By Barry Egan
Sunday Apr 17 2011

Bob Carlos Clarke was shipped off to boarding school in Dublin when he was eight. He never forgot the experience of being torn from the bosom of his family in Cork. His widow Lindsey recalled Bob telling her how he wrote "endlessly tear-stained letters home to his mother Myra, 'Get me out of here. This is so awful.'"

Perhaps the mercurial photographer -- whose controversial work was a Marquis de Sade-style celebration of the youthful female form that made him world famous and rich -- felt the same sense of abandonment by a mother figure when Lindsey left him at The Priory in the first week of March, 2006.

Sitting outside a restaurant a couple of weekends ago in Chelsea, where she and Bob lived for years, Lindsey tells me that when she brought Bob into The Priory, he told her: "I don't want to be here."

"I said, 'I know you don't. I'm not abandoning you but you are frightening me and I want you to feel better.'" Three weeks later, he was dead.

On March 25, 2006, at midday, the 55-year-old, who had photographed Caprice and Jordan and Jerry Hall, left the hospital in south-west London, where he had been a voluntary patient, told staff he would be gone for about 30 minutes, before strolling to Barnes. He then threw himself in front of a train bound for Waterloo.

He left behind Lindsey and their teenage daughter Scarlett. She discovered a quote from one of his books, Shooting Sex: The Definitive Guide to Undressing Beautiful Strangers, after he died, which read: "For the purposes of deification, an early and appropriate death is essential. If you want to qualify as a legend, get famous young, die tragically and dramatically."

Lindsey tells me now that she would sometimes go in the evenings to Brompton Cemetery in south-west London where he was buried and scream at him in his grave: "It's not such a good idea, now, is it, Bob?"

In retrospect, high-octane and turbulent romances like Lindsey's and Bob's never seem like such a good idea. But life would be a lot duller had they not met in the spring of 1976, when anything but bashful Bob popped by Lindsey Rudland's flat in London with a view to photographing her. He was on the verge of marrying his girlfriend of six years, Sue, which he subsequently did. Two months later in "the hot summer of 1976", Bob and Lindsey -- who was married to Andrew -- started having an intensely heated affair that lasted for two years until they left their respective marriages.

"It got to a point when they found out and the s**t hit the fan. Bob liked the explosion," she laughs now at it all. "Things had got very intense. Bob couldn't deal with the mundane. It wasn't in his psyche. I understood him."

Understanding Bob was no easy job. Looking back, Lindsey can't pinpoint some moment when she noticed Bob was changing rather than just being a driven neurotic. "The problem was he was like that the whole way through," she says, "I suppose it got

worse, it got more complex."

She takes a sip of tea and ponders the imponderable for a second. "The problem is, if somebody keeps telling you they are going to kill themselves, you do get quite tired of it," she says.

"We were on holiday in the South of France with Isabella Blow eight years ago. Scarlett was fond of Isabella; riveted by her because she brought these boxes of hats. I said to Scarlett one morning, 'Let's take Isabella a cup of tea.' We knocked on the door and Isabella said: 'Oh, I think I am going to kill myself.' I said, 'Could you tell me whether you are going to do it before or after lunch, because I am going to lay the table.'" (Blow committed suicide in May 2007.)

"But you get exhausted with people. You never knew with Bob whether he was playing a game. How do you know? He was always saying it. He was a great actor." So much so that the day before he killed himself, he had, says Lindsey, convinced the doctors in The Priory that his condition had improved. He seemed happier. Lindsey believes perhaps that it was to do with the fact that he had maybe made the decision that he was going to kill himself the next day. No one will ever know. He conned them, Lindsey believes.

She went to see Bob on the Friday, March 24. She sat on the bed opposite him, as the psychiatrist said: "I want to let you know that he has turned the corner. He is on the mend." Lindsey was going to pick him up on the Monday. She and Scarlett were going to have supper with him on Saturday evening at The Priory. Bob said goodbye to Lindsey. She can remember staring at him in the corridor as she left and thinking: "I don't know who you are any more." Then she went home to Chelsea. On Saturday morning, she picked up Scarlett at the station from school. They had lunch and were just about to do some shopping when there was a ring at the bell.

"Scarlett answered the door," she says. "It was the police. I thought, 'Oh God, I've been caught putting on lip-gloss in the car while driving.' These three police came in and I had this feeling where something very odd is happening. And then when they asked what relation I was to Bob Carlos Clarke, I just knew something horrific had happened. Scarlett just burst into tears. I noticed they were all wearing this thing on their arms, London Transport Police. Scarlett asked for an ice cream. 'I need an ice cream.' It was most peculiar, but you see people do very odd things in a state of shock."

Scarlett rings during my long tete a tete with her mother. I ask Lindsey how is she getting on. "She's great. She is very Bob Carlos Clarke, I have to tell you. She has a very dark sense of humour. I don't know long-term how this sort of thing affects one. I can't gauge that. We clung together for a long time. She understood things which I wish she hadn't. She was so perceptive; just like him."

But who was he precisely? Who was this man who shocked the world with this dark erotica? On one level, Bob was like a Victorian school teacher with endless upper-class rules and regulations, and then a complete out-of-control 15-year-old, Lindsey says.

"He had all that whole grand upper-class behaviour," she says. "I remember getting on a plane with him once and we were going to Ireland -- and don't forget I was a model who had flown all over the world -- and at 11am the air hostess asked did I want a drink and I said I'll have a glass of champagne. Bob said you don't have a drink until after six o'clock. I had an orange juice."

This grandness he inherited from his father, Charlie Carlos Clarke, an Old Etonian, who was married to a countess, managed estates for the Duke of Marlborough and hung out with the Prince of Wales. In the late Forties, Charlie caused a stir in that titled world when he left his wife for his personal secretary Myra (who suffered from depression; her brother killed himself). Myra was also 30 years Charlie's junior. To escape the scandal, they bolted to Cork, where on June 24, 1950, their first son Bob was born (his brother Andrew died of a heroin overdose two years after Bob's death.)

One of Bob's most enduring images is of a beautiful young "widow" weeping on the steps of a mausoleum in Putney Vale Cemetery in a vaguely S&M rubber rig-out. It was titled Faithful Unto Death. Bob was possibly unfaithful until death to Lindsey. She is the (still) beautiful blonde whom the Daily Telegraph once described as "the Seventies Sunsilk girl and a Page 3 model from an era when it was populated by 'nice gals' from the middle classes -- a fascinating mix of girlish effervescence and stainless-steel backbone".

She certainly needed the backbone to put up with the increasingly cruel Bob, who at times could be "hysterically rude, shatteringly rude".

Did her love for him change as she started to know about other women? "I can honestly say to you that his obsession was about control," she says. "He wanted them in that camera really. He had a fantasy about the lifestyle that should go with that. He should really hang out in the studio and sleep with who he wanted. The problem was there was a big part of Bob that was basically a comfy pair of slippers, a cup of tea and some biscuits. He was such a mix.

"I loved Bob to death, but he was very controlling. We had an obsessive relationship. It would have been easier if he had done his pictures and slept with the odd girl in the studio. That would almost been simpler. It was so much more complex -- sometimes, I don't think sex was even involved. I wish he was here and I could just say, 'Tell me.' Because I know the people that he was obsessed with. His obsessions with people became out of control.

"He became obsessed with Mandy Smith and I don't mean in any sexual sense whatsoever. He would get obsessed with a model and then he'd get bored with them like that" -- she clicks her elegantly manicured fingers -- "and then they would be dropped and they'd be devastated and I'd have to pick up the pieces."

She says the reason why his debilitating mental problems were difficult to detect was because she got so used to them over the years. "When you live with someone who is very dysfunctional, you become slightly dysfunctional yourself," she says. "You compensate with them. You allow things to happen that you wouldn't in a normal situation. I got very good at cutting off. I would get phone calls from people -- 'I'm sure there is something going on with so and so. I'd go, 'Oh, okay.'"

She says she would never ask Bob had he had sex with that woman. She didn't want to know? "I didn't see the point. Because all obsessions with him passed, whatever they were."

So even if he had been physical with another woman, she would have let it go? "Yeah, but it was almost like he'd got them and then he didn't want it. It was very complicated." Lindsey admits that it did bother her that she was putting up with a lot to be in a relationship with Bob. She decided, however, that "it was a sort of a sacrifice" worth making because he was "the most exciting man I'd ever met in my life".

Lindsey believes her attraction to Bob had a lot to do with her relationship with her father Peter, an artist who had a studio in a house in Hampstead. "My father was a very soft and gentle man, but he was obsessed with perfection," she says. "I would come home from school -- a frightfully smart school that they couldn't really afford -- and say I can't do maths. He would say, 'Neither can I. And don't forget there are artists and people." Lindsey's mother Josephine had been a nurse during the war and then became a model for her future husband, just like Lindsey would with Bob. Her father died when she was 17 when he developed motor neurone disease. "I watched him just disappear in front of me," she says.

In the same way that she watched Bob just disappear in front of her ... "Oh yes, and over a much longer period than I was aware of. My father's illness took six months. He said before he died, 'You must see a dead body because it is frightfully interesting.' My father was very interesting because he really believed that you shouldn't hide things from children. Everything was openly discussed."

Was she similarly open with Scarlett in terms of Bob's illness? "I was open but it was difficult. She is 19 now. But she knew. She knew. She said to me, 'Daddy's not well.' I said I know. That was scary."

She cites the suicide of their friend Terence Donovan in 1996 as having a major influence on Bob's mood. I remember Bob, whom I got to know well, telling me that Donovan was photographing all these young models and they were appearing to remain young while he was ageing. "Bob was obsessed by age," agrees Lindsey, "and I think it came very early on because of his father. His father was 30 years older than his mother. He always told me a story about when he was at public school and his father coming and everyone saying, 'Is that your grandfather?' So, that was deep in there."

When she and Bob had their first house, they decided that they should do a flickerbook of themselves. They'd take a nude picture of each other every week and put it in the flickerbook. "And when we got to a point where we couldn't stand how old we got, we were going to do ourselves in together," she says. "Of course, you promise and say those things when you're very young. It's rock'n'roll. You don't think you are going to live past 30 when you are 18. You can't imagine being old. But I think Bob used to look in the mirror a lot and say, 'I can't believe it. I'm 52.' The age thing definitely weighed on him very heavily. He hated it. That was a lot to do with it."

Lindsey has lived a fascinating life; there are stories of staying up all night with Keith Richards and Bob in The Savoy Hotel and hanging out with Princess Margaret in Mustique.

"One could never have been bored, ever," Lindsey says. "There was no opportunity. It was like burning coal in your hand: the pain is so bad but the light is so bright you can't put it down. I mean, I miss him desperately, of course. Sometimes I think to myself, 'For God's sakes Bob, just turn up," she says in that awfully grand accent of hers. "'Pitch up.'"

If he does pitch up, Bob Carlos Clarke will get a surprise -- because Lindsey is doing what she probably should have done years ago. She has finally left him for another man. Lindsey is marrying professional golfer Andrew Raitt, 11 years her junior, in June. She met him in Barbados four years ago. He proposed to her in Thailand last year.

Has she finally made sense of Bob's suicide? "No. And I don't think I will. There are some things I can't deal with, because I'm still waiting. I still think he is going to come back."

Bob Carlos Clarke's Peep Show is at The Little Black Gallery, 13A Park Walk, London SW10 0AJ until May 14. Visit www. thelittleblackgallery.com for more information

- Barry Egan

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