Bacon: A mystery in the East

His favourite pink champagne is still on ice at Le Café Royale in Pattaya but John Edwards will not be going back to drink it. "Mr John" died from lung cancer in a Bangkok hospital on Wednesday, leaving close friends to grieve and the art world to wonder what became of the paintings and the millions of pounds he inherited from the late and indisputably great artist Francis Bacon.

His favourite pink champagne is still on ice at Le Café Royale in Pattaya but John Edwards will not be going back to drink it. "Mr John" died from lung cancer in a Bangkok hospital on Wednesday, leaving close friends to grieve and the art world to wonder what became of the paintings and the millions of pounds he inherited from the late and indisputably great artist Francis Bacon.

Edwards was his companion and muse for 18 years, and the dyslexic son of a pub owner from the East End of London acquired Bacon's taste for bubbly. He liked his Jouet Chandon to match the pink silk shirts worn by waiters in white hotpants at Le Café Royale, a bar on Boyz Town, the most flamboyant nightclub strip in Thailand. But he would always chase the champagne down with J&B whisky, said the barman there yesterday.

Edwards' body will be cremated in the next few days, then flown back to Britain, where his relationship with Bacon has inspired gossip, intrigue and lawsuits over the years. He is again the subject of the kind of envious attention he fled to Thailand to avoid, after the death of Francis Bacon in 1992. The gay-friendly resort has catered for foreign divas and dudes ever since the Vietnam war. Edwards lived with his friend and sometime lover Philip Mordue in an immaculate penthouse on the 14th floor of a tower in the Royal Cliff resort, where stars and royals take their holidays. From the wrap-around balcony you can see expensive speedboats cut through the turquoise Gulf of Thailand and the lights of Pattaya's gogo bars twinkle beyond Buddha Hill. There is an old-fashioned jukebox in the sitting room, and 10 reproductions of Bacon's paintings hang on the walls.

Edwards' personal assistant, a slender 22-year-old Thai who did not want his name in print, has grown to admire the arresting art. "I was too young to understand it at first," he said. "I thought it was crazy painting. But John taught me to see that it is beautiful."

The young man, who was at his friend's deathbed on Wednesday, once proposed opening a bar in Pattaya. Edwards would have none of it. "Mr John said better not. Best to travel, and to take computer studies at university. He made me promise to give up smoking too," he said. "There was no one better. He could only whisper at the end, but he never stopped laughing. He was young at heart."

The manager of the resort next to his home said: "Towards the end of his illness, he knew life was short. He'd insist on going to chemotherapy by helicopter instead of wasting two hours on the road. We have a helipad."

Drinking mates said Edwards used to chat animatedly about his friendship with Bacon and said they were fond friends, but denied they were lovers. "He was not a bit of rough trade, but more like a brother to the artist," said one. "John amused him because he was never in awe of his posh friend." Mr Mordue, on the other hand, "certainly talked rough", and even had a scar where a bullet had whistled clean through his throat during one pre-dawn bar crawl.

"Mordue was his personal secretary," said Ian Read, owner of a gay piano bar which Edwards frequented three times a week. "He never had a formal education and writing got all jumbled up for him. But he was very smart." Friends recalled how Edwards would manage his money carefully. He threw home-cooked dinner parties of steak and kidney pies in his lavish flat, rather than eat out at spicy restaurants. "Once he discovered Pattaya, this became his home," Read continued. "He came here for the sun and the freedom."

Bacon and Edwards had been the art world's odd couple. The artist, arguably the greatest British painter of modern times, whose screaming popes and distorted human figures became 20th-century icons, was 40 years older; but after the two men met in 1974 at the Colony Room, the legendary Soho drinking club which was Bacon's favourite hangout, they became inseparable. Both Bacon and Edwards were gay but always maintained that their relationship was platonic.

As famous for his drinking and gambling as for his disciplined working habits, Bacon lived in Reece Mews, South Kensington, in a tiny house lit by bare bulbs where he painted in a studio as cluttered as a municipal rubbish dump. Every morning, he woke around 6am, worked until 9am, then phoned Edwards who lived nearby (in a flat Bacon had bought for him) with Philip Mordue. Edwards would come round to Reece Mews where Bacon, who prided himself on his culinary skills, cooked them a fry-up (a devotee of cockney rhyming slang, his nickname for Bacon was "Eggs"). Then Edwards would sit in Bacon's studio while the master painted – a rare privilege since Bacon was notoriously secretive about his work. During their friendship, Bacon painted Edwards 30 or more times.

The art historian and Bacon biographer Michael Peppiatt says: "John, as he himself said, had something of a father-son relationship with Bacon, who was capable of enormous affection and generosity. He was always there for people he liked and John was someone he was extremely fond of."

Gallery owner James Birch, who knew both men well, says "Bacon quite liked the fact that John was uneducated. I think Francis got fed-up with talking about art. And John was just a regular bloke, very chatty, easy to get on with."

In the only interview he ever gave, Edwards himself said, "[Francis] liked the way I didn't care who he was supposed to be."

Edwards was one of six children from an extended East End family of dockers turned licensees and he worked behind the bar in family pubs until he met Bacon – after which, according to James Birch, "he would say he was Francis's photographer". The art critic Richard Cork describes the Colony Room of the period as "a mixture of Soho bohemians, often with these plummy public school accents, and an East End contingent, with broken noses, looking thuggish, but quite often gay, you know, the whole mixture which fascinated Francis." The same peculiarly British nexus of toffs and "diamond geezers", artists, aristocrats and gangsters, embraced the Kray twins in their day and was dramatised in the film Performance.

The quasi-domestic idyll ended abruptly in 1992 when Bacon died of a heart attack aged 82 on holiday in Spain. Edwards was the sole heir to Bacon's £11.4m estate. The resulting press furore unnerved Edwards – a friend described him opening the curtains at Reece Mews and seeing the street full of press photographers – and he left the country in search of a quiet life, first and briefly for Florida, then to Thailand with Mr Mordue.

"A great artist leaves deep traces," says Michael Peppiatt. "Francis is as much alive after his death as he was when he was here. He was a transforming person. If you met him and spent time with him, you couldn't help but be changed, and this effect goes on. I think that's one of the signs of great genius, a person who actually transforms the lives around him."

He certainly left his mark on the courts. Three years after the artist's death, Edwards felt he had still not received a "full accounting" from Marlborough Fine Arts, the gallery that had represented Bacon since 1958. The potential sums involved were huge. Bacon himself had little interest in money and gave or gambled it away. He once said his life consisted of "going from bar to bar and drinking and that kind of thing". However, he is estimated to have earned £14m from his art in his lifetime. In 1989, he became the world's most expensive living artist when a triptych sold at Sotheby's New York for £3.53m, later topped by £4.6m for a portrait of a previous lover, Greg Dyer, who committed suicide in 1971. There is no definitive catalogue of Bacon's work and no one knows exactly how many paintings are out there.

Confused, Edwards turned for help to another old friend, the architectural artist Professor Brian Clarke, granting Clarke his power of attorney. In a series of dramatic moves orchestrated by Clarke, Bacon's work was withdrawn from Marlborough and reassigned to other galleries. In 1998 a High Court judge dismissed the trustees of Bacon's estate and replaced them with Clarke. There followed a full-scale lawsuit against the Marlborough, claiming it had exercised "undue influence" over Bacon, charged too much commission, undervalued work and resold it for higher prices, and failed to account for 33 paintings. The overall value of the action was estimated at £100m. Marlborough denied all wrongdoing and promised to "vigorously contest" the suit.

Meanwhile, there was more controversy, this time over the Reece Mews studio which John Edwards said he would leave "to the nation". Like everything else about Bacon's legacy, the outcome was mysterious. Either the Tate refused the gift or wasn't given enough time to consider it. Instead, Dublin's Hugh Lane Gallery benefited, sending 14 archaeologists and conser- vators to London to disassemble the studio and remove over 7,000 items including 2,000 pots of paint, 570 books, numerous loose pages, 100 slashed canvases (Bacon was meticulous about destroying work he wasn't happy with) and pairs of Marks & Spencer corduroy trousers the artist cut up and used as painting tools. Shipped to Dublin, the studio was reconstructed in minute detail, then put on public display.

Suddenly last year the case against Marlborough was aborted in a so-called "drop hands settlement" with each side paying their own legal costs. The Bacon estate announced that Edwards had just been diagnosed with cancer, implying that was the main reason they withdrew their action. Marlborough claimed victory, meanwhile, saying the case had been "without foundation and totally unsustainable".

Whatever the truth – and there is a middle position suggesting that the passage of time made gathering evidence difficult for both sides – leading members of the London art world describe themselves as "traumatised" by the whole experience. There are stories of subpoenas being threatened and of lawyers arriving on people's doorsteps to search their private archives. One potential witness, who insisted on anonymity, said: "It will take a long time for anyone to be able to talk perceptively about the whole thing because I don't think it's all come out in the open yet. It's a very murky and in many ways inexplicable business."

The person who would be best placed to explain is Professor Clarke, who was also by Edwards' bed when he died. Clarke is variously regarded as the powerful éminence grise or the altruistic white knight of the Bacon story. Clarke always insisted his overriding aim in bringing the lawsuit was not financial but to establish Bacon's legacy for future scholars. When the suit was dropped a year ago, Clarke said work would begin on a catalogue raisonné and setting up a John Edwards Charitable Foundation to advance Bacon studies. As yet, there's no public evidence either development took place, though Barbara Dawson of the Hugh Lane Gallery says the estate has funded research deriving from the preservation of his studio and has "always been very professional".

Nobody knows who will inherit from Edwards, although most of those who knew him expect it to be Mordue. Some of the Bacon legacy was spent on turning Reece Mews into a luxury home, and some of it on the good life in Thailand. It is thought Edwards bought property for his family in Suffolk. Suggestions that Edwards arranged for the sale of paintings have not been backed by firm evidence.

The story of Francis Bacon's legacy is full of contradictions and confusions that echo his work and the reactions to it. Some critics see the paintings as a profound commentary on mortality and the human condition. Others dismiss them as the products of a kinky mind, obsessed with images of death, disease and decay, of butchers' shops and 1950s gay porn that Bacon collected. To Michael Peppiatt, Bacon was an "enormously complex and enormously intelligent and vital man who tried to make himself simple. He tried to bring the two extreme sides of his personality into some kind of liveable equilibrium. He was everything and its opposite – vital, warm and caring at times and at other times very analytical, very cutting, very devastating. He could light up the day and he could send it into darkness when you were with him. He could be a tremendous force for joy or for despair."

Some of those who knew Bacon describe him as amoral, disloyal and vicious; others say he was great company, an open-handed man who loved to talk. "The champagne would come out almost immediately," they say. After the death of John Edwards it must remain on ice, for the moment, until the mystery of Francis Bacon's legacy is resolved.