Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (15 page)

One wet afternoon, Patti is overcome by a craving for a cheese and lettuce sandwich. She searches their room high and low for the necessary fifty-five cents, puts on her grey trenchcoat and her Mayakovsky cap, rushes down to the automat, finds a seat, picks up a tray, goes to the back wall and puts her fifty-five cents in the slot.

The hatch won’t open, so she pulls it again. But still it won’t open; only now does she notice a sign that says the price has risen by ten cents, to sixty-five cents.

‘Can I help?’

She turns around. It is a portly man with a dark curly beard. She recognises him: ‘no mistaking the face of one of our great poets and activists’. It is Allen Ginsberg, the author of ‘Howl’, the man described in an FBI report, not altogether inaccurately, as ‘an entertainer with a fuzzy beard who chants unintelligible poems’. He is also a hobby nudist
⁵⁴
and a vociferous advocate of drugs.
⁵⁵

Ginsberg has just returned from the funeral of his old lover and fellow beat writer Jack Kerouac, who collapsed while watching
The Galloping Gourmet
on television, then died in hospital of cirrhosis of the liver. ‘So he drank himself to death, which is only another way of living, of handling the pain and foolishness that it’s all a dream, a great baffling silly
emptiness, after all,’ Ginsberg concluded in a speech at Yale University the day before yesterday.

‘Can I help?’ he asks.

Patti nods her consent. Ginsberg adds the extra ten cents, and also treats her to a cup of coffee. She follows him to his table and starts eating her sandwich. Ginsberg introduces himself, and begins talking about Walt Whitman. In her deep voice, Patti mentions that she was brought up near Camden, New Jersey, where Whitman is buried. At this point, something strikes Ginsberg. He leans forward in his chair and looks at her quizzically.

‘Are you a girl?’ he asks.

‘Yeah. Is that a problem?’

Ginsberg laughs. ‘I’m sorry. I took you for a very pretty boy.’

Patti senses a misunderstanding.

‘Well, does this mean I return the sandwich?’

‘No, enjoy it. It was my mistake.’

Thus, on the strength of an unexpected hike in the price of a cheese roll, Ginsberg and Patti Smith meet and form a lifelong friendship. Keen self-mythologisers, as the years roll by they take to reminiscing about this chance encounter. Once, Ginsberg asks her, ‘How would you describe how we met?’

‘I would say you fed me when I was hungry,’ she replies.

In his latter years, Ginsberg is inspired by Patti to write rock lyrics, though with limited success: he is just too
wordy
. Always a generous man, he takes to introducing her concerts with lengthy preambles. ‘Patti Smith was one of the pioneers of spoken poetry music,’ he tells an audience in Michigan on April 5th 1996. ‘... She pioneered that combination of music and poetry which has caught fire among the younger generation to the point where a lot of older folks including myself learned from her how to put the two together.’

Exactly a year after this particular concert, Ginsberg dies. At his memorial service at St Mark’s church, Patti dresses in a white T-shirt with Rimbaud’s face on it and sings ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’.

PRESSES NUDE PHOTOGRAPHS OF HIMSELF ONTO

Room 9, The Villa Muniriya, 1, rue Magellan, Tangier

May 1957

For a gay Western man in the 1950s, there is nowhere quite like Tangier.
⁵⁶
In March 1957, Allen Ginsberg and his boyfriend Peter Orlovsky arrive there to stay with Ginsberg’s old lover, William Burroughs.

On the first night, Burroughs, still pining for Ginsberg, grows very drunk, and starts waving a machete around. But over the next few days, things settle down. They soon establish a nightly routine of chewing
majoun
, a sort of hashish candy heated into what Ginsberg describes, unappealingly, as ‘the consistency of sticky shit’, and arguing about the nature of art until the early hours. Sometimes they come to blows – one night Ginsberg rips open Burroughs’ shirt with a hunting knife – but, by and large, everything goes swimmingly. Early each morning, Ginsberg retreats to the patio to edit the rambling manuscript of Burroughs’
The Naked Lunch
.

If the English expatriates have a leader, it is David Herbert, who rules them with what someone calls ‘a whip of knotted floss silk’. They gather in the louche Dean’s Bar, described by Ian Fleming as ‘a sort of mixture between Wiltons and the porter’s lodge at White’s’. In a letter home, Fleming adds, ‘There’s nothing but pansies, and I have been fresh meat for them ... Francis Bacon is due next week to live with his pansy pianist friend.’

The pansy pianist in question is Peter Lacy, the former Battle of Britain pilot with whom Bacon is desperately in love. To settle a drinking debt, Lacy plays piano in Dean’s Bar, but drinks so much that the debt escalates nightly. In the early hours, he tends to snap and resorts to violence. One
night, Bacon’s face is so damaged it must be repaired with stitches around the right eye, but at the end of it all, notes a friend, ‘Bacon loved Lacy even more.’

Some blame the repetitive violence on muggers. ‘Francis was always being beaten up,’ recalls Herbert. ‘Our consul general was very upset and got hold of the chief of police and told him he had to do something about it. He impressed on him that Francis was a very distinguished painter. A few days later, the chief of police returned, patently embarrassed. “
Pardon, mais il n’y a rien à faire. Le peintre adore ça!
”’

The sex and violence in Tangier also provide perverse tourist must-sees for Burroughs’ gloating prose: ‘The City is visited by epidemics of violence, and the untended dead are eaten by vultures in the streets. Albinos blink in the sun. Boys sit in trees, languidly masturbate. People eaten by unknown diseases watch the passer-by with evil, knowing eyes.’ During his annual visits, Bacon spends time with Burroughs, though he prefers alcohol to drugs: when Burroughs gives him
kif
, his face blows up like a balloon, so he never tries it again.

Burroughs introduces Bacon to his guests. For Ginsberg, Bacon is ‘an English schoolboy with the soul of a satyr, wearing sneakers & tight dungarees and black silk shirts & always looks like going to tennis ... who paints mad gorillas in grey hotel rooms dressed in evening dress with deathly black umbrellas’. Ginsberg thinks the Beat writers have much in common with Bacon, and that Bacon paints the way Burroughs writes, in ‘a sort of dangerous bullfight of the mind’. For him, Bacon is just like Burroughs, placing himself in psychic danger with his art, jeopardising the very foundations of his being, and so forth. But Bacon has no time for such claptrap. His own reputation is, he says, ‘a lot of chic shit’. His real love, he boasts, is gambling: he once won $4,000 at Monte Carlo, and was offered a larger stake for letting himself be whipped, plus a bonus for every stroke that drew blood.

Ginsberg likes to shock convention, but Bacon prefers to go one step further, and shock the shockers. He bashes away at the halo of sanctity that hovers over artists, and takes to goading Ginsberg and Burroughs with provocative statements about abstract art. ‘It’s never meant anything to me. To me, even the best of it is just decoration. Jackson Pollock’s paintings might be very pretty but they’re just decoration. They look like old
lace ... I always think marvellous painting will come out of America, because it should, a country with an enormous mixed race. But it doesn’t, it’s so
dreary
, those super realists, the abstract expressionists, all so very
dreary
.’

‘What about Jasper Johns?’ asks Burroughs, when they recreate their Tangier discussions years later.

‘I try never to think about Jasper Johns. I hate the stuff and don’t like him either.’
⁵⁷

Bacon plays the philistine,
pour épater les beats
, sticking pins into anything that smacks of the self-indulgent and the self-important. Ginsberg, on the other hand, sees art as a sacred calling. Still searching for common ground, he talks about editing
The Naked Lunch
: how, he wonders, can Bacon tell when a painting is complete? Bacon says that he can’t orchestrate or predict it – he simply finishes with a chance brush-stroke that locks in the magic. In a gesture of friendship, Ginsberg offers Bacon a drink out of an old tin can he has picked out of the garbage. This is a further misjudgement; Bacon, horrified, refuses it.

Ginsberg hopes to be immortalised on canvas by Bacon, preferably in the nude; he has never been slow to strip off. Perhaps by way of an advertisement, he hands Bacon some photographs of himself and Orlovsky naked in bed. Would Francis like them to sit for him?

‘That might be awkward, Allen. How long can you hold it?’ asks Bacon, saucily.

Bacon pockets the photographs, though he has no interest in the naked Ginsberg or his boyfriend. Something else has caught his eye: the clapped-out old mattress. ‘Those photos were terribly useful,’ he explains later. ‘The lovers weren’t interesting, but there was something about the way the mattress spilled over the metal spindles of the bed that was so
despairing
. So I decided to keep them and use them.’

HECKLES

Warwick House, St James’s Place, London SW1

1977

Brought along by his fellow painter Lucian Freud to a ball thrown by Lady Rothermere, Francis Bacon clings to the champagne bar. He is not one for mingling, and would certainly never dance. At the furthest corner of the ballroom, Princess Margaret, emboldened by champagne and egged on by her fellow party-goers, decides to put on a bit of a performance.

Traditionally, members of the royal family are granted a special licence as entertainers. Their efforts at sparkling, however dim, are greeted with enthusiasm; their repartee, however pedestrian, sets tables aroar; their musical forays, however painful, are hailed as delightful. This conspiracy of sycophancy has, over the years, led one or two of them to gain an inflated notion of their own talents.

From an early age, Princess Margaret has been encouraged to believe that she is blessed with a heaven-sent knack for playing the piano, singing and mimicry. ‘She has an impeccable ear, her piano playing is simple but has perfect rhythm and her method of singing is really very funny,’ swoons Noël Coward in 1948.

Occasionally, a guest might come a cropper, misdirecting the gush. The biographer Michael Holroyd was once placed on the right of Princess Margaret at dinner. The Princess began a series of terrible impersonations, adopting a heavy Irish brogue for the author Edna O’Brien, who was also present. Holroyd laughed dutifully at the first two, which he vaguely recognised, then continued to laugh at a third – a high-pitched, nasal squeak – which he did not. ‘If I may say so, ma’am, that’s your funniest yet!’ he remarked. The moment he did so, it occurred to him that the Princess had, in fact, reverted to her own voice.

‘What happened next?’ the Princess’s biographer asks him some years later.

‘I seem to remember,’ Holroyd recalls, ‘that she spent rather a lot of time talking to the person on her left.’

As a house-guest, Princess Margaret is allowed exceptional leeway. Hosts bend over backwards to satisfy her every whim. One hostess has the guest bedroom rewired so that the Princess can employ her Carmen rollers. Another swims out to her in a pool, fully clothed, bearing the glass of gin-and-tonic she has ordered. Lights in dining rooms are always kept bright, in accordance with the Princess’s professed belief that ‘a dark dining room upsets my tummy. I can’t see what I’m eating.’ When the Princess finally departs, her hosts invariably take a masochistic pleasure in recounting her more outrageous demands to their friends and acquaintances. If the Princess were aware of the pleasure afforded by her haughtiness, she might feel less inclined to make such a display of it.
⁵⁸

On this particular evening at Warwick House, she has the wind behind her. She strides up to the stage, adroitly removes the microphone from the hand of the singer and instructs the band to strike up some Cole Porter. ‘All the guests who had been waltzing under the vast chandeliers instantly stopped dancing,’ recalls Lady Caroline Blackwood, the former wife of Lucian Freud. ‘They stood like Buckingham Palace sentries called to attention to watch the royal performance.’ Francis Bacon, however, stays rooted to the bar.

Princess Margaret bursts into song. She sings off-key, but with ever-increasing gusto, egged on, as always, by her jubilant fellow guests, who shout and roar and beg for more. Consequently, she grows fearfully over-excited and starts, in the words of one observer, ‘wiggling around in her crinoline and tiara as she tried to mimic the sexual movements of the professional entertainer. Her dress with its petticoats bolstered by the wooden hoops that ballooned her skirts was unsuitable for the slinky act but all the rapturous applause seemed to make her forget this.’

She has just embarked on ‘Let’s Do It’ when ‘a very menacing and unexpected sound came from the back of the crowded ballroom. It grew louder and louder until it eclipsed Princess Margaret’s singing. It was the sound of jeering and hissing, of prolonged and thunderous booing.’

Everyone looks round aghast, as though drawn by H.M. Bateman. It is Francis Bacon, barracking the Princess from the bar. As Lucian Freud remembers it, ‘People became extraordinarily angry about it. Binkie Beaumont, the promoter, was one of the angriest. Because I was the one who had brought him, they turned on me, blaming me. Of course, in response I was fiercely defensive of Francis.’

Princess Margaret falters and screeches to a halt mid-song. ‘Mortification turned her face scarlet and then it went ashen. Because she looked close to tears, her smallness of stature suddenly made her look rather pitiful.’

The Princess rushes offstage. The band stops playing, unsure what to do next. A furious red-faced man comes up to Caroline Blackwood and splutters, ‘It’s that dreadful Francis Bacon! He calls himself a painter but he does the most frightful paintings. I just don’t understand how a creature like him was allowed to get in here. It’s really quite disgraceful!’