Breakfast, lunch and sex with Lucian Freud

During daily visits to Clarke’s restaurant, “Mr Freud” entertained London’s glitterati, including his future memoirist Geordie Greig. The painter was the last true bohemian, he tells Nick Curtis
Lucian freud, taken from the book Breakfast with Lucian
GEORDIE GREIG
27 September 2013

For 15 years until his death aged 88 in 2011, Lucian Freud, the great and unsparing British painter of flesh and frailty, took breakfast and usually lunch at Sally Clarke’s eponymous restaurant, a short walk from his house on Kensington Church Street. “He started coming into our shop and just sat in the little café we had in the back,” says Clarke. “I don’t think I knew who he was. He came in a discreet way, usually with his assistant David Dawson, at about 7.30 every day — as soon as the paper shop opened and they could get their stack of three papers.” They read and talked while Freud devoured the milky coffee and huge pains aux raisin that fed his sweet tooth.

“As time went on other customers got to know who he was and his habits in terms of his timing, and there were perhaps certain times when he was being bothered,” Clarke continues, “so I invited him to use the restaurant, which was closed in the mornings before lunch and in the afternoons before dinner, so he could have some private space.” This table saw a vivid cross-section of life: famous sitters from Kate Moss to Leigh Bowery, the great and good gallerists and dealers of the art world, David Hockney and Frank Auerbach, Bono and Roman Abramovich, but also bookmakers, builders, a selection of Freud’s estimated 500 lovers and several of his 14 acknowledged children.

For 10 of those 15 years, a regular breakfast guest was Geordie Greig, the editor by turns of Tatler magazine, the Evening Standard and now the Mail on Sunday. Greig had been bewitched by Freud’s portraits, nude and clothed, as a 17-year-old schoolboy, and sought to coax the artist into print throughout his journalistic career. His persistence was eventually rewarded as a one-sided correspondence matured into a professional acquaintance and then a friendship across many years, many late-night phone calls, and many, many breakfasts.

Tken from the book, Breakfast with Lucian
GEORDIE GREIG

Although Freud was fiercely private he allowed Greig to take notes and later to record sessions, while he talked about painting and punch-ups, wives and lovers, escaping from Nazism or tattooing Kate Moss’s bottom. He disclosed his dislike of his mother and two brothers, his contempt for Prince Charles (as a painter, at least). These tapes, and subsequent startlingly frank interviews with several Freud family members, lovers and acquaintances, would result in Greig’s book, Breakfast with Lucian — “not a biography, but a portrait of the artist, an intimate snapshot of the last 10 years of his life, written with the benefit of immediacy”.

Greig first met Freud over breakfast. After years of writing to the artist he sent a postcard hinting at “a brilliant idea that I must discuss with you in person” and was summoned to Freud’s Holland Park studio at 6.45am. “There was this silhouette of a man in these paint-speckled butcher’s trousers and a wrinkled, rumpled shirt and crumpled silk scarf, and this eagle-like stare. It reminded me of Samuel Beckett. That intense scrutiny.” Greig entered a scene of “gilded chaos, the last gasp of bohemia” with spattered rags and paintings everywhere, and joined Freud in a breakfast of Burgundy and the carcass of yesterday’s partridge. He told Freud he’d like him to be in a portrait to be taken for Tatler of Frank Auerbach, his oldest artist friend and a fellow refugee from Hitler.

Lucian Freud taken from the book . Breakfast with Lucian
GEORDIE GREIG

Freud acceded, and the photograph was duly taken, over an offal-y breakfast at the Cock Tavern in Smithfield, again at 6.45am, after which Freud gave Greig a hair-raising lift home — “ignoring red lights, taking corners on a skid” — to west London. “The most extraordinary conversation took place,” Greig recalls. “Anecdotes and opinions, strong views and dislikes. I just thought this was the most riveting man I had ever met.

“What we first of all had in common was that my last girlfriend before I got married, when I was working in America, was his second wife Caroline Blackwood’s daughter. I used to see a lot of Caroline and we loved discussing Caroline. That led to us talking about the Forties. I was always interested in Ian Fleming’s books and his life, and Freud would regale me with stories of staying in Jamaica in the days of Fleming and Noël Coward. He started to call me at odd hours. During the second Blair election he would ring me up at 2.30 in the morning to ask who was winning, and talk about how he knew Eden, from there on to Churchill and [artist] Graham Sutherland. Without ever a sense of name-dropping. That [relationship] fused and merged until breakfast with him became a regular event.

Lucian Freud , taken from the book Breakfast with Lucian
GEORDIE GREIG

“It was a pure pleasure to be able to spend time with him. He was like the Forrest Gump of the cultural world of Britain in the last half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st — everyone seemed to cross his path, from Greta Garbo to WH Auden to Stephen Spender to the Krays to Kate Moss. There was something incredibly special about this mind that could recite nine stanzas of a Kipling poem, a bit of Goethe, or lyrics from a song he heard in the Merchant Navy in the Thirties. There was a crystallisation of incredible memories and hard opinions and humour, which made him the best company in the world.”

Good company, perhaps, but a feckless, selfish, sometimes cruel lover and father. Greig does not judge, but presents Freud as Freud presented his subjects: warts and all, as it were. The painter comes across like one of the stallions he so admired and lost so much money on, galloping through society, siring children hither and yon before hurtling off after the next filly. There is a plaintive, aching undertow of loss and rejection beneath the quotes of those of Freud’s children who spoke to Greig, even when they are defending their father. “He was straightforward in his candour,” says the author. “He was the most selfish person he could be, because he was an artist who pursued with absolute focus his desire to paint the best pictures he possibly could in the course of his lifetime.”

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The sexual affairs and betrayals are boggling in their scope and labyrinthine in their complexity, and were conducted without concern for feelings or propriety: the testimony of a lover who remembers him physically hurting her is heartbreaking. One sitter, Raymond Jones, recalls Freud breaking off from a nude sitting to shag an unnamed female visitor against the bathroom door, have a bath, then return to work, naked. You couldn’t call Freud indiscriminate: the lovers identified in the book are all beautiful, or exotic, or rich, or titled, or some combination of all four. And they were, it seems, all women. Although there is a frisson of ambivalence about a figure so recklessly carnal and heedless of boundaries, and a suggestion that he might have had an affair with Stephen Spender, Freud told a female friend the only man he ever wanted to have sex with was the jockey Lester Piggott.

Lucian Freud , from the book Breakfast with Lucian
GEORDIE GREIG

So much of his life was hectic: the painting, the rutting, the gambling, the feuding. No wonder he sought solace in a quiet breakfast. Sally Clarke always regarded him as a customer first and a friend second, and always called him “Mr Freud”, even though she sat for two paintings and an etching by him, and once drew her own portrait of him for a National Portrait Gallery postcard auction. “I kick myself for not keeping the one I did; it was a rather lovely little line drawing,” she says. “I did it over breakfast. He was fantastic as a subject but I couldn’t get the nose right.” She clearly misses Freud, although David Dawson still comes in for breakfast. “I see him every day,” says Clarke. “He was left Mr Freud’s house so he is slowly but surely moving in. He’s ripping the garden apart and he got into terrible trouble with the local council, I think, for felling a tree the other week.”

Freud’s passing did not just bring to an end a prodigious artistic career and an extraordinary life, but an era. His house is changing. Clarke’s has been remodelled; the place where he first sat in the café is now a ladies’ lavatory. Clarke herself will turn 60 next year, and is looking for a helpmeet-cum-successor to “take the reins” of the restaurant she has run for 24 years. The idea of what an artist, or a lover, or a father is has changed in today’s world. “It would be difficult to get away with a life of such self-imposed selfishness,” says Greig. “He didn’t allow the noise to get to him. Never had a mobile phone, never used a computer, and gave very few people his phone number so he could have seclusion. He was the last bohemian. It is difficult to imagine the life [now] of such drama, intent and serious ambition, with a desire to follow the path he needed to be Lucian Freud.”

Breakfast with Lucian is published by Jonathan Cape

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