The exhibition was finally scheduled for September 22, 1988. As it approached, my mood was touched by the chill of fear. Trouble was brewing. At my suggestion, Bacon had written a short introduction for the exhibition catalogue that acknowledged the influence of Eisenstein. The journalist David Sylvester, who considered himself an authority on Bacon, was furious that he hadn’t been invited to write a second essay for the catalogue, and started to put – as one of Bacon’s East End boyfriends might have said – the frighteners on him.
“You’re very wealthy now,” he must have whispered in Bacon’s ear. “You might get kidnapped.” And what was unsaid but implied: “Fear might bring on an asthma attack.”
I had known asthma would be one of the added complications of getting Bacon to Moscow. He hated smoking, though he continued to drink to excess in ill-ventilated bars and breathed in paint and white- spirit fumes every day, and lived in fear of a fatal attack. But his doctor had agreed to come with him to Russia, bringing oxygen.
Then, on August 19, Edwards rang me with the news I most dreaded. Bacon no longer wanted to go to the USSR. The work of two years was starting to unravel.
Officially, said Edwards, Bacon’s excuse was asthma – but the truth was that, alongside Sylvester’s prophecy of doom, he had also been seething about the amount of official engagements the British Council were asking him to undertake in Moscow. This was their moment, and Bacon was their man – they wanted to make the most of it, with tea at the embassy, photo ops with Soviet officials, and interviews with the world press. It was a chance for the British Council to re-enter the exciting political space that Russia had become, but their charmless demands on Bacon had had dire consequences.
The next time I saw him was at the Groucho. It was a starry gathering of British artists; Peter Blake, Joe Tilson and Bridget Riley were there. Edwards and Bacon arrived and, to my relief, it was as if nothing had gone awry. They whisked me out to dinner. Edwards handed me an envelope from Francis and inside was a cheque for £3,000, money for me to look after Edwards, who would be officially representing Bacon in Moscow.
Bacon was already looking beyond the exhibition and talking to me about the sense of failure he felt about paintings that he had abandoned, or ambitions that had not been fulfilled. Another night, soon after, he revealed that he wanted to be a sculptor, and to make films. He was a great admirer of Andy Warhol’s Flesh, and thought Warhol’s films were better than his paintings. “There are still so many things I want to do, James.”
Conversely, in losing my professional claim on him, I seemed to have got closer to him. Perhaps this was my compensation for his non-attendance in Moscow.
On September 18, Francis told The Sunday Times: “It is a great disappointment. If it wasn’t for this bloody asthma, I would be over there. I had been looking forward to it. Everything was closed up after 1917. It would have been fascinating to see the country now.”
On September 21, I was invited for breakfast, to collect Edwards and say goodbye to Bacon, who cooked us eggs and bacon. On my way out, I saw that his suitcases were still packed and waiting by the front door, as if he was expecting to overcome his own fear and come with us. I felt a wave of disappointment. “I’m sure you’ll have a marvellous time.”
Since my last visit, Moscow had changed yet again. Soviet citizens were now free to travel the world. (Free, that is, if they had connections abroad.) But other things had worsened. In Moscow, food was beginning to run out and basics such as butter and coffee were almost impossible to obtain. When the show opened, one embittered Moscow wit would write in the visitors’ book, “We want bacon, not Francis Bacon.”
Edwards was delighted with the appearance of his portrait on the catalogue cover. “Oi, James,” he said, when I met him in his Moscow hotel, “there are posters of me all over the shop!” Together we trawled the department store GUM, the Harrods of Moscow, even though it was empty; then John exchanged a large jar of caviar in an underpass in return for two packets of condoms, a perennially scarce resource in Moscow.
On the morning of the exhibition, we arrived to find a long queue outside. Edwards saw it and whistled. “F—ing hell, James, I think Francis is going to be a sell-out.” As I passed Klokov, he reached out to me. “Ah, James, I was right all along,” he said. “The queues are longer than those for Lenin’s mausoleum.”
Bacon in Moscow by James Birch with Michael Hodges (Cheerio, £17.99) is out now. Francis Bacon: Man and Beast is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London W1 (royalacademy.org.uk) from Saturday to April 17
