IV
Upper Ground
In August 1969 I moved into the first of a series of warehouses on the river front. Upper Ground was at the end of Blackfriars Bridge. It was a large, airy L-shaped room. After seven years in cramped Georgian terrace houses and basements the change was exhilarating. There was space to spread out – to entertain – for friends to stay without falling over each other. Life could be a bit Spartan in winter, but the summers were an idyll; and the old brick buildings – all of which have now disappeared under improvements – a delight.
The area was deserted since the docks had been moved further down river. Returning home late at night down these empty streets you felt the city belonged to you. In the mornings you would be woken up by the tug Elegance towing the barges down river. The seagulls would desert them for a moment and come to catch the bread from your hand. The riverside was my world for another nine years, before the invasion I pioneered with Peter turned the few remaining buildings into DES. RES.
Back in 1969 the warehouse allowed me to slip quietly away from the ‘scene’ which for five years had been the centre of my life – and had now exhausted itself – and establish my own idiosyncratic mode of living.
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January 1970, Upper Ground: I was dreading coming back to London as by Christmas I had very little money and no way of heating the warehouse at Upper Ground, with the exception of the small office I’ve made of my bedroom. I can just afford to keep the ‘pither’ stove going, but it does nothing except keep the water from freezing in the lavatory. The old coke water-heater swallows up fuel, and you have to lay in at least half a ton at a time.
The holiday in Excelmans in Paris solved the problem for a couple of weeks as the fridge was well stocked and the building centrally heated. On the train waiting to return home, I noticed a girl carrying two heavy suitcases. Something about the way she was dressed and her long hair told me she was English, so I shouted out of the window that there was a spare seat in our carriage, and she clambered in. Throughout the eight-hour journey we chatted about the theatre and painting. Janet Deuter was teaching at Hornsey in the experimental light and sound department. She was a friend of Ken and Shirley Russell so she told me of their new film project, The Devils. When we parted company she told me that she’d tell Ken about me, as she was convinced we would get along.
I soon forgot about this. But a day later the phone rang and Ken asked me if he could come over – ‘tomorrow’. OK I said. ‘I’ll be there at eight in the morning,’ and at eight he arrived in the freezing empty warehouse at Upper Ground. He was bowled over by the building and while we huddled over mugs of tea I pulled out the odd drawing from Jazz Calendar and the Don, plus various other projects I had worked on. After looking at them briefly he asked me to design The Devils. I was quite taken aback by the suddenness of this offer, as I’d promised myself that after Don Giovanni I would never design again. I asked him if I could think it over, and he gave me twenty-four hours. ‘In the meantime can Shirley come to tea to meet you?’ In the evening I rushed out to see Women In Love. On the strength of that, and conversations with a few friends, I decided to plunge in …
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Designing the Devils
February 1970, Ladbroke Grove: I sit upstairs on the living-room floor among the bric-à-brac which invades every corner of Ken’s home. His latest addition is a portrait of Hedy Lamarr – which I spotted in Camden Passage. Shirley makes coffee while Ken and I thrash out ideas. My architectural history, the years with Pevsner, stand me in good stead.
The town of Loudun is an enormous task. There’s the exterior as well as all the interiors to consider, and also a large number of sets for Louis XIII’s court in Paris. I’ve brought a bottle of sepia ink and the finest rapidograph, which I use to make meticulous drawings of the sets, stone by stone, after initial (very rough) sketches. An art director, George Lack, is drawing these up into proper plans and elevations, and the students at the Central are building a scale model of the exterior.
The whole lot is to be built at Pinewood. My source books are Ledoux, Boulée, and Piranesi’s prison series. All detail is sacrificed to scale as I want the sets as large as possible, and as forceful as the sets from an old silent.
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May 1970, Pinewood: The journey out to Pinewood Studio is a nightmare. I’m usually up by 5.30 to get there by 8.30. So much of the time is spent waiting for trains – and in the evening it’s worse unless I manage to hitch a lift. Yesterday I came out with Ken in the white Rolls for a meeting with the American investors – a gang of Hollywood mafia, who took the model of Loudun up to the lot where it was dismembered with a breadknife while they argued about its size. They posted studio assistants to mark its limits on the ground. They spent half an hour dissecting three months’ work, and at one point attempted to jettison the cathedral. The set is apparently going to be the largest since the ill-fated Cleopatra.
Later, Ken called to say he’d been battling with them all day. Although he’s saved Loudun, we’ve lost the sets for Louis XIII’s palace, except for the theatre and perhaps the library; so the original design will never be realised – a historical film shot entirely in sets.
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17 August 1970, Pinewood: We started filming after months of preparation. The great white city is nearly complete on the lot and has become a tourist attraction. You could almost pay for it with visitors’ fees. It cost £97,000. The finish of the white machine bricks (rather than the stone of the drawings) was decided upon in the plaster-rooms where they have brick and stone moulds of every description. I had various sections painted with more usual brick colours – yellows and reds – but they looked dowdy on the glittering surfaces. Today we take up the catafalque with its shrouded figures; the whole of the studios are devoted to us as we’re making most of the props and furniture here as well. A few special pieces, amongst them the life-size crucifix for the nuns’ chapel, are being sculpted by Christopher Hobbs; the crucifix is from the Isenheim altar (in polystyrene with a gesso finish). We found an authentic sixteenth-century brank, a skull mask made in limewood. It’s in fragments, but we are going to restore it for the burning sequence, for which Christopher is making a half-burnt Oliver Reed out of latex.
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The bald nuns have caused quite a stir. At first, they refused to have their hair cut off, but the producer bribed them with an offer of £150 and two wigs each.
Niki, quicker off the mark than the others, made a sensational entrance in the dining-room (which is constructed so that you can keep an eye on who’s arriving). She walked very slowly down the stairs at lunch-time before turning and sashaying back again, making sure no one had missed her. The restaurant at Pinewood is a meat market.
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September 1970, Northwood: I just picked up the tail-end of a conversation between my parents, who are washing up in the kitchen having insisted on me leaving it to them. Whatever Dad had said, Ma replied, ‘I’m so glad our children haven’t grown up normal, they’re so much more interesting than their friends.’
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September, Pinewood: Lunch with Max Adrian, which brightens up the day no end. I found him in bed with the lady who is covered with the most revolting plague sores, eating a sandwich lunch on set. He said why didn’t I join them, as she couldn’t go to the restaurant looking like that: it would put everyone quite off their food.
Max sat at lunch today eating cherry pie surrounded by empty plates. When I asked him what the plates were for he said, ‘For the bones.’ He recalled that at his twenty-first birthday party his mother looked him up and down and said, ‘Max, you are really quite ugly but at least you’re clean.’
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Work is a minefield: the courtiers came down to the set this morning with horrible plastic roses in their hair. I told them to take them out, which most of them did quite willingly – but alas I didn’t know that the designer’s powers do not stretch to hair, and a dispute began which came within a hair’s breadth of stopping the film. The whole thing was conducted with the utmost pettiness. The extras can be as stubborn as mules. They insist on wearing watches, never take off their rings, carry newspapers around with them which come out the moment Ken shouts ‘Cut!’, along with the knitting and the crosswords.
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Rushes are like bingo. Each of us votes for his favourite – one, three, four or whatever. Ken sits at the back with the lighting cameraman, Watkins, who usually gets his way. Watkins, who always wears plimsolls, reminds me of a bad-tempered sportsmaster. One expects him to take out a whistle and blow it. He doesn’t like me very much, probably because everyone calls me ‘the artist’ and the sets, rather than his lighting, are the continual topic of conversation.
Today, Charlton Heston was sitting in the projection-room – he has a hide like tanned leather.
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Revolting afternoon at the plague pit: it is composed of dummies and extras made up as corpses. Ian laid in gallons of real blood from the abattoir – splashed all over the place, it attracted clouds of wasps which made it almost impossible to act dead. Ken, as usual, stormed around, the bodies shifting as a wasp flew too close even when the cameras were turning. Nothing was right; the blood was a disaster. In the end he made me bring bottles of ketchup from the kitchens, which made everything worse as the wasps preferred it to the real thing.
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There was a huge row this morning about the houses on the lot. I’d taken down some shutters without consulting Ken. He’d seen them at an early stage of the design, and was expecting them on the buildings. ‘I can’t trust you, I can’t trust you. In future you’re going to bring me everything to be signed.’ He looked like the mad empress from some B movie – waving his cane, his long hair flowing, wearing a smock and enormous rings on every finger. He left the set shouting to the air, everyone looking at each other rather embarrassed. I quietly carried on and tried to ignore the whole affair.
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October 1970, Pinewood: The wilder scenes in the film are fuelled with champagne, which sometimes arrives with breakfast. In the cathedral Ken has a drum-kit brought in and drums away loudly to whip up fervour. The set is closed, and there are wild rumours all over the studio about ‘orgies’.
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I’m back at Bankside every night, exhausted, often as late as ten. I’m up at 5.30 to reach the set by 7.30. Ian Whittaker picks me up in his car, on Southwark Bridge, bleary-eyed at about six. I work most Saturdays and often Sundays. Life as I knew it has ceased to exist.
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May–September 1970, Ladbroke Grove: Ken asked me what would most upset an English audience. Louis XIII dining al fresco, carelessly shooting peacocks on the lawn between courses. ‘Impossible,’ said Ken. ‘How would you do that?’
‘Make some dummies, stand them on the lawn and detonate them.’
‘No, you’d have to shoot real peacocks. It wouldn’t work otherwise.’
Later, this scene crept into the film in the garden at Pinewood. Ken dressed his Huguenot extras as blackbirds, which the king shot while nonchalantly talking to Richelieu. At one moment our Louis said camply, ‘Bye, bye blackbird.’
‘Marvellous,’ said Ken. ‘What do you think of that, Derek?’
‘Oh I suppose it’s OK,’ I said half-heartedly. I didn’t want to be the kill-joy. The idea had transformed from the steely, vicious concentration of a scene from The White Devil to a farce.
‘Do it again,’ said Ken, and into the film it went. My sensibilities about what was appropriate were violated. A flip joke in a nasty little garden at Pinewood, instead of a great abstract topiary set with strutting peacocks. In a very dark mood I returned to Bankside.
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December 1970, Pinewood: Ken and his camera crew were tempers frayed come the end of filming in December. When the day for the great detonation of the walls of Loudun arrived, when all the charges were laid and we were ready to go, Ken, who had been very moody, said, ‘I’m not having this fucked up,’ and climbed on to the camera to film it himself. The signals that had been organised to let the explosives experts know we were rolling were primitive; and Ken, waving his arms in the argument around the camera, set the whole lot off. The camera stood idle, and as the dust and debris descended from the massive explosion everyone stood around dumbfounded. The next ten days were spent restoring the walls to get the shot.
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Almost every waking moment of 1970 was spent working on The Devils. When I began in January I had no idea that a film of this size completely usurps your life. And by the time I emerged from Pinewood in December, the easy life of the sixties – designing and painting – had gone for ever. It was now impossible to pick up all the threads. Painting was the major victim: I continued it over the next ten years very sporadically. After the intense pressure under which a film is made, it seemed undemanding – and the isolation in which it was pursued, enervating.
However, in the autumn the first of my own films took off with the help of Malcolm Leigh; to be followed by a whole series of Super 8s which gradually, without my realising it, relocated my work. Although much of my time at Pinewood was spent in the constructions of sets, every now and then my presence on the set was necessary. In fact, Ken attempted to keep me there full-time; and I discovered (imperceptibly) how a feature film ran. There was no better director to learn from, as he would always take the adventurous path even at the expense of coherence. In December 1971 he asked me to design The Savage Messiah, almost a year to the day after I had finished work on The Devils.
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1971. The Oasis
The intervening year was spent painting a series of blue capes, which hung on the walls at Bankside. They were simple sky pieces to mirror the calm that returned after the frenzied year of The Devils. That summer was an idyll, spent sitting lazily on the balcony watching the sun sparkle on the Thames. When I wasn’t painting I worked on the room and slowly transformed it into paradise. I built the greenhouse bedroom, and a flower bed which blossomed with blue Morning Glories and ornamental gourds with big yellow flowers. On Saturdays we gave film shows, where we scrambled Hollywood with the films John du Can brought from the Film Co-op – The Wizard of Oz and A Midsummer Night’s Dream crossed with Structuralism. There were open poetry readings organised by Michael Pinney and his Bettiscombe Press. Peter Logan perfected his mechanical ballet, and Michael Ginsborg painted large and complicated geometrical abstracts. Keith Milow came down and worked for a month, discovering a plasterer’s comb which he drew through his thick paint in spirals.
A continuous flow of people stayed or lived in the studio. Below, in Horseshoe Alley, small groups of earnest American tourists would look up at the building while a guide-lecturer told them about the Globe Theatre that had once occupied this site.
In late summer, we opened the studio for two weeks. This brought a steady invasion of people interested as much in the rooms as in the work. The studio was photographed for Italian Vogue, and also featured in a book on modern interiors – where it was sandwiched, barnlike, between uncomfortable-looking rooms furnished in Milanese moderne.
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Pontormo Angels
June 1971, Bankside: Late at night Alasdair and I take off from the Yours and Mine where we’ve been dancing. In the taxi he produces a tab of acid. His drug habit got him sent down from Oxford, where he also enjoyed brief notoriety for his ‘scandalous’ dancing with April Ashley at a May ball. Now he’s gone wild, dyed his hair with henna, and done it in a thousand springy curls. He wears his clothes, even the Blues blazer, like old rags. He broke his nose boxing for the university, and has carelessly failed to have it reset.
We lie in the dark and watch the river swirling below. I put on Daphnis et Chloe and the music runs through our heads in riverlets. Alasdair takes off his T-shirt and we lie in each other’s arms as the sun comes up. The light dances across the river and streams through the mighty black Doric columns of Cannon Street Bridge. The sooty towers materialise out of the darkness, and the sun, catching the golden cross at the summit of St Paul’s, gradually puts out the lights of the City. A fleet of barges is afloat on the Thames, seagulls screeching and diving around them. The clouds turn a dull pink of faded roses, then all the colours of Pontormo angels; finally they become emerald shadows floating away to sea.
Now the city is silhouetted: the sun is spreading flaming bands over the rooftops, and splashing scarlet into the eddies left by the barges. A train crosses the bridge, and the light falls through its windows, transforming it into the richest of ruby necklaces. Tides of Ravel’s music swell through the rafters and Alasdair floats in a rainbow geometry of carpets and cushions …
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An Unexpected Guest
August 1971, Bankside: At three o’clock this morning I was woken up by the telephone. ‘Southwark Police Station, sir. We have a friend of yours who’s lost his way trying to find your home. He says he’s called Sir Francis Rose …’ – this last said with slight disbelief. The sergeant caught the hesitation in my reply and said, ‘He’s very eccentric, isn’t he, sir?’ Alarm bells ring – I am suddenly awake. I asked the sergeant if he could find a hotel for my unexpected guest, as I knew that once Francis had climbed the stairs at Bankside he would never climb down them again. The sergeant to my surprise said yes. I pulled on my clothes quickly and sat on the riverbank waiting for him to arrive. A black Maria drew up with two highly amused young policemen in it, and Francis in the back looking like the scarecrow from Oz and obviously delighted by the mode of transport. As we were driven to Victoria, out of a plastic carrier bag he produced some exercise books filled with scrawled biro drawings of boys fucking. ‘I’ve been showing the officers my drawings,’ he croaked.
When we arrived at the hotel, he insisted I pay for a double room as he had come to London in search of his ‘son’ Bob. I booked him in for one week, and was then driven back to the studio.
Later that morning, the phone rang again and an agitated Francis asked me to meet him at 11 a.m. in a pub in Old Compton Street: we were going to find Bob, who is an addict. Bob’s story is not dissimilar to that of his Spanish half-brother, but is complicated by the fact that when he met his father they fell in love with each other.
In the pub, Francis’ inquiries into Bob’s whereabouts were conducted as though we were in a forties’ crime thriller. He whispered to old cronies in one pub after another, most of them looked like ex-boxers. Eventually, after calling in at a snuff shop, we tracked Bob down at the White Bear pub in the Piccadilly underground, a rendezvous for junkies and hustlers. The two of them fell into each other’s arms. The old man silently wept into his beer as his destitute son broke down, every now and then kissing his father with passion.
Later, when Francis had collected himself, he said, ‘We’ll go to the gallery.’ When we arrived at the Grosvenor Gallery, I could hear the alarm bells going again, and quietly slipped away.
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Savage Messiah
Savage Messiah was low budget. Ken put his savings into it. He asked me to design it as he knew I was keen on the painters of the period, particularly Vanessa Bell (who has the finesse of Matisse) and Bomberg’s great abstracts. On the other hand, I found Gaudier an equivocal character, and still do. He might have boasted that there were no artists except himself, Brancusi, Modigliani, ‘we the moderns’, – but his life, cut short at twenty-three by a bullet in the trenches, hardly gave him time to prove it. He left a small body of stylistically uneven work, much of which decorated his biographer Ede’s home at Kettles Yard in Cambridge. When I arrived there I felt like an intruder. Ede told me he saw Gaudier as the god Apollo in a golden sunset. ‘The film would be like that, wouldn’t it?’ Bill Weedon, now in his nineties, saw something different. He told me of the poverty and chaos of the studio, and trips with Henri to prize fights. Sophie Brzeska’s breath, he said, would have knocked out a trooper. He should know because he was in the trenches.
Both men retained images of Gaudier as a wild boy. But Gaudier knew Sert and the sophisticated set of Diaghilev, so perhaps they remembered only part of it. When I wrote to Karsavina, she replied that she hardly remembered Gaudier but had met him once or twice at the Serts’ – strange company for Ede’s rebel.
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December 1971, Bankside: The studio has been turned into the Omega workshops, and it’s crammed with the furniture that we are painting. There are chairs, tables, trays, screens, crockery. Bill Woodrow and Paul Dufficey are helping to paint the more difficult pieces, which have been made in the studio workshops or bought from Junk City. The pottery is being fired at Wimbledon and looks indistinguishable from the originals. Paul has developed a facility for forging Gaudier drawings: he began by copying them; then introduced variations; and can now turn any goose into a Gaudier swan. Scott Anthony, who is playing Gaudier, comes for drawing lessons, and even he is now quite a dab hand at them. They’re very easy to forge. Nicholas tells me that he dumped a whole wad of them that he drew at the Slade into a sale at Polperro. There were no signatures on them, and he made no claims to their identity. They were snapped up by a beady-eyed London dealer, and later no doubt some appeared in London catalogues ‘in the style of …’ Now they are in private collections as originals? The next step will be the museums.
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March 1972, Lee Studios: Down in the yard they’re filming Steptoe and Son. Up here Christopher Hobbs and I are chipping away at the marble torso in relays to get it finished for tomorrow. Since we started filming the sculptures have overshadowed all our other problems. Christopher has carved several of them in soft stone, as well as a huge seventeen-feet-high Easter Island head out of blocks of polystyrene, which filled the whole building with snow as we hacked away at it with kitchen knives. All this was easy compared with our present problem:
Sequence. Megalomanic film director in a fit of creative frenzy: ‘The central image of our movie is the titanic Struggle of the Sculptor to release his Genius from the intractable Marble. What I need is a torso, a torso like no other, in snow-white marble.’ So I store this request in my mind along with the paintings, the furniture, another twenty or more sculptures, sets, and a thousand props, every now and then giving it some attention. I search the art schools for a sculptor.
Sequence. Three weeks later, and a telephone bill as long as my arm, I discover that no one sculpts in stone any longer – fibreglass, steel, waste paper, nail clippings or teabags, any material but stone. ‘Can’t do it,’ says the voice, and the line goes dead. It is as if I were trying to order macramé from Leonardo. Christopher, who has by now produced ‘Bird Swallowing a Fish’, suggests that we make the marble torso in plaster with just a hint of glitter.
Sequence. The artist’s studio. Film set. ‘Plaster with a dash of glitter, would that do?’ The director fixes me with a steely, unforgiving eye. Improvised conversation along the lines of what the fuck’s the world coming to. We’re making a film about a sculptor. Some joker suggests why not try a monumental mason and everyone agrees, as if we’re fools not to think of it.
Sequence. The monumental mason’s. Kent. Rain-soaked designer stands in a graveyard of angels and forlorn blocks of Sicilian marble. Attempts to describe what he wants to ex-POW from Naples. ‘I want a torso like this.’ Designer fumbles in his pocket for drawing which conveys ‘the artist’s titanic struggle to release his genius from the intractable marble.’ The response is a blank stare, misted by angels. ‘Oh, you want something sexy,’ this said as if the madonna had just exposed herself in St Peter’s. When I leave I imagine the torso being carved in the outside privy.
Sequence. Same location. Later. It’s still raining. The Neapolitan stone-carver smiles as he pats it. I try to hide my emotions: it looks like an African tourist sculpture, an etiolated plant searching desperately for the sun. I have to accept it. It’s cost hundreds. With heavy hearts, we heave it into the boot and travel back to Lees.
Sequence. Artist’s studio set. Directorial hysteria. ‘You call yourself an artist, you sculpt it!! You’ve got forty-eight hours.’ Christopher, help!! We have one block of marble left, with the texture of bullet-proof glass. Our wrists have swollen and our eyes are smarting from the lethal flying splinters. We’ve been carving in relays, about twenty minutes at a time, for two days, and we’re still not nearly finished.
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A few days after the film opened I was rung up by a Russell fanatic who asked me if we had any of the props left. ‘Yes, I’ll ask Ken if you can have something.’ Ken said, ‘It’s all in the empty house at Lees, take what you want.’ I relayed the message. When the guy saw the storerooms he quickly ordered a lorry. Then he set up a stall in Chelsea Antique Market. The first I knew of this was a phone call from John Jesse, a dealer specialising in Art Nouveau and Deco. ‘A dealer friend of mine has just bought six Omega chairs for over £1,000,’ he said. ‘I saw them and smelled a rat.’ He then described my Junk City chairs – Gaudier would have loved that.
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