London Calling (17 page)

The press loved the Angries, particularly in the silly season when there was not much news. Doris Lessing wrote:

The AYM was entirely a media creation but no matter how many times its so-called members denied it, the newspapers would not
let it die. Then the academics got hold of it until so many people had a vested interest it could not be allowed to die. It
had to exist, too many people had written scholarly books and articles about it, there were too many reputations at stake.
²⁶

Not a soul cares what your class is, or what your race is, or what your income, or if you’re a boy, or girl, or bent, or versatile,
or what you are – so long as you dig the scene…

COLIN
M
AC
INNES
,
Absolute Beginners
¹

Bernard Kops first ran into Colin MacInnes, the author of
Absolute Beginners
(1959), at the Colony Room. MacInnes was sucking a strange fruit that Kops didn’t recognize. It was a passion fruit. MacInnes
offered him a bite but Kops passed it back. ‘It’s so wrinkled,’ he said.

‘Yeah! Just like a black boy’s balls,’ MacInnes said, and then introduced himself.
²
He was the son of the novelist Angela Thirkell, his great-grandfather was the painter Edward Burne-Jones and other family
members included Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling. It was a privileged background that he totally rejected. He was a homosexual,
alcoholic anarchist who hated all forms of hypocrisy and called himself ‘the best off-beat journalist in London’. He was not
an Angry Young Man; rather he was a precursor of the youth counter-culture of the sixties; the first to write about rock ’n’
roll, the youth scene, and, above all, the first to describe the lives of the newly arrived West Indian community in London.
In 1948, Colin MacInnes was working as art critic for the
Observer
and living at 4 Regent’s Park Terrace. At the Anglo-French Arts Centre in St John’s Wood, he met a fellow art critic, the
young David Sylvester, and shortly afterwards Sylvester rented his spare room to him for twenty-five shillings a week. They
got on very well, but according to MacInnes’s biographer, Tony Gould, MacInnes took a romantic, idealistic attitude towards
Sylvester’s Jewishness which Sylvester found very claustrophobic. It was this same attitude that MacInnes exhibited toward
blacks, never really accepting them as fellow human beings.
³
MacInnes, like Francis Bacon, was a masochist. He basically liked to be raped by a black man, preferably a ponce. It was
pain and humiliation he sought, not love, but it
was mostly conducted in such a way that MacInnes did not get too seriously hurt. Usually the active partner was paid and,
more often than not, was West Indian rather than African. Bryan Robertson told Tony Gould: ‘He could not, it seemed, have
a sex relationship with an equal… He was by nature a warm, tetchy queen, but he would have hated such a description.’
⁴
He frequented the Paramount dance hall on Tottenham Court Road (the Cosmopolitan in
City of Spades
) and any cafés or pubs where West Indians gathered. He roamed the streets, stopping to chat with any black person he met
as if he were the local vicar patrolling his parish.

He was memorable for his death-like pallor: pale eyes and lips and a chalk-white face as if all the blood had drained from
his body. He was large, way over six feet tall, but always carefully dressed in the latest fashions. He was a complete outsider,
described by Bernard and Erica Kops, the models for Mannie Katz and his wife Miriam in
Absolute Beginners
, as ‘the most alone and lonely man we ever met’.
⁵
The publisher Thomas Neurath once described MacInnes to me as a ‘large, threatening man, who could be charming but also came
across as something of a thug to those who dealt with him’.
⁶

In 1955, MacInnes was arrested on a drugs charge at a black East End gambling club. The arresting officers were CID, not the
local police, and Colin was concerned to note that the West Indian who was interrogated before him returned in tears. ‘Negroes
do not often cry,’ he wrote.
⁷
His apprehension proved well founded; the moment he entered the room he was chopped expertly on the back of the neck, knocking
him to the floor, and when he refused to be fingerprinted they began to do him over properly. Arrogant as ever he told them:
‘You’ve been watching too many American films’, which miraculously did the trick and they stopped beating him.
⁸
It was only when he appeared in court that he found out they had all been arrested on drugs charges, falsified evidence in
his case, and probably for many of the others present. Colin and one other were the only ones not to be convicted, though
it cost him over £200 in legal fees, a huge amount of money those days.
⁹
Later he wished that he had had the courage to explain to the court that the police had framed him; instead his lawyers picked
holes in the police evidence and got him acquitted. Years later, in 1966, MacInnes was the only white member of Defence, an
organization set up to counter police harassment of the West Indian community in Notting Hill.

In 1956 he took a room above Victor Musgrave’s Gallery One at 20 D’Arblay Street in Soho, though he retained his Regent’s
Park flat. In Soho he was in easy walking distance of places like the West Indian Myrtle Bank Club
on Berwick Street, where one could eat chicken and rice, and drink coffee and Coca-Cola until 4 a.m.. There was no licence
for alcohol, but that did not mean you couldn’t get it. It was there MacInnes met Terry Taylor,
¹⁰
who, according to Tony Gould, was interested in ‘jazz, soft drugs and hustling’. Taylor lived in Soho and worked at the Wardour
Street amusement arcade running the passport picture concession. There was no art involved in taking passport pictures, and
Taylor, then in his early teens, had no interest in photography. However, one day MacInnes introduced him to the photographer
Ida Kar, at Gallery One, on the ground floor below his flat. Ida Kar, born in 1908, was twice Taylor’s age but they quickly
hit it off together and within a week he had moved in with her and Victor Musgrave and was working as her photographic assistant.
Shortly afterwards he became her lover, something that Musgrave had no objection to. For several years they lived as a ménage
à trois, with Taylor learning about a whole new world of artists and poets, galleries and writers. Ida Kar encouraged him
to paint and MacInnes presented him with a series of edifying books, intended to stimulate him to write. Musgrave and his
assistant, Kasmin, showed him how the art world worked. Taylor wrote a novel,
Baron
’
s Court, All Change
, but it was MacInnes who gained the most from the relationship because he based the photographer hero in
Absolute Beginners
on Taylor, and gave much of Taylor’s experience as a ponce and hustler to his protagonist in
Mr Love and Justice
.
¹¹

After the Notting Hill race riots in August and September 1958, many show business people felt the need to use their influence
to prevent such a thing ever occurring again. The Stars Campaign for International Friendship committee was set up, numbering
among its members leading jazz players Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Laine, Chris Barber, Ken Colyer and Humphrey Lyttelton, and
from the pop world Tommy Steele, Lonnie Donegan and Frankie Vaughan as well as Eric Hobsbawm from the
New Statesman
(who wrote his column and his jazz books under the name Francis Newton). Colin MacInnes had the richest contacts and, as
he was experienced in raising money for his own uses, he soon built up a war chest. The committee published an unashamedly
populist eight-page newsletter called
What the Stars Say
which looked like a celebrity glossy except that the stars were all talking about race relations. Colin took over the job
of distributing it to the riot area, where it was most needed. Victor Musgrave persuaded Don Cammell, then a portrait painter,
to drive them through Notting Hill in his Austin Seven and wait, with engine running as their ‘get-away driver’ as Colin and
Victor pushed the newsletter through letter boxes. Musgrave told Tony Gould: ‘Afterwards Colin
said to me that we two between us had prevented a second Notting Hill race riot – and said it in all seriousness.’
¹²

It was because of actions such as this that MacInnes claimed to be very active in civil liberties for blacks, a kind of ‘one
man Council for Civil Liberties’, but it came at a price; his attitude to blacks remained condescending and exploitative;
he boasted that every afternoon he would go to Hyde Park and pick up a boy, usually but not always black, and take him back
to his basement flat in Harrowby Street, off the Edgware Road. Though he sometimes went out in the evenings he usually slept
after his sex session. His MO was to rise at 5 a.m. and write until about half past ten. After a nap and lunch, he returned
to Hyde Park.
¹³
It was not just West Indians who felt that a friendship of equals with him was impossible. Michael Law described him as having
‘anger, temper, petulance and exasperated violence’ and being ‘socially destructive with friends’.

But there was another side of MacInnes that was often overlooked. He was a sponge and a parasite at times, but he could equally
be generous. Frank Norman remembered that, despite his success with
Fings Ain
’
t Wot They Used T
’
Be
, his follow-up,
A Kayf Up West
, had flopped leaving him close to bankrupt. He wrote:

He sidled up to me one lunchtime in the French pub and tucked ten, unasked for, ten pound notes into the top pocket of my
jacket. ‘Just a little present,’ he said. ‘Don’t hate me.’ Before I could utter a word he fled and I didn’t see him again
for weeks.
¹⁴

Even if he could not treat people as his equal, he dreamed of being able to do so. This was why he was so keen on jazz clubs
and the world of the teenager; he thought that there he could overcome the class barriers and the problems of background.
As his hero said about the jazz world in
Absolute Beginners
: ‘You meet all kinds of cats, on absolutely equal terms, who can clue you up in all kinds of directions – in social directions,
in culture directions, in sexual directions, and in racial directions.’
¹⁵
MacInnes would have loved to live like that.

In London in the late fifties the most interesting art being produced was by the painters of the so-called ‘School of London’,
a sobriquet coined by R. B. Kitaj to describe the group which included himself, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach
and Michael Ayrton. They were all of them great painters of London, though none of them except Ayrton was actually born there.

For Bacon, the fifties was not a happy time. It was the decade of his disastrous relationship with Peter Lacy, whom he met
in 1952. Bacon was by then over forty but maintained that he had never fallen in love with anyone before meeting Lacy. Unfortunately
Lacy’s real interest was young boys, whereas Bacon was older than him so their relationship was never one of mutual attraction.
Bacon:

Of course, it was a most total disaster from the start. Being in love in that extreme way – being totally, physically obsessed
by someone – is like having some dreadful disease. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. He was marvelous-looking, you see.
He had this extraordinary physique – even his calves were beautiful.
¹⁶

Lacy was a worldly man, he had been a test pilot and had flown combat missions during the war. Bacon found him tremendous
company, admired his piano-playing and enjoyed Lacy’s endless flow of witticisms. Lacy was a bad drunk but because of the
nature of the relationship – Bacon liked to be whipped and beaten up – Bacon obviously was not in a position to get him to
temper his drinking, which got up to three bottles of whisky a day. Eventually Lacy moved to Tangier, where he fell in love
with an Arab boy and became the piano player at Dean’s Bar, one of William Burroughs’s favourite gay bars. Bacon often visited
him in Morocco but terrible arguments always ensued and on one occasion Lacy destroyed thirty of Bacon’s paintings destined
for a show at the Marlborough in New York.
¹⁷
They did not see each other again after Lacy found Bacon in bed with Lacy’s Arab boyfriend.

In 1962, Bacon had a retrospective at the Tate which received rave reviews. When Daniel Farson walked into the Colony Room,
having just returned from a trip to Paris and missed the opening, he found everyone drunk and some of them in tears. He assumed,
incorrectly, this was in celebration of Bacon’s success. Elinor Bellingham-Smith, wife of Rodrigo Moynihan, was sobbing and
asked Farson if he’d heard the news.

‘Yes,’ Farson exclaimed. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ Whereupon she slapped him across the face. Bacon beckoned to him and led him
to the small lavatory at the back of the club and told him that he had received a pile of congratulatory telegrams that morning,
but the last telegram he opened contained the news that Peter Lacy had died in Tangier the night before. Lacy’s death marred
what should have been the pinnacle of his achievement.

Throughout the fifties and sixties Bacon and Lucian Freud were as close as Braque and Picasso: they were the leading members
of the School of London, they went gambling together and were both full-time Sohoites, frequenting
the French pub and the Colony Room. They sat for each other and over the years Bacon painted twenty-five portraits of Freud
and no doubt destroyed far more. Their mutual friend John Richardson described them as being very different from each other
in temperament, as well as in sexual orientation and in artistic style. He suggested that their friendship was based on their
shared characteristics: