David Hockney needs no introduction. I have always loved his work and had the pleasure of meeting him briefly a couple of times. When my brother was at an exhibition at the Tate Gallery Hockney suggested they go outside together and have a cigarette on the steps. A coachload of Japanese tourists pulled up and they all jumped out to take photographs. I have told this story before on the blog when I commented approvingly on Hockney’s opposition to moving the Bayeux Tapestry.
We met Hockney through George Lawson, who was a friend of his. George was a director of our family bookshop, originally taken on by my grandfather. He was an elfin, puckish figure, but surprisingly strong. He had a long relationship with ballet dancer Wayne Sleep and Hockney painted them together which is particularly why I watched the BBC double portrait documentary as part of Hockney night yesterday. George was also Wayne’s manager and together they made a great deal of money. He later lived with Jamie Whittington, recently deceased I am sorry to say. I did not know that Hockney had painted the two of them as well and there is an interview with them in the programme.
He was, as I once described him, a master of introductions, always thinking laterally, making connections. He became close to Tom Staley, director of the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Texas in Austin (HRC) after his time at the University of Tulsa and from that the firm made many significant sales of archives. He was rarely actually at the shop
George was truly one of a kind. Some of the stories (quite a lot in fact) about him are unrepeatable here – to say that he was a bon viveur would be a major understatement. But finding himself up in court on a drink driving charge (seen as a much less serious offence back then than it is now), the judge asked him why on earth he hadn’t just walked the short distance from the restaurant to his flat. “I was completely drunk, I couldn’t possibly have walked.”
We enjoyed many lunches together and he was always kind, full of anecdotes and occasionally mathematical conundrums. I was extremely fond of him and am glad that I once made a point of telling him so. He was extraordinarily well read and a lover of ‘great art’ of all kinds. He had a collection of antique or ancient phalluses and a clavichord in his flat above the shop in London. In his autobiography, Alex James describes him in Bit of a Blur, writing about his visits to a club called Peg’s: “George was usually there. I like George’s company. He’s an upper-class pixie of some vintage, gay and fabulous. He’s from another world that involves things like cufflinks, bone china and ballet. Sometimes it was just George and myself there for lunch, other days there’d be a minor royal or a mega-dega film director, lunching his stars. It was ludicrous. A bar that was empty apart from people who were so famous that they had to hide there between meetings in town. It was a good place to go and have ideas. The barman never spoke. He just made fantastic martinis.”
A girlfriend and I once imagined how the various members of staff and directors at the bookshop would react if there was a fire. George, I suggested, would have said, reaching for his phone “Oh don’t worry about that my dear. I have a very good contact at the local fire station.” He might well have added something about what a beautiful young man he was.
He once arranged for my father and him to arrive, quite unnecessarily, at a client’s in a helicopter, simply because he knew it would impress.
As my father says in his autobiographical Books in The Blood (which is were the above photo comes from), George was always thinking two moves ahead. He was once instructed by Warren Roberts when he was director of the HRC to arrange the shipping of a library of important books on astronomy in the South West of France along with the observatory’s telescope. George’s invoice was, well, astronomic. George’s explanation and the upshot are summarised in Books in the Blood:
“Being too late to book a direct flight to Bordeaux [George has probably missed more planes than he has caught in the course of his lifetime], I had to fly to Paris, stay overnight and rent a self-drive car for the journey to the observatory Unfortunately, at this short notice, Hertz could only offer me a rather large Mercedes the petrol consumption of which does admittedly make the hire-charge rather high … When I checked into a hotel near the observatory, I found that a major French public holiday was fast approaching. If we did not get the books and the telescope packed and loaded on board before that holiday began, we would miss a sailing date and there would be a long delay. Luckily I was able to find a manufacturer of packing cases who was of a sporting disposition and I persuaded him to accept a wager that he and his men could not build the necessary set of custom-made wooden crates in forty-eight hours. Settling this wager cost a further FF1,000.
Once at the observatory I soon realized that there was only one way to get its large telescope out of the building and that was through the open cupola. Lifting a precision instrument of this heavy weight and manoeuvring it through the opening in the cupola was clearly beyond the firm of packers I had engaged. But then I happened to discover that a detachment of the United States Air Force was stationed nearby. I drove over. I went into the N.C.O’s Club and said I should like to meet any Top Sergeant who came from Texas. Happily one was found and I explained the predicament to him. As soon as he knew I was working for the state of his birth, he promised to take care of the problem, and promptly introduced me to a friend of his who was in the engineering section. More money changed hands (see attached voucher) and that evening a mobile crane and supporting crew arrived at the observatory and successfully extracted the telescope.
Dealing promptly with bureaucratic minutiae has never been a forte of the French and I was worried whether the shipment would obtain customs clearance before the holiday. I went to the docks to meet a moderatelv senior douanier and made him a wager similar to that accepted by the packing-case makers. I bet him FF2,000 that his men could not stamp the necessary documents and have the packing cases on board before the shipping company’s deadline. Naturally I lost the bet (see attached voucher) and the vessel sailed on time with books and telescope safely aboard.
[My father] dulv sent on to Warren Roberts … a modest bill for George’s time, the rather more extravagant claim for expenses and George’s account of how they had arisen. Warren was equal to the occasion. He wrote back: “I’ll pay your bill. Anthony, and I’ll pay George’s expenses, but only if you throw in the copyright in his account of the affair.”
My family and I were in Brighton one weekend for a wedding and we visited George and Jamie in their flat overlooking the sea. We were all invited to try on a fur coat which had once belonged to someone famous, I cannot remember who. An actress or a ballet dance in all likelihood. I am against fur in principle and I look ridiculous of course, but with whom else might this have happened?
When Princess Diana died, George suddenly appeared in my office and removed her letters to Wayne Sleep from the safe. I had no idea they were there.
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