London Calling (14 page)

It was altogether appropriate then, that when Lucian Freud’s portrait of him was reproduced in the
Daily Telegraph
it was under the heading: ‘Studies of Compelling Nastiness.’

Though Deakin’s photographs were well known from his work in
Vogue
,
he did not have an exhibition until David Archer showed his pictures at the bookshop. The opening of the
John Deakin
’
s Paris
show was in the afternoon of 7 July 1956, in the Parton Gallery, named by Archer to commemorate his previous bookshop and
press. There were two exhibitions, two months apart, the first of Paris and the second of
John Deakin
’
s Rome.
The first was hung by Deakin’s friend Bruce Bernard – Jeffrey’s brother – fifty-five pictures, many of them of graffiti or
street people. After Deakin’s death in 1972, Bruce Bernard retrieved several cardboard boxes of negatives and tatty prints
from under Deakin’s bed at his flat in Berwick Street. It is on these, and the archive of commissioned prints still owned
by
Vogue
magazine, who employed him for fashion and portrait shoots from 1947 until 1954, that his reputation rests.

His
Vogue
years were marred by frequent arguments, lost, stolen and missing equipment, models in tears and enormous bar bills, but
he did some extraordinary work. He had a confrontational approach that many sitters found highly uncomfortable, but no-one
could deny that his deep black shadows, his tightly framed head shots and raw, unforgiving portraits were among the best being
produced at that time. There was no flattery of his often famous subjects; indeed, the results sometimes took on the quality
of police mug shots. He photographed Humphrey Bogart, Gina Lollobrigida, John Huston, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Yves Montand,
as well as all the artists and writers of his Soho circle. Deakin wrote:

Being fatally drawn to the human race, what I want to do when I photograph it is to make a revelation about it. So my sitters
turn into my victims. But I would like to add that it is only those with a daemon, however small and of whatever kind, whose
faces lend themselves to be victimised at all. And the only complaints I have ever had from my victims have been from the
bad ones, the vainies, the meanies.
⁸

His pictures of the Soho scene are the best record there is of the habitués of the French pub, the Colony Room and the Soho
streets and clubs. He took dozens of pictures of Bacon, in Soho, in his studio, in the
Vogue
studio, in Limehouse and even on the Orient Express. In
Eight Portraits
he described Bacon: ‘He’s an odd one, wonderfully tender and generous by nature, yet with curious streaks of cruelty, especially
to his friends. I think in this portrait I managed to catch something of the fear which must underlie these contradictions
in his character.’ Before the war Deakin had some small success as a painter, but a show in the fifties at the Mayor Gallery
drew nothing but contempt, even from his friends.

In
Not a Normal Man
, Dan Farson reports a conversation between Deakin and Archer:

With my usual naivety I could not understand why Archer should pay the rent until Deakin made a casual reference to the previous
night when Archer fumbled in a chest of drawers. ‘What are you doing?’ Deakin demanded. ‘I’m looking for my favourite whip’
Archer had explained. ‘Oh for God’s sake!’ ‘You’re not supposed to shout at me,’ Archer protested. ‘I’m supposed to shout
at you.’
⁹

One afternoon in 1963 at the French pub, Henrietta Moraes was drinking with Francis Bacon, Deakin and some other friends.
Francis told her: ‘I’m thinking of painting some of my friends and I’d like to do you, but I can really only work from photographs,
so if it’s OK, Deakin will come round to your house and take them. I’ll tell him what I want. You are beautiful, darling,
and you always will be, you mustn’t worry about that.’
¹⁰

A few days later Deakin presented himself at 9 Apollo Place in Chelsea, the house that Johnny Minton had bequeathed to Henrietta,
and after a few drinks they moved to the bedroom, where he said: ‘he wants them naked and you lying on the bed and he’s told
me the exact positions you must get into.’ Though she knew he had no interest in women, she was still somewhat shy about stripping
off in front of him, and after undressing sat on the edge of the bed with her arms and legs crossed. ‘For God’s sake, sweetie,’
he exclaimed. ‘That’s not exactly inspiring. I mean, he’s not into the Pietà phase.’ He explained that Francis wanted her
on her back, arms and legs thrown open wide. Deakin at once began shooting pictures of her sex. Henrietta was concerned and
told him: ‘Deakin, I know you’ve got it wrong. Francis can’t possibly want hundreds of shots of these most private parts in
close-up’,
¹¹
but Deakin insisted that this was the pose that Francis wanted so she had a couple more drinks and then let him continue.

When she next saw Francis he was irritated with Deakin. The poses had been correct except he wanted them all shot with her
head in the foreground. Would she do them again? Francis was an old friend and she had spent countless hours in his company,
enjoying champagne and oysters at Wheeler’s at his expense, drinking with him at the Gargoyle, the Colony and the French.
Of course she was happy to repeat the performance. A week later she came across Deakin in a Soho drinking club, selling the
explicit photographs of her spread-eagled naked for ten shillings each to sailors. He was caught red-handed and even managed
a sheepish grin. He bought her several drinks.
¹²

In April 1972, after a supposedly successful operation for early cancer, Deakin was intending to go on a recuperative holiday
to the Greek island of Poros, paid for by Bacon, where he was to meet up with Dan Farson. Farson flew there from Romania,
where he was researching a book on his great-uncle Bram Stoker, author of
Dracula
, but after waiting three days in Poros he decided that Deakin was not going to arrive so he flew back to London. When he
walked into the Colony Room, Muriel greeted him cheerfully with ‘Buried him this morning, dear!’
¹³
With one lung missing, he could not find any airline to take him, so Deakin had spent a week in Brighton, where he ill-advisedly
went on a heavy drinking tour of the local pubs with an old friend. At the hospital he had given Francis Bacon as his next
of kin so poor Bacon had the unenviable task of identifying the body. He told Farson:

It was the last dirty trick he played on me… They lifted up the sheet and there he was, his trap shut for the first time in
his life.

‘Is that Mister Deakin?’ they asked.

‘It most certainly is,’ I said.
¹⁴

As next of kin he was liable for the funeral costs, but when he explained he was not a relation, the coroner told him that
Deakin had thousands of pounds in his bank account. The endless charade of biting coins, or holding notes up the light as
if he had never seen one before, and the continuous protestations that he was broke were all an elaborate lie.
¹⁵

One of the visitors who made a close critical study of Deakin’s 1956 show of Paris photographs at Archer’s Bookshop was the
photographer Ida Kar, who was also documenting Soho’s bohemia. Ida Karamian arrived in London with her husband Victor Musgrave
in 1945 from the Old Town of Cairo, where they had lived in the beautiful seventeenth-century Darb el Labana artists’ colony.
Ida was born in 1908 in Tambov in Russia, and grew up in Iran until her parents moved to Egypt when she was thirteen. She
moved to Paris in 1928 to study and became part of the avant-garde of the Left Bank. It was here she discovered photography,
but not until she had first trained as a singer. It was only when she damaged her voice that she considered photography as
a career.

Victor Musgrave was twelve years younger than Ida, a tall, thin man, habitually dressed in a black corduroy suit and a blue
sweater. He changed to a white sweater for evening wear. Colin MacInnes described him as having ‘a mild, quizzical, amiably
insinuating face with two candid, limpid and dispassionate brown eyes – in which one could sometimes detect, however,
a penetrating, steely glint’. He was a poet, painter and writer, and during the war had published and edited
Contact
magazine. In Cairo he exhibited in Surrealist exhibitions in 1944 and 1945. He was an early member of the Barrow Poets and
won the first prize in the André Deutsch Poetry Award in 1953, but his greatest love was art.
¹⁶

They settled first in Devonshire Close, a small mews off Devonshire Street close to Regent’s Park, but it was not until they
moved to Litchfield Street, between Upper Saint Martin’s Lane and Charing Cross Road, that their life in London really began.
This row of old houses between Covent Garden and Soho was home to a number of artists, and in number one the painter John
Christoforou had opened a small ground-floor gallery to show his own work. Ida and Victor Musgrave moved in; Ida opened a
photographic studio on an upper floor and Victor ran the gallery when Christoforou was in his studio painting. In 1953, Christoforou
departed London for Paris and then the South of France, leaving 1 Litchfield Street to Musgrave and Kar. The building was
condemned, the floor was missing floorboards, the stairs were unsafe, so Musgrave did the obvious thing – in December that
year he opened Christoforou’s old gallery as a commercial art space, naming it after his street address. He had no money,
but his enthusiasm and his already large circle of friends enabled them to just about get by without starving, even though,
throughout the gallery’s ten-year history, Musgrave refused to show anything that people already knew. Stephen Spender introduced
him to Francis Newton Souza, and his 1955 show at Gallery One marked a turning point for both the artist and the gallery;
it was a sell-out, establishing the gallery on a much firmer footing.

Ida was already thirty-six when she married Musgrave; it was her second marriage. She had lived in the bohemian quarters of
Alexandria, Cairo and Paris but it was Soho she loved. They drank at the Mandrake, where Victor won the 1947 chess championship,
the French pub and the Colony Room, though Muriel was not very taken with Ida, who, like her, was a very forceful woman. Ida
belonged in bohemia with her French Armenian accent, her loud, non-stop talk, her eccentric clothing and flamboyant attitude.
According to her biographer, Val Williams, she did not read or take any interest in film or the theatre. Her friends and her
photography were the only things that mattered. She knew all the market traders in Berwick Street fruit and vegetable market
and was friends with a group of elderly French prostitutes, with whom she liked to speak French. Both she and Musgrave took
a great interest in prostitutes: she spoke at meetings on their behalf, and Musgrave, in his nocturnal ramblings around Soho
and Mayfair in the
days before the law drove them from the streets, appeared to know every one of them personally. Sometimes if the night was
cold he would push a newspaper up under his trademark sweater to ward off the cold as he wandered aimlessly through the dark
city streets. Victor and Ida’s flat in Litchfield Street became a bohemian meeting place, always filled with people sleeping
over or lodging – the ‘Angry Young Men’ writer Bill Hopkins lived there in 1952, before the gallery even opened. He told Val
Williams that Ida ‘filled the room with enormous warmth and laughter and mockery. She was a wonderful companion.’
¹⁷
He also told her of the problems Ida had in being a photographer, which in those days was not regarded as an art form. She
couldn’t sell her photographs. ‘All she could do was peddle abrasive ideas that no-one wanted to hear anyway. A middle-aged,
dumpy, foreign woman who was too self-opinionated by half.’
¹⁸

Ida persevered with her work and throughout the early fifties she took the series of portraits of British artists upon which
her reputation as a photographer rests. For her Christmas card of 1953 she used a picture of Jacob Epstein modelling a head
of Bertrand Russell, and sent it to a number of artists, asking them to pose for her. Ivon Hitchens, Barbara Hepworth, Reg
Butler, Victor Pasmore, Lynn Chadwick, Henry Moore, Patrick Heron and others responded favourably and she took a number of
pictures that have become iconic of the period. She made a trip to Paris to photograph Giacometti, Marc Chagall, Le Corbusier
and others, and in October 1954 her show
Forty Artists from Paris and London
opened at Gallery One. But her sitters were not celebrities; nor was she known as a portraitist; and the show received little
in the way of reviews. But despite her lack of success as a photographer, Ida was always surrounded by friends. She sang operatic
arias and Armenian folk songs in a deep powerful trained contralto as she cooked huge Eastern European meals of her own invention
for their many guests.

Victor and Ida had an open marriage and kept separate rooms, which enabled their various lovers to live with them. Sex was
a subject that interested them both greatly, and was the usual subject of conversation when Ida was getting to know a sitter
before taking their portrait. Val Williams: ‘She was autocratic and demanding, but derived no pleasure from manipulating or
scandalizing.’ Victor and Ida’s love life did scandalize some people but in Soho no-one was concerned; they were often doing
the same things themselves.

In March 1956, Victor moved Gallery One to a large corner building at 20 D’Arblay Street, in the middle of Soho, that he found
through a prostitute who was being evicted from the building. Bill Hopkins had left to travel
in Europe so he did not move with them. His place as lodger was taken in D’Arblay Street by Colin MacInnes. Ida had three
rooms on the top floor which she made into a bedroom, sitting room and photographic studio and she converted one of the basement
rooms into a darkroom. As before, lovers, lodgers and friends became all mixed up together in the sleeping arrangements as
those with not enough money to eat stayed to eat, and those with nowhere to stay stayed over, lovers came and went and lodgers
brought in their own companions. Victor managed to find backers for the gallery but money remained a problem.