Breakfast with Lucian Read online

  As Anne said: ‘Lucian was the split atom in the midst of us all.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN Caroline

  Lucian’s recollection of falling in love with Lady Caroline Blackwood, the wilful Guinness heiress, was sharp and fresh even more than fifty years later. He had painted her at the start of their affair, in a hotel in Paris in 1952, in the picture Girl in Bed. Caroline is radiant, seemingly naked between the sheets, with honey-blonde hair and enormous, forget-me-not blue eyes. There is no hint of the unsettling drama that would eventually unfold. She was twenty-one, rich, shy and alluring. He was nearly thirty, barely earning a living, divorced and renting a dilapidated house in Paddington.

  A sense of the pain and anxiety of their eventual parting was later captured in his 1954 painting Hotel Bedroom, in which his aristocratic, Anglo-Irish wife lies awkwardly dressed, between the sheets, looking vulnerable and distressed, in a cramped hotel room in Paris. Lucian had painted himself standing apart from her, apprehensive, furtive, anxious and unsettling, his hands stuffed in his trouser pockets. Caroline is tremulous and pale, with her fingers touching her cheek, as if in shock. The image suggests a sickbed rather than a marriage bed. It marked the stressful end of his impulsive love affair with the eldest daughter of the 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and his wife, the brewery heiress Maureen Guinness. The two portraits mark the start and end of their relationship and, more than half a century later, sparked a bitter-sweet memory of the affair and their short-lived marriage, which ended in acrimonious divorce.

  Turning the pages of a book of his paintings that I had brought to show Lucian while we had breakfast in Clarke’s one day, he looked with a degree of detachment at the later portrait of his second wife. His memories fell into focus. ‘I had broken the window to get myself more room to paint. She looked miserable because she was cold,’ he recalled. As is so often the case the painting reveals truths beyond mere outward appearance. As he talked about how he had fallen in love and why she had left him, it was almost as if he was describing the disjointed narrative of a film that he had seen a long time ago.

  Girl in Bed, 1952

  Lucian met Caroline through Ian Fleming’s wife, Ann, whom he had painted in 1950 with hard pursed red lips, a diamond-encrusted tiara on her head, a single pearl on her right earlobe, her chin jutting forward, purposeful and forceful, ever the grand society dame. ‘She asked me to one of those marvellous parties, 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,’ he recounted. ‘So Freud now takes Princess Margaret out dancing in yellow socks,’ wrote Evelyn Waugh in capital letters on a postcard to Lady Diana Cooper in October 1951.77

  Ann had very publicly taken up Lucian, showing the wunderkind off at her soirées, and they later spent time together in Jamaica, where the Flemings had their house Goldeneye. Ian had married Ann in 1952, and started to write his first James Bond book Casino Royale while on honeymoon with her; he always disliked and distrusted Freud, suspecting him of having had an affair with Ann. ‘It was simply not true. It was just the sort of absurd thing he believed. I thought he was ghastly,’ Lucian said. But despite her husband’s ill feelings towards Lucian, Ann kept him in her circle. The antipathy between the two men was no secret. Noël Coward visited Ian and Ann on 16 February 1952, to dine with the newly engaged couple, along with Cecil Beaton. Coward offered his thoughts on what they should and should not do to inflame the Freud–Fleming tensions:

  Don’t Ian, if Annie should cook you

  A dish that you haven’t enjoyed

  Use that as an excuse

  For a storm of abuse

  At Cecil and Lucian Freud.78

  Lucian’s recollection of his first sight of Caroline chaotically attired is almost visceral: ‘I remember she wore sort of dirty clothes, the wrong way round,’ he said.

  ‘What else caught your eye?’ I asked.

  His reply had urgency. ‘I think it was really her. 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.’

  Lucian and Caroline Blackwood on their wedding day in 1953

  She and Lucian were viewed by their contemporaries as rebels. In the very conformist 1950s they stood apart from the post-war puritan spirit, not consciously in any deliberate political way but instinctively. Ignoring what anyone else thought, as he nearly always did, he was utterly bewitched by Caroline. ‘I don’t really think of myself in a dramatic romantic way. I just thought of what I wanted to do, you know, take her home alone, that sort of thing. That night I went home and started painting her,’ he said.

  It was a time of social change, the dark shadow of the Second World War receding. In some ways Lucian’s paintings captured the starting point of a more permissive society in Britain. They seemed modern, dangerous, brimming with psychological drama and unrestricted behaviour, so different from other portraiture at that time. The tension in their marriage was frozen in time in Hotel Bedroom. To her family and immediate social circle it was outrageous that someone of her background (being the daughter of a marquess, she had the courtesy title Lady Caroline) should be exposing herself so brazenly in bed for public display. For Caroline, of course, that was half the thrill.

  Lucian, Lady Rothermere and the choreographer Frederick Ashton, Warwick House, Green Park, London, 1950s

  Lucian (centre) with Simon Hornby (left) and Osbert Lancaster’s daughter, Cara at Warwick House, Green Park, London, 1950s

  Caroline’s mother Maureen, Lady Dufferin, was especially horrified by her daughter’s involvement with Lucian and had one aim: to split them up. Her anti-Semitism fuelled her fury. In her eyes he was dangerous and subversive, but above all, he was beyond her control. Through the censorious eyes of society matriarchs, Caroline was deemed wild, even wanton (‘A mermaid who dines on the bones of her winded lovers’ was her third husband Robert Lowell’s crushing judgement, albeit much later). Her contemporaries acknowledged her blithe insouciance.

  Lucian adored Caroline’s careless abandon which merged into self-centredness. As an artist, he understood selfishness. In some ways, with Caroline he had met his match. She rebelled against the flamboyant but narrowly mannered pretensions of Maureen, with her smart house parties, grandiosity and snobbish social ambition, simply by being with Lucian. Caroline always found her dysfunctional and restrictive childhood too painful to speak about and Lucian gave her a means of escape.

  I told Lucian that when I had first seen Hotel Bedroom it had reminded me of Robert Browning’s poem ‘My Last Duchess’, a dramatic monologue about a psychotically controlling husband who ruthlessly destroys his women, in seemingly civilised circumstances. ‘But doesn’t he end up killing her?’ he asked, smiling. ‘Even I have never done that.’

  However, in Hotel Bedroom I see a willing victim being used and using, waiting for as well as weathering the storm of an unstoppable love affair as it wound towards its difficult end. In this picture Lucian has broken new ground in allowing the drama of his personal life more effectively to move the senses of the viewer and show an intensification of reality while at the same time acquiring a life of its own as a work of art. Its spare style and narrative tension show a marked progression from his earlier pictures of Lorna and Kitty. Lucian’s painting seems more assured. There is a suppressed drama and conflict, and the silence between Lucian and Caroline is palpable. Her eyes appear red-rimmed through tears or tiredness, her yellow hair is radiantly bright while Lucian is in shadow, darkly silhouetted against the shutters and stone of the buildings in the Paris street opposite. In Girl in Bed she is again obsessively observed, for such a long time, pinned down like an exotic butterfly. She stares out with an empty vagueness. The tonality is subdued, almost bleached. Her vulnerability and sensuality are sug
gested by her blue cloudy eyes, the size of gull’s eggs.

  The end of the love affair left Lucian hurt and wrong-footed after Caroline rejected his extraordinary charisma that had once been so magnetic. She had loved his outsider edginess, a route of escape from her claustrophobically inhibited and inhibiting parents, but sensed that she would be hurt by him if she stayed. She could not tolerate being betrayed by him and knew that he would stray. His memory was partly nostalgic for the beauty and originality of Caroline but was also spoiled by thoughts of his hated mother-in-law, who had waged a vitriolic campaign against him, which in the end led Lucian to escape with Caroline to France.

  Outside his home in Delamere Terrace, Paddington, West London, 1963. Photograph by Lord Snowdon

  ‘Caroline was in Paris with me because of her mother, who tried to have Caroline kidnapped in London and had me followed. Well, since I had lived among villains in Paddington you can imagine I was not going to be intimidated by such things. I looked round, of course, but all that couldn’t bother me. But Caroline was very nervous and it made me feel horrible. She bit her nails even further down. So all that was partly why we left London.’

  He held Maureen Dufferin in acid disdain: ‘Look, she called herself Lady Dufferin when she wasn’t titled any more – she was really Mrs Maude, having got remarried. It was just odious snobbery. I do not mind ordinary snobbery but she was really vile.’

  Part of the attraction of Caroline was that she was funny and clever with an original turn of phrase: more Wit-girl than It-girl. But she was also desperately shy and to compensate would drink excessively. (As one contemporary who witnessed her disruptive behaviour put it, albeit harshly, ‘She was simply drunk; she redefined the word “fast”.’) Together with her sister Perdita and brother Sheridan, she stood out at society balls filled with debs in pearls and well-behaved English public school boys. Caroline was risqué, decadent, sly and experimental.

  There was still at that time a constant undercurrent of anti-Semitism among the Establishment. In 1951 Evelyn Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford: ‘I went to London for the General Election – just like last time, same parties … [Duff] Cooper got veiners [a term used by Waugh’s wife to teasingly describe him when so angry his veins protruded] with a Jewish hanger-on of Ann [Rothermere’s] called “Freud”. I have never seen him assault a Jew before. Perhaps he took him for a Spaniard. He has very long black side-whiskers and a thin nose.’79 Later she wrote back, ‘Yes. I don’t like Freud. I knew him before he got into society & didn’t like him then. Boots [Cyril Connolly] does though.’80

  There was resentment amongst the stiffer, conservative element of the artistic establishment as Lucian inevitably drew attention. But, liked or disliked, he was noticed, especially with Caroline in tow. Ned Rorem, the American composer and diarist, met Lucian at the Paris apartment of Vicomtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles, the society hostess and patroness. Picasso had painted her portrait and she put on the first viewing of Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s film Un Chien Andalou at her Paris home in the Place des Etats-Unis. The couple had caught her eye. Rorem wrote:

  Lucian brought his fiancée for lunch. Lady Caroline Blackwood was heart-stoppingly beautiful, but vague. There she sat, in Marie-Laure’s octagonal drawing room, on the edge of a sofa, legs crossed, one knee supporting an elbow extending into a smoking hand which flicked ash abstractedly onto the blue Persian rug. Caroline, very blonde, with eyes the hue of the Persian rug and large as eagle eggs, uttered nary a word, neither approved nor disapproved, just smoked. Marie-Laure was wary of her, as of all attractive females.81

  They soon became the most talked-about young lovers in London, with hide-bound society agog as the Jewish, German-born artist, grandson of the famous psychiatrist, swept the Guinness heiress off her feet. ‘I was chasing her and finally I caught up with her and then we went off to Paris. We came back to England to be married,’ he recalled of their rollercoaster romance. They became Lady Caroline and Mr Lucian Freud at Chelsea Register Office on 9 December 1953, one day after his thirty-first birthday.

  But why had he married her, I asked more than fifty years later as we sat in Clarke’s, sunlight streaming in from the window overlooking the rear garden? He was so obviously not the domesticated kind, and loathed the entrapment of family life. ‘Oh, we got married because Caroline said she would feel less persecuted. 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. Remember this was the early 1950s.’

  The marriage, of course, was doomed as Lucian would never be tied to one woman, as he openly admitted: ‘When I finally caught her, I celebrated in a way that wasn’t really suited to being with someone. Before we were together I felt much more intensely towards her than when we were together.’

  ‘You mean you went after other girls?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Lucian nodded. He was never embarrassed by the truth about his conduct. He had never pretended that he was going to behave conventionally. He made clear his rules, or lack of them, to whoever he was with, and he kept to them. It was the expectations and assumptions of others that hurt them.

  Nevertheless, he was still very upset when she deserted him. This was an important time professionally for Lucian as he sought to find a new way to progress with his painting, away from the minuscule detail and tiny brushstrokes, abandoning the fineness of his early works for a more explorative use of paint. It was also a time when he physically altered how he painted. He no longer sat trapped in a chair, but began to paint standing up. Lucian was on the move.

  An important influence was Francis Bacon, with his dramatic and liberal application of paint. They saw a lot of each other at this time and Lucian sat for eighteen different portraits. They drank in Soho, talked incessantly and were quietly competitive. Lucian admired the grand aspirations of Bacon’s paintings with his ambitious themes, extraordinary imagination and unrivalled genius with paint. He wanted to make his own brushstrokes less still and controlled. He was impressed by Bacon’s carefree approach to life, and by the fact he didn’t mind what anyone else thought.

  Lucian sometimes used the fact of having an heiress in his life for Bacon’s benefit.

  GG: ‘Was part of the excitement Caroline’s wildness and wealth?’

  LF: ‘Absolutely, the fact that she was independent and rich. I know I asked her for some money to give to Francis to go to Tangiers. 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.’

  GG: ‘Did she give it?’

  LF: ‘Yes and said, “Is there anything else you really want?”’

  They both played off each other’s surprises. For instance when Lucian took Caroline to meet Picasso something happened between them. He was aware that they had disappeared together but did not really want to know exactly what had occurred. Perversely, he was both boasting and blaming her as he described how Picasso may have had a sexual liaison with her right under his nose.

  GG: ‘You thought something happened between Caroline and Picasso?’

  LF: ‘Well, they came back about three hours after they went out. That was enough time, to put it mildly! But then my own memories of Caroline are not entirely physical. I was much keener physically on Caroline than she was on me. One can never say these things with more than a little bit of sureness, don’t you think?’

  GG: ‘I think instincts on such things are usually correct.’

  LF: ‘Yes I feel that.’

  GG: ‘Did you mind that she might have had a fling with Picasso?’

  LF: No.

  GG: ‘Because you’re not possessive?’

  LF: ‘I remember coming home one day to the house in St John’s Wood and there was someone in bed with her and they were asleep. I remember being so careful to shut the door so as not to wake them. I didn’t go home that much to my house.’

  Hotel Bedroom, 1954

  Caroline told
him she did not want to remain married and ran off to Spain. She felt he was too dark, controlling and incorrigibly unfaithful. Her mother was jubilant; ‘It was marvellous. Caroline ran, ran, ran,’ Lady Dufferin crowed.82 But despite the hostility of his mother-in-law, Lucian was not prepared to give her up.

  Lady Dufferin was willing to resort to the lowest possible tactics to disentangle Caroline from Lucian’s clutches. ‘She was absolutely ghastly, what I would call really corrupt,’ he said. ‘Maureen said she had tried to get my father Ernst deported back to Germany in order to put an end to my relationship with her. It was disgusting. She was vile, worse than the caricatured evil mother-in-law.’

  Lucian did not give up even when his wife hid herself in a secret address in Spain. ‘I could not think of anything else for a long while. Maureen thought if Caroline was out of the country, she’d be safe. Caroline became a tutor, teaching English to some children in Madrid.’ He went on a somewhat quixotic search, as he did not even know her address. ‘When she left me I just knew I had to find her. 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,’ said Freud. ‘Meanwhile, her mother hired people to tell everyone how appalling I was, asking if I had a criminal record. I had one or two speeding offences,’ he said.

  GG: ‘How tense was it?’

  LF: ‘Very. I’ll give you an example: Maureen to Caroline: “I don’t mind Lucian being married to you but only if he is nice.” Me to Caroline: “What does she mean by nice?” Caroline: “Well, titled, of course.” I couldn’t do anything about it. That gives you an idea of what she was like. Then she had my parents followed. It was really horrible because she knew so many important people – MPs and so forth – that she thought she could have my family exiled from England. Well, we happened to have been naturalised British subjects.’