What David Hockney said about ‘imagined’ accounts of his sex life

A French author of note, resident in New York, she was not sure how he would take to her account of his sexual awakening after a strict Methodist upbringing in Bradford – especially, as she freely admitted, she had invented much of it.

“I was afraid he would sue me,” she revealed to The Yorkshire Post. “He is a lot wealthier than me, after all.”

Her startling biography of the world’s most prized living artist, the English translation of which will be published in Britain in two weeks’ time, contains a frank and intimate account of Hockney’s first gay relationships in the early 1960s. But much of it is the product of Miss Cusset’s imagination.

She had neither met nor even interviewed her subject before completing David Hockney: A Life, which is billed as “a hybrid of novel and biography”. Instead, she interpreted previously published material and anecdotes to construct an account of the artist’s first encounters after leaving Yorkshire.

“Until David was 22, anything that happened did so secretly and shamefully,” she said.

“But when he arrived at the Royal Academy of Art in London, he met one student and then another who was openly gay.

“One was American and the other British, and the American brought a magazine full of images of beautiful, blond models. That was a shock for David and it triggered the desire within him to go to the United States, which he saw as a place of freedom. It changed his life.”

It was in stark contrast to Hockney’s earlier existence in Bradford, with loving but unworldly parents, she said.

“David’s father, Kenneth, was an original thinker. He was anti-smoking and anti-war, which at the time of the Second World War was not a popular position.

“But both his parents were Methodists who didn’t even know what homosexuality was, except that it was a crime punished by God.

“It wasn’t until David was in his 40s that his mother, Laura, discovered a book about homosexuality published by a priest, and bought it because she wanted to understand. What a wonderful mother.”

Ms Cusset said she would have loved to question Hockney directly about his early sexuality but instead worried that he would unleash his lawyers when he read what she had written.

“I was terrified. He didn’t know about it beforehand, and while it’s all positive it is just my interpretation of what happened in his mind, of his love stories, his reactions, his paintings,” she said.

Upon receiving the original French version at his new home in Normandy, Hockney assigned three assistants to read it and write him a report, eventually pronouncing that “the book caught a lot of me. I could recognise myself”.

He then agreed to meet Ms Cusset when they were next on the same continent.

“He was very charming. He has incredibly witty eyes,” she said. “We had lunch in New York and he invited me to visit him in Los Angeles.

“But I wished I could have travelled to Bradford to visualise his earliest life, or to Bridlington where he lived later.”

However, she did get as far as Haworth and is considering a new semi-fictionalised account of the Brontë sisters.

David Hockney: A Life is published on November 12 by Arcadia Books.

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