‘The artist Duncan Hannah died at his house in Cornwall, Connecticut, on Saturday, June 11, lying on his favorite bed watching the 1962 film Les Parisiennes, an obscure tale of bohemians, musicians, playboys and love-lost French ladies—everything he enjoyed, not the least the obscurity.
‘This charming riverside cottage was looking at its very best. It was recently remodeled by his paramour of 30 years, Megan Wilson, a leading book designer; it was also packed with his collections of paintings, drawings, films, clothes, model soldiers, boats and planes, vintage advertising signs, music, and books.
‘Hannah’s life was run on generosity, to every sort of person and their equally varied creative work. A self-confessed fan of the old Hollywood mode whose passions were wide as deep, Hannah was an eternally curious lover of culture, both high and low, and of people, both the lofty and the low, and this large love for the world was much returned by we who people it.
‘It would take a book to tell of all the famous and infamous folk who Hannah knew throughout his rich existence, not least during his rocambolesque youth of drugs and drink, and there is indeed just such a volume, Twentieth Century Boy, a selection from his 1970s journals that’s as addictive as his life from that era. It’s an outrageous page-turner where our hero is either about to drop dead of whisky and cocaine or do a line with yet another downtown celeb.
‘Hannah started early as a lifelong fan. Growing up in Minneapolis, he was suitably excited to meet the drummer Gene Krupa and to get a letter from J. Edgar Hoover, not to mention maybe spotting Nabokov while holidaying in Switzerland. He was given his first joint by Janis Joplin, and he chatted with John Berryman on the very bridge from which he would later jump.
‘Thrown out of the prestigious Blake prep school, he was already an acid-head and serious drinker as a teen. By then, he’d already begun drumming in various local bands, most prominently the Hurricane Boys.
‘It must be explained that Hannah was also strikingly, dazzlingly beautiful, a gorgeous youth, and always remained preposterously good-looking, with a widely celebrated head of hair untouched by age. He also knew how to dress.
‘Thus it was hardly surprising he became a well-known local figure studying art at Bard and only accelerated the legend, pedal slammed, when he moved in the early ’70s to Manhattan, where he became everyone’s dream lover.
‘A central Hannah paradox was that he had all the beauty, panache, fashion flare and gossipy wit that defined homosexual society of that place and time while also being the most committed of heterosexuals. Indeed, he was an obsessive fan of certain actresses and no mean connoisseur of continental cult pornography.
‘The other paradox was that this impeccably suited and tied English gentleman, who ranked on best-dressed lists authored by everyone from Anna Wintour to Glenn O’Brien, was actually a key participant in the birth of the New York punk scene. He was a mainstay of CBGB and Max’s, he drummed with Television, he hung out with Nico at the Chelsea, he was proffered coprophilic pleasure by Lou Reed, or he introduced the young Talking Heads to his friend ‘Andy.’
‘Hannah’s stunning looks and charisma made him a natural actor. The cinema he so adored loved him right back, and he made a memorable debut with Debbie Harry in Amos Poe’s film Unmade Beds and its follow-up, The Foreigner, attending the Deauville Film Festival as a bona fide star, even appearing on stage with Gloria Swanson, Kirk Douglas, and King Vidor. Hannah happily carried on playing curious roles throughout his life whether for the avant-garde director Andrew Horn or playing a murder victim in Richard Kern’s short film for the artist Lucy McKenzie. Oddly enough, Hannah played a pervy photographer in Art for Teachers of Children in 1995 and then a photography professor in Hellaware in 2013.
‘At twenty Hannah had been to London to see the debut of Ziggy Stardust, backed by Roxy Music, and even hung out with Kit Lambert at the Marquee, and rock ‘n’ roll remained a mainstay of his life, continually committed to going to see artistes young and old, famous or just starting, unstoppable.
‘In fact, since becoming sober in 1984 (his commitment to AA came mainly because it saved his life, but also because the group offered a chance to hear stories from its intriguing and sometime famous fellow members), Hannah’s life was pleasingly fixed to a certain groove, an altogether rewarding routine.
‘He loved his New York club, the Century Association, and he loved taking people there for lunch, not to mention proposing his friends for membership. He loved going to the cinema and watching films and new TV series at home, he loved listening to music and going to concerts, he loved reading and also writing, to the extent of his voluminous and carefully maintained journals. But above all he loved painting every day, almost without fail.
‘The sheer range of characters and anecdotes in Hannah’s life story, his impossibly vast ‘back-catalogue’ of counter-culture encounters and adventures, somewhat interfered with a proper appreciation of his unique oeuvre as an artist.
‘Trained initially as an illustrator, he worked for Warhol’s Interview and designed T-shirts for another great friend, Anna Sui. Hannah’s knowledge of art and its practical techniques was nonpareil.
‘As much an ardent Anglophile as he was a fanatical Francophile, he loved Sickert, Whistler, William Orpen, Vallotton, Vuillard, and a host of lesser-known names, from Henry Lamb to Rodrigo Moynihan and Boutet de Monvel. Hannah’s paintings were often compared to Hopper, but their subject matter was rarely as American, his taste running to vintage cars, romantic European cityscapes complete with mysterious poised encounters, and above all beautiful women, cult movie stars such as Nova Pilbeam or Leonora Fani. Notably striking is a recent series of imaginary magazine covers, some with amusingly invented titles, which are the subject of a forthcoming volume from Dashwood Books.
‘Hannah’s generosity to the world was most evident in his interest in meeting and cultivating new people. At 69, he seemed oddly younger than many he befriended, and not just thanks to his notoriously dark hair but his eternal twinkle, the smile of it all. Nobody who met him and was lucky enough to be treated to a dose of his magic would forget him, considering him an eternal friend or brother long after.
‘This politeness, the good-manners and old-world charm, might be considered a legacy of Minneapolis, but his democratic, demotic openness to everything and everyone was very Manhattan, more specifically the New York School of poetry he so loved. He was a close friend of such key participants as Rene Ricard, Joe Brainard, Larry Fagin, and Tim Duglos, and a regular participant at the Poetry Project events, as well as an artist-illustrator to numerous chapbooks.
‘How suitable it is, then, that he should be conjured recently by Gerard Malanga in a memorial poem: “Duncan, / I guess you’ve left a blank wherever your presence stirred. / Just the thought of you not wholly imagined, / like I won’t be running into you at the corner newsstand…”
‘For myself, heartbroken, I think of Walt Whitman, the great-grandfather of the New York School, master of love and generosity (those two words yet again), and his ending lines from “Song of Myself”: “Missing me one place, search another; / I stop somewhere waiting for you.”’ — Adrian Dannatt
____
Further
Duncan Hannah @ Wikipedia
Duncan Hannah’s Blog
Duncan Hannah at Castillo/Corrales
PICTURING DUNCAN HANNAH, Part I
Duncan Hannah interviewed in 1982 by Simon Lane
Remembering Duncan Hannah
My brawl with Basquiat (and other wild nights in No Wave New York)
‘Duncan Hannah and Anna Taylor (1981)’
Duncan Hannah’s Seventies New York
Duncan Hannah works @ Paddle8
Duncan Hannah @ IMDb
‘The lady vanishes: Nova Pilbeam’
‘Le dandy Duncan Hannah’
‘Spotlight On Artist Duncan Hannah’
__________
The artist in his youth
___
Extras
Paradigm Presents Rear Window with Duncan Hannah
Trailer: ‘Unmade Beds’ (1976), starring Duncan Hannah & Deborah Harry
Trailer: ‘The Foreigner’ (1978), starring Duncan Hannah & Deborah Harry
An Afternoon With… Duncan Hannah
Inside Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine with Duncan Hannah
____________
Interview about Twentieth-Century Boy
by David Gordon
You didn’t look at these diaries for twenty years, right?
More. I never read them—six feet of journals. What finally happened was, I’ve got a friend who works for [rare-book dealer] Glenn Horowitz, and he saw them and said, You know, we could sell this. I thought, Oh, fuck, I should read them first, at least. And I should mine them for natural resources, because I have no idea what’s in there. So in the spring of 2016, I stopped painting, I got Microsoft Word—I think I got a new laptop, even.
I started with the first intact one, winter of 1970, because I thought, Okay, that’s good, it’s a new decade. But really with no ulterior motive other than to keep a copy of something I was going to sell. There was all this LSD drivel, just stream of consciousness. And then there’d be a nugget of a funny story and I’d go, Oh, that’s good. Some of it I remembered, some I didn’t, but it did start to come alive.
The list of people you wrote about is amazing. I guess, right off the bat: Lou Reed. Was that the first time you met him?
And the last. I mean, I’d see him around, but he didn’t recognize me. But that song, “Rock and Roll,” I first heard it on an FM station in Minneapolis, driving in my car, and it was an epiphany. Euphoria. Such a rush. So when I saw him at Max’s Kansas City I thought, That’s the guy! What happened was a great lesson in the dangers of hero worship.
What happened?
There was this small room downstairs with a velvet rope, so you had to stick your head in and see if somebody waved you over. I was sitting with [Stooges and Ramones manager] Danny Fields and Fran Lebowitz, who was nineteen and just the same as she is now, funny and grumpy. She got up to leave and Danny said, Louis! Louis! So Lou Reed came over, Danny introduced me, and he didn’t pay any attention. He started talking about this and that, he wanted to kick Lester Bangs’ balls in, he’d just seen Peter Wolf and Faye Dunaway fucking at the Chateau Marmont while he was with Iggy, he’d just auditioned the MC5 drummer for his band, you know, just kind of Lou Reed stuff. Then he started talking about Raymond Chandler, and that summer I’d read all of Chandler. I thought, Oh, I can talk about this. So I said, “Yeah, I love that, and that bit he actually cribbed from Hammett, except it wasn’t in The High Window, it was in The Little Sister.” And this just stopped Lou in his tracks and he said, “Danny, she’s talking.” And Danny said, “Yeah, she talks.” I felt chastened, so I shut up and he went on, and then I did it again, I said, “Oh! I know! And then there’s that great switch!” And he said, “Danny, she’s doing it again.” And Danny said, “Well, she’s a big reader.” And he said, “Where did you find her?” “I found her at the Waldorf. The New York Dolls had a Halloween party.” And I was thinking, Okay, so they’re talking about me like I’m not here, A. And B, I’m a she! And I thought, Oh, well. What do I know? This is their clubhouse and I’m just a visitor. I’ll see where this goes.
And where did it go?
Danny got up to get cigarettes, and “Walk on the Wild Side” came on and I said, “Hey, do the ‘doop-de-do’s with me!” And Lou Reed said, “Are you fucking kidding me?” And I said, “No, come on.” So he started doing it! We were going, doop, de, do, de, do …” And then he just started laughing, like he was incredulous. Then he said, “You look like David Cassidy. Do you like David Cassidy?” And I said no. And he said, “I do.” And he said, “Do you belong to Danny?” And I said, “No, Danny’s my friend.” And then he said, “I’ll tell you what. I have a hotel room nearby. Why don’t we go there and you can be my little David Cassidy? Would you like that?” And I said no. And he said, “Well how ’bout this? We’ll go there and you can shit in my mouth. Would you like that?” And I said no. And he said, “How about I’ll put a plate on my face and you can shit on that and then I’ll eat it? How would you like that?” And I said, “Yeah, I wouldn’t like that.” And then he just stared at me and said, “You’ll be missing me tonight,” and left. I was just sitting there thinking, Wow, that was so not what I thought was going to happen. Then Danny came over all excited and said, “Lou’s in love with you!” I said, “How do you know?” He said, “I just saw him in the men’s room—he told me.” I said, “You know what he just asked me to do? He asked me to shit in his mouth!” And Danny said, “Didn’t you want to?” And I said, “No! What’s wrong with you people?” So that was my introduction to Lou Reed. He was going through a bad time, I guess.
Do you want to tell me about meeting Dalí? It was such a funny story but I was confused about the end.
There is an end to it, which I couldn’t put in, because I heard about it ten years later. I was at an Interview magazine Valentine’s Day party, and I was really drunk. Amanda Lear, who was Bryan Ferry’s girlfriend, came over to me. She was blond, looked like a European movie star, and she sat next to me and started scolding me, “Dahling, you’re so drunk.” Anyway, she was part of Dalí’s entourage and would I model? I said, “Sure,” in my drunken way. A week later she called and said, “Meet me at the St. Regis and you’ll meet Dalí.” So we’re having a drink in the Old King Cole room and it was happy hour, so it was crowded with tourists and wealthy businessmen, and suddenly in the doorway in a gold cape was Dalí with his eyes bugged out and his crazy mustache. And the noise in the bar went down. And then he proclaimed, “Dalí is here!” And it went silent. So he strides over waving a cane around, completely preposterous. And Amanda says, “This is Duncan Hannah.” So he sits down next to me and says, “Yes! So you are going to be an angel for Dalí.” And I said, “Sure.” And then he said, “But wait! Do you have hair on your chest?” And I said, “No, I don’t.” He said, “Ah, this is good. Dalí does not paint angels with hair on their chests.” And then he said, “But wait! Are you a professional model?” And I said, “No, I’m not.” And he said, “Ah, good! Because Dalí does not paint professional models.” And then he said, “But then what is it that you do?” And I said, “I’m an art student.” And he said, “Ah! Then you love Dalí!” And I said, “Oh, yeah, we’re all crazy about you down at art school,” which was a complete lie because everybody just thought he was kitchiest, worst painter ever.
Then Amanda took me up to her room. She was changing for dinner and it was dark and she was toying with me like a cat with a mouse. She gets down to her underwear and I’m thinking, What’s going on here? Then the phone rang; it was Bryan Ferry from Toronto, and I just adored Bryan Ferry, and I could hear him saying, “Who’s there?” “Oh, just a beautiful boy …” And he’s going, “What beautiful boy?” And I was thinking, Bryan Ferry’s jealous of me, yay! But then she had to go, Rod Stewart was sitting in the lobby. She called the next Sunday and said, “You have to come up to my room to watch The Ballad of Cable Hogue.” I said, “Sorry, I have to do my homework.” And she said, “This is Amanda, baby. When Amanda snaps her fingers, you come.” And I said, “I know, but I still have to do my homework.” Then she got really mad, saying, “This is it, unless you get up here right now”—which seemed like stud service—”you can forget about modeling for Dalí!” So I said, “Fine, I’m not coming.” Bang!
So anyhow, years later I had a new friend who was very campy, and he mentioned modeling for Dalí and I said, “What? Were you enlisted by Amanda Lear?” And he said, “Yeah, it was complete bullshit. I went up to their suite. There was Dalí sitting in the far corner. But it was all about Gala, his wife. She had me stand on a desk and strip down to my BVDs and there were all these hangers-on milling around being fabulous but Gala was the only one who was concentrated on the model, the angel. And she goes, ‘Why don’t you masturbate, dear boy?’ ” He was creeped out by the whole thing. He said, “I ain’t jacking off for you, lady!” And so he got down and put his clothes back on and said fuck you to everybody. And I said, “Did you even get paid?” He goes, “No! It was supposed to be fifty bucks, but I wasn’t going to jack off for fifty bucks for this old bag.” And that was the thing: all this modeling for Dalí was about Gala’s voyeurism. Because he was … I don’t know what he was.
You’re such a good observer even though you’re young and starstruck. Like with Andy Warhol, at one point you say, “I don’t think he knows he’s Andy Warhol.”
I noticed that he just deflected everything, like it was all about you. He just projected out. And I thought, That’s it! He just removes the Warhol from Warhol. I mean he never was given to reflecting on his past, or even his present, he was just like an antenna or something, a receiver.
___
Show
Small Sorrows (2005)
Winter is Blue (2011)
Lee Remick as Temple Drake (2010)
Thames Valley (2010)
The Second Mrs. DeWinter (2007)
Punting on the Cam (2010)
The Loom of Youth (2011)
Nova Sleeping (2005)
Love’s Young Dream (2005)
Prince & Princessa (2009)
The Mystic Twig (2009)
The Weekend Mystery (2008)
By the Sea (2010)
Dora (2010)
Gamine (2010)
Isabelle (2010)
Bugatti 1924, Cap-d’Antibes (2011)
Nova (2005)
John and Jane (2007)
En Route (2007)
Europe (1980)
Misadventure (2011)
Air Boat (1996)
Blowup (2004)
Little Angel (2005)
Mykonos (2009)
Upper Fifth (2009)
Monica’s green coat (2011)
Orpheus and Eurydice (2008)
Regarding Rosemary (2006)
The Ascent (2012)
Spy Story (2008)
The Green Hat (2003)
The Partisan (2013)
The Shipwreck Boys (2004)
The Shipwreck Boys in Yorkshire (2006)
The Shipwreck Boys on Regents Canal (2008)
Fireflies (2013)
*
p.s. Hey. ** politekid, Hey, O! How lovely to see you! You’ve had the ‘Out 1’ experience. Rite of passage, that one. And you’re still sparkling. I’m good. Uh, gosh, life has been pretty fully ‘RT’ related and impacted by a visa thing I have to apply for, gulp, and little else, honestly. But life will return to a more random-like thing to some degree post-premiere, I think. ‘RT’ is submitted to a London film festival. Not a ton of hope it’ll get in, but we’ll show it in London for absolutely sure. We’ve just been too busy to figure out what the options are. But, yes, count on it. Sad state of affairs that it took two years to get you a subscriber, but surely word of mouth will have you going viral and sorry you ever volunteered for such a thing soonish. You generally good? How are your projects going? Ace to lock texts with you, pal. ** _Black_Acrylic, Haha. Oops, Surely the loss is a mere blip and fluke. Sorry, though. But still. ** Misanthrope, Awesome! Don’t be deterred. ** jay, Hey. I like how when you get to the big reveal at the end, you can go back and see all the signs of it coming. Dude’s poker face was not very persuasive. Angel surgically … so just the expected implanting of wings and maybe some ‘beatific’ sculpting facial surgery and so on? I can’t wait for you to see the film too. We’ll sort it. Hope I’ll get to see you again pre-liftoff. ** James Bennett, Thanks, James! Gosh, I hope so on the premiere success. It’s a strange film, but I think likeably so? We’ll see. That is exciting news about the DIY press! Great! All the encouragement possible from me re: that. ‘Inland Empire’, yes, so true. If I don’t get to see you again pre-vacation, I hope your weeks ahead are super rich. ** Nick Toti, Hi, Nick! Oh, wow, it’d be really nice to see you there. I’ll know my schedule, whatever it is, better after I land and check in with the festival planners, so hit me up after Friday, if that works. And ideally I hope to see your screening. Nice, man. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I liked how he couldn’t quite manage to hide his ‘evil’ no matter how hard he seemed to be trying. Thanks so much about the film. Gin Wigmore … you’re introducing me to all sorts of brand new (to me) entities. I’ll go listen. (Are) we in love like I think we be?, It Ain’t a long rhyme, It took ages to think, I think I’ll hurl it in the water, baby…, G. ** PL, Hi there. Wow, memorable first kiss. Nice that it was so complicated. Nice to be in charge. Hm, no, I don’t remember my first kiss. Must’ve been pretty glancing or something. Huh. ‘Strait-Jacket’, oh, right. I agree about her performance off the top of my head. She was definitely best when she was ludicrous. I can’t remember any jokes about my work. I guess they weren’t very funny, or they were behind my back. I think my work is ripe for jokes? I do like House Music. I don’t wilfully play it much at all, but I like when I’m somewhere and it fills the air. You do, I’m safely assuming? ** James, Blog returns your hello. Glad he riled you up. Or glad to observe the results of your riled up-ness. My parents didn’t read, and our ‘library’ was full of books they bought in bulk at thrift stores intended to make them look like they read, but I did find ‘Ulysses’ wedged in there at a tender age. Dennis is actually my middle name, legally. My egomaniac dad gave me his name, and I ended up being called my middle name to distinguish us in conversation. Bowling, nice. I hope to go bowling when I’m in LA. Lightest ball possible, please. I think I like every nut, but maybe not much almonds. Yes, I suppose consistent is a better term than hard. How does one ‘kind of’ look like someone in a painting? Whoever said that must have been afraid to commit to his opinion. Have an exploding day. ** Steve, Hi. Um, it would be good to meet with distributors in LA. I’m not sure. Yes, the Mahmoud Khalil arrest is deeply shocking and horribly unsurprising. I hope he has good lawyers because that really seems like an illegal act, as if that even matters these days. ** Bill, Hey. Today I start packing and making lists and checking things off. Hopefully our airships will pass safely. I must say I don’t feel the usual confidence in the US air traffic controller scene these days. Nice, I’ve never seen Joy Williams read except on video. I don’t think she’s very known over here. Easy preparations, and I’ll write to you pronto. ** Steeqhen, Feel better. I don’t know any of these TV shows. I really just don’t watch TV. It’s too much of a whirlpool for my busy brain. Okay, yeah, email me then. The festival is at the beginning of April, but I’ll get to it as soon as I’m post-that. In normal times, that does seem like a very good angle to get funding. And it’s probably inoffensive enough to be an attractive funding option even in the current world. Sounds great. ** Joshua, Hi, Joshua. It’s great to meet you. Thank you so much for coming in here. And thank you for the kind words about my work. You played ‘Eternal Darkness’? Such a great game. I wonder why they haven’t spruced it up for Switch. Wow, you were right there, proximate, for the Chardon shooting. He was a particularly spooky shooter. Thanks for wanting to come to the premiere. Hopefully we’ll be able to start getting the film out and out from here on. What are you up to? What do you do that interests you? ** P, Hi. Yeah, the passholders, whoever they are, get first picks on the events. Hopefully there aren’t too many of them or too many that want to see our film. I’m a bit worried that the screenings wil sell out extremely fast. Haha, ridiculous thing to worry about, I know. Being a hardcore amusement park nerd, I know about Little Amerricka, at least in a general way. Wow, that haunted house looks really nice. My type of haunt. Thank you, that was/is exciting. The park looks sweet. One of Zac’s and my plans is to do a big East Coast/Midwest US road trip targeting as many amusement parks as possible, and that one will get a pop-in if we do. That’s a wild story there, the John Wayne ->. I’ll read the articles when I’m out of p.s mode, thanks. You’ve helped my day start on a tasty note. ** HaRpEr, Oh, maybe yeah, hm. Agreed, and I think J.T. is a perfect example, as far as I can tell. I’m happy you liked the Kay Gabriel book. She’s a really special writer, I think. Me too on the trying to survive the month thing. With the trip west and a bunch of film finishing expenses, I’m very skint as well. But, like you my feet seem to know how to land in such a way as to keep me going. Very best of luck. What would you sell if you have to? ** Darby𓃰, Howdy, D. I will very happily eat Pho with you. Way yum. Let me know what your overall thoughts on ‘FoKA’ once you get there. I’m rarely awake at 3 am because I need a lot of sleep at night, but, yes, I have walked around at that time, and there is nothing quite like that silence. Well, except maybe how it was over here all day every day during the Covid lockdown. That was really, really trippy. If I don’t get 8, or at least 7 1/2, hours of sleep at night, I’m a wreck. I listened to the start of the Labyrinth Ear track, and, yes, I like it. I’ll finish listening a little later. Thank you! ** Justin D, Hi, Justin. ‘Guide’ is the novel of mine that’s most set in my actual real life at the time. With the obvious exaggerations. So, yes, your reading makes sense. Thank you for the song. I’ll hit it shortly. Lately I’ve been listening mostly to the new Destroyer album and the new Sparks album and the latest GbV album. And the other day I fell into a Byrds hole snd listened to ‘The Notorious Byrd Brothers’ on repeat. ** nat, Hey. Thanks about the teaser. It was hard to pull something out of the film, but I love that little scene. The boy (Desmond) was so amazing. An unresolved disappearance is certainly an ultra-novel-worthy premise or area. Exciting to contemplate. Why not start with ‘Less Than Zero’, yes. It’s excellent. Hm, I think my favorite Mario game is ‘Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door’. What’s yours? ** Corey, Hey. No, other than it having been made before I made the gif novels, I don’t think it fed that work. It was more from the thematic gif posts I was making for a while. Yes, spend a bit of your month making a guest post. That’s a capitol idea! ** Okay. Today the blog becomes a galerie consisting of paintings and words and other things by the artist/writer/actor Duncan Hannah who sadly died too young a few years ago. See what you think. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 