Remembering Henrietta Moraes

She was the sort of person who would have wanted to make the most of all twelve days of Christmas. So it seems fitting that she died on Epiphany.

I knew Henrietta during a comparatively brief period in her life when she was stable and sober. She was a recovering alcoholic, but had been on enough of an even keel to write a memoir of huge warmth and charm, which I had the good fortune to edit. She hoped to build on this achievement. She had begun to write some stories and she also wanted to write a newspaper column.

The last paragraph of her book offers a good snapshot of where she was in her life when we met:

***

The book’s publication was a very special time for Henrietta. The years of hard living had taken their toll. She was no longer the stunningly beautiful force of nature that had led so many people to fall in love with her, and some to use her as a “muse”. She was certainly pleased to be able to say that she had been painted by such celebrated artists as Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon, but at the same time there were dissatisfying aspects to such a passive pedestal. Now she was showing the world that she had her own unique voice. It was a pleasure to see her begin to defy the typecasting and to earn a different kind of fame. But nothing could ever be normal with Henrietta. Even her time of triumph would be accompanied by a fall.

As part of the publicity for the book, published in 1994, she appeared on the radio programme Loose Ends, which was then presented by Ned Sherrin. I remember collecting her and Max, her dog, from her bedsit in Edith Grove in Chelsea. The night before, she told me, as we made our way to BBC Broadcasting House in a cab, she had dreamt that she was on board a pirate ship, being made to walk the plank by Captain Ned Sherrin.

She was so elated when the show was over (having put in a star performance) that she suggested we celebrate with a walk in Hyde Park. On the way, we stopped off at a newsagent to buy a copy of that morning’s Daily Telegraph, in which her rival for the bohemian crown, the Spectator columnist Jeffrey Bernard, had reviewed her book. His piece began: “Henrietta Moraes is one of the most courageous women I have ever come across.” And it ended: “If only the drink had not hurt such a good woman so badly, this autobiography would have had a happier ending; although, as I say, she is far too brave to be kept down for long.”

This warm, enthusiastic review topped off what had already been a pretty perfect morning. But almost immediately afterwards, as if in some warning from the Soho gods, Henrietta tripped on a paving-stone in Wigmore Street. She fell so badly that she was unable to get up. She insisted that, rather than call an ambulance, we should take a taxi to her local hospital, the Chelsea & Westminster, just up the road from where she lived. While she lay on the ground clinging to Max, I hailed a cab.

We must have looked like trouble. It was only the third time that a cab actually stopped. The first two slowed down only to chug off again as Henrietta began to crawl towards the kerb.

When the triage nurse asked what had happened, Henrietta said as a joke, which I didn’t find very funny, that I had pushed her over. During the interminable wait to be seen by a doctor, she then passed the time blagging painkillers from the nurses. She was lying down on a bed in an open bay, from where she could hear but not see what was going on in a busy A&E department on a Saturday afternoon.

From a near-by bay came the voice of a very angry addict who did not understand why the police had been summoned to the hospital.

“I don’t want to get treated,” he shouted. “I want to get out of here and sue the arse off the lot of you.”

“You were unconscious,” a nurse explained.

“What are these coppers doing here? Can’t you tell them to bugger off?”

“Just sit down.”

“I am fucking sitting down!”

“He’s a game old cove,” said Henrietta, unable to resist the sniff of a possible drama.

“Can’t you go out and catch some frigging burlgars?” the addict said to the policemen who were surrounding him.

“I rather think I’m looking at myself of yesteryear,” commented Henrietta, although from where she lay on the bed the only person she could actually see was me.

“Is this what we pay our taxes for?!” shouted the addict.

“When did you last pay tax?” said Henrietta loudly.

“I’d keep your voice down,” I said. “Or he’ll come charging around here in a minute.”

“How many policemen are there?”

“Three.”

“So I can insult him with impunity?”

A nurse arrived. “So you were a cat burglar?”

“Only for a fortnight.”

“Did you get caught?”

“Of course I got caught. I was hopeless at it.”

“You sound wild!”

“It’s all in my book. Published this week by Hamish Hamilton. £16.99.”

***

A few days later, on Thursday 3 November, the Chelsea & Westminster let her out in a wheelchair so that she could attend her launch party and a dinner afterwards, both hosted by her friends David and Martha Mlinaric. By that time she had some more glowing reviews to celebrate. While the reviewers made the most of her picaresque past, a few pointed out what an exciting literary prospect she offered for the future. “At long last she is doing something that will endure past the days when Lucien Freud adored you and grace and beauty were enough,” wrote Linda Grant in an interview piece for the Guardian. “It’s a pity she didn’t start 40 years ago and tell Lucien to get his own bloody supper.”

The following Monday, the hospital let her out again so that she could attend the ICA, where she was scheduled to do a joint event with Marianne Faithfull. Henrietta had once been Marianne’s minder and by a coincidence Marianne had just published her own autobiography.

At the ICA, Henrietta had to get out of her wheelchair to negotiate a flight of steps. As she struggled up them, she chanted, “G-B-S, G-B-S!”

“George Bernard Shaw?” I asked.

“No. Good leg. Bad leg. Stick. G-B-S! ”

Marianne Faithfull arrived with a large bouquet of flowers, which she somehow managed to get caught in one of Henrietta’s half-moon ear-rings.

It was noticeable how nervous Marianne was. Of the two, Henrietta was by far the more spontaneous. She was able, in spite of her own nervousness, to be herself.

The framework of the evening was that each author read a passage from her book before taking questions from the audience. When Henrietta spoke, she did so with a wit and humour that was of a piece with what she had read. But when it was Marianne’s turn, there was a disconnect, because her presence in person was so different from the tone of her book, which had been written by a ghostwriter.

Henrietta’s ultimate edge was that, having no money, no aides, no “career”, her only choice was to fall back on herself. It was no surprise that she stole the show that evening. The audience came to see Marianne Faithfull, but they left remembering Henrietta.

***

Henrietta found it difficult to cope with the ordinary. Rather than adapt to reality in the way that she mostly managed during the four years that I knew her, she decided, ultimately, to fly away from it. I remember one evening listening incredulously as she told me that her doctor had said there was no reason why she shouldn’t drink again.

And another thing, she added, she had fallen in love. Wasn’t I pleased for her?

“How wonderful,” I answered. But that was the day I began to fear the worst.

The last time I saw her was only a few days later when we went to the ABC in Fulham Road to see The Exorcist, which had been re-released in cinemas on the occasion of its 25th anniversary.

We were early. “Let’s have a drink!” she said, marching into the bar. She ordered a Pernod.

“I really don’t think you should be doing that!”

“It’s OK! The doctor says it OK.”

“I don’t believe you.”

I continued to argue as she took the Pernod into the cinema.

“Oh, shut up. Don’t be so boring!”

I can’t remember how much of the film we saw. Only that at some point she got up and walked out. When she didn’t return, I went to look for her, but she was nowhere to be found.

I don’t suppose it would have made any difference, but I wish we had chosen another film that day. It was Henrietta who was possessed, but there was nothing anyone could do to exorcise her demons. It occurred to me that Max was probably seeing her drunk quite a bit now.

The creative satisfaction Henrietta had once got from writing brought no sudden, magical transformation. It required plugging away on her own when what she wanted was excitement. One of her ideas, which she hoped her agent might be able to make possible, was that she should travel to India (where she had been born during the Raj), and write a book about the experience. She asked me if I would like to come along. The idea was that I would be her minder. I said, Of course. But that was before she started drinking again.

The promise of rewards that her writing might make possible in a distant future wasn’t enough to compensate for the actual reality of a poverty-stricken life in a bedsit. So a little earlier than was really necessary, she decided “to burn and rave at the close of day”.

In a characteristic act of egoism, Henrietta’s last lover – a well-known artist – turned Henrietta’s gravestone into a gallery for her own work. The inlaid images are among many other drawings that she made of Henrietta over the last months of her life. The drawings were published in a book two years after Henrietta died. It is a book that I dislike intensely.

Several of the drawings – which I prefer not to look at – depict Henrietta just before and after she died. They remind me of Odd Man Out, a film made by one of Henrietta’s favourite directors, Carol Reed. One of the characters is a failed painter who wants to paint a man on the point of dying because he thinks he will capture the truth of life and death. But it is pointed out to him that we are all dying, so what he finds is no great revelation.

The most important muse in Henrietta’s story was not herself but Francis Wyndham. “He was the person I needed most in the world and he understood me best,” she wrote in her book. Francis helped her to become a writer (as once he had helped Jean Rhys to return to being a writer). When Henrietta went to prison, it was Francis who gave her a typewriter. When her publishers wanted a quote for the back cover of her book, it was Francis who provided it.

I wish that those of us who had become Henrietta’s friends had done more to live up to his example. After her book was published, she needed more help than she got to take a firm hold of the next rung. I often think of the short stories she began to write after the book was published. She completed four that I know of. If she had received more encouragement to keep going, could it have led to a different, happier ending?

Impossible to say. After all, no amount of encouragement was ever going to restore her liver. But I can’t forget the exciting sense of possibility I felt when I read the first page to emerge from her dot-matrix printer, typed on an old hand-me-down computer that she hadn’t quite yet learned how to use.

And so she began. She called them “Tales”. And they all featured a young woman with red hair called Rosetta, who “drank a lot, smoked a lot, laughed a lot, had a quick temper and made a lot of noise”.