The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I’ve never had such good and bad times’
Lucian Freud’s passion for Jacquetta Eliot led to broken teeth, defaced Bentleys – and superb portraits. By William Feaver
The first time I met Lucian Freud – one dark November day in 1973 – I asked him what completing a painting felt like. Was the end of the involvement a bit like finishing with people? He winced, cleared his throat and raised his voice as though announcing a fatalistic rule of thumb.
“No. Pictures and relationships are not directly related… You’re living and your relationships grow and mature or decay.”
“Is there then a see-sawing between painting and relationships?”
“I don’t think of them as in any way competitive.”
At that time, I later learnt, his relationship with Jacquetta Eliot, for one, was fluctuating on an epic scale. It had already resulted in several intensely realised paintings: markers to be reckoned with as he approached, with growing (though still limited) fame, his 50th birthday.
He had first encountered her about five years before. “I went down to stay at Perry’s,” he told me. Peregrine Eliot (later 10th
Earl of St Germans) lived at Port Eliot, a great Gothic mansion in Cornwall. “It was a very odd place. Sleepy atmosphere, land below sea level, wine cellar by John Soane. I was terribly impressed: in the morning the butler came in and lit the fire quietly and said what the weather was like. And they ate off solid silver plates, even shepherd’s pie.”
Most impressive, most pleasurable, was Perry’s wife, Jacquetta. “She was 24, had married pretty young. Her father was the person who kicked Farouk out of Egypt [the wartime British Ambassador to Egypt, Miles Lampson, overseer of King Farouk’s abdication].
She seemed brilliant and wrote marvellous poems and was friendly with people.”
She, in turn, found Freud irresistible. “He was funny, clever, ardent, urgent and fantastically intimate. Just the way he walked into the room, the way he breathed, like an animal, very feral. He did exactly what he wanted.”
Freud pursued her with letters, several a day (many never sent) and trunk calls to Cornwall. (“You know when I get angry it’s only from waiting and waiting…”) He stood in the rain outside the Eliots’ London house in Chepstow
Place two nights running and then shinned up a wonky drainpipe to reach her balcony, scrabbling until, as she said, she relented.
“Finally I had to say, ‘This is ridiculous. OK: better come in and have coffee or something and get dry.’ That was very typical of him: to focus on his prey. I remember watching him at parties. Once he came to Cornwall when Perry was away and I was having a house party; he arrived and I was horrified. ‘You must go,’ I said. He said, ‘I’ve come all this way,’ and so I let him have a bath and drove him to the station in Plymouth and he jumped out and disappeared.
“He acted on rushes of adrenalin: he would crash in on dinner parties and make me leave with him... And he would get things wrong: when I had my wisdom teeth out, he brought me a pineapple. It took two years to realise I was hooked. A terrible realisation.”
As for Freud, he thought he had met his match. Or so he told Frank Auerbach.
Jacquetta accepted that she liked a man to have an obsession and that sitting for Freud was the one reliable way of seeing him. All else followed from that. She put it to him that there were three great attractions for him in a woman: that she be married, be pretty and have an independent spirit. “Right on the last two,” he said. “But not sure on the first.”
Both Freud and Jacquetta took pride in being quick to act in the heat of the moment. “The thing I had with Lucian was very difficult of course and intensified by the fact that I was married – and happily married – when it began. Terribly fraught and a lot of it was to do with going back to Cornwall. That used to infuriate him. And I used to feel strongly that he wanted to break up the marriage; he once said, when we were going down Charlotte Street to get a kebab and the kebab shop was shut, ‘Damn, I want it even more,’ and went into a whole number. The whole thing was break-ups and make-ups.”
The notes he sent switched from blunt to cajoling. Mercilessly direct, every sentiment cut to the quick, he told her off for overdone self-expression (“Stick to talking about your hard little heart”). He drew bottles on a shelf labelled “telephone tricks, poisonous letters, bitter aloes, evil telegrams Not To Be Taken” and reproachful thumbnail faces staring out from mid-sentence. Letters came with red dabs around the margins (“Are you really so hard and brittle; I feel completely old and lost without your love”), letters overwritten “Moan”, “Moan”, “Moan”. He demanded photographs so that he could paint her in a Cornish pastoral, a Giorgione figure with attendant cow.
“I was terribly in love with him, completely hooked, a dreadful drug and couldn’t get off it and I tried and I tried,” she told me. “We had an awful lot of fun together.”
In Paris they stayed in the littérateur Jean-Pierre Lacloche’s basement apartment, draped in dust sheets with monkeys and a parrot, she remembered, and sat on the bed while their host “made up an opium spliff ” for them to share. The critic John Russell remembered a lunch with Freud. Jacquetta came too and sat silently, her hand cupped, looking into her palm with a radiant smile and, in the end, as they left the restaurant, she held it out and showed a conker. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
Jacquetta came to see the relationship as a drama, a two-hander of many acts. “We would be Tom and Jerry.” To be volatile, it seemed, was to be fully alive. Freud, who couldn’t bear frustrations not of his own devising, was racked with impatience. “Mean and shallow little tyrant,” he raged.
“The first phone I had was in my secret flat in Camden Road, quite a lot to do with Jacquetta as she was supposed to ring me up. A man at
Freud shinned up a drainpipe to reach her balcony, scrabbling until she relented
which brushes and palette knife are displayed like a batch of surgical instruments. Of all the paintings of her, this, Freud said, was “the least like. She’s in a kind of trance.”
This Jacquetta denied. She was, she said, just thinking of other things. “Dead tired from looking after the children all day, not having a proper nanny. Why was I doing it? It was difficult fitting the sittings in, terrible stress and strain. It did make me somebody basically I’m not.”
They tried living together. Polaroids survive of Freud romping with the boys and fooling around in the bath. “Lucian never helped out. Never. Not even then. My life was either in Cornwall or with the children and if I wasn’t going to be his model we wouldn’t have been together. I was with the children and he with his pictures. Then he’d go off with some girl and I’d retaliate. I’d drive around the block and there would be his car, nestling and hidden, and I’d get furious.”
Freud, having prompted the
‘She’d got incredibly strong legs and she kicked me in the head while I was driving’