When Lucian Freud painted Caroline Blackwood in a small Paris hotel room in 1954, he produced an image so unsparing that it effectively ended their marriage on canvas. The painting, called Hotel Bedroom, shows his young wife lying on a narrow bed, pale and prematurely aged, looking away toward a window, while Freud himself stands in the darker half of the frame, fully dressed, watchful, as if he had just entered or was about to leave. Critics later called it a unique work of intimate autobiography. Blackwood herself said she felt horrified by it.
Others wondered why he had painted a girl who looked so ravaged. Some who examined the work later suggested the woman in the bed was not so much depressed as extremely drunk, and both interpretations were true. It was the last portrait Freud ever painted of her. Caroline Blackwood was born in 1931 into one of the most storied families in British aristocratic life.
Her father, Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, was the fourth Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, heir to an Irish estate near Belfast and a lineage stretching back to the first Marquess, a Victorian viceroy who shipped the treasures of India back to County Down. Her mother, Maureen Guinness, was the daughter of Ernest Guinness of the Dublin brewing dynasty, one of three sisters known in the 1920s society press as the Golden Guinness Girls. By the time of Caroline’s birth, the family fortune from Dublin stout had funded earldoms, art collections, and hospitals. The marriage united two of the most significant names in the Anglo-Irish world.
But the house where Caroline spent her childhood was not the glittering seat its pedigree suggested. Clandeboye, near Belfast, had been in the Blackwood family since the seventeenth century. The first Marquess had landscaped the grounds, dug a lake shaped like a shamrock, and filled the hall with imperial plunder. By Caroline’s childhood, the estate was collapsing under inherited gambling debts.
Rain fell through the roof so persistently that servants kept rubber boots by the door. The library was sealed against mold, and walking the corridors required a coat. Food in the nursery was irregular. Caroline once reached a point of hunger that drove her to beg scraps from village families, while her younger brother, heir to a vast brewing fortune, developed rickets.
One governess reportedly held her brother Sheridan out of an upstairs window to stop him humming before sleep. The children learned early that adults in that house could do as they pleased and there was no appeal. Her mother was rarely present. Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, was one of the most notorious comic figures in mid-century London society.
She demanded servants warm the toilet seat before she used it, wore fake jewelry over the real kind, and sometimes greeted arriving guests as an Irish maid named Mabel. At dinner parties she deployed a device under her dress that made an annoying noise when the conversation flagged, and she appeared at balls with deliberately obscene false noses chosen to frighten duchesses. Her closest friendship, fiercely competitive, was with Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Her children were not her project.
Her project was social placement. All she wanted from Caroline was a suitable marriage, announced in the right papers and admired by the right women. Caroline gave her the opposite, repeatedly, for forty years. The one adult in the family who might have changed the situation died early.
Basil joined the government in the 1930s and served through most of the decade in a career later described as brilliant at first, then ruined by alcoholism. When war came he joined the Royal Horse Guards, and by 1945 he was a captain in Burma leading the 2nd Indian Field Broadcasting Unit, which brought loudspeakers to the front lines and broadcast surrender appeals into Japanese positions. On March 25, 1945, at thirty-five, he was killed in action. He has no known grave and is commemorated among the tens of thousands on the Rangoon Memorial.
Caroline was thirteen. Her debut into society came in 1949, hosted at Londonderry House with Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret among the guests. The evening acquired its own legend when Maureen, having drunk too much champagne, fell on the dance floor and broke the family’s shamrock-shaped tiara. Caroline was described as the most beautiful girl of the season, with a heart-shaped face and wide gray-blue eyes that one observer compared to eagles’ eggs.
Beneath the composure was a pathological shyness. She handled it with a sharp, mordant intelligence that made friends admire her and enemies fear her. And she was entirely unsuited to the marriage market her mother had built for her. So she did something rare for a marquess’s daughter in 1950: she got a job.
As a secretary at the publisher Hallon, inside the building that produced Picture Post, she caught the attention of the radical journalist Claud Cockburn, who began giving her small journalistic assignments. For the first time, someone cared about what she noticed rather than how she looked while noticing it. At a party hosted by Lady Rothermere, the future Ann Fleming, she met a painter ten years older, already married, famous, and the most talked-about young artist in London. His grandfather had invented psychoanalysis.
He was Lucian Freud. From Maureen’s point of view, he was a calculated insult: a painter, a commoner, married, Jewish, and short of money. Caroline remarked with pleasure that her mother had never heard of Sigmund Freud. In 1952 the couple moved to Paris, and Caroline began her long career as the most scrutinized face in British painting.
Freud’s method then was what he called precise observation: he sat extremely close to his sitter for long hours. In her case, that meant the eyes, which appear in the finished paintings less like anatomy than like weather. Girl in Bed, painted in 1952, is a small canvas showing a young woman lying with her head on a pillow and a hand near her face. The sheets are painted with the same care most painters give to faces.
Caroline’s verdict on the whole series was dry: the results were only half her work, because it was Lucian’s vision and the model added little. Everyone who has stood before these paintings knows she was wrong. The Paris year produced the one story she told for the rest of her life. Picasso summoned her to his studio, painted her bitten fingernails, invited her upstairs to see his bathroom, and then, as she described it, lunged at her on the rooftop while Freud waited below.
She called Picasso an old lecher, and it was said she refused to wash her hands for three days afterward. She married Freud in December 1953. The marriage lasted barely two years. The paintings are the record.
Girl Reading shows her from above, eyes downcast. Girl in a Green Dress shows her staring at the horizon. Then came Hotel Bedroom, and the marriage was effectively over. The scene she told friends about was simple and domestic: a meal she had taken great care to prepare, and a husband who pushed his plate away.
She went to a hotel, then to Italy. Freud followed and asked her to come back, and she refused. Maureen’s recorded reaction was a delighted verdict: it was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Her daughter had escaped a marriage she hated, and she counted the collapse as a personal victory.
At twenty-five, Caroline left for America. In New York she found a man almost the opposite of Freud: Israel Citkowitz, a composer twenty-two years older, a student of Aaron Copland who had written music for James Joyce and then stopped composing. They married in 1959 and bought a brownstone in Greenwich Village. For a woman raised by strangers in a cold Irish house, the early years of that marriage were the closest she came to conventional family life.
She had three daughters. By the time the third was born in 1966, the marriage was effectively over, though Citkowitz remained close and helped raise the girls. In the mid-1960s, Caroline began a long affair with Robert Silvers, co-founder and co-editor of the New York Review of Books, who believed for years, as did one of the daughters herself, that he was her father. The truth, which Caroline concealed for thirty years and revealed only on her deathbed, was that the girl’s father was Ivan Moffat, the screenwriter from her California period.
In 1970, Caroline returned to London and rented the top floors of a house in Redcliffe Square, Chelsea, with the children and their nanny below. In April of that year, the most famous poet in America entered this arrangement. Robert Lowell, born in Boston, winner of a Pulitzer at thirty, was fifty-three and living with what was then called manic depression, moving between episodes of mania that hospitalized him and left him apologizing. He had been married to the writer Elizabeth Hardwick since 1949.
In the spring of 1970 he met Caroline again, and within weeks he had moved in with her. The literary consequences were immediate and brutal. Lowell began writing the sonnet sequence that became The Dolphin, his name for Caroline, drawing parts of it directly from Hardwick’s letters to him. Elizabeth Bishop, his closest poetic friend, read the manuscript and advised him plainly not to publish it.
He published it in 1973 and won his second Pulitzer. In the poems, Caroline appears as a dolphin, a killer whale, a mermaid feeding on the bones of exhausted lovers. They had a son, named Sheridan after Caroline’s playwright ancestor, and married in October 1972. They moved to Milgate Park in Kent, a vast historic mansion with staircase murals and Elizabethan lineage, which Caroline had bought in a state of decay her visitors compared to a cold, chaotic ruin.
It was, without any visible irony, a second Clandeboye. Lowell described the situation in a phrase friends repeated for years: he was manic, Caroline was panicked, and their relationship was like eggs breaking. His illness and her alcoholism together produced the domestic chaos of those years. Under the strain, her drinking, which had begun in Soho bars in the early 1950s as a treatment for shyness, became permanent.
But these were also the years when she finally began writing books. Lowell took her seriously as a writer before anyone else did. It was he who encouraged her to assemble her journalism and stories into her first book in 1973. She called it For All That I Found There.
The reviews were good, the sales modest, and she was forty-two. She had stopped being the subject of other people’s writing. The marriage lasted about five years. In the summer of 1977, Lowell left Caroline in Ireland and flew to New York, returning to Elizabeth Hardwick.
On September 12, 1977, he arrived at Kennedy Airport from London. Among his luggage was a package wrapped in brown paper containing Lucian Freud’s Girl in Bed, the small painting of Caroline from the Paris hotel room twenty-five years earlier. During the ride into Manhattan, Lowell suffered a heart attack. When the taxi reached Hardwick’s building on the Upper West Side, the driver found his passenger collapsed in the back seat.
According to the account in Caroline Blackwood’s New York Times obituary, when Elizabeth Hardwick opened the taxi door, she found the body of her former husband holding the image of the woman he had left her for. Hospital staff had to pry the painting from his hands. He died at sixty. Nine months later, in June 1978, Caroline’s eldest daughter Natalia died at seventeen.
The registered cause was positional asphyxia due to a drug overdose. The British tabloid press did with the story what it had done in 1945 when her father died in Burma: exploited the tale of a cursed family and its growing fortune. Caroline’s published work never mentions Natalia. She continued writing.
Her books of the next decade were her most controlled. All her novels are short, none exceeding two hundred pages, and all concern families inflicting hidden damage on their members. Princess Daughter, published in 1976, won a first-novel prize. The Great Grandmother Webster, published in 1977, reached the Booker shortlist; according to one Irish biographical account, it did not win because the chairman of the judges, Philip Larkin, considered it autobiography rather than fiction.
John Betjeman called the book wicked in its most admiring sense. The Fate of Mary Rose pursued the theme further, tracing a mother whose mind collapses under her excessive fear for her daughter’s safety. It was published by a woman who had recently lost her own child. Her next project was her strangest.
In 1980 the Sunday Times sent her to Paris to interview Wallis, Duchess of Windsor. The duchess was old, ill, and entirely unavailable, controlled by her French lawyer, Suzanne Blum, who decided who could see her, which was no one, and what could be said about her, which was very little. Instead of abandoning the assignment, Blackwood turned her attention to the woman who blocked her. The Last of the Duchesses is a series of encounters with Blum, portrayed as possessive of her famous client to the point that the New York Times, reviewing the book, called the attachment almost erotic.
Legal delays held the book back for years; it was not published in full until after Blum’s death, reaching American readers through Pantheon in 1995. The New York Times described it as eccentric and Kafkaesque. It was the last book she published in her lifetime. Her own life was deteriorating in the familiar pattern.
Her drinking was now the dominant fact of her existence, and her daughter’s memoir records a woman who drank herself unconscious most nights, making terrible pronouncements she retracted when sober. Friends described two entirely different personalities: one the funniest and most sought-after figure in London, the other unreachable. Her mother, meanwhile, continued a vivid social life into her eighties, having long concluded that her middle daughter’s career as a novelist was a whim best not discussed. In 1995, Maureen transferred fifteen million pounds directly to two of her grandchildren, a decision Caroline’s sister and sister-in-law challenged in court without success.
That same year, Caroline learned she had cancer. She traveled to New York, where the men who had painted and written about her were gone, and spent her final weeks in a suite at the Mayfair Hotel on Park Avenue, preferring the hotel to a home or a hospital. Friends visited, drinks were served, and the conversation remained, by all accounts, unemotional to the end. Then her mother arrived from London, eighty-nine years old, on Concorde, in a floor-length fur coat, followed by luggage.
Maureen booked a suite down the hall and sat beside her dying daughter. The rest of the family withdrew and left mother and daughter to finish a conversation that had been running since 1931. No one has published what was said. Caroline used some of those final days to reveal one last secret, telling Evgenia the truth about her father.
Caroline Blackwood died on February 14, 1996, at sixty-four. The New York Times published her obituary the next day, calling her a satirical novelist. Le Monde noted the death of a British writer who had rebelled against the world she was born into. Her mother outlived her by two years and was buried at Clandeboye beside the son who had preceded her.
The house Caroline wrote about as Dannan Hall still stands above the shamrock lake, and people hold their weddings on its lawns now. Girl in Bed hangs today in the National Portrait Gallery in London, and visitors stand before the image of a twenty-one-year-old girl with strange eyes and read the label instead of looking at her face. Three men immortalized her in oil and verse. She described the family with precise attention.
The great wealth bought houses, governesses, seasons, and tiaras, but it did not provide one warm room for the child who lived in them.