Breakfast with Lucian Read online

  Irrespective of all these contradictions, what ultimately made Freud remarkable, of course, were the paintings. In the 1950s and 60s, when abstraction and postmodernism were in the ascendant, he continued obsessively painting the human figure in a studio. Although America dominated the art market for the next twenty years and viewed Lucian as a parochial sideshow, eventually fashion and the market caught up with him. In 2004, the art critic Robert Hughes justified his long struggle against the tide. ‘Every inch of the surface has to be won, must be argued through, bears the traces of curiosity and inquisition – above all, takes nothing for granted and demands active engagement from the viewer as its right. Nothing of this kind happens with Warhol or Gilbert and George or any of the other image-scavengers and recyclers who infest the wretchedly stylish woods of an already decayed, pulped-out postmodernism.’9

  Freud was the greatest realist figurative painter of the twentieth century. His naked portraits created a new genre. He entered the national conversation as an artist who pushed boundaries, artistic as well as sexual. He was resolutely unbiddable. ‘If someone asked me to paint them, I would usually feel the opposite idea, even want to hit them,’ he told me, ‘and if anyone threatened or pressurised me in any way at all, I would never ever do what they wanted.’ His art and his life joined seamlessly. He courted danger, took risks and lived a lusty, libidinous life, but often indefinably and untidily, contradicting himself, behaving in the opposite way to his public pronouncements.

  Naked Man with Rat, 1977–78

  CHAPTER TWO Stalking

  I was a seventeen-year-old schoolboy the first time I saw a painting by Lucian Freud. It was on a day trip from Eton to London in March 1978 with my English teacher, Michael Meredith. The seventeen pictures hanging in the Anthony d’Offay art gallery ignited my lifelong interest in the artist and his work.

  The painting that stopped me in my tracks that day was Naked Man with Rat, a portrait of a long-haired man propped up on a sofa, his legs apart, and in close proximity to his genitals he held a rat, its tail coiled over the man’s inner thigh. Graphic and startling, this picture hung next to a sedate portrait of the painter’s elderly mother in repose.

  My school group had been taken to see the Freud show before going to the theatre to watch Peter Shaffer’s Equus, our A-level set play about a teenage boy stripping himself bare mentally and physically to dispel his sexual and psychological demons. The portrayal of the boy who blinds six horses sticks in my memory alongside the paintings by Freud, particularly the image of the naked man and the rat.

  The biggest picture in the exhibition was only three foot square, and the smallest one of Lucian’s mother’s head was just twelve and three-quarter inches by nine and a quarter. But they achieved maximum impact. Who was the long-haired man? Why was he naked? Why on earth would he place a rat so perilously close to his exposed genitals? Anonymity ruled. Was Freud’s mother ill? Her stillness and patience dominated, sentiment and affection both absent in these extraordinary studies of old age. A strange alchemy was going on. The figures appeared charged, psychologically disturbing, scrutinised, and with more than a hint of risk or danger. I was left in no doubt that the truth could hurt.

  Inside the exhibition catalogue was a photograph taken by the artist’s daughter Rose Boyt, in which Freud stares out aggressively with an air of menace. His heavy boots have no laces, the dishevelled white shirt and scarf give him a bovver-boy toughness crossed with a touch of the dandy. With his chequered trousers he is dressed like a cross between a pastry chef and a bare-knuckle fighter, eyes startled, with a sense of raw power.

  In Equus, Martin Dysart, the kindly psychiatrist, understands and analyses the behaviour of the boy who gouged out horses’ eyes. He is shocked by his primal urge, but also envies his freedom from restrictive middle-class morality, his breaking away from convention, even in such a depraved manner. While the boy indulges in wild Dionysian ritual and sacrifice, the psychiatrist buys fake souvenirs in package-holiday Greece on sexless holidays with his bored and boring wife. I could make the connection that Michael Meredith must have intended. Freud’s paintings were a million miles from domestic or bourgeois entrapment and sent out an illicit, electric current with their unprocessed truths, erasing convention. They sought the exact experience of his encounter in the studio, however unsettling this might be for both the subject and the viewer.

  The gallery in Dering Street, a narrow lane off Hanover Square in Mayfair, was more like a spare room in a private house than a public exhibition space. It contained sixteen portraits and one landscape. Every detail stayed with me, including the exquisite catalogue with its grey paper wrapper and a hand-glued label on the front cover. It was full of contradiction and drama.

  For several days afterward Michael Meredith and I discussed the Freud show, analysing the order of the pictures and compositions and coming up with our own theories. But Lucian never gave explanations. Harold Pinter (who much later sat for Freud) had once teasingly described his own plays as the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, a carefully crafted throwaway quip to tease literary inquisitors. Most of the time the playwright hid behind the ‘Pinter pauses’, refusing to explain, leaving it to others to offer interpretations. He too stayed in the shadows, never talking publicly at the height of his fame in the 1970s and 80s, realising that, as Ted Hughes once told me, ‘the whisper goes further than the shout’.

  If Pinter barely whispered, Lucian kept absolutely silent. He gave no press interviews from 1940 until the last decade of his life. He had been known to attack photographers physically, and verbally abuse those who came too near. Photographs of him were rare. He would hire gangsters to warn people off. It was only insiders who would gain access, and even then everything would be meticulously controlled, which was why the photograph for the exhibition catalogue was taken in January 1978 by his daughter who, like all his children, he saw only intermittently. He scorned a conventional family life, preferring not to live with his children.

  Thirty years later Lucian would give me some insights into the process and the people that he had been painting in those pictures, and how they fitted into his life. He spoke of his frustration at his mother’s depression and attempted suicide. He said he felt fury at her pervasive curiosity about his personal life, and resented that he had to deal with her interference and unquenchable desire to know about his life and also to try to share it. He saw his mother more frequently only when she was incapacitated by depression over her husband Ernst’s death in 1970. He then saw a lot of her and in 1973 she sat for one particularly compelling portrait, Large Interior W9, sitting in an armchair, with his then girlfriend Jacquetta Eliot lying on a bed behind her with her breasts exposed.

  I learned that the man in the rat picture was called Raymond Jones, a painter and also a talented interior decorator who was born in 1944 in Radcliffe, near Manchester. He was Freud’s first model for a male nude painting. The rat was usually drunk. Every day it was given Veuve Clicquot in a dog bowl, with half a crushed sleeping pill. Lulled into a state of compliant inertia it would then sit motionless for hours on end, day after day, on Raymond’s upper thigh.

  Raymond had charm, talent and was also – crucially for Lucian – extremely willing. Indeed, he was somewhat besotted by the artist, even styling some of his own pictures similarly. As with everyone entering Lucian’s inner circle, secrecy was obligatory in order to avoid exclusion. I had tried to track Raymond down but he had vanished to India for many months and was, I was told by his friends, uncontactable. It was only when he sold a paint-splattered easel that Lucian had used for the rat portrait, given to him by Lucian, that I was able to trace him. It was sold in October 2012 for £3,000 at Christie’s to Evgeny Lebedev. Only when Lucian was no longer alive – and more than three decades after sitting for him – did Raymond feel that it was somehow permissible for the omertà surrounding his time with Lucian to be lifted.

  The initial and unlikely link between Lucian and Raymond was a cockney burglar cal
led George Dyer who in 1963 had broken into Francis Bacon’s studio in South Kensington in the middle of the night only to be seduced, becoming Bacon’s most significant boyfriend until Dyer’s suicide in Paris twenty years later. Dyer was painted several times by Bacon, and also by Lucian.

  Raymond bought Lucian’s portrait of Dyer for £1,000, even though initially he had no idea who the subject was. Raymond was delighted to own a Freud painting as he had admired his work from the age of eleven. Lucian wanted to meet Raymond and found him quirky, funny and difficult to pigeonhole. Lucian asked him to sit for a portrait – at first quite conventionally, with no mention of rats.

  Lucian introduced him to his painter friends Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews, and also his girlfriend Jane Willoughby. They were brought closer by Freud’s spiralling gambling debts when Lucian asked to borrow money. Raymond was non-plussed but flattered. ‘I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t trying to get this money from Jane or the Duke of Devonshire, or whoever else he knew, all of whom would have had far more money. But anyway I had a bit of money put aside and made my mind up to give it to Lucian. Alarmingly, he then said, “I won’t give you your money back.” I thought “Oh God!” until he then explained. “I’d like to paint a portrait of you which you will then own, thus cancelling any debt.”’

  Lucian borrowed about £2,000. Raymond did not sit for Lucian until more than a year later. ‘Lucian would pick me up in his navy blue Roller. I nearly fainted when he first got out all dressed in his black and white butcher’s clothes, my neighbours all looking on wondering who was this tramp in a Roller,’ he recalled.

  Lucian asked him to help make his new flat into a workable studio. ‘He said: “I will get plastic bags and we will knock this wall down.” I said: “You can’t do that. It might be a structural wall.” He just replied, “Sod that, it’s coming down.”’ For two nights they demolished walls. ‘When the dust settled in the flat he started to paint me,’ he said.

  The first picture was a tiny portrait of Raymond’s head, just three inches by four, ‘magnificently powerful’, Raymond thought. He believed that Lucian was actually secretly working on two portraits of him at the same time. The sittings carried on for a year, sometimes three of four evenings a week. But just when he thought he was about to take delivery of it, Lucian asked him to start the whole process again. Frank Auerbach, the person whose judgement Lucian most valued, said the picture was not good enough. ‘When I got there Lucian said, “Don’t be alarmed, Raymond, but as you know I take Frank’s judgement on my pictures, and he doesn’t like it.” I protested that there was nothing not to like and that I would be pleased to have it. Lucian said, “No I can’t allow that. It is going to be destroyed. So Raymond, please sit for another picture.”’

  Raymond believes the ‘destroyed’ picture was actually sold or given to Jane Willoughby. He claims he went to stay with her in Scotland several years later at her estate and saw it in her bedroom. He was too shocked to say anything to his hostess or to Lucian, and never mentioned it.

  ‘They were the tricks that Lucian could get up to and that’s one of the things I admired about him so much. I knew he was a naughty boy. Think of the quarter-inch steel plate he had on the door of his Holland Park studio. It was only some time later when he was asking me about what colour baize he should put on to cover it that I realised the door was not to protect the pictures. It was to protect him, because of the villains he knew.’

  Lucian painted a second portrait of Raymond and did give it to him. (Raymond kept it for ten years before eventually selling it to buy a house.) It was then that the idea for the rat picture emerged. ‘In 1977 Lucian told me, “I want you to sit in the nude. You’ll be the first man I’ve painted in oil and I am confident I can do a major picture of a man naked.” He then paused, before saying, “… With rat. Would you mind being naked with a rat? That’s more important.” I said, “Oh not at all Lucian, I wouldn’t mind one little bit. But how will you get it to behave on my thigh?” He said, “Leave that to me.” So I get undressed and he brings out this black rat. It belonged to his friend Katie McEwen. There was nothing said about it being an odd picture to paint, nothing about the fact that the rat is near my testicles. This was never discussed with Lucian. The only thing I asked Lucian was “Is it necessary right from the beginning of the picture that I should be holding the rat? Can’t the rat come in later?” Lucian said “No, because it is the whole emotional attitude that matters. Being with the rat would affect the whole portrait. If the rat was not there your mind would be working differently.” I went along with that

  ‘The rat was given the champagne and half a sleeping pill in the dog bowl, but would wake two or three hours later, starting to flap its tail and all that. Lucian would then get hold of it, but sometimes it would jump from out of his fingers. That was the funny bit, it running round his studio behind the canvases and plants. We had to catch the bugger. Once we did, it would go in Lucian’s kitchen and be given some cheese and then some more champagne and after a quarter of an hour it was nodding off again. We would go back to the studio and carry on for another hour.’

  For nine months Lucian, Raymond and the rat went through this ritual. The portrait was to change the perception of male nakedness in contemporary painting, as Freud emphasised a brazen and raw male physicality. There was a psychological drama to the man stripped of all his clothes lying with a rat. It had overtones of discomfort and exposure, like a man in a prison cell, but seemed more perverse by virtue of it being in a domestic setting. There was no nobility or idealisation. His penis and balls are deliberately in the centre of the canvas and are meant to be stared at. It was far away from the posed classicism of almost all previous male nudity in art. It startled. The picture hinted at odd undercurrents, yet no clue was given in the title as to who was painted or why.

  Raymond found sitting for Lucian was intense. ‘It was quite charged. Lucian once said to me, and I almost jumped off the sofa when he did, “If you’d been a woman I would have gone with you, but you are not and I am not into that.” I was just a piece of meat on the sofa and that was it.’ Lucian’s desires were, as always, directed widely elsewhere, as Raymond witnessed. ‘Sometimes there was a knock on the studio door at Holland Park and a woman would come in and go straight into the bathroom. Then they would go at it, bang, bang, bang. Lucian would have said to me, “I am just taking a break. I won’t be that long.” He would tell the woman “I have just got someone called Raymond here.” More often than not there was then the bang, bang, bang noise of her being shagged, not on his bed but always behind the bathroom door. Lucian would have a bath after his exertions, wandering back into the studio naked. He would say, “I’ve just had a bath to settle myself down and now we’ll carry on.”’

  Raymond also sat for a double portrait, Naked Man with His Friend (1978–80), with his platonic companion John, with whom he lived for more than thirty-five years. It was another picture ahead of its time with its suggestion of affection and intimacy between the two men which hinted that they might be lovers. ‘For me, the funny thing is the pyjamas that John wore. Lucian provided them and said they had belonged to his grandfather Sigmund,’ said Raymond. Both men have their eyes closed, Raymond’s right hand on his friend’s left ankle, their limbs interlocked, the tip of his penis concealed under John’s calf. It is a scene which poses many questions about their identity and relationship. Both naked portraits of Raymond were key to Lucian fearlessly marking his territory as a cold-eyed observer. They became crucial images in his canon.

  As a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, seeing the Freud show with Naked Man with Rat was like encountering Keith Richards crossed with Picasso: libidinous, risk-taking, bold and threatening. I was hooked.

  * * *

  On my return to school I almost immediately sent a letter to Lucian asking to interview him for our school magazine. No reply. I wrote several times. Nothing ever came back. There were other cultural diversions like punk, but Lucian seemed to me just
as disruptive and alluring as the Sex Pistols or the Clash. I had a sense that he would somehow be important. I was doing history of art for A-level and he seemed far more exciting and unsettling than most of the dead artists we were studying. Fuelled by the impact of his pictures, I was on a mission to know more about him and his paintings which was to last thirty years.

  Lucian was fifty-five when I first wrote, and eighty-eight when we met for the last time for a moving farewell on his deathbed. It was a long, unpredictable journey, arching across the two centuries, beginning with silence and suspicion, even a spot of subterfuge and stalking. It ended in friendship and mourning.

  To fill the silence from Freud, instead I wrote to David Hockney who sent a handwritten reply, but I could not decipher the scribbled signature for several days. I visited him at his top-floor studio in Powis Terrace in Notting Hill, arriving in my corduroys and tweed jacket with a bad 1970s schoolboy’s haircut, mesmerised by his blond mop, pop-star aura and extraordinary drawings.

  The most ambitious journalistic target in my first year at Oxford was Francis Bacon. I telephoned his Mayfair gallery, Marlborough Fine Art (from where Raymond Jones had bought Lucian’s portrait of George Dyer), and spoke to his patient gatekeeper, Valerie Beston – ‘little Miss VD’, as Bacon called her – as I did every week for six months. Bacon’s illiterate cockney boyfriend John Edwards helpfully intervened, as he later told me, smoothing the way for me to see him.

  Brilliant, Wildean, darkly seductive and dangerously charming, Bacon got me completely drunk after a long lunch at Wheeler’s in Old Compton Street, a thick wad of £50 notes tumbling out of the inside pocket of his leather jacket. One bottle of champagne after another followed at his drinking club, the Colony Room in Dean Street, where he signed me up as a member. He referred to Lucian as ‘she’, like a pantomime queen. He was cutting and disparaging but affectionate and admiring. Fortunately, I taped the interview, otherwise I wouldn’t have remembered any of it. I asked what he would paint if he did my portrait: ‘Your vulnerability,’ he answered.