By 1970, in spite of my apparent disdain for money, I seemed to be enjoying its fruits, with a beautiful Grade II-listed, sixteenth-century manor house in Oxted, Surrey, and a pied-à-terre in London with all the various accoutrements. The only thing that I needed to complete the picture was a wife and family.
I suppose in the end it happens to all bachelors. The ever-constant regime of a new woman, a new bed, and waking up in the middle of the night in an icy state, not knowing whether you’re on planet Earth or Venus. I remember once reading: ‘A man’s mind and body are not purged until he has woken up at least once with a woman by his side, whose name he doesn’t know.’
By the time I was twenty-eight years old, I had experienced this once too often and I was now ready to change course.
I saw her in an advertisement in a magazine one day. This vision of beauty – a woman of such sexual poise, with sensual lips and a wonderful face, haloed by golden hair the colour of wheat. The advertisement was for Smirnoff vodka and she was astride a horse on a long beach. I became immediately besotted. Through friends in the advertising industry, I soon discovered who this paragon of beauty was.
Her name was Greta van Rantwyk and after about three months of manoeuvring we had dinner in a restaurant in Beauchamp Place. Everything was set for the birth of one of those great eternal love stories – the candles, the food, the wine. Everything was perfect, or was it?
There was one small detail that I hadn’t counted on – it seemed she wasn’t too keen on me. Later, I was to discover that she felt I was too flash. My black leather clothing, zip-up jacket and tight-fitting trousers, plus the black Aston Martin DB7 sitting by the front door, were simply too much. She was probably right; I was a bit flash.
I was not to see her again for quite some time. It was almost two years later when I was invited by some mutual friends to dinner in Bayswater and, as luck would have it, Greta turned out to be one of the dinner guests. This second meeting turned out to be far more successful than the first. By evening’s end it was love, if not at first sight, then at second.
I was due to go to Rome for a wedding the next day, but was able to persuade her to join me there in four or five days’ time. I intended driving to Rome in my brand-new Rolls-Royce, which I had bought as my dream gift for my thirtieth birthday.
OK, she was right. I was flash.
I set off next day on the Grand Tour, via the RN 7, stopping at the Hotel de la Poste, where Napoleon had stopped many years previously on the way to his various conquests.
Once in Rome, it didn’t take long to get into the customs of this wonderful Italian city. In fact, on the first night of my stay in the hotel Parco dei Principi, I was to behold one of the great traditions of Italy – lifting radios from cars.
I had been told by the hotel management that under no circumstances should I leave my car on the road, or the outside car park, so on my first night I stored the black Rolls in the hotel’s underground car park, which I was assured would be locked and bolted at 11 p.m.
The next morning, I was awoken by an over-excited member of the hotel staff, jumping up and down.
‘Signor Morrison, excuza me, but your car in the garage – it eez smashed up. Pleeza come fast!’
I threw on a pair of jeans and tore downstairs, where I was joined by the hotel manager. I arrived in an underground car park filled with the crème de la crème of automobiles: Ferraris, Maseratis, BMWs and Mercedes and, of course, my Rolls. Shattered glass lay everywhere. Rear doors, drivers’ doors, passengers’ doors – all were open or askew.
Quarter-lights smashed, windscreens crushed – it was complete devastation; their interiors were now a mass of tangled wires and jack plugs, left dangling in the air without their radios. Wincing in anticipation, I walked over to my Rolls, and then I stopped dead.
For some inexplicable reason, instead of smashing the windows or prising the doors open, they’d merely cut the rubber surround off the windscreen and taken it out in one piece, before gingerly stowing it by the side of the car. Why, I have no idea – maybe even they couldn’t rape this great piece of British engineering. The radio was gone, but I was able to have the windscreen put back within twenty-four hours.
What was even more amazing was that the thieves had not come through the steel doors, but through a ventilation shaft some twelve feet above the floor. My first baptism into car theft, Italian style.
Greta arrived the next day and after picking her up we hit the road for Portofino and the fabulous Hotel Splendido, where we had lunch in the beautiful quayside restaurant. The sea was a dark cobalt blue, flowers of all shapes and sizes danced and bent their heads in the gentle breeze, and yachts bobbed tugging on their umbilical cords that attached them to the quay.
She sat there, with her long blonde hair and that classical smile, the catalyst that created beauty for the day. I told Gret (as she was now called) that we would be married by December. She accepted and within twenty-four hours of our meeting, we had made a commitment to marry. All those thoughts for years about who she might be, what she would look like, the touch of her skin, the voice – indeed, would it ever happen? All these questions were answered in a matter of minutes. It seemed a perfect match.
We were married on 12 December 1972, and the reception was held in the Hyde Park Hotel, now known as the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park. The one mistake that I made was having my stag night on the eve of the wedding. Of course, I went completely crackers for the whole night, finally falling asleep at half past six, only to rise a couple of hours later to prepare for my big day.
Come the evening, I was so tired I remember very little about our party, though I am told it was a great success. Greta was beautiful, intelligent, and making a fortune – what I didn’t know then was that this apparent fortune was going to dry up the day after I married her, as she’d had her fill of the glamour of high fashion and photography.
She stopped working soon afterwards and the only monetary equation was not one of profit, but loss. Within months of that December day, I had to pay out a small fortune in back taxes for her. However, Greta was influential in changing the course of my business career. It was time for something to be completely different.
In the early seventies, I felt the music business was going through some kind of metamorphosis. It had started to lose its way, creativity was drying up, and few new artists were making it. We had entered a new era of the ‘supergroups’, individual artists of great proficiency who had already achieved fame or respect in other bands, and were now getting together to form supergroups.
The term took its name from the 1968 album Super Session, with Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield and Stephen Stills. These bands made great music, like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Cream, and Yes, to mention a few, but my interest had always been in finding new artists. As this source was now drying up, I found myself enjoying more and more the haven and the daily flow of NEMS, which was rather more interesting than the pursuit of unknown bands, who had ceased to exist. I must say that the last seven months I spent in 3 Hill Street bring back very fond memories.
Don Black, who wrote the lyrics to ‘Born Free’, ‘To Sir with Love’ and ‘Diamonds Are Forever’, among many others, constantly amused me with his quick-witted stories and one-liners. Don was a great friend of Vic Lewis, and manager of the singer Matt Monro, and he was often around as Vic went about his everyday business, with his artists, in his personal fiefdom. I was always the outsider looking in on his grand and opulent office, with his two pretty secretaries guarding first the outer and then the inner sanctum doors.
Vic loved his opulence and thrived on precision. He nearly always wore a well-cut, dark blue suit, or a blazer and flannels, with a tie of the finest silk. Tea was served punctually at 4 p.m., a habit that in all my years I’ve never seen portrayed so earnestly. It was served as it should be: Earl Grey, Orange Pekoe, Darjeeling or Indian, with fine bone china tea cups, teapots and milk jugs; a pat or two of butter lying like small yellow suns next to the perfectly produced scones and regimentally aligned slices of toast. All of this nestling on a fine crisp Irish linen cloth.
When taking his lunch or dinner, Vic would only patronise those restaurants where he was well known to the management. I had many a giggle when eating with him, while eying the obsequiousness that these waiters displayed. The finest food, finest wine and always tea, never coffee. The jokes, the stories, the reminiscing of his days as a bandleader in the fifties and sixties – this was the way I was to ride out the years of 1971 and 1972, the last years I was to be actively involved in rock ’n’ roll until 1976.
I now craved something different. I was quite well off and had been quietly indulging myself in one of my principal passions, the collection of art and artefacts. I always get a particular kick when an unknown painter, whose work I’d bought for nothing years ago, becomes a star, or when I can use their success for a bit of one-upmanship. It didn’t take long for me to turn this passion for art into a new business.
In 1972, along with Rodney Kinsman, my old compadré from the Central School of Art, and the art dealer Bernard Jacobson as our working partner, we set up a gallery in Maddox Street. It was to be called the Jacobson Kinsman Morrison Gallery. It was a beautiful space – dark mahogany wooden floors, high ceilings, and a rear gallery that had a vaulted glass atrium. The gallery specialised in modern prints. By the early seventies, more and more people were clamouring to buy good art, but the prices were becoming unobtainable. The natural progression was to buy limited edition, signed prints.
Of course, the art of the printmaker had been around for centuries and many great editions had been published, including ‘The Vollard Suite’ by Picasso and ‘Elles’ by Toulouse Lautrec, the latter being for me the greatest exponent of this movement.
So we rode the wave by selling modern prints by Hockney, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Caulfield, William Tillyer and Ivor Abrahams. For me there was one truly great print artist and painter of this period and that was David Hockney. I personally rate his ‘Celia’ from 1973 as one of the great masterpieces of art. The fluidity of his line for me matches the genius of Lautrec and Picasso.
So, with all this demand, an even greater profusion of screen prints, lithograph wood block, and every other medium was used to satisfy the growing avarice of the buying public. Inevitably, in many cases the currency was debased as more and more publishers put out even larger editions, sometimes up to as much as a thousand units. I remember seeing an advert in one of the Sunday colour supplements that boasted of a unique print, which was limited to only ten thousand impressions. It all started to get a bit like Germany in the twenties and the hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic.
The ultimate failure of the modern print market is all said with the benefit of hindsight. If it had been looked at logically, we probably wouldn’t have started the gallery in the first place. In 1972, of course, we were not to know this, and so we went into the business ‘gung-ho’.
One of the first important buying decisions we had to make was whether to invest heavily in any one particular artist. We all favoured Hockney, but finally we decided that Patrick Caulfield was our man.
I was visiting the office of the music publisher Freddy Bienstock. He had picked me up in his Rolls and we were driving around Berkeley Square. Freddy was one of the most successful independent music publishers of the day, and his principal company was called Carlin Music. I remember him telling me on this occasion that he owned 56,000 songs – this was before he bought Chappell Music in 1984, which increased his ownership of songs by about 400,000.
‘Bryan,’ he said, in his slightly Eastern European accent, ‘I have all these songs, but only twenty great ones. I should sell the rest and retire on my Evergreens.’
I had about 600 songs at this time and I think one great one, which left rather an imbalance in my mind, and gave me some idea of how far I still had to go to become a music publisher. About ten minutes later, sitting gazing around his office, my eyes suddenly alighted onto an abstract painting.
‘That’s nice,’ I murmured.
‘You like the painting?’
Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s excellent. I’ve always loved Appel.’
He looked at me for a second with total amazement, before asking me how I was familiar with this little-known artist in England. I explained that I was an avid collector and had also studied art for five years.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I paid £30,000 for that, Bryan.’
‘Did you Fred?’ I replied. ‘I’ve got a similar one that cost me £150.’ I had purchased mine back in 1960.
His jaw dropped open and, momentarily at least, I had redressed the balance between his 56,000 songs and my 600.
Being a great lover of Patrick Caulfield, I owned at the time two of his paintings, including one of his masterpieces, a painting entitled ‘Santa Margherita Ligure, 1964’, which together with another of his paintings, ‘Boats at Brindisi’, ranked Caulfield, for me, as one of the great English painters to come out of the sixties.
There was in fact a less amusing story attached to my masterpiece. One day the Tate Gallery wrote to inform me that they were about to put on a major retrospective of Caulfield’s work, and they asked me if I could lend them ‘Santa Margherita Ligure, 1964’ for this exhibition.
This was a difficult decision for me as I had looked after, loved and cherished this painting for more than ten years, moving it from pillar to post. In the end the painting was duly dispatched to the Tate, and nothing was heard for several weeks until the fateful day when I received a telephone call from them.
‘Mr Morrison? Ramsbottom here.’ (Not his actual name, but I’ve forgotten what it was.) ‘Sorry, sir, but we have some bad news for you.’
A thousand different scenarios flashed through my mind as to what could have happened to my beloved painting and I realised that I was gripping the receiver very tightly.
‘Well, actually, sir …,’ he stammered, ‘we were photographing it propped on two easels, and it just slipped off and hit the floor!’
I should say at this point that the painting was not on canvas, but instead on a form of hardboard. I remember thinking that it was a bloody good job that the Tate wasn’t around at the time of Leonardo or Michelangelo because if it had been there would be nothing left for posterity. The painting was damaged and I was duly paid out by the insurance company, but no amount of money could ever make up for the loss of my painting.
Years later I was approached again by the Tate, this time to borrow a picture by Peter Blake. Boldly, I took the plunge and lent it to them. I am glad to report that it came back in one piece.
Back at the Jacobson Kinsman Morrison Gallery, the next two years were gloriously full of exhibitions featuring everything from Art Deco jukeboxes and Toulouse Lautrec prints, to Californian orange-box labels. The interesting thing about the latter two exhibitions was that the Lautrec exhibition was one of the finest collections of an artist’s work to be put together for decades. We had some thirty different prints on show and although the exhibition received extensive publicity I doubt if even three hundred people came in to see it. In 1991, the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly put on a similar Lautrec show, the main difference being that hundreds of thousands of people poured in to see it.
By contrast, our orange box show was a sensation. Two American students ventured into the gallery one day, carrying with them three or four boxes of assorted orange-box labels from California. Back in the forties and fifties, colourful crate labels were one of the keys to marketing citrus fruit. At first, these labels only identified the contents and packer, but soon they became small advertising posters. A well-designed label with a distinctive slogan or image would attract buyers and ensure a profitable season.
Today these labels are considered among the twentieth century’s best graphic designs and are highly sought by collectors of advertising art and local history. The kids assured me that they could procure a couple of thousand if needed and so we organised an exhibition.
Our humble showing got a very small mention in the Observer one Sunday. The following Monday morning, we had a queue a hundred feet long outside of the gallery, almost beating down the doors to get in. Not only did we sell hundreds of these works of art but in the course of the exhibition literally thousands of people poured in through our hallowed portal.
Having recently visited the 1990 Velázquez exhibition at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, where I witnessed daily a queue that took six hours, with people four abreast stretching for half a mile, I can only assume that the general public’s perception of art and its importance in our lives has finally personified itself. The intriguing thing is that all these people could have gone to the Prado prior to the exhibition, or after, walked in without a moment’s delay, and seen probably eighty per cent of Diego Velázquez’s work, as they are all owned by the museum. Once again, the power of publicity. Still, I have never seen such beauty, such foresight, and such individuality in my life as I did in that exhibition.
The Jacobson Kinsman Morrison Gallery finally closed its doors in the mid-seventies, unable to compete in a market where modern prints lay as thick on the ground as the ticker tape after a Wall Street parade. Today the wonderful space we once occupied in Maddox Street is a Chinese restaurant. I suppose the reader might think of me as a butterfly, as I flit from business to business. The reason for this, I suppose, is my passion to achieve the best, whether in music, art, fashion or latterly the polo club.
Never was there so much as a thought about selling an inferior product regardless of its potential. In those heady years, business was always about a passion to create, and never one that was money led; it was only a tool to be used to prolong the buzz of creativity. Given the same set of circumstances today, I would not change a single thing. I loved every moment of it.
The art gallery was not the only business venture that Rodney and I embarked upon together; many years earlier we had set up a modern furniture company called OMK Design Ltd.
I was the M and Rodney the K, and the third partner in this venture, the O in OMK, was Jurek Olejnik. We had all been at Central School of Art together. As I explained earlier, I had left Central School early to manage the Pretty Things. Six or seven months later, I was in the enviable position of having not only enough money to enjoy myself, but also some spare cash for investment.
It was decided in 1965 that the three of us would form this new company based on our initials OMK, which for some reason sounded Scandinavian, a country that dominated the furniture design scene at that time.
As I was the only one with any money, it fell on me to finance the company, with Rodney and Jurek being the designers. Our first office in Charing Cross Road was so small that either Rodney or Jurek had to stand up in order to let the other one pass by to get to his drawing board. The weekly outgoings of this little set-up were in the region of £100 (about £2,000 at today’s prices). This enabled the fledgling company to produce chairs and furniture that now dominate many of the world’s international airports, railway stations, police stations and public buildings.
In fact, I always smile when I arrive at somewhere like Kennedy Airport in the US to be greeted by acres of my furniture, then to be whisked into a car and hear one of my songs on the radio. It’s always a great thrill.
Someone once asked me what I did for a living, and I replied that I was in the furniture and music business. ‘Oh, musical chairs!’ they replied. That about sums it up, I guess.
I suppose that my biggest influence on the company was financial support, combined with a new and flourishing business acumen and belief in my partners. Unlike the music business, where the most popular statement is ‘Where there’s a hit, there’s a writ’, in the furniture business this hardly ever happens.
However, on one occasion I remember receiving a call from Rodney, irate because Terence Conran’s company was knocking off one of our designs. I rushed over to a meeting at the OMK offices to discuss this potentially major problem. The difficult situation was exacerbated by the fact that over thirty per cent of our business was at that point going through the various Conran establishments, including the newly emerging Habitat. It seemed rather unwise to begin legal action with one of our largest clients – potentially suicidal.
Rodney’s view was that we could not afford to sue Conran and potentially upset the whole organisation; but my view was the opposite. Unless we insisted on them discontinuing, then they would surely go on and knock off all our designs within a year and we would have nothing. So a course of action was finally agreed upon, that we would sue them if they failed to stop.
Letters were sent and to our surprise they did stop, pulling the design from their stores. Some two years later, the managing director of Conran stores told me how surprised they had been that we had taken this line of action, as they knew they were by far our largest customer. I took that as a sign of vindication. From my first years at Central School of Art, I have always believed that Rodney Kinsman is one of the great furniture designers of our time, but I also believed that OMK had to protect the copyright of its designs at all times.
• • •
The Habitat stores carried on selling OMK products, such as their innovative T1 leather swing chair, for another fifteen years. Kinsman and Morrison bought out their partner Jurek Olejnik in about 1970 and Bryan was involved with the company for the rest of his life.
In 1972, OMK launched its ‘Omstak’ tubular steel frame stacking chair, which has sold more than a million and is still in production. It is now regarded as a classic of 1970s hi-tech design and is included in the permanent collections of twentieth-century furniture in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other museums.
In 1982, Rodney Kinsman was commissioned by the British Airport Authority to design and produce a new seating system for Gatwick Airport. The ‘Transit’ seating system is now used in more than 100 airports and other public buildings. Since then, he has designed many other furniture projects, including the ‘Trax’ seating system in 1990 for British Rail Intercity stations, which has been installed in more than 300 airports worldwide and received a British Design Award.
Rodney Kinsman was appointed a Royal Designer for Industry in 1990 and he continues to lead OMK Design.