Jonathan Jones on an unlikely affair between Kenneth Tynan and Louise Brooks – and the widow who told their story in a screenplay
Martin Scorsese is best known for his films about the violently deranged and delusional, about boxing, vigilantism and the mafia. Now he is set to tackle a story about a British theatre critic.
The New York director has bought the rights to a screenplay about Kenneth Tynan, the legendary journalist, who exerted a huge influence on British theatrical culture. The script was written by his widow, the screenwriter Kathleen Tynan, who died in 1995. Under a thin fictional veil, it describes the dying critic’s last love affair with one of the icons of cinema, while still married to Kathleen. Their son Matthew will co-produce the film as a memorial to both his parents.
Tynan was in his early fifties and dying of emphysema, an exile in Los Angeles, when – as he recounts in his 1979 New Yorker article The Girl in the Black Helmet – he saw one of his favourite films on television. GW Pabst’s silent classic Pandora’s Box stars the raven- haired Louise Brooks, who Tynan described as “the only star actress I can imagine either being enslaved by or wanting to enslave”.
Aroused by the film, he set out to find her. He recounts in the article how he met his idol, a recluse in her seventies, in a tiny apartment in Rochester, New York. They drank, smoked and talked, and she declared she was in love with him. In the New Yorker article, Tynan leaves this declaration hanging in midair. The screenplay goes further. It depicts, says Matthew Tynan, a full-blown love affair. “I’ve listened to the original interview tapes,” he says, and his father’s account “excluded just about everything that happened between them. The film will tell the full story in all its perverse romance.”
Kenneth Tynan, who died in 1980, is one of the most significant figures in post- war British culture, but his legacy is hopelessly entangled. He inspired a theatrical generation with the idea of politically engaged drama. He is also remembered as the man who said “fuck” for the first time on British television and for devising the erotic revue Oh! Calcutta!.
Tynan was a walking contradiction, famous for advocating a theatre of social realism and even more famous for his star-studded parties. One moment he was praising Shelagh Delaney, the next, exchanging aphorisms with Nol Coward at the Caf Royal. He made himself the voice of an emerging Sixties generation, even though his sensibility was shaped in the late Forties. He wanted theatre to be as exciting as cinema, as universal as pop music; he wanted Britain to be both itself and a new America. His best criticism encompassed these tensions in a vision of theatre as part of modern culture.
This was a delicate balancing act, and in the end it collapsed under the weight of his enthusiasms. Tynan was driven to increasingly bizarre extremes in his pursuit of a theatre of desire. This is what makes his encounter with Louise Brooks more than an odd episode at the end of a brilliant life. Tynan’s meeting with the woman he called his “dark lady” was the culmination of a systematic pursuit of erotic fantasy. Several years before he met Brooks, the critic impersonated her in a black wig and stockings at a party.
Tynan found it impossible to sublimate his sexuality into theatre criticism. He became fascinated by explicitly sexual theatre; not just the would-be high-brow erotica of Oh! Calcutta!, with its sketches by Samuel Beckett and John Lennon, but the sado-masochist role play he explored with his mistress Nicole in a semi-public way while Kathleen Tynan and their friends shuddered with embarrassment. “It was compulsive and obsessive, and he was a brave man in that he wanted to confront it,” Trevor Griffiths, the playwright and Tynan associate, told me.
It is often said that Tynan’s tragedy lay in his desire to make theatre rather than write about it, which drove him to give up being a full-time critic to become the literary manager at the National Theatre under Laurence Olivier. “He wanted to be on the inside pissing out,” says his friend Tony Garnett, the radical film producer who once collaborated with Ken Loach.
Tynan was the critic as moralist and politician. In a time of huge creativity in British theatre, he argued against “cool, apolitical stylists” like Harold Pinter. He defined the critic as an ethical as well as aesthetic judge, praising Bertolt Brecht for his compassion and condemning Samuel Beckett for “facile pessimism”. Yet he was fascinated by things that made no sense in his philosophy. His relationship with Louise Brooks was his final betrayal of kitchen sink for sexual fantasy.
The illegitimate son of a Birmingham businessman, Tynan was drawn to theatre as a teenager, in a hedonist attempt to escape the austerity of 1940s Britain. Tony Garnett, who grew up in Birmingham a decade later, remembers how exciting nearby Stratford-upon-Avon seemed in the Fifties. Garnett used to do his uncle’s milk round to save up for first nights at Stratford, then read Tynan in the The Observer the next day. “I remember seeing the Olivier-Leigh Titus Andronicus, then reading Ken’s review. He said this terrible thing about Vivien Leigh. He said: `She receives the news that she is about to be ravished on her husband’s corpse with little more than the mild annoyance of one who would have preferred foam rubber.'”
At school, Tynan dressed in colourful scarves, women’s coats and plus-fours. In a school debate, aged 14, he defeated the motion that “This House Thinks the Present Generation has Lost the Ability to Entertain Itself” by extolling the value of masturbation. His lifelong obsession with Hollywood also began as an adolescent. “He was practically in a state of sexual excitement talking about Orson Welles,” recalls his protg and friend Jonathan Miller.
By the time he graduated from Oxford, he had invented himself as a Wildean public figure, chastising the bourgeoisie in language so witty they enjoyed the lash. But he turned out to be an aesthete who argued for authenticity and truth – an anti-Wilde. In place of country-house flummery, he insisted: “We need plays about cabmen and demigods, plays about warriors, politicians and grocers.”
When he was appointed theatre critic of The Observer in 1954, Tynan became the spokesperson for a new generation of socially engaged dramatists. “His political and social views were completely fatuous,” says Jonathan Miller, “His Marxism was just radical chic.” But Tony Garnett insists that Tynan was sincere in his socialism. “It was more of an emotional, romantic leftwing politics … He championed the working-class voice that was coming through at that time.”
Yet Tynan’s own literary style was very different from the writing he praised. It was an amoral journalistic cocktail of camp wit and toughness, catching the reader unawares by veering from sophistication to brutality. Tynan wrote about theatre in an intensely sexual way. His cruelty to Vivien Leigh was a corollary of his fascination with Olivier, whom he admired because he touched the audience “below the belt”. He said, with some regret, that he had never slept with a man, but as a writer he was bisexual, and his hedonism was irreconcilable with his public stance as responsible critic.
Tynan became obsessed with sex as theatre and theatre as sex. Oh! Calcutta! was followed by ever more obscure experiments. He wrote a screenplay about sado-masochism and spent years researching a never-published article on psychologist Wilhelm Reich, who argued that suppressed erotic energy festers and causes perversion. Far better to release it through masturbation and store it for future use in a battery called an Orgone Box. “Oh! Calcutta! was theatre as Orgone Box in a way,” suggests Jonathan Miller.
By the mid-Seventies, Tynan was a marginal figure, denounced in the Times as an example of Sixties decadence. He felt so isolated that he fled to Los Angeles with his family.
When he married Kathleen Halton in 1967, she gave up journalism to support him socially and politically, making their home a centre of left wing London life. In her dedication to Tynan, says their son Matthew, “a lot of her own writing had fallen by the wayside”. But in Hollywood Kathleen Tynan started to develop a screen-writing career just at the time when Tynan’s ambitions were falling apart. Tynan reacted with paranoia.
Kathleen Tynan kept an extraordinary, imaginative faith with him. “It is an odd thing to turn sleuth on one’s husband”, she admitted in her 1987 biography The Life Of Kenneth Tynan, but it’s love that lies behind her investigations, as she tries to understand every corner of his life, even the things she didn’t know about him when he was alive. This is the spirit in which she wrote her screenplay about Tynan and Louise Brooks.
Tynan’s encounter with the star is a potent image of his downfall. His own New Yorker article about the episode is uncomfortably self-revealing. He recounts how Brooks became, for him, the seductress Lulu in Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, who is killed by the one man she loves, Jack the Ripper. Tynan thrills in telling us how Brooks asked him: “Are you a variation of Jack the Ripper?” The public figure who spoke for British theatre has become an expatriate eccentric speaking only for himself.
Months after his article appeared, Tynan wrote to Brooks – who remained besotted with him – asking for her co-operation with a biopic about her that he proposed setting up. She wrote back furiously rejecting the idea and accusing him of betrayal. In the end, Tynan was utterly confused about what he wanted. He was torn between integrity and glamour, theatre and film, Britain and America. He was even disloyal to his own fantasy life.
British theatre has still not answered the questions that Tynan posed. His fixation on rationally explicable and political content still dominates theatre criticism.
The joke is that the man who thought we should all be watching revivals of Mother Courage liked to flirt with film stars. Theatre meanwhile still has no language in which to justify itself as pleasure, without claiming superior moral and political worth to the siren delights of film.
And the audience? They’re at the multiplex.