Francis Bacon
"You'll all be sorry when I'm found lying in a pool of blood!" was the call from time to time by Francis Bacon in the afternoon drinking club The Kismet, known also as The Iron Lung, or Hell's Waiting Room, on the edge of Soho. John Deakin, photographer, turned to me at the bar and said: "She's off again!" It was not a cry for help, but a cry for attention, for Francis did like adulation and flattery about his paintings, and would say to anyone who dared to question his position in the hierarchy of great painters of the 20th Century: "When that old bitch Picasso dies, I'll be number one." John Deakin started to talk about his early photographs in Soho. There was one of Iron Foot Jack, the brace on his short leg, who started a restaurant with Derek Ingrey, an award winning novelist, as his waiter, and a menu with "everything's off -- but I can recommend the fish" and send Ingrey running to the fish and chip shop down the street for two cod and chips for some poor young couple who had thought it was a real resto. Francis Bacon interrupted his flow of words: "What's going on here, then?" and Deakin said: "Oh, shut up you old Queen. You're all jelly-bags because I'm talking to youngies..." "Did John Hurt leave?" he asked, ignoring Deakin. "Yes he's gone to do a voice-over." "Actors, novelists, musicians, painters," Bacon said, "Ninety eight percent of the people in this world stand around waiting for the other two percent to entertain them." John Neville made an appearance and we walked up to Gerry's bar in Shaftesbury avenue, another basement club for artists. At the foot of the stairs, John Hurt turned to Liz Gill and said: "Francis Bacon, John Neville, Peter Kinsley." Then the serious drinking started, Francis buying champagne with his usual shout, which dated back to the 18th century: "Champagne for my real friends. Real pain for my sham friends." He was annoyed, however, when the barman added Guinness to my champagne to make a "Black Velvet", took the champagne bottle and poured until the glass overflowed and soaked the carpet. Much later we had a fierce argument about subjective and objective writing.
Quote from Chapter 19, Bogged Down in County Lyric, Vol. III Memoirs: "(I) said Joyce had knocked Shakespeare for not writing a subjective work. Bacon kept burbling on about Racine, and saying Shakespeare had a greater understanding of humanity than Joyce, and I quoted Thoreau, requiring all writers to give an account of their own lives. I said parts of the subjective memoirs of Joyce were filched directly from Melville; and so we rambled on, drunk, until I crashed out and into a taxi for the Press Club, where I was refused a drink for not wearing a tie, and later, much later, fell off a bus in Dalston Garage"
Another Soho hang-out was Muriel Belcher's afternoon drinking club, The Colony Room, where Francis had once touted for Muriel, ("Get your bean-bag out, Lottie, and buy a drink") bringing in tourists and getting a percentage of the amount they spent. Bacon worked under a single electric light bulb in his tip of a studio and came into the West End to relax in the afternoons. He told me: "I don't like drinking with people who work." He did not mean working class people, for his friends were fellow painters, actors, writers and out of work waiters and barmen. He meant people who took their job into the bar with them, boasting of their brilliance in advertising and copywriting and journalism and commercial photography. Bacon was fascinated by extremely ugly people; one man with a twisted face, who was a bouncer and doorman at a Soho club, was sometimes used as a model for the painter, who was also very kind to down-and-outs. I met a woman in Ibiza who normally slept in the car park opposite the French Pub in Soho. Her name was Edna, known as Dreadna. She told me that her air fare and her holiday had been paid by Francis. He would invite tramps off the ramp to dine at Wheeler's restaurant, much to the annoyance of the snobs who ran it, but they liked him as a big spender. One night I was with Patrick Skene Catling and Stephen Constant (real name Danev) the Russian correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. Bacon invited us to Wheeler's.
Quote from Chapter 9, BOGGED DOWN IN COUNTY LYRIC, Vol. III, Memoirs: "At supper, where they ordered Dover sole with lobster sauce and Pouilly Fuisse, Bacon was affable until I said the French claimed there was there was a pecking order in the Arts: first of all came the great philosophers, then the great composers, followed by the poets and great prose writers, followed by the painters...
"I'm not going to listen to this," said Bacon, standing up. He was clearly annoyed at painters being placed so low on the list, and, after all, he was paying for supper. Not exactly paying, for the manager had greeted him with: 'Mr. Bacon, you owe us £660. Can you settle it soon?' to which Bacon had replied: 'Oh, do you want a cheque or a painting?"
'Oh, a painting, of course, Mr. Bacon.'"
It was too late to explain to Francis that he thought the French were classifying pebbles on a beach, behaving like sociologists, and how could they dream of not putting Rembrandt and Michaelangelo and Leonardo at the very top. But it was too late, and Francis had stormed out. Two American businessmen at the next table had heard every word.
"He's annoyed because he's illiterate," said Catling
There followed a long argument, with the manager insisting that the bill was paid and being told to put it on Bacon's account as we were his guests. The avaricious little manager called the police. Two enormous Bobbies came and questioned them and took names and addresses, saying, with a hard look in their mean little eyes: "We know Mister Bacon on this manor, sir." They conferred with the manager and left, and the two American businessmen asked where they could go on for a drink.
At The Stork, off Piccadilly. they insisted on paying for all the drinks. They had clearly been impressed at seeing the famous Francis Bacon at close quarters.
Next morning Patrick Catling, a regular customer at Wheelers for many years, rang the manager to register a furious complaint, harangued him, then stopped and put the phone down.
"He said the American gentlemen paid the bill while we were being questioned by the fuzz."
The closest friend Bacon had was Dan Farson, wayward son of Negley Farson, author and former newspaperman in Russia. Once, on a train he looked at the electric shavers the Russian officers were using and said he had had a similar one in America before the war. One of them said: "You couldn't have. We didn't invent them until after the war." Negley led a rather bizarre life in Devon where he slept in a bed with his wife and the au pair girl slept at their feet in a sleeping bag, and recorded it all in his autobiography. Dan Farson had the idea to purchase, with Bacon, a hearse, and together they drove around the London docks for what was known as Turts, or TRTs (Tattooed Rough Trade). It was when John Deakin died that Farson suggested to Bacon that they go to view the corpse in the mortuary, but when they got there, Farson backed out, leaving Bacon to view the body alone, and when he returned and Farson asked how he looked, Bacon said: "Well, there she was, dead, with her trap shut! For the first time in twenty five effing years her trap was shut!"
Another of Bacon's drinking pals was Jeffrey Bernard who wrote the very funny "Low Life" column in The Spectator magazine, He had once advertised that he was about to start writing his memoirs and if any of his friends could tell him what he had been doing all those years in Soho he would be glad to hear from them.
Bacon invited Bernard to The Ivy, a resto. frequented by the famous stars of stage and screen.
During supper they talked about sex, and Bernard asked Bacon who he fancied.
There was one of those silences in the celebrity filled room, when clocks are at twenty past or twenty to the hour, or an angel is passing overhead, and it was cut by the piping voice of Bacon, who said: "Oh, I'd like to screw Colonel Gaddafi", which drew every eye and brought on a sudden babble of conversation to cover the customers' confusion.
"What about you, Jeff? Who do you fancy?"
"I fancy Cyd Charisse," Bernard said.
"Sid Charisse? Who's he when he's at home? I've never heard of him..."
"No, no, Francis, Cyd Charisse is a beautiful dancer in the films, she has gorgeous long legs..."
"Oh, gawd. I forgot for a minute that you're not bent..."