III
Life was to change for ever after my return from America in the autumn of 1964. By October I had discovered my first gay pub – the William IV in Hampstead; and shortly after, the La Douce in Poland Street and the Gigolo in the King’s Road. These were two of a handful of gay bars which were the only haven in a city of eight million souls. From our flat in Priory Road I could walk to the William IV, but on several occasions went to the Gigolo, quite prepared to do the two-hour walk back to West Hampstead late at night.
At the Slade things had not stuck still. By the end of the year I had met Patrick Procktor and Ossie Clarke, two artists who were establishing reputations. The Gregorian chant was put back into its sleeve and replaced by the Who and the Stones. On the literary front, too, old loves faded. From America, like a smuggler, I brought back Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch and my own City Lights copy of Ginsberg’s Howl, which displaced The Waves and The Years of Virginia Woolf. At the Slade I resorted more frequently to the Theatre Design room where there were sympathetic spirits. I’d brought some muscle mags, and I collaged them into the set for Stravinsky’s Orpheus which I was designing that winter. This caused a minor contretemps with the Slade professor Bill Coldstream, who talked about the acceptable limits of art, citing his role at the British Board of Film Censors, while standing with his back to my set.
In the theatre room homosexuality was accepted quite openly, while upstairs the atmosphere of the painting studios was fairly equivocal. ‘Straight’ painters were envious of connections made quickly through ‘the gay mafia’ with painters and gallery-owners. Also, many of them were affronted by our insouciant, happy-go-lucky lifestyle – a reaction against the deadening world around us. But who could blame me if after years of repression I found that homosexuality, far from being a disability as I’d been brought up to believe, led to an easy social mobility and with it incredible advantages? The homophobia of the art schools was mixed with a lot of plain jealousy.
For the first time I could view myself in the mirror – I became aware of how I looked and how I dressed. I discovered that I was handsome enough and with new confidence and sympathetic friends, I made some first faltering steps into the ‘art world’. And as my own repressed past broke up like ice in a spring thaw, so did the old England which had produced it.
~
Building for Pleasure
January 1965, Priory Road: Peter Cook was here to look at Dougal’s work, and we fell into a row about modern architecture. It started off with some remarks I made about NYC, that once you’re out of the lobbies of those skyscrapers you could be anywhere. The upper storeys are all the same, whether or not the architect is a Philip Johnson. I said I thought functionalism was totally crazy, unless you saw architecture as disposable. The function of any modern building is bound to alter after a few years from the original intention. And then you’re left with something that’s not only obsolete, but also probably ugly. Buildings should be designed for purely aesthetic reasons: form should respond to the demands of pleasure, the inward function. More often than not you’ll find that an ‘aesthetic’ building is an adaptable one.
During the course of the evening Peter Cook came up with the horrific notion of cities on stilts, which are to roam the world like vast praying mantises. I said I thought most people wanted to put roots down. Who wants to wake up in a location that someone else has decided for them? Presumably, someone drives the awful thing. Dougal was rather cross with me as Mr Cook is a current architectural hero.
~
Architecture was as much a daily topic of conversation as painting. Perhaps more so, as nearly all my friends were either at the AA in Bedford Square or at the Poly. For weeks on end the basement flat at Priory Road, which I moved to in September, was taken over by students working through the night for crits. I was glad to have avoided this fate. It all seemed infinitely tedious, dry and academic. My own interest in architecture was historical; and as I had had Niklaus Pevsner as a tutor at Kings for three years, every Wednesday evening at the annex of Birkbeck College, my knowledge of architectural history was usually greater than my friends’.
With Pevsner, architecture became a passion. We would travel to the cathedrals – Lincoln, Winchester, Canterbury – and spend the entire day leaving no stone unturned. At Lincoln we clambered through the roofs; the timbered forest above the crazy vaults was spectacular, with great beams radiating in every direction like the spokes of a wheel. Hitch-hiking to Greece or Italy my route would be planned by way of the cathedrals, Laôn, Rheims, Strasbourg or Aachen, Cologne, Ulm. The Renaissance architecture interested me less – though Brunelleschi’s Pazzi Chapel in Florence I believed to be the most exquisite building in Europe, with an oriental calm and clarity of proportion that was unequalled in any other work, even Michelangelo’s stupendous lobby in the Laurentian library. But neither of these buildings, or indeed any of the French or German cathedrals, gave me as much pleasure as Ely.
In the garden at Priory Road, 1965 (Photo: Ray Dean)
~
Ely
A sudden decision: we drove to Ely in the gathering dark. I am eagle-eyed for cathedrals, and the first to spot the building looming up, caught in the mesh of gaunt winter trees. A gale was whipping across the fens, and the towers almost touched the heavy rain-laden clouds that flew past and reeled as you looked up at them. Jackdaws, falling in gusts of wind, encircled the great lantern. Inside, our footsteps died away in the deep shadows which enveloped the vast emptiness of the unlit nave. The wind outside came faster, battering the silence. We walked through the massive stony piers like trespassers, our hearts beating loudly, absolutely alone in the building.
Far at the end, hidden by the choir screen, the sound of the boys singing evensong mingled and dispersed with the rushing wind, and filled the building with its stillness. The octagon, suspended as if by magic over the crossing, disappeared into a dark, dizzying vortex. With my eyes fixed high above I began to turn in a circle, and gradually the whole building spiralled with me to the sound of the boys’ singing and that roaring winter wind.
~
We Two Boys Together Clinging
David Hockney was the first English painter to declare his homosexuality in public. By example, he was a great liberating force, reaching far beyond the confines of the ‘art world’: his work paved the way for the gay liberation movement at the end of the decade. From the beginning, with his ‘Rake’s Progress’, his ‘shower paintings’ including ‘We Two Boys Together Clinging’, and finally the exhibition of his etchings for the Cavafy poems, he produced vital new images that pulled away the veil behind which the work of older painters had had to hide. The Cavafy etchings were particularly powerful. With his fine line he produced images of boys in bed that resembled Cocteau – but without a trace of the sentimentality which so often bedevils gay art.
When I met him, his golden hair signalled a new dawn. Gentle, with a wry northern wit, his unassuming presence confounded all criticism. With his Bradford brogue, and wholehearted love affair with the American dream, he was the spirit of the age. His presence in a room blew away cobwebs. In thanks a whole generation called at Powis Terrace with flowers – tulips, if possible, for our man of all seasons.
~
Travelling Light
Ossie Clarke and I went to the Picasso sculpture show. On the whole, I greatly prefer the sculpture to the paintings which were shown here in 1960. I particularly admired the cubist constructions, and the (late) metal cut-outs, which were painted over quite roughly.
At the show we met David, who’d just arrived from California. He invited us back to Powis Terrace, which had been left unoccupied and was freezing. Ossie and I climbed fully clothed into the bed in the living-room while David made tea. David put on the TV and joined us. Ossie asked what he’d brought back with him, and David produced two suitcases, one full of physique mags featuring hunky American boys, and the other packed with fluorescent socks and brightly coloured underwear. I asked him if this was all he’d brought. He said he used to travel with luggage, but realised his mistake. One should travel as light as possible. Now he went in what he was wearing, and bought razors and even toothbrushes at the other end. This to me seemed the height of modernity.
~
A Garden at Luxor
Patrick Procktor asked me one bitterly cold March day where I would most like to be. Off the top of my head I replied, ‘Sitting on top of the pyramids.’
‘Go and get your passport. Come straight back and we’ll go. David’s in Alexandria doing some etchings. We can meet up with him.’
Taken aback by this sudden gesture I demurred, making some excuse about work.
Patrick: ‘You really are silly. Nicholas Ferguson went round the world twice while he was at the Slade. You’re so unadventurous.’
I said that we’d go when I could afford to pay my way.
‘What a perfectly middle-class attitude,’ said Patrick. ‘Now you’ll never go.’
I felt awful.
‘Can you play chess?’
I said, ‘No,’ and went home to Priory Road feeling very foolish.
~
The Antique Room
The Slade has just witnessed the passing of an epoch. The old antique room has fallen victim to the huge canvases everyone is now painting – American gigantism has pushed aside the academy. Skeletons, gnarled branches, shells, stones and classical plaster casts are thrown out. In the yard the copy of the head of Mausolus (the original is in the British Museum, and once crowned a tomb which was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world) stands in the rain. Clement Greenberg has spoken. Henry Moore and the English megaliths are out. Instead, American Popism and the fluorescent spaghetti trails of the Cohen brothers ensnare us.
~
And other Landscapes Went as Well
I was brought up to loathe the Victorians – one thrilled as the ball and chain demolished their work. Down came Josiah Doll’s Imperial Hotel in Russell Square, with its mosaic maps in the imperial pink of school atlases. Down came the Euston Arch, the Coal Exchange, Birkbeck’s Penny Bank, whose great rotunda exploded as I watched in showers of multi-coloured faience. Off came the grey suits, the starched white collars, the pullovers and sensible shoes. Down came the tiled Lyons Corner Houses, the grocers’ shop which weighed your orders, and packed them in blue bags; and the row houses, with their little back yards. In their place, curtain walling, Carnaby Street, supermarkets and finally, American hamburger joints – aptly known as The Great American Disaster.
~
1966 – the Slade: I’m working more and more in the theatre room. I like working on shared projects. It breaks down the isolation of working as a painter. There is much greater aesthetic freedom. The theatre is not subject to the same strict rules we surround ourselves with as individual producers: I can employ imagery I would not dare or wish to use in my painting. So I’m definitely working as a theatre designer, not as a painter imposing an individual vision. The designs for Stravinsky’s Orpheus are a direct response to Rauschenberg’s ‘Dante Suite’, which were shown at the Whitechapel and made a great impression on me. The set is black and white, and made up from xeroxes of physique magazines and a variety of fragmented classical motifs. The backdrop contains a haunting portrait of ‘A Boy in an Asylum’ by Avedon collaged against an Inferno whose gates are the Brooklyn Bridge.
I’ve also designed Sartre’s Huis Clos, in a set made entirely of red-hot velvet, with three velvet-covered armchairs, yellow, blue and black; and a set for Volpone, which has his bed high up on a pyramid of treasure. The atmosphere in the theatre room is friendly, and the tutors, Peter Shaw and Niko Georgiadis, give me enough freedom to hang myself.
~
Looking Back to 1967
I can see clearly the division that was opening in my work between the painter and the designer, that was to be confirmed in two events that year. In May I opened the Lisson Gallery with Keith Milow, in a joint show. Nicholas Logsdale, the owner, was a fellow student at the Slade, who converted his small house in Bell Street with a junk shop underneath into a gallery. During the early part of the year we helped him with the painting, and by mid-May were ready to open to the sounds of Sergeant Pepper.
Keith’s work was architectural, mine landscape. We were both figurative painters, but where was the figure? Keith was a fine draughtsman, perhaps the finest of his generation. At Camberwell, he produced beautiful life drawings. I also drew from the model at the Slade, but when the show opened there was no evidence of this.
During the previous years both of us had ‘come out’, and spent most of our spare time with the small band of gay artists around Patrick Procktor and David Hockney. David was the star – although other artists in the group were equally adventurous painters. But David fullfilled all the rules of the classic sixties’ success. He passed for a working-class hero, had a sure grasp of publicity: his dyed blond hair, sharp American dress sense, coupled with his identification with the stars and stripes of Pop singled him out. By 1967, with the Cavafy etchings, David had made the gay vision his own. The drawings were matter-of-fact, the simplicity of their content a revolution. Any treatment of the homosexual figure was precluded, unless you wished to be labelled a follower. Patrick Procktor stopped painting the boys at La Douce.
The ‘new generation’ show three years earlier had established the painters of the sixties. Those of us who came right behind had a great struggle ahead. Success was the order of the day, and it had to be instant and heady. We all believed in it. Fifteen years later and the figure has at last surfaced in my work, and also in Keith’s. For the moment we were the interregnum before Nicholas Logsdale provided a final solution when he turned the Lisson Gallery into the Temple of Conceptualism.
Meanwhile, that autumn, I exhibited theatrical designs at the Biennale des Jeunes in Paris. My entry was Prokofiev’s Prodigal Son, which sent me on a different path to share for a brief moment the 1960s razzmatazz – not, as you might expect, at the Round House, but the wrong end, at the Opera House. The beginning of my career was to resemble the end of anyone else’s.
~
Manchester Street
Patrick looks down his long nose at me quizzically. Sitting down, we can talk to each other eye to eye; otherwise he towers over me, his voice booming around high above. Every now and then he peers down to take stock of the situation, like a delicate wader sizing its prey. He’s painting a watercolour – ‘Derek Telling Me about Orpheus’ – with his butterfly washes, in the tiny room he sometimes uses as a studio. The sun streams through the zebra blinds, falls across the floor in bars. The sun is always shining in this room. Watercolours of Peter Hinewood lying in the sofa. Watercolours of Ossie, and new oils in washed pastel shades with Peter, Keith and myself; and a strange pink gymnasium filled with disembodied leather boys, with a drawn venetian blind … Patrick’s speech is full of sudden enthusiasm, enquiries left suspended in the air. He seems taller than ever this afternoon.
~
August 1966, Liverpool Road, Islington: The new house is in a permanent state of decoration … Michael’s tropical fish bubble away in the gloom of the basement. Stacked between the tanks are a thousand bottles of home-made wine. In the room above Michael plays piano selections from his musicals, which you never quite remember. Then he stops, and begins to type out one of his manuscripts. Brenda comes in from Chapel Market with volumes of the Arden Shakespeare sandwiched between cauliflowers, and trips over Keith Milow’s pair of elephant-grey velvet pants, that lie in a hopeful and permanent heap of laundry outside her door. Roger is patiently stripping the wooden casements of the windows in their room. Upstairs on the top floor the record-player plays the Who, while the sun streams in through the window over my green landscape paintings and the rolls of used masking tape which cling to the floor.
~
Blow Up
Michael Ginsborg rang to say they needed extras for Antonioni’s Blow Up. Would I alert the Slade, as the film extras provided by the industry for Swinging London are all middle-aged antique dealers and their molls – Antonioni had a fit when he saw them. So Ron (who arrived from Canada) and I took off for the Porchester Hall to be auditioned. When Antonioni arrived the hall was packed with students. He took one brief look at us and said, ‘You’re lovely’ through an interpreter; and took the lot of us at £8 a day, which is a fortune.
The following week, dressed to the nines, we presented ourselves at the Elstree studios. I stood in the queue till the wardrobe mistress looked me up and down and said ‘T-shirt!’ – meaning I had to strip and put on a hideous Swinging London T-shirt to dance to the Yardbirds. Ron, who’d made no effort, got by. No way was I going to appear in this film in that T-shirt, even in the background. So I sacrificed riches and failed to turn up for the shooting. Each night Ron faithfully collected his £8 and danced. In the film he appears as a shadow for two seconds.
~
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Last night, after the pub closed, I found myself among a gang of Saturday-night revellers at a bottle party in Earl’s Court. I’d already had one too many when we arrived at the flat, and I lost my friends in the crush. The living-room floor vibrated to the Stones, and in the centre a dark-haired boy was throwing himself about, attracting a lot of attention. He smiled at me; and dancing through the crowd asked me my name and what I was doing. Before I knew what was happening I was seated in a car speeding out along the Westway.
We arrived at one of those small suburban row houses, and he deposited me in the uncomfortable lounge while he went to fetch some coffee. I lay back on the sofa and glared drunkenly at the ceiling which billowed above. This reverie was interrupted by the arrival of a small bald man with two mugs of coffee. I shifted on the sofa to be out of reach, as he seemed rather too friendly. It was only when he opened his mouth that I realised my Beatle friend was nothing but a wig. Illusions had evaporated, and no amount of coaxing could rescue the situation. Then he disappeared to return with the wig back on, and a pack of amyl nitrate capsules which he crushed in my face. This made matters considerably worse, for combined with the alcohol it caused the room to blur and fuzz at the edges. I crawled upstairs and hit the bed in a stupor. My Beatle, realising that nothing would rouse me, gave up the struggle with resignation and went to sleep.
In the morning I woke with a splitting headache. When the Beatle had restored himself in the bathroom, he told me that Aunty was making breakfast for us. I made to put on my trousers but he said they never dressed for breakfast. So feeling utterly miserable I followed him downstairs to the back parlour where ‘Aunty’, bald, with rolls of cherubic pink fat round his middle, was crouched in front of a gas fire, toasting bread on a metal prong like a devil in the bottom corner of some Last Judgement scene. He paused briefly to look me up and down, and then told me to sit on the bed. The bed was occupied by a large lady with an ample hennaed bouffant and a tough-looking lad of about eighteen, who was obviously also a guest and seemed to be even more embarrassed than I was by this unexpected turn of events. The large lady had picked him up the night before at the local, and now he was trapped in the back parlour while she explained in intimate detail his physical attributes and stamina as a lover. ‘He fucks like an angel,’ she announced. The boy turned a terrified scarlet and slid further beneath the blankets in protest as she attempted to pull them away to reveal his tattoos for Aunty, whose eyes glistened in anticipation. In the corner was a small Hammond organ at which my Beatle friend sat and played selections from Rodgers and Hammerstein with ostentatious trills. Aunty munched his toast and stared at my cock in appreciation. I managed one slice before making an excuse about feeling cold; then rushed upstairs, pulled on my clothes and came down again.
After breakfast they offered to drive me into the centre as they were going to the Pig and Whistle, a gay pub in Belgravia. Aunty, dressed in a smart suit, led us round the corner to the garage at the back of the little house. The doors opened to reveal a Rolls – in which we drove back to town. At Sloane Square, I made an excuse and got out, and hammered breathlessly at Anthony’s door.
~
Anthony Harwood
I met Anthony Harwood in 1966 through the Danish sculptor Olaf Gravsen, who stayed with him during part of that year. Anthony lived an itinerant gypsy life with his Georgian wife, Princess Nina – travelling across Europe from one hotel to another. In London, which he considered home, he kept a flat in the block above Sloane Square tube station, where he retired in the daytime to write his plays, before cooking Nina supper, which he would take to her hotel in a plastic carrier bag. During the day you would find him sitting cross-legged on a silver cushion in front of his typewriter, with his work scattered across the floor. He always dressed immaculately, if eccentrically, in silver wind jackets, black polo-necks, velvet breeches and court shoes with diamond buckles. His belt clasp was a snake in gun-metal with a diamond set in its head. There were coats in strange modern fabrics, gold, black and silver. He said that he wished to live in a diamond – hard, glittering and pure. If you arrived hungry there was strong black coffee, fresh orange juice laced with rose water, and scrambled eggs which were scented.
During the year we became firm friends. His life seemed rich and glamorous. He sent postcards with extravagant messages signed ‘A’ and books dedicated: ‘It’s better with no shoes on, no shoes at all’ – this in the two volumes of Genji, but there were others – Ouspensky, The Gothic Tales of Karen Blixen (this was a particular favourite as he had known her and was writing a play based on The Dreamers). The music on the hi-fi was Callas, or Stravinsky, if not the Beatles or the Loving Spoonful. I was given the keys to Sloane Square the following year, and it became a vital extension to my life, an escape from my room in Islington – and later, when I moved into my first warehouse at Upper Ground, a place to have a bath. Also, since the King’s Road was the ‘centre’ of London for a few brief years at the end of the sixties, it was the ideal place to start an evening which might drift from the Colville to the Casserole, and on to the Gigolo. In Sloane Square the furniture was kept to a minimum – a bed, a glass table with three clear perspex cubes for seats, and one silver lustre vase with iris or scented narcissus. The flat was on the top floor of the block, and had views right across London. Its walls were clad in grey mirror.
~
In 1960 the local antique shop in Newport on the Isle of Wight burned all post-Regency furniture. The middle class wanted the eighteenth-century Chippendale in original or reproduction, and everyone else wanted the New. A bright new world came into being – but as the decade wore on nostalgia crept in by the back door and drove out the New like a rampant weed. Teenagers, invented in the fifties, became the pampered trend-setters of the sixties. Success came early – earlier here than in the US – and with it John Stevens’ Carnaby Street clothes. Mini-skirts and mini-cars, Beatles haircuts, the whole adrenalin rush of the New. Housing was cheap and plentiful, and the decaying Georgian and Victorian terrace houses of central London were covered with ‘Unfurnished flat to let’ signs. You could rent a three-roomed flat plus ballroom for a fiver in Notting Hill – many places were half that price. Like an exotic flower that has bloomed and died in one night, by 1970 all this was over; and the Past, which in the eighties is our present, had come to stay – in a thousand shops with names like ‘Retro’ – and fashions had looped the loop.
Long ago, when things were New, and the Beatles were singing ‘It’s getting better all the time’, Ossie Clarke bought a small Art Deco clip in chrome and glass, and pinned it to his shirt. By 1967 they’d spread like a rash; and the Deco revival, the first revival of our own dear modern twentieth century, was on – (Teddy boys didn’t count, as the Edwardian period was a nineteenth-century hangover). Only we knew this. And the great Pop machine, in all its idiocy, was plundering art nouveau and the awful Beardsley’s etiolated line in sinuous acid parody. This was most definitely out. Instead, the hunt was on for chrome and glass, and silver lacquer. My own great Deco prize – a Rowley gallery suite, split between our home in Liverpool Road and the Lisson Gallery.
~
May 1967, Liverpool Road: Anthony rings up and asks if I’d please take him and his wife to Camden Passage antique market that Saturday. Although she is quite small, Nina sails through the market, giving the impression that Russian ‘royalty’ must have dwarfed everything around them. Sailing into Chiu’s Art Deco shop she resembles a stately silver barrage balloon, hung with huge gold bangles and strings of enormous pearls which Anthony says belonged to the Dowager Empress of China. At a recent opening of Warhol’s in NYC Nina was gliding down the aisle in a white lace mini-skirt, turning all the heads, when a young man said ‘Unreal’ in a voice loud enough for the whole theatre to hear. It was like a gunshot across the bows of a galleon; for Nina heard too; and looking him straight in the eye, stretched herself so that the diamonds glittered like a Christmas tree and said ‘All Real’ in RRRussian, very loudly …
So, at Camden Passage we walk into Chiu’s Deco shop and Nina sits down while Anthony discovers treasures and brings them over for her inspection. She is very short-sighted and holds these prizes within an inch of her eyes. Chiu flutters around amongst his Lalique like a doll in the Peking Opera – his eyes alight with the myriad reflections from the Dowager Empress’s phosphorescent pearls.
At this point I must explain that Madame la Princesse (her French maid always makes you wait outside the door while she announces you with true protocol) never buys anything. This, I believe, is a prerogative of royalty. Chiu doesn’t know this, of course, and allows his cabinets to be ransacked by Anthony, who looks like ‘Death of Chatterton’ in his silver boots and velvet breeches. ‘Thees ees remarkable,’ Nina says, peering at a vase. ‘Vat ees?’
Lalique, says Chiu.
‘Oh, Laleeque, very eenteresting Anthony! Vee buy – Meester Chiu, you deeleever to Hotel Vestbury, vee haf tea.’ Then she stretches out her hand and picks up a box of Swan Vesta matches (which Chiu used to light his black Sobranie cigarettes) and slowly, ever so slowly and deliberately, holds it up to her myopic eye, so that it touches her eyelashes. ‘Eenteresting, Anthony!! Most eenteresting. Vat ees?’
There is a pause. ‘A box of Swan Vesta matches, Nina dear.’
‘Oh.’ An even longer pause. ‘Zo clever, Zo clever. Most remarkable vat zee do zees days. Now vee go Meester Chiu. I keep zees as momento.’ And she opens her handbag and pops them in, staring like a basilisk. Needless to say the vase, once delivered, was never paid for.
~
Anthony walked with a slight limp. He told me that after he met Nina in Paris in the early fifties, she took him to India as her secretary with her husband Denis. While they were travelling Anthony bathed in the Ganges at Benares and caught poliomyelitis, which completely paralysed him. Meanwhile, Nina’s husband died.
After exhausting the Western-style doctors, Nina brought Anthony to a holy man in the Himalayan foothills who cured him. Telling this story, Anthony insisted the man could fly.
Nina and he were married, and thereafter he led a jewel-encrusted life. She combed her long grey hair with a gold and ivory comb, sitting on the edge of the bed in her black dress. Besides the Dowager Empress’s pearls, she wore Marie de’ Medici’s wedding ring; on her ankles there were gold bangles. For years she waged a battle for her sister’s jewels, emeralds and rubies, with Chanel, who was said to have arrived at the sister’s deathbed where she was left alone for a few minutes. When the family returned Chanel was sitting at the bedside brazenly wearing the jewels, saying that the dying woman had gained consciousness for a moment to insist she take them from the dressing-table. Still wearing them, she walked out of the room and drove back to Paris.
When the Arno flooded Florence, Anthony muttered darkly to himself and was off. He arrived back some days later carrying a Clarks’ shoe-box, which he tipped out on to the glass-topped table at Sloane Square. It was full of gaudy-looking gew-gaws, among which were three strands of beautiful blue glass beads. I was off down the King’s Road and asked him if I could wear them. He said yes, if I really wanted to, but I’d have to be very careful as they were all sapphires.
Anthony kept the whereabouts of his flat a secret from Nina. It was his hideaway. So when one day he decided to ‘disappear’ she had no idea where he’d gone. Within hours I received a phone call – ‘Derek, come to tea at Vestbury.’ She allowed no time for an excuse – I was the unwilling rope in a tug-of-war, for Anthony had made me promise I would deny all knowledge of his whereabouts. Arriving at the Westbury I found Nina, tearful, sitting on a sofa in the lobby surrounded by forbidding young Russian aristocrats in dark suits, who stood like a guard of honour. I sat opposite her and nervously sipped my tea while all around I could feel the eyes boring into me.
‘Derek, Darleeng, Ver is Anthony – I lov him very much.’
‘I’m not certain, Nina.’ White lies for White Russians. ‘He said he was going away for a few days. He’ll be back, I promise.’
‘Derek, you know thees flat.’
The rat trap was sprung – ‘No,’ I said, with a guilt which rattled my tea-cup.
Nina took out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. I felt truly awful. The next morning there was a knock at the door and a grey uniformed chauffeur handed me a parcel with an ‘Are you Mr Jarman?’ I opened it nervously – no note, but it contained the painting I had given Nina the previous month.
Anthony fared no better. After tea a quick phone call to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who assured Nina they could trace a missing person in a few hours. So by lunch-time the next day, along with photos of Anthony coming out of Sloane Square underground, she had the address – 19 Sloane Square House. She sent a telegram – ‘Impossible, yes. Invisible, never.’ And for the next month had private detectives follow Anthony and his friends.
~
1968 – The Lisson Gallery
I have been painting landscapes fairly consistently since I left school, and during that time they’ve changed a great deal. At first they were sparked off by holidays with Aunt Isobel at Kilve in North Somerset. I painted the red brown earth and dark green of the Quantock Hills, which are at their brightest under the stormy grey skies which blow up over the Bristol Channel. In these paintings there are megaliths and standing stones and clumps of beech trees. By 1965 this has all changed. Oil paint is out. Aquatec, the new acrylic paint, in. The canvas is no longer rough brown flax, but smooth white cotton duck. The use of rulers and masking tape produces a metrical precision, and ‘replaces’ improvisation.
I began a series of landscapes which were larger – you have to paint large at the Slade or nobody notices. They have flat red grounds, blue skies, above eye-tricking imagery: Trompe l’oeil water, real taps, classical statues. The largest of these canvases, nine feet by seven, wins the Peter Stuyvesant award for painting at the Young Contemporaries show at the Tate in May 1967.
Since then things have changed again, and at my one-man show, my first one-man show at the Lisson, the canvases have become linear and perfectly balanced. There are no longer any figures or objects, and definitely no jokes. The canvases which are left raw resemble marble through which a grid of lines has been scored.
I am in love with de Chirico, and the two rooms of paintings which form the show are secretly dedicated to him. I hope they will be seen as ‘Enigmatic’. Dom Sylvester Houedard has given me a present of one of his ‘typestracts’. He’s upstairs, thundering away at the typewriter. He hands me another paper on which is written, ‘Mrs God invites you to her opening.’ An invitation to my own show.
~
The Roundhouse
Queueing for returned tickets for the Living Theatre at the Roundhouse, I bumped into Keith Milow with one of his millionaire friends. Keith has a passion for bankers, particularly if they are young and play squash. This latterday Maecenas had bought a dozen tickets which he was giving away at Keith’s prompting to the young and promising with much ostentation. I managed to lay my hands on one. As we waited for the performance he managed to drop names like bricks – Andy, Jasper, Don, Dan, Claes – art bricks.
Then Julian Beck and his theatre commenced their performance with a dirge of ‘can’ts’ – you can’t strip in public, smoke dope, etc. They’d hardly begun when, immediately in front of us, Michael Chapman from the Exploding Galaxy, all six foot four of him, started to heckle in a loud voice. First he stripped, giving a loud commentary on the process and apologising for his spotty torso, and then lit a joint, all the while shouting ‘You can if you want to!’ In this way the beginning of the performance was reduced to a shambles and the Living Theatre suddenly became the outraged guardians of their own negativity. ‘Great – great – great,’ said Keith’s banker.
Later, when Michael passed by him in the interval he rushed up to him and said, ‘You must have dinner with us.’ But Michael, looking down from his great height, said, ‘What the fuck do I need dinner for?’ and spat at him right between the eyes.
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The Exploding Galaxy, 1967
From the top of a 19 bus – Michael Chapman walking down Charing X Road, swathed in sheets of white lining-paper, trailing a number of empty cans which bumped along the pavement making a terrible noise.
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At 99 Balls Pond Road the Exploding Galaxy is alive with Experiment. David Medalla hops about like a wide-eyed genie, initiating this and that. This evening Richard and I spent the time attempting a dance exercise which became gradually more chaotic as we grew more tired.
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I went with the Exploding Galaxy to Artaud’s Spurt of Blood this evening at the Royal College. There were explosions in which great polystyrene rocks fell on the audience, who ducked and almost panicked. Then a whole troop of Lolita nymphets danced, Isadora-like, in very skimpy Greek dresses through the audience with spray cans of lavender scent, singing as they slid off the knees of the oldest men in the audience. In the row in front of me a woman in an expensive fur sat unaware of the blood dripping all over her from the cow’s head and hooves suspended above the audience and hidden by the lighting grid. We were repeatedly informed, like Candide, that we lived in the best of all possible worlds. Everything went wrong. Finally the nanny lifted up her skirts and a red balloon inflated between her legs until it burst. This was the best piece of experimental theatre that I’ve ever seen.
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1968, Paris: Michael Chapman was in the Coupole this evening. We were all exchanging stories of French hospitality. I’d spent last night in a prison cell. Having hitch-hiked from Boulogne and been dumped at 2 a.m. in a strange part of Paris I was foolish enough to ask a jumpy flic where I was. I was marched down the streets at machine-gun point, and deposited for the night in a thruppenny-bit cell next door to a cage full of girls who had been plying their trade without the correct permits. They sang all night and made jokes about the flics’ limp dicks.
In the cafe Michael drew out a scruffy sheet of poems from his bag and proclaimed in a stentorian voice – ‘Paris, City of Art’ – then proceeded to read aloud a sound poem he’d written. Within seconds a hush had fallen over the cafe, the waiters stopped in their tracks, and a table of gross-looking burghers nearby, who were tucking into a large meal, started to make bleating noises. Michael, undeterred, raised his voice to a howl, rose, and walked over waving his poems in the air, glowering at them, clucking like a chicken. Then he walked slowly and deliberately round the table, grunting like a pig. The waiters, instead of reacting with anger, fell about laughing and brought us more drinks. Vive la France!
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Jazz Calendar
9 January 1968: The opening of Jazz Calendar was a Christmas Day. Anthony gave me a garland of silver bells held by a cascade of bows; Michael Fish, a velvet suit in a soft dark brown, which I wore instead of a black tie. Ma made me a silk shirt and jabot in cream, and gave me a pearl tie-pin, and Robert Medley threw a party for the whole gang. Patrick, David, Anthony et al. Jazz Calendar itself looked like a packet of Licorice Allsorts dancing; and the audience, who loved it, gave us curtain call after curtain call. Seventeen in all, I think. This morning the reviews were all favourable.
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When I drew the designs for the costumes of Jazz last November, Sir Frederick Ashton said that if I had any problems with the dancers he’d take care of them; but Nureyev was a law unto himself and I’d have to cope as best I could. I hadn’t realised that this was a warning! The design for ‘Friday’s Child’ is a red and blue love-knot, which is reflected in the costumes which are split from top to bottom, half vermilion, half cobalt-blue. When I arrived at the ballet rehearsal-rooms just before lunch one morning, for my first fitting with Nureyev, I found Sir Fred talking to Margot Fonteyn in the dressing-rooms. After Fred had introduced us she asked me to show her the costume, which an assistant from the wardrobe had packed in a box. When she saw it she said, ‘You can’t cut a dancer like Nureyev in half like that.’ I was tongue-tied; and Sir Fred, sensing danger, said, ‘I think it’s time for lunch.’
I waited nervously for the summons into Nureyev’s dressing-room. The whole business of theatres and design was completely new to me and I found costume fittings unnerving – taking in a bulge here and there, and attempting to reassure insecure dancers that they looked good, knowing nothing of how they should look in any case. When Nureyev announced he was ready we walked into the room to find him naked, drying himself from a shower. I was even more unprepared for this and didn’t know which way to turn my eyes. Blushing, I introduced myself and hesitantly showed him the costume. My hesitation was like a red flag to a bull. He picked up the costume and pinched the material nonchalantly between his finger, before dropping it with disdain. He looked at me mockingly, and said the material was awful. Then rubbing himself suggestively with the towel he lectured me on tights, and said that it would be wasting his time trying them on. He had a perfect pair which he’d brought back from Switzerland. Then looking me slowly up and down he said – ‘Well.’ From that moment our relationship became one of cat and defenceless mouse. I’d suggested a wig, and he arrived at the next rehearsal with an awful black plastic number from Woolworths. Wearing it back to front, he danced in front of the company and as they fell about laughing declared he always looked ridiculous in wigs.
And so it went on, right up till the last moment. At the premiere on 9 January I had no idea if he would wear the costume or not. When at the beginning of the evening it was announced that he had flu and would not be performing, the whole audience went ‘Oh …’ Then, just before the curtain went up on my front cloth, the announcer said that in spite of the flu he was going to give it a go. ‘Ah …’ went the audience. Everything was played for maximum effect. I sat on the edge of my seat in terror, half-expecting him to appear in practice clothes and a Beatles wig, but he was wearing my costume. During the curtain calls he said he didn’t like the colours, but by then this game of Russian roulette was played out. And after all, I had witnessed one of the seven wonders of the Swinging Decade – I had seen Nureyev naked.
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Marie Rambert arrived during the lighting rehearsals this morning and sat quizzically in a box. She made little comment about the sets. Unlit, the Naples yellow cloths looked grey and the stage rather empty. All during the lighting rehearsal there’d been a battle with Bill Bundy, a belligerent and unfriendly man who has given my inexperience no quarter. He is involved in a feud with the manager of the Opera House, John Sullivan. They don’t speak to each other, and communicate (I’m told) with acid little notes. When I first arrived in the theatre, I made the mistake of listening to John’s advice about the perspex globes for ‘Tuesday’s Child’, while Bill stood in the background. This afternoon when we were lighting the Nureyev scene – ‘Friday’ – I asked him to light the stage half blue, half red. He threw a tantrum and said it was quite impossible. I rashly suggested he put blue lights on one side and red lights on the other and see what happened – ‘Are you telling me how to do my job?’ – and throwing his notes down with a crash, he went into a sulk. Fred, who I could see was getting more and more impatient, suddenly said loudly from the stage, ‘Stop behaving like Maria Callas, Bill. This is only a little ballet.’
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Sloane Square: Anthony sits cross-legged on the white carpets with his ‘maxims’, postcards, and the playscript of The Dreamers lying scattered around him. He hunches over the electric typewriter, knocking at the keys with three fingers. A gnarled windblown tree in a pot rises up behind him, its branches hung with crystal icicles which reflect in the grey mirror walls. Anthony sips his tea from a grey Japanese bowl. The Ting Ling bowl. Clack. Click. Clack. – ‘Rome’s trouble was too few Lions.’
He gets up with difficulty and walks to the kitchen, where the Princess’s dinner is cooking. As he walks, he limps slightly; and an impish smile crosses over the carefully constructed face. Abbé Liszt of the King’s Road. He returns carrying Nina’s gigot in a carrier bag, gives me the door keys and leaves for the Westbury.
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Designing for Mozart – The Invasion of Prague
23 August 1968: When the curtain came down on Don Giovanni last night John Gielgud and I faced a barrage of hissing. The opera establishment was out in force for the opening of the Coliseum. And the next day, being the ‘outsider’ in this production, I copped it in a series of savage reviews. Not one kind word. In self-defence I decided that opera-goers were a race of hysterics, fanatic worshippers at a necropolis, who would go through the most extreme contortions to convince themselves that the corpse is animate.
As we walked off the stage, John Gielgud said that like much modern art my designs had been misunderstood. Today a letter arrived from him saying much the same thing. Even though he has been outwardly encouraging I know that in his heart he dislikes my designs. In the publicity photograph taken last May, when we began all this, he seems puzzled by my enthusiasm as we look at them. Today, everyone avoids me in the theatre: a lesson has been learned – on both sides. First and foremost, that the living and the dead don’t mix. The music of the Don might seem as alive as ever, yet the sexual politic is obsolete. And since that is the core of the opera … I made simple decisions for the design, I set it roughly contemporary with Mozart, in Goya’s Spain – but like Tricorne reinterpreted the historical past in a contemporary manner. My original intention was a single all-purpose set, and colour, masses of it, to combat the usual browns and greys of the theatre.
From the moment I began work there had been opposition, and I wasn’t old enough or experienced enough to handle it. Drop cloths were ordered and sets were changed; up until the last moment the theatre was being converted – an ugly false proscenium was introduced, and the stagehands changed the sets, so they thundered through the arias, unaccustomed to the new space. Sir John was quite out of his depth as well, and prey to every bit of ‘sound’ advice. Meanwhile, Sir Fred had warned me that I did the opera at my own peril – adding, of course, that I had no choice. The lesson had to be learned. A career that started in reverse has been brought to an abrupt halt, not a moment too soon.
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Gibraltar – Tangiers
Robin and I arrived on the Rock with its schizo culture of Tudor-bethan pubs and Spanish taverns a few days after the ill-fated Don Giovanni opened and nearly closed the London Coliseum. We were both wearing long hair, and at the Moroccan checkpoint we were informed that our appearance was degenerate. So, in spite of a request for scissors, we were posted back to Gibraltar where we had military short-back-and-sides from a mess barber. To our chagrin, when we arrived in Tangiers all the Moroccan boys had long hair, except for a few who had no hair at all. We discovered that this was the local police punishment for lads who were too friendly with the foreigners. We spent our time swimming and sightseeing. With our youth, lack of money and deplorable haircuts, we were not attractive propositions. For the boys.
The Hotel Colon was owned by one Andy Flack. At breakfast he entertained couples from Wimbledon and Clapham with risqué stories, his up-swept diamante glasses perched on the end of his nose, his blue-rinsed hair immaculately coiffed. He slept with his Moroccan boyfriend Mohammed behind a curtain near the stairs. This lair was lined with yellowing paperbacks – lives of Heliogabalus – and dog-eared photos from his former life as a drag queen. There was a particularly startling one, taken circa 1940, of him as Carol Lombard in the arms of an immense muscle-bound gladiator. Lads, he told Robin and me, were definitely not allowed in at night – even if you tiptoed, he’d hear.
We went to the old theatre, which was now a cinema. High above, plaster images of Cervantes, Shakespeare, and other great worthies of European literature stared sightlessly down on a mob of Moroccan revellers who treated the Italian B movie – Hercules versus Atlas, Medusa and hosts of busty Italian ladies – like a football match. At times it seemed a fight would break out as the tension mounted. Except for The Wizard of Oz, it was probably the most exciting film I’ve ever watched.
In the evening we used to get stoned in the Dancing Boy Cafe, where the old men played dominoes, smoked kief and drank mint tea, all the while entertained by twelve-year-old boys who danced in diaphanous sequined dresses.
When we left Tangier I nagged Robin lest he try to take any of the nefarious weed home, and he swore he was clean. The Gib customs turned us upside down, tipping out Robin’s cigarettes and finding two joints that had been placed there as a parting gift from a crony at the bar.
The cells resembled a zoo, and behind the bars Rob looked like a dejected monkey. I stared at him uncomfortably and slipped a copy of The Times through as a parting gesture. He showed up five days later, saying he’d met a sailor in the cells.
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May 1969 – Le Nid
Patrick Procktor asked me to spend a few days with him at Tony Richardson’s house in the South of France. We flew to Nice and drove to the old house, which is deep in a pine forest. We arrived as Mick Jagger left, and Patrick, who knew the place, rushed ahead. I discovered him in the guest-room lying on Mick’s unmade bed. ‘This is mine,’ he said, ‘and there’s no need to change the sheets.’
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1969 – Marlborough Fine Art
Anthony Harwood and I arrived at the Marlborough Gallery to see the Henry Moore show – in that plush environment, the work looked like the perfect foil for the tacky entrance hall of a bank. Visitors were walking around the place in silent reverential awe. Anthony went up to the desk and whispered confidentially to the girl sitting there. A door opened and a dapper young man in a Savile Row suit appeared. He motioned Anthony into the back room, but Anthony said in a loud voice that everyone could hear, ‘Could you tell me a little about these sculptures? This one over here in pink marble, for instance.’
‘That’s Soraya marble from Persia,’ said the young man.
‘And this one?’ said Anthony.
‘Oh, that’s Carrara.’
Anthony prodded it. ‘How much is it?’ Art-lovers hovered and strained their ears. Something in Anthony’s look allowed no quarter. The young man was about to ask him back, but instead suddenly said ‘£40,000.’
‘£40,000,’ said Anthony, ‘quite reasonable.’ He prodded the next sculpture; ‘And what’s this one made of?’
By now the whole gallery was ears and eyes for Anthony. While he limped around, his well-manicured hands fluttering over the marble, the exhibition was reduced to inflated price-tags and the quality of the material. Round the corner, at the end, was a huge reclining figure in elm. Anthony stopped in front of it and said, ‘I like marble but wood’s a much finer material. I’ll buy that one.’
These words were like stones flying in a glass house. ‘That’s already taken, sir.’
‘What a pity. I’ll leave you my card. Do ring me when he does another.’
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A Rose is a Rose is a …
Sir Francis Rose, premier Baron of Scotland and Grandee of Spain, descended from the Inquisitor Torquemada, crept like a black beetle with uncertain steps through Soho. A gremlin fallen from the battlements of Nightmare Alley, with his whirly corkscrew walking-stick and black bohemian hat crushed over his silver hair.
At the beginning of the century Francis had crossed all seven tiers of the Inferno to be born as an elegant golden boy in a painting by John Singer Sargent. From that moment legend stuck to him like hoarfrost on a blasted oak. A cardinal dressed in the scarlet silks of the Whore of Babylon, he built an altar in his Rolls-Royce and toured the world. In Paris he was a painter whom Gertrude Stein mistook for a genius in a fit of Moderne amnesia. ‘A Rose is a Rose is a Rose,’ she wrote, and then announced the advent of the heavenly twins of modern art – Pablo and Francis. Jean Cocteau, impressed and never missing a trick, brought twenty-one sailor boys as a gift to Francis on his twenty-first birthday.
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May 1967, Sloane Square: Anthony Harwood told me this evening that he and Nina were invited early in the fifties to a dinner-party Francis gave in Paris for Anna de Noialles and other celebrities. They were waited on by a young Spanish boy, dressed in scarlet, who changed the courses with an engaging, absent-minded insolence – thumping the plates down – he muddled his way through the dinner. When Anthony asked Francis who the boy was (he was, by the by, very attractive) the latter announced to his guests’ surprise, ‘My son.’
Later this story emerged: some time in the early thirties Francis was travelling through Spain in his fabled Rolls when it broke down in some fairly remote village. He was forced to stay a few days while spare parts were brought from Madrid, and during this time he seduced the girl who was his chambermaid. Months later all she knew of her son’s father was that he was an Englishman called Rose. The war made further contact impossible. Then a month or so before the dinner-party, Francis had been sought out by a priest who broke the secrecy of the confessional to tell him he had a son – a peasant boy in Spain. Francis brought him to Paris, and had him wait at his table.
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June 1969, Belgravia: Karl Bowen and I were invited to tea this afternoon by Francis Rose. He has a small basement flat that Cecil Beaton is paying for. When we arrived, Francis appeared out of the gloom, carrying his cat with a diamond collar. In the hall he pointed out Sargent’s dazzling portrait of him as a boy, before ushering us into a gloomy little studio smelling heavily of incense. He shuffled about to get ‘tea’ together in between snorting snuff.
The studio was crowded by the new paintings which he’s been working on. These were all crudely painted in comic-strip Pop about which there was nothing remarkable. But their subject-matter threw both of us. Hitler and Goebbels were most prominent. Francis obviously expected us to say something; and when Karl muttered ‘interesting’ Francis said sharply, ‘I’ve been painting old friends. Old friends are always INTERESTING.’ He then served us with glasses of sickly crème de menthe and enlarged on his holidays in Germany, and Hitler’s exquisite good manners. Karl quietly poured his drink into one of the brush pots when Francis wasn’t looking as he was certain it was poisoned.
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1971. Powis Terrace
The Art Deco blight has taken over David’s home. Lemonade is served in precious Lalique glasses. There’s a dining-table that would seat the boardroom of the Chase Manhattan, and David has the food brought in from Mr Chow’s. The flat now parodies his painting. There are huge bunches of tulips in yet more Lalique vases dotted around like wreaths. The place is antiseptic, a waiting-room for the good life. The same blight has overtaken Warhol’s Factory. The room of silver dreams has gone, to be replaced by the lobby of a bank with huge brass Deco desks from the France. When I first came to Powis Terrace you could lounge around, but now the decoration dwarfs and depresses. It’s the house of any millionaire art-collector. The good taste shrieks: there is the original Mackintosh hall chair, the ample sofas, and a fine twenties’ neoclassical decorator’s picture of a godlike boy which hangs like Peter over it all. Conversation is forced and very difficult. Henry Geldzahler sits like a Buddha round every corner. Tonight, over dinner, his conversation pours out, an unending eulogy. At the other side of the table Stephen Buckley, a camp-follower, nods his assent.
After dinner I make excuses and leave early. How sad all this is, life illustrating the art so remorselessly. David, who seems the same on the surface, has become a tortoise within a decorator’s shell. He let the dollar dowagers take over.
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Swinging Decayed
In Liverpool Road you met Joe Orton passing Chapel Market. The bus to the Slade from Priory Road passed over the world-famous crossing at Abbey Road. But life seemed to touch lightly on the decade – an Edwardian yachting hat from Herbert Johnson to hike around America. Listening to Sergeant Pepper in Anthony’s all glass and mirror flat. Sitting in Patrick Procktor’s studio nearer the hub, sun streaming through venetian blinds as he painted ‘Derek Telling Me about Orpheus’. Or appearing as one of the characters in the painting ‘Shades’ of the Coffee Bar La Douce in D’Arblay Street with Ossie and Keith Milow. Sitting in a silver convertible with Peter Hinewood wearing a sky-blue metallic leather jacket Ossie had designed for him … Kennedy’s assassination announced at my friend Caroline’s twenty-first. The march on the American Embassy during the Cuban crisis. The march in Fleet Street to protest against Mick Jagger’s arrest, blocking the paper vans by filing across the crossing in front of the law courts. Pauline Fordham’s jacket, glittering like Liberty at the barricades. The sun still filtering through the blinds in Patrick’s flat as we sipped his favourite Vouvray. Wayne Sleep dancing in the King’s Road with a T-shirt: ‘To live is to dance – to dance is to live.’ Beads and chiffon scarves: clothes seemed so important, they were a means of broadcasting a philosophy … The theatre, which in those days seemed alive, even at the Aldwych – The Comedy of Errors which I saw seven times – The Wars of the Roses – Patrick’s designs for Saint’s Day and the Rimbaud play … David Medalla and Paul Keiler’s 99 Balls Pond Road. The first showing of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and the Magick Lantern Cycle at Camberwell and the endless hours of SLEEP – Satie and Mahler. The Who singing as I painted my landscapes at Liverpool Road – Liquatec acrylic paint and white cotton duck – Ferlinghetti – Corso – Ginsberg – Burroughs – Kerouac’s Book of Dreams.
Catalogues like manna from the Museum of Modern Art – the Machine – Ouspensky – and the Tales of Genji which Anthony gave me, and I never opened, ‘It’s better with no shoes, no shoes at all.’ Peter de Rome in a grey mac showing movies at David Hockney’s (one in particular: two boys naked in front of a fire talk of Garbo, and crossing over to the window discover that she’s passing far below in the street, dark glasses and woolly hat). The smell of Gallener paint and polish, Kasmin and Cavafy. Robert Fraser’s ‘Memorial’ show – the opening of the Lisson, Nicholas Logsdale obsessed with white paint … and painters’ lofts, Mark Lancaster at Dick Smith’s, ‘real’ American painting on the walls in Old Street – Ken Noland’s vast bales of canvas and his brother painting the Stripes like gigantic awnings. New York City, before the hangover. Cheap housing, Notting Hill and Soho – Anthony Harwood’s ‘plans’ – a mirror Rolls-Royce, dinner at the Dorchester (‘You have to see it all, Derek, it’s most important’) and his grandes dames, Nina, Mrs Fraser, Lady M-----, Mrs I-----, ON DUTY.
Shyness. I was immensely shy and gauche – at dinner would sit in silence, a bad table companion who could only talk to those I knew, and usually on home ground – parties were an agony and I found myself at a lot of them; the newly rich and sophisticated gave them with abandon – Tony Richardson, his toucans and metallic rooms – usually after a suitable time I ducked and ran, disappeared without saying goodbye. Often I ate in restaurants alone and nearly always went out alone – preferred to prop up bars with anonymity, talk to strangers in the Gigolo and the Hustler, and walk home early in the morning from Chelsea to West Hampstead.
Painting at Liverpool Road: I was impatient, wanted quick immaculate results, hated ‘the struggle’, the time that it took physically to complete an idea – I envied Keith Milow’s concentration. Felt guilty. Thought the results had come too easily. Thought that facility bought shallowness. Nevertheless, still refused to struggle. I was obsessed with environments and objects, but discarded them with ease. Out of sight was out of mind. I understood Anthony when he shrugged his shoulders after he’d lost a decade’s work.
I became obsessed by the beauty of young men – the obsession alternated elation with paranoia. I failed to declare my passions lest they cause embarrassment. Then rushed headlong into the back room for public sex. I created my own delight in exhibitionism. In the sixties the effect seemed all – I took Diaghilev’s commandment, ETONNEZ NOUS, to heart; but shunned success in myself and others, or wherever I encountered it. At that time wordly success seemed the easiest of prizes, and a deadly trap. I never built on it, always destroyed it. I guarded against it by always being broke; and if the bank balance ever hit the blue, I gave it away in a series of magnanimous gestures which amounted to distress signals … All this passes through my mind as I think of London then.
Relationships in the gay art world switched like musical chairs: ABC CAB ACB. Although the world in which they occurred was fairly small, the variety of combinations seemed infinite – and every five years another generation invaded ‘the scene’. There are always experienced mentors prepared to spend time with you, give advice, spice up the evening with delicious gossip – who had fallen into which bed – and relate tales of chance and magical encounters. It was easy to have a good time. You felt that to be part of this world was an immense privilege, that the lifestyle was more affirmative than any other available. As the decade wore on the ‘straight’ world, I realised, was a giant vegetable nightmare from which I’d miraculously escaped. Like everything mundane, it made every effort to keep young men and women in its muddy waters.
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