Breakfast with Lucian Read online

  The same was not the case when Freud sat for Hockney a few weeks later. ‘I got two afternoons, that was all,’ said Hockney. ‘During one he fell asleep but I carried on drawing him. I said, “It’s OK, I can draw you asleep,” but no, he didn’t want that. So he woke up.’ He disliked any prospect of being seen as less than vigorous. He fidgeted like a child, his head twitching round as if fearful that some enemy was about to appear, like a mountain eagle in a cage. He appeared apprehensive in someone else’s space, even Hockney’s airy Kensington studio.

  Hockney’s sittings started with a cup of tea brewed by Freud on a grease-covered gas stove. ‘I liked the old-fashioned bohemia of it all. The plates with old beans on them from last night, or even last week, it was like student days, very appealing after all those very clean New York lofts. I told him you can’t have a smoke-free bohemia by definition. He let me smoke – “Don’t tell Kate Moss” was his request.’ (Lucian was also painting the supermodel in his Notting Hill house at the same time, and he forbade her to smoke.) Every day, Hockney would walk through the delightful public park to reach Lucian’s flat, past the bronze statue of Lord Holland. ‘Sometimes I was early, and he would leap up the stairs two at a time. No slouch at eighty. He never wanted to be seen as inactive.’

  It was as visually arresting as a scene from Sweeney Todd: Freud’s grip on the paintbrush was sabre-like and his concentration unswervingly focused. ‘I was fascinated with his technique,’ said Hockney. ‘At times, I thought he might have pre-mixed colours to speed it up for me, but I quickly realised he wouldn’t do that as he wanted as much time as possible. Because of this we could talk. Lucian’s talk was always fascinating. Sometimes it was just gossip about people we both knew, very amusing, very good put-downs that made me laugh. But we talked about drawing a lot, Rembrandt, Picasso, Ingres, Tiepolo, I remember he didn’t like Morandi. We talked a lot about Rembrandt drawings and how everything he did is a portrait, no hand or face is generic.’

  Hockney’s fleshy face dominates Freud’s canvas, peering over round-framed spectacles. Freud’s take on Hockney had a historic frisson of two great contemporary talents locked in the observation of each other in a silent room, frozen in time. One sitting was brilliantly captured in a photograph by David Dawson, with the enjoyment they shared for each other’s company being almost tangible. Of Lucian’s famous paint-encrusted wall, Hockney observed that ‘He squeezes the tubes so the paint cakes up on them and he flicks this off on the wall with a swipe. He has been doing this on the studio wall for the last forty years so it is thick with many years’ layers – like a wall in the life rooms at the art schools of the 1950s that I knew, but this was all done by the same hand, a rare and beautiful thing in itself.’

  They first met in 1962 through the Guinness family. ‘Lucian was very famous even at the time while I was still a student. He was always social; he was Jewish aristocracy and through Caroline Blackwood he had married into the Anglo-Irish aristocracy,’ said Hockney. Caroline’s brother Sheridan, the 5th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was a roué who was rich, charming, clever, married and gay. Dufferin became the financial backer of Hockney’s first dealer, John Kasmin. He had married his Guinness cousin Lindy but had led a not very discreet gay life, especially on visits to New York, before he died of AIDS in 1988. Both artists had liked Sheridan but had diametrically opposed views on his widow Lindy. Lucian liked to have a pet hate or feud and said he loathed her in his final years, even though he had previously felt no such animosity. He loved to use the phrase ‘really ghastly’, rolling the Rs, his German intonation seeming more apparent, delightfully so on the word ‘corrupt’. She was everything he might have liked but it all somehow worked against her: an amateur painter, organic farmer, yoghurt maker at Clandeboyes, the 6,000-acre estate in Ireland she inherited from her husband. She was very tactile, enthusiastic, sometimes intrusive of other’s space but for no particular reason he found her beyond the pale. ‘Lucian could not bear enthusiasm,’ explained Lucinda Lambton. Hockney, however, was a big fan. ‘You had to take his diatribes with a pinch of salt. They were often funny and I am not sure how seriously even he took them.’

  ‘How is Hock?’ Lucian would ask me at Clarke’s when David was at one time away in Norway painting the fjords. He enjoyed hearing of Hockney’s powerful tirades against anti-smoking legislation or the ‘puritan pygmy politicians’ Brown and Blair. Lucian admired Hockney’s experimentation, drawing with a camera obscura, learning to paint watercolours, and later on iPhone or iPad ‘paintings’. It was the opposite of what Freud was doing, confined to one of two cell like studios, intense watching of one person equipped with the same brushes and palettes that he used decade after decade.

  Hockney liked Freud’s portrait so much that he offered to buy it, but Freud’s dealer Bill Acquavella declined to sell it to him. His wife said she wanted it. Lucian and David remained close friends.

  Donegal Man

  Breakfast with Lucian was expensive for Pat Doherty. The Irish builder sat for Lucian on 220 mornings between 2006 and 2008, usually starting with a cup of tea at Clarke’s, before sitting for his portrait. He paid £4.5 million for two paintings of himself.

  Pat Doherty’s house is five minutes’ walk from Clarke’s. ‘You are only the seventeenth person ever to have come into my house,’ Lucian told him, and although that was possibly a slight exaggeration, his house was indeed a very private space.

  Doherty has no pretensions. He is a property developer who came to London in 1961 to seek his fortune. His face is wide, his teeth project crookedly from his smile. Born in 1942, he did well in business and now has homes in New York, London and Ireland. This modest man whose portraits were simply titled Donegal Man often entered Lucian’s house just as I was leaving. We would nod and say hello, but nothing more, as Lucian kept each bit of his life separate.

  It was by chance he became a Freud subject, but there were always links. Andrew Parker Bowles, another of Lucian’s sitters, was chairman of one of Doherty’s building companies. They had been in business together since the late 1960s. Doherty had also built David Hockney’s studio in Kensington, and collected his prints. ‘Back then to reduce my bill I was offered a portrait of [John] Kasmin for £5,000 but I had not started collecting and I told them I would not take it even if it was free. Five grand then was quite a lot of money.’ (It was not an error he would make with Freud, although the number of noughts in the price of the pictures he acquired doubled.)

  There were moments when Doherty feared that sitting for his portrait would never be finished. ‘He was looking intently at my tie and then he said “Lots of life in that tie.” I thought the whole process could last years. I might be sitting for the tie on its own for weeks more.’ Doherty settled into the routine, sustained by the conversation. ‘He vividly remembered the merchant navy in the 1940s, telling me, “I thought I was a hard man till I joined them. For fun they would stub a cigarette out on your neck if they found you sleeping.” Lucian told me he cried with relief on the train back to London when leaving the boat for the last time.’

  Donegal Man, 2006-08

  He sat a hundred times for the first painting, Donegal Man, thirty-five more for an etching and then eighty-five further sessions for another oil portrait Donegal Man, Profile. But his first instinct when Freud asked to paint him was to turn him down. ‘I initially said no, but then Andrew Parker Bowles said I would be mad to refuse.’ Sometimes Brigadier Parker Bowles, the builder and the painter would have dinner at Clarke’s or the Wolseley.

  The first sittings did not work and the sessions stopped. A half-sketched head was never finished. Some months later Lucian requested Parker Bowles to ask his Irish friend to come back. ‘I had expected it to last just a couple of sittings but I saw he was slow, very slow. I had started counting how many strokes he was doing in an hour. But somehow it was not right the first time. He was trying to fathom me out, and me him.’

  Through the marathon sessions they got to know each other well.
‘His hobby was reading people. Some people wondered why he would sit with a young girl, a model or one of his grandchildren and not speak much. It was because his eyes were swivelling round reading people’s movements and looks. It was what he did professionally,’ said Doherty.

  ‘His life was like a dramatic film, always in fights, never uttering a dull word, making art that would last for ever, always there were great women and characters in his life, always so many children. Even the bad times sounded good. He told me about the time that he fell out with Francis Bacon after Lucian had hammered into a boyfriend who had attacked Francis. Francis then fell out with Lucian for giving him a hand.’

  He mulled over his extraordinary times with Lucian.

  ‘It was a grand life.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE Dealers and Gambling

  Gambling was inherently linked to Lucian’s painting. Whenever he made money from selling his pictures in the earlier part of his career, he gambled wildly, often losing the lot; yet when he began to make vast sums, he gave up gambling almost entirely. Risk fed his enjoyment of more risk, so when a financial safety net appeared as the price of his pictures soared, the relishing of gambling disappeared. When he had run up mountainous debts, death threats were made by unsavoury lenders. He would pay what was owed, when he could.

  Sitting in Clarke’s in the autumn of 2009, Lucian explained that he was neither glad nor sad that his gambling days were behind him.

  GG: ‘Did you gamble to make money?’

  LF: ‘No. Gambling is only exciting if you don’t have any money.’

  GG: ‘Did that get you into trouble?’

  LF: ‘Very much. I tried to pay back the sums I owed but they were so big that there was no chance. I laid very low after I got involved with the Krays who gave me credit. They forced money on me.’

  GG: ‘More than £10,000?’

  LF: ‘More like half a million.’

  GG: ‘So you were in deep trouble?’

  LF: ‘Yes I was. Nothing to be proud of. When I occasionally won money I repaid them, but there was a dodgy moment when I had to put off a show. If they had read about an exhibition of mine they would have said, “Do you see how much it made and he only fucking owes us this much.”’

  GG: ‘Scary?’

  LF: ‘I was nervous.’

  GG: ‘Did they threaten you?’

  LF: ‘No. You see I can’t be threatened. Even if it is something I want to do – if someone threatens me I will never do it. I can’t function like that.’

  GG: ‘Did the Krays get heavy?’

  LF: ‘They were clear and polite. It was all honour-bound. No swearing. Their reputation was such that if people said, “I will call the Krays,” people were afraid. If anyone said or was even rumoured to have said one of them was queer, which one of them was, their life was in danger. The funny thing was I wanted to paint one of the twins and the other said no. I quite enjoyed people treating me in a very delicate and careful way because of my association [with them]. But it got rather out of hand and the police warned me.’

  GG: ‘And no regrets now that your gambling days are over?’

  LF: ‘It just no longer interests me as I have enough money to lose without it ever hurting me. The only point of gambling is to have the fear of losing and when I say losing I mean losing everything. It has to hurt.’

  Lucian’s art dealers grew used to him making agitated demands for cash. It was a constant cat-and-mouse game, with Lucian wanting more money and earlier, hopefully before a picture was finished, but at the latest on the day that the final brushstroke was applied. That said, it never made him rush to finish, as he kept a steely focus on achieving the best. Money mattered because as well as gambling, he needed it for his ex-girlfriends and children. He had their school fees to pay and would also get letters from some of his children at university about their monthly allowance. He was randomly generous when he could be, although some of the children found it embarrassing to being given a wedge of banknotes. And while his studio might have had a touch of squalor, he would offer guests the finest burgundy, and from there he ventured out to the best restaurants.

  It was a combination of feast and famine. Jacquetta Eliot recalled going with him in his Bentley to drop off an envelope of cash for Bernardine Coverley, his ex-girlfriend and mother of his daughters, Bella and Esther. Sometimes it was as little as £25, and she remembers him remarking that Bernardine did not seem very pleased with it and had barely looked up as he dashed in to drop it off. But, as she pointed out, he had just popped in, he had not given her much time. He and Jacquetta would then head off to some expensive restaurant.

  Like a financial Houdini, he believed that somehow he would always find an escape route, postponing, delaying, avoiding or at the last resort finding the wherewithal from others to pay. He had often lived off other people’s money, his grandfather’s legacy, odd cheques from his father, Peter Watson’s generosity as a patron when he was a young man, also borrowing from Jane Willoughby, and when really in dire straits selling paintings to her which he owned, such as Francis Bacon’s Two Figures. Although they became her property, they remained in his house. There was always a way out. But it was not always easy – twice Jane had to rescue the Bacon picture from pawnbrokers. It was amusing for her to look back on his recklessness with money, or rather her picture, but it was not so at the time.

  One night in the 1970s when he lost £20,000 at John Aspinall’s casino in Mayfair, pressure was immediately applied for him to pay the debt. In desperation, Lucian offered to paint a baby gorilla which Aspinall kept at his wildlife sanctuary in Kent. Laughing, Lucian recounted how John’s mother-in-law, Dorothy Hastings, had brought a baby gorilla to his studio in the back of a black taxi, but not before it had urinated on her and ripped her dress. ‘My daughter Jane is on the cover of Tatler and here am I in the back of this cab with a wild animal out of control,’ she lamented.115 The animal portrait has never been seen.

  Although betting at the racetrack was deleterious to his finances, he loved everything about the sport: the horses, the risk, the speed, the chase and the endeavour, as well as the company of jockeys, punters and bookies. He was addicted. ‘I always went all out. The idea of it being a sport seemed to me insane. The thing I liked was risking everything.’ He never let his debts, which were often burdensome, unduly upset him, or affect his work. Gambling provided tension, which he loved. ‘There is nothing quite like gambling, the chance throw of the dice, as it were, that can leave you without a roof, or bring the thrill of winning,’ Lucian once said as a way of explaining his gambling habit. ‘It is like galloping or jumping through fire, sort of beyond what is sensible but it makes you feel alive.’

  Bookies inevitably became part of his life. He painted them, talked to them often, borrowed off them, sold them pictures and sometimes got blind drunk with them. Lucian’s favourite bookmaker was Victor Chandler, who was debonair, mischievous and enjoyed a night out on the town and was besotted with Lucian. ‘I really did love him and would have done anything for him.’ He arranged for a daily to clean Lucian’s flat, bought him shirts, had his clothes laundered, and even ordered special silk scarves from Sulka in New York that Lucian wanted. It was only over money that things became tricky. Collecting money from Lucian was a regular task for Chandler’s associate, Michael Saunders. ‘Victor would say to me, “He owes £50,000,” and we would say, “Let’s do a deal for £30,000.” There was no question of him not wanting to pay and somehow everything was settled in the end, but it was never easy getting the cash,’ Saunders said.

  Saunders would walk up the fifty-four steps to the top floor of Lucian’s studio before giving a coded secret knock on the outer front door to gain entry. There were often gifts brought to try to sweeten negotiations, and also because Chandler was naturally very generous. He arranged for a man called Jimmy the Cigar to fly to Warsaw to buy for Lucian the entire stock of Cuban cigars and Beluga caviar in the duty-free shop and then fly back the same day.

  Wh
ile Chandler, dapper, charming and amusing, was a public school boy, Saunders had started in the gambling industry at the age of twelve, first as a street bet-taker. Both lived and breathed horses’ form. ‘Lucian was a bookmaker’s joy and nightmare. He never had no cash but that did not stop him from betting,’ Saunders said. ‘I loved him like a brother, and had many of the funniest times in my life with him,’ said Victor. In 1983 Lucian was banned from most racetracks as a bad debtor but he was undeterred and used disguises to enter race meetings. ‘I remember laughing till I cried getting Lucian into one meet wearing a beanie hat, sunglasses and his grey cashmere coat. Somehow it worked,’ said Chandler.

  A chit from Chandler shows Lucian placing £400 on Man in the Middle and £80 on Grand Unit to win the 3.20 p.m. The sums were always multiples of eight, Lucian’s lucky number. Chandler took the bet on tick and, as so often happened, Lucian lost. Chandler believes Lucian liked the edge of losing as much as the delight of winning.

  Over the years Lucian probably paid somewhere between £3 million and £4 million to the Millfield-educated bookie. ‘I’m going to have my betting shoes on today,’ Lucian would boast as he rang to back a horse, but they seldom brought him luck. Lucian did have some significant wins, but ultimately his addiction to risk meant he lost more than he won. Saunders would be sent to Clarke’s for a ‘debt breakfast’ with Lucian. ‘I would know if he would pay on the day simply by what he did. If he put his glasses on, he would read the bill and that was hopeful. But if they stayed firmly on the table, Victor and I knew that he would take the bill home to read later. No money then,’ he said. Victor would sometimes try to make him more likely to pay by saying, ‘Lucian, please put your glasses on.’