38

Spectacle

ONE AFTERNOON IN 1976, when he was back in London, Bacon quit for the day and went to the Colony. Suddenly, a young man with dark curly hair was all over him. “So you’re the fucker who I got champagne in for then didn’t turn up to drink it. What kind of bloke are you?” The young man spoke with a thick cockney accent. He did not stop. Bacon was only dimly aware of what he was talking about. Sometime before, Muriel Belcher had promised her friend Joan Littlewood, who directed the Theatre Royal in Stratford, east London, that she and Bacon would visit the theatre. To make the trip an adventure rather than an obligation, Muriel asked another friend—David Edwards, a publican in Stratford who sometimes dropped into the Colony— to stock some champagne at the Swan, his pub near the theatre. But “Daughter” had not yet made the trip, sticking Edwards with the champagne, which was not a cockney drink of choice.

John Edwards and Bacon in 1980: Bacon “fell for him in a minute.”

Photo by Edward Quinn. © Edward Quinn Archive

Bacon loved being braced by this handsome cockney. John Edwards, then twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, worked at the Swan with his brother. Some thought John staged the confrontation at the Colony. “I do think that it wasn’t Francis who met John; it was John who made Francis meet him,” said Bacon’s doctor, Paul Brass. “He knew … his weaknesses and proclivities and thought that maybe he could get in on the act when George was no longer around. I think that’s a possibility.” Bacon would not entirely mind, of course, being John Edwards’s mark. That could remain ambiguous, just another of love’s concealed knots. Bacon invited John to dinner at Wheeler’s. “Francis fell for John in a minute,” said the artist Brian Clarke, one of Edwards’s close friends and later the executor of his estate. “He was breathtakingly handsome. John’s demeanour … he exuded strength. He was very reliable, like a rock. Very strong.” David Marrion, a barman at the Colony and a friend of Edwards’s, described him as having “an aura about him. Charisma. And he was fun.”

Bacon found “something terribly depressing about old people in love.” Old people in lust was worse. But there Bacon stood, as Ian Board put it, “riddled with love.” As usual, he fell for a man who did not appear homosexual, or not obviously so. And as usual, Bacon believed he was the one more in love. John Edwards reminded many people of George Dyer, of course, another East Ender looking for an angle; but John differed from George much as Eddy and Reinhard did from Dicky and Denis. He was a safer “echo.” He was not a hopeless alcoholic, for one thing, and while he had a temper, he was not subject to tantrumlike rages. He typically refused to react to Bacon’s needling—shrugging him off with a “You silly old queen”—and he did not flatter or kowtow. “I think he felt very free with me because I was a bit different from most people he knew,” Edwards said. “Most people around Francis looked up to him and he didn’t like that. I asked him once, ‘What do you see in me?’ and he laughed and said, ‘You’re not boring like most people.’” In a world where most people praised Bacon, Edwards’s roguish charm and independence were a relief. “John,” said his friend Brian Clarke, “didn’t have it in him to be deferential.”

Edwards was born and raised on Cable Street in Stepney, in the docklands area north of the Thames, where his father was a docker who also boxed successfully and had earned a medal for bravery as a seaman in the Second World War. His mother, Beatrice, known as Beatty, was an East Ender who worked in a shop in Stepney before having a large family. John was the next-to-last of six siblings. He had three older brothers—Leonard, David, and Michael—and one older sister, Patricia. The last child was his younger sister, Colleen. The family was “very close, a very tight East End family,” said Philip Mordue, John’s closest friend. Born in 1949, Edwards was dyslexic, a condition not then well understood that often led schools to label otherwise normal children as slow-witted. “He could read certain things and recognize word formations,” said Brian Clarke. “He would sit with the newspaper in front of him for a long time enjoying it. But if he were trying to leave a note for someone he might begin the word ‘bottle’ with a t and then couldn’t move on. If he wanted to sign a note ‘Love to David,’ say, someone would need to write it first and then he would copy it.” Edwards was also left-handed when that was considered a physical handicap: a “lefty” often had the left hand tied behind his back to force him to write with the right hand.

John “bunked off” a lot from the local Church of England school he attended because he felt constantly humiliated. At fourteen, he dropped out and “bounced from pillar to post,” said Clarke, taking one odd job after another. “He was incapable of academic learning, but he was highly intelligent: many dyslexics are.” His older brothers Leonard and David managed a number of pubs in the East End—the Black Horse, the White Horse, the Salmon and Ball, the Plough and Harrow, and by the mid-1970s, the Swan in Stratford. John began working at the Swan off and on from about the age of sixteen. John loved cars, often a symbol of escape, freedom, and wealth for young men with few prospects. He was arrested three times and fined a thousand pounds for drunk driving. At the third offence, he lost his licence for seven years. The fourth time he was caught he was sentenced to six months in jail.

Edwards’s most lucrative job was that of “kept man and companion,” a profession Bacon also once practised in his way. “John had very few jobs in his whole life,” said Clarke. “Between leaving school and arriving on the radar John formed a friendship with a man of a similar age and resources to Francis.” The role of “kept man,” in which a good-looking young man developed a relationship with a much older, rich queen, was usually more business than pleasure. Edwards himself was attracted to younger men and romantically committed, in particular, to Philip Mordue, whom Edwards met when Edwards was around twenty-two. Despite the complicated dynamics, Bacon became very possessive, wanting always to be with Edwards—to the point, said David Marrion, that it “might have been a bit trying for John.” Edwards “was a young man; he still wanted to see old friends.” Bacon took pride in taking care of his young companion, much as he once did with George, Marrion recalled:

It was like, you know, My Fair Lady in reverse, someone he could sort of groom, teach to dress, take out eating … John and I, our best food was pie and mash. But you know, I was a bit more sophisticated and I’d been out much more, but after a while it was John that was going out and becoming a bit more sophisticated. Better groomed. Knew about wine. I think that Francis enjoyed seeing him blossom. He loved it.

In the beginning, the relationship between Bacon and Edwards was sexual, but Edwards—four decades younger than Bacon—was not sexually interested in him. That did nothing to cool the ardour of the older man, who wanted Edwards to become his public partner. The relationship was soon well-known at the Colony and among Edwards’s friends, but John at first refused to enter the wider circles of Bacon’s world. Valerie Beston, Sonia Orwell, and David Sylvester knew nothing of him for a long time. It would remain, said Clarke, “a nighttime acquaintance” until Bacon and Edwards sorted out their relationship between themselves.

In the late summer and autumn of 1976, Bacon—having completed his big theatrical triptych and now working towards his January 1977 show at Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris—made a number of portraits and self-portraits, the most notable of which was Portrait of Michel Leiris (1976). Bacon did not intend this painting for the show, but as a gift for Leiris. Its power seemed to come from Leiris’s mind, which animated his face. He appeared as a man of ample thought and questioning, telegraphed in a series of tics and grimaces. Leiris’s left eye, somewhat enlarged by the magnifying Baconian disc, stared intently at the viewer while his doubled mouth appeared poised to speak. His nose sliced downwards with the force of the last word in an argument. The likeness was less exact than that found in a portrait Bacon made two years later, which conveyed “precisely the upward crinkling of the forehead,” wrote John Russell, “with which Leiris would prepare to address any topic that moved him deeply.” But Bacon preferred the first. “It is less literally like him but in fact more poignantly like him.”

Not surprisingly, the directors of Marlborough were growing annoyed. They had the exclusive right to sell Bacon’s paintings and, while they could arrange with another gallery to exhibit his art, that also put another hand in the financial pot. Bacon insisted upon the Bernard show in Paris. And so, Marlborough sold Bernard three Bacon paintings for his exhibition, which also exasperated them, since Marlborough, like other galleries of the time, preferred to sell pictures from its own venues outside England—such as Zurich and New York—in order to avoid English taxes. Selling directly to a dealer in Paris could limit their many options. Even worse, Bacon had already sold works directly to Claude Bernard—and not just small ones. “They [Bernard and Bacon] were great friends, but not through us,” said David Somerset. “I remember Lloyd being irritated because he rather liked to think [the Marlborough’s deal with Bacon] was an exclusive.”

Claude Bernard knew how to promote a show. The international edition of Newsweek planned a cover story on Bacon timed to coincide with the January opening, an indication that Bacon’s mystique now extended well beyond the art world. It was not the art that captivated Newsweek but the aura:

For weeks the Parisian art world has been gearing up for the great day. French Minister of Culture Françoise Giroud will be there in company with other prominent government officials. So will the cream of le tout Paris and a legion of Europe’s top art critics. (One group of Italian critics and gallery owners plans to arrive in a chartered jet.) To make sure things don’t get out of hand, the section of the narrow rue des Beaux Arts that runs in front of the Galerie Claude Bernard may well have to be closed to traffic—an understandable precaution in view of the fact that the staff of the fashionable gallery is braced for an onslaught of as many as 5,000 people within a matter of a few hours.”

Newsweek was very interested in money and controversy:

Bacon’s grisly visions have outraged scores of critics—and made devoted disciples of many others. And the furious controversy that has swirled around him and his paintings has helped make Bacon one of the world’s highest-priced and most courted artists. One work by Bacon that sold in 1953 for a mere $85 is now valued at $171,000, and among the paintings on display in the Claude Bernard show will be a massive three-panel work priced at $500,000. (A painting by Jasper Johns that sold for $240,000 in 1973 holds the price record at Sotheby Parke Bernet for a living American artist.)

Newsweek published its cover story before the private view. It would otherwise have described one of the most feverish art scenes of the 1970s. The night of the opening, Michel Soskine was working at his uncle’s gallery. “The whole neighbourhood was closed by the police,” he said. That would happen occasionally before big shows, with employees at the door “busy driving people back,” but this time the excitement verged on hysteria. Three rooms were given over to the show and, said Soskine, there were “crowds and crowds and crowds of people. People sitting on the floor … queues waiting outside.” Inside, visitors saw (when they could see) three of the large George Dyer triptychs and Bacon’s recent Triptych. Eight additional large paintings were on view and six new small triptychs and single portraits that Bacon painted after the show at the Musée Cantini. The three rooms provided less space than at Maeght a decade before. Now, the concentration was “incredibly powerful,” with no escape from either the paintings or the monstrous crowd.

Floating in the mob was Francis Bacon, wearing a glistening leather trench coat, tightly belted and with shoulder tabs. He looked like a glamorous—if world-weary—French detective investigating a murder on the Left Bank. A French minister told him, “You are the Marilyn Monroe of modern art,” a compliment Bacon did not appreciate, but he otherwise enjoyed the fuss. His French always became remarkably good in public after a glass or two of champagne. A “contingent of heavy drinkers from England” eventually arrived at the gallery. By the end of the evening, according to Raymond Mason, they “could be found on all fours or lying on their backs under the influence of alcohol.” And then les punks arrived. For the punks, the more Grand the Guignol, the better. They strode barbarously into Claude Bernard’s gallery in Mohawk haircuts, spiky dog collars, and clinking chains. Paris Match estimated that eight thousand people came to the private view: “Never has a living artist had so frantic a private viewing.” Its reporter called Bacon the “most expensive artist in the world.”

Some of Bacon’s friends disliked him in the role of movie star. Not only did Reinhard refuse to attend the opening, for example, but he also especially disliked the centrepiece, Triptych (1976). Bacon noticed: he always referred to the triptych around Reinhard as “that painting you don’t like.” But Bacon respected the challenge. Bernard capped the event at 10 p.m. with an enormous dinner party. He commandeered “an old grain market house, the Bourse de Commerce,” said Soskine, an historic building and home to the commodities exchange. It had a mural-lined rotunda and an imposing dome. At the dinner, Bacon, who spent his time at the gallery mostly greeting visitors and signing catalogues and posters, circled continuously through the vast space, visiting each table to chat and individually greet the hundreds of guests. Two days later, he went to the gallery with the Veličkovićs to see his exhibition under quieter circumstances. “The best exhibition I’ve ever had was in 1977 at the Galerie Claude Bernard, in Paris,” he would later declare, “where the spaces are all small and the paintings looked more intense.” The critics did not as a rule hold back. “Powerful like Rembrandt, tragic like van Gogh,” read the announcement for the Quotidien de Paris, “he is our grand painter.”

Bacon was successful in London, of course, but the streets were never barricaded, and Miss Beston was never forced to beat back mobs at the door. The spectacle in Paris could hardly have pleased Marlborough, whose directors now felt—as Erica Brausen once did—that they had done all the hard work over the years only to see someone else grab the glory. Had Bacon forgotten about their exclusive contract? Why did he consign some pictures directly to Bernard? He was not particularly productive, moreover, after the Bernard show. He completed fifteen pictures in 1976—including the imposing Triptych that he consigned to Claude Bernard—but only eight the following year. Meanwhile, he spent as freely as ever, travelling between London and his new studios in Paris and Wivenhoe.

In January 1978, after a year of small production, Marlborough asked Bacon to take a pay cut. Bacon wrote to Somerset—one of the most genial men in the London art world—an icy letter in response.

I have been thinking over Frank[’s] and your proposal to reduce what you pay me by 10 or 15 percent. I have decided I cannot do this for paints and canvases have [the page is torn: the missing word was probably “risen” or “increased”] by about treble will you please let Frank know that I cannot do this reduction.

Yours very sincerely, Francis Bacon

The note contained a subtle insult and, in its way, a declaration of principle. Bacon knew perfectly well, as did Lloyd and Somerset, that art supplies were not the issue. But Bacon refused ever to discuss—not with holders of the purse—serious matters like oysters, champagne, and roulette. Extravagance was a principle. To a serious nihilist, a virtue. Contracts and ordinary commerce meant nothing to Bacon, and he cared little if Lloyd and Somerset took advantage of him if they honoured the only agreement that mattered, which was an implicit gentleman’s agreement. They could have his paintings. He must live without a bridle. Bacon’s reference to the cost of “paints and canvases”—and mention of the penny-pinching “10 or 15 per cent”—was a way to make Somerset and Lloyd feel like grubby tradesmen who could not possibly understand the life of a committed artist.

Bacon was so angry that when a friend proposed that he leave Marlborough for the Pace Gallery, he agreed to meet the founder of Pace, Arnold “Arne” Glimcher, who was then turning his gallery into one of the most important in New York. Glimcher brought a kind of museum lustre to his exhibitions of contemporary American artists by publishing serious (and seriously lavish) catalogues. Among the artists he represented were a number of older “modern masters,” among them Jean Dubuffet, Louise Nevelson, and Agnes Martin. They gave to his younger artists an air of gravitas. Glimcher’s own combination of boyish charm and business acumen appealed not only to collectors but also, sometimes, to lonely (and elderly) artists. He possessed the enthusiasm of a fan and the reverence of an acolyte. He was also a serious student of art. Bacon was a prize.

At the time, Marlborough appeared wounded, its reputation damaged by the Rothko trial, in which the children of the painter Mark Rothko (after his suicide in 1970) sued the gallery and the executors of their father’s estate for “waste and fraud”—in effect claiming that the gallery cheated them out of millions of dollars in sales. In 1975, the court found for the children, excoriating the gallery and its executors. In 1977, Frank Lloyd was indicted in New York for tampering with evidence presented during the trial and, though the case still had several years to run, celebrated artists were beginning to leave the gallery. Bacon looked ripe for the plucking. Glimcher flew to London, meeting Bacon for tea at Claridge’s. Bacon came wearing a jacket and tie, said Glimcher, and “beautifully turned out. We had such a long talk. He knew the gallery. He was very complimentary … He had just told me that he sold his paintings to Marlborough for fifty thousand [pounds] each and then they asked for whatever they wanted … He said he would sell the paintings to me at a very good price and I said that would be very nice, but I wouldn’t do that, we have a commission and when we make money you make money. And he said, ‘Well, I’ve been going on like this with Marlborough, fifty K a painting, for years now.’ I said, ‘How could you get yourself into a situation like that?’ Bacon said, ‘Because sometimes I prefer the company of thieves.’ I absolutely loved that. So we laughed. I said, ‘Are we going to do this?’ He said, ‘Absolutely.’”

On the flight home, Glimcher wrote to Bacon, “I’m drafting this letter on the Concorde which spiritually seems an unnecessary form of transportation as I am so elated by our new association.” Once Bacon informed Marlborough, Glimcher intended to announce the move in the art journals and schedule an exhibition of between six to eight paintings “with a suitably important catalogue” in April–May or November 1979. “I am not suggesting that you rush to produce works—whenever your works are ready I am at your service.” The association with Pace, Glimcher assured Bacon, would improve the market in his paintings. Soon after, Bacon wrote back to ask Glimcher to hold off the announcement. “He was very nervous about telling Lloyd,” said Glimcher, who returned to London once more before finally learning that Bacon would, after all, remain with Marlborough.

Years later, Glimcher attributed Bacon’s decision to remain with Marlborough to his complicated tax and financial position. In the 1960s and ’70s, taxation rose to an all-time high in the UK, with a top rate of 83 per cent. In 1980, the records of Marlborough Fine Art show that seventy thousand pounds were set aside from Bacon’s profits as a provision for income tax. Many high earners in the UK simply left—David Bowie to Switzerland, the Rolling Stones to the South of France. Even after the Labour Party was ousted in 1979, the top rate of income tax stood at 60 per cent. As a result, tax games—generally legal—were common. Peter Beard alluded to Bacon’s “Swiss bank account” in his 1980s letters to “Fran,” and of course Marlborough maintained a presence in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Over the years, Bacon often made short trips to Switzerland. He was not known as a skier or mountain climber. He was probably picking up cash before proceeding to the Mediterranean casinos, or working out estate planning for Ianthe and her children. He had reason to fear that if he left for the Pace Gallery, he would not have access to his foreign accounts.

Martin Summers, for thirty-five years the managing director of the Lefevre Gallery, where Bacon exhibited in the 1940s, described how galleries could move money around to escape taxes: “You see, there was Marlborough London and Marlborough International. Marlborough International would sell the picture and give London a commission and give Francis a commission in Geneva or Zurich. So it would go into there … There would be no record in London that Francis was being paid [abroad] … Whether Miss Beston had the key to the safe in Switzerland I don’t know, but there was a lot of money there.” Bacon himself often mentioned such arrangements. Andrew Graham-Dixon reported in a profile in The Independent in 1988: “A friend remembers meeting him in Soho just after VAT was introduced. Bacon looked very cheerful. ‘The Marlborough gets me out of VAT,’” he said. Grey Gowrie, Margaret Thatcher’s minister for the arts and later the first chairman of the Arts Council, believed that an “offshore” tax arrangement probably complicated—but also solidified—Bacon’s relationship with Marlborough. Any such arrangements would have “made Bacon apprehensive,” said Gowrie. “This is what I suspect may have happened, but I have no knowledge whether or not it was the case.” But Bacon resented paying huge sums in taxes, and he detested remittance laws that limited the amount of pounds sterling he could take outside the country. The limit was set too low for a high-stakes gambler: he would hide money in his belt when he left for Paris.

It was not surprising, then, that Bacon and Marlborough repaired their relationship. Each maintained significant leverage over the other. Marlborough did not want to lose its best-known English artist as the Rothko trial threatened its reputation. At the same time, Bacon became aware that disentangling himself from Marlborough would be both daunting and stressful. And he was, besides, a homebody. A restless homebody, but one with settled habits, accustomed to being taken care of by the priceless Miss Beston. New York was an ocean away. How could he start, at almost seventy years of age, afresh with the Americans?

That spring of 1978, after the momentary uproar, Miss Beston took particular care of Bacon. His studio and living quarters at Reece Mews were in sorry need of care; no maintenance had been carried out since 1961 (apart from a spruce-up after the fire in 1968). The year before, in August 1977, she had asked John Lelliott Ltd contractors to take a look. The firm proposed stripping the ceilings, walls, and woodwork—with the exception of the sacrosanct studio—and rewiring the place. Varnishing the floors could follow. Bacon initially resisted the idea of a renovation, but finally allowed the workmen to enter. He could hardly bear the thought of daytime strangers, not to be confused with the strangers of the night, wandering through the careful disarray of his rooms, especially the studio. Not long after the renovation began, in April 1978, his fears were realized. He caught some workers in flagrante: they were putting their dirty hands on his dirty magazines on his dirty floor. He retreated to his studio in Wivenhoe, and Miss Beston fired off a stern letter that was a small and comic set piece on the sacred and profane. Her letter foreshadowed the reverential removal to Ireland many years later of his relic-filled studio—lock, stock, and dust:

Although Mr Bacon has cleared away as much as possible of his personal possessions, he has left his studio exactly as it was. As you know, the floor is littered with apparent rubbish and old magazines etc … but to the artist it is a very private place for his work (even I who consider myself one of his closest friends never ventures in there). Nothing whatsoever must be moved or even touched …

“Apparent rubbish” and “even touched” had such a lofty ring, given the piles of old newspapers, books, and boxes that littered the studio floor, that the blokes at John Lelliott Ltd—putting in a day’s work—might well have imagined they now had no choice but to get on their knees in penance at the National Gallery. One stole a seemingly rejected or unfinished painting of a bullfight left in the “apparent rubbish.” Bacon did not notice its absence for months, then reported the loss to the police. He was reminded of the painting stolen a decade earlier by an associate of the Kray twins, and in July 1979, he made two comic-tinged pictures of gangsters. Valerie Beston nicknamed the two pictures, originally part of a triptych, the “Mafia triptych,” which sounded too important to capture the pleasure Bacon took in caricaturing his own dream of bad boys. In the first painting, a gangster in a dark suit leered at the viewer, his wolflike teeth exaggerated and his eyes hidden. He looked like a laughing but dangerous hyena, yet very dapper, too. (“I think the most attractive man I’ve ever met,” Bacon once said, “is Ronnie Kray.”) In the second picture, two figures in dark suits and fedoras sat at ease, leaning towards each other as if engaged in private bad-guy stuff. They looked ominously still. Bacon liked to be in places where there could be, said his friend Clive Barker, “some very undesirable people.” Lucian Freud, no less enamoured of gangsters than Bacon, told a story about a party where Francis met a man whom he fancied, but who was already with a boyfriend. One of the Kray twins, to be helpful, offered to do away with the boyfriend. You could never quite be sure if the Krays were joking. Bacon liked that feeling, too. (By the late 1970s, the Krays were serving life sentences.)

Working with the police, Bacon set a trap for the thief, offering a reward for the return of the unfinished bullfight. The thief fell into the trap, receiving £2,500 for the stolen work, and was arrested: he was subsequently put on probation for two years. Once Bacon recovered the painting, he gleefully picked up a knife. There was sometimes no greater joy—or solace—than murdering a bad piece of art. It was another way of laughing off a failed bet.