The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
My Cold War mission: to get Bacon to Moscow
From bubble baths to Soho benders, and beyond how my friendship with the great painter led to a wild political gamble in 1988 –
Francis Bacon looked at me over his linguine. “Oh yes, I should like to have a show in Moscow. What a marvellous idea. I love Russia.” I was so surprised that all I could manage to say was, “You love Russia?” “When I was younger, I met two Russian sailors in Berlin, they were very good to me.” He looked up and away with a characteristic private smile.
It was 1987, and we were in the Italian restaurant on the corner of Dean Street and Romilly Street that everyone in Soho called the Trat. In the mid-1980s, before the internet, before smartphones and social media, it was over tables like these that the art world exchanged its ideas. The people in the circle surrounding Francis Bacon were all champion champagne drinkers – usually at his expense – but sometimes even they had to eat. So we were at the Trat – or “Mario and Franco’s La Trattoria Terrazza” – which had been the trendy place to go in the 1960s, when you might have seen the Beatles, Brigitte Bardot, Michael Caine, David Bailey and even Princess Margaret tucking into some pasta. By now, it was a little run-down, and we were put in a gloomy alcove surrounded by gurgling pipes.
I was only 32, but I had known Bacon since my childhood. My grandmother lived in East Anglia, near Dickie Chopping, illustrator (to my great excitement) of the Bond novels, and his partner Denis Wirth-Miller, who would often bring their friend Bacon to my grandmother’s house. Once, the three of them came into the bathroom when I was having a bubble bath. Bacon had a camera and took a photo of me. No one in our household seemed scandalised by this, even though a prevalent view at the time was that all gay men must be paedophiles. “Well, I trusted them completely,” my mother explained to an outraged friend.
My family had nicknamed me Rawhide, after the TV series I loved. Bacon was very amused by this (I was thrilled to receive a letter from him addressed to Rawhide) and treated me like a favoured nephew. From adolescence, I spent a lot of time in his company, on trains to East Anglia, then on benders around Soho, conspiring with him in the sticky corners of the Colony Room. By 1983, I had my own gallery, at the far, very unfashionable end of the King’s Road, where boozed-up Chelsea fans would stick their heads in and ask, “What’s this f---ing s---, then?”
And now, three years later, I had just told Bacon about my trip to Moscow: how exciting it was to be engaging with a world that was vast, insular and totalitarian, but seemingly eager to open up. “You know, James,” the fixer Sergei Klokov had told me there, “if Mr Bacon made a show in Moscow, I’m sure the queues will be bigger than those for Lenin’s tomb. People have not seen a Western artist here, especially a famous one. If Bacon were to come, it would be a big sign for the whole world to see: ‘Look, perestroika is working, we’re not going back to how it used to be.’ The whole country would come.”
The trouble was, I could hardly think of a less Soviet-friendly artist. Bacon did not have a communist bone in his body. He dreaded the thought of a collective ideology. He had said that Picasso was “the reason I paint”, but shared none of his hero’s Left-wing politics. Francis would dread proletarian rule. A workers’ state would spell the end of the art world as he knew it, and the good things that he enjoyed so much. His most outrageous public act – booing Princess Margaret as she sang at a society ball in 1949 – had been driven by aesthetic distress, not anti-royalist anger. “Her singing really was too awful,” he had said.
His only close experience of revolution, or of revolutionaries, had come in his childhood at the family’s “big house” outside Dublin, where he lifted the corner of a curtain to watch shadows in the grounds. These were the IRA men who might burn the family out at any moment and who occasionally gathered on the edge of the lawn to make their point. Although I felt his art was universal, Bacon’s life was dedicated to individualism. He had no interest in a collective enterprise.
“I don’t think Francis is very sympathetic to the cause, Sergei,” I had told Klokov. “He may call Margaret Thatcher a silly cow, but he still votes for her.” “That is perfect, James,” he had replied. “We all like Mrs Thatcher now. Gorbachev has said so!”
Back at the Trat, I told Bacon how every artist in Moscow had invoked his name, which I could tell delighted him. “They would like you to come, Francis,” I said. “The Russians want you to have an exhibition in Moscow. They’re serious.” Bacon, it turned out, was serious, too. He talked about the great Soviet filmmaker Sergei
Eisenstein, and how he had used images from the films Strike and Battleship Potemkin in his work, particularly the famous screaming woman with broken spectacles. He seemed annoyed when I rang him the next day to check if he was still keen. “James, I REALLY want to have an exhibition in Moscow.”
A week later, John Edwards, the working-class East Ender who had become Bacon’s best friend and confidant, came into the gallery and told me “Eggs” – as in “eggs and bacon” – was upstairs in the Colony Room and keen to talk more about Moscow. Bacon was, in his words, “chuffed” with the whole idea. He gave me the signed proposal letter that Klokov had requested, and we drank champagne to celebrate. I felt a sense of absolute elation.
Our exhibition was, of course, a matter of international politics, although I didn’t fully realise it then. There was a Cold War going on, and I would soon learn that Bacon and I were part of a much bigger game being played out between the West and Moscow.
At that time, no one had a clue that 70 years of Communist Party rule were coming to an end. Brezhnev had died in 1982, but his brooding presence was more real to us than Gorbachev, newly instated; to most people, perestroika and glasnost were still just catchphrases. In our collective consciousness, they had yet to replace our vision of a dictator state with its KGB and its gulags.
Even someone like me, more interested in art than politics, had noticed in September 1985 when the British government had accused 25 Soviet diplomats and trade officials of espionage and expelled them. The Soviet agents had been exposed when Oleg Gordievsky defected to the West. Twenty-five British diplomats were chucked out of the Soviet Union in retaliation. Even as they were packing their cases, other British institutions were looking to find ways back into positions of influence in Moscow. Among them was the British Council, founded in 1934 for the dissemination of British culture and the English language for political ends.
“Don’t worry, James,” Klokov had said. “Francis Bacon, in Moscow. Imagine!”
I had been heedless at the start of this adventure about the practicalities. I didn’t need the permission of the British government to take Bacon to Moscow, but I had run some estimates and I was beginning to understand the huge costs involved. Transportation and insurance would run to hundreds of thousands of pounds alone, and our gallery had no money. I realised that the next step was to approach Bacon’s gallery, the Marlborough. I needed him to introduce me formally, but Bacon airily brushed aside any suggestions of a meeting: “Don’t worry, James, I’ll talk to them.”
I spent as much time with Edwards as I did with Bacon, and I knew he was an ally in the Moscow trip – he really wanted to go – but he didn’t want to get involved in the toing and froing with the Marlborough. I also found myself wondering about the intricacies and mysteries of their relationship, about who was beholden to whom.
The great love of Bacon’s life had been George Dyer, a petty criminal from the East End, who had overdosed in Paris in 1971. John Edwards was from a similar mould as Dyer, but less troubled. The son of an East End dock worker who had previously been a champion boxer, he was severely dyslexic and could barely read or write. Dyslexia was not properly understood before the 1980s and, as a consequence, John was very poorly educated. Bacon was quite capable of drawing attention to this. On one occasion, the three of us were having lunch in Wiltons on Jermyn Street, in the heart of London clubland, and Bacon passed the menu to Edwards. As he couldn’t read, Edwards had barely scanned it. Watching him carefully, Bacon asked, “What do you like the look of, John?”
It was a cruel tease for him to play, but Edwards, to his credit, bluffed his way through. “I think I might have bangers and mash.” “But that’s not on the menu, John.” “Well, it looks like it is.” And so Bacon had the kitchen make bangers and mash specially.
At the end of one evening, Edwards and I briefly shared a taxicab. He leant forward to the driver and asked, “Do you know who I am?” “Sorry, mate, no idea,” said the driver. “I’m John Edwards.” “Whatever you say, mate.” “The John Edwards that Francis Bacon paints.” “That who paints?” “He’s a famous artist,” I said. “And we are going to Moscow.” “Moscow,” said the driver. “That’ll be something.” “Yes,” said Edwards, now looking at me. “It f---ing will.”
Finally, on November 24, after an introduction by Bacon, in some trepidation I went to talk to Valerie Beston, who represented him at the Marlborough Gallery. There was another person present, Muriel Wilson – a collector in her own right, and an early supporter of Peter Blake, David Hockney and Eduardo Paolozzi. She was also, Wilson mentioned in passing, here as a representative of the British Council.
I told them of the hunger for Bacon’s paintings in Moscow; how the artists called him “the great Francis Bacon”, even though they had only seen his work reproduced in battered Western art magazines, so rare and precious they were passed around from hand to hand until they fell to bits.
‘If Mr Bacon made a show here, the queues would be bigger than for Lenin’s tomb’
When I finished, there was a brief silence before Beston said calmly: “OK, we’ll do this exhibition.”
There were just two more questions. Who would guarantee the insurance for the show, and who would pay to get the pictures to Moscow? “I think,” said Wilson, “that is where the British Council might just be able to help out.” 1987, an uncharacteristically terse Klokov rang up: “James, I need Francis Bacon’s passport number.” “Why?”
“Then I can arrange a flight for him. He must come to Moscow soon, before the show. So we can have preliminary talks.”
“With whom?” I asked.
“I need Francis to meet all the officials. They must see that he is not a decadent Western monster.”
“I don’t think Francis would like to do that.”
I was right, Bacon said he did not want to do that. “Why do I have to go?” he demanded in the querulous voice I knew well. “John can go instead of me.” I was almost tempted to tell him the truth, “It’s so they can double-check that you are not a decadent Western monster.” Luckily, that uncomfortable prospect was averted when Klokov reported that Francis Bacon had been deemed well-known enough not to have to go through the Moscow vetting in person.
Bacon’s genius came with particular drawbacks. He didn’t like being propelled in a certain direction. He was a creature of whim, able to change his mind at any moment. He could be totally unbiddable if he chose, and would see offence where none was intended.
I suspected that his occasional petulant behaviour was a defence mechanism, employed to deflect attention from the interior Bacon, the workings of his mind, the bit that really mattered. He remained fascinated by other people and their stories, and he had the most beautiful manners. As Desmond Morris once put it, “None of his painted figures share the twinkle in the eye, the ready smile, or the joyous laughter for which he was renowned in his social circle.”
Being allowed to visit the inner sanctum of Bacon’s flat at Reece Mews in South Kensington was a final sign that you had been
admitted into the very heart of Bacon’s life, yet on first arrival it was unprepossessing. The ground floor was a garage given over to storage and a washing machine. To reach the flat above, you had to clamber up an almost perpendicular staircase. There was a rope on one side that Bacon used to pull himself up, and an iron handrail on the other. I wondered how many times he must have attempted this operation while under the influence of drink.
At the top of the stairs was a little lavatory and then the mad clutter of his studio, which I occasionally glimpsed. It looked as if a skip full of rags and paint had been dumped willy-nilly into a small room. Bacon didn’t use a palette, he used doors and the walls to mix his colour. The size of the paintings was governed by the dimensions of that paintsplattered studio door; anything even an inch bigger would not be able to leave the studio. Canvases were made to measure accordingly.
Along a tiny corridor was his bedroom and living room combined: it contained a table with piles of books – Bacon read voraciously, anything from Aeschylus to Robert Carrier cookbooks – and a round mirror, possibly from his early London days as a furniture designer, cracked as a result of a lovers’ tiff with George Dyer. In his bedroom there was a small bed, at the end of which were the oxygen tanks. There was also a galley kitchen on one side and a bathtub opposite. Small wonder that Bacon liked to eat out.
I returned to Moscow in June 1988 to measure up the galleries for
Bacon. In some respects, flying to Moscow was like going to prison and not knowing if you would ever get out. Our tour guide took away our passports and our return tickets, which were only to be given back on the day of our departure.
But in Russia things were changing. Since my last visit, the posters in the streets of Moscow were no longer about fighting imperialism, but about fighting alcoholism, according to Klokov, who translated as we drove. “The wife and children are asking tearfully, stop before it is too late!” Perestroika and glasnost were picking up pace. Gorbachev had begun the liberalisation of the economy, allowing small businesses to open as long as they were run as co-operatives. It was the first private enterprise activity since Lenin’s New Economic Policy in 1923, Klokov told me. There would be elections in 1989, to a new congress of people’s deputies, and the process of the congress would be broadcast live and uncensored.
Klokov brought his beautiful friend Elena Khudiakova, with whom I had fallen a little in love, to lunch. “What will Bacon do in Moscow? He will want to meet prestigious people,” she said.
“I don’t think Francis will want to do that at all,” I laughed.
“Then what will he do?” Khudiakova demanded.
“He wants to look at the Rembrandts in the Hermitage with his friend John.”
“His boyfriend?”
“Yes, I suppose so. Is that a problem? I know it’s illegal here.”
Khudiakova said “Pfft!” and flicked the problem aside with a swatting gesture. “It’s not issue,” she declared. “It’s easier for these men. Being gay is fashionable in Moscow. There is a big men’s room at a railway station where they all go for sex.” “A cottage?”
“A cottage, James?” Khudiakova looked quizzical. “Like a dacha?”
The exhibition was finally scheduled for September 22, 1988. As it approached, my mood was touched by the chill of fear. Trouble was brewing. At my suggestion, Bacon had written a short introduction for the exhibition catalogue that acknowledged the influence of Eisenstein. The journalist David Sylvester, who considered himself an authority on Bacon, was furious that he hadn’t been invited to write a second essay for the catalogue, and started to put – as one of Bacon’s East End boyfriends might have said – the frighteners on him.
“You’re very wealthy now,” he must have whispered in Bacon’s ear. “You might get kidnapped.” And what was unsaid but implied: “Fear might bring on an asthma attack.”
I had known asthma would be one of the added complications of getting Bacon to Moscow. He hated smoking, though he continued to drink to excess in ill-ventilated bars and breathed in paint and whitespirit fumes every day, and lived in fear of a fatal attack. But his doctor had agreed to come with him to Russia, bringing oxygen.
Then, on August 19, Edwards rang me with the news I most dreaded. Bacon no longer wanted to go to the USSR. The work of two years was starting to unravel.
Officially, said Edwards, Bacon’s excuse was asthma – but the truth was that, alongside Sylvester’s prophecy of doom, he had also been seething about the amount of official engagements the British Council were asking him to undertake in Moscow. This was their moment, and Bacon was their man – they wanted to make the most of it, with tea at the embassy, photo ops with Soviet officials, and interviews with the world press. It was a chance for the British Council to re-enter the exciting political space that Russia had become, but their charmless demands on Bacon had had dire consequences.
The next time I saw him was at the Groucho. It was a starry gathering of British artists; Peter Blake, Joe Tilson and Bridget Riley were there. Edwards and Bacon arrived and, to my relief, it was as if nothing had gone awry. They whisked me out to dinner. Edwards handed me an envelope from Francis and inside was a cheque for £3,000, money for me to look after Edwards, who would be officially representing Bacon in Moscow.
Bacon was already looking beyond the exhibition and talking to me about the sense of failure he felt about paintings that he had abandoned, or ambitions that had not been fulfilled. Another night, soon after, he revealed that he wanted to be a sculptor, and to make films. He was a great admirer of
Andy Warhol’s Flesh, and thought Warhol’s films were better than his paintings. “There are still so many things I want to do, James.”
Conversely, in losing my professional claim on him, I seemed to have got closer to him. Perhaps this was my compensation for his nonattendance in Moscow.
On September 18, Francis told The Sunday Times: “It is a great disappointment. If it wasn’t for this bloody asthma, I would be over there. I had been looking forward to it. Everything was closed up after 1917. It would have been fascinating to see the country now.”
On September 21, I was invited for breakfast, to collect Edwards and say goodbye to Bacon, who cooked us eggs and bacon. On my way out, I saw that his suitcases were still packed and waiting by the front door, as if he was expecting to overcome his own fear and come with us. I felt a wave of disappointment. “I’m sure you’ll have a marvellous time.”
Since my last visit, Moscow had changed yet again. Soviet citizens were now free to travel the world. (Free, that is, if they had connections abroad.) But other things had worsened. In Moscow, food was beginning to run out and basics such as butter and coffee were almost impossible to obtain. When the show opened, one embittered Moscow wit would write in the visitors’ book, “We want bacon, not Francis Bacon.”
Edwards was delighted with the appearance of his portrait on the catalogue cover. “Oi, James,” he said, when I met him in his Moscow hotel, “there are posters of me all over the shop!” Together we trawled the department store GUM, the Harrods of Moscow, even though it was empty; then John exchanged a large jar of caviar in an underpass in return for two packets of condoms, a perennially scarce resource in Moscow.
On the morning of the exhibition, we arrived to find a long queue outside. Edwards saw it and whistled. “F---ing hell, James, I think Francis is going to be a sell-out.” As I passed Klokov, he reached out to me. “Ah, James, I was right all along,” he said. “The queues are longer than those for Lenin’s mausoleum.”
In Moscow, food was running out. A visitor to the show wrote, ‘We want bacon, not Bacon’
Bacon in Moscow by James Birch with Michael Hodges (Cheerio, £17.99) is out now. Francis Bacon: Man and Beast is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London W1 (royalacademy.org. uk) from Saturday to April 17