The muse who stripped for 25,000 artists . . . and saved John Lennon’s life
She was a friend of Freud and Bacon — and posed nude for two Beatles. As June Furlong dies at 90, a portrait of a truly remarkable woman
WITH the possible exception of Yoko Ono, no human being ever spent more time unclothed in the company of John Lennon than a buxom Liverpudlian by the name of June Furlong.
Renowned for her comely smile and deep brown eyes, she was perhaps the most prolific life model of a generation, disrobing for more than 25,000 artists.
Her career spanned six decades and took her to the studios of Francis Bacon, Augustus John, Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud, who described her as ‘an exotic creature with a deep, penetrating mind’.
Yet it was her chum Lennon who perhaps owed her the greatest debt after she talked him down from taking his own life in the summer of 1958, when he was an unknown art student.
The duo had developed a close friendship at the Liverpool College of Art where she made a living posing for life drawing classes.
It was here that one day she came across a 17-year-old Lennon standing in front of an open lift shaft, having just learned of his beloved mother Julia’s death in a road accident.
She managed to persuade him to walk away, and got one of his tutors to send him home in a taxi with a bottle of whisky.
On another occasion, Furlong helped convince Lennon, ten years her junior, that his band ought to sign a management contract with a businessman called Brian Epstein.
‘He came in and he said to me he’d met this fellow called Epstein,’ she recalled. ‘He said he wants to manage us. I said to him: “What have you got to lose?” He cracked up laughing . . . and said: “Yeah, that’s right what have we got to lose?” ’
The band signed the very next day. ‘ He didn’t realise what was going to happen after that. He thought it was a bit of a laugh. And then of course the rest is history.’
Furlong, who has died at the age of 90, also posed naked for another Beatle and art student at the college. Stuart ‘Stu’ Sutcliffe, the band’s original bassist, played with The Beatles in Hamburg before leaving to pursue his career as an artist. He died from a brain haemorrhage at the age of 21.
JUNE and Lennon had quickly struck up a friendship after he’d walked into one of her life-drawing sessions and asked if it would be ‘all right’ to draw her, to which June replied: ‘Get yourself an easel.’ Lennon stayed for several hours, and would return, day after day.
She memorably described her first encounter with him in an interview: he was ‘just a Liverpudlian, stinking of fish and chips, before the charisma arrived’, she said. He was, she said, ‘a bit of a rebel’. ‘If he didn’t like history of art, he’d just walk out of that lesson and he’d come into the life room. He’d conduct things as if it was a big cocktail party, and the group who were trying to get their drawings right would say: “Shut up and sit down and draw.” And he’d say to me: “I’ll be back, I’m going next door to see Paul [McCartney]”.’
Lennon would invite her to listen to his latest songs during lunch breaks. ‘I used to look at him and think: where will your talent take you? Where will you go? You’ll either hit the bottom or you’ll hit the top. There’ll be nothing in between for you.’
Furlong was a working-class girl from a modest background, who had entered the professional art world aged 17, when she met the Liverpool artist Don McKinlay at a local advertising agency.
He suggested she might like to earn some extra cash as a life model at the art college. It was, she soon discovered, her vocation and she sat for artists until the mid- 1990s. ‘ I walked i nto the college aged 17 and walked out again aged 65,’ she said.
‘I only stopped because I was getting ti red. It’s physically exhausting, it had nothing to do with my body. There were good drawings of me older, as my figure changed, just as there were good ones of me younger. You can look good at 17 or 70, but equally you can look awful, it really isn’t about age. It’s not what you do in this life, it’s the way that you do it.’
June was never embarrassed undressing in front of strangers. However she hated being described as a nude model.
‘Nudity has such sleazy connotations,’ she said. ‘It conjures up pictures of those awful pouting girls in the tabloids and gives completely the wrong impression of the art world I was involved in.’
Nakedness was strictly professional: ‘If you were self-conscious you just wouldn’t do it,’ she said, adding: ‘In an art college people have only one thing on their mind: getting that drawing done . . .’
Her peers were women of all ages and shapes, none of whom were necessarily sexualised, she said.
‘There was one huge, fat woman, but there was character there too, real personality and that was what counted. If you look at Rembrandt’s paintings they’re superb, but they’re not young, slim women — that’s Page Three girls, not real models.’
June Furlong was born and lived for almost her entire life on Falkner Street, a now f amous, l i sted Georgian terrace that has been the subject of a BBC2 documentary called A House Through Time, presented by historian David Olusoga.
In the programme, June recalled how during World War II air raids, her family would all cower in their Morrison Shelter, with their Bullmastiff and its pups. In May 1941, an incendiary bomb fell through their home’s roof, but her parents put out the fire with sandbags.
When she began life modelling in the late 1940s, Furlong soon found she had a peculiar ability to remain still for extended periods, even in the unheated studios of the era. She was also famously punctual.
Her years in Liverpool were only briefly interrupted by a spell in London in her early 20s, when she modelled at the Royal College of Art, Central Saint Martins and the Slade School of Fine Art where she became chummy with Lucian Freud who was teaching there.
FRANK AUERBACH and Francis Bacon painted her as students, and she was also friends with fellow Liverpudlian, the critic and jazz musician George Melly.
After she had returned to Liverpool, her friendships with the hottest names in British art were a source of fascination for the young John Lennon. ‘He used to talk to me for hours about them, and used to come up here to my house inviting me out to parties,’ she said.
On one occasion, he borrowed her grandmother’s old pink corset and diamante necklace to wear in a student production of Cinderella, in which he played an ugly sister.
‘And he came back with every bit of stuff I’d lent him,’ she said.
In later years, she staged exhibitions for some of Liverpool’s most f amous artists and holidayed in Majorca each summer with painter (and confirmed bachelor) George Wallace Jardine, one of her closest friends.
The late Liverpool poet and painter Adrian Henri dubbed her ‘as constant as the Liver birds’.
But unlike other famous muses, she never acquired much valuable artwork, or cashed i n on her connections. Contemplating her friendship with Lennon, she once said: ‘If I’d kept all the letters he sent me, I’d be in blooming South Kensington now, I tell you.’
‘People say to me now: “You’ve led a Bohemian life, haven’t you?” ’ she said i n one of her f i nal interviews. ‘Well as far as I know, anyone who sets out to lead a Bohemian life lands in the gutter. I was just trying to keep going.’
WHATEVER your views about the man, it’s likely that Julian Assange will be stuck in Britain for the rest of his life. Or at least as long as the United States maintains its desire to prosecute the Australian for espionage. Which might amount to the same length of time. Having defied the British justice system by jumping bail to avoid sex charges, the WikiLeaks founder now owes it his protection from Washington’s retribution for placing hundreds of thousands of secret US military and diplomatic documents in the public domain.
Politicians of all persuasions, lawyers and journalists – including myself – have welcomed the decision by British district judge Vanessa Baraitser to block America’s extradition attempt. But many of us have done so while holding our noses.
Assange helped expose some of the dirty secrets of America’s 21st Century foreign wars. In a democracy, investigative journalists and whistleblowers – Assange was more a technical facilitator – should be protected from politically motivated punishment.
But his is a complex story and a far from noble character, for all the unquestioning hero worship he has received from some quarters.
A reckless narcissist and sexual predator, the Australian-born Assange, 49, was disdainful of the collateral human cost of his unredacted leaks.
WikiLeaks’ collusion with hackers working for the Russian state to undermine Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential election campaign – won by her Putin-friendly opponent Donald Trump – saw his support wither among liberals who had cheered his initial exposés.
It wasn’t about the justice of the cause, they thought. It was about Julian Assange.
YESTERDAY, Judge Baraitser ruled that while US prosecutors met the tests for Assange to be extradited for trial, she discharged him on the grounds t hat she f ound t he US was incapable of preventing him from attempting suicide. She had heard evidence of him being a ‘depressed and sometimes despairing man’ who had thought of killing himself.
The example of another recent very highprofile case – that of the paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein who managed to kill himself while on remand in custody in New York in 2019 – was not far from her mind. An astounding blunder by the American authorities.
Still, there will be those who wonder at the true extent of Assange’s extradition-preventing mental health problems. And it should be noted that the judge did not reach her decision on the grounds that Assange was a campaigning journalist.
One issue is clear: Assange would be foolish in the extreme now to leave British shores of his own volition, save perhaps on an Aeroflot flight to Russia, where his fellow whistleblower Edward Snowden has been living as a guest of Mr Putin to similarly avoid American prosecution.
Planes can be diverted, companies or individuals punished for complicity. The CIA has a recent history of extraordinary renditions of those America cannot reach through official channels.
Who could have foreseen this tortuous saga back in 2010, at the height of Assange-mania?
That spring, WikiLeaks had released a devastating tranche of cables that had been given to the organisation by a disaffected US army intelligence analyst called Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning.
Some of the material showed what appeared to be war crimes. Others exposed what was happening in the back channels. It wasn’t pretty. Channing was arrested and sentenced to 35 years in jail (she would be pardoned after serving seven years behind bars).
Based in the UK, Assange remained at large; a rock star for the internet age. That summer
he took himself to Sweden to meet his fans and explore the possibility of moving the WikiLeaks operation to Scandinavia.
But while he was there two female WikiLeaks supporters went to the police and made allegations against Assange of sexual assault.
Against their wishes, they said, he had deliberately not used a condom during what had started as c o nsensual sexual encounters.
Having returned to the UK, Assange denied any wrongdoing. He claimed the allegations were part of an American plot to see him extradited to Washington. The sexual encounters had been a honey trap, many in liberal Sweden agreed.
One of the alleged victims hit back: ‘The accusations were not set up by the Pentagon or anybody else. The responsibility for what happened to me and the other girl lies with a man with a twisted view of women, who has a problem accepting the word “no”.’
The Swedish prosecutor concurred. Interpol issued an arrest warrant for ‘sex crimes’. And the stage was set for the drama to take an extraordinary turn. In September 2011 Assange dumped WikiLeaks’ entire library of 250,000 secret US cables on to the internet. These communiqués reportedly contained the identities of informants, sources and agents who had been assisting the US in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries.
As they were unredacted, the cables presented a de facto hit list of vulnerable targets to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But Assange was unrepentant, apparently.
HE was reported to have told his media partners: ‘Well, they’re informants so, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.’ In May 2012, the British supreme court ruled that he should be extradited to Sweden.
He wasn’t willing to get what was ‘coming to him’ in Stockholm so he jumped bail. Friends and supporters, who knew nothing of his plans to abscond, lost a total of €103,000 they had put up for surety.
He swapped the stately home which had been his bail address for asylum in the embassy of a sympathetic Ecuador, situated behind Harrods department store in London’s Knightsbridge. There began a long, long stand-off. Longer than anyone could have anticipated. While the UK police mounted a surveillance operation that in the end cost more than €13million, Assange played host to a series of famous and glamorous visitors, such as Pamela Anderson and Lady Gaga.
But his existence inside the embassy was constrained and by all accounts squalid – Assange was not particular about hygiene. Gradually his relations with his hosts soured and his access to the internet was restricted.
The Ecuadorian leadership changed and by April 2019 they’d had enough of their troublesome guest. The police were allowed inside the embassy and Assange was arrested, charged with jumping bail and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, which he spent in Belmarsh high-security prison.
By then the Swedes had dropped their cases against him, having run out of time to proceed with them.
But the Americans had shown their hand. Shortly after his arrest at the embassy, the US charged Assange with a single count of conspiring to hack into a Pentagon computer. He would face a possible five-year jail term. A further 17 offences against the Espionage Act were then added. Assange’s friends claimed he faced up to 175 years in prison. The US authorities suggested no more than six.
The extradition hearing began last September. Perhaps the most sensational revelation was that Assange had fathered two sons, Gabriel and Max, by a junior member of his legal team while inside the embassy. The couple are now engaged to be married.
STELLA Moris is a 37-year-old lawyer of Spanish-Swedish nationality. She recently gave a couple of well-timed interviews to bemoan her fiancé’s plight. If extradited, she claimed, Assange might kill himself and ‘I will lose the man I love for ever. Even now I don’t know whether my children will ever be held in their father’s arms again.’
That could happen as early as tomorrow when his formal bail application is heard.
Barring a successful US appeal against the decision there might even be a Wikiwedding. A new chapter in the always remarkable and often unsavoury life of Julian Assange has begun.
THE last year has been very difficult for all of us and also very different depending on what you do for a living. Now with Brexit happening, that has added another spanner into the financial works.
So how have you fared over the last year? And what should you be doing to protect yourself and your income for 2021? Financial planner Eoin McGee, presenter of RTÉ’s How To Be Good With Money, says currently there are two sides to the coin — those who are still working the way they were before the pandemic and those who have been laid off either temporarily or permanently.
‘One side of the coin is that in the first lockdown, there were two million people who were better off financially as a result,’ he says.
‘People stayed on the same wage and their expenses went through the floor.
‘On the opposite side of the coin, there are people who are really struggling financially who don’t know where their job will be, who don’t known what the next pay packet is going to look like and they don’t know how long they’re going to be on the Pandemic Unemployment Payment or whatever else. They are really struggling and are in a very different mindset.’
But there are more people who are in a better place financially than those who aren’t. Here, he takes a look at what we can all do to ensure we are spending our money on the things that add value to our lives, whatever our current situation.
LOCKDOWN YOUR FINANCES IN JANUARY
THERE is a financial positive to be taken here for the lockdown we are jumping into. January is always a tough month for everyone and we normally all have to cut back on stuff anyway to make up for the excess spending we did in the month of December.
This year there was probably less excess spending because we were restrained quite a bit and now everyone who is still working is in the same boat in that we can’t do anything for the next few weeks.
All nonessential retail is closed and you can’t really do a lot but you could change your life if you used that time to look over your finances. If you make a couple of positive changes over the next few weeks, you could change your finances forever.
Start by pulling out your bank statements and go through them for the last three to six months. Look at what is coming out of your bank account and figure out how much of that stuff you actually use. What is important to you? What is of value to you? Is there anything you can cut out?
Begin with the things you can cut out completely. Have you got a TV subscription or something else you’re not using? If you are paying for something that you aren’t using or haven’t used in three months then get rid of it immediately.
Then you look at the things you can pay less for. For example, take a look at your health insurance, home insurance and utilities and see what savings can be made. We all have a little extra time at the minute as there is no commute so use that time wisely.
Once y ou have g ot through the easy things then move to the bigger things. Are you paying over the odds for your mortgage? Are your pension charges too much? What about your life cover?
If things like your home insurance aren’t up for renewal until September make a note of that and set a reminder for August 1 to take action — don’t leave it until September when it becomes too late.
This is a real opportunity for people who are making good money at the minute to engage with someone professional and get a financial planner that you are happy to deal with.
You can do this for 45 minutes or an hour sitting at home on your sofa.
LOST YOUR JOB? TAKE CONTROL
IF THIS week you have found out you are one of the people who doesn’t have a job to go to next week then you might feel like you have lost control of your financial future. You can no longer go to work and earn money the way you were used to as that has been taken out from under you.
But the only way you can take back control of that is to sit down, look at what’s in your bank account and look at when your next PUP or social welfare payment is coming in. When is the next time money is going to hit your bank account? What is that money is needed for? How long it will be until money will be coming in again?
Give every single euro in your bank account a job. Make sure that you take control of the finances you have control of and that is the money that is already in your bank account. When people do that after losing their job, it gives them the empowerment to say, ‘Right, I am taking back control and I will make sure I know what every single euro I have is going to do.’ If you are the one deciding what is important and where the money you have is going, then it will make you feel better.
It is an awful position for people to be in and there will be people out there unemployed for the first time and there will be people out there losing their job for the third time in nine months. The most positive thing you can do from a financial perspective is take control again and put the money you have to good use. Remember to allocate money to everything you need but allow yourself something for living — like the odd takeaway. And remember this is not your fault, you haven’t done anything to put yourself out of work and the situation is completely out of your control.
But there is an opportunity too. Start thinking about what you want to do, what job do you want to go back to? What does your future look like? If you ever had an opportunity to change your career, there has never been a better time to strike.
BUYING PRODUCTS POST-BREXIT
AS THE impact of Brexit is felt, there will be products that the likes of Amazon won’t be able to ship here any more. Also, when you buy something on the internet from anywhere in Europe, you have a great cooling off period — you can send stuff back within 30 days as the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission here works with all of its partner s across Europe to make sure the same r ules apply.
Britain would always have signed up to them but now it no longer has to. The difference here i s that because the European market is so important to Britain, the expectation is that companies will start to say that they still adhere to the same rules and regulations.
But you just have to be more vigilant and I think as a shopper in Ireland, unless there is nowhere else that you can get something except Britain, now more than ever is a time to buy online in Ireland for your own security but also f or the Irish economy.
Companies here are relying on you to spend your money on them. There’s no Belgian man or woman sitting at their laptop who will prefer Irish goods over anything else and so it’s up to us to keep our Irish companies going. You will have the security of the CPC here as well. Try as best you can to support local then support Irish and if you really have to, then go beyond that.
SHOULD I KEEP MY BRITISH BANK ACCOUNT?
A LOT of people have bank accounts in Britain and it is a concern in a
post-Brexit world. For ordinary people who have money sitting in sterling in British bank account for trips to England or the North, the reality is if you are still going to use sterling in that manner then that’s fine. But if you aren’t using it then you should think about bringing it back.
Essentially you are holding money in a foreign currency and that is actually a bet. People don’t see it as a bet but now more than ever we don’t know what way the pound is going to go. You could make a fortune on that bet or you could lose a fortune on that bet — and most people don’t need or want to take the risk.
If you are concerned about losing out by converting it to euro, there is another way you can do it. The big Irish banks here can give you a sterling bank account so you can bring your money back to an Irish bank account and hold it in sterling and not take the exchange rate. And people aren’t aware of that.
As the Brexit deal has just been done, we are still unsure what will happen if you have a sterling bank account but that will likely become apparent in the next few weeks.
What I would say is the British government has too much to lose by shaking confidence in their banks. So in six months time is your money going to be locked away in a British bank account never to be seen again? No, I don’t have that fear at all. But will there be more paperwork to factor in and will it be a nuisance to you? Probably.
SAVE ON PAYDAY
If you are still earning the same wage but not commuting and yet you haven’t been able to save money then you have a problem. I often talk about Parkinson’s law, which says that if you have an hour to cut the grass it takes an hour. If you have three hours to cut the grass it takes three hours.
The same goes for your wages — if you earn €100,000 a year you spend €100,000. If you earn €300,000 a year you spend €300,000. Your lifestyle expands to the income that you have. In a year where we haven’t had the same opportunities to go out, it is a real effort to spend like you have done before the pandemic. So I would say to you - put the laptop away and stop buying things online as that is the only way you are managing this.
If you are finding that even though you are stuck at home, you are still spending money then you need to start taking your money away from yourself as soon as you get paid. Take the amount you want to save out and put it to one side.
I look at it like rocks and sand in a jar — when you get paid, the rocks are the things like your mortgage, your car loans and your bills, and the sand is the discretionary spending, the new clothes and the nights out. Most people get paid and pour a whole pile of sand into their jar and then start to put the rocks in and they don’t all fit. If you flip that around and the minute you get paid, do your savings and all the rocks first then you know y ou c an s pend what’s left guilt-free.
■ How To Be Good With Money returns to RTÉ One on Thursday at 8.30pm and Eoin’s book of the same name is out now. See prosperous.ie