There is probably only one man who could allow his dog to sully the floor of Dennis Hopper’s stunning Californian house, designed by Frank Gehry, and get away with it — and that man was the artist David Hockney.
How Little Boodgie, Hockney’s dachshund, came to commit the faux pas in the actor and film-maker’s home is recounted in Hockney: The Biography, Volume 2, A Pilgrim’s Progress.
Christopher Simon Sykes, its author, quotes Jonathon Brown, Hockney’s friend, recalling Hopper’s “ chain-gang murderer” look as Hockney wagged his finger at the dog and said: “Oah, it’ll be dry in the morning, Luv, and you can just pick it up.”
Sykes was given access to Hockney, his works, notebooks and diaries, and the artist’s friends and family, for what the publisher describes as “the one-and-only, definitive record” of his life.
Hockney’s many famous friends are mentioned, as well as his relationship with his mother and father, whom he immortalised in the 1977 work My Parents.
Advertisement
The late Henry Geldzahler, a friend, once said to his mother: “Goodness me, you must be very proud of your son,” to which she replied, “Oh yes. To be mayor of Bradford!” Paul, Hockney’s eldest brother, was appointed to that position in 1977.
Working with Hockney was not always easy. He and Jonathan Miller did not always see eye to eye when they put on a production of Tristan und Isolde, and Hockney once sacked Rudolf Nureyev from a ballet project. Nureyev was utterly shocked, witnesses recalled, sitting in silence for several minutes before getting up to leave.
The book spans 1975 to 2012 and is dedicated to Dominic Elliott, Hockney’s assistant, who died last year after drinking drain cleaner while intoxicated on drugs and alcohol, but includes no details about the death.
Hockney: The Biography, Volume 2 is published by Century on September 11, price £25.