Jeremy King — co-owner of the Wolseley — used to compete with Lucian Freud to see who was better at remembering the lyrics of Cheek to Cheek or You’re the Top, two songs Freud loved to sing. Reading the amazing story of Freud’s life two other songs spring to mind which may well have been the leitmotif of his life. The first is Cole Porter’s Solomon, of which the first line is ‘Solomon had a thousand wives’ and the second is ‘I Put A Spell On You’, one of Nina Simone’s big hits.
Exactly how many women (and possibly a few men as well) Freud had is difficult to say but there were certainly a great many and he seemed capable of putting a spell on them from the moment he met them. It would have been a lifetime’s work for his grandfather Sigmund to try and put together the broken pieces of his many affairs and his two marriages. How many children were born from these liaisons is impossible to know. According to this book there are at least 14, but this could well be the tip of the iceberg. It is often said that if we go back far enough among our ancestors we are bound to be related to some famous or notorious person. I have a feeling that if anybody in a 100 years from now would dig far enough into their ancestry they would find they were related to Lucian Freud. Geordie Greig writes:
‘He was accused of infidelity, cruelty and absenteeism as a father, yet in spite of sometimes defiantly selfish behaviour some of this children and girlfriends, and even the children of his girlfriends, would defend him over what was pretty indefensible behaviour. All his life he got away with it. He was so charged with charm and charisma, few were immune to his power of seduction on some level.’
This book is perhaps too preoccupied with gossip about the amorous part of Freud’s life. Some people might even find reading the index a bit overpowering. ‘I travel vertically, rather than horizontally’ is how he described his mingling of social classes.
However, in spite of all that, what comes through loud and clear is the fact that painting was the main occupation and driving force behind everything he did during his long, creative and certainly never boring life.
- © British Journal of General Practice 2013