Maggi Hambling picks muse and lover Henrietta Moraes

0:00Today's guest is the brilliant British artist Maggie Hambling, whom I unashamedly adore. Welcome, Maggie. Whom have you picked and why? The Queen of Soho, Henrietta Marais, because she was a force of nature who took me over completely. And you drew her. I did. I've got a huge book of your amazing sketches. What do you mean, sketches, Maggie? Oh, no, I've said sketches. I know you told me I must say drawings. Drawings? Your amazing drawings. No, no, I'll tell you how it happened. She wrote me a letter saying she'd got some annoying bills coming to£400. Could I help her out? And in exchange, she'd do some work for me.

0:46Well, the only thing I could think of that she could possibly do was to pose. And so we started in May 1997. Yeah, that's how it was. How well did you know her? I'm assuming you got to know her quite well. Yes, certainly. Was there an affair? A love affair, yes. I'd met her first at a Boxing Day lunch in Wiltshire. There was a lot of people there, and I looked across the table, and there was Henrietta, and it was just like a Francis Bacon portrait in motion. You know, we artists have a thing about the muse. Yes. She was the living embodiment of the muse, and I became her subject rather than she mine.

1:31I mean, she took me over completely. I can sense our listeners thinking, who is this woman that we're talking about? So let's find out a bit. Henrietta Murray's lived an extraordinary life, a kind of queen of Bohemia. What do you mean by muse? Well, you know, one works away, at least I do, every day, in doom and doubt and despair and all the rest of it. And then occasionally something happens. I don't know why and I don't know when, but the painting paints itself. and those are the moments I really live for. She was Francis Bacon's muse as well, wasn't she? Yes, yes, she was a very good friend of Bacon and he painted her 15 times.

2:12And Lucien Freud painted her quite a bit as well in the 19... No, not so much when he had an affair with her in the early days. Henrietta was a foul-mouthed, amoral, thief, a violent drunkard and a drug addict. Yet she was witty, wonderfully warm and lovable. Her presence in any room immediately told you, life is more thrilling than we dull folk imagine. That was from one of her many obituaries. Is that fair? Yes, absolutely. And a friend of mine who'd been at parties long before I met Henrietta, this friend of mine said she was about 100 times more alive than anyone else in the room. We have some archive of Henrietta talking here in 1992 about Francis Bacon.

3:01It's a programme called A Brush With Violence. When he went out on a binge, it was a proper binge, you know. It started... I mean, I had lunch with him every day for about 18 months at one time, and it started at about 11 o 'clock in the morning, and it went on until the gargoyle closed at 4 the next morning. I mean, it was nothing faint-hearted about it. And there was a jolly good lunch at Wheeler's, and there was a jolly good dinner at Wieders' and then afternoons at the Colony Club with bottle after bottle of champagne and everything. And he was just... He was very large. He was a bit... Personally, he wasn't...

3:42He was enormously generous when he was with people. I've never heard her voice before and it's not quite as I imagine it. It takes me back. Does it? Quite unnerving. We have with us also a painter, Darren Caulfield who, with books such as Queens of Bohemia has carved out a second career for himself as a notable chronicler of Soho's past and you're working on a biography of Henrietta now is that right, Darren? Yes, that's true Henrietta's a fascinating character who deserves to be more widely known than she is no one seems to know much about her life What did she do? Well, she was very well educated, surprisingly her mother was a single mother.

4:26Her father had tried to strangle her mother when she found out she was pregnant with Henrietta. What? Yes, she was born in the foothills of the Himalayas, Henrietta. She was half Indian beauty. Yeah. And her father was in the Indian Air Force. And once he discovered that Henrietta's mother was pregnant with her, he tried to strangle her and kill her, fled the house and was never seen again. So Henrietta sort of grew up with her grandmother who moved back to England. Maggie, can you read this? It's something that Henrietta herself wrote. All my life I've been on the wrong side of the fence. It started off by my having no father and living with a very belligerent grandmother.

5:04My mother was known to me until I was about seven as Mummy Judy and appeared once a year dressed in startling and very beautiful black clothes. And that is all she said. Yes, well, she was sort of forged in fire, really, I think. Yes. her grandmother had had fleets of servants whilst in India but back in England had to learn to cook and clean for herself all of which apparently she wasn't very good at and so she took her frustration out on Henrietta and would lock Henrietta into a darkened cupboard for hours on end This is an awful story Yes Totally rejected by her father abandoned by her mother put in the care of a wicked grandmother why was she not crushed by this?

5:48Well, she had a very strong personality, and I think this is where it developed from. She went to various boarding schools, one of which was very close to Marion Faithfuls, who was a very good friend of hers as well. Very well educated. She was a very articulate, clever woman. But she was sent to a secretarial school at the age of 18 with another person that was Caroline Blackwood. But Hemia hated the idea of typing, so she just used to steal typewriters every day and pawn them to go to the cinema. she then decided that she wanted to move up to the next thing and wanted to be an artist model so she went to a red telephone box and pulled out the telephone directory and phoned up all the art schools in london and told them she was the most beautiful model in the world and they should employ her but little did she realize actually how boring it was to be an art model at art school she also developed a pathological hatred of art students and kept passing out during exams whilst they were trying to draw her so this was all very short-lived really but she um went to the hundred club on just off of oxford street which was the place to get in people like george melly who maggie knows very well used to perform there and that's where she met michael law and fell in love with him and he was the man who took her across the road to soho a world she'd never seen before and renamed her henrietta because her real name wasn't henrietta torres audrey wendy Yeah, but...

7:09Right. Let's pause it there. She's changed her name. I just want to ask you a little bit more about her childhood. You said she hated boarding school. I read somewhere that she was so afraid when she first went that she was sick all over her bed and then so afraid of what she'd done that she ate it all up. Yes, that's true. And one of the girls, she was at boarding school with, she had a huge craftsman called Valerie, and Valerie slept with T.S. Eliot's poems under a pillow every night and went on to marry him. Marianne Faithfull told me that she went to a much posher school than Marianne did.

7:46I mean, people think Marianne was quite posh, but Marianne said, oh, no, that was a really posh school. They used to wear red cloaks like Red Riding Hood. So that's the only extra information we have, I'm afraid. Maggie, was your childhood anything like this? Definitely no cloaks. Wicked grandmother? No. just falling passionately in love with various of the teachers which is actually how I became an artist. I was deeply in love with the biology mistress who was invigilating this exam and I was 14 and I did nothing but flick paint at people and generally be a nuisance to draw attention to myself and I suddenly saw the clock and it was 20 past 3 so I knew at half past 3 I'd got a hand in a painting so I just did one and when the results came out I was top of art.

8:32I thought, well, it's worth looking into this business. Did she talk to you at all about her childhood? No, no, she didn't. She was very, very much in the present, right now, what was happening. And she'd ask me a question, and if I sort of had to think for a moment, she'd say, I can hear those clods of Suffolk clay moving round your brain.

8:58I want to talk about her looks. Because I think they are intrinsic to her capturing people's attention. Well, she was voluptuous, and she had this devastating way of looking at people. And as with a lot of people, her cheery side, if you like, was the right-hand side of her face, and the sadder side was the left-hand side of her face, and in the middle was a broken nose that had never been seen to. And she had very sensual lips. She had smouldering eyes as well, didn't she? She had a very penetrating stare. And she would sort of lock on to people with her eyes if she was trying to get a drink out of them in the Colony Room Club or a bottle of champagne.

9:43I mean, she knew how to get people's wallets open.

9:50Do we know when she discovered Soho? Approximately 1952, so quite early on. And it was Michael Law, who's now not very well remembered. but he's more remembered for his love life than actually being a filmmaker. He'd actually won an award at Cannes, and Michael sort of knew everyone in Soho. So for Henrietta, it was very much like a village. In fact, she said it was like a pantomime, and everyone said that she was Cinderella at the pantomime. So, for example, they knew everyone, like Sid the Swimmer, Brian the Burglar. Everybody tended to have names, because alcoholics are terrible at remembering names, so they tend to make up nicknames for people.

10:32But the other interesting thing is, talking about her childhood, is that none of those people who occupied those places in Soho, like the colony rooms, would ever talk about their childhood. And if you asked them, you'd be asked to leave by people like Newell Belcher. They'd say, sorry, you're asking too many questions, leave. Which makes it very hard to write books on these people. Yes. Because it wasn't a done thing to ask these questions, you know. As Maggie said, you lived in the present, and you basically invented yourself, and Henriette was her own invention. Just as Francis Bacon was. They could be as devastatingly what we would nowadays call rude to each other, couldn't they?

11:07Absolutely. And then meet the next day as if nothing had happened at all. Yes, I mean, they could have fights, glasses would get broken, horrible things would be said about one another. Yeah. And the next day they would carry on as normal as if nothing would happen. Exactly. And to some extent, she was not the victim in all this. She had a very good nose for celebrity. Well, everybody needs a sport. I mean, some people like tobogganing, some people like skiing. Her sport was, you know, celebrity climbing, which she was very good at. You know, she could sort of stick a pickaxe in a celebrity's head or their Afghan coat and sort of latch onto them.

11:40Because I think she actually chose people rather than people chose her. I mean, I'm absolutely sure that she chose Maggie. Did she sleep around? Oh, yes. Well, yes and no. I mean, compared to what women were supposed to do then, you've got to remember that she was a taboo breaker. they're expected to put up and be quiet and henriette wouldn't put up and be quiet she'd hold forth so she did have affairs i mean she had an affair with the marquis of milford haven who was the best man at queen elizabeth's wedding the marquis used to have sex parties in his apartment off of park lane and then she had an affair of lord glen connor who was hotly tipped to marry princess margaret as well as lucian freud and half a dozen other men but this is over a period of years and compared to what the men did she wasn't very promiscuous at all really.

12:26Her first affair was with a trumpet player with smelly feet. That's right and it didn't occur to her that she should say no so she slept with the rest of the band as well. Yes now this is this is what intrigues me Maggie in her autobiography she says she slept with him not because he was at all attractive but because she didn't realize that if someone asked you to sleep with them, you could say no. I think that's disingenuous. No, no, I've met several women who said to me, it seems rather impolite not to sleep with them if they want to sleep with you. It seems, you know, just bad manners. Right, we're going to play a clip.

13:03I would think that I met Henrietta in Muriel's Club, the colony room in Soho, and she had the most extraordinary, overwhelming personality. This is Diana Mellie talking to the BBC in 2009. She was glamorous and behemoth. She wasn't exactly a real beauty because she was too strong-looking to be a real beauty. And once she had a bad oyster and she got typhus. Once she came out of hospital, she was allowed to eat free there for, I think, about three or four years and behave as badly as she liked, which I think sometimes involved getting under the table and doing something with men's trousers.

13:53Shall we talk about her first marriage, Maggie? I don't know much about her first marriage. To Michael Law? Well, actually, what happened was she wasn't going to get married to Michael Law. She fell in love with Lucian Freud one night at the Gargoyle Club and she said to him, I want you, and then the next day they consummated their relationship on the edge of a cold sink in a Soho basement. How do we know about the sink? She talks about it quite openly. But when she went to use Lucian Freud's painting of her for the cover of her book, someone had to go and ask Lucian Freud for permission. And when they mentioned Henrietta's name, he ranted for about half an hour about her disgusting morals and all these sort of things.

14:35And then at the end, the person said, so is that a no then? And he said, no, no, of course you can use the portrait. for the cover of a book, but, you know. I think she stole her next husband off his former boyfriend. Is that right? That was Norman Bowler, yes, and he was a sort of keep-fit fanatic. He was a bit of a bodybuilder, and everyone marvelled at Norman's physique because after the war they'd been rationing, and most models were as skinny as a rake. But Norman was being picked up by a friend of Henry's called John Minton, heir to the Minton Ceramics Empire, and a tutor at the Royal College of Art.

15:12And he had a sort of group of people around him, mostly sailors, which were known as Johnny's Circus. Johnny took a fancy to Norman Bowler and moved him into his house. And Henrietta proceeded to seduce Norman Bowler and they disappeared one night at John Minton's studio and the last anyone saw of them was Norman Bowler and Henrietta looking back up the stairs and they eloped. Have you lived in a world like this, Maggie? No, I'm completely unadventurous. Are you? I need a very quiet life. Well, it doesn't sound very quiet to me. You see, the thing is that Henrietta goes on. I keep a photograph of her in the back of my sketchbook and I transfer it each time I work in a new sketchbook.

15:56And that terrible childhood obviously bred in her, her spirit. I mean, when I paint a portrait, I don't have to think about likeness. That just happens. I try and paint the spirit of the person. That terrible childhood, which I never knew about, obviously bred in her. It was the fight in her. It was the... With drink, for instance. It was a sort of dance to the death, you know. But in the end, you know, she was a great liver and her liver got her in the end. But it was her defiance, her defiance of everything. Yes, but Maggie, you have spirit. You have defiance. You can be quite fierce. You didn't have a disastrous childhood, did you?

16:42No. So where do you get your spirit from? I don't know. I think drinking special brews are a great help. It's quite funny when they recommended to Henrietta that she go to AA and she thought it was something to do with automobiles. What we've got to remember is that people of that generation didn't know what an alcoholic was. I mean, if you said to Dylan Thomas you're an alcoholic, he'd look at you blankly. They had absolutely no idea. To drink every day was a natural thing to do. You're listening to The Great Life of Henrietta Morais, proposed by Maggie Hambling. Now, help me out, Maggie or Darren, either of you, because I'm trying to get a handle on this life.

17:19I'm looking for shape, for who she hung out with, how she filled her day. What did she do, either of you? There's different phases of her life. There's the sorrow phase of the 50s and then there's the sort of King's Road phase of the 60s. during the 50s they'd awake quite late in the day and wander down Dean Street she lived at the top of Dean Street then in a Queen Anne house and she'd wandered down D Street with Michael Law and they'd sit in a cafe on the corner of Old Compton Street called the Madrid which is where all the Spanish communists hung out who'd had to flee Franco and she'd sit there and wait for the French house pub to open and then as soon as that opened she went in and would ask the proprietor Gaston Burlimont to lend her a fiver and give her a perno and that's how her day would start.

18:02Looking for someone to get lunch off of. Once they spotted their meal ticket, a cry would go out from Michael Law. He'd shout, look Henrietta! And Henrietta would clap her hands and go, oh, Michael! And they'd got their meal ticket. They'd latch onto them like wild animals and not let their meal ticket leave until they were fed. Her next marriage? Yes, to Dom Morais. Yes. that's interesting because Dom was just come to England he'd got into Oxford via his father who was Frank Moraes who was a very well-known newspaper man in India so Dom's father knew people like Stephen Spender and Cyril Connolly very well connected and so Dom didn't have a sort of typical immigrants approach to London I mean he was plugged in right from the beginning into this literary world.

18:51But he met Henrietta at the age of 19, and Henrietta was much older than him. She was also six months pregnant at the time. I know that Henrietta called Dom Marais a 24-hour poet. Yes. Because it was very short-lived, his success. How did the marriage go? What happened really was they married quite late on. They'd been together for four years before they married. and then they went on the honeymoon so they took the orienting express to athens on honeymoon and then dom got commissioned to go to the adolf eichmann nazi show trial in israel so their honeymoon then turned into a nazi show trial which they spent six months at was it a good relationship it started off very well i think until um dom in his head married up um henrietta with his mother who he had problems with.

19:44And then once he'd made that psychological link, he found it very difficult to be with her. So he tried to escape from her? He did try to escape from her, yes. He found that she was quite controlling, like his mother was. His mother had had a mental breakdown and had gone berserk and used to hit him as a child. And he made this link in his head between her and Henrietta, and after that the marriage was doomed, really. So he kept trying to leave, but Henrietta kept tracking him down and bringing him back because she was twice the size of him.

20:16literally carry him under his arm whilst he's protesting like a child how did he finally escape well one day they were around a friend's house and he said i'm just popping out to get some cigarettes and they came back what but she did track him down she was sitting in a pub a year later with her next boyfriend who's the sudanese painter hussein Sharif and out the corner of her eyes she spied Dom crossing the road so she trailed him all the way through Chelsea until she got to the house he was in and forced entry and Dom was sitting in a chair which he tried to sink into he wanted to disappear whilst gulping down whiskey and Henrietta found a pistol lying on the side and picked it up and started waving it around threatening to shoot him and Dom was terrified and the host of the house wasn't quite sure if the pistol was loaded or not You see, this is why Darren has written a fantastic biography of her, which I've read, which is terrific, and let's hope it comes out very soon.

21:17What I find interesting is if you look at any book on Francis Bacon, look in the index and look at Henrietta, and she's barely mentioned at all, maybe two or three quotes on her, and always the same anecdote about being photographed by John Deacon. And yet she was so central to that scene. She had various jobs, including newspaper columnist, cult investigator, gypsy storyteller. She worked in the coffee bar of a Greek Street bookshop run by David Archer, subject of a 1974 documentary called A Gentleman in Soho. Henrietta Marais was another close friend and admirer of David Archer's. He was an entrepreneur and he didn't have the worldliness of Diaghilev.

22:01He didn't have any worldliness at all. I mean, he produced, if he'd been a racing trainer, I mean, he produced a very good stable, to put it like that. He was so funny. He used to say things like, they tell me cucumber is awfully good to put on the nose because by that time he had rather a sort of split vein sort of nose. Maggie, what's it like hearing her voice again? It's rather eerie. I mean, as she still haunts the studio, if you like, and to hear that voice again after all these years is really quite a shock. What did she do as she got older, as the decades began to pass, Maggie? Well, she became a gardener, didn't she?

22:52She did. Marianne Faithful said to me that Henrietta took up gardening with the same zeal that she'd once taken up cat burgling. Yes. The alcoholism was increasingly a problem, I think. Well, yes, it was when we started to work together, she wasn't drinking, and then towards the end of the year she began. But it was this defiance. There was drink and there was Henrietta, and she was in battle with it in the end of drink one. The only thing I would say is that she was a bit like the first punk pensioner walking up and down the King's Road in old age because she would go shoplifting all the charity shops.

23:33Yes. She'd walk up and down. She'd say, well, I'm a charity. Exactly. But I'd say, you can't pinch things from charity shops. She'd say, well, what do you mean I'm a charity? Her favourite one was Oxfam. She liked to nick from Oxfam regularly. With a dachshund on a lead. Yes, yes. And 60 Camel cigarettes and a copy of the Daily Mail under her arm. That was her daily thing was to go and get the Daily. She read the Daily Mail. I mean, you'd think she'd be reading the Daily Star or something or Tribune, but she was a Daily Mail reader. So these people are quite complicated. They're not left-wing or right-wing, you know.

24:02They just have their own little quirks. But she was two people. Yes. One when she was drunk and one when she wasn't. I'm getting the impression, listening to your evocation of the bohemian scene, most of these people actually lived rather tragic lives and died rather lonely or broken. There was a lot of suicides. David Archer committed suicide. John Deakin drank himself to death. But what's interesting is when Henrietta in the 50s was a young woman, there was a group of sort of mother figures around her, such as Muriel Belcher, the poet Elizabeth Smart, the painter Eleanor Bellingham Smith, and these were all taboo breaking women from the 30s and 40s.

24:45There was a kind of network there, because basically there were orphans, all these people. That's why they met in bars and drank. And if they weren't actually physical orphans in that sense, than they had been cut off by their family, like Henrietta and Francis Bacon had. So these clubs, like the Colony Rooms, became their families. The French House became a family. What I'm struggling with is a sort of will-o'-the-wisp. How do you catch the wind? Well, this is the interesting thing. The women at the time were incredibly important to this bohemian world. They were the sort of dark matter holding the universe together.

25:20And so even though some of them seemed to have not produced very much, the point of writing the book Queens of Bohemia was to show you how these women actually facilitate all the artists, all the writers, all the poets, and if it wasn't for these women, that we wouldn't have the rich culture that we do. You said, Maggie, I learnt an enormous amount from her. The whole of her life was in her face. And you drew her in death as well as in life. You went to the morgue. Yes, I was with her when she died, and she said, come here and give me a hug and another cigarette. and I was arranging some lilies in a vase in her room and she died telling her doctor a joke on the telephone.

26:03And then she was in the chapel of rest early in the morning before her funeral and this very large woman let me in to draw her. We both killed ourselves with laughter because she looked so hilarious. I mean, she'd been got up in her best suit and trousers and this Indian hat was on her head, slightly at an angle, and she was holding a wand, and she looked absolutely furious. It was as if she was still alive as I drew her. Definitely she was there. And then, I mean, much later, much later, when I had the show Touch at the British Museum a year or two ago, we had the sculpture Henrietta eating a meringue in the middle of the drawing show of mine.

26:49And this Henrietta eating a meringue sort of was projected into the middle of the Michelangelo cartoon. So I felt she was still there. She would have loved that. When she was told she was diabetic, she really tucked into cream cakes like nobody's business. I mean, it's her spirit that, I won't say keeps me going exactly, but her lust for life and her challenge and her, you know, and keeping the photograph in the back of the sketchbooks. So she sort of keeps an eye on me, do you know? My thanks to you, Maggie, and also to Darren for bringing Henrietta to life. Goodbye.