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.
More shenanigans from Feldman, Bacon, and co, after the jump…
