Anne revealed a more Machiavellian agenda. ‘When my affair with Lucian was collapsing, I saw paintings in his studio by Michael. I asked Francis Bacon to introduce me, which he did in the Colony Room. I thought my best revenge when Lucian was off with someone else would be to go off with Michael, which I did.’ Michael claimed he saw a kindred spirit in Anne when he noticed a live Australian fruit bat or flying fox hanging from the ceiling in her flat. ‘She opened the door like a spinster expecting a rapist; it was on the chain. I saw a tightly bandaged wrist. I fell in love with the bandage on sight and very soon afterwards with the wearer, when we were dancing at the Gargoyle,’ he wrote in his memoir.

  Of course, one thing they had in common was their passion for Lucian. Although Michael told Anne that he and Lucian had had some sort of a physical relationship, Lucian would not have accorded it any significance. ‘We have to assume they did something. I actually think Lucian had an affair with anyone who was handy,’ said Anne. The interior decorator and social chronicler Nicky Haslam, who later had a long affair with Michael, confirmed that his lover had had a brief frisson with Lucian.74 But Lucian never considered himself gay, and in the eyes of those close to him he was notorious for relentlessly pursuing women at every turn. (Francis Bacon told John Richardson at a dinner hosted by Lady Dufferin that the reason that Lucian was not gay was because he was poorly endowed – a flippant and asinine remark, but one which nevertheless revealed that Lucian and his undoubted attraction were at the centre of conversation.) It was more that he took advantage of any sexual opportunity, and was conscious that a great many of his male friends were gay. He admired their courage, especially in the years when it was still a crime, and regarded homosexuality simply as just another flavour in life. As Bruce Bernard wrote, in an astute biographical essay about his friend, ‘It has also probably never displeased him that homosexuals do not offer any rivalry in his own field of amatory manoeuvre; but these are deep waters that cannot be plumbed with any certainty.’75 Clearly, at this time Lucian was sexually opportunist and omnivorous.

  Anne Dunn, with her husband Michael Wishart

  The theory that Michael was in love with Lucian is too simplistic, according to Anne. Michael knew how passionate the relationship between Lucian and his mother Lorna had been, and by having Lucian he was stealing something of hers. Anne inevitably had to share Michael with Lorna. ‘I half adored her and half didn’t, but we were close. I always had the feeling that she couldn’t believe my son Francis could be anyone’s but Lucian’s. I don’t think she thought Michael could have a child and I don’t think she wanted him to. She was half in love with Michael and he was half in love with her.’

  Lucian did not attend the wedding at Marylebone Town Hall, although Kitty did. ‘She was seen glued to the telephone telling Lucian who was there and what was happening,’ remembered Anne. An awkward lunch followed. ‘Everyone hated everyone except my brother who fell in love with Lorna. My mother refused to eat and drank only brandy and milk. My father-in-law, a God-fearing Communist, didn’t like what was happening at all,’ said Anne. That it was an unusual marriage was demonstrated by who landed in bed with whom that night. It defied not only convention, but also logical explanation. ‘I ended up with Lorna at the Royal Court Hotel
and Michael ended up with Peter Watson,’ said Anne. ‘My mother-in-law and I slept in the same bed, but I don’t think anything happened. It was odd to wake up with her rather than with my husband.’ This was musical beds on a grand and anarchic scale.

  The bohemian disquietude continued after the honeymoon. ‘We got back from Paris at the beginning of October 1950 and got a room somewhere off Knightsbridge, but Michael then disappeared. He had gone off with Francis Bacon, who I think also had an affair with Michael.’ And so, like a rogue homing pigeon, Anne went back to Lucian, although she did love Michael too. ‘I was very, very close to Michael. He was more like a brother, almost like a blood relationship but very intense. He and Lucian were both amazing mentors,’ she said.

  Michael and Anne’s son Francis had an unorthodox start to life in 1951 in the private maternity hospital at 27 Welbeck Street in Marylebone. ‘Michael dropped me off and I didn’t know what I was in for, knowing nothing about babies or childbirth. Michael then got very drunk and landed up in jail on a charge of being drunk and disorderly. So the first people to come round to see me were Francis Bacon and Lucian. It was so unlikely and they even brought flowers. I think Lucian partly came round to investigate if the baby was his,’ said Anne. He read to her Memoirs of a Midget by Walter de la Mare and Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys.

  Parental responsibility often took the back seat. During the Festival of Britain, Lucian took Anne out for the evening when Michael was away in Ireland and they brought baby Francis with them. They were extremely reckless by today’s standards. ‘I left him in a carry cot in the ladies’ room at Northolt while Lucian and I went on the big dipper. I gave him a bottle and just left him with the attendant. He was still asleep when I came back,’ she recalled.

  They continued to see each other, and Anne found herself again pregnant by Lucian. She could not cope with another child, certainly not one by anyone other than Michael. ‘I had to get one of those backstreet abortions. I think the barman from the Montana arranged it,’ she said. She pretended to stay in Italy, sending a postcard to Lucian and Caroline and one to her husband, before sneaking back to Paris to stay at the Hôtel Saint-Pierre until she recovered.

  Even after 1957, when Anne left Michael for the Spanish painter Rodrigo Moynihan, whom she married in 1960, she and Lucian remained intermittent lovers. Lucian did not always end relationships with clear finality. Some women – and indeed men, like Francis Wyndham and Francis Bacon – stayed in his life for decades. In Anne’s case, it was for a quarter of a century. Anne’s view was that although she was deeply fond of him she also saw his faults, and the physical side of life with Lucian was at times dark. With Anne he appeared to be occasionally a relentless and somewhat cruel lover.

  AD: ‘One had to be very careful not to show that one wished he would stop. I heard from someone else with whom he had an affair that he became quite vicious, really hurt breasts and things and became painful and sadistic.’

  GG: ‘Did that happen with you?’

  AD: ‘The very last time, I didn’t want to see him again in that way. It was horrible; he was hurting my breasts, hitting and squeezing, really painful.’

  Unusual among his lovers, Anne rarely sat for him. ‘It was so boring and if you are an anxious person, which I am, all one’s anxieties flood and you can’t breathe. I remember myself hyperventilating,’ she said. When Anne did sit for a nude some years later, it was abandoned because she could not face the stream of passionate eruptions and interruptions from another of Lucian’s lovers, Jacquetta Eliot.

  Jacquetta was a competing girlfriend and muse, hot-tempered, beautiful and probably the most dexterous of his sitters, contorting herself into tiring, troubling positions. She was also the mother of Lucian’s son Freddy. ‘I was doing a night-time session,’ said Anne, ‘and would hear Jacquetta shouting outside. It really was unbearable. I was just being a model. Even so, he was very angry with me because I had walked out on him when he was in the middle of a picture and I completely understand that.’ All that remained of one incomplete portrait was her bare breasts.

  Lucian was self-centred but never shy in defending his position of needing utter dedication from those in his life. His wiles and whims were sometimes comic, and sometimes furiously impulsive. After he had a row with one lover he sent a postcard with a crude drawing of her defecating. She considered suing before a friend told her to hold on to it, as its value one day would exceed any compensation. He sent Jacquetta pencil sketches, one a jokey cartoon showing him naked with an erection and the word ‘moan’, his nickname for her, written on every part of the body,.

  He had first met Jacquetta, a stunningly beautiful and captivating woman, in 1968 and started using her as a model a year later. It was one of the most passionate and enduring relationships of his life. She was born Jacquetta Lampson, the third daughter of Lord Killearn, and was a famed society beauty with a sharp intelligence and independence. Born in 1943, she had married Peregrine Eliot, the 10th Earl of St Germans, in 1964. Their marriage lasted twenty-six years, and her charged relationship with Lucian ran in parallel. Even in Lucian’s final years he gave her drawings and paintings, and sent her hundreds of intimate, sometimes furious, letters and sketches.

  Jacquetta was funny, original, creative and bluntly forthright with Lucian. She recognised that he was as badly behaved as he was utterly magnetic. ‘When he was not there it was as if the light got dim. In the same way, he made everyone who was with him feel more illuminated and somehow more alive and interesting. No one else had that capacity to light up everyone and everything,’ she said.76

  Always, the painting took precedence over everything in his life. Anne said, ‘He did dedicate himself to his art completely as well as packing in an awful lot else; he wasn’t unsocial. He had this incredible energy to go on working deep into the night, plus go out to lunch and juggle his love life. Furtive is a good word to use about him; he slid sideways through doors.’

  Every girlfriend had to accept that they were one amongst many. Anne recalls being bundled into the bathroom in Delamere Terrace, the bath filled with coal, while he painted other women, including Augustus John’s daughter Zoe, and Henrietta Moraes.

  GG: ‘It must have been strange as Lucian was most likely making love to them upstairs while you were in the “coal cellar”?’

  AD: ‘Exactly … You couldn’t quite believe what was happening but in retrospect I did. I often think, “How could I have been so dumb?”’

  The liaisons continued. Rodrigo Moynihan’s first wife, Elinor Bellingham-Smith, also sat for Lucian. ‘John Moynihan, their son, used to go and collect her and sometimes from his descriptions it seemed to me that she too probably did have an affair with Lucian. I suspect they did. It was another of those things going round after I had gone off with Rodrigo, another revenge. They were revenges, but not vengeful.’

  * * *

  The link to Lorna through her son Michael and grandson Francis continued into the early 1970s, when Anne had an exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in Cork Street. Francis’s girlfriend at the time was Tanya Harrod, and Lucian was immediately attracted to her. Tanya was just twenty-two, and he was fifty. She sat for him but they did not have an affair, but not for want of Lucian trying. ‘He was like a hawk going for her. He started walking up and down and gesturing as he undid his belt.’ It was manic, clumsy and strange, just short of undoing flies, according to Francis. Francis’s next girlfriend Liz Kneen was seduced by Lucian. She was an illustrator who had lived with Francis but when they broke up and separated, Lucian asked her to sit for him. ‘It was she who told me that he was vicious in bed,’ said Anne. ‘She had refused to sit for him because he would not give her his telephone number and as an ardent feminist she thought this unfair.’ She died of cancer in 2007. A third girlfriend of Francis, Rose Jackson, also became a model and muse for Lucian, for about a year. He stopped seeing her after she had a child.

  As with affairs, disputes were also ever present. When Michael was dying of
cancer and short of money, he tried to sell a drawing Lucian had done of Lorna in a fur coat. Lucian jinxed the sale. ‘Lucian did not deny he had drawn it but claimed that Lorna had fiddled with the nose and Christie’s should drop the picture from auction. I think what he said wasn’t true but it stopped the sale,’ said Anne. In the end it sold for £60,000, less than the projected auction price, through the dealer Thomas Dane.

  One day during his final years in France in the 1990s, long after he was divorced and was staying with Anne, Michael asked to drive over to see the novelist Edward St Aubyn, who was to fall in love with another Lucian muse, Janey Longman. Born in 1955, she was translucently beautiful and clever, with an aristocratic elegance and learning which was lightly worn, and had sat for several portraits in the mid-1980s. She also fitted into the close-knit Freud web. Her previous boyfriend had been Tim Behrens, subject of a 1962 portrait Red Haired Man on a Chair. Lucian fell for her when they met at a party given by the Duke of Beaufort for his daughter Anne. He made two naked portraits of Janey on her own and then a double-portrait of her and India-Jane Birley, the daughter of the club-owner Mark Birley, also naked. The picture of the two women, Lucian told her, was inspired by Gustave Courbet’s Le Sommeil, another double portrait of two naked women voluptuously entwined which caused a sensation when exhibited in 1866. When she met Lucian, Janey was working for Lady Arabella Boxer, Food Editor of Vogue. After the three portaits Lucian quietly and undramatically ended their affair.

  As Michael turned up at Teddy St Aubyn’s house in Provence, the Lucian links came almost full circle – St Aubyn was a protégé of Francis Wyndham, who was Anne’s oldest friend, and after whom she had chosen to name her son. Michael had agreed to the name because it was shared by his closest friend, Francis Bacon. When Edward and Janey went on to have a baby boy in 2000, they named him Lucian. It was always an entwined world, and continued to be so – in 2011, Janey’s niece Marina Hanbury married Ned Lambton, the son of Lucian’s former mistress Lady Lambton.