In The Beverly Hills Housewife, the story of David Hockney’s iconic painting becomes a portrait of friendship, ambition and the transformative possibilities of Los Angeles in the 1960s. At its centre is Betty Freeman, the woman Hockney painted, whose life and remarkable patronage of music extended far beyond the role suggested by the painting’s title. Here, the author James Cahill, explores the story behind Freeman and Hockney’s unlikely friendship, the young artist’s fascination with LA, and the encounters, influences and ideas that shaped his early career.
Who was the woman in pink?
James Cahill (JC): The woman in pink was called Betty Freeman. She was born in 1921, the daughter of a wealthy Russian-Jewish industrialist, and grew up on the east coast. She had been intrigued by new art and music since her youth – she later said: ‘From an early age (I think I was about 15), I liked all the arts of my time’. She studied at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, in the 1940s – Vladimir Nabokov was among her lecturers – and it was here that she resolved upon becoming a concert pianist. She soon married and had four children in quick succession, then moved to Los Angeles with her young family in 1950. But she never stopped playing the piano and would practise for eight hours a day. Then in 1965 came a realisation. She had just played a recital – her best ever – and it struck her with the force of an epiphany that she would never be as good as she needed to be. She closed the piano and never played it again.
It was around this time that David Hockney, then newly arrived in LA, paid her a visit. He had intended to take pictures of Freeman’s garden and swimming pool, but he decided to make her the subject of a painting. This book tells the story of that painting, their different lives and the friendship that evolved between them. Much of the book focuses on what Betty went on to become. The irony, so far as the painting’s title is concerned, is that she wholly outgrew the role of an affluent housewife, becoming one of the most influential patrons of music of her era.
Betty Freeman, 1975. Betty Freeman Papers. MSS 227. Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego Library.
In the book you refer to the gay man’s fascination with older sophisticated women – not just Hockney himself but Warhol and Capote. Why do you think this is, and what do you think drew Hockney to Freeman?
JC: I mention Capote and Warhol as just two of examples of a widespread phenomenon – the beguilement of the younger gay man for the older, beautiful woman, and at the same time, of course, her love for him. It’s often a reciprocal thing. In the end, though, it’s more useful to think about the participants in such a dynamic as individuals, when thinking about what made them intriguing to one another. Part of the glamour of a woman like Betty Freeman must have been her otherness: she belonged to a world that was nothing like Hockney’s own.
Part of the glamour of a woman like Betty Freeman must have been her otherness: she belonged to a world that was nothing like Hockney’s own. James Cahill
In the painting, she has a slightly unreachable quality, and many of her friends recall a quality of aloofness in her. But then, as her letters to Hockney make abundantly clear, she came to adore him. The numerous depictions that he made of her over the years, and the many photographs of them together (often in the shadow of Beverly Hills Housewife) are testament to his own strength of feeling. I have a sense that, back in 1966, David and Betty sensed the untapped possibility in one another. Each was poised in a moment of becoming. He was on the brink of the greatest phase of his career – about to create the pictures of LA that would become emblems of their time and place. And she was at a more personal crossroads, wondering what she would become in the aftermath of her divorce and having abandoned her musical ambitions.
David and Betty sensed the untapped possibility in one another. Each was poised in a moment of becoming. James Cahill
David Hockney and Betty Freeman, November 15, 1987. Betty Freeman Papers. MSS 227. Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego Library.
You’re an author of two critically acclaimed novels, Tiepolo Blue and The Violet Hour. The Beverly Hills Housewife is novelistic in many ways, particularly in its eclectic structure and tone. How would you describe the process of writing non-fiction versus fiction?
JC: The main difference is that the nonfiction book was very much research-led, whereas in fiction, my research has tended to be intermittent and subservient to the story: it’s not the driving force. The idea for this book, my fascination with Betty Freeman and her world, all began with Hockney’s painting. The picture is the recurring motif, the epicentre of the story. In addition, I had conversations with numerous people connected with Betty and the Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s, and those conversations fed into the book, helping to create its episodic, conversational structure. That structure, however, is also what brings the book closer to the form of a novel (or a certain kind of novel). I was always conscious of wanting to tell a story, even in the most forensically art-historical parts of the book. So the two forms have much in common, too. And to write about Los Angeles is perhaps always to err slightly into myth or fiction.
The Beverly Hills Housewife: Hockney’s Californian Muse and the World Beyond the Pool
How did it all happen for David Hockney, the young Yorkshireman from humble beginnings?
JC: I’m not sure David Hockney had single ‘big break’ so much as a long – pretty much unbroken – winning streak, beginning at the Royal College of Art, where he studied from 1959 to 1962. A large part of it was his innate talent: he stood out among his peers, he was already selling his work and enjoying a kind of stardom. At the RCA’s convocation ceremony in 1962, where he was awarded a medal for outstanding work, he wore a gold lamé jacket in place of an academic gown. His early work remains some of his strongest, partly because of its emotive and unapologetic expression of his sexuality.
One of the defining characteristics of Hockney – as a young man or throughout his life – was his curiosity. It was his open-hearted fascination with other people, especially people unlike himself, that propelled his work. Betty Freeman was a case in point. James Cahill
One of the defining characteristics of Hockney – as a young man or throughout his life – was his curiosity. It was his open-hearted fascination with other people, especially people unlike himself, that propelled his work. Betty Freeman was a case in point. Ostensibly, they had little in common. But quickly, she went from being an object of curiosity to a friend.
The book explores how the young Hockney had a vision of L.A. – largely inspired by gay magazines he read at art school – and when he moved there as a young artist he realised his dreamy impressions of it were true. What is it about the city that Hockney loved so much, and what makes it such a special place, symbolically, for artists in particular?
JC: He loved the light, the architecture, the sense of space and the sense of possibility – not least the possibility of greater sexual freedom. The bohemia that he had existed in at the RCA had been pretty permissive, as he always said, but Los Angeles offered a whole new level. West Hollywood boasted a gigantic gay bar, the Red Raven, that was unlike anything he had found in London or New York. He later admitted that his early years in LA were one of the few times he was promiscuous.
LA has always been characterized as place to escape to – an ‘elsewhere’ or Lotus Land. James Cahill
He had always known that he would love LA. Even as a child, going to the cinema in Bradford with his father, he was enchanted by the sharp light and hard-edged shadows of Hollywood movies. ‘I was brought up in Bradford and Hollywood,’ he later remarked, ‘because Hollywood was the cinema.’ When he finally arrived in 1964, he had the impression that no one had ever painted or drawn the city – that it didn’t have an artistic image. That wasn’t quite true, but part of the appeal of LA for artists – even today – is its sense of newness, of being free from tradition or precedent. It’s why LA has always been characterized as place to escape to – an ‘elsewhere’ or Lotus Land.
David Hockney, Venice, California, 1964. Photo John Kasmin. Courtesy of the artist and Lyndsey Ingram
A fascinating element of this book are the serendipitous encounters Hockney had and the friendships he made. He met Andy Warhol by bumping into him in the street. He wrote Christopher Isherwood a letter asking him for dinner and they became lifelong friends. Do you think this is a mark of the times? Can this be recreated in society today?
JC: Hockney’s early life was filled with serendipitous encounters, but then a large part of it was his own easy-going charm. When he went for dinner with Christopher Isherwood, the novelist was amused to hear of Hockney’s mishaps during his first days in Los Angeles (he had travelled around on a bike, not appreciating the scale of the city – and taking a ride all the way from Santa Monica to Downtown, which was a twelve-mile trip). They were very different people, but each sensed a kindred spirit in the other. Each of them had found, in California, a kind of freedom from the prejudice and pettiness of their home country. Isherwood would later declare: ‘Oh, David, we’ve so much in common: we love California, we love American boys, and we’re from the north of England.’ As for whether the happy encounters of Hockney’s early LA years would be so easy to achieve now – I suspect not. We live in an even more status-conscious and stratified world. Class was a more pervasive structure in the 1960s, but then Hockney was a good example of how that system could be stepped around. Money and power have a way of gating people, now more than ever.
They were very different people, but each sensed a kindred spirit in the other. Each of them had found, in California, a kind of freedom from the prejudice and pettiness of their home country. James Cahill
Nicholas Wilder and David Hockney at Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles, March 1976. Photograph by Betty Freeman. Betty Freeman Papers. MSS 227. Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego Library.
The book explains how Hockney was inspired by ‘the static, staged and vaguely primitive … in the manner of the early Renaissance’. Can you tell us more about Hockney’s style in the mid-1960s?
JC: Hockney’s first arrival in Los Angeles in 1964 coincided with the development of a precise realist style. Partly, this was inspired by the luminous scenes of early Renaissance art – particularly those of Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca. It was also a matter of turning outward to survey the world around him. If you think about his earlier, RCA-era pictures, they’re very interiorized. They’re about his own longings, desires, musings. And while longing and desire are still very much there in the LA pictures, there is a fresh sense of objectivity.
Where figures did appear in his pictures, they tended to be nameless sun-kissed youths. Then, around 1966, things changed. Hockney became more interested in the real inhabitants of the city – Beverly Hills Housewife was the first painting he embarked upon that showed an actual, nameable individual. James Cahill
For the first year or two, he was primarily interested in the physical fabric of the place – its palm trees, signage, architecture and pools. Where figures did appear in his pictures, they tended to be nameless sun-kissed youths. Then, around 1966, things changed. Hockney became more interested in the real inhabitants of the city – Beverly Hills Housewife was the first painting he embarked upon that showed an actual, nameable individual. Paintings of his lover Peter Schlesinger, and an art dealer friend called Nicholas Wilder, quickly followed.
The painting is vividly modern. In the book, you describe it as Hitchcockian, with that uncanny sense of simultaneously zooming in and out, and you write that its precision amplifies its mystery. Betty herself doesn't quite feel photorealistic, which only adds to that sense of distance and enigma. Why do you think Hockney chose to paint it this way, and what was he trying to achieve?
JC: It’s an important point – the fact that the painting isn’t photorealist. None of Hockney’s supposedly realist paintings actually are. They all have a pervasive sense of design, a sort of charged serenity that works against verisimilitude. If you take a picture such as Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1971), the artist’s friends, Ossie and Celia, are like actors on a stage, momentarily breaking character. Betty Freeman has the same semblance of a character in a story. And in a bigger sense, the elusive distinction between reality and unreality – the point at which fact blurs into fiction – is central to Hockney’s vision of Los Angeles. The city itself is so much a construct, a place in which reality is impossible to disentangle from myth. It’s also an interesting way of thinking about the identity of the woman in Beverly Hills Housewife – how far we should read her as an archetype, and how far we should understand her as a ‘real’ woman with her own thoughts and desires and complexities.
David Hockney and Betty Freeman with his painting Beverly Hills Housewife, California, 1967. Photo John Kasmin. Courtesy of the artist and Lyndsey Ingram.
Sadly, we’ve just lost Hockney at the age of 88. The book preserves such a vivid portrait of him as a young artist, rather than the national treasure we’re used to seeing. Does his death change the way you think about the book, or the way you hope readers will experience it?
JC: I hope that the book brings his young life back into full focus. It’s inevitable, with a figure as long-lived and restlessly inventive as Hockney, that we think about him as he became – and he was rightly hailed as a national treasure in later years. But he started out as a rather different person, and I like to think of this book as an opportunity to rediscover that earlier, still-half-formed version of him.
The Beverly Hills Housewife: Hockney’s Californian Muse and the World Beyond the Pool by James Cahill publishes on 27 August and is available for preorder now.
