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When Marty Feldman met Francis Bacon drink was involved.

Before he became internationally famous for his performance as Igor in Young Frankenstein, Marty Feldman was a very successful and hugely influential comedy scriptwriter with his long-time writing partner Barry Took.

One night in London, sometime during the almost swinging sixties, Feldman and Took had been working late finishing off another episode of their hit radio show Round the Horne. It had been a good day, a productive day, and now Feldman was on his way home to see his wife, Lauretta. As he walked through the city he heard jazz coming from an art gallery. The band were playing “Night in Tunisia.” It piqued his interest. Feldman had started off as a jazz musician when he was fifteen playing trumpet with his own band and occasionally filling in with other combos. He wandered towards the gallery. A small crowd stood around clinking glasses. Ah, jazz, art, and free booze.

Feldman snaffled a couple of cocktails and had a look at the paintings. Not bad. Interesting. Certainly different but not really to his taste. Against one bare white wall there stood a man who looked like he was losing his battle to keep himself or the building up. He had the look of an aged choirboy gone to seed. A round turnip head, with dyed hair slicked back, and just a hint of rouge on his cheeks. He wore a leather jacket, a white shirt (top button undone) and blue paint splattered denims. Feldman thought he looked familiar but wasn’t quite sure where from?

What was said, we can only imagine, but it apparently began with the man against the wall commenting on Feldman’s distinctive face.

“I could use that face,” he might have said
“Well, I’m using it myself at the moment,” Feldman replied in our imaginary dialog.
“Your eyes,” returned the first.
“Yes, they’re my eyes.”
“You don’t understand, I. Have. To. Paint. You,” almost like Edith Evans’ “handbag” in The Importance of Being Earnest.

The man against the wall leaned towards Feldman as if attempting to capture something invisible between them.

“I,” he continued, “must paint you. You look the sort of man I could do something with.”

Feldman thought what sort of things this man might want to do with him then decided this strange character was trying to pick him up.

“Here, take my number,” the man said. He wrote something down on a scrap of paper. Feldman took the paper and watched the man who was no longer holding up the wall stagger off into the night.

The next morning, over breakfast, Feldman told his wife Lauretta about the man at the gallery who had tried to pick him up. “He wanted to paint my portrait, ” he added.

“Who was it?” Lauretta asked.

“Dunno. He wrote his name down.”

Feldman retrieved the slip of paper and said, “Francis. That’s all it says.”

Lauretta asked Feldman to describe this painter. He did. Lauretta then suggested her husband had met Francis Bacon.

Francis Bacon in his studio.

Moving forward a few months: Feldman spent the day writing with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in a local pub. It was a long day’s writing and drinking into the night. Eventually, the threesome were “poured out of the place hammered” trying to remember who they were and where they lived. Somehow they got lost and ended up (surprise, surprise) at another art gallery party.

Once again, Feldman tucked into the cocktails, this time joined by the equally drunk Cook and Moore. And once again, there was that man Francis holding up a wall. As Feldman recounted the incident in his autobiography eYE Marty:

I spotted my old pal Francis standing at a distance and pointed him out to Peter, who knew my story because I had become obsessed with what-ifs. Bacon’s work was fetching high prices and it would have been fun if he’d painted a portrait of me and I hadn’t told Lauretta, just inviting her to a gallery and pretended it was no big deal.

Cook told Moore about Bacon’s offer to paint Feldman’s portrait.

Without hesitation, Dudley went up to Bacon and told him that Marty was now ready to be painted.

Unfortunately, the temperamental Bacon told Moore that he had “never seen or talked to [Feldman] in his life.”

Though Bacon may not have known Feldman, he was bound to be at least acquainted with Cook and Moore, as he had often visited Cook’s Establishment Club, and had been at parties also attended by Pete ‘n’ Dud. Perhaps, as Feldman suggested, Bacon saw the state the trio were in and thought they were just “a bunch of drunken wankers.”

Pete ‘n’ Dud.

A few days later, Feldman received a letter from Bacon in the post, asking him to drop by his studio. At first convinced this was Lauretta, Cook, or Moore winding him up, Feldman considered ignoring the missive. However, that night, after another long day toiling over the typewriter with Barry Took, Feldman decided to “throw caution to the wind” and call round at Bacon’s studio.
As Feldman later wrote:

I knocked at the door and was let in by a rather strange bloke who left me to wait for ages in the hallway.

Bacon finally appeared and was very apologetic. He explained that he was readying a show and his agent had been hounding him. I told him I didn’t want to disturb him, and before I knew it I was sitting sipping cognac surrounded by his work. He was such a lovely man and he told me that after the night when Dud had approached him at the party he did remember me but was too embarrassed to do anything about it. It turned out that one of his pals was a fan of Round the Horne, and when he told Bacon I was one of the writers of Julian and Sandy, he was very excited to meet me.

The Julian and Sandy characters were two gay actors played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, who each week offered their bona services to the show’s host Kenneth Horne. Julian and Sandy spoke polari, the secret language of the gay community, and were out gay at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England.

[Bacon] sat there sipping his drink and would suddenly burst into dialogue from our show. Hours passed and when I got up to use the bathroom I realised I was plastered.

{snip}

As I was leaving, he couldn’t stop hugging me and saying all sorts of silly things when he suddenly stopped and said, ‘Mart, we’ve spent all this time together and I still haven’t painted you. You must take a painting with you.’ I declined his kind gesture but he just grabbed one, thrust it at me and threw me out the door.

Ideally, this would be the place to leave Marty’s story: Feldman’s solved the riddle of the painter Francis and although he has not had his portrait painted, he has at least been gifted a canvas by the great artist Bacon himself. But no, that would be too easy.

The next morning: Feldman woke up to find his wife Lauretta standing over him demanding to know where he had got the painting from. Feldman explained about meeting Bacon and being given a picture. Unfortunately, Lauretta did not believe him and called him “a fucking liar” and threatened to destroy the painting unless he told the truth. But, but, but…. It was a no-win situation as Lauretta thought her husband was just winding her up.

Feldman took the painting over to Cook’s house while he decided what to do with it. Eventually, they decided to return the painting back to Bacon. Cook agreed to help. The pair were in a pub getting very drunk. Around closing time, they decided to return the painting.

We made our way back to Francis’s house with the painting in the pouring rain–I threw my coat over it and we took turns to carry it, trying not to drop it. When we finally got to his house and rang his doorbell, we found nobody was home. Pete thought the best idea was to leave the painting at the door with a note saying, ‘Thanks but I simply couldn’t accept it.’

I said we should leave it at his back door because it had an awning and we didn’t have a pen or paper and it was fucking lashing on us.

Pete helped me over the wall, then threw the painting over to me and I placed it carefully under the awning, leaning against the back door with my coat still on it. The painting was a distorted portrait of maybe a man, maybe even Bacon himself, and I figured a spot of water couldn’t make it any more distorted. I tried to climb back over the wall but couldn’t manage it. Lanky Pete had to scramble over and push me back. I was sure I’d broken some part of my body.

When Pete was on my side of the wall again, he straightened himself up and said ‘All right, Mart, see you tomorrow, mate,’ and was gone.

I never heard from Francis, and Pete never spoke of it again, but every time Sotheby’s puts another of his paintings up for sale, Lauretta always says, ‘What if, Mart!’

What if, indeed.

Below, One Pair of Eyes (1969) featuring Marty Feldman, in which the great comic writer and actor discusses his early career and interviews some of the comedians and writers who inspired him like Spike Milligan, Eric Morecambe, and Johnny Speight.