Breakfast with Lucian Read online

  Large Interior, W9 (1973) is one of the most remarkable of his portraits, with his elderly mother, buttoned up in tweed suit and sensible shoes, sitting in a leather armchair while his naked lover Jacquetta Eliot lies on a low iron bed, half-covered under a brown blanket, her naked breast exposed, her arms locked behind her head. Neither woman interacts, they appear in separate worlds and that is really the point. It is as if he has created a scene between a psychoanalyst and a patient. For years Lucian had felt harassed by his mother seeking personal information about him; the intimate details that she would have so desired were now flung in her face with the image of Jacquetta lying exposed on a mattress.

  There is a sense of the hospital or asylum about this painting. A mortar and pestle lie on the floorboards, suggestive of a chamber pot beneath the old woman’s chair, but also a reminder that they are both in a painter’s room (or patient’s room), where pigments are ground. Both cry out for psychological interpretation. But it is also not quite as it seems. The two women never posed together. Lucian kept them separate, joining them only on the canvas, which gave a bizarre psychological twist to the strange three-way dynamic of the artist, his widowed mother and his lover. Again, this is a milestone painting in Freud’s oeuvre with its more adventurous use of space and the experimental composition. Perhaps more is learned about Freud himself in the end, rather than about the lover and forlorn mother. The woman with her arms locked behind her head on the bed exposing her armpit hair, her knees bent under the woollen blanket, and the bare mattress echo an earlier portrait of Kitty. His mother is gripping the chair with her gnarled hands, her wedding ring in contrast to the illicit affair between Lucian and his married lover. The colours are brown and muddy with only the pink of the nipples and the gold wedding band showing lightness, and the empty space between the two figures and their gazing in diametrically opposed directions increases the sense of alienation. The bare simplicity is stark, and the fact that no clue as to the relationship between the two women is given in the title, gives the picture an edge of tension.

  Large Interior, W9, 1973

  All his life Lucian captured moments to which he brings a sense of drama: Kitty appearing to be about to strangle a kitten or tensely gripping a rose; the gangster masculinity in Guy and Speck, in which the massive right hand of Guy the bookie is all that stops his terrier Speck from falling off his lap on to the floor. So often he makes the viewer feel discomfort. It often simply reflected surreal aspects of his life, or how he was perceived to live; for instance, when he and Kitty set up home their household was rumoured to include a condor with a six-foot wingspan. (Not true, but he did have a large, fierce kestrel, about which Kitty gave him the ultimatum ‘either me or it’. In a rare retreat, he took it back to Palmer’s, the pet shop.)

  A mystical connection to animals was integral to his art and life. He had a particular passion for birds of prey, and in the late 1940s he kept a pair of sparrowhawks in his house. To feed them, he would shoot rats with his gun on the canal bank at Regent’s Park. He once brought home a pair of buzzards. His whippets Eli and Pluto were part of his entourage and he drew, painted and engraved them. At an auction in 2012, an etching of Eli fetched a record price for a Freud etching of £147,000.

  ‘I am a sort of biologist. My interest in humans as a subject is as an observer, examiner and watcher of people. I worked a lot from horses in this way,’ he told me.

  ‘I don’t know if he could break a horse but if anyone could it was him,’ said John Richardson. ‘He adored animals and they him. It was like some psychic power. Just as Picasso could put his hand into a cage of wild birds and one would quietly allow itself to be taken, so too did Lucian have a gift.’ At the close of his career, he painted Grey Gelding (2003) and Skewbald Mare (2004), portraits of horses he rode outside Wormwood Scrubs prison where he had transformed the stables, run by a nun called Sister Mary-Joy, into a temporary studio. He liked the juxtaposition of a nun and a jail. He would sometimes turn up at Clarke’s for a late breakfast after riding Sioux, the skewbald cob mare. He knew how to make horses do exactly what he wanted (except win a race). ‘He was like a shaman with horses. They knew him as if he had magic powers,’ said Sister Mary-Joy.102 The shamanic side to him can be seen in a 1948 Clifford Coffin photographic portrait of Lucian with a kestrel.

  It was a feisty quality in Kate Moss that he liked, her particular wildness, an aversion to conformity and domesticity. ‘He talked about foxes in the same way that he talked about her,’ said restaurateur Jeremy King. ‘He liked the free spirit. He liked the bite of danger.’

  Sometimes this sense of danger, mixed with intrigue and mischief, hovered over the breakfast table as he sat in Clarke’s, incongruously slicing slivers of nougat. ‘I don’t think I ever killed anyone,’ Lucian told me. We had been talking about gangsters with guns turning up at Delamere Terrace, which had led Lucian to query whether he had killed anybody. ‘I like conflict and tension,’ he said.

  When he left his house or a restaurant in his later years he would often pull his grey coat over his head and hide his face with a scarf to shield himself from the attention of the paparazzi. It made him seem like a prisoner on the run rather than the Grand Old Man of British art.

  Did he ever get into trouble with the law? ‘Only occasionally being locked up overnight: something to do with fighting. Shaftesbury Avenue in the 1950s was a bad place for me. I had a house in Dean Street but I couldn’t paint there. Too many people on the run from the police knew I was there and would ask if they could stay a couple of nights.’

  Was he ever jailed?

  ‘Only in a police cell but I visited people in prison. The man who lived underneath me was a car dealer and the police said he killed somebody. I got involved because the night he was supposed to have done it, he was with me. I went to see the chief of the West London police and they were cajoling and blackmailing: “You are well known around here and if you want to go on living in this district …” It was really squalid. I did not realise how crooked the police were and then something happened, like in a really bad novel: I went out with Princess Margaret and the Queen and this was reported in the press and all the trouble stopped.’

  Lucian instinctively distrusted those outside his immediate circle. When the art dealer Robin Hurlstone bought at auction some of Lucian’s love letters to Caroline Blackwood, he furiously demanded them back because they were, in his opinion, stolen. They were, in fact, sold legitimately and he eventually conceded that Hurlstone was an acceptable owner of his love missives, which included some drawings. But he had been viciously vocal on the matter. He never apologised and seldom explained. Lucian did only what he wanted and never what others asked. When also asked by the National Gallery trustee Simon Sainsbury if he would lend the painting Two Figures (1953) by Francis Bacon which hung in his bedroom, Lucian refused – even though it was for a big show at the Pompidou in Paris. Lucian declined with poetic brevity: ‘How dispiriting to look at a nail.’103

  At work on his final portrait of David Dawson in January 2011

  Lucian was by reputation litigious, and quick to ring his lawyer Lord Goodman, the consummate legal fixer of the time (whom he drew in 1987 wearing a pair of yellow pyjamas). Just as Lucian liked to have his suits made at Huntsman, the grandest and most expensive tailor on Savile Row, so he sought the best legal advice. Arnold Goodman was not a strong-arm tactician and more often than not would make a problem go away with a quiet word. But Freud rarely sued and certainly never commented in the press. I interviewed Goodman in 1989 for the Sunday Times and the editor decided not to use the article. I rang Goodman to apologise for wasting his time and he could not have been more charming, assuring me that he would sort it out and that it would most definitely be published. And it was. This was exactly the sort of ally Lucian loved to have on his side: discreet and influential.

  In Lucian’s latter years Goodman’s successor Diana Rawstron was equally effective. He was well protected by her, a soft-spoken Yorkshirew
oman, and they talked almost every day. His dentist bills, tailor’s invoices, bank statements and fan mail all went to her. Occasionally a letter from a stranger intrigued him – the painting Naked Solicitor (2003) was the result of Marilyn Gurland, a Ghanaian-born solicitor from Brighton, writing to him to enquire why he had never painted a black woman.

  Very few details of him as a father or indeed as a husband emerged. At least one lover was banished from his life as soon as she had apparently given birth, the child never meeting Lucian. Some of his children gave interviews to the press, quite guarded and careful and usually with his permission, but some of them infuriated him with their public complaints about his absenteeism. Sitters who were bold enough to divulge what happened in the artist’s studio were given the cold shoulder. When the endless rumours about lovers and children threatened to make it into print, swift action was often taken to maintain his privacy. One newspaper was forced by Rawstron to apologise and pay damages when it muddled a daughter with a lover. A protective silence was built up around him, which is how he preferred it.

  Sometimes he was not averse to less orthodox means of persuasion, such as calling in a few gangland favours. Once over breakfast, Lucian asked me if I needed any help from his ‘friends in Paddington’ when I was involved in a quarrel with someone. I declined, but it was a part of his armoury. He would also occasionally resort to unconventional means of self-protection. Delivering a copy of the Evening Standard to his front door one evening, I rang the bell and after the clunking of several locks the door opened a few inches and a voice menacingly asked, ‘What do you want?’ A ten-inch knife with a serrated edge was pointed at me. ‘Lucian. It’s me, Geordie. Put the knife down,’ I urged. And then I laughed, and when he saw I was laughing, he laughed too. ‘“Lunatic Artist Stabs Editor of Evening Standard” is not a good way to be remembered,’ I said.

  ‘I can think of worse ways,’ he answered, letting me in and offering me a cup of tea.

  Woman in a Fur Coat, 1967-68

  CHAPTER NINE Lovers

  In his later years two women stood out, of more significance than all of the younger ones who were to sit for him. Jane Willoughby and Susanna Chancellor ran on parallel tracks, seeing him separately, almost never meeting each other but both very important to him in different ways. They were essentially the women to whom he turned for true companionship and unconditional love. They were only too aware of the difficulties of falling in love with Lucian. His restlessness as an artist and inability to be tied down defined him.

  No one loved Lucian longer than Jane Willoughby. They were introduced in the late 1950s and for the next sixty years their lives were threaded together. Jane helped him all his life and forgave him everything. ‘She understood he was an artist and would do whatever he needed to fulfil that role,’ said Anthony d’Offay. They met at a ball where Lucian emerged from under the skirts of another girl’s ball gown. Both had the same bohemian impulses and, crucially, Jane had a love of art and an understanding of why it mattered more than anything else. Tim Behrens remembered Lucian at his most anguished over Jane. ‘He was terribly upset, rolling on the ground in complete misery. I don’t know what it was about. Maybe because she would not go to bed with him or because she did not love him as much as he did her. It was very un-Lucian-like, I was impressed by this sign of human weakness and heartache. Before that I had always thought he was invulnerable in that way.’104

  Over time she came to accept his refusal or inability to be tied down. Two failed marriages were enough for Lucian to know that it was better that he lived alone. ‘Through not being married they remained in love with each other, if you see what I mean,’ added d’Offay. ‘If they had married it would have been untenable because Lucian would never abide by anyone else’s rules. By being separate and sort of understanding each other they managed to love each other all their lives. His relationship with Jane was a big anchor for Lucian. It made him feel safe or something like that.’ Not that it was easy for Jane. She would sometimes write to him saying it was too painful to go on seeing him; but it always did go on. Lucian told Jane there were only two women with whom he had fallen in love: her and Caroline.

  Jane is depicted in the 1967–8 painting Woman in a Fur Coat (also the title of a great portrait by Titian painted c. 1537). It is a picture of tenderness and affection. Clothes were always important and they interested him, but he wanted the picture to make people ask ‘Who’s that?’ rather than ‘Who’s that in a fur coat?’ He felt strongly that they were two distinct reactions. There is no known picture of her naked and this surviving portrait tells little of their long relationship. Lucian used to stay with her at her baronial home in Perthshire and supported her plans to build up an astonishing collection of work by modern British artists who were essentially his friends: Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews and Francis Bacon were the most significant. She owned the Holland Park flat where Lucian lived. She bought his first ever sculpture, the three-legged horse. Jane was kind to his children and his parents. When part of her house in Belgravia was altered she used Ernst Freud as the architect. She was generous not only with her money but also with her time and thoughtfulness. She was crucial to his life and continues to be crucial to his legacy, accruing the greatest collection of his works. There are plans to use part of her house as an extraordinary museum for the work of Freud and his circle.

  Born Nancy Jane Marie Heathcote-Drummond-Willoughby on 1 December 1934, she was the daughter of Earl Ancaster and Nancy Astor; Jane’s grandmother was the more famous ‘other’ Nancy Astor, the first woman member of the House of Commons. On her father’s death in 1983 she became the 28th Baroness Willoughby de Eresby.

  When Lucian met her she was free-spirited, beautiful and clever, a modern girl with an ancient pedigree. Lucian particularly liked the fact that she had served as a train bearer and Maid of Honour to the Queen during the Coronation. She seemed set for a charmed life, until her brother Timothy, heir to the earldom, went missing at sea off Corsica in 1963. Suddenly she was the heir, and from that moment her life was defined by her family’s possessions. She was to inherit 75,000 acres in Lincolnshire and Perthshire, and become a joint hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain to the Queen. She has never married or had any children, and it was Lucian who played perhaps the most significant part in her life, together with Eric de Rothschild, who also became an important collector of Freud’s pictures much influenced by Jane. She was one of the few people with whom Lucian remained close over a long period.

  He talked to me about her with deep affection and admiration. Often on a Sunday she came to have breakfast to see his latest paintings. She also was part of an inner circle invited on his rare trips abroad. In some ways, she had seen all the other women off. She knew they would not last as long with Lucian as she had and would continue to do so. Perhaps it was the fact that she had never had a child with him that gave her a sense of independence and also availability. But if Lucian had married her, as his friends often thought he might, he would have also married into the responsibilities of owning two great stately homes – an impossible task for a man dedicated solely to his own life and work.

  She showed him great love and was loved back in kind. If any woman got the most of Lucian’s capacity to commit in his own peculiar way, it was her.

  Also important for many years was Susanna Chancellor, who like so many of the women who stayed in Lucian’s life he met when she was very young, still a teenager. Born Susanna Debenham, she was a schoolgirl at Cranbourne Chase when they met. Her father Martin was a left-wing politician and worked for the Coal Board. The family name was famous because of the eponymous Oxford Street department store. The Lucian links were almost claustrophobically close, as Susanna’s boyfriend for about two years at that time was Timothy Willoughby, Jane’s brother, shortly before his death at sea. Susanna sat for several portraits, but not until the 1980s. She remained a constant thread in his life, especially in his later years. When he gave her etchings, and there were many, he always
autographed them using her maiden-name initials ‘SD’. She introduced whippets into his life and his art. They were the only constant in his domestic life. In Double Portrait 1985-1986 Susanna’s arm shields her eyes as she lies entangled with a whippet called Joshua, an intimate image combining his obsession with animals and women.

  Their relationship started with tremendous passion. Ffion Morgan, daughter of Ann Fleming, who had introduced Lucian to Caroline, recalls ‘a dinner party where he had her sitting on his lap ignoring every other guest – especially me, as I had made it clear that I did not want to have an affair with him’.105 They were introduced when Susanna was seventeen and the relationship lasted until his death, when she was in her mid-sixties. Throughout all this she remained married to Alexander Chancellor, the convivial and clever journalist who had edited the Spectator magazine in the late 1970s and early 80s. Their families were close: Alexander’s aunt Paget was married to Susanna’s uncle Piers Debenham, and their grandfathers had also been friends.

  Susanna’s link to Lucian had a new layer of complexity added around 2000, when Lucian painted and started an affair with a young writer called Emily Bearn, who had also had an affair with Alexander. Born in 1974 and educated at Westminster and Cambridge, she was a talented features writer for The Times and the Sunday Telegraph when she first met Lucian in 1998, at which time she was in her mid-twenties while he was in his late seventies. She later quit journalism to become a successful writer of children’s stories. She was intelligent, articulate and attractive. In all she sat for seven paintings, one of which, After Breakfast (2001), shows her lying on white sheets placed directly on the floorboards of the Holland Park studio. The perspective is disorienting as the floorboards seem to be tipping towards the viewer. Emily looks almost wounded, lying in a state of seeming anxiety, accentuated by the games played with odd angles and perspective, her right hand grabbing her own hair.