CHAPTER FIVE

MAN IN A MUSEUM

“MARILYN MORTA” exclaimed the headlines of the daily papers prominently displayed on the newspaper vendor’s stall on the promenade in Viareggio, the Italian seaside town where Hockney was staying in August 1962. He would always remember hearing the news of the blonde goddess’s death in the middle of this idyllic Italian holiday. With his final term at the Royal College over, he had decided to celebrate by visiting Mark Berger and Ferrill Amacker in Florence, taking with him a new love interest, a young artist called Jeff Goodman. “Jeff was a very handsome, attractive Jewish New Yorker,” he remembers. “He was very American, with crew-cut hair. I didn’t really think of him as a lover. We were just sexy friends.”¹ It was a carefree summer. Florence was very different from what it had been like on his last trip there in the winter, and Hockney’s spirits were high. “I had a little motorbike,” Berger recalls, “and one evening when driving about in central Florence, after David had had a few drinks, he became very exuberant and he was sitting on the back of the motorbike shouting out ‘Pizza Pie’ and ‘Anna Magnani’ and all these kind of Italian phrases, and I kept saying, ‘Oh my God, David, they’re going to beat us to death.’ It was his spirit and his exuberance. He just wanted to sound a little Italian.”² Amacker had an open-top car and at the end of July they decided to drive to Viareggio. There they enjoyed long tranquil days lying on the beautiful beaches.

Left to right: Andy Warhol, Henry Geldzahler, David Hockney, Jeff Goodman, 1963 (illustration credit 5.1)

From Italy they took a train to Munich, and then to Berlin, drawn there by reading Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. Hockney was greatly disappointed to find that the world of the young Weimar Republic invoked by Isherwood, with its eccentric characters and sleazy nightclubs, had been largely swept away; the shadow of the Berlin Wall, erected only one year previously, hung heavily over the city. They did, however, stumble onto one of Isherwood’s old haunts, the Kleist Kasino, on Kleiststrasse, a gay nightclub where men could dance together in a room that had blue-and-white-striped awnings hanging from the ceiling, maroon wallpaper, and a bar that was illuminated by two lamps supported by half-size torsos without fig leaves. The other highlights of their tour were eating at numerous Wurststands, and a visit to East Berlin to see the Pergamon Museum, so named because it contains the monumental reconstructed Pergamon Altar, built in the first half of the second century BC, as part of the Acropolis of Pergamon in Asia Minor. “It was quite amazing,” Hockney recalls, “and looked very splendid in one great big room, but just looking at East Berlin in those days made me realise that communism was a failure. Everybody looked downtrodden and there didn’t seem to be a spark about anything or anybody. It was as if a dead hand had come over it.”³

When Hockney returned to London alone, Goodman having flown back to New York, it was to face the reality of his new life. His education was finally over and a career as an artist beckoned. His reputation was beginning to spread, partly because he had won the Royal College gold medal, but mostly because of relentless propaganda by Kasmin. In a letter to Hockney, the American painter Larry Rivers mentioned that “Kasmin, your gallery dealer, came to see me in Paris and when your name came up he just happened to have 500 photos of your work in his inside pocket.”⁴ By the autumn of 1962, Hockney’s work had featured in at least ten group shows at many distinguished galleries, including the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, the ICA, the Musée d’Art Moderne and the National Museum of Art in Tokyo.

Kasmin had a deft touch when it came to organising Hockney’s exhibiting life, and his Tuesday-night gatherings continued to spread the word and sell the odd painting or drawing. An early client was Grey Gowrie, who had wanted to buy a Hockney ever since he had seen A Grand Procession of Dignitaries, and now, appointed as art buyer for Balliol, his Oxford college, with a brief to find suitable works to hang in the junior common room, was in a position to do so. Unfortunately things did not quite work out as he might have hoped. “Balliol was then in the vanguard of political correctness,” Gowrie remembers. “They didn’t like you smoking Rothmans, for example, because of their South African connection. Their taste in art at the time was social realism and they had a rather good, though gloomy, Derek Greaves of an industrial landscape. Anyway, I went and bought for £75, which was quite a lot of money for an undergraduate college, The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, and it was hung in the JCR where it caused a great deal of uproar and a cup of tea was thrown at it.”⁵ Nor did it end there. So much fun was poked at the painting and endless missiles directed at it that Gowrie asked Kasmin to come up and talk to the students about it. “I had to try and explain what was going on in the picture,” he recalls, “and put it into some kind of current context with Larry Rivers and Dubuffet, and explain that this wasn’t just some kind of one-off madness or childish prank.”⁶ At the end of his talk, he asked for a show of hands on whether they liked it or not and the answer was no, so he agreed to buy it back for £80.

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World was one of fifteen pictures sold by Hockney to Kasmin that year. Others included A Grand Procession of Dignitaries, sold for £100, Typhoo Tea No. 4 for £50, Swiss Landscape for £60, Teeth Cleaning for £55 and Cha Cha Cha for £120. The total income Hockney declared to the Inland Revenue was £563 with zero profits. “I’m sorry I can only find about £30 of bills,” Hockney wrote to his brother Paul, who was now acting as his accountant, “but if you look at the dates of them you’ll notice they only cover about 2 months (average expenditure on materials is about £20 per month). ½ my rent is 35s per week—my visit to Switzerland for inspiration for Swiss Landscape was £60 + trips to Bradford £8 per year. If they don’t believe how much I spend on materials tell them to inquire about the high cost of canvas and stretchers and Artists quality oil paint.”⁷

As well as selling from his own front room, Kasmin also allowed Hockney’s work to be shown by a few galleries who he considered to have an enlightened attitude. One of these was the Grabowski Gallery in Sloane Avenue. Mieczyslaw Grabowski had come to England with the Polish Army in 1940, and after the war opened a pharmacy in Chelsea, and a mail-order business to send medical supplies to Poland. A keen lover of art who liked to promote the work of young and unknown artists of different nationalities, according to the principle of “art without borders,” in 1959 he opened a non-profit-making gallery at 84 Sloane Avenue, next to Grabowski’s Pharmacy.

Hockney was showing there in the summer of 1962 as part of a group show also featuring Derek Boshier, Allen Jones and Peter Phillips. What distinguished this particular show was that Grabowski invited each of the participants to write a personal statement for the catalogue on the theme of “the strange possibilities of inspiration.” Hockney wrote: “I paint what I like when I like, and where I like, with occasional nostalgic journeys. When asked to write on ‘the strange possibilities of inspiration’ it did occur to me that my own sources of inspiration were wide—but acceptable. In fact, I am sure my own sources are classic, or even epic themes. Landscapes of foreign lands, beautiful people, love, propaganda, and major incidents (of my own life). These seem to me to be reasonably traditional.”⁸ It was a philosophy he has adhered to all his working life.

One of the first things Hockney had to do on his return from Berlin was to look for a studio. In the meantime he worked out of a rented lock-up near Lancaster Road. His head was buzzing with ideas from his trip. A small drawing of a leaping leopard, for example, noted in a Berlin museum and quickly sketched from memory on his return to his hotel room, became Picture Emphasizing Stillness, which presents the viewer with a conundrum. Two nude men are enjoying a quiet talk close to a small semi-detached house, oblivious of a leopard, which is about to leap upon them. Just as you are getting caught up in the action, you notice a line of type between the leopard and the men which reads “They are perfectly safe, this is a still.” The inspiration for this picture also came from some battle scenes which had caught his eye in the Tate. “In spite of one’s immediate impression,” he told Guy Brett from the London Magazine, “there is of course no action in these paintings at all. Things don’t actually move—the figures are and will always remain exactly where the painter put them. The same thing that struck Keats when he saw the Grecian Urn.”⁹

The Pergamon Museum provided a curious image of duality that lodged in Hockney’s mind the germ of an idea that was later to develop in his joint portraits. “I never seem to be able to go round a museum at the same pace as anybody else,” he later wrote, “and when I went with Jeff … we got separated. Suddenly I caught sight of him standing next to an Egyptian sculpted figure, unconcerned about it because he was studying something on the wall. Both figures were looking the same way, and it amused me that in my first glimpse of them they looked united.”¹⁰ He immediately consigned the image to paper with a couple of drawings, and as soon as he got back to London painted it on to canvas, titling it Man in a Museum (or You’re in the Wrong Movie). This was a theme he would return to and concoct into two much more elaborate pictures at the end of the year, the Marriage paintings.

Since it was considered de rigueur at the time for a young painter fresh out of art school to do some teaching, as well as beginning to pursue his own career, Hockney also started teaching at Maidstone School of Art. He was offered this work by the flamboyant head of the fine art department, Gerard de Rose, a portrait painter of part Russian descent who had taught at various art colleges and liked to bring fresh young talent into the school (he gave jobs, at one time or another, to Patrick Procktor, Dave Oxtoby, Michael Upton and Norman Stevens). He employed Hockney to teach etching one day a week, for which he was paid £15, and Hockney brought with him not just his talent but his work ethic, painting the word “WORK” in large letters on the studio wall. “I taught for one year at Maidstone,” Hockney remembers, “then I gave it up because I would rather have been working on my own work. I didn’t mind teaching once I was there, but in the end I began to resent it.”¹¹

The search for a proper studio bore fruit in the autumn when Don Mason, both a fellow student at the Royal College and a resident of Kempsford Gardens, was offered his aunt’s flat at 17 Powis Terrace, round the corner from Ladbroke Grove. Since he couldn’t afford the five pounds a week rent, he asked Hockney whether he might like to take it on. As soon as he saw it, Hockney jumped at the opportunity. It was on the first floor of a narrow street of four- and five-storey late nineteenth-century houses, and consisted of two large rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom. For the first time in his adult life, he would be able to live and work in the same place.

Notting Hill in 1962 was a far cry from the chic place that it is today. The streets around Powis Terrace consisted mainly of slum properties, with large houses divided into bedsits, mostly for West Indians who had recently arrived in London, or for poor students. Many of these were owned by the notorious slum landlord Peter Rachman, a Pole who had come to England in 1946 and set up a property empire. “I was amazed at the area,” remembers Kasmin, who had put up the key money for Hockney, “because opposite where he was living were buildings owned by Peter Rachman. He used to buy properties with sitting tenants at low prices, the sitting tenants being almost always older people who had the right to live there protected by the rent act. He would then move in many large groups of young black people, prostitutes and party people, and encourage them to give parties, which would make life intolerable for the tenants. Opposite 17 Powis Terrace was a whole block of houses that he was gradually emptying out, so there was the constant sound of shrieks of laughter and gorgeous black girls coming in and out of the buildings and walking up the street in a precocious manner. It was like a constant party, with an atmosphere of a Trinidad town at night.”¹²

The street may have been noisy, but it was friendly and neighbourly, and it suited Hockney down to the ground. There were shops, including a chemist’s, an off-licence, a motor repair garage, and, on the ground floor of number 17, a grocer’s, run by Mrs. Evans, where Hockney used to buy his tea, eggs, butter and milk. It was not unusual to see a rag-and-bone man’s cart trundling down the road.

Being gregarious by nature, he found himself a lodger, a fellow Yorkshireman called John Pearson, who came from Boroughbridge, and word soon got round that Hockney now had somewhere he could entertain his friends. Charismatic and funny, Hockney made new friends easily, and among the most important of these were a number of strong women. The first great woman friend that he made in London was Anne McKechnie, an extraordinary red-haired Pre-Raphaelite beauty, who wore long corduroy skirts with hooped petticoats and had run away from her convent school at sixteen with the ambition to become an existentialist, even though she was uncertain quite what that meant. After waitressing and a stint at Harrods, she had been employed as a model by John Bratby and then Roger de Grey, through whom she first heard about Hockney.

“I was asked by Roger de Grey to pose for him at the Royal College,” she recalls. “Nobody seemed to do any work, but the staff obviously found Hockney funny because I used to hear them saying, ‘Oh, let’s call Hockney and see what he’s got to say about so-and-so.’ They didn’t do it to tell him off. They just found him amusing.”¹³ Her boyfriend, Michael Upton, an ultra-cool and devastatingly handsome painter from the Royal Academy Schools, was sharing a flat with Hockney’s friends Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips, which is how Anne met Hockney: she was instantly smitten. “The reason I liked David was because of his sense of humour,” she says. “I remember once seeing a mouse and jumping on the bed in my tiny little bed-sitting room, and David, instead of saying ‘Oh dear, was that a mouse?’ just said ‘Was it Minnie or Mickey? You can tell by the shoes.’ ”¹⁴ They also shared a passion for the movies and Anne became his regular companion on outings to the cinema.

By the time Hockney moved into Powis Terrace, Anne was living with Upton down the road in Colville Square, in a row of derelict houses that had been taken over by students from the Royal Academy Schools, and were heated and lit by paraffin stoves and lamps. Because Hockney had a bit of money and a nice flat, all the friends graduated there for tea parties and evenings of beer and tittle-tattle, and “going over to Hockney’s” soon became the norm. “As I suddenly had this big apartment,” Hockney recalls, “it was very attractive to all my friends and the doorbell was always ringing. They knew I was always there, and they would come in and sit down and I would just carry on painting, but I would say to them, ‘Well, if you’d like a cup of tea, make a cup of tea and I’ll have one too.’ That started almost as soon as I got Powis Terrace, and there was a time when I actually got rather fed up with the amount of people who came to visit.”¹⁵

Hockney saw order where others saw chaos, and his ability to carry on working surrounded by friends or by untidiness served him in good stead. “When I moved into Powis Terrace,” he remembers, “the biggest room was where I painted, and I had my little bed in the corner. At the end of the bed was a chest of drawers on which I painted a message rather carefully that said in large capital letters ‘GET UP AND WORK IMMEDIATELY.’ So the first thing I saw every morning when I woke up was the sign, and not only did I read the sign but I remembered that I had wasted two hours painting it, so I jumped out of bed.”¹⁶ In his first few months there, he was amazingly productive. One of the early pictures he worked on, The First Marriage, was an elaboration of Man in a Museum, his first double portrait. This time he placed the couple together, in an exotic honeymoon-style setting suggested by a simple palm tree, injecting life into the stylised Egyptian figure of the woman by making her look like the man’s wife “who is a bit tired and therefore sitting down.”¹⁷ A Gothic window in the bottom left-hand corner of the canvas was added to make an ecclesiastical connection with the title of the painting. In the more complex follow-up, The Second Marriage, painted on a cut-out canvas suggesting the walls of a room, the woman became more realistic, wearing a white dress and high heels, and the couple, the man in a suit and dark glasses, were placed in a stage-like domestic interior complete with curtains and wallpaper. It is a tour de force that draws viewers in and forces them into a meditation on the nature of illusion and art.

A trip to the cinema in January 1963 inspired another painting using two figures, which was even more theatrical, further developing the canvas as a stage-like setting, complete with curtains round the edge. The film was Roger Corman’s comedy horror The Raven, based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe, in which two magicians, Dr. Erasmus Craven and Dr. Adolphus Bedlo, battle for supremacy, and culminating in a scene where Dr. Craven, played by Vincent Price, uses his hands like a hypnotist and causes green electric bolts to fly between his fingertips and Peter Lorre’s. The resulting picture, The Hypnotist, shows an evil-looking practitioner casting his spell upon an innocent-looking boy who, in his long red robe, has the appearance of a young priest. The model for the hypnotist was Mark Berger. “I had just arrived in England,” he recalls, “and decided to go and visit David. As I walked in he said, ‘Quickly Mark, come here and just stand and hold your hands out in front of you like that.’ I stood there for hours, and it looks exactly like me.”¹⁸ An etching made at a later date also taught Hockney a useful lesson. “I drew the etching plate,” he wrote, “with the figures in the same positions as in the painting, but of course when it was printed it was reversed. Seeing both pictures together made me realize that even pictures are read from left to right.”¹⁹

His inventiveness knew no bounds, though he was quick to acknowledge his debt to other work. Kasmin had been badgering him to paint his portrait, but not till he saw Apollo Killing Cyclops by the Italian baroque artist Domenichino in the National Gallery did Hockney figure out how he could do it. It portrays an elderly man seated on a chair, his cat at his feet, in front of a tapestry depicting a dramatic episode from Greek mythology. The floor space between the bottom of the tapestry and the edge of the canvas is shallow, just enough for the cat to sit on and to create a trompe l’oeil effect whereby you can imagine the old man getting up and walking out of the picture. No such luck for Kasmin in Play Within a Play, which depicts him standing in front of a tapestry of Hockney’s own invention, yet trapped behind a sheet of glass. David’s thinking was, “Well, he’s been pressing me to do his portrait. I’ll put him in and I’ll press him.”²⁰ The glass was real and to depict the effect of Kasmin’s face, hands and clothes pressed against the back of it, David added another level of unreality with painted marks on the front of the glass. “I must admit,” he wrote later, “I think of it as one of the more complex and successful pictures of that period.”²¹

Bradford seemed a long way away now to David, and his parents were seeing little of him, something they both took for granted. Laura wrote him weekly letters, though she didn’t always get a reply, but he was usually home for Christmas. “David arrived about 8pm,” she wrote in her diary on 21 December 1962. “He has made 10 special etchings of Rumplestiltskin [sic]—his version—not to sell, but as gifts, which makes them more valuable. We received the No 1 copy, Paul and Jean no. 2 and so on to others. I have bought a very nice telephone list for David …”²² After Christmas he returned to London, and the unusually harsh winter of 1962–63 in which the temperature often sank to minus sixteen degrees, and in Earls Court there were reports of milkmen doing their rounds on skis. There was no central heating in Powis Terrace, which relied solely on the warmth from two coal fires.

As well as painting, Hockney was all the while still working on A Rake’s Progress, printing all the proofs himself at the Royal College, since it was now commissioned for their Lion and Unicorn Press, and the colossal workload began to affect his health. “I got ill because I was anaemic and not eating enough,” he remembers. “I was living on tins of cold baked beans.”²³ Things came to a head one evening when he failed to turn up to meet Kasmin at a private view at the Rowan Gallery in Lowndes Street, Belgravia. Kasmin then telephoned Powis Terrace and got Hockney’s doctor on the line, Patrick Woodcock, a charming homosexual and socialite who relished the arts and numbered John Gielgud and Noël Coward among his patients. Woodcock insisted that Kasmin come round straight away because Hockney was complaining of pains in his right arm, and wanted to make a will in case he was having a heart attack. When Kasmin arrived at Powis Terrace, Dr. Woodcock assured him that Hockney was no more than just severely run down. “He wanted to talk to me,” Kasmin remembers, “so I went in to see him, and I said, ‘David, it seems you are feeling quite ill and your right arm hurts. I think it’s worth considering that you’ve probably been masturbating a lot and that it’s possible you’ve got a pain in your arm from overdoing it.’ ‘Oh, do you really think that?’ he asked. ‘Well, it’s possible,’ I replied, ‘and I think it might help if you got dressed and we went out to dinner.’ So I took him out to a Chinese restaurant and I said I thought it would be a good idea if we got him off the diet of bean curd and that kind of thing, so I suggested that we would eat a lot of vegetables, but that he should try one thing from the animal world. He said, ‘Well, I don’t know about that.’ I said that it could help cure his anaemia. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ I said, ‘we will go gently into it, and we’ll just share a small dish of prawns.’ So I got him to eat the prawns, and he discovered that he quite liked them.”²⁴ It was the end of Hockney’s vegetarianism.

Life in Powis Terrace, though often chaotic, and not helped by Hockney’s lack of skills in running a house, was beginning to inspire his work. “I started painting the domestic scenes,” he recalls, “because I realised I was having a more domestic life, which is something that I needed.” Since he had also started painting figures again, he felt that doing something from life would fit nicely into this pattern, but there is a touching naivety and disconnection in these paintings, scarcely surprising considering the lack of experience that he so far had in living with anyone.

In Domestic Scene, Notting Hill, the first of these pictures, he used as models two regular visitors to Powis Terrace, Mo McDermott, now working part-time as his assistant, and his friend Ossie Clark, who was studying fashion under Professor Janey Ironside at the RCA Fashion Design School. The painting is striking in that the interior is brought to life without walls or a floor, but just through the few objects that happened to catch the artist’s eye. The truth, as Hockney explained, is that if you enter a room in which somebody is standing naked, you certainly don’t notice the wallpaper. “When you walk into a room you don’t notice everything at once and, depending on your taste, there is a descending order in which you observe things. I assume alcoholics notice the booze first, or claustrophobics the height of the ceiling, and so on. Consequently I deliberately ignored the walls, and I didn’t paint the floor or anything I considered wasn’t important.”²⁵ Domestic though the scene is, it is not a cosy domesticity, the figures, one naked, Mo, and one clothed, Ossie, being curiously alien to one another.

He followed this up with another domestic fantasy combining his love of America with his deepest erotic desires. Painted long before he went to California, Domestic Scene, Los Angeles was taken from a photograph he had seen in Physique Pictorial, which he had been collecting since he was first introduced to it by Mark Berger. Though the magazine, published in Los Angeles by Bob Mizer of the Athletic Model Guild, was aimed at homosexual men, it had to be careful not to openly proclaim its market, so the resulting images, usually of virile young men pretending to be engaged in everyday domestic activities such as vacuuming, showering and washing-up, have a coyness that amused Hockney no end. “I painted Domestic Scene, Los Angeles,” he later wrote, “from a photograph in Physique Pictorial where there’s a boy with a little apron tied round his waist scrubbing the back of another boy in a rather dingy American room; I thought, that’s what a domestic scene must be like there.”²⁶ When he finally got to LA, he found much to his delight that his picture was quite close to life.

The shower in Domestic Scene, Los Angeles was painted from life. Hockney had longed for a shower of his own ever since his first trip to New York and had one installed as soon as he moved into Powis Terrace. Almost immediately he began to include it in his pictures, and did various experiments using Mo as a model, drawing and painting both through the shower curtain and without it. “The great thing about showers,” he says, “is that you can see the body. The body is more visible in a shower, so it’s more interesting to watch somebody have a shower rather than take a bath, and that was the appeal, and of course the technical thing of painting water has always interested me, the whole subject of transparency. A lot of the paintings I was doing at that time, like the painting of Kasmin, Play Within a Play, were all about making pictures.”²⁷

*

Ken and Laura heard nothing from Hockney till April when she recorded, “At last we have a letter from David who is still busy—says he may be up after Easter for a few days—but is using the College whilst students are on vacation for working on his etchings.” A few days later Hockney telephoned and invited his father to come down to London for the annual Aldermaston march. Laura decided this was the perfect opportunity to see her son and check out his living conditions. “We discussed my going with Ken on Thursday and staying with David,” she noted. “He has two beds, but I wrote to ask if it was convenient. He told us Anthony Armstrong-Jones, Princess Margaret’s husband, is going to photograph him for the Times on Wednesday.”²⁸

In fact, Laura meant the Sunday Times, and this photo shoot and subsequent article were to prove one of the turning points in Hockney’s career, bringing him to the attention of a huge new audience. On 4 February 1962 the Sunday Times had launched its magazine, the first ever colour supplement to accompany an English newspaper and the brainchild of Roy Thomson, the Canadian owner, who had seen such supplements work successfully in North America. It was a colossal gamble, but the paper’s editor, Denis Hamilton, knew exactly what was wanted, “a magazine that would have little interest for anyone over forty. I had watched the build-up of brilliant new graphic design—the outpourings of art schools in the late forties and fifties. No newspaper was storming away in this field and I wanted the magazine to do so.”²⁹

To bring reality to his vision, Hamilton appointed as editor a talented thirty-year-old, Mark Boxer, who even as a Cambridge student had developed a reputation “for being bright and gifted in an undefined way, with a suggestion of … naughtiness”³⁰ and who recently had been editing the ultra-stylish Queen magazine. “I felt he had the necessary kind of iconoclastic attitude,” Hamilton wrote in his memoirs, “a chap I’d have to restrain rather than ginger up.”³¹ Boxer caused controversy almost immediately by appointing Armstrong-Jones as photographic and design adviser. Despite the rows that followed over whether or not it was right for a member of the royal family to work for a newspaper, it turned out to be an inspired choice, for not only was he a brilliant photographer, but he was brimming with ideas.

Thomson was distinctly underwhelmed by the magazine’s first issue. He “came up to Watford,” Hamilton recalled, “specially to see the first copies off the machines, and was appalled…‘This is a disaster, we’ll be a laughing stock.’ I said, ‘It doesn’t really matter, people will look at it because of its novelty. It’s what’s coming ahead that matters.’ ”³² Hamilton was right. The first six months were a disaster, with the magazine having to put up with losses running as high as £20,000 a week, together with the almost total derision of Fleet Street. One commentator, however, absolutely got the point. “Though most of the people I talked to did not like it much …” wrote Francis Williams in the New Statesman, “those under 25 liked it a good deal more. ‘You’re all much too stuffy,’ exclaimed one young woman. ‘It’s fun and it’s new. It’s interesting and it makes me want to look inside.”³³ Luckily Thomson was determined to stick with it, having a cast-iron certainty that it would get better and better with each issue. His gamble paid off and after a year, with its profits and circulation finally rising, the Sunday Times had the pleasurable experience of watching the rest of Fleet Street falling over themselves to imitate it.

By the time Hockney appeared in it, the magazine was hitting its stride, introducing millions of people each week to a glossy world of youth and style, art and culture, and creating celebrities out of pop singers, hairdressers, photographers, fashion designers, writers and artists. The Sunday Times article for which Snowdon photographed him was “British Painting Now” by the art critic David Sylvester, which appeared in the 2 June edition, and in which he appeared alongside established artists like William Coldstream and Francis Bacon, and the up-and-coming school such as Harold Cohen and Frank Auerbach. While expressing his view that “David Hockney … is usually less effective in his large paintings than in his graphic work, where he is working on the scale of illustration,” Sylvester also described him as being “as bright and stylish a Pop artist as there is,”³⁴ a label Hockney did not take kindly to, having once astonished visitors to a private view of one of his shows by shouting out loud, “I am not a pop painter!” In the accompanying photographs he was pictured wearing his gold lamé jacket. “I regret buying that bloody gold coat,” he later wrote. “For I think people thought I had worn it every day. In actual fact I only ever wore it twice. I wore it for that Gold Medal and my mother thought it was an official coat. And I wore it for some photographs Snowdon took.”³⁵

Two days after the photo shoot, his mother got her first look at Powis Terrace, taking a taxi to carry Kenneth’s Aldermaston paraphernalia after arriving at St. Pancras just after five in the morning. “Cost 10/3d,” wrote Laura. “Ken had so much baggage and banners. David had tea and toast in a jiffy & wasn’t it welcome! He went back to bed at 6.00am—I washed up and generally cleaned up the kitchen which is very nice and modern. As soon as I thought the world was up, I vacuumed my room—a gorgeous room with such possibilities—but dowdy and in need of much attention—a divan bed but no sheets.”³⁶ Over the next two days, while Hockney was working on his etchings at the Royal College, and Ken was busy getting everything ready for the march, Laura passed her time shopping for sheets at Pontings and sightseeing—she walked through Hyde Park, explored Portobello Road, and spent a frustrating time failing to find a Methodist chapel. Then on Saturday night “about 11:15 p.m. door bell rang & there was Kenneth—looking very tired and worried. His rucksack and contents—also large banners—had been stolen—value nearly £20 from behind a tent where he had foolishly left them unattended.”³⁷

After this unfortunate event things began to look up. While Hockney and Kenneth went off marching, on Easter Sunday Laura spent her time in the local Salvation Army chapel, and went to a service at Methodist Central Hall in Westminster. On Monday she visited the Houses of Parliament and took a trip up the Thames before making her way to Hyde Park in time to see the CND marchers arrive at Marble Arch. Before they returned home on Tuesday night, Hockney gave each of his parents a special treat. For Laura it was lunch at the Vega (“I enjoyed that very much!!” she noted in her diary), while for Ken this was followed by a trip to the pictures, to see The Best of Cinerama at the Casino Cinerama cinema in Soho.

Laura mentions Hockney’s work several times: he was almost finished with A Rake’s Progress. After his parents had left, however, he felt that he had to make one more trip to New York in order to successfully complete the series. In return for one edition of the completed work, Kasmin paid for the voyage, and at the end of April, Hockney set off on the Queen Elizabeth, one of the two transatlantic liners of Cunard’s White Star Line. On arrival in New York, he went to stay with Jeff Goodman and spent time looking around for ideas. He made two more etchings at the Pratt Institute: number 7, titled Disintegration, in which the dissolution of the Rake is presented graphically through his depiction as a limbless bust; and 7A, in which the bust is then Cast Aside, to be devoured by a dragon. With these the series was finally complete.

One afternoon, Hockney and Goodman went down to look at a show on East 74th Street at the Stable Gallery, the name of which derived from its original location in a former livery stable on West 58th Street, a place where on damp days the smell of horse urine was said still to linger. It was owned by the New York art dealer Eleanor Ward, who had nurtured the careers of many abstract expressionists and had employed Robert Rauschenberg as a janitor before eventually giving him his own show. In November 1962, she had given Andy Warhol his first New York exhibition of pop art, which included paintings of Marilyn Monroe, Campbell’s soup cans, Coke cans and dollar bills. On the day Hockney visited, Warhol happened to be in the gallery and they were introduced. Warhol immediately invited him and Goodman to come that evening to his Upper East Side house on Lexington Avenue.

They arrived at Warhol’s brownstone to find three other people there: the actor Dennis Hopper, who had appeared with James Dean in both Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, his wife, Brooke Hayward, and Henry Geldzahler, the newly appointed assistant curator of twentieth- century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a good friend of Warhol’s. “Dennis wanted to buy one of Andy’s Mona Lisa paintings,” Hockney remembers. “He invited us to come the next day and watch him shooting a television series he was working on.”³⁸ As soon as Hopper had left, Hockney mentioned to Warhol that he’d just seen a still of Hopper outside a downtown cinema, so they all piled into a cab and went down to 42nd Street to see him in Night Tide, directed by Curtis Harrington. Then the following day they took up Hopper’s invitation and went up to Harlem to watch him filming an episode of Naked City, a popular detective series then playing on TV, which always ended with the line, “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.”

This twenty-four-hour episode, immortalised in a famous photo-graph taken on the set, marked Hockney’s first meeting with a man who was to become one of the key figures in his life. Born in Antwerp in 1935, Henry Geldzahler came from a family of European Jews who emigrated to the United States in 1940. He attended Yale University and, on graduation in 1960, joined the staff of the Met. Quick-witted, extremely funny and gay, he was a fountain of knowledge. “Oh, you know so much,” Andy Warhol once said to him. “Teach me a fact a day, and then I’ll be as smart as you.”³⁹ Barely able to sit still—he was later to be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder—he hit it off with Hockney right away. “Henry and I got on instantly,” Hockney remembers. “First of all he liked the fact that I’d remembered seeing Dennis Hopper in the film still. We then realised we shared a love of music, opera in particular, which I had started to go to a bit, upstairs at Covent Garden, and there was painting of course, and we became friends very quickly. He was very, very funny, very clever, and we had the same kind of taste. I thought we had a similar way of looking at life.”⁴⁰

On his return to London at the end of May 1963, Hockney was introduced to someone who was to further transform his life. Paul Cornwall-Jones was a young architect two years down from Cambridge who with a fellow undergraduate, Michael Deakin, had hit upon a clever way of making money: commissioning topographical prints of their colleges, Emmanuel and Jesus, from the artist Julian Trevelyan and selling them to the staff and students. This venture had been successful enough for them to form a company, Alecto Editions, named after one of the mythical Furies. Cornwall-Jones’s big coup was persuading John Piper to do a print for the quattrocentenary of Westminster School; the success suggested the potentially huge audience for an artist with a big name. His lodger, Mark Glazebrook, was a friend of Kasmin’s, and told him about David Hockney, and A Rake’s Progress.

“He thought Hockney was terrific,” Cornwall-Jones remembers, “and took me round to Powis Terrace to meet him. He was very young and very open and I immediately liked him. As for the work, I thought it was fascinating.”⁴¹ What he saw was the complete set of sixteen images, all stuck up on the wall of the studio. He was intrigued by the fact that the prints were not made from a set of finished drawings that were then copied onto plates—the only drawings that existed were a few studies made on scraps of paper—but were drawn directly on to the plates, Hockney developing the image as he went along. Cornwall-Jones was hugely impressed by the work, and decided to take a gamble: he made an offer for fifty sets of A Rake’s Progress at £100 each, making the then staggering sum of £5,000.

“…  they were paying me a hundred pounds each for a set of sixteen prints,” wrote Hockney, “and they were going to print them. They sold the sets for two hundred and fifty pounds each, and I didn’t dare tell people the price because it was so outrageous I was ashamed of it; I thought etchings should cost two or three pounds each; two hundred and fifty pounds—madness!”⁴² The typographer Eric Ayers introduced Cornwall-Jones to an elderly jobbing printer who worked in Bushey, on the outskirts of London, and printed the fifty sets over the next few months. It always amused Hockney that when he offered the old man, who had done the job so beautifully, a complimentary edition, he turned it down because he said he didn’t like them. “Every time I went to see him,” he wrote, “to see how they were going on, he would show me a little etching of a churchyard or something, and he would say, ‘Can’t you do anything like this?’ And I would say, ‘Well one day I’ll be able to do something like that.’ ”⁴³

Under the terms of Hockney’s contract, the money for A Rake’s Progress, which was to be paid over three years, went through Kasmin, who now had his own gallery in partnership with Sheridan Dufferin. He had operated out of Ifield Road for a year before he began to consider looking for a premises, a step which had become necessary to establish himself and avoid being eclipsed by the other young dealer making his name on the gallery scene, Robert Fraser. Fraser was a 25-year-old ex-army officer and Old Etonian with a remarkable eye for art, who had recently, with the backing of his father, a successful City banker, opened a gallery in Duke Street. His opening exhibition, the first show in England of paintings by Jean Dubuffet, had caused quite a stir, and subsequent shows, which included work by Egon Kalinowski, Richard Lindner, Eduardo Paolozzi, Harold Stevenson and Francis Bacon, had proved to be influential. “The gallery made an extraordinary impression from the beginning,” commented Bryan Robertson, the director of the Whitechapel Gallery, “because of its obvious sophistication and style … It felt serious. And the kind of work that one saw there, pretty well all the time, was of a very high order.”⁴⁴

Kasmin understood how difficult it would be to find the perfect site, and he was not prepared to accept second best. The British artists he was primarily interested in, like Hockney, Richard Smith, Bernard Cohen, Robin Denny and Anthony Caro, all worked on a scale that was large by London standards, as did the Americans he sought to represent, who included Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Frank Stella and Jules Olitski. He needed somewhere bold, where their work would not look out of place and which took them out of the English drawing room. On the site of the old Walker Galleries at 118 New Bond Street, behind a small shopfront, which had already been let, he found what he had been looking for: a series of nineteenth-century galleries with cornices, skylights and a large room, which had infinite possibilities. “…  the main room was a peach of a space,” he recalled, “and the gallery was going to be one big room in which you could see everything by turning round.”⁴⁵

The architect Kasmin employed was Richard Burton of ABK, step-son of John Russell, the art critic of the Sunday Times, to whom Kasmin wrote: “I want to show artists no one else wants to here because they are either too difficult, too enormous in picture scale, too expensive (some of the Americans) but are still doing great things; and I want to make new collectors of the young rich and … aristocracy who have been neglected too long.”⁴⁶

The finished space was like a temple, with sophisticated fluorescent lighting designed to boost and balance the daylight, which came from a lantern in the roof, electrically operated louvred blinds, and state-of-the-art flooring, a kind of hard-wearing rubbery linoleum, made by Pirelli. (Annoyingly for Kasmin, large numbers of people turned up to look at the floor rather than the pictures.) The Kasmin Gallery opened on 17 April 1963 with a show of concentric circle paintings by Kenneth Noland, Kasmin’s favourite artist. It was a glittering evening during which the art world rubbed shoulders with the worlds of society and the aristocracy, and was followed by a party given by Claus von Bülow in Belgrave Square. “First show over,” Kasmin wrote to the American art critic Clement Greenberg, “and trying to assess the effect here—great attendance and discussion; generally vapid reviews … the world of painters and students very excited and keen; the general public mostly discussed the beauty of the gallery and its lighting—concrete results are a couple of sales and the Tate discussing a possible purchase … Nevertheless it was my idea of a success.”⁴⁷

John Kasmin and Lord Dufferin in the Kasmin Gallery (illustration credit 5.2)

In August, passing through London en route to Paris, a trip that Hockney was taking them on as a treat, Ken and Laura got their first view of both the gallery and Kasmin. “We went to Bond Street,” wrote Laura on 16 August, “where J. Kasmin, Hockney’s agent, has his gallery. Not very large—but wonderfully modern—with engine-manoeuvred lattice ceiling blinds which commanded light and sunshine in any part of the room … White walls and black beams were very striking—also two pictures? in entire black for £500. Mr. Kasmin is a small energetic person—full of vitality—he suggested we had an evening playing ‘Poker’—which David evidently does (I hope not often). One wonders!”

Hockney’s gambling habits were not the only thing on Laura’s mind that day. A few months earlier, the satirical magazine Private Eye, which, launched in 1961 by Peter Cook and Nicholas Luard, had brought back into public life a strain of public insult and personal vilification not seen in England since the eighteenth century, had run a full-page spoof newspaper story titled “How to Spot a Possible Homo,” under the byline Lionel Crane. “The Admiralty, the Foreign Office and MI5 don’t seem to know,” ran the headline, “so the Sunday Mirror offers them some useful advice.” There had then followed a mixture of cartoons and photographs depicting various scenarios, such as…“The man in the bar who drinks alone and is forever looking at other customers over the top of his glass”; “the middle-aged man unmarried who has an unnaturally strong affection for his mother”; “the man who is adored by older women” (this one accompanied by a photo of the prime minister, Harold Macmillan); and “the Obvious those who dye their hair, touch up their lips and walk with a gay little wiggle.”⁴⁸

The scenario titled “The Toucher—the man who is always putting his hand on another man’s shoulder or arm” was accompanied by a photograph of Hockney with his hand resting on the shoulder of the figure modelled by Mo in Life Painting for a Diploma. Hockney’s brother John saw the piece and mentioned something about it to Laura, before getting cold feet about telling her the content. She was determined to find out, however, so she had asked Paul if he knew what it was about. “John … tantalizingly refused to unfold,” she wrote on 12 August. “Paul told me—but he did not believe it was true—I can’t think so either. So I commend my boy to God and leave it to Him.”⁴⁹

An agreement existed between Hockney and Kasmin that he should have his first one-man exhibition at the new gallery as soon as he had enough paintings completed, and his next trip abroad provided the final picture for the show. One morning Hockney received a call from Mark Boxer at the Sunday Times. The previous autumn, Boxer had commissioned some drawings for a piece on colonial governors; his new idea was a series in which well-known artists visited and drew places that had a special meaning for them: would Hockney be interested in going back to Bradford? When Hockney heard that Philip Sutton was being sent to Tahiti and Jan Haworth to California, his response was that he’d only just escaped from Bradford, which was far too J. B. Priestley, and he’d rather go somewhere more exotic. Instead he suggested the furthest place away he could think of and said, “I’ll go to Honolulu; I’ll draw the view from the top of the Honolulu Hilton.”⁵⁰ Boxer consulted his art critic, David Sylvester, who reminded him of the interest Hockney had shown as a student in Egyptian art; the following day, he called back to suggest it, an idea Hockney accepted eagerly. Travelling alone, Hockney left London on 26 September, wearing a white suit, a white cap and sporting a polka-dot bow tie.

Hockney’s initial experience of Egypt was of five-star luxury in Cairo, having been accommodated by the Sunday Times in the first Hilton to open in the Middle East. He couldn’t wait to draw the view from his window, and the resulting image, View from the Nile Hilton, precisely captures the snatched excited glance out of the window that is the first thing any tourist does on being shown their room. It has a lightly sketched palm tree and the outlines of four figures in djellabas crossing the street, but the central image, which dominates the picture and roots the viewer in the country that the artist was so longing to see, is a greatly exaggerated Egyptian flag billowing in the wind, inviting the tourist to leave the international confines of the hotel and come down and explore.

Over the next three weeks Hockney did just that, and the set of beautiful coloured crayon drawings with which he returned to England show him at his skilful and inventive best. This was the first time since his student days at Bradford that he had drawn consistently from life over a long period, and the drawings cover many subjects on his travels from Cairo to Alexandria and finally to Luxor. Among them are an apartment in an eighteenth-century house in Cairo belonging to Mr. Milo, a Russian, who gave tours to selected groups, and which was full of “wonderful spaces and marvellous objects” and where the tranquil sound of a courtyard fountain was omnipresent; two Arab boys walking down a street in Luxor, one wearing a green-striped djellaba, the other sketched in pencil, with his left hand resting on his companion’s shoulder; a book of matches with “These Matches Belong to David Hockney” written on it in Arabic script; a number of objects in the Cairo Museum; and a Shell garage in Luxor, an image made particularly striking by the larger-than-life head of President Nasser painted on the wall next to the Shell sign.

“It was a marvellous three weeks,” Hockney remembers. “I didn’t take a camera, only drawing paper, so I drew everywhere and everything, the Pyramids, modern Egypt, it was terrific. I was very turned on by the place, and on your own you do a lot more work. I carried all my drawings everywhere and a lot of equipment, and I would get up very early in the morning. I loved the cafe life. Egyptians are very easy-going people, very humorous and pleasant, and I liked them very much. It was a great adventure.”⁵¹

The drawings were due to run in the 24 November edition of the Sunday Times magazine, but a world-shattering event intervened. “President Kennedy has been assassinated,” wrote Laura in her diary on 22 November. “Died in hospital 25 mins later. Came thro on TV at 7.10 this evening … The world feels cold with shock. One can sense the feeling of horror everywhere even to the far ends of the earth.”⁵² At the Sunday Times, the magazine and twenty-eight pages of the paper had already gone to print, but the editor, Denis Hamilton, was decisive. “These would all have to be cancelled,” he wrote, “and the paper torn to pieces and remade if the Sunday Times was to give the event the coverage it felt it deserved.”⁵³ Out went Hockney’s drawings of Egypt and in came an album of Kennedy family photographs that Mark Boxer had been saving for a rainy day.

By this time, however, Hockney was too excited to be upset about the story being dropped. He had decided to use the money from Alecto to make a long trip to the land of his dreams: California. He also had two upcoming exhibitions to think about—his first one-man show at the Kasmin Gallery, and a simultaneous showing of A Rake’s Progress at the Print Centre in Holland Street, Kensington—and he was working hard to finish his last picture, a six-foot-square oil inspired by his visit to the Pyramids at Giza, called Great Pyramid at Giza with Broken Head. In it a man in a green striped djellaba stands beside a broken monumental head lying beside a palm tree in front of one of the Great Pyramids. Hockney had decided that all the paintings in his show should have figures in them, thus distinguishing him from the purely abstract painters that made up the rest of Kasmin’s stable, and giving him the title of the exhibition, Paintings with People in.

Kasmin gave Hockney complete control when it came to organising his show, his only involvement being to put him together with Gordon House, a painter who was also one of the best graphic designers in England, and who had designed all the catalogues for the Marlborough Gallery. Together they designed both the catalogue for the show and the invitation to the private view. Kasmin also made sure that the press got wind of what was going on. “David is in the news this week,” Laura noted in her diary on 1 December. “A whole page in this month’s Studio and his exhibitions are announced in the Sunday Times. Also next Sunday ‘The Critics’ on the Home Service discuss his Exhibition. David has not yet let us know if and when we can go.” Two days later she was bemoaning the fact that he was increasingly difficult to get hold of. “About 7 p.m. we rang his flat, but again there was no reply—Why?!! Well!! When we turned round there he was on ‘BBC Tonight’ programme speaking to Kenneth Allsop who was questioning him about his pictures—some oil paintings and 6 of his Rakes Progress engravings were compared with Hogarth. It was very thrilling to see him there. It makes me choke with a queer mixture of pride & humility that he is our boy. God bless him—may he make good & do good with his success.”⁵⁴

Paintings with People in opened on 6 December. There were ten paintings on show, all the works he had completed since leaving the Royal College, including The Hypnotist, Domestic Scene, Notting Hill, Two Men in a Shower, Great Pyramid at Giza with Broken Head and Play Within a Play, as well as many drawings. The paintings were priced between £250 and £400, which Kasmin regarded as “a reasonable price rather than a high-fashion price. We also wanted them to go to the right places, people that we liked and who really liked them and weren’t playing games. The fact was that Hockney’s work sold briskly from the word go and we could always have asked more.”⁵⁵ Anticipating a large crowd at the private view, Kasmin had persuaded the newspaper vendor from whom he regularly bought his Evening Standard, who had a stand on the corner of Bond Street and Grosvenor Street, to come and be the commissionaire on the front door. “The evening was a wonderful mixture of art people, gay people and society people,” Kasmin remembers, “and the show was a big success. There were people, of course, who thought it was thin and over-praised, Francis Bacon for one. He thought Hockney was overrated, though I think he was also rather peeved at the amount of attention he was getting.”⁵⁶

Among the guests was the director of the Bradford City Art Gallery, Peter Bird, who wrote to Kasmin on 9 December, “I think there is a possibility of our being able to acquire something for the gallery here, and I mentioned this to David Hockney when I last saw him in Bradford.”⁵⁷

The reviews for the show were mixed. Edwin Mullins, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, considered it “a considerable achievement: to be able to use figurative imagery today in a manner that is neither a painstaking alternative to the photograph nor the excuse for some striking patterns of light and movement. But to use them in fact as dramatic material. Bacon has done it, but very few others besides.”⁵⁸ John Russell said the show “had given foreign visitors something to bite on when they ask what is happening in British art,”⁵⁹ while Hugh Gordon Porteous, in the Listener, wrote that when he had worked all the “perilous adolescent stuff out of his system, Hockney … promises to develop into that kind of artist—and here we may think of the imperfections of Blake as well as of the rare perfections of Hogarth or Goya—who is indeed a rather special kind of man.”⁶⁰ Neville Wallis, writing in the Spectator, took a more measured view. “The importance of being Hockney,” he wrote, “is not to be ignored at this moment when the reputation of the golden youth from the Royal College is ballooning …” but, he continued, “in his large and lightly brushed paintings at the Kasmin Gallery … his natural sense of the bizarre can degenerate into frivolous exhibitionism … Oriental tags and shreds of what-nots are all pressed into the service of this self-consciously naive imagery. It exhibits a magpie alertness. But overshadowed by Bacon’s dreadful power and the intense subjectivity of Larry Rivers and Kitaj, their attitudinizing junior is cut down to his size.” On the other hand, he continued, “his darty, needly drawing is another matter,”⁶¹ and to a man the critics all raved about A Rake’s Progress, showing simultaneously at the Print Centre.

Much to the annoyance of his father, who had been looking forward to spending a long weekend in London, Hockney did not invite his parents to the private view, but fixed up instead for them to make a day trip to see the show on 10 December, an arrangement that Ken took “very badly.”⁶² “David met us at Kings Cross,” wrote Laura, “where first we had coffee. Then went to the Kasmin Gallery. I was pleasantly surprised with the exhibition and had David to interpret what I did not understand.”⁶³ After lunch at a vegetarian restaurant in Kensington, he took them to look at the prints. “My parents didn’t really comment on my pictures,” says Hockney. “As far as my mother was concerned, if they were by me then she liked them. That’s what mothers do. I don’t think they were that interested in pictures and I don’t think they would have known the good ones from the bad ones.”⁶⁴

Among the many members of London’s artistic elite who attended the show was Hockney’s early patron, Cecil Beaton. “…  on to crowded David Hockney exhibition,” he wrote in his diary on 11 December. “He is undoubtedly an original, and his engravings for Rake’s Progress are beautiful. This Bradford boy with the yellow glasses, yellow dyed hair and exaggerated north-country accent was accosted at vernissage by an irate lady. In a loud voice she challenged him for drawing his nude women in such a distorted manner. ‘Can you really imagine that is the way the arm comes out of the socket? Look at their bosoms—they’re nowhere near where they should be. Have you ever seen a naked woman?’ ‘A dorn’t knogh ars ah harve!’ ”⁶⁵

Before leaving for America, he went home for Christmas. “David had brought gifts for everyone,” wrote Laura, “but said Dad’s & mine would follow later. However he could not contain himself & said we may as well have them—but they would not be in effect till January 8/64. I think he was as thrilled to give as we were to receive a cheque for £50 each. It is wonderful & I am so glad he is giving us some of the benefit of his good fortune.”⁶⁶ Three days later he left Bradford on the 7 a.m. train to London on the first leg of what was to be a great adventure. “…  a thought for David,” mused Laura, “a thankfulness that his work which is also his pleasure has brought him success & thankful that he has shared his financial gains in all our lovely gifts. Only I pray will he keep good & use his gifts for the world’s good.”⁶⁷

On 30 December, Hockney left London for New York, secure in the knowledge that he had enough money to allow him to spend a year in America. The Kasmin show had also been a sell-out, netting him a couple of hundred pounds. “I knew I had a star on my hands straight away,” Kasmin recalls, “though David did not have a big head. He was neither a boaster nor did he expect things. He took it all with great ease and grace. It didn’t go to his head. It’s not as if he stayed at home and lapped it all up. Instead he went off to work in a foreign city where he wasn’t known at all, where he wasn’t treated as a star, and where he didn’t know the ropes.”⁶⁸