KENNETH TYNAN was the greatest theatre critic of the 20th century. Flamboyant, witty and waspish, in the 1950s, he championed what became known as kitchen-sink drama, was literary manager of the National Theatre under Laurence Olivier, created the sexually explicit review Oh! Calcutta! and was the first person to utter the “f-word” on British TV.
Now Corin Redgrave will portray Tynan in a one-man Royal Shakespeare Company show, based on his diaries. It will preview at the Arts Theatre in the West End tomorrow and runs until March 26.
The 2001 publication of the diaries — which span 1971 to 1980, just before his death — revealed the most controversial aspect of his kaleidoscopic persona: his addiction to sadomasochism.
During marriage to his first wife, the American author Elaine Dundy, his persistent attempts to embroil her in his sexual predilections led to their divorce. It was only after he married his second wife, Kathleen Horton, then took a mistress — a former convent schoolgirl — that he was able to indulge fully his appetite for sadomasochistic sex.
The lurid details of Tynan’s affair with his mistress, to whom he gives the pseudonym Nicole, are in the diaries, as is the story of his relationships with Olivier, Vivien Leigh, and his personal struggle since he was a child, born the bastard son of Sir Peter Peacock, the mayor of Warrington.
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On his deathbed, when he was 53 and dying of emphysema, Tynan bequeathed the diaries to his eldest daughter by Dundy, Tracy, asking her to have them published in their entirety.
Tracy, 52, a designer who has designed the costumes for the Tynan play, has lived in Los Angeles since the mid-1970s, is married to Jim McBride, a film director, and is relatively comfortable in her role as keeper of the Tynan flame.
She says: “My father wanted to shock people; he wanted to ruffle feathers, and he took pleasure in doing so. He was a narcissistic man, more of a pal than a father.”
Her 21st birthday party — held at the Young Vic and attended by A. J. Ayer, Frankie Howerd, Lauren Bacall, Lord and Lady Harlech, Eric Morecambe, Liza Minnelli and Peter Sellers — epitomised both Tynan’s obsession with celebrity and his idiosyncratic style of fathering.
“The party was more my father’s birthday party than mine,” she recalls. “Max Wall entertained, Dudley Moore played the piano, and I didn’t know half the people. My father and I sat in the circle and snorted cocaine together.”
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Kenneth Tynan grew up the adored son of a mother who ended her life in a mental institution, and at times he tried to play the conventional father to Tracy.
“When I was six, I ‘mooned’ a group of girls, which I found hysterically funny. My father sat me down in the living room and said, ‘Sex is a wonderful thing, but you mustn’t lift your knickers up in the street.’ I didn’t know what sex was and I was puzzled.”
Soon, though, she became exposed to her father’s lurid sexual likings, which he would later characterise as a philosophy and a lifestyle.
“When I was 13, my mother came to me in the middle of the night and said, ‘Your father is beating me.’ She was drunk, and I didn’t know what to believe. I couldn’t ask my father — and what my mother had told me became a burden,” she says.
The trauma was such that she is still seeing a psychiatrist, who has helped her to understand her father and come to terms with his legacy.
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“Everyone whom my mother and father knew was famous,” Tracy Tynan says. “He and my mother were the Scott and Zelda of their time and lived a separate life from me. They went out every night and I hardly ever saw them. I don’t think I ever had a family meal at home with them.”
Her father sent her to one school, simply because Anna Massey had attended it and, when she was 11, to Dartington Hall, because it was trendy. Far from missing her family, she was elated at escaping them.
“I was a boarder and loved it, because I had escaped from all the craziness at home. When I was 14, my father found out I had a boyfriend, and said, ‘You are turning into a Lolita’ but my teachers at school told him not to be so hard on me because, after all, he was living a bohemian life.”
By then, her parents had divorced and Tynan had wed Kathleen, with whom he would have two children, Roxana and Matthew.
“After my parents divorced, I thought I would have my father to myself. But I didn’t. He married Kathleen, who was only 12 years older than me. She adored him, but their wedding picture is dominated by Marlene Dietrich, as if she, not Kathleen, is getting married to my father.”
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Tracy spent alternate holidays with her mother and her father, and was with her father just before he made his notorious BBC broadcast. “I remember him telling Kathleen, ‘I am going to say fuck on TV tonight.’ He was planning it, just like he planned the diaries to be published.”
At 17, she and her father smoked pot together, but by then she was off on her own adventures, and he took only a small part in her life. Her relationship with her mother was stormy.
“She wanted me to side with her, to choose her over my father, and I couldn’t do that. I felt more of a connection with him. He gave me my love for literature, art and food, and had a great sense of humour and joie de vivre.”
Tracy Tynan read social anthropology at Sussex, became a potter, made a documentary and then went into costume design, working with the director Blake Edwards, among others.
When she was in her early twenties and living in Hollywood, her father confided in her regarding his extramarital sadomasochistic affair with “Nicole”.
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Tracy says: “He told me that Kathleen knew about her, and was very upset, but that he wasn’t going to give Nicole up, because he needed her. He told me about the nature of their relationship and I was shocked.
“Since then, I’ve come to understand why sadomasochism appealed to my father. S&M is drama, and my father was addicted to drama.”
Though the diaries radiate Tynan’s obsession with Nicole, with whom he had a ten-year relationship, Tracy believes that he would never have married her.
“If he had, the drama would have passed, and he would have needed another drama,” she says. “He thought it was abnormal for a man to be with just one woman. If he had lived longer, he might not have remained ‘faithful’ to Nicole.
“I have never met Nicole. My father never introduced us, because he compartmentalised his life. He had a whole separate life with her, and another with Kathleen and the children. In exactly the same way in which his father, Peter Peacock, had one life with his family, and another with my father and his mother, Rose. My father repeated his own father’s pattern, and that fascinates me.”
Tracy has not repeated her father’s patterns. For 20 years she has been married to Jim McBride, with whom she has two children, Ruby, 15, and Matthew, 17. She says: “I think it was hard for me to find a man to live up to my father — who was as bright, as smart, as critical.”
The last time she saw him was when she went to lunch with him just before he died in 1981.
“Kathleen came in late, and my father said, ‘Here I am, like a character in a Tennessee Williams play. Here comes my wife, and I don’t know where she’s been.’ He was very theatrical and light-hearted, but we knew it was the end.
“Later I told him that I loved him. I did love him, but I was angry at him because he hadn’t been a good father. But when I got the phone call that he had died, I drove to the hospital and insisted on seeing him. They refused, but I said I had to. They showed me to the room. His face wasn’t covered and one of his hands was dangling by his side. I could see that his spirit had left his body, and I was able to face the truth that he was dead.”
Tynan was buried in a churchyard in Oxfordshire.
His daughter remembers having an argument with Kathleen about the wording on the tombstone. “I wanted it to read, ‘Kenneth Peacock Tynan’,” says Tracy, “but Kathleen didn’t. To me, the most significant thing in my father’s life is that he was a bastard. And he spent most of his life making up for that.”