Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (16 page)

Bacon complains afterwards: ‘Her singing was really too awful. Someone had to stop her. If you’re going to do something, you shouldn’t do it as badly as that.’

Caroline Blackwood is one of the few present to be impressed by Bacon’s refusal to kowtow. ‘I can think of no one else who would have dared to boo a member of the royal family in a private house. Among all the guests assembled in Lady Rothermere’s ballroom, more than a few were secretly suffering from Princess Margaret’s singing, but they suffered in silence, gagged by their snobbery. Francis could not be gagged. If he found a performance shoddy, no conventional trepidation prevented him from expressing his reactions. Sometimes his opinions could be biased and perverse and unfair, but he never cared if they created outrage ... He had an anarchic fearlessness which was unique.’

Thirteen years later, Lord Rothermere is introduced to Francis Bacon at a
Daily Mail
party, but fails to recognise him. ‘And what do you do?’ he asks.

‘I’m a nancy boy,’ replies Bacon.

WATCHES A BLUE MOVIE WITH

20 Thurloe Square, London SW7

Spring 1968

Princess Margaret is a regular guest at Kenneth and Kathleen Tynan’s risqué parties. Tynan, who has made his name as an iconoclastic theatre critic, is one of the most flamboyant figures in town. His parties are formed from a combustible mix of pornography, snobbery and revolution. ‘A new kind of man is being evolved in Castro’s Cuba,’ is just one of his beliefs, yet at the same time he has been known to upbraid guests for failing to curtsey to the Princess. He is at the cutting edge of both left-wing politics and high society, and refuses to acknowledge any contradiction. Swanning around his own party in a deep purple suit, he causes a gatecrashing member of the Workers Revolutionary Party to ask, ‘Who’s the antiques dealer?’

The Tynans’ guests dress in the latest beads and bobbles, consuming Kathleen’s turbot
monegasque
or lamb
Casa Botin
, drinking fine wine and, when they feel like it, taking drugs. Tynan runs his parties as though they were theatrical productions, with Kathleen as his stage manager. His choice of cast members is determined by their capacity for friction. He grows bored if no row is brewing or in progress, and fills any vacuum by plotting ever more outlandish diversions.

‘I remember very clearly at one of our parties somebody suggesting a Pee-In at Buckingham Palace,’ Kathleen recalls. ‘On another occasion, to emulate the students who had occupied the Beaux Arts, we planned to take over Covent Garden opera house. An argument started among the prospective occupiers over what we would present on stage. Was it to be propaganda or art? Readings from Shelley or from Freud? And on that note of aesthetic discord the plan was dropped. Instead we wondered whether it would not be better to burn down the Old Vic.’

Mary McCarthy, Germaine Greer, Mike Nichols and Vanessa Redgrave are regular attenders. One evening John Lennon is sitting on their stone
stairs in a white suit, talking about his idea for a sketch in Tynan’s forthcoming production,
Oh! Calcutta!
: ‘You know the idea, four fellas wanking – giving each other images – descriptions – it should be ad-libbed anyway. They should even really wank, which would be great!’ Meanwhile, Sharon Tate, newly married to Roman Polanski, is sitting cross-legged, doling out hash brownies she has just baked.

Tynan is forever on the lookout for new forms of sexual adventure. In July 1961, after Jonathan Miller tells him of a group of motorcyclists who wear masks, drive at breakneck speeds, have orgasms and then throw themselves off their bikes to their deaths, he takes his guests in a taxi (‘costing fortunes’) to the spot where the ritual is supposed to take place, but they find nothing happening. ‘It was deadly respectable and the only crazy people around were us,’ remembers Christopher Isherwood.

On this particular evening, Ken has decided to show avant-garde films as an after-dinner entertainment. There are just eight for dinner: the playwright Harold Pinter and his actress wife Vivien Merchant, the comedian Peter Cook and his wife Wendy, and Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret. Within the next few years, all their marriages will end in divorce.

The dinner starts badly – or perhaps well, given Tynan’s preference for fireworks – when Ken attempts to present Vivien Merchant to Princess Margaret, and Merchant cocks a snook by simply carrying on talking to Peter Cook. ‘I put out my hand which was refused,’ recalls Princess Margaret, ‘so I sort of drew it up as if it were meant for another direction.’

At dinner, Merchant is placed next to Lord Snowdon, who recently photographed her playing Lady Macbeth at Stratford. ‘Of course, the only reason we
artistes
let you take our pictures is because you are married to
her
,’ she informs him, stabbing a finger in the general direction of the Princess.

At this point, ‘everyone began to drink steadily’, observes Kathleen Tynan.

After dinner, they settle down to watch the pornographic films. Tynan prides himself on being at the forefront of the permissive society. Nevertheless, he has taken the precaution of warning Lord Snowdon that there will be ‘some pretty blue material’. But Snowdon is relaxed, even excited. ‘It would be good for M,’ he replies.

The films start. ‘The English bits were amateurish and charming, with odd flashes of nipple and pubic bush,’ writes Tynan in his diary, ‘and the American stuff with fish-eye lens and zoom was so technically self-conscious that the occasional bits of explicit sex passed almost unnoticed – eg a fast zoom along an erect prick looked like a flash zoom up a factory chimney.’ The atmosphere, hopelessly awkward over dinner, is settling down into something more relaxed and playful.

But then a film by Jean Genet,
Chant d’amour
, begins. It is set in a prison, and features male prisoners getting up to all sorts of adventures. ‘It contained many quite unmistakeable shots of cocks – cocks limp and stiff, cocks being waved, brandished, massaged or just waggled – intercut with lyrical fantasy sequences as the convicts imagine themselves frolicking in vernal undergrowth,’ reveals Tynan.

Silence descends on the party. It is as though the sixties had just reverted to the fifties. Society suddenly seems a lot less permissive. But Peter Cook saves the day by starting to speak over the images. Tynan is thankful: ‘He supplied a commentary, treating the movie as if it were a long commercial for Cadbury’s Milk Flake chocolate and brilliantly seizing on the similarity between Genet’s woodland fantasies and the sylvan capering that inevitably accompanies, on TV, the sale of anything from cigarettes to Rolls-Royces. Within five minutes we were all helplessly rocking with laughter, Princess M. included. It was a performance of genius ... I hugged Peter for one of the funniest improvisations I have ever heard in my life.’

Sex has been skilfully filtered for comedy, relieving everyone of embarrassment. The Tynans’ guests all leave content, except, perhaps, for Harold Pinter. He is so drunk that ‘having solemnly taken his leave’, he falls all the way down the stairs.

IS CUT INTO LITTLE PIECES BY

United Nations Plaza, New York

1970

Kenneth Tynan and Truman Capote have much – perhaps a little too much – in common. They share an epigrammatic style of writing and a love of high society, and are both a combustible mix of affectations and afflictions, Capote with his high-pitched baby voice, rolling eyes, tiny stature (just over five foot two inches) and effeminate hand gestures, and Tynan with his stammer and facial contortions (lips puckering, eyes squinting shut). Tynan has also developed a louche way of holding his cigarette between his two middle fingers.

Both men have been dandies since their youth. At Oxford, Kenneth Tynan – middle name Peacock – wears a purple doeskin suit and gold satin shirt. At the same age, Truman Capote – middle name Streckfus – dresses, according to one friend, ‘as though he were going to a costume ball’. Both have offbeat sexual preferences – Tynan is a sado-masochist with a love of pornography, Capote a homosexual attracted almost exclusively to heterosexuals. Both are iconoclasts, favouring artistic overstatement.
⁵⁹
Furthermore, the two are born – and due to die – within four years of one another.
⁶⁰

For a time, they are distant friends, each amused by the other’s bravura. But then in 1965, Capote writes
In Cold Blood
, a so-called ‘non-fiction novel’ about the murder of a Kansas farming family six years ago. Before publishing his book, Capote has been forced to wait for the execution of the two murderers, as the tale needs a suitably dramatic ending. Published
in 1966, it becomes an instant bestseller, extravagantly praised on both sides of the Atlantic.

But not by Kenneth Tynan: early signs of his disapproval emerge when he encounters Capote a year earlier, in the spring of ’65. According to Tynan, Capote has just heard that the execution day has been set and is hopping up and down with glee, clapping his hands, saying, ‘I’m beside myself! Beside myself! Beside myself with joy!’ Tynan is shocked. They have an argument, and Tynan ends up calling Capote’s behaviour ‘outrageous’.
⁶¹

The following autumn, Capote is staying at Claridge’s in London, and asks to drop in on the Tynans, just around the corner in Mount Street. The Tynans suspect that Capote, knowing Ken is planning to review his book, is intent on buttering him up. He is notably deferential and effusive. The next day, Capote sends Tynan ‘a small, rather miserable little plant’.

The review is printed in the
Observer
. It is a stinker. Tynan suggests that, by refusing to testify in support of the murderers’ pleas of insanity, Capote let them die, just to give his book a dramatic ending. It is a view corroborated, he says, by a ‘prominent Manhattan lawyer’. He adds, ‘Where lives are threatened, observers and recorders who shrink from participation may be said to betray their species. No piece of prose, however deathless, is worth a human life ... In cold cash, it has been estimated that
In Cold Blood
is likely to earn him between two and three million dollars. It seems to me that the blood in which his book is written is as cold as any in recent literature.’

Capote goes berserk, complaining to the
Observer
that Tynan has ‘the morals of a baboon and the guts of a butterfly’. He challenges Tynan, offering him $500 if he can produce a ‘prominent Manhattan lawyer’ willing to sign an affidavit saying that a successful appeal might have been made on the grounds of insanity. Tynan wins the bet, producing a lawyer who not only does so, but adds that it is unlikely the book could have been published at all had the murderers not been executed. A triumphant Tynan pins Capote’s $500 cheque to his study wall.

This makes Capote hate Tynan all the more. The two men avoid one another for several years. Then, one day they find themselves walking towards each other along a lengthy corridor at the UN Plaza.

‘Coming in the opposite direction toward us was his tiny figure,’ recalls Kathleen. ‘It was a wonderful theatrical moment because of the length and the height and width of those corridors and wondering what the heck Capote was going to do. Was he going to hit him? Was he going to spit on him?’

The two men approach each other from this great distance, like a pair of dandy gunfighters. As they draw level, Tynan simply nods at Capote. In return, Capote drops a curtsey, pipes, ‘Mr Tynan, I presume,’ in his high-pitched voice, and walks on.

But Capote’s anger does not subside, nor do his dreams of retribution. One day, he shares with his friend George Plimpton the very particular revenge he has cooked up.

It kicks off with a kidnapping. Tynan is to be blindfolded, gagged and bundled into a Rolls-Royce, then deposited in a hospital room.

‘Truman was very careful with the details,’ says Plimpton. ‘He described how pleasant the nurses were, what a nice view there was out the window, and that the meals were excellent. Then his voice took on an edge as he described how Tynan would be wheeled off somewhere in the clinic into surgery to have a limb or an organ removed.

‘Truman announced this last chilling detail quite cheerily, followed by a burst of laughter. In that oddly deep voice he used for dramatic effect, he then went on to describe the extensive postoperative procedure, the careful diets, a complex exercise programme to get Tynan back into good shape ... at which point he would be carried off to the operating room yet again to have something
else
removed, until finally, after months of surgery and recuperation, everything had been removed except one eye and the genitalia. Truman cried out, “Everything else goes!”

‘Then he leaned back in his chair and delivered the dénouement. He said, “What they do then is to wheel into his hospital room a motion-picture projector, a screen, along with an attendant in a white smock who sets everything up, and what they do is show
pornographic
films, very high-grade, enticing ones, absolutely
non-stop
!”’

SINGS ALONG WITH

Le Restaurant, Bel Air, Los Angeles

1979

Truman Capote loves to mix with famous people. Among the five hundred guests at his black-and-white ball at the Plaza Hotel in 1966 were Frank Sinatra, Mia Farrow, J.K. Galbraith, Tallulah Bankhead, Henry Ford, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Norman Mailer, Candice Bergen, Gianni Agnelli, Andy Warhol and Lauren Bacall.
⁶²

A devoted jazz fan, he has long admired Peggy Lee, but has never met her. Luckily, Peggy Lee also likes to name-drop. In Los Angeles, their mutual friend Dotson Rader resolves to introduce them. He telephones Peggy Lee. ‘I’m here with Truman and we’d love to take you to dinner. Are you free tomorrow?’