The curse of free love
Robert Hughes, the celebrated art critic reveals how his life was deeply scarred by the dark side of the Swinging Sixties

When I was 28, an Australian living in late Sixties London, I launched into a marriage that brought me, along with early episodes of great delight and even a small ration of enlightenment, the most extreme and durable misery I had ever felt.

Her name was Danne: Danne Patricia Emerson. For a long time I believed I could not possibly exist without her; that there was no other woman on earth who could offer me the same sexual and emotional intensity. Erratically and episodically, she cherished the same fantasy about me.

And it was just that: a mutual fantasy. If there was ever a misalliance between two emotionally hypercharged and wolfishly immature people, it was our marriage. I was as unsuited to her as she was to me. The result was a disaster so complete that even now, 40 years and two marriages later, I shudder inwardly when I think about it, though I can’t and wouldn’t deny that we had some good times together — at first.

We met at a drinks party in Notting Hill. “Do you want to meet the best **** in London?” the host delicately inquired. And he pointed to a sofa, on which sat a tall, rangy, square-jawed blonde holding a glass of warm vodka. We were introduced. Things began to click, small cogs and then larger ones to engage.

Her upbringing had been Catholic; perhaps not as strictly Catholic as mine, but orthodox all the same. Like me she had studied at Sydney University. She had seen me in university revues, seen my writings and cartoons in Honi Soit, the university newspaper, and even seen me briefly on British TV — BBC2.

She had just got to London with no particular plans. But she hadn’t come all this way to do secretarial work in some ****ing dentist’s office. She hoped to make it to Italy before long.

Two weeks later we were off to Venice. And less than a month after that she had moved with her few belongings into my flat in Cornwall Gardens, SW7: a neat little two-bedroomer, looking out onto a square of winter-bare trees.

Except to pick up groceries and the mail, and occasionally to take in a movie or a play, neither of us stirred outside much for the first couple of months of 1967. We were both in a feverish and untiring rut, a sort of erotic trance: the first thing I bought for the flat was a king-size bed.

I also made a big mistake. In the course of some conversation about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I remarked that I thought there was no point in getting married unless you meant to have children. Me and my big mouth. A few weeks later Danne announced that her period was late. By February it was clear that she was pregnant.

I had, as far as I knew, only once made a woman pregnant before, and with deep tremors of guilt I had paid for the abortion; but this one we were definitely going to go through with. I felt quite irrationally pleased with myself, as though I had actually achieved something. And Danne, once she was sure that I wanted her to have the child, was thrilled. The hard edges, the scepticism, appeared to be gone.

She was becoming, to my astonishment, a sentimental mother-to-be. Since all fears of pregnancy were now settled, we made love with even more hunger and abandon than before, and in places I had sometimes thought of but never tried, most of them downright uncomfortable: the last row of a cinema, the back seat of a taxi.

I had never, in any real sense, been responsible for anyone else before. Wasn’t I too young to get married? Of course not, I told myself; I was 28, the same age as my brother Tom had been. (This first marriage of his had clearly failed by then, but Danne’s and mine, I told myself, hadn’t and couldn’t.) Now I could be a real man like Tom.

Our baby, a robust boy, was born on September 30, 1967, four months after our wedding. Having rejected orthodox names, we decided on Danton after the French revolutionary. Danne had not heard of Danton before (she had never been strong on history, and a politician had to be black and armed with an AK-47, not a mere 18th-century whitey, to really engage her respectful interest).

We hired a Sicilian au pair, Diletta Vollono, and moved into a larger flat in Park Road, NW1, just across the street from Regent’s Park. It had a living room, a dining room, a nursery, three bedrooms, three bathrooms and a huge kitchen fitted out like the galley of an old Cunarder. The rent was £700 every three months, a bargain then, unimaginable now.

It looked like urban heaven to me. But Danne felt trapped. Pregnancy had been a way to ensure getting married, but then marriage became a prison whose tyrannous jailer was Danton. If it hadn’t been for him she could have just walked away. So she decided to walk away anyway and come back when she felt like it.

Almost as soon as Danton was weaned, Danne announced in a way that would admit of no opposition that she needed to “explore”, to “look around”, to “experiment” with other lovers — a declaration that caused me, since I was still a Catholic in some parts of my heart, an anxiety verging on dread. I had wanted, by getting married, to reconstitute the safe haven that had been shattered in my childhood by my dad’s death from lung cancer; the dream of untroubled certainty of a woman’s love, which I would repay with my own coin of protectiveness. But Danne wouldn’t admit that she wanted protection, and she interpreted my own desire for emotional security as a form of weakness.

“I want to find my own ****s,” she said once, with her accustomed brutal directness. “So should you.”

Danne would find someone to **** whenever she felt horny, or for that matter quite often when she was not horny. For her, the search was the thing. She equated it with freedom, grail or no grail. Her ruthlessness in pursuit of this reduced me to stammering misery.

Off she would go in the evenings, dressed to kill: a gauzy antique top embroidered with the iridescent wing cases of exotic beetles, which she had found somewhere in the King’s Road; a pair of scuffed-up black German lederhosen complete with the ornamental metal belt known as a charivari; high inlaid boots of various coloured skins. A dish for some minor rock star or visiting American undergrounder.

Where was she off to? Oh, to see never-to-be named friends, or to a concert in which I would not be interested, yet another jiggle night at the Roundhouse. Don’t worry, I’ll be home to feed Danton. Or Diletta can do that. Don’t worry, for Christ’s sake. And off she would go; and come back, grey eyes blank, wide mouth twitchy, ill-tempered from the drugs, at 10 the next morning. Or not come back for another day or two.

It was like living with a deranged alley cat; moreover, an alley cat who ascribed her libidinal raging to ideological purpose. Once, when she fell into one of her fits of hysteria on entering the flat, I stroked her hair to comfort her and encountered a crusty patch of some stranger’s dried semen.

Diletta bravely continued to tend little Danton, and I went into a moping spiral of helpless, unassuageable jealousy. I was a cuckold, going cuckoo. I was bewildered, shell-shocked and lacking the necessary defence of indifference.

Danne liked counterculture icons but generally tended to score mediocre ones. An exception was Jimi Hendrix. She did not tell me about this. Some girlfriend of hers did. I think it was Hendrix who gave her a sentimental souvenir of their encounter in the back of a limo: the clap.

She did not tell me about that, either, before passing it on to me. It was a nasty strain and it took months of antibiotics to shake it. Hendrix’s clap almost outlasted Hendrix himself, who died of an overdose in September 1970.

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