London Calling (6 page)

In 1946 Rodrigo was commissioned by Buckingham Palace to paint Princess Elizabeth, now the Queen. The princess, accompanied
by her mother, sat to him in the mornings, whenever the racing meetings would allow, causing something of a traffic jam outside
as Chelsea residents lined up to see the Queen. His 1975 portrait of Francis Bacon is probably his best work. In the years
directly following the war, this enormously social couple were to be seen virtually every night at the Gargoyle or other Soho
haunts.

Minton, Rodrigo and Elinor liked to dance and the Gargoyle allowed them to combine energetic jitterbugging with drinking with
their friends. It was also a safe place for Minton to take young men. He was ever conscious of the fact that his sexual preference
was not only illegal but also despised by conventional society. At one Royal College dance Elinor Moynihan found
him sitting in a chair, his head in his hands, sobbing his heart out while students stood around jeering and laughing at him.
She took him home to his bed.
⁹
It was a very real problem for him and others like him and one that was only to get worse. In August 1953, Sir John Nott-Bower
took over as the new commissioner of police at Scotland Yard and vowed to ‘rip the covers off all London’s filth spots’ as
part of a new drive against ‘male vice’ announced by Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, the Home Secretary, in the wake of the Burgess
and Maclean spy scandal. Henrietta Moraes told Minton’s biographer, Frances Spalding: ‘I think he was very secretive and never
even told his closest friends that he was obviously frightfully unhappy. I suppose if you are always breaking the law it creates
a lot of pressure.’
¹⁰
Michael Wishart summed him up: ‘Johnny was very obviously manic. In frantic pursuit of love or even companionship, he dissipated
himself to the hilt, while spending a useful inheritance on useless pursuits, such as nights of black dejection or blacker
oblivion. The waste of self and money amused his followers.’
¹¹

Minton and Moynihan were part of the new wave of change at the RCA. They were hired by Robin Darwin, who took over as Rector
on 1 January 1948 and began replacing the reactionary old guard, in particular Gilbert Spencer, the professor of painting,
who had advised his students not to visit the 1945–6 Picasso and Matisse exhibition at the V&A. Even after the war these artists
were regarded as dangerously modern by the British art establishment. Darwin managed to sever the connection with the Ministry
of Education and set the RCA up as an independent foundation. Minton’s work was of an illustrative style, more suited to the
book jackets, posters and illustrations that he became known for than to painting. He was a good teacher, very witty, and
students would always gather round afterwards to hear his wildly exaggerated stories which mixed art history with gossip and
fantastic invention. Talk was possibly his best medium.

In the fifties the Gargoyle still retained its mirrored walls and balls on the ceiling and became home to Francis Bacon, Dan
Farson, Antonia Fraser and a younger crowd. Francis Bacon:

I used to go up there after the Colony Room closed with Muriel Belcher and Carmel, with so many people who used the Gargoyle.
People like George Barker, Rodrigo Moynihan and Gerald Hamilton, and of course Natalie Newton and Henrietta Law (later Moraes)…
Cyril Connolly went there a lot… I miss the Gargoyle very much. It was a sympathetic place to go.
¹²

In 1952 It was bought by John Negus and for a while nothing changed. The Gargoyle was sold to Michael Klinger and Jimmy Jacobs
in 1955, and they
turned it into the Nell Gwynne Revue, a strip club. It had a resurgence as a New Romantics club twenty-five years later.

Before going to the Gargoyle, many people would first stop off at the French pub: partly to see their friends, partly because
it was cheaper to drink there. The York Minster, known to everyone as the French pub, on Dean Street, was started in 1914
by Victor Berlemont, the first foreigner to hold a publican’s licence in Britain. After his death in 1952 his son Gaston took
over. Both men sported fierce handlebar moustaches and a Gallic manner, though Gaston was in fact born above the bar in the
family flat in 1914, making him Soho born and bred, and his father was actually Belgian. However, to his customers Gaston
was the epitome of Frenchness; something he encouraged by much kissing of ladies’ hands and grooming of his magnificent moustaches.

The pub was known for its champagne and stock of different wines by the glass. There was nowhere else in London you could
walk in and ask for a glass of Alsace and be served immediately. During the war it quite naturally became the headquarters
of the Free French; de Gaulle was said to visit, and a reproduction of de Gaulle’s famous call to arms, issued from his headquarters
at 4 Carlton Gardens, still hangs on the side of the staircase today: ‘A tous les Français. La France a perdu une bataille!
Mais la France n’a pas perdu la guerre!’ In the French tradition, the French does not serve beer by the pint, possibly the
only pub in Britain not to do so. Over the years the walls became covered with signed photographs of French vaudeville stars,
boxers, cyclists and personalities, all of whom, according to Victor Berlemont, had drunk at the bar, from the youthful Lena
Horne to the boxing champion Jack Dempsey, who drank there in 1926. No more photographs were added to the display after Victor’s
death.

Before the war, the vicar of St Anne’s church across Dean Street would pop out of the sacristy door and run into the French
for a quick drink in the middle of Sunday service while his congregation was singing a hymn. In the blitz, the church sustained
a direct hit, leaving just the tower standing in the middle of a bomb site; the same bomb destroyed the façade of the French.
Then the traffic began to go in the other direction for it was said that Lucian Freud had found a way to gain access to the
ruined church tower and after lunchtime closing time had taken a dazzling blonde there to make love. Others quickly followed
in his footsteps. Because of its French connections, the pub was a haven for many of the Soho prostitutes until the Street
Offences Act of 1959, which was designed to clear prostitutes from the streets but forced them into the hands of pimps. Up
until the war, a large number
of them were French, easily recognizable by their immaculate clothes, and known as Fifis. They would gather at the French
for a split of champagne, a Pernod or a Ricard. If anyone dare approach them at the bar they would appeal to Gaston for help
and he would immediately intercede. As long as they were in the pub, they would not be bothered. He told Judith Summers they
were ‘lovely girls – the best in the world. In here was sacred. I’d tell the men to hop it.’

In addition to Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, who first went to the French pub in 1949 because he heard it attracted a lot
of artists, there was a group of regulars once typified as ‘artistic gangsters’. The sportsmen and entertainment figures still
frequented the French after the war. Gaston told Judith Summers: ‘The crowd we have now is just a carbon copy of the same
crowd that was coming in 40 or 50 years ago when I was a boy. They are the same type of people… They themselves create an
atmosphere.’
¹³
Some

extraordinary things had happened in the French. One day Dylan Thomas and Theodora Fitzgibbon sat at the bar drawing doodles;
then they turned each other’s doodles into a cartoon. They were interrupted when the barman brought them a sheet of paper,
sent by a figure sitting across the room. It was an identical drawing. Dylan immediately grabbed Theodora and rushed out into
Dean Street, where he explained that the man was the Great Beast himself, Aleister Crowley, up to his tricks. He had no wish
to get involved in Crowley’s magical workings.

Upstairs was a small restaurant with French waiters where typical Soho food was served: steak tartare or kidneys washed down
with a rough red Corbières. After a break of many years, it was reopened by Fergus Henderson in 1992 as the French House Dining
Room where he perfected his ‘nose to tail’ dining, specializing in offal and other forgotten elements of British cooking.
(In October 1994 he opened the much larger St John restaurant in Smithfield, and has since become a celebrity chef known for
his warm pig’s head and his roast bone marrow.)

Gaston’s retirement on Bastille Day, 14 July 1989, was celebrated by a huge Soho street party organized by Jeffrey Bernard’s
brother Bruce. Gaston took the signed photographs with him, but not until they had been carefully photographed and replaced
with copies, so that for many years the French retained much of the same atmosphere. The strange metal dispenser that dripped
water through a cube of sugar on a leaflike spoon into a glass of absinthe departed from the bar in the seventies but is still
brought out on special occasions. Visitors still stand at the south side of the bar, while regulars still sip splits of champagne
on Saturday morning at the north side.
At the time of writing little has really changed except that the windows are now always open so that the smokers standing
outside can reach in and get their drinks.

The York Minster was not the only French bar in Soho. The Caves de France, (pronounced in the French manner) was opened just
after the war at 39 Dean Street by the Philippe family,
mère, père et fils
. It was on two floors, entered by a dark doorway guarded by two doormen who queried whether you were a member but never seemed
to bother much if you were not. On the ground floor was a dark low-ceilinged smoke-filled room featuring an enormously long,
American-style, high bar dimly illuminated by a string of coloured lights hanging above. Across from the bar was a row of
battered seats and some small plastic-topped drinks tables surrounded by circles of cigarette ash and dog ends. On each table
stood a jar of highly salted gherkins, designed to make the customers even thirstier. The room was decorated with wine barrels
and the walls featured some of the worst painting ever seen in Soho: semi-surrealist works by a monocled old fraud called
‘Baron von Schine’, who presided over them, night and day, frequently irritating the bartender by rearranging them. No-one
ever saw him make a sale even though a notice gave a rather suspect list of galleries in which he had exhibited.

A short flight of steps led to a small basement bar but it was the ground floor that was favoured by the Sohoites. It was
packed with regulars during the afternoon: Nina Hamnett often managed to get this far, Caitlin Thomas, usually looking for
her husband, the Roberts Colquhoun and MacBryde, the impecunious poet Paul Potts, the writers Stephen Fothergill and Gerald
Hamilton, and later Dan Farson. Julian Maclaren-Ross, after he had been banned from the Wheatsheaf, had a habitual position
at the far end of the bar beneath a particularly repellent painting of a young nymphet staring in awe at a giant snowman sitting
on a rock and brandishing a red furled umbrella. Though the owners took turns to serve behind the bar, the regular barman
was Secundo Carnera, the younger brother of Primo Carnera, the heavyweight boxer; their mother had decided on the expedient
of numbering her sons rather than finding names for them. Elaine Dundy described it in
The Old Man and Me
as ‘a sort of coal hole in the heart of Soho that is open every afternoon, a dead-ended subterranean tunnel… an atmosphere
almost solid with failure’.
¹⁴

By about 5.30, the bar had thinned out, as customers headed to other pubs and the Caves prepared itself for a more genteel
evening clientele. A palm court trio, incongruous in evening dress, mounted the bandstand and played pre-war dance numbers,
occasionally joined by Mme Hortense, the
owners’ middle-aged daughter, who attempted to add class to the proceedings by singing light opera. The photographer John
Deakin often acted as an impromptu MC for these events, twirling imaginary moustaches and filling his introduction with malicious
double-entendres: ‘And now,’ followed by a roll on the drums, ‘let me present Mademoiselle Hortense, the girl…’ and he paused,
melodramatically and looked her up and down with increasing incredulity, ‘with the most incomparable voice in the world. What
you’ve done to deserve this I really don’t know.’ As she began fluttering her eyelashes and running up and down a few scales,
Deakin bowed to the audience and beat a hasty retreat.
¹⁵

Most people seemed to agree with George Melly’s description of John Deakin as ‘a vicious little drunk of such inventive malice
and implacable bitchiness that it’s surprising he didn’t choke on his own venom’; the kind of remark made by Deakin himself
on a daily basis. He is now known, not for his rudeness and acerbic personality, but for his photographs. He was a superb
portrait photographer but, unfortunately for posterity, he was careless with both prints and negatives and many have been
lost while others exist only in a folded or bent print or ripped and scratched negative; he threw them under his bed or loose
into drawers, even walked over them. He began life as a painter, travelling the world, including the South Pacific, with a
wealthy patron. In 1939, in Paris, he bought a used camera and immediately switched to photography. During the forties and
fifties he worked for
Vogue
, where his work was appreciated even though he often rubbed people up the wrong way. He took great enjoyment in hurting people’s
feelings, but in his photographs there was an unexpected humanity. Colin MacInnes, reviewing Deakin’s 1956 show of Paris photographs
for the
Times
, identified his sitters as ‘crushed by life, and the artist, quite without condescension or sentimentality, sees the poignancy
of their desperate will to live on in a world that has quite defeated them.’ He said: ‘the beauty of these photographs lies
in the fund of affection, and at times of pity, that the artist clearly feels for his fellow mortals’, a sentiment most of
Deakin’s friends found surprising.