Part 2: Inside a 40 Year Friendship With David Hockney, Told by the West Hollywood Man Who Knew Him Best

King Charles called him a giant of the world of art and a dear friend. Dame Tracey Emin called him a proud chain-smoking homosexual who flew the flag higher than any other British artist. The tributes came from everywhere — monarchs, museums, galleries on several continents. But none of them knew the man who had the keys to a friend’s house, let himself in while nobody was home, hung his own work on the staircase in a specific order he’d thought about, and left a note on a phone slip on the way out. Joel Rothschild knew that man for more than four decades.

On March 31, 1994, Hockney wrote Rothschild a note from his home on Montcalm in the Hollywood Hills. “Dearest Joel, why not come for tea next Tuesday afternoon. It would be lovely to see you and the studio is pretty full. Much love, David H”

He has a lot of things. A 1991 Christmas card Hockney designed himself. The text across the top and bottom where a holiday greeting would normally go reads: TRY AND HAVE A MERRY CHRISTMAS THIS YEAR 1991. The image on the card is one of his own paintings. That’s what he had to say in 1991. Try. It was the height of the AIDS epidemic after all. Try was most any could do during that dark time.

There’s also a phone message slip filled out in Hockney’s handwriting. “Dear Joel — I stopped by. Ring me at 850 0790 or 850 8256.” He’d come by the house and found nobody home.

He had the keys to Rothschild’s home on Sierra Mar, just above West Hollywood. There was a wall by the staircase that had bothered him for a while. The kind of thing you mention to a friend in passing then forget about. Most friends forget about it too. Difference here — when that friend is David Hockney — and he lets himself in one day while you’re out and does something about it.

Hockney assembled a collection of his own work going up the stairs, each piece signed, arranged in an order he designed himself. Paintings of Rothschild’s dogs in reds and yellows against blue. Works on paper. I asked Joel if he thought Hockney understood, even somewhere in the back of his mind, that what he was leaving behind had real value — that one day his friends might be sitting on something pretty significant. He didn’t hesitate. “No. It was just from the heart. David never saw the value in his art that way,” he said.

How They Met

Rothschild said he met Hockney around 1982. They were introduced through a mutual friend and the Metropolitan Museum curator Henry Geldzahler at Studio 54 in New York. He said David’s first impression was likely nothing special, “just a friend of so-and-so’s.” But eventually they came to connect over a shared sense of intellect. Hockney was always testing the room and Rothschild held his own. What followed was more than four decades of showing up for one another. Through thick and thin and when the days seemed their darkest. They would drive the streets of West Hollywood together just to drive them. They played chess with their friend Dr. Leon Banks during the worst years of the AIDS crisis, long games that gave them somewhere to put their heads for a few hours when they couldn’t seem to escape the death and depression that surrounded them. They went to Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding. They had dinner in France at Chateau Mouton Rothschild where Hockney drank the baron’s rarest wine, got progressively louder about his refusal to design their label, then told Baron Philippe at the end of the night it was the “best homemade wine he’d ever had.” They lived a good life.

Rothschild introduced David to people in LA, Hockney returned the favor and somewhere in all of it they became the kind of friends who don’t need a reason to stop by.

“Mutual respect,” Rothschild said, when asked what held it together all those years. “I could keep up with him.”

What Was Hockney Like

“A really sweet, gentle person who was incredibly sensitive,” Rothschild said. The legendary director Billy Wilder once gave Hockney a designer chair worth $25,000, thinking the cold steel would get him a painting. Hockney looked at it a few hours and told Rothschild to take it. Get it out of here. Rothschild kept it for years. That was how he was about things — generous in ways that didn’t feel like generosity because there was no ceremony to it, he just handed stuff over and moved on.

He wasn’t easy to criticize and you couldn’t really tell him what you thought about a piece of work and expect a good outcome Rothschild said. But he was clear about who he was underneath all of it. “He just was a good guy,” he said. “He wasn’t pretentious. The monument the retrospectives make him look like now isn’t quite the man I knew.”

Hockney was sensitive in ways that surprised people who only knew the work. His closest friends new differently. Rothschild tells the story about the time he was with David at LACMA for Hockney’s first show there. David presented a portrait to the Duchess of York and had misspelled “Duchess” on the work. She called it out from the stage, on camera, in front of everyone. He was devastated for a month.

“He said, I’m an artist,” Rothschild said. “How does she know I didn’t do that intentionally?” He was dyslexic and sometimes drew arrows on his own canvases to correct transposed letters. It wasn’t the error. It was her pointing at it in front of a room full of people. “He hated insults,” Rothschild said. “He really hated insults.”

What He Thought Was Funny

When I asked him what made Hockney laugh. He went quiet.

“I remember him being heartbroken about so many things,” he said. “I’m trying to think of something funny.”

He couldn’t get there. Not in that moment. He said he didn’t remember a sense of humor for humor’s sake, and then caught himself because that wasn’t quite right either. He said there were plenty of great times and wonderful moments, he just couldn’t locate them right then — and then he stopped talking.

“That was the hardest question anyone has asked me in months,” Rothschild said. “In years. I’ve never even thought about that.”

He said he was sure Hockney made people laugh, just not always in the ways that are easy to describe now. Their relationship had a weight to it that colored everything. “Even after protease inhibitors I don’t remember a lot of laughter,” Rothschild said. What he did remember was sitting in restaurants during the worst of it and the room being full of men who were visibly dying and neither one of them saying a word about it. That was its own kind of thing.

“I remember going into a restaurant and everyone was skeletal,” Rothschild said. “It looked like someone had just liberated Auschwitz. We both just went silent. Neither one of us said a word.”

Hockney shared his favorite Picasso stories and Rothschild said that always made them laugh more than once.  One of the stories has Picasso at a restaurant in the south of France drawing on the tablecloth all through the meal and when the check comes the owner asks to keep it and Picasso says sure and then asks him to sign it. Picasso paused, looks at him and says I’m willing to pay for the meal, not buy the building. They would laugh about that one all the time.

AIDS and the Christmas Card

The 1991 Christmas card is still out in Rothschild’s home. Hockney designed it himself and sent it to him. The message where a holiday greeting would normally go reads TRY AND HAVE A MERRY CHRISTMAS THIS YEAR 1991. That was the message. That was what he had.

“That’s what AIDS was to David,” Rothschild said.

Everyone was dying and Hockney was depressed in ways that were hard to put into words, Rothschild said. The chess games with Dr. Leon Banks helped. The drives helped. In 1991 he also made a series of lithographs for a book called Hockney’s Alphabet to raise money for the AIDS Crisis Trust in London. He didn’t turn the paintings dark, not really, even when everything around him was. The swimming pools and the boulevards and the Yorkshire fields stayed bright. Rothschild has been HIV-positive since 1986 and is one of a very small number of people from that era who are still alive. He said Hockney used to joke about the smoking whenever anyone got on him about it. I smoke less than Chairman Mao, Hockney would say — Mao lived to 82. Hockney was 88. He got his number.

Rothschild has a black and white photo from his 50th birthday party he treasures. He and Hockney are with some of the closest friends they shared. Hockney is clearly comfortable, the way one is when they’re with family. But now David’s gone, and so is everyone else in that picture except one person.

“Now I look at the picture and it’s like everybody’s gone,” he said.

He also has a small drawing that sat in a drawer for years before he finally got it framed about a year ago. Hockney made it on a bench in Malibu the day they got word that Henry Geldzahler had died. It’s a self-portrait, about four by six inches. Two halves on the same piece of paper. In the first half, drawn before the phone rang, the figure is upright, filled with life. In the second half, drawn after, something collapsed. Bent over. The grief is right there in the lines. “You see the shift on the two sides of the drawing,” Rothschild said. He couldn’t look at it for a long time.

“I have to shove that down,” he said.

What He Would Say

Rothschild was asked what Hockney would want West Hollywood to remember about him. Not the world. This city. The streets he drove, the buildings he fought for, the boulevard he painted.

He thought about it.

“Oh, love,” Rothschild said. “You have so much. Just have a good day.”

He said Hockney had a lot of good days, even through the worst of it, even when the Christmas card said only try.

“No matter what’s going on,” Rothschild said, “try to have a good day. Because he did.”

He paused.

“We just have to remember that.”