He Was Mostly Wonderful, But His Shenanigans Could Be a Pain in the Arse

’The Power and the Passion’ by Peter Conrad, The Observer, Sunday 10 August 2008

I saw Francis Bacon once in passing 30 years ago, on the gilt and velvet staircase at the Royal Opera House. Even if I hadn’t known who he was - the most celebrated painter of his time, all the more famous for the diabolical whiff of sulphur exuded by his alcoholic binges, his homosexual promiscuity and his voluptuous taste for pain - I would have found him unforgettable.

His face was a painting. Boot polish had been applied to his teased hair, with a quizzical wisp of a fringe fixed over his forehead; a thick application of make-up gave his cheeks a feverish heat. His eyes kept watch from inside asymmetrical craters, mementoes of drunken tumbles or of beatings administered by the East End bruisers with whom he consorted. His smile showed off teeth scoured with Vim, and inside his oddly circular mouth his tongue darted as if it were a lizard jabbing at its prey. He looked eruptive, like the popes who scream on their thrones in his early paintings.

As the novelist Paul Bowles wrote, Bacon’s head always seemed liable ’to burst from internal pressures’. Or perhaps that head was likely to liquefy, melted like wax by some combustible fantasy within. I could imagine a puddle of boot polish, mascara, rouge and granulated ammonia on the plush Covent Garden carpet.

After a few more years of furious creativity by day and self-destructive indulgence by night, Bacon died of a heart attack in 1992 in Madrid. As his centenary approaches, oligarchs and arms dealers compete for possession of paintings in which feral, rutting men and mutant women reel through life in a mood of what Bacon thought of as tragic gaiety, exhilarated by their lack of hope: last May, Roman Abramovich broke the record for contemporary art auctions by spending $86 million on Triptych, 1976.

A few surviving acolytes and cronies - veterans of stupefied afternoons in Soho clubs, resilient victims of Bacon’s vitriolic temper - cling to their memories of revelling with him, though as time goes on it becomes harder to separate the man from the mythic figure he has become. The French critic Michel Leiris likened Bacon to a pantheon of legendary heroes: Orestes guiltily pursued by the furies, Hamlet grappling with a censorious ghost, Don Juan driven by sexual demons.

Hoping to demythologise him, I talked to two fellow artists he encouraged, Peter Beard and Michael Clark; to his biographer Michael Peppiatt, who was a 19-year-old student when they first met in 1963; and to the Irish photographer John Minihan, who, after snapping Bacon in 1971 outside a magistrate's court where he was facing a trumped-up drugs charge, became obsessed with documenting his irregular existence. What I found was that even those who knew Bacon well were unsure who or what he was: a human being or a self-fashioned artefact? A bilious ogre or a suffering god?

Francis Bacon with Michael Peppiatt
 

As Peppiatt recalled: ’Francis used to say, ”I’m the most artificial person you’ll ever meet.” He followed the example of an old whore in Paris, who said to him, ”Je me fais jeune” - I make myself young.’ ’He did a lot of work on himself,’ Clark agreed, hinting that Bacon's jowls had been tidied away by cosmetic surgery. Peppiatt likened him to a devil, an irresistible tempter, and Clark described him as a phantom, a noctambulant wanderer noiselessly circulating on crêpe-soled shoes. ’I’d say he was a sacred monster,’ smiled Minihan. ’He was Prometheus,’ said Beard, ’with the eagle picking at his liver every day. He had a mantra that he got from Nietzsche. He was always repeating it: ”Since everything’s so meaningless, we might as well be extraordinary.”’


One thing they don’t deny is Bacon’s centrality to their lives. ’I had my best times with Fran,’ Beard told me. ’The drunker he got, the more sense he made.’ ’That was a life-determining encounter for me,’ said Peppiatt about buttonholing Bacon in a Soho pub to interview him for a Cambridge student journal. ’Francis immediately became essential to you, like an addiction. It was so exciting, so exalted to be with him.’


’I love talking about him,’ Minihan burbled, before leading me off on a nostalgic tour of Bacon’s South Kensington haunts - the mews studio where he painted in a swamp of composted squalor, the cornershop where he bought his smoked salmon, the automated booth in the tube station where he took the grimacing photographs he used for his self-portraits, the bus stop where he was patiently standing when Minihan saw him for the last time.

Francis Bacon with John Minihan

In all these relationships, adoration was mixed with anxiety, even dread. Valerie Beston, the Marlborough Gallery employee who looked after Bacon's chaotic business affairs, once said to Peppiatt, ’I can't think of a worse fate than being loved by Francis.’ An early partner, Peter Lacy, fantasised about keeping Bacon chained to the wall and buggering him with a gang of accomplices; when they split up, Lacy sullenly drank himself to death in Tangier.

Bacon’s East End boyfriend George Dyer, a petty crook whose intimates included the Kray twins, died in 1971 of an overdose of sleeping pills in a Paris hotel two days before the opening of Bacon's retrospective show at the Grand Palais: the doomed relationship is the subject of John Maybury’s 1998 film Love is the Devil, with Daniel Craig as the befuddled Dyer and Derek Jacobi as an evilly epicene Bacon. Clearly, Bacon was dangerous to know.

For both Peppiatt and Clark, to enter the dives he frequented was like descending into an underworld, a realm of arduous tests and trials where young lads were despoiled of their innocence. Or perhaps it was a dizzier, more vertical rite, climbing into a rarified atmosphere of bohemian decadence.

Clark remembered the staircase that led up to the studio in Reece Mews, with a rope to clutch instead of a banister. ’It was as steep as a ladder, and so narrow that his paintings had to be squeezed out with not an inch to spare, so the edges always got scuffed. He’d leave the downstairs door open for me. I’d haul myself up with one hand on the rope,  preparing for some great experience when I got to the top.’

The initiation could be hazardous. Peppiatt was at first rebuffed by Bacon’s pet photographer John Deakin, who flapped his wrist and - using the feminine pronouns that were obligatory for Bacon's camp courtiers - said ’Oh no dear, she’s become so famous she wouldn’t deign to meet a student!’ In 1977 Muriel Belcher, the dragon-like proprietor of the Colony Room in Soho, told Clark he was a ’cheeky cunt’ when he gatecrashed her drinking club; another of Bacon's witchy guardians said, ’You’re too young and pretty, you’ll need to get your face bashed in a bit before my daughter takes an interest in you’.

’I was a bit naïve,’ Clark primly added. ’Valerie arranged for me to make a portrait of Francis, but I wasn’t a lackey - maybe that’s why he trusted me.’

’Yes, I was playing with fire,’ Peppiatt admitted. ’There was always some foreboding when I went to meet him, I knew I'd be X-rayed down to the bone. You remember in that South Bank Show when he keeps on pouring out red wine and says to Melvyn Bragg ”Are you real?”. You can feel Bragg flinching off-camera. Francis probed you like that, but it was more fun than studying for my Cambridge exams. I suppose he was attracted to me: he liked the challenge of a strapping young heterosexual. But I felt protected by him, never exploited. With George Dyer, it was trickier. He enjoyed the idea of luring me out of my respectable background into something criminal.’

Peppiatt brilliantly mimicked Dyer's adenoidal, glottal-stopped cockney grunt: ’”Fuckin’ college boys, ain’t got the guts for a proper job.” He dared me to turn up at some midnight rendezvous to rob a house or something. I was there on the dot, it was George who didn’t keep the date! Francis had a subtler way of corrupting people. He loved to be ripped off, he’d leave bundles of money lying round to see if the rough trade he picked up took the bait - and they always did. He wanted to prove people to be rotten, himself included. ”Rotten to the core,” he’d say about himself, and he said it with pleasure and a kind of pride.’

Knowing Bacon enabled Peppiatt to walk on the wild side, trifling with illegality; for Clark - a fey, slightly haunted character, who told me in a paranoid whisper that he was ’breaking silence for the first time after 30 years’ by discussing Bacon - the experience was an induction into mysteries that resembled the arcane ceremonies of a religious cult. ’He gave me access to everywhere in the studio. There’d be underwear strung up to dry in the bathroom, and frying pans full of pigment in the kitchen. For me, it was like those labs where the alchemists conducted their experiments - a cabbalistic place. There was a charm on the door, a secret symbol to warn that you were entering somewhere hallowed. He had a mirror that was smashed when someone threw an ashtray at it; it was pitted all over, and the silver backing had corroded. It was a black mirror, like seers use. It didn’t reflect reality, it showed you visions. You can say it’s all hocus-pocus, but what Francis did was esoteric: he was playing with very powerful, violent forces when he made those images.’

Peppiatt too acknowledges that he was ’spellbound’ during his time with Bacon. Hero-worship usually compensates for some psychological need in the eager worshipper, and in Peppiatt’s case, as he said, ’Francis was a father-substitute. I didn’t get on well with my actual father, and here was this charming, devious replacement. In return he told me about his problems with his own father. He hated him, yet felt sexually attracted to him. And Eddie Bacon so despised this effeminate son that he got the stablehands on their horse-breeding farm in Ireland to flog Francis to toughen him up! Trust Francis to combine pleasure with pain by having affairs with the grooms who were told to whip him.’

The lurid Oedipal scenario may explain one of Beard’s reminiscences. ’Fran loved his Shakespeare, and he was always reciting that song from The Tempest, ”Full fathom five thy father lies, / Of his bones are coral made”. ’It sounds like a joyfully lyrical revenge, on behalf of wishfully patricidal boys. Yet when Peppiatt’s father died, Bacon was tenderly solicitous. ’He took me out to dinner to console me, and we ended up at Annabel’s having a second supper at one in the morning. ”Why don't you dance?” he said, but I told him I didn't feel like it. So he went over and told a girl I’d had an eye on that I was too shy to ask her to dance. He pimped for me! When we got on to the dance floor, I looked around and he’d gone - he’d left me to enjoy myself. That was so healing: it reintroduced me to the fun of life.’

While Bacon supplied Peppiatt with an alternative father, to the homesick Minihan he represented a lost fatherland. ’I was born in Dublin, like Francis, though his family was grand and mine didn’t have a pot to piss in. My mother went off to England and gave me to her sister to be reared. Francis was sent away by his father when he was 16; a friend of the family took him to Berlin, so he completed his education in the gay bars and cabarets that Auden and Isherwood went to. I was even younger when I escaped. I left school at 11, came to London and got a job as an office boy in Fleet Street. You could say I finished school at El Vino!

’It wasn't fashionable to be Irish in London in the 1970s, as the IRA were blowing the place up, but I always wanted to photograph my own people; I was working for the Evening Standard in the Seventies and I volunteered to go to the magistrate’s court because they told me some Irish painter was up on a cannabis charge. That’s all I knew about him. He let me take his photograph, and after they acquitted him - it was Dyer who planted the drugs and tipped off the police after some tiff they’d had - we walked off to Soho together. He was very gracious and kind, that was one of his Irish qualities.’

Bacon’s grace and hospitable generosity are evident in Minihan’s photographs of him squiring William S Burroughs around town: upstaged for once in his life, he fusses over his frail, bewildered companion. Minihan’s photographs also capture a sociable exhibitionism that counteracts tales about Bacon’s maniacal rages and his morbid gloom.

Francis Bacon by Michael Clark

Michael Clark’s portraits of Bacon emphasise the sad preoccupation of his sagging face, with eyes deep in concussed hollows grimly contemplating mortality; Minihan’s Bacon, by contrast, looks quite different: dapper, dandified, irrepressibly larky. In one photograph, he preens in a PVC mac, no doubt relishing the snug feel of the female panties and fishnet stockings that he customarily wore as undergarments. 'Ah yes,’ said Minihan, ’that’s Francis throwing me some shapes, as we say in Ireland. He loved clothes, and so did I. He liked to pose and swagger when he had something fancy to show off, just like Oscar Wilde with his green carnation.’

Perhaps there was more to this fashionable flaunting than Minihan suspected. ’His clothes were always so tight,’Peppiatt remembered. ’Pegged trousers, leather jackets with epaulettes, those belted macs - he liked the sense of constriction, as if he was in bondage. And he wore a necklace that was so tight it often seemed to be choking him.’

Clark also recalled the choker, and wondered whether it had anything to do with the self-asphyxiating games of those who seek the perfect orgasm. In Bacon’s paintings, a live, captive being often writhes in a steel cage; he created the same agonised entrapment for himself when he got dressed. The fetishistic gear also disciplined him. His afternoons and nights may have been devoted to the sloppy satisfaction of desire, but his mornings in the studio were a triumph of the strict, self-punishing will. Peter Beard noticed Bacon's weakness for uniforms made from animal skins and polished to a high shine, and drew the obvious conclusion: ’Fran sure as hell loved the Third Reich!’ Bacon once gave a figure he painted a swastika armband; he disingenuously claimed that he liked the crooked shape and had no interest in what it signified.

Francis Bacon in the Claude Bernard by John Minihan

Minihan, chatting to Bacon about home, enrolled him in his own nostalgic psychodrama. ’My great ambition was to introduce Francis to Samuel Beckett, so I could photograph the meeting of two great Irish exiles. But Beckett was a recluse, and eluded me for years. And Francis wasn’t keen, he said he couldn't see what the two of them had in common: he was nervous of meeting someone whose view of things was even bleaker than his own. I suppose it’s true that he'd listen to me rattle on about Ireland, without contributing much himself. Most of what he said about it was dismissive. In 1977 I showed him some photographs of a wake that lasted  two days and three nights in a village in the west of Ireland. I was so proud of this work: it was a family of Beckett characters, and the whole thing demonstrated, like Bacon’s paintings, that death is the only reality. But Francis screeched ”Aaargh!” and looked away. He didn’t like the photographs, but wouldn’t give a reason. He was consumed by himself, in his own world.’

Like all who knew Bacon, Minihan had come up against a barrier, concealed by his boozy conviviality. Peppiatt’s biography is subtitled Anatomy of an Enigma. When I asked Peppiatt what the enigma was, he immediately replied, ’His secretiveness. He had an almost magical gift for slipping away, for suddenly becoming someone else. And if you got too close, he warned you off by turning nasty.’

The pub crawls, the sessions in casinos, even the bouts of sadomasochistic sex were all a diversion and an evasion. Bacon was only himself when he was alone in his studio, accompanied by the private incubi he painted. Even if he was painting a friend or a lover, he worked from photographs and debarred the living model: his solitude could not be shared, and the secrets of the image-making that contorted and even crucified reality were never imparted.

’No one was allowed to see him at work,’ Peter Beard remembered. ’The process had to remain out of sight. Once when he was drunk he spilled a bit too much. He said he added texture by sweeping up the mess on the studio floor and blowing it on to the wet painting: it was a kind of blow job! Then he got annoyed with me, because he regretted telling me.’

Michael Clark saw the shutters drop when, invited to look at a new painting, he noticed a patch of pastel and asked Bacon how he had fixed it. ’There was a pause, then he said ”By the usual method”. He wasn’t about to give away a technical tip; I realised I'd gone too far.’

Confronted by this disappearing act, Bacon’s friends were free to see him as whoever they wanted him to be, or as an ideal projection of themselves. This, I found, had happened to Bacon in the befogged memory of Peter Beard. ’My mind is fucked,’ bawled Beard when I arrived to talk to him in Cassis, the resort near Marseille where he lives in a seaside villa. ’It’s my attention deficit disorder - and the drink! Hey, that reminds me, can I get a kir? Then I can claim I was drunk during the interview. You gotta try one too, it’s the local specialty.’

While waiting for his solicitous young wife to bring the sweet blackcurrant cocktail, he ripped open a can of beer, chomped on a steak sandwich known as an Al Capone, and treated me to a hallucinatory anecdote about leafing through a book of Bacon reproductions while on an LSD trip in New York during the 1960s.

’I’d recommend it,’ he said. ’When you’re full of the magic mushroom, you can see all those clouds of gaseous, tumultuous air that Fran painted.’ Had I come to the south of France, I wondered, to talk about Bacon, or to meet Bacon’s staggering reincarnation?

Beard, now 70, inherited a fortune from a clan of American railway entrepreneurs; he spent his youth cavorting with supermodels and rock bands, and possesses the eroded remains of a handsome profile that Bacon often painted. When not lolling beside the Mediterranean, he lives on a property in East Africa, fondly named Hog Ranch. His Kenyan connections make him a Hemingwayesque character, boisterously virile - although, unlike Hemingway stalking big game, his obsession is protecting imperilled species rather than gunning them down.

As a photographer, Beard has documented the slaughter of elephants and rhinos, which he sees as rehearsals for our human fate. ’Yeah, mankind is doomed,’ growled Beard. ’I often talked to Fran about population dynamics, about how we were going the way of the elephants.’ I wasn’t sure about that meeting of minds: Bacon certainly thought that men were beasts, but he hardly shared Beard’s ecological conscience.

Nevertheless, Beard considers Bacon - whose mother and sisters moved to South Africa and Rhodesia after his father’s death, and who went on a photographic safari to Kruger Park in the early 1950s - to be an honorary African. ’He was always planning to come stay on the ranch in Nairobi. He never made it, but the realities in his paintings are primitive, primordial, so to me they evoke Africa. All that bleeding meat, and the dry grass: he's the greatest painter of grass, and it's African grass, not a wet English lawn.

’He was really into my dead elephants, and we had plans to collaborate on some sculptures. He was gonna mould the corpses and twist them over these immaculate chrome rails - he liked chrome because it reminded him of the car JFK was riding in when he was shot in Dallas - but there was a problem with the gallery in New York, some crap about keeping Brits out, and the dealer cancelled the show.’

Beard’s own work pays homage to Bacon's carnivorous art. On the roof of his Mediterranean villa samples of elephant blood coagulated in the sun, waiting to be smeared on photographic collages that include snapshots of Bacon, transcriptions of his talk, and excerpts from Beard’s African diaries, speckled by vulture shit. Images, as in Bacon’s paintings, emerge from an abattoir, and paint - which Bacon once likened to the slimy track of a snail - is one of the fluids that spurt from a live, dying body. According to Beard, a thug Bacon once picked up in Monte Carlo stumbled into an unfinished painting in the middle of the night on the way to the bathroom. ’He decided he wanted to add something to it, so he whipped out his prick and jerked off on the canvas. You can still see the jism dripping down it. Fran didn’t mind sharing the credit!’

A tough guy himself, Beard attributes the same machismo to Bacon. ’I hate the way Derek Jacobi minces about in that movie. I never saw one homosexual bone in Fran's body!’ (At the very least, this counts as an original view.)

’He was strength on strength,’ bellowed Beard. ’He was the Rock of Gibraltar, the best of British. Hell, he wasn’t camp, the guy used to take a leak in the sink! One time when we were walking through Paris, a car ran over his foot. The driver jumped out to help, but Fran just shrugged like the stoic he was. Next day his foot was so swollen he could hardly walk: that's what Hemingway called grace under pressure. It's like Andy Warhol when he was shot in the guts by that nutty feminist [Valerie Solanas]. When they carried him out on the stretcher, all he said was ”Now don’t make me laugh!” Of course they were different guys. Andy was an idiot savant, but Fran was a fucking genius.’

Francis Bacon in his studio, 7 Reese Mews off the Old Brompton Road London (a painting later destroyed), Peter Beard, 1972

The genius was a generator, transmitting an electrical charge to those around him. ’Francis used to say that 99 per cent of people weren't activated,’ Michael Clark recalled. ’He switched you on.’

Near the end of our long lunch at Green’s, a fish restaurant in St James’s that Bacon often patronised, Peppiatt gave me an example of how this vitalising influence worked. A morose waiter brought us our coffee, then wearily retreated. ’You see what an automaton he is?’ asked Peppiatt. ’Francis would have twinkled at him, flirted with him, made him a player. I remember once in Paris he ordered, as usual, a ridiculously expensive bottle of wine. The waiter poured it out with tremendous care, and Francis offered him a glass. ”Oh no, monsieur,” he said, looking over his shoulder, ”la direction!” But Francis wouldn’t allow the management the right of veto. He gave the waiter a glass and told him to sneak into the kitchen with it and drink it later. After a while, the door from the kitchen opened, the waiter peeped out, raised the glass and toasted us. That was Francis: he created excitement, mostly by transgressing the rules. That’s what's missing from Love is the Devil. Jacobi doesn’t convey Francis’s geniality, his love of fun.’ Our waiter eventually returned with the bill, hoping to speed our departure; I decided to leave him unactivated.

Bacon could deactivate people just as abruptly. ’He thought that friendship gave people the right to lacerate each other,’ said Peppiatt. ’He did that to me once. He spent an entire night doing down Hockney, going on and on. ”Leave it alone,” I said. ”Well of course,” he shrieked back, ”you with your pathetic taste would think Hockney was worth something.” I told him off for it when he sobered up the next day.’

Beard witnessed another gratuitous outburst, directed at Jerry Hall during a party in a gay disco in Paris. ’I’d introduced Fran to Mick [Jagger] and that was fine, but when Jerry turned up he aimed this thunderball at her. ”You fucking old cow,” he said, ”you grotesque cunt, you hideous bloody witch.” He just wouldn’t stop; it was this wave of bad vibes. The rest of us went down into some dark pit behind the dancefloor and hid. You can imagine what was going on there, but it was better than being within range of Fran.’

When Bacon died, the critic David Sylvester paid him a provocative tribute. Quite apart from Bacon’s achievements as an artist, Sylvester described him as ’the greatest man I've known, and the grandest’, and listed his staunch moral virtues: honesty, generosity, courage.

’I think that's a bit solemn,’ said Peppiatt. ’He was mostly wonderful, but his shenanigans could be a pain in the arse. Yet he played up superbly, and he could be very suave when he took the piss. His rudeness was a by-product of his searing determination to tell the truth. He was a great possessor of people, and some of them were swallowed whole.’

Or else they swallowed Bacon whole and can still disgorge him on demand, which happened when Michael Clark staged a creepily vivid simulation of his antics in my London sitting room. Clark, channelling Bacon, primped his  forelock with a non-existent comb, and freshened his makeup with sideways glances at an imaginary pocket mirror. Having titivated himself, he then nimbly removed an unseen £50 note from his pocket to press it into an open, needy hand that supposedly belonged to Jeffrey Bernard. Groping towards a bar that wasn’t there, he wheeled across the floor in a re-enactment of Bacon’s swooping gait, which made him look like a dipsomaniac question mark. Clark, in common with Beard, thinks of Bacon as a shaman who painted in a state of trance; during this impersonation, Clark was the shaman who conjured Bacon up before me. The spectacle was ghoulish but somehow touching: by such performances, Bacon’s loyalists keep him alive.

Even in Bacon’s absence, his images retain their terrifying power, a vampirish capacity to imbibe life from those who look at them. For a while, Peppiatt had a portrait that Bacon gave him hanging above his desk. ’It stared at me, and I could never face it down. Nothing in the head had settled, there was unfinished business going on inside the frame. It was so incredibly alive, and it made me feel - how can I say this? - so static. It seemed to be asking me if I was real, and I never knew what to answer.’

Peppiatt eventually sold the painting, and ever since has felt an aching regret, combined with relief at having escaped its mute interrogation. The story sums up the impact of Bacon’s personality and his art. To know him was to be enraptured, to lose contact with the safe, stable norm; it made the rest of your existence, when you had to return to it, a mournful anticlimax.