Andrew Lycett

‘Crazy mixed-up Yid’

Litvinoff apparently knew everyone in Sixties London, including Lucian Freud, Mick Jagger to Ronnie Kray (who slashed his face)

issue 06 February 2016

Even David Litvinoff’s surname was a concoction. It was really Levy. Wanting something ‘more romantic’, he appropriated that of his mother’s first husband. So his elder half-brother, the respected writer Emanuel Litvinoff, informed Keiron Pim, adding that David was ‘an unfortunate character altogether’, prone to ‘inventing roles for himself that didn’t have any reality’.

Yet this fantasist is the elusive figure whom Pim has endeavoured to capture in an ambitious book which seeks to resurrect an era as much as an individual. David
Litvinoff was an extraordinary live wire who, by dint of a quick wit and chameleon personality, propelled himself from an immigrant background in London’s East End to cavorting with wealthy ex-public-school boys in Chelsea and gangsters in Soho. His heyday in the 1950s and 1960s coincided with the emergence of ‘Swinging London’, as class barriers broke down and new energies swirled, often fuelled by drugs and rock’n’roll.

Litvinoff initially blagged himself a place in a house owned by the artist Timothy Whidborne in Cheyne Walk, where George Melly also lived.

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