How Jacobi served up a camp slice of Bacon

Advice to the actor Sir Derek Jacobi: there is a world of difference between butch and camp. Consorts of the late Francis Bacon (pictured), a violent homosexual who liked rough trade and sado-masochism, and commonly wore women’s pants and fishnet stockings under his normal clothes, are complaining that Jacobi got the artist monstrously wrong when he played him as a winsome queen in the Bacon biopic, Love is the Devil, a decade ago. “I hate the way Derek Jacobi minces about in that movie,” roars the artist Peter Beard, one of Bacon’s few friends still alive. “I never saw one homosexual bone in Fran’s body.”

If this sounds improbable, Beard explains: “He was the Rock of Gibraltar, the best of British. Hell, he wasn’t camp, the guy used to take a leak in the sink!”

Beard unburdened himself in the Observer, where the last survivors of Bacon’s drunken lowlife Soho circle talked before the opening of a retrospective of the work of the world’s most expensive contemporary artist – Roman Abrahamovich set the record this year, paying £44m for Bacon’s Study from Innocent X – at Tate Britain next month.

Bacon had a filthy temper and Beard recalls the artist turning on Jerry Hall for no apparent reason at a party at a gay disco in Paris: “I’d introduced Fran to Mick [Jagger] and that was fine but when Jerry turned up he aimed this thunderball at her. ‘You f****** old cow,’ he said, ‘you grotesque c***, you hideous bloody witch.’ He just wouldn’t stop. The rest of us went down into some dark pit behind the dance floor and hid. You can imagine what was going on down there, but it was better than being within range of Fran.”

Bacon’s courtiers did, however, turn on the high camp. Michael Clark, another young artist who asked for an introduction after gatecrashing Bacon’s Soho drinking den, The Colony Room, was rebuffed by one of his queeny friends: “You’re too young and pretty, you’ll need to get your face bashed in a bit before my daughter [ie Bacon] takes an interest in you.”