Bella Freud’s Podcast, “Fashion Neurosis,” Offers a Talking Cure

It can take a lifetime to reckon with the legacy of a complicated parent, and Lucian Freud, in addition to being a great artist, was a parent of prodigious unconventionality. Born in 1922 in Berlin, he fathered at least fourteen children, mostly out of wedlock, across four decades. He never shared a home with his partners or his children for more than a brief period; in 1961, the year of Bella’s birth, he became a father to two other daughters, with two other mothers. (William Feaver, in his biography of Lucian, includes the artist’s explanation for this paternal clustering: “Don’t you realize I had a bicycle?”) The first portrait that Lucian made of Bella, “Baby on a Green Sofa” (1961), depicts her asleep, tiny arms flung back and fists clenched. But her earliest appearance in his work had come the previous year, in “Pregnant Girl,” a tender portrait of Bella’s mother, Bernardine Coverley, asleep on a couch, with swollen breasts and a rounded belly.

Coverley was just eighteen when Bella was born. The daughter of an English father and an Irish mother, she worked in the mailroom of a newspaper on Fleet Street by day and socialized with the artists of Soho by night. Lucian installed Coverley and Bella in an apartment on Camden Road, in North London. Bella saw her father occasionally during her early childhood; he once based a painting, now lost, on a photograph of himself bending solicitously over her on the Regent’s Canal towpath. But not long after Esther was born, in 1963, their parents’ relationship ended.

In the years that followed, Bella told me, “it just felt like our life was in transit the whole time.” For years, Coverley kept her daughters’ existence a secret from her own parents. Lucian’s financial provisions were sporadic, and Coverley’s life became improvisational. She moved with her daughters to Kent; then, when Bella was six and Esther was four, Coverley took them to Marrakech for eighteen months—a period of exotic and penurious displacement which Esther later chronicled in “Hideous Kinky,” a semi-autobiographical novel, from 1992, narrated by a younger sister in awe of her fierce sibling. Esther told me that, though she always thought of herself as having had a happy childhood, “Bella, as far back as I can remember, was bristling with utter fury.” Esther went on, “I’d be, like, ‘Wow, look at this house we’re moving to!’ and Bella was always, like, ‘Nightmare.’ ” While Esther formed a dyad with her mother—“I worshipped her, and I just wanted to lie in her bed, in her arms,” she recalled—Bella clearly had an affinity for her father. “As soon as we glimpsed him, she was, like, ‘That’s the person I’m gravitating toward,’ ” Esther said.

Bella recalled her childhood as lacking in boundaries, with adults engaged in experimental ways of living which purported to offer freedom but in fact undermined any sense of security. “It was such a stupid time, all these seventies notions of idealism,” she said. She remembers being perpetually hungry, not so much because she was deprived but because of living in households committed to whole-food vegetarian diets: “We seemed to have no food that didn’t take twenty-four hours to cook.” While the family was in North Africa, Coverley travelled to Algeria in pursuit of a spiritual teacher, taking Esther with her but leaving Bella with acquaintances in Marrakech. These acquaintances, too, moved on, placing Bella in the care of strangers; when Coverley and Esther returned, they had no idea where Bella was and spent hours hunting for her. (In the movie version of “Hideous Kinky,” starring Kate Winslet as Coverley, this harrowing episode is a turning point in the family’s curdled adventure.) Bella told me, “I didn’t really know where or when my mother was coming back—or if she was coming back.” The experience was so distressing that she never discussed it with her mother, who died in 2011.

In Morocco, Bella had few clothes, and she chose to dress in boyish garments rather than in the caftans favored by her mother. This self-fashioning, she now realizes, was in part a defense against the shame of poverty. When Coverley and the girls returned to England, in 1969, Lucian arranged for Bella to spend time with some aristocratic hippies who travelled around southern England in caravans. Bella, in her podcast conversation with Trinny Woodall, recalled that once, at a village post office, a shop assistant disdainfully called her a hippie. “I thought I was a cool person,” she said. “I was so mortified. I remember what I was wearing—a blue jumper, some scruffy old cords, and a kerchief around my throat, to try to be like Heathcliff from ‘Wuthering Heights.’ ” Among the travelling group was Penny Cuthbertson, a friend of Lucian’s and his sometime subject. The caravan experience appealed to Bella, not because of the wandering but, rather, because Cuthbertson offered structure. She was strict about bedtimes, and Bella told me, “I realized, I like this. And that was quite a shock, to like something that you were supposed to be rebelling against.”

Bella spent the years between eight and sixteen living, malcontentedly, in Sussex. Her mother entered into a relationship with a teacher in whose home she and the girls were lodgers. Coverley eventually had a baby with him—Freud’s half brother Noah. The teacher, who effectively became Freud’s stepfather for several years, taught English and theatre, and his older students often hung out at the house, making Freud uneasy. “I hated him,” she told me. Freud’s own education, at a Waldorf school, was ostensibly progressive, but it was hidebound with rules she despised. “You weren’t allowed to wear black. They didn’t like corners,” she said, alluding to the belief held by Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Waldorf education, that rounded forms were the most harmonious. When Freud told me this story, she was seated in an angular black Lucite armchair and dressed in narrow black pants and a black sweater, along with a pair of shiny white platform sandals over socks. “You weren’t allowed to have your own taste,” she said. “As you can imagine, it was like a red rag to a bull.”