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Freud Ego
Clement Freud arrived in England and was despatched to a notorious 'progressive' school, where he spent more time drinking cider than attending lessons. After an eccentric childhood, and a spell as an apprentice chef at the Dorchester Hotel, things went downhill as Clement became a soldier, night-club owner, journalist, television personality and Liberal MP. By the end of Freud Ego, Clement is celebrating his win at the Ely by-election...a contest for which he backed himself 33-1.
- GenresNonfictionBiography
224 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 17, 2019
It started off in a very humorous style, but I found it dragged at times, sometimes quite boring.
I was disappointed, was looking forward to this book as I twice met Clement Freud, once when I was a student in Aberdeen university and once, later, at a Liberal dinner in Orkney
I was disappointed, was looking forward to this book as I twice met Clement Freud, once when I was a student in Aberdeen university and once, later, at a Liberal dinner in Orkney
October 22, 2022
It is a pity this book was never subjected to Freudian analysis. There are hints all the way through, within the dominant mix of light-hearted anecdotes and tales of ambitions fulfilled, of memories of sexual violence and licentiousness.
Clement Freud portrays himself as an affable bon vivant with a taste for fine living and fine wines. He clearly drank to excess but insists he was never aggressively drunk. He was a successful chef, restaurant/night club owner, journalist, raconteur and radio and television personality, a hard working and devoted family man and the book is full of his stories, jokes and culinary tips.
He remembers the veg cook at the Dorchester Hotel in London,
“an old French drunk who had been recalled from bibulous retirement when war broke out. He smelt of garlic, which he chewed as others chew gum, and his favourite trick was to garnish restaurant-bound silver veg dishes by filling his mouth with chopped parsley and shooting the now garlic-scented herbs on to his vegetables through the gaps between his teeth. This was particularly effective with new potatoes, where the evenness of his aim made the dish look impressive.�
And the hatred of the chefs for the wealthy patrons they served. Again in the Dorchester:
“They were the natural enemy and anything we could do to hurt them was a blow for us. I saw in my first week, while I was still noticing these things, a commis pissing into the stockpot.
'Why are you doing that, chef?'
'That'll teach them � bastards!'�
There is a brief note on Reform lamb cutlets, a dish he offered at his Royal Court Theatre Club, noting that “Reform sauce is made of Sauce Espagnol spiked with Worcestershire sauce, garnished with slivers of boiled tongue, beetroot and hard-boiled egg-white.�
Against all of this, and tales of public school, Army life, the BBC and winning a constituency election to become a Liberal Member of Parliament, there are the unsavoury recollections. Public school punishments, of course; some of the beatings clearly leaving him with erotic memories. There are two sadistic incidents from his time with the Army, one at a party in Glasgow which involved two soldiers being chained naked to a sofa and positioned with “their buttocks jutting out.� �'Help yourself,' said Sergeant Alexander.'They're the entertainment.'� The other happened in Germany when a German woman, no saint herself, accused a sergeant of imprisoning her and subjecting her to rape, whipping, gang rape and attack by a guard dog. They are only the most severe, there are quite a few other unpleasant incidents.
There is a side to Clement Freud's life which goes some way to explaining the complexities of his character. As a young child in 1933, he and his family escaped from the Nazis, and as a schoolboy he found that prejudice against German-speaking Jews was not confined to Berlin. His schooldays were tough and sometimes brutal. When he left school at sixteen his father found him a job as a trainee chef and was introduced to further harsh discipline in the kitchen. At eighteen he was called up into the Army ending as an officer but experiencing all of the harshness and more brutality serving in the wreck of defeated Germany. It would challenge anyone to live through such an upbringing and come out unscathed in later life. It does not pardon his own faults but his grandfather might have understood them.
Clement Freud portrays himself as an affable bon vivant with a taste for fine living and fine wines. He clearly drank to excess but insists he was never aggressively drunk. He was a successful chef, restaurant/night club owner, journalist, raconteur and radio and television personality, a hard working and devoted family man and the book is full of his stories, jokes and culinary tips.
He remembers the veg cook at the Dorchester Hotel in London,
“an old French drunk who had been recalled from bibulous retirement when war broke out. He smelt of garlic, which he chewed as others chew gum, and his favourite trick was to garnish restaurant-bound silver veg dishes by filling his mouth with chopped parsley and shooting the now garlic-scented herbs on to his vegetables through the gaps between his teeth. This was particularly effective with new potatoes, where the evenness of his aim made the dish look impressive.�
And the hatred of the chefs for the wealthy patrons they served. Again in the Dorchester:
“They were the natural enemy and anything we could do to hurt them was a blow for us. I saw in my first week, while I was still noticing these things, a commis pissing into the stockpot.
'Why are you doing that, chef?'
'That'll teach them � bastards!'�
There is a brief note on Reform lamb cutlets, a dish he offered at his Royal Court Theatre Club, noting that “Reform sauce is made of Sauce Espagnol spiked with Worcestershire sauce, garnished with slivers of boiled tongue, beetroot and hard-boiled egg-white.�
Against all of this, and tales of public school, Army life, the BBC and winning a constituency election to become a Liberal Member of Parliament, there are the unsavoury recollections. Public school punishments, of course; some of the beatings clearly leaving him with erotic memories. There are two sadistic incidents from his time with the Army, one at a party in Glasgow which involved two soldiers being chained naked to a sofa and positioned with “their buttocks jutting out.� �'Help yourself,' said Sergeant Alexander.'They're the entertainment.'� The other happened in Germany when a German woman, no saint herself, accused a sergeant of imprisoning her and subjecting her to rape, whipping, gang rape and attack by a guard dog. They are only the most severe, there are quite a few other unpleasant incidents.
There is a side to Clement Freud's life which goes some way to explaining the complexities of his character. As a young child in 1933, he and his family escaped from the Nazis, and as a schoolboy he found that prejudice against German-speaking Jews was not confined to Berlin. His schooldays were tough and sometimes brutal. When he left school at sixteen his father found him a job as a trainee chef and was introduced to further harsh discipline in the kitchen. At eighteen he was called up into the Army ending as an officer but experiencing all of the harshness and more brutality serving in the wreck of defeated Germany. It would challenge anyone to live through such an upbringing and come out unscathed in later life. It does not pardon his own faults but his grandfather might have understood them.
April 13, 2009
You might remember Clement Freud as the bloke with the beard on the cover of the Paul McCartney and Wings' album Band On The Run; or as the slow-talking, former Liberal MP who often won Just A Minute on BBC Radio Four; or as the grandson of the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, brother of the artist Lucian Freud and father of broadcaster Emma Freud. Ah, but there's so more to him than that. Like those 1970's TV commercials for Minced Morsels - which he was reluctant to do, and so asked for a fee equal to the salary of the Prime Minister! In the adverts he was sat next to a dog called Henry - or rather a bitch, because the dog got too... um, excited.
Then there were his columns in the Telegraph magazine for which he tried various experiences (including being a jockey, a Formula Three racing driver, tackling the Cresta Run, and being hanged as an extra in Roman Polanski's Macbeth). He also presented various cookery shows on live television in the 1960's in which things would frequently go wrong and he would end up having to ad-lib to fill-in time (good practice for Just A Minute perhaps?) On one occasion he gave this explanation of how to clean a burnt saucepan: "soak it, scrub it with a solution of salt and vinegar and in the end throw it away and buy another pan." He even read the shipping forecast on Radio Four once.
Freud Ego (geddit?) is one of the most amusing autobiographies I've read. He flits through the first fifty years of his life (from his birth in Germany on April 24th, 1924, to his victory in the Isle of Ely by-election in 1973) with the droll wit you would expect from such a great raconteur, restauranteur, and probably some other French words beginning with an R as well.
"I wonder," he says at the end of the prologue in which he describes what happened once when he was sent to the headmaster for a beating, "is this where one starts an autobiography - the circumstances of one's first grope...?"
To say that there is a laugh-a-page would be an understatement; and there is no shortage of (slightly irreverant) name-dropping along the way either: " ...At the Spenders' I met W. H. Auden, whose poetry I hugely admired and could recite in great wodges, Auden urinated in the kitchen sink, in full view of us all, and had the most disgusting table manners I ever encountered..." "...invited to lunch with Somerset Maugham, who had the worst halitosis I have encountered. Picasso asked me to visit him at Vallauris..." He even went drinking with Dylan Thomas, although he doesn't say much about it (presumably because he doesn't remember much about it!)
His even-more-famous psychoanalyst grandfather is relegated to a few childhood memories in Chapter Two, along with his not-quite-as-famous psychoanalyst Aunt Anna with whom he fell out after an unfortunate encounter with one of her patients (which I found absolutely hilarious).
His early years were fairly typical for the time: school, bullying, beatings, Ovalteenies, scouts, and being a page-turner for Paderewski (the Polish pianist and Prime Minister); followed by a stint in the army where, after being court martialled for "misappropriating ducks", he ended up attending some of the Nuremberg trials while tracking down war criminals for the War Crimes Investigation Unit.
After being demobbed he took over the running of his favourite Soho restaurant, in which he served up horsemeat as 'steak' because of rationing; and later opened the Royal Court Theatre (cabaret) Club where stars like David Frost, Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore made early appearances. Rolf Harris also performed there several times, and apparently it was Clement Freud who suggested the line: "Hold my platypus duck, Bill" for the song 'Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport'.
He also pursued a successful career in journalism, and was a sort of upmarket pioneer of mystery shopping when, as Food editor of The Observer in the 60's, he wrote a series of columns called Mr Smith Goes To Lunch, which consisted of him visiting restaurants (and later auction houses and theatres) as 'Mr Smith'.
Clement Freud led a fascinating and unpredictable life, and his account of it is laugh-out-loud funny. Sadly, he passed away in 2009, so we may never get to read his post-1973 memoirs.
[This review is adapted from one I posted on ciao.co.uk in April 2004.]
Then there were his columns in the Telegraph magazine for which he tried various experiences (including being a jockey, a Formula Three racing driver, tackling the Cresta Run, and being hanged as an extra in Roman Polanski's Macbeth). He also presented various cookery shows on live television in the 1960's in which things would frequently go wrong and he would end up having to ad-lib to fill-in time (good practice for Just A Minute perhaps?) On one occasion he gave this explanation of how to clean a burnt saucepan: "soak it, scrub it with a solution of salt and vinegar and in the end throw it away and buy another pan." He even read the shipping forecast on Radio Four once.
Freud Ego (geddit?) is one of the most amusing autobiographies I've read. He flits through the first fifty years of his life (from his birth in Germany on April 24th, 1924, to his victory in the Isle of Ely by-election in 1973) with the droll wit you would expect from such a great raconteur, restauranteur, and probably some other French words beginning with an R as well.
"I wonder," he says at the end of the prologue in which he describes what happened once when he was sent to the headmaster for a beating, "is this where one starts an autobiography - the circumstances of one's first grope...?"
To say that there is a laugh-a-page would be an understatement; and there is no shortage of (slightly irreverant) name-dropping along the way either: " ...At the Spenders' I met W. H. Auden, whose poetry I hugely admired and could recite in great wodges, Auden urinated in the kitchen sink, in full view of us all, and had the most disgusting table manners I ever encountered..." "...invited to lunch with Somerset Maugham, who had the worst halitosis I have encountered. Picasso asked me to visit him at Vallauris..." He even went drinking with Dylan Thomas, although he doesn't say much about it (presumably because he doesn't remember much about it!)
His even-more-famous psychoanalyst grandfather is relegated to a few childhood memories in Chapter Two, along with his not-quite-as-famous psychoanalyst Aunt Anna with whom he fell out after an unfortunate encounter with one of her patients (which I found absolutely hilarious).
His early years were fairly typical for the time: school, bullying, beatings, Ovalteenies, scouts, and being a page-turner for Paderewski (the Polish pianist and Prime Minister); followed by a stint in the army where, after being court martialled for "misappropriating ducks", he ended up attending some of the Nuremberg trials while tracking down war criminals for the War Crimes Investigation Unit.
After being demobbed he took over the running of his favourite Soho restaurant, in which he served up horsemeat as 'steak' because of rationing; and later opened the Royal Court Theatre (cabaret) Club where stars like David Frost, Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore made early appearances. Rolf Harris also performed there several times, and apparently it was Clement Freud who suggested the line: "Hold my platypus duck, Bill" for the song 'Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport'.
He also pursued a successful career in journalism, and was a sort of upmarket pioneer of mystery shopping when, as Food editor of The Observer in the 60's, he wrote a series of columns called Mr Smith Goes To Lunch, which consisted of him visiting restaurants (and later auction houses and theatres) as 'Mr Smith'.
Clement Freud led a fascinating and unpredictable life, and his account of it is laugh-out-loud funny. Sadly, he passed away in 2009, so we may never get to read his post-1973 memoirs.
[This review is adapted from one I posted on ciao.co.uk in April 2004.]
July 15, 2016
A complex man (what else but complexity could that family have produced?) who used language brilliantly. Of course his autobiography is a lively read. Listeners to Radio 4 especially can imagine hearing his syrupy voice throughout. My favorite part was his quip during one of his political campaigns; he was trying to establish rapport with a group of railway workers, and to do so he reminded them that they probably knew his grandfather, Signalman Freud. Silly, smart, quick.
March 10, 2010
Poorly edited (weird typos in the edition I read) but totally charming. I read it twice.
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