Peter in Carennac, 1967 (illustration credit 8.1)
Peter in Carennac, 1967 (illustration credit 8.1)
Hockney’s first move on his return to LA was to find himself an apartment of his own, where eventually he might also live with Peter Schlesinger. The place he found, in a very seedy part of the city near to the junction of Pico and Crenshaw Boulevards, was a run-down little house that had been converted from a garage. Dirt cheap, it had concrete floors, a bedroom, a tiny kitchen and bathroom, and a room at the front to use as a studio. When the gas stove was lit, cockroaches dived for cover. There was no phone. Instead Hockney took a leaf out of his father’s book. “It had a telephone booth right outside,” he remembers, “and I just kept all my quarters and dimes so I could make phone calls. I didn’t have that many phone calls anyway. People didn’t in those days. I just went to see people in person.”1 It was in this scruffy little studio/apartment, in one of his most prolific periods, between the summers of 1966 and ’67, that Hockney painted some of his most iconic paintings.
The first of these was Beverly Hills Housewife, an enormous twelve-foot-long picture which, the studio being so tiny, had to be painted on two canvases and which, as Hockney remembered, “I could never get more than about five feet away from …”2 It is the modern-day equivalent, as Henry Geldzahler later described it, of those “grandes machines” from the heyday of the Paris Salon in the nineteenth century, “impressively large paintings grandly conceived to show the artist’s strength.”3 The subject was Betty Freeman, the daughter of a chemical engineer, Robert I. Wishnick, who had made a fortune in Chicago. Inspired by the example of her father, who gave away large amounts of his money to hospitals and educational establishments, she dedicated her life to supporting people in the sphere of the arts which she loved most, contemporary music, and over the years commissioned works from many of the world’s most famous modern composers, such as John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Harrison Birtwistle and Steve Reich.
She and Hockney had been introduced by Jack Larson during his first visit to LA. “She used to have these kind of concerts on Sunday afternoons,” Hockney recalls, “and sometimes they were almost like a joke. I remember one afternoon when there was this event which consisted of just one note going on and on and on for hours and hours and people just sat there and didn’t really know what to do. I think it was by Harry Partch, a composer she had rescued off the streets. Then Betty would come in and say, ‘You can talk if you want to.’ If you did, it then just sounded like there was a washing machine going on in the other room. I was very amused by this of course, but I loved Betty because she was interested in painting and music.”4 Still in the throes of his love affair with the very newness of Los Angeles, he first asked Mrs. Freeman if he might paint her very glamorous swimming pool. When he arrived at her house to do some preliminary sketches, however, he found himself seduced by her entire surroundings—the open-plan inside-outside house, the lush plants, the perfect lawn and the belongings (already hinted at in his entirely invented California Art Collector), which included a William Turnbull sculpture, the head of an antelope bagged by her husband and a Le Corbusier chaise longue. Since Hockney was carrying an early Polaroid Land camera, he persuaded Betty to pose for him in front of the house.
This was one of the first instances of Hockney using the camera as a tool to help compose a picture. Though he had previously taken many photographs, using a tiny Kodak Instamatic, they were mostly holiday snaps. From this out-of-focus, rather badly lit black-and-white print, he composed an extraordinary painting which, though it does not name the sitter, was his first naturalistic portrait for many years, and the first of a series of paintings which, to millions of people, were to be the evocation of California. Betty Freeman loved the finished work and liked to joke that she was “just one of the artistic objects on display.”5
*
Hockney’s image of California as a carefree land of sunshine, affluence and leisure is indicated in the series of paintings featuring swimming pools on which he now embarked. He saw the swimming pool as the embodiment of the foreigner’s view that he had of the country, and he began meticulous observations of the water in the pools he saw. “Water in a swimming pool is different from, say, water in the river, which is mostly a reflection because the water isn’t clear. A swimming pool has clarity. The water is transparent and drawing transparency is an interesting graphic problem. I noticed that with the sun on the pool you got these dancing lines, so I would sit watching the surface of the pool and draw what I saw and then I would go and paint it. I drew with coloured pencils, or I would just work with an ordinary pencil. The problem is, how do you represent water in the pool graphically?”6
Though there was no photography used in the swimming-pool paintings, because the camera “freezes” water, which was not the effect he was after, he did continue to use it as an aide-memoire, typically in one of his first paintings featuring Schlesinger, Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool. “I didn’t ever pose in the pool,” Schlesinger remembers, “which is why the painting looks a little weird, especially the legs underwater, because I was actually posed against the hood of my car. Then he put two paintings together.”7
Photography was used in a similar fashion in another important painting of this period, Portrait of Nick Wilder. Hockney’s friend Mark Lancaster, an English artist who had worked for Andy Warhol, took photographs of Wilder standing in his pool as studies for what was to be Hockney’s first explicit portrait since that of his father, painted in 1955. The picture, which shows the upper torso of Wilder emerging from the pool like a Roman bust, perfectly captures the Californian light, with the overwhelming brightness of the sun creating extremely dark shadows. For Hockney it was something of a breakthrough. “To me, moving into more naturalism was freedom,” he wrote. “I thought, if I want to, I could paint a portrait; this is what I mean by freedom … I could even paint a strange little abstract picture. It would all fit into my concept of painting as an art. A lot of painters can’t do that … To me a lot of painters were trapping themselves; they were picking such a narrow aspect of painting and specializing in it. And it’s a trap. Now there’s nothing wrong with the trap if you have the courage to leave it.”8
The more closely Hockney observed water, the more fascinated he became; but it was a photograph that inspired his next depiction of the subject. While leafing through a book about the construction of swimming pools which he found on a Hollywood news-stand, he came across a photograph of a splash, and immediately thought what a good subject it would be for a painting. “What amused me was the fact that the splash only lasts a very, very short time,” Hockney recalls, “and a photograph can freeze it, and that’s not what it’s like. When you paint it, you can make it flow. That is the difference, and that is what I was doing.”9 The first painting of this series, The Little Splash, was a tiny picture, two foot by one foot, and was painted quite quickly, in a couple of days. It was closely followed by The Splash, which was a bit bigger and more fully realised, giving more emphasis to the background. With hindsight, Hockney decided that this version was too fussy, with the background, in which you can see the landscape, detracting from the subject, so he now chose to paint an even bigger, eight-foot-square version, using a simpler building and very strong light.
A Bigger Splash turned out to be one of Hockney’s most enduring images, a painting securely established as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century art. It is a mesmerising depiction of order and chaos. On a hot, still, cloudless day, with the sun at its highest in the sky, the heat at its most intense and the surface of the water in the swimming pool mill-pond calm, a diver has leapt from the diving board and disappeared into the depths of the pool, gone for ever, his existence marked only by a violent eruption of water that is in complete contrast to the ongoing stillness of the scene. To emphasise this contrast, Hockney put the paint on using rollers, except for the splash. “… the splash itself is painted with small brushes and little lines,” he wrote. “It took me about two weeks to paint. I loved the idea, first of all, of painting like Leonardo, all his studies of water, swirling things. And I loved the idea of painting this thing that lasts for two seconds … the effect of it as it got bigger was more stunning.”10
*
In the summer of 1966, Schlesinger had returned to Santa Cruz to continue his studies, and Hockney would visit him there at weekends, trips which were immortalised in a series of beautiful drawings, such as Peter in Santa Cruz, which demonstrate his ever-increasing skill with a line. Among these, perhaps the most sublime is Dream Inn, Santa Cruz, a touching portrait of Schlesinger asleep on a bed, the tranquillity and gentleness of which says everything about the happiness of the relationship. It is a remarkably accomplished drawing, in which he breathes life into his lover’s body with an astonishing economy of line. Hockney didn’t have to wait long for them to be permanently reunited, since Schlesinger was becoming increasingly disenchanted with the lack of any art teaching at Santa Cruz, and was missing Hockney. At the end of the term he made the decision to transfer down to UCLA, which he was able to do quickly thanks to the help of Hockney’s friend Bill Brice, an influential teacher there who pulled a few strings.
So at the beginning of 1967, Schlesinger moved into the Pico Boulevard apartment and began his art course. He had to explain his new living arrangements to his parents, to whom he was close. “I was living with David,” Schlesinger recalls, “but I pretended to my parents that I wasn’t. Then they found out what was going on, and there were fights and arguments and they eventually said I had to go and see a psychiatrist. They sent me to see someone I knew, and I went for a while, but I hated doing it because I didn’t feel I had a problem that needed changing.”11 These sessions kept his parents off his back, but amounted to little more than hours of gossiping about mutual friends. The person who helped Schlesinger most was Nick Wilder. “My father once went to see Nick to say he was worried about me, and Nick said to him, ‘Your son is with a very wonderful person and would you rather have him hustling on Santa Monica Boulevard?’ and that was one thing that helped my father see my relationship in context, because Nick, being naturally drawn to the underworld of LA, knew all of that scene of hustling.”12
Although Hockney had shared apartments before, this was the first time that he had ever lived with a lover and it was quite a steep learning curve, since Hockney was a self-confessed slob, and Schlesinger was naturally neat and tidy. For Hockney, it was a blissful period. With Schlesinger out at school, he would paint all day, then go out in the evenings to eat, returning home to a bed which was as much a place to read as to sleep or make love. Unable to go to bars since Schlesinger was underage, they kept the fridge stocked with Californian white wine. Sometimes they would go to Nick Wilder’s for a swim, and hang out with the young and beautiful boys who were invariably to be found there. They went to the cinema a lot, and visited friends, in particular Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, and Jack Larson and Jim Bridges, Hockney regarding both of these couples as role models when it came to successful gay relationships. “The six of us spent many hilarious evenings together,” wrote Schlesinger, “often at a little Japanese restaurant where they would sneak me sake, illicitly.”13 “Looking back on it,” Hockney wrote, “it was certainly the happiest year I spent in California, and it was the worst place we lived in.”14
In the first few months of 1967, Hockney worked on A Bigger Splash and Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool, as well as new paintings such as A Lawn Sprinkler and Four Different Kinds of Water. Then he went off to teach three days a week of the summer term at Berkeley, the oldest part of the University of California, on the east shore of San Francisco Bay. Here they gave him a studio and put him up in a hotel on Telegraph Avenue. It was quite a different experience from his previous posts, because he was teaching graduates, who proved to be an interesting group, and included Joel Perlman, who went on to become a successful sculptor, and the painters Alan Turner and Mary Heilman. In addition, it was an extraordinary time to be in the San Francisco area, then at the centre of the phenomenon that has come to be known as the “Summer of Love.” This had its origins in the Golden Gate Park, where on 14 January 1967, tens of thousands of young people came together on a glorious sunny day to celebrate a Gathering of the Tribes, a Human Be-In, at which Timothy Leary addressed the crowd and encouraged them to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” By the summer, the message had reached 100,000 people, who had variously made their way to San Francisco in a haze of marijuana, LSD and flower petals.
Although he was aware of it, the counter-culture affected Hockney very little, though he did occasionally attend anti-Vietnam War meetings. He was too busy teaching, painting in his studio and flying back at the weekends to see Schlesinger. Occasionally he would stray from the path of true love. “Sometimes I can remember I would have gone to bed in my hotel and then woke up thinking, ‘I’m feeling a bit horny,’ and I’d get up, get in the car and drive over to San Francisco and check into the Embarcadero YMCA, which is cheap, and it was an amazing place. All you had to do was check in and you got this tiny little room for about three dollars, and if you went for a shower and it was three in the morning, as soon as they heard the shower going, there would be two or three other guys who’d come and join you and you got what you wanted pretty quickly. I just thought this was amazing. This is America.”15
Hockney completed A Bigger Splash in Berkeley, before beginning a new work, another painting featuring Schlesinger. Leafing through the San Francisco Chronicle one day, he had come across an advertisement for Macy’s department store, which used a colour shot of a room to advertise furniture. “The photograph caught my eye,” he wrote, “because it was so simple and such a direct view, although it’s got angles in it … I thought it’s marvellous, it’s like a piece of sculpture, I must use it.”16 Directly transcribed to the canvas, it showed a room furnished with a single bed, a side table and a rug, with the light coming from an open window in the top right-hand corner. Hockney’s next thought was that there should be someone on the bed, so he summoned Schlesinger to fly up to Berkeley for the weekend and photographed him lying on a table at the correct angle, naked from the waist down. The two images were then put together.
The finished work was named after the town where Edgar Rice Burroughs lived and wrote the Tarzan books. “He called the painting The Room, Tarzana,” Schlesinger recalls, “because I was from Encino and Tarzana was the next-door community. I didn’t want him to call it The Room, Encino as I thought my parents might see it and recognise it as being me. David was of course quite oblivious to any of these fears and couldn’t care less what my parents thought or anything.”17 Since the painting is undeniably erotic, presenting him as a sex-object lying face down on the bed, passive, his eyes open and buttocks bare, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and a pair of white sports socks, Schlesinger’s caution is understandable. Though many people have cited Reclining Girl, Boucher’s 1751 portrait of the child-courtesan Marie-Louise O’Murphy, as an obvious reference for this painting, Hockney denies this, saying, “I knew the painting, of course, but it wasn’t in my mind at the time.”18
The Room, Tarzana is important because of the way Hockney used light and shade to create perspective. There are no shadows in A Bigger Splash, nor in Portrait of Nick Wilder, though there are hints of shadow in Beverly Hills Housewife. “… because of this light dancing around,” he wrote of this painting, “I realised the light in the room was a subject and for the first time it became an interesting thing for me, light. Consequently I had to arrange Peter so the light was coming from the direction of the window … I remember being struck by it as I was painting it; real light; this is the first time I’m taking any notice of shadows and light. After that it begins to get stronger in the pictures.”19
In the early summer, with his teaching contract at an end, Hockney ended his tenancy in Pico Boulevard and decided to give Schlesinger the treat that he wanted more than anything else, which was to make his first trip to Europe, and to travel by sea. They sailed cabin class on the RMS Queen Elizabeth, then the largest passenger ship in the world. Schlesinger was entranced by the decor, with its wood panelling and curved surfaces, which he labelled “Dowdy Deco,” and was thrilled when they passed the Queen Elizabeth’s sister ship the Queen Mary mid-ocean, with much sounding of horns. In the dining room they shared a table for the whole journey with a Mr. and Mrs. Wally Warwick from Allentown, Pennsylvania. “They didn’t say much,” Hockney recalls, “but I remember that he collected wooden decoy ducks. They said they were coming to Europe and going to go to Switzerland. I said I’d assumed that they would go to Italy as I thought all Americans went to Italy, and Mrs. Warwick said no, she didn’t like Italy because of what the Italians did in the war. She said they were no respecters of authority. Well, I told her that as far as I was concerned, that was one of their more charming characteristics.”20
Schlesinger was thrilled to arrive in England to a welcoming committee of friends, including Patrick Procktor, fresh from a successful show at the Redfern Gallery, John Kasmin and Ossie Clark, all eager to meet Hockney’s new lover. They drove off to Powis Terrace, which did not particularly impress Schlesinger. “It then really only consisted of two big rooms, and I remember thinking it was kind of filthy. Of course David smoked heavily, and I had never smoked, and I didn’t particularly like the cigarette ash in the bed.”21 Hockney’s first big sacrifice for Schlesinger, a demonstration of the strong feelings he held for him, was to give up smoking. It was a privation that also delighted his mother. “I am so glad about that,” she confided to her diary “—he is a good boy, only different … he has his own ideas of life but I’m so happy about him and very thankful.”22
Once they had settled into Powis Terrace, the unsophisticated boy from Encino had to deal with the enormous social circle in which Hockney moved. “It was a little scary,” Schlesinger recalls, “because I was only nineteen and shy and I didn’t know anybody. Swinging London was in full swing and I was a little suburban Californian.”23 Hockney may have been little-known in America, but in London he was a star, one of the glittering group of young artists, musicians, designers and photographers that had put London on the cover of Time the previous year. Antonioni had come to London to film Blow-Up, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles ruled the world of popular music, it was a must to be seen in the pages of Vogue, and the Scotch of St. James, Sibylla’s and the 100 Club lit up the night scene. Society revelled in its new “classlessness” and its leading hostesses fell over themselves to invite Hockney and Schlesinger to their houses. “There was a big garden party at Lindy and Sheridan Dufferin’s,” Schlesinger remembers, “and Princess Margaret was the guest of honour. Nothing could happen until she arrived, and when she arrived she had to go around and shake everybody’s hand, and somehow, being the least important person there, I was the last person for her to meet and I didn’t have a clue what to say. I was left speechless. Everyone was wearing silver, and I was sitting at a table with Lord Snowdon, and at one point in the evening he threw a glass of wine at Princess Margaret.”24
Hockney’s fame was well attested when he was one of the sixty-four signatories of a full-page open letter in The Times on 24 July, paid for by the Beatles, calling for the legalisation of marijuana; others included Jonathan Miller, George Melly, Tom Driberg MP, David Bailey and David Dimbleby. Though this letter was to achieve nothing, other than to elicit a few splutterings of horror from Middle England, a few days previously a far more important piece of legislation had been passed by Parliament that was to transform Hockney’s life and the lives of countless other homosexuals.
On 21 July 1967, royal assent had been finally granted to the 1965 Sexual Offences Bill, which gave exemption from prosecution for homosexual acts committed between consenting adults in the privacy of their own home. It was a huge step forward, even though outside this exemption homosexuality continued, technically speaking, to be a punishable offence, a situation that was not to change until 2003. “The Earl of Arran,” reported The Times, “… said that because of the Bill perhaps a million human beings would be able to live in greater peace. ‘I find this (he said) a truly awesome and a truly wonderful thought.’ ”25 Cecil Beaton wrote, “A great event in history that this should have been achieved.” Had it happened a century earlier, he mused, “Oscar Wilde could have given us half a dozen more Importances and early life for so many of us made less difficult.”26
At the end of July, Hockney decided to whisk Schlesinger away from the social whirl and take him and Patrick Procktor on a tour of Europe. Hockney loved to drive, and this was the first of many similar trips, dubbed “Mr. Whizz’s Tours” by Christopher Isherwood, and done entirely on Hockney’s terms. The drive to Paris passed without event, though it was a little slow, since Hockney’s brand-new Morris Minor convertible, which he nicknamed his “district nurse’s car,” had a 900cc engine and was incapable of overtaking. In Paris they stopped at a little art materials shop on the corner of Boulevard Saint-Michel and Rue Saint-André des Arts to buy watercolours and paper, as the most practical painting medium for travelling.
The next stop was to be Uzès, near Nîmes, where Douglas Cooper, the celebrated collector and friend of Picasso, lived in the Château de Castile. Famously obstreperous and a cultivator of quarrels, he was not a man who took kindly to people turning up uninvited at odd hours. “He wasn’t expecting us,” Schlesinger recalls, “and we just rang his bell and the servant came out and said, ‘I’m not waking him at five in the morning,’ and we had to sleep in the car until Mr. Cooper could be awakened and he was not pleased. David just used to arrive at people’s doorsteps with three other people thinking they would be pleased to see him … Douglas did actually allow us to stay one night there.”27
From Nîmes they headed to Italy, stopping off in Lucca to visit the American art critic Mario Amaya, and visiting Ferrill Amacker in Florence. After a short spell on the beach in Viareggio, they ended up in Rome. As they travelled, they painted, but while Patrick discovered a true love of the immediacy of watercolour, Hockney could not persevere with it. “It was the first time I properly tried watercolour, but in the end I preferred coloured pencils,” he says. “With watercolour, you have to follow certain rules otherwise you are in the soup. For instance, you have to move from light to dark because you can’t put a light colour on top of a dark, and generally you can’t put more than three coats on otherwise the colour would begin to get nondescript and muddy. There are techniques you have to follow and I got into it a bit but I didn’t get into it enough for me to want to carry on.”28
After Rome, they drove back to France to stay with Kasmin who had rented a house for the summer, the only actual invitation they had. For Procktor and particularly Schlesinger, the trip had been a steep learning curve. “There was no plan; there was no map,” he remembers. “We didn’t know where we were going. There were no reservations anywhere. If you stopped somewhere and the inn was full, you’d have to spend the night sleeping in the Morris Minor. That wasn’t too comfortable even for me but for Patrick, who was so tall, it was an absolute nightmare.”29
Their destination was Carennac, a medieval village of breathtaking beauty that lay right on the banks of the River Dordogne. John and Jane Kasmin had first visited it in 1961, taking rooms in the chateau, which had been turned into a hotel. Carennac’s romantic history appealed to the poet in Kasmin, its ancient priory having been for many years the home of François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century Catholic theologian, who was said to have written there his famous work Télémaque, a saga of the adventures of the son of Ulysses and Penelope. When the chateau finally shut up shop as a hotel, the Kasmins decided to rent it every August during their sons’ school holidays. The painter Howard Hodgkin and his wife Julia joined them in this enterprise, and over the next few years, Carennac was to be the setting for a number of idyllic summer holidays for them and their families and friends.
On this first visit, Hockney and Schlesinger coincided with the Cornwall-Joneses and Jane Kasmin’s mother, the fabric designer and painter E. Q. Nicholson. The long, carefree days, filled with sunbathing, sightseeing and reading, were immortalised in drawings such as Carennac, Vichy Water and “Howards End,” Jane in a Straw Hat and Kasmin in Bed in His Chateau in Carennac, while the evenings generally passed in a haze of delicious food, wine and marijuana. “It was a lovely place, with loads of bedrooms,” Hockney remembers. “In the evenings we played word games. I remember one game where somebody said a word and the next person had to say a word that either rhymed with it or made sense with it … It got interesting as it started to get faster because the words seemed to get quite revealing and if people kept it going, it was very good. Mo [McDermott] was good at it because he simply said the first word that came into his head, even if it had no relationship to the word that was spoken. I never remember him stopping the game. It was Kasmin who was the one who usually stopped the game because he was trying to think up something clever.”30
This European tour convinced Schlesinger that he “was born on the wrong continent in the wrong century,” and that he had to move to London. However, when he applied for a place at the RCA, Hockney’s connection with the college did not work in his favour. “I took along a portfolio of drawings I had done at UCLA,” Schlesinger recalls, “and I was turned down. I heard later that it was because they thought David had done the drawings for me.”31 Disappointing though this was, Patrick Procktor then suggested that he should apply to the Slade, which eventually accepted him, to begin his course in September 1968. As it turned out, being a much smaller school, it was to suit Schlesinger better.
Both Hockney and Schlesinger were prolific photographers and they returned to England with rolls and rolls of film. Hockney’s prints and negatives usually ended up being chucked haphazardly into a box, never to be looked at again. On this occasion, however, after Schlesinger had returned to UCLA, Hockney had a clear-up and came upon several boxes of his own photographs from the previous five years. “I realised then that if you put them away in boxes and you can’t see them, they just get lost and you have to be able to see things. So I made a decision to just stick everything into books.”32 He immediately went to Harrods and bought a large green photograph album into which he stuck all his snapshots from the previous five years. Inspired by this, and by the belief that he could take photographs just as well as anyone else, he also bought his first good camera, a 35mm Pentax. From the moment he started his next album, the quality of the images got better and better.
After Schlesinger had returned to UCLA, Hockney turned his hand to another portrait, this time of his old friend Patrick Procktor. It was the first of a series of portraits he was to paint over the next ten years, in which he sought to re-educate himself as a draughtsman and test his powers of observation. In The Room, Manchester Street he further developed his use of perspective, to create an illusion of space, and used backlight effectively to show off the figure of Procktor, standing, campily holding a Sweet Afton cigarette in his left hand. The shadows on the floor and the patterned carpet created by the cool silvery light pouring through the venetian blinds are also beautifully subtle. Made from a mixture of drawings, photographs and life, the painting depicts Procktor’s London home and studio at 25 Manchester Street, which the artist André Gallard described as being “rather like going into a film set: as if you had stepped back into 1880.”33 In fact, as Hockney described it, you never really knew what you were going to find there. “In 1967 Patrick’s studio looked clean, neat and office-like. The next year it looked like a den in the Casbah—it seemed to change as often as Auntie Mame’s.”34 In the portrait, which brilliantly captures Patrick’s theatrical bearing and extravagant hand gestures, it has the former appearance. Though honoured to have been the subject of such an important painting, Procktor never really liked the portrait, which he considered to be unflattering.
While Hockney was still working on this painting, one of his other portraits won him the most prestigious art prize in England, the publicity for which took his fame to a new level. The John Moores Prize for Contemporary Painting was held biennially at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. First awarded in 1957, when it was intended to be a one-off event, it was the brainchild of John Moores, the founder of the Littlewoods department store and the football pools company, who was a keen amateur painter, and who wanted to celebrate the best of modern art in Britain. Open to all, its subsequent success ensured that it was soon regarded as the country’s leading showcase for avant-garde art. In its tenth year, Hockney won with Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool. “Preview at John Moores Exhibition at Liverpool,” wrote Laura in her diary. “We were very proud and pleased to see David on Television he being first prize-winner at the Exhibition. Almost all the papers had write-ups with photos of both David and his picture. We had many congratulations around.”35 In a typically generous gesture, Hockney put half the considerable prize money of £1,500 towards a trip to Australia for his parents, to visit his brother Philip.
The Room, Manchester Street was completed in January 1968, just in time to be included in his fourth one-man show at the Kasmin Gallery, a striking exhibition of seven large canvases, which he called A splash, a lawn, two rooms, two stains, some neat cushions and a table … painted. It hung alongside A Bigger Splash, The Room Tarzana and four other new pictures, Two Stains on a Room on a Canvas, A Neat Lawn, Some Neat Cushions and A Table. “David’s exhibition is wonderful,” wrote Laura of her and Ken’s visit to it, “—only 7 huge pictures—but he does improve and his work is so perfect in detail. It seems a huge success and there have been more than 2000 visitors in 9 days.” Writing in The Times, Guy Brett described “images which are permeated with Hockney’s feeling for Los Angeles. These new paintings are sharper and neater and broader in scale than earlier ones; the brittle subject matter and Hockney’s dry shallow paint surface are very elegantly matched.”36
With the show over, Hockney flew to New York with Kasmin, staying at the Stanhope Hotel on Fifth Avenue, across the street from the Metropolitan Museum. The plan was to return to LA to spend six months with Schlesinger prior to his course at the Slade, but not before undertaking another epic road trip across America, this time in a Volkswagen brought over from Europe by a friend of Schlesinger’s. After much cajoling Hockney persuaded Schlesinger to take a few days off school and fly up to join them. He arrived at the Stanhope soon after midnight and at five in the morning the three of them set off, driving through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado and Utah, everything recorded in hundreds of photographs taken by Hockney with his new Pentax camera. “… it was like an Easy Rider in a Volkswagen,” he wrote. “Nice pictures of Colorado when it was snowing.”37
While Hockney had been in London, Schlesinger had moved in with friends who lived on 3rd Street in Santa Monica. In a 1934 art deco apartment building across the street—which in LA was considered historic—there was a tiny penthouse for rent, where Schlesinger and Hockney could live, while using a small spare room in the friends’ house as a studio. It was a perfect arrangement. “It was like being on the Queen Mary,” wrote Hockney, “with the mist in the morning, in Winter … and it was very nice. They were very happy times; once we were in the house, I didn’t care if I went out to see anybody or not, whereas before that … I was a roamer, I had to go out. It was because of Peter. Why should I go to a bar and roam around? There was no need for it.”38
Again Hockney was to prove that an artist does not need a large studio to paint a big picture, for in the very small room in this old wooden house he produced three seven foot by ten foot paintings. In the first of these, he challenged himself to attempt something he’d never done before: his first double portrait. The painting was quite different from any of his previous works containing two figures, such as the marriage pictures and the domestic scenes, in that those were painted from his imagination rather than from life; and the subjects he settled on were Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, two of his most intimate friends who also happened to live conveniently close by.
Hockney was fascinated by the dynamics of their relationship and began by hanging out with them and working up preliminary drawings. “The trouble with drawing people you don’t know,” he told the art historian Anthony Bailey, “is that you never really know what they look like. You spend a lot of time just trying to get a likeness. Whereas if you know them well you know there are several faces there. You can draw one of them, a face that belongs to a certain day.”39
He also took lots of photographs of the two men, observing that when he asked them to relax, Isherwood would always sit with his right foot across his left knee looking at Bachardy, while Bachardy would look straight at Hockney. That gave him the pose, and the “story”—in this case an older man’s worries about his much younger lover. “If a picture has a person or two people in it,” he said, “there is a human drama that’s meant to be talked about. It’s not just about lines.”40 Though the setting for the portrait is the living room of their house, Hockney never took his easel and paints down there, preferring to work on it in his little studio. While Isherwood would often come and sit for him, he relied mostly on photographs for the figure of Bachardy. “I remember that when the painting was almost finished, he was still dissatisfied with the painting of my head,” Bachardy remembers. “If you look at the painting you can see that the paint on my head is much more built-up than it is with Chris, where the paint is very fresh, very first time, whereas he really laboured over me.”41
Part of the problem was that just when Hockney was quite far into the portrait, Bachardy left LA to go and live in London for two months, a situation that did not make Isherwood particularly happy. “Three-thirty in the afternoon and raining hard in heavy gusty showers,” he wrote in his diary on 1 April. “… Just the right weather for the situation in this house, which is that Don took off at noon for London. We neither of us quite knew why he was doing this. Chiefly because David Hockney has lent us his apartment and since I still have no reason to go there it seemed as if Don had better use it.”42 Since he was lonely after Bachardy had left, Isherwood got into the habit of dropping round to Hockney’s studio most days, either to sit for him or just to talk about books, California or life. “He’d talk about Don being in England,” Hockney recalled. “I do remember he said, ‘Oh David, don’t ever get too possessive about your friends; let them feel free.’ Later I think he was a bit hurt that Don stayed away a long time. Still, it was good advice.”43 Eventually, dissatisfied with not being able to paint from life, Hockney rolled up the canvas and took it to London, only to find that Bachardy had left the previous week. The result was that it was completed without another sitting. “When I saw the picture,” Bachardy remembers, “it was quite clear that Chris looked much fresher, and I don’t think that David was ever satisfied with the version of me. I know better than to complain, and in the end what does it matter? We were flattered and pleased to be among the subjects for those wonderful double portraits.”44
About a month after he had started work on Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, Hockney began a second double portrait, of the wealthy art collectors Fred and Marcia Weisman. Marcia Weisman was the daughter of Meyer Simon, of Portland, Oregon, the creator of the Hunt Wesson Foods empire. In the early 1950s she and Fred began to build up what would become one of the best contemporary art collections in the country. Their first purchase was Self Absorbed, a sculpture by Jean Arp, which they followed up with works by Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Ed Ruscha and others, until they owned over a thousand major pieces, including Jasper Johns’s iconic Map. On meeting Hockney, she asked him if he would paint her husband. He declined, since he did not like taking on commissions; but after seeing their house he offered to paint them as a couple.
American Collectors is a characteristically witty portrait in which the Weismans are portrayed, rather like Betty Freeman, as further objects in their collection. “In the Weisman portrait,” he wrote, “there’s a Turnbull sculpture, a Henry Moore sculpture, other things, all part of them. The portrait wasn’t just in the faces, it was in the whole setting.”45 On the left Fred stands bolt upright as if carved from a piece of wood, his hand clenched so tight that an accidental drip, which Hockney chose to leave on the canvas, almost appears to have been squeezed out by him. To his right stands Marcia, echoing a huge totem pole behind her, her mouth frozen in the same rictus grin as the face on the pole. “It really had a similar look,” wrote Hockney. “I couldn’t resist putting that in.”46 Marcia was not amused. In fact, the Weismans hated the picture so much that they decided to take it out of circulation by buying it and donating it to the Pasadena Museum, with the stipulation that it should be kept in the basement.
Hockney completed one more large painting, California Seascape, which depicts a window and sea view in the home of the artist Dick Smith, in Corona del Mar, before returning to London with the unfinished portrait of Isherwood and Bachardy. Had it not been for Schlesinger starting at the Slade, though, he would almost certainly have remained in California and travelled back and forth. His mother was delighted. “David is back again in London,” she wrote at the beginning of July. “He came home just for a few days. Met the people who are to judge the ‘First Biennale of Prints’ in Bradford at Cartwright Hall. My washer has broken down—but David went in to town with me and bought a brand new Servis Super Twin. He is so kind to me, indeed to us. He gave Ken money, but he never spends it wisely.”47
His return home turned out to be timely, as in September, on a trip to Bradford to judge the work sent in for the Print Biennale, he was able to see at first hand just how ill his father was and what Laura had to cope with. “… in the odd hour we had together we talked of Australia. Dad was late in and David kept going to bus stop to meet him and back again to find he had not come. We started our meal but could not enjoy it. Had just picked up phone to call Infirmary when Mr. Holloway came to back door. He had picked Ken up in Harrogate Road. Again in coma—he had kept on the bus to the terminus at Ravenscliffe and walked back half dazed—dared not cross road and slumped by wall. David tried to impress the fact he must come straight home—or there would be no Australia … I was getting so ill with worry night after night.”48
Schlesinger arrived in London in September, ready to take up his course at the Slade. Foreign students were not given their own painting area on the premises, so one of his first moves was to buy himself a bike in order to cycle each morning to the school, in Gower Street, Bloomsbury, and from there to Regent’s Park, where he had temporarily rented studio space off Kitaj. As a result, Schlesinger never quite fitted in, because he would have to leave after classes, while the other students hung around to paint. It didn’t help either when word got out that he was David Hockney’s boyfriend, and he was considered a bit of an oddity. “I would flit in and out of the Slade,” he recalls, “but I had this whole other life with David, a very un-studenty life. I raised a few eyebrows at the Slade, especially when I arrived in my Ossie Clark snakeskin jacket. I didn’t really take part in the student life there.”49
At least Hockney was supportive. “He certainly took an interest in my painting,” Schlesinger remembers. “He was respectful of my work without critiquing my pictures. He didn’t like to carry on in a professorial way, but he certainly encouraged me, and he hung some of my work up on the wall in Powis Terrace.” The closest he came to giving Schlesinger any kind of tutorial was allowing him to watch and draw alongside him while he worked on a portrait. “I drew Cecil Beaton a couple of times with David,” Schlesinger recalls, “and I drew while David was drawing John Gielgud and Rudolf Nureyev.”50 On another occasion, Lindy Dufferin had managed to persuade Sir Frederick Ashton to allow her and Hockney to draw the Royal Ballet in rehearsal. They took Schlesinger along, but since only two of them were allowed in the rehearsal room at once, he had to stand and watch from the door. Here he caught the eye of Wayne Sleep, one of the company’s up-and-coming young dancers. “During my breaks, I chatted to him there,” Sleep wrote later, “and he asked if I would be willing to be drawn. This led to an invitation to join them that day, with Sir Fred, at Lindy’s house in Holland Park for lunch. Sir Fred and I posed together for the artists, he in a chair with me (naked) sitting at his feet.”51
While Hockney’s sitters usually had no objection to Schlesinger being brought along, there was one notorious occasion when the subject was extremely unhappy about it. In October 1968, the music critic of the Observer, Peter Heyworth, suggested to Hockney that he might like to do a portrait of W. H. Auden, who happened to be staying with him. Since he longed to meet Auden, Hockney cast aside all his usual doubts about commissions, and said he would love to. Without asking, he decided to take Kitaj and Schlesinger with him, reasoning that Auden was probably not unlike Chris Isherwood, who was always cheered up by the sight of a beautiful young boy. How wrong he turned out to be. “Auden was a bit grumpy about having three people there,” wrote Hockney, “and my impression of him then was that maybe he was playing a role, the grumpy man, because he complained all the time about pornography. He talked all the time. He said every time he went to the railway station in New York to make a journey and he wanted to read detective novels, it was all pornography now, all pornography. He gave me the impression of being rather like the headmaster of an English school.”52 The documentary maker and author Peter Adam, who was involved in filming Auden at the time, put it more strongly: “Auden was furious … he kept on about ‘the manners of people who have no manners’ and the invasion of his privacy.”53 In spite of the bad atmosphere, the drawings Hockney made were a success, beautifully capturing the craggy lined landscape of the poet’s face. “I kept thinking,” Hockney said, “if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?”54
In between putting the finishing touches to Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, and planning a new double portrait, Hockney was typically industrious, going on a trip down the Rhine in September to take photographs of castles, as references for a new illustrated Grimm’s Fairy Tales, as well as paying a visit in October to a friend who had a house in the south of France, the film director Tony Richardson. Hockney had first come across the flamboyant and complex Richardson while working on Ubu Roi at the Royal Court and they had struck up an instant friendship. They had a Yorkshire background in common, Richardson, the son of a pharmacist, having been born and brought up in Saltaire, just outside Bradford, and educated at Ashville College, a minor public school in Harrogate. By the time they met, Richardson had had a distinguished career, firstly in the theatre with the English Stage Company, putting on the first productions of Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer, and latterly in films, as the director of two successful social realist productions, A Taste of Honey and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. Having made a fortune from his latest film, Tom Jones, to which, along with John Osborne and Albert Finney, he owned all the rights, he had used part of the money to buy an extraordinary property in the mountains above St. Tropez, just outside the town of La Garde-Freinet.
Le Nid de Duc, “the nest of the night owl,” was a hamlet in which two or three families had once eked out a living harvesting cork from the cork-oak forest, which was the only real source of revenue in the area. Abandoned since the 1950s, it was almost entirely in ruins when Richardson first came across it, and he fell instantly in love with it, seduced as much as anything by the profusion of wild flowers that flourished there throughout the seasons, “the wild mimosa … the wild tree heather, white and purple; the scarlet poppies; the violets and blue periwinkles; the purple and yellow flags; orchids of every colour; white starwort and daisies; gold celandine and ragwort; green spurge; and the red and orange berries of the arbutus.”55 By the time Hockney paid his visit—the first of many over the next few years—it had been restored with the help of local craftsmen. There were six houses habitable and, precariously cantilevered out of the sloping hillside, a brand-new swimming pool, which was later to form the setting for another of his most iconic paintings.
Richardson was a wonderful and generous host who mixed and matched his guests regardless of class or sexual preference, so long as they amused him and were prepared to bend to his whim. “When you are at his mercy,” wrote Christopher Isherwood, “he can drive you absolutely nuts. You have to do exactly what he says every moment of the day. If you refuse he asks ‘Are you alright?’ as much as to suggest that your refusal is the first sign of an oncoming mental breakdown.”56 The six houses could accommodate twenty or thirty people, usually artists, musicians, actors and writers, with any children sleeping in one huge room, and everybody gathered together for meals, which were taken outside on a long table set beneath a huge tree, around which ducks and peacocks wandered. Delicious Provençal food was provided, while wine flowed, loosening tongues and encouraging gossip. Guests needed their wits about them, especially if Richardson decided to play one of his “truth” games. “He once asked a man,” wrote Isherwood, “ ‘How long was it after your marriage before you started sleeping with boys again?’ And the man hesitated and then replied, ‘Four months,’ and his wife cried out and got up and left the room, and soon afterwards they were divorced.”57 After years of experiencing similar behaviour, John Osborne, his partner in Woodfall Films, used Richardson as the model for the character of KL, the tyrannical film producer from whom the three couples are escaping, in his play The Hotel in Amsterdam.
Richardson loved games, not all of them quite so sadistic. He “organised games, picnics and theatre evenings; treasure hunts could last the whole day. He would always make sure that the most unsuitable couples or the most unconventional ones were teamed up together. One never knew what one would find: bottles of champagne hidden in a stream with glasses, or a book with pornographic photographs.”58 In the evenings there would be charades, or murder in the dark, and sometimes elaborate theatrical productions put on by Natasha and Joely, Richardson’s children from his marriage to Vanessa Redgrave. The one thing that was expected of the guests was that they should join in, and woe betide those who didn’t. “He could be cruel or incredibly charming,” Schlesinger recalled, “directing the house party as he would one of his plays or movies, and he loved guests who performed well. No extrovert, I failed the audition and he took a great dislike to me.”59 Hockney, who refused to join in the games, was told by people, “Well, he’ll never invite you again,” but because he was always seen to be drawing and observing, he got away with it and was asked back many times.
*
On his return to London, and with Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy finally completed, Hockney was preoccupied with thinking about a new double portrait of his close friend Henry Geldzahler and his partner Christopher Scott, whom Hockney had drawn once before, in 1967, in the lithograph Henry and Christopher, which shows Henry seated in an armchair and Christopher lying on a sofa in the Chateau Marmont. Each print in the edition of fifteen was customised: one, for example, has hand-painted multicoloured lines connecting their mouths, as if to signify a conversation taking place between them even though their mouths are closed. Hockney was intrigued by what made the relationship work between the gregarious and witty Geldzahler and the younger and rather dour Scott and, believing them to be perfect material for a new large oil, he flew to New York in November to stay with them, in the Wyoming Building on Seventh Avenue. In his role as curator of twentieth-century art at the Metropolitan Museum, Geldzahler was putting the final touches to New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970, a landmark show that was to open the following year, and give the Museum of Modern Art a run for its money.
Geldzahler was a man Hockney truly loved, who made him laugh more than anyone else, and who introduced him into the New York art world where, as well as the Warhol crowd, he encountered artists such as Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly. With a great eye as well as a vast knowledge of art, Geldzahler was not afraid to criticise, and he became one of the few people from whom Hockney got critical feedback about his work. But like many a man of formidable intellect, Geldzahler could also be temperamental and difficult, and he had a voracious sexual appetite in which not even Hockney’s boyfriend was off-limits. “I first met Henry,” Schlesinger recalls, “when I was in the little house in Santa Monica. He was a little chubby thing, but very amusing. At one point David had to go out to get some cigarettes, and at that moment Henry pounced on me. He literally did it in a matter of seconds. Once he’d established that I wasn’t interested in going along with his desires, he immediately lost interest in me entirely. Of course that didn’t apply to David, because he was famous. To get on with Henry you had to be useful to him and you had to serve his ego in some way.”60 Geldzahler’s wit was legendary. On one occasion he managed to browbeat Andy Warhol into painting his portrait for free. When Warhol had completed it, he delivered it to Geldzahler, who had a good look at it before handing it back. “You’ve left something out,” he told him. “Whaaat?” drawled Warhol, in his soft, barely audible voice. “The art!” replied Geldzahler.61
He could also be quite cruel. “There was this old society lady called Violet Wyndham,” Hockney remembers, “and she used to give lunches in Trevor Square. When I took Henry to lunch with her, I told him that she was a rather marvellous old lady whose mother was called Ada Leverson and was a very loyal friend to Oscar Wilde. She met him when he came out of prison and he said to her, ‘Only you, Ada, would know what hat to wear on an occasion like this.’ This was all explained to Henry before we went to lunch. Violet was pretty deaf, and when we arrived at her house and she greeted us, Henry turned to me and said loudly, ‘Now let me get this straight. Oscar Wilde was her mother.’ Of course I couldn’t stop laughing, and Violet was saying, ‘What? What?’ and I thought, ‘You are cruel, Henry, but you are very, very funny.’ ”62
In New York, Hockney began the portrait of Geldzahler and Scott by doing some preliminary sketches. “He did a few drawings on the spot,” Geldzahler later recounted, “—of my face, of Christopher and of the scene out of the window behind the couch, which was a scene out of the window in another room of the apartment. That was something he decided to do in order to let in more air, I suppose, more space to the picture.”63 Scarcely had he started work, however, than Hockney was struck down with flu at a time when Geldzahler’s doctor was on holiday in Florida. “For the last four days of his stay,” Geldzahler recalled, “he tried every home remedy in patent medicine that he had ever heard about. He also made the point over and over again that in England you can reach a doctor over the weekend. That has not been my experience.”64
In spite of being ill, Hockney still managed to get enough drawings done, and the painting was completed once he was back at home in Powis Terrace. It was on this return journey to London, however, that he became involved in an incident which was to have profound significance, and which was to gain him almost heroic status within the homosexual community.