The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan

"Roman shoots the nude sleepwalking scene. Francesca does it very sportingly and with no fuss about her nudity - though of course the set is closed, great curtains are drawn around the acting area whenever a take is imminent, and the wardrobe mistress, rushes to cover Francesca with a dressing gown the instant Roman says, 'Cut.' After Hamburg those furtive precautions seem ludicrous.

At lunch I opine that Francesca has Jesses tristes. Roman agrees, adding that he much prefers bottoms to breasts. We discuss which stars have the sexiest bottoms. I say Natalie Wood; he says Jane Fonda. I reply that hers is boyish. 'Why not?' says Roman. 'As a matter of fact I have the sexiest bottom in the film industry.' (And he gets up to model it.) I then put in a word for Marilyn Monroe. Roman says, 'Oh, if we're going to talk about dead people, Sharon's bottom wasn't bad.' It does not seem to occur to him that his tribute could have been less callously phrased.

Roman {with bemused pleasure): I fucked a Chinese lawyer!

Note R.'s use of phials of amyl nitrate to produce emotion in actors.

'He was fucking one of those girls you find everywhere - somewhere between a starlet and a secretary.'

R. never apologises, no matter how he offends.

"The guests included Gore Vidal, Richard Harris and Marlon Brando, the latter pair drunk on arrival; Marlon joined me in the bathroom, locked the door, and dared me to kiss him on the lips as a proof of friendship. (I did.) ..."

Recognising much of myself in this, I recall the moment when my own unseriousness lost me the trust (I've enjoyed and much cherished) of Marlon Brando. Playboy had asked me to approach him with a view to interviewing him for the magazine. I called him in Rome, and made the request. "I'd rather be boiled in urine,' he said softly. I pointed out that the questions would be mine, not Playboy's, and that I was merely a contributor to the magazine, not a part of its publicity machine. 'I've never even been in a Playboy Club,' I said rashly. There was a pause. 'Ken,' Marlon said. 'Why did you say that? Because I've got here in front of me a picture of you and your wife drinking in a Playboy Club.' And he was right: I had attended the opening-night party of the London Playboy Club. He had caught me in a lie, and I squirmed like Steiger in the taxi-cab in On the Waterfront when Brando turns towards him and says, in a voice full of commiseration, bewilderment and moral rebuke: 'It was you, Charlie - it was you.

I used to be a close chum of Marlon's (we once read Act III of Othello together, me playing the Moor and imitating the intonations and emphasis Larry was amazing us with in rehearsals, with Marlon, reading Iago, interrupting to say: 'Jesus Christ, he can't play it like that, it's impossible). And I think of the occasion when, at Marlon's express request, I took him to dinner at Parkes with Princess Margaret, and for the only time in my experience saw him over-awed, literally unable to address her except through me: 'Would you ask Princess Margaret what she thinks of. . .' etc. HRH said next day on the phone that this wasn't an uncommon reaction. 'People just clam up. I'm told it's like going on television for the first time.' Since the Playboy gaffe, we have drifted apart, to my great regret

Flashback to the sixties - I went to Rome to interview Richard Burton for BBC TV. He drank wine steadily all day as we filmed (around five bottles) and then invited me and the producer to dinner at the huge villa he and Elizabeth had rented outside Rome. (She was filming Reflections in a Golden Eye. This took place the day after Brando presented them with the two memorial antique silver goblets, the first engraved 'Richard: Christ, I've pissed in my pants' and the second: 'Elizabeth: That's not piss, that's come.')

Large group of guests in entrance hall of villa. Richard, the producer and I are chatting when R. suddenly directs his wolfish grin at me and says: 'How do you think Elizabeth is looking, Ken?' 'Fine,' I say, inwardly meaning 'Fat'. Pause: still eyeing me, he says: 'How would you like to go to bed with her?' A no-win situation, as they say: to answer 'Very much' is to lech after the host's wife, to answer 'Not at all' is to stigmatise her as unattractive.

I wiggle out by self-deprecation: 'To be quite candid, Richard, I doubt whether I'd be capable of making it with Elizabeth.' 'You mean you couldn't get it up?' I still refuse the provocation. 'Something like that.' 'Elizabeth!' Richard bellows at her across the room. She breaks away from a group by the fireplace, and teeters a little unsteadily across the hall to join us. 'Yes, Richard?' 'Do you know what our friend Ken just said about you?' 'No, dear.' 'He said he didn't think he'd be able to get it up for you in bed.' Elizabeth turned blazing eyes on me. she said noisily, "This 'is the most insulting thing that has ever been said to me. Leave my house'

So here I am being ordered out of a house for not having made a pass at the hostess. I retire to avoid a drunken row in which goblets are likely to be thrown. Next day the phone in my hotel bedroom rings. It is Elizabeth, her voice honeyed with hungover apology - 'So terribly sorry. Don't know what got into me' (a crate of vodka?). 'Please forgive us both.' Flowers are delivered to my room. But the scene sticks in memory, not inspiring affection.

L.O. (Laurence Olivier) furious that I have told The Times that I went to see Max Rayne to arrange a meeting with the Board. Reading Reich, I find an explanation of his deep anxiety and fear in such situations. He would like to dominate the chairman (father) but is terrified of offending him and causing him to react with anger. In other words, the Oedipal impulse is frustrated by castration anxiety. (N.B. How Larry adopts a passive-feminine persona when in the presence of authority - such as the chairman, i.e. he anticipates the castration by taking on the manner of a woman - mother.) I recall what Gadge Kazan once said to me: 'Above everything else, Larry is a coquette!'

'Larry (of an actor suggested for a comedy part): 'He's about as funny as a baby's open grave.'

'With Larry and Joan to a preview of John Osborne's new play, West of Suez.j.O. has lately taken to abusing L.O. and me in print whenever he has the chance, berating the National Theatre for rejecting his last two plays and revealing that he and Tony Richardson' once discussed hiring a thug to beat us up. He has become a friendless and mean-spirited man who feeds on hostility and only feels fully alive when he is hating or hated.'

" Over supper at Mimmo's we lament J.O.'s general decline and specific nastiness. Joan says that Jill is fond of explaining in public that John can't make her come and has trouble getting an erection. When she is working on a TV play or a film, John takes to his bed and drinks champagne all day long. Larry derides J.O.'s repeated assertions to the press of unswerving loyalty to the Royal Court..."

By the end of supper Larry is fairly tight and reveals grave doubts about the influence he has had on English actors: 'I once saw the National Youth Theatre give a performance of Shakespeare when all the actors - every bloody one of them - were imitating my Henry V scream. I was absolutely horrified and I looked at them and said to myself: 'Jesus Christ, is this what I have spawned?"

"General enthusiasm at NT for Trevor Griffiths' new play The Party. Peter Hall likes it; John Dexter wants to direct it; and Larry not only likes it but wants to play the part of the old Trotskyite, Tagg. John has given him various basic revolutionary texts to read as background. Larry confesses to me that Trevor's play has for the first time explained to him what Marxism is about. But I have doubts about him in the play. It needs — all its characters need — a core of burning revolutionary zeal: a passionate and caring political intensity. And Larry, for all his rage and virtuosity, is a cold actor: he can with an effort simulate passion (e.g. Othello), but it is not communicated, and often leaves an audience wondering rather shamefacedly why they haven't been more moved.

He's at his best with the contortions and turbulence of the cold heart, the extinct volcano - e.g. Richard III, Dance of Death, Long Day's Journey. If Tagg is played thus, he will come across as a hard and demonic monster - not as a man of feeling - and this would be disastrous'

Gore gives birthday party for Howard, Paul Newman and Kathleen. Present: George Cukor, William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Peter Bogdanovich, Ryan O'Neal, Bianca Jagger, Swifty Lazar, Sue Mengers, Tony Richardson, Johnny Carson, Christopher Isherwood, George Segal, various heads of studios

Bianca Jagger and I idly discuss possibility of sexual threesome with K.H. to whom Mrs. J. confesses herself much attracted. I get slightly drunk but thank God there is no grass to produce the deadly effect of a few nights ago when, departing from a party at Tony Richardson's, I drove the Buick into a bunker on a miniature golf course, and then reversed it straight into a parked sports car

'Another Larry reminiscence; of the weekend Elaine and I spent with him and Vivien at Nottley Abbey in 1955. I had written some pretty devastating things about Vivien, which Larry had deeply resented (indeed, at one point he unfairly told me they had given her a nervous breakdown): Vivien herself, oddly, seemed almost excited by them, and it was always she who took the initiative when we met.

Anyway, we arrived at Nottley before lunch on a Saturday. Larry was away in Spain, where his brother had just died of cancer, and would not be back until dinner. Vivien was vivacious, metallic and in a high manic state, talking endlessly with eyes unnaturally bright. There was a lot to drink at lunch after which Elaine and I retired for a siesta. Our room had separate beds.

No sooner had I stripped to my Y-fronts and fallen asleep than I felt the sheet slowly turned back and a hand placed on my genitals. It was Vivien, naked under a peignoir. I began to respond and then suddenly thought how impossible it would be to cuckold a man I venerated under his own roof — a really cock-crinkling thought. I muttered it to Vivien, who pouted a bit, but eventually rose to her feet - and tiptoed across to Elaine's bed. I hastily dressed: as I left the room, Vivien and Elaine were sleepily embracing.'

Larry returned during dinner: the other guests were Vivien's mother and father, a petty bourgeois former colonial administrator, I believe. Vivien's manner with L. is haughty and densive: how can he bear it? But he does, bearlike staying the course.

After dinner V.'s mother knits, father pulls on his pipe and reads The Times. V. is drinking hard. 'Come with me,' she says to me, and to my consternation starts to lead me upstairs. 'What for?' I say. 'I'm going to put on Sybil's chain-mail from St Joan and you're going to help me,' she says. I look at Larry. 'Do as she says, Kennie,' he says wearily. So up we go to a dressing-room where hangs Sybil Thorndike's battle dress.

V. points mischievously at a writing desk. 'There's a secret drawer where Larry keeps letters from all his ladies. He doesn't think I know about it. Shall we peek?' I decline the offer.

Vivien now strips down to petticoat, bra and knickers and I lower the heavy costume over her head. Thus encased, we return to the living-room, where V. proceeds to render some of the longer speeches from St Joan, including 'Light your fires.' On an impulse she then sheds the chain-mail. Mum is appalled: 'Now, miss,' she says, addressing the forty-eight-year-old like an errant schoolgirl. 'That's quite enough of that. You mind your manners!' 'What are you going to do, Mummy?' says V. provocatively. 'Spank me with a hairbrush?' Mum seems on the point of doing just that (what a scene that would have been!) when V.'s attention wanders back to me. 'Let's see how Ken looks in armour!' she cries.

Larry, drinking brandy in great gulps, looks up to meet my eye, nods heavily, and goes on drinking. I retire behind a screen, remove trousers and shirt and slip on the bloody corselet. Conversation continues as before, nobody referring to the fact that I am dressed as the Maid of Orleans. A saddening but surrealist night.

'Loss of interest in sex lately due to guilt induced by K. We try to make love this morning and make no headway at all. Even deeper sense of guilt afterwards. The self-disgust I feel at being unable to fuck K. makes me feel more self-disgusted than ever. Can this be what is known as a vicious circle? (Compare and contrast: vicious circle and double bind.)

Gide on returning from Turkey: What a relaxation it is to have enlarged on the map the space one no longer wants to go and see! For too long I believed (out of love of exoticism, out of fear of chauvinistic self-satisfaction, and perhaps out of modesty), I thought that there was more than one civilisation, more than one culture that could rightfully claim our love and deserve our enthusiasm . . . Now I know that our Occidental (I was about to say French) civilisation is not only the most beautiful; I believe, I know that it is the only one . . .

I think so too, and wish the matter were more openly debated. For instance: can we imagine a Chinese writing that about his civilisation? (I know the Chinese think they are superior, as a people, but as a civilisation . . .?) Is Europocentrism merely conditioning? Or has it some objective validity? After all, one civilisation has to be better than the others, and how many competitors are there? (Egypt suggests itself: certainly it lasted as long and longer).

K. discovers that today is the tenth anniversary of the first time we fucked. It was at the Edinburgh Festival, 1963; and we stayed at the George Hotel. Great sense of thanksgiving.

I was naked in public today for the first time in my life. After our eating tour of France we are spending a few days in St Tropez. Most of the beaches here have been topless for several years; now there is a whole stretch of rocky coast near L'Escalet beach where nudity is permitted. How long will it be before the rest of the Mediterranean coast catches up with sanity? (I recall how, only three years ago, Kathleen declined to join me in looking for an alleged nude beach in Sardinia, supposedly because a woman she didn't like very much might be there.)

'At dinner Gore Vidal bets me $1,000 that Nixon will be out of office by 1 April, next year. Cravenly, I refuse the bet, though I'm sure he can't be right. Gore is fascinating on the subject of E. Howard Hunt, the novelist, CIA man and Watergate conspirator who just may have had a hand in the killing of J.F.K. and the assassination attempt on Wallace. He tells K. a story he got from Princess Margaret about the meeting, at the Duke of Windsor's funeral, between the widow and the Queen Mother, who has always detested her. It seems the Duchess, nowadays a bit gaga, struck up conversation by saying: 'Is your kitchen upstairs or downstairs?' The Q.M., who is completely ignorant of her own domestic geography, replied that she didn't know. For several minutes the Widow Windsor talked about the relative merits of upstairs and downstairs kitchens and then moved away. Later during the wake she reappeared at the Q.M.'s elbow, staring glassily. Then she spoke. 'Tell me,' she said. 'Is your kitchen upstairs or downstairs . . .?'

I talk (and write) to Larry, about the huge Theatre Exhibition to be mounted at the Hayward Gallery next spring to mark the opening of the new National Theatre. After discreet consultation with Peter Hall, it has been designed to edit Larry out of the listing of the NT. Fifty-seven display items are devoted to Barry Jackson's Birmingham Rep; only five to Larry's decade at the NT. No mention of his Othello, Dance of Death, Long Day's Journey or Uncle Vanya. Nothing about the Shaffer plays, the Stoppards, or any of the non-Larry successes in which he took such pride.

Meanwhile room after room is devoted to 'Peter Hall's Stratford' - a regime which lasted eight years, as against Larry's ten. When I inform him of this by phone, his voice is sombre! 'We really didn't understand P.H,' he says. 'I've never known a man more dedicated to self-glorification. He's rewriting the history of the National as if it started with the first reading of his production of The Tempest.'

Afterthought: a couple of nights ago David Frost conducted a thirty-minute TV interview with Muhammad All on his forthcoming heavyweight championship fight with George Foreman. Ali was great value, as usual, and plugged the fight with limitless verve. What wasn't mentioned was the fact that the fight has been financed and sponsored by Hemdale, a company owned by Frost. Thus he was paid a vast sum for a half-hour commercial on his own behalf A fearless, independent, probing reporter gives a fearless, independent probing report on an event he is himself promoting from which he stands to make millions of dollars.'

'Last week, Lord Lucan, a millionaire gambler, murdered his children's nanny mistaking her in a darkened house for his estranged wife, and then bashed his wife over the head several times with a length of lead piping. What has happened since then is a perfect illustration of the influence of class on British justice. Firstly: four days passed before the police issued a warrant for Lucan's arrest. (British justice hates to put a nobleman in the dock. And British citizens have a similar reluctance to believe a nobleman capable of violent crime. Kathleen admitted that when she first read about the case she assumed that Lucan must have been insane - a conclusion to which she would never have jumped had he been called Ginger Noakes and lived in Streatham.) Thus Lucan had ample time to leave the country if he chose.

Next, the press reported that many of his friends were 'dedicated men 1 who would not hesitate to shelter him. Would Ginger Noakes' pals have been described as 'dedicated men'? Or as 'underworld cronies'? Assumption: it is honourable to hide a wanted lord, but squalidly criminal to hide a wanted commoner.'

Next: the TV newscasts all used the phrase 'Lord Lucan is still missing' With Ginger Noakes, it would have been 'Noakes is still on the run . . .' Several papers expressed fears that Lucan might have killed himself'to avoid causing distress to his children'. Such a sympathetic diagnosis would never have been made about G. Noakes.

Most significant of all: newspapers and TV shows are full of interviews with Lucan's aristocratic chums, all testifying what an honourable man he is and how unthinkable it is that he should have committed murder. Such treatment would never, of course, have been granted to G. Noakes; it would have been quite nghtly regarded as a deliberate attempt to influence potential jurors and to interfere with the course of justice. Meanwhile Lady Lucan has returned home from hospital with a round-the-clock armed guard of police. Would the same protection have been extended to Mrs Noakes?

Last night James Mitchell, my half-Israeli lawyer, passionately maintained that, if threatened by the Arabs with defeat, the Israelis would use the atomic bomb to destroy all the major Arab cities. And what (I asked) if this triggered off a nuclear war that demolished Western Europe? So much the worse for Europe, said James: we aren't looking for anyone's approval, this is simply something we must do. If I am asked whether I am prepared to sacrifice Western Europe on the altar of Israeli nationalism, I must say no.

George Weidenfeld agrees with me that it will not come to this, that the Americans will probably use 'coercive military measures' against the Arabs, and that in any case the Arabs and Israelis will sooner or later work out a balance of terror that will operate as effectively as the Russo-American equivalent. But do I want European civilisation to be permanently dependent on a balance as volatile and precarious as this? (Later Kathleen tells me that very few people suspect that there is a connection between the increase in oil prices and Arab hostility to the State of Israel, and that if the West gave up its support of the latter, the Arabs would take a softer line on the former)

On the Parkinson TV show Muhammad Ali loses his cool when Parkinson quotes Budd Schulberg to the effect that Ali, though he professes to hate white men, has many white friends. Ali launches an intemperate near-paranoid attack on Parkinson, accusing him of laying traps, of behaving like the typical white devil. Later he says something revealing: that if he had had an education, he would never have been a rebel, because education induces conformity, especially in blacks...

'Nicole at least confesses that, contrary to earlier protestations, she has had several brief affairs in my absences during the past two years. This news, on top of what I already know (and suspect) about Kathleen's affairs, leads to a curious conclusion: though accused on all sides of infidelity, I am the only one of the principals in this situation who has remained sexually faithful throughout'

'Nobody - on TV - has to be funny any more. All laughter is canned, pre-recorded, fixed: the art of comedy is in the hands of backroom engineers, matching laughter tracks with jokes: and so infectious is laughter that home audiences laugh along with the mechanised euphoria. This is perhaps the most hateful thing about TV: that it removes from the audience its great prerogative of deciding which performers are good and which are not. So subtle is the manipulation that when the comic pauses, the engineer will dub in a tiny audience cough to indicate that the pay-offline has not yet arnved. Instead of making the spectator laugh, the comic tailors his gag to fit the most enthusiastic available burst of pre-recorded laughter. In other words, it is impossible for all but the most critical audience to decide for itself what is funny or what is not'

'A horrendous scene as I drive Nicole alone up to London. She has been offered a flat at the ridiculously cheap rent of £7.50 a week: but a tacit part of the deal (unspoken but extremely operative) is that in order to get it she must go to bed with the owner. This she has now done (he's a personable chap, it seems, around thirty) and it's clear that further favours will be expected of her. I said this saddened me, and asked why she didn't take an evening job so that she could afford to take a flat without prostituting herself. (She takes singing lessons during the day and at present lives on the dole, which is approx. X 12 a week.)

This provokes a ferocious outburst against people who float around in their Jaguars spending more money on a lunch than she has to live on for a month, and presume to tell poorer people that they ought. And then, when her anger dies down, she begins to fear that she has alienated me: and after a long pause, looking at the floor, she mutters: 'All right. I won't go to bed with him again and I'll get an evening job/ What I wanted to say was: I'm sorry for what I've done to you: why should you get an evening job if you don't want one? All I said was. k It doesn't matter. Make up your own mind.'

Saw a private showing of the new Warren Beatty film, Shampoo - a sensational success in the States. Found it a unique, self-erected (he co-wrote the script) monument to narcissism: every shot is an act of salivating homage to the incredible loveliness, the tousled charm, the innocently puckered brow, the tentatively parted lips, the unassuming muscle of W.B., the hayseed whoremaster. All other men in the picture are either ugly middle-aged clowns or raving poufs. Everyone in it is corrupt except Beatty, a randy hairdresser whose only crime is that he enjoys fucking. Sure, at the end he loses the girl he really loves (Julie Christie) because - in a sudden and belated bow to conventional morality - he has spread himself too thin: but to whom does he lose her? Why, to a corrupt multimillionaire who is fat and combs his hair forward, for God's sake.

So although Julie quits, she'd have done better to stay with Warren, wouldn't she? Because whenever Warren and a girl go walking together, the music gets pure and exquisite and lyrical, which it doesn't when anybody else does anything. The action of the picture takes place concurrently with Nixon's election as President in [968: and we are supposed to be gulled into believing that there is a valid parallel between the moral hypocrisies of the characters in the movie and the hypocrisies of the political world outside. This pretentious attempt at 'extra resonance' isn't for an instant credible. On the credit side: beautiful photography of Beverly Hills (by Kovacs).

Astaire again on TV in a programme in celebration of Irving Berlin. I recall what I said to the Panovs (Jewish ballet dancers recently allowed to leave the Soviet Union) when 1 met them at the party after the London premiere of That's Entertainment. The Panovs had never before seen Astaire and when they asked me what I thought of him, I said, half-jokingly: 'He's the poet of late capitalism.' The more I see of him -always in top hat and tails, against settings of grandeur and glitter, the more I take my own joke seriously. Whatever can be salvaged by art from the greed and oppression of the thirties is contained in the elegance of that tapping and twirling little gentleman. He is the froth thrown up by the maelstrom of a condemned era, and miraculously, he has outlived it.

The greatest films are those which show how society shapes man (cf. The Godfather 1 & 2 - we saw Part 2 tonight). The greatest plays are those which show how man shapes society. Probably not strictly true, but worth defending as a stepping stone to the truth.

After Godfather 2 with its brilliant exposition of the Sicilian ethos (defend the family, kill enemies and traitors, compel respect, demand return with interest on favours granted) we go to a Sicilian restaurant, where we are given a free meal on the (tacit) understanding that Kathleen will get Vogue to write about it. We were invited, and did not buy this favour; but it was granted, and we must now, in true Godfather style, return the compliment

Keep 'em coming.

He admits in R2 that he is "unserious". He would say any untruth to shock his audience.

'Sally rang the doorbell of 14 Pindock Mews, where Nicole and I were waiting for her. I told her she could ask us any questions she liked. It was soon obvious that we were all on exactly the same sexual wavelength. I produced a bottle of champagne and we drank a solemn toast: 'To spanking.' The atmosphere of happy anticipation was intoxicating.

Then Nicole and I played the roles of a count and countess whipping a new housemaid for theft and drunkenness. Sally wore Victorian knickers with a slit at the back, Nicole a pair with a rear-buttoned flap. After lecturing Sally (or Sophie, as we named her), I put her over my knee, opened the slit of her knicks and gave her chubby bum twenty-fix e smacks. Nicole sat two yards away, staring at the reddening globes. She then replaced me and gave Sophie twelve stingers with the hairbrush, making her count after each stroke. Sophie opened her bum well as Nicole instructed, and we noted an exquisite, hairless little pink anus.

Now came the reversal of fortunes: I revealed that the Countess, too, was to be chastised, for having spent £500 on a new dress without permission. So it was Nicole's turn to bend over my lap. I unbuttoned the flap and Sophie got her first glimpse of my darling's bare bottom. I gave her twelve hard strokes with the brush. Sophie watched, riveted. (Both girls afterwards said that they found this episode the most exciting of all; Sophie humbly said that one day she hoped to be granted the privilege of spanking Nicole.)

Then both girls were sent to the bedroom to prepare to be whipped. When I joined them, Nicole was already in the whipping position, her bum well spread; and Sophie demurely sat at the foot of the bed, her eyes fixed on Nicole's anus. I gave her six stripes, very hard, with the white whip. Sophie then took her place: Nicole and I both noticed that she spread her globes much wider apart than we do, so that the flesh around the anus was pulled as taut as a drum. She got six, too, after which I left the whip resting between her outstretched cheeks.

After a few minutes standing in the corner for their red bums to be on penitential display, the girls joined me on the bed to have their weals inspected. I made both of them kiss each other's whipped globes. They held my prick, I gently squeezed their corrugated bums, and we quietly and passionately reminisced about every detail of an experience that had already eaten its way into the deepest recesses of our minds.

'Did you like Nicole's bottom?' - 'What does she think of mine?' -'We both adore your anus.' - 'Did the hairbrush hurt more than the whip?' - etc. etc. on into the night. On this occasion we didn't fuck in Sally's presence (she had to get home to North London): but next time Nicole will surely end up on top of me, being whipped by Sally while I fuck her and at the same time stroke Sally's already glowing bottom. A milestone! If it were now to die.

I had arranged a spanking trio with Sally for Sunday evening and was annoyed when she wrote to say that one of her professional clients had summoned her to a 'contract' that same night, and that of course business came before pleasure. I phone to remonstrate with her, but without success: 'If Nicole had to act on Sunday night,' she said, 'wouldn't that take precedence?' She's night, of course; if I object, I'm saying that fucking for fun is morally superior to fucking for money, and that whoring is a different kind of profession from acting - neither of which I believe. So I'm reduced to a sort of accusing silence, the more foolish for having no moral grounds on which to base the accusation. Yet I am annoyed and do feel cheated. I suppose it's injured ego: that she should prefer anyone to me as a reddener of her bottom!

I interview Larry for TV at Thurloe Square, not having seen him for over a year, during which time he has suffered (and nearly died) from a muscular degenerative disease that has robbed his voice of its bass notes, leaving only a light tenor. He is frailer than I remember him and has difficulty climbing the stairs to the living-room; his Rolex watch hangs loosely round his wrist; and he has unwisely grown a little suburban moustache which makes him look slightly pathetic, like a boring retired major in a Sunningdale saloon bar. He will never appear on the stage again, though he has several big film parts lined up.

Over lunch he chats unhappily about the National, underlining how-he laments the fact that under the Hall regime all sense of company solidarity has gone: 'It isn't a company any more. They just cast each production from scratch out of Spotlight. That wasn't what this National Theatre was created for. That wasn't what we fought for all those years/ His contract with the NT expires next month, and he won't be sorry; several times he has dictated intemperate letters of resignation, only to be dissuaded from posting them by Joan.

My general impression is that in the past year he has somehow faded. He seems to be talking to one from a long way off; that overpowering physical presence has irrevocably waned. Still, he talks for the cameramen for an hour, never boringly though sometimes forgetfully: it was a kindness on his part to do this for me, since he is getting only a token payment. At one point, rather oddly, he says that he regrets not having imposed more of his own ideas as a director on the NT company: whereas one of the things on which prided myself during our association was that I was able to protect him from doing just that!

Another death: Pamela Brown, at fifty-eight. I had worshipped this pop-eyed, tawny-haired, attractive actress since my teens: indeed when I was under twenty I burst into her dressing-room after a performance of Giaconda Smile and fell on my knees before her. She was witty, kind and waspish; and although she was a semi-cripple, with one leg partially withered and visibly thinner than the other, she had great sensuality and could look at you with a wonderfully predatory gleam in her eye. I gave a party for her and Trevor Howard and the Old Vic company when they visited Oxford with Hie Taming of the Shrew: that was when I officially met her (self-introduced a year or so earlier, as explained above).

In the late fifties she came to New York, where I was unhappily married; and I remember a memorable day we spent together in her hotel suite. I confessed all my (then horrible secret) sexual desires, and she happily indulged them; yes, I spanked the lovely cripple; and we fucked and tenderly talked and giggled and knew we were friends for life, even if we never met again. Sadly, we didn't meet much thereafter: but had she been ten years younger, there was - as I think we both divined - a distinct possibility that we might have been in love.

Shirley MacLaine opens at the Palladium. A staggering success, and a triumph of H.I).P.: she dances like Zizi Jeanmaire, 2 has ten times the looks of Streisand and the charm of Minnelli, and a voice to match either. Moreover, she can act. For an hour and a quarter she goes through really complex and taxing Broadway dance routines, effortlessly singing her heart out; and all this at forty-two. I hug her afterwards and tell her that she is a credit to the species

Life for the past two weeks (apart from an ebullient lunch with lovely Shirley at the Waterside Inn last Sunday) has been a depleting experience. When the jury acquitted Linda Lovelace's autobiography of obscenity, The rimes ran a thunderous leader headed 'The Pornography of Hatred 1 in which it singled me out as a writer who had himself been 'depraved and corrupted' by the pornography of cruelty, of the concentration camps, of rape and the rapist. This flabbergasting charge has stunned me and inhibited all action since it appeared. I can hardly reply to it myself sinc e it accuses me of having had my character perverted by exposure to pornography: independent witnesses are needed to attest that I'm not irreclaimably sunk in depravity.

Letters from John Trevelyan' and Eric Hobsbawn appear in my defence: but mud like this will stick. (It's no good my saying that spanking between consenting adults is a little different from what went on in Auschwitz: it will all look the same in print.)

Pamela Brown with Anne and Julie

It occurred to me last night that my recent deep melancholy may be due to the fact that for the last month or so I have been using Mandrax instead of Soneryl as sleeping pills. (Mandrax has a fearful reputation for turning people into zombies, but the doctor who prescribed them assured me this was bogus.) Last night I returned to Soneryl. Result: a dramatic lightening of mood. So it wasn't -wholly - my chest, after all.

The main practical purpose of acquiring wealth is thermostatic - i.e. it enables people to control the temperature in which they live. In cold weather the rich follow the sun. In cold houses the maids rise at dawn to light the fires, and in the evening put hot-water bottles in the bed. Servants cook the food (i.e. expose it to the right amount of heat) and serve it at the proper temperature. Central heating is among the first luxuries that the poor man buys when he acquires a little money. Fur coats may have snob value, but their principal virtue is that they are warm. To be bronzed is the visible evidence of wealth. We may have ceased to be sun-worshippers: we remain heat-worshippers

Exhaustion total: the icy New York air hits my lungs hard, so that I dread the thought of living here again. Extreme loneliness: for succour and reassurance I twice phone K., staying with Dirk' in France. I lunch with Marion Capron, a girlfriend of my New York days, whom I haven't seen for twelve years. We used to travel a lot together - to Chicago once, and even to Vienna, where I filmed an interview with John Huston (then working on his 'Freud' film) and she was working for Andre Deutsch, into whose Soho office we broke one night and fucked on his desk. Marion looks fine — a tall, chirpy, gallant girl — but has a terrible story to tell of the past decade. She had a child which was born deformed, whereupon her boyfriend left her: and soon afterwards the child died. She then fell in love with someone else: three days before they were to marry, he died of a heart attack. She went heavily on to pills and liquor, but has since straightened out. I note that she drinks only Coke at lunch.

Barely able to tote my hand-luggage from cab to checking-in desk, I fly to Miami in search of recuperative sun (my usual spring pilgrimage: cf. Taroudant last year). I have never felt more fragile: my last two nights in NY were sleepless through coughing. My ambition is zero: no will or wish to do anything but lie down, and when I do that I cough. Sidney and Gail Lumet invite me for drinks on my last day in NY and Adolph and Phyllis join the party: all say how glad they are that I'm coming back, and promise parties and help with schools: but somehow I can't see it happening. I can't face the spontaneity, the free-flowing energy, the high spirits of these excellent, enviable people.

Seductive dream of Egypt and the ecstatic winter month I spent at Luxor so long ago - was it five years? - the last period of uninterrupted happiness I can remember, when I was just finishing the film script and a new horizon seemed to be opening up. Karnak and the Valley of the Kings and Hatshepsuf s temple - these for me are images of bliss, in a climate that flattered my lungs like no other I've encountered. And the little temple of Amun, with an erect prick surprisingly sprouting from the god's official regalia; and the boatman who took us by felucca to have lunch in his mud hut, and gave us a huge parcel of Kif as a farewell present.

And my theory about Akhnaten, a figure who has fascinated me since childhood (he was the frontispiece ol my first book): the heretic Pharaoh who worshipped the sun's rays and married Nefertiti. Why did he so suddenly transport the court from Thebes to El Amarna, thus abruptly shifting the centre of an entire civilisation? My suspicion: that he was either queer or androgynous (the curiously realistic statues and reliefs of him suggest as much: he looks effete, curvaceous in the wrong places, something of a loller: in addition, he frequently lacks male genitals. And that Nefertiti was not a woman at all but his boyfriend. (Why, in the Berlin portrait bust, alone among Egyptian women, does she wear that strange headdress that fits her as closely as a skull-cap? Because 'she' had the close-cropped hair of a boy.) Akhnaten had to get out of Thebes to avoid what must have been a huge scandal - i.e. when he announced his determination to 'many' his boyfriend - whose name, incidentally, means 'the beautiful woman is come'.

It's interesting, too, that Nefertiti appears literally out of nowhere (her background and origins are unknown), and that immediately after her supposed death, Akhnaten's brother, Smenkh-Ka-Re, became his co-regent. There's a stela in Berlin that implies a queer relationship between the two men: and there's the further fact that, on assuming the co-regency

I remain sceptical about his claims of fornicating with that very good English actress Pamela Brown; R25.

He says she was 'pop-eyed' which is undeniable. But he was definitely bug-eyed.

On TV I see for the first time Spencer Tracy's last film, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? - the one in which Sidney Poitier wants to marry his (white) daughter. It was held at the time to be a slice of sentimental middle-brow hokum, since Poitier is so obviously a respectable bourgeois black; but watching it tonight, I ask myself how many racially mixed marriages I know, and the answer is: very few. Johnny Dank-worth and Cleo Laine; Lena Home and Lennie Hayton , and Lena's daughter, Gail, and Sidney Lumet.

Blacks and whites still intermarry rarely, far more rarely than they should; and although the film is full of verbal schmaltz, its message remains potent and timely. (If Black Power entails Black Separatism, I'm against it.) And Tracy is superb, carved out of rock, exuding moral authority as few actors ever have. I ask Kathleen if she would have liked him as a father. She says: 'Yes, even if I'd hated him.' There's an unforgettable two-shot in which Tracy, who was already known to be dying, describes his love for Kate Hepburn, from whose eyes, as he speaks, tears start to descend. Larry may have greater power than Tracy in the portrayal of monsters; but he can't play nice men with anything like Tracy's monumental authority.

Went with K. (in the Garbo dress from As Yon Desire Me which I had copied for her) to a twenties ball, at which I wore a feathered blue lurex peignoir, sequinned knickers, suspender belt and black stockings and a wig modelled after the hairstyle of Louise Brooks. And a six-inch ivory cigarette-holder.

Introduced myself, to people who asked who I was meant to be, as Lord Baden-Powell. I also shaved my legs for the occasion. Although I wouldn't want to be a woman, I love the idea of making love to a woman while dressed as one; and I much prefer the feel of my own legs when they are hairless. This doesn't make me a transvestite; but it does mean that I enjoy exploring more sexual possibilities than those available to macho males in jeans and T-shirts. (I regard it as a gap in me that I've never been turned on by the sight, touch or thought of a man.) Sadly, the other guests were mostly rich bores.

'Attacked again in Private Eye, this time because of wearing drag at the twenties ball. I have just identified the distinguishing feature of the magazine's style. It is written as if by a collection of teachers at public schools, viz. the constant use of phrases like 'the wretched Wilson', 'the appalling Rees-Mogg', 'the vile Haden-Guest', etc. which exactly capture the tone of the sarcastic beak' rebuking the errant pupil. (And of course all P. Eye's standards of conduct derive from Victorian public schools.) Odd how Eye contributors, like many other right-wing journalists, develop from inky schoolboys into middle-aged schoolmasters without any intervening period of young manhood.'

I re-enter Brompton Hospital under doctor's orders. The first night - in a ward full of ancient emphysema victims - is hell, because I have forgotten to bring sleeping pills (and thus lie hacking until dawn) and because the nocturnal sounds of my fellow-sufferers would probably have forbidden sleep in any case. I listen to the falsetto, gibberish moans that are the audible half of the dialogues in which old men take part while they sleep: the other speakers are heard only in their dreams

The best cure for anyone who is tainted with Enoch Powell's racialist notions would be to spend a week in a National Health hospital. (The private wards at the Brompton, incidentally, are nowadays lull of Arabs, and are referred to by the staff as 'the Kasbah)

Shocked to hear from K.H. that she is planning to send the children to Los Angeles a week before she arrives, accompanied only by Sheila (the cook). The reason: she needs another week in England to do research on her Agatha Christie film script. How could she conceive of sending two kids to a strange country, a strange house and a strange school with neither parent to look after them? (I have to stay here for the opening of Carte Blanche on 30 September.) I protest strongly, and she will no doubt change her mind. Which won't remove the stain left by the fact that she even considered the idea.

The Queen opens the National Theatre. Larry makes a typically florid speech on the stage of the theatre that bears his name, singling out a dozen politicians for praise and not one playwright, actor or director except of course P. Hall.

The choice of play is perverse to the point of madness - a minimal Goldoni called // Campiello: devoid of wit or warmth or any kind of excitement. The company shouts, stamps and runs about betraying all the signs of panic. The whole evening was what Noel would have called 'sheer sauce'. The most significant performance was given by a drinking fountain that played throughout the action -quietly pissing on everything we expect of a National Theatre. During the second half, Larry, who was sitting beside the Queen, dropped off to sleep.

HRH instantly noticed and directed a beady glare in his direction, fearful lest he should topple forwards into the acting area. The glare lasted for five minutes until Larry, galvanised by some particular noisy piece of business, returned to wakefulness. During the interval Ben Travers said to me, 'If they had to open the theatre with a thoroughly rotten play, why couldn't they choose a thoroughly rotten English play?' He summed up what was felt by most people present. What a disaster! But will the press record it as such?

After four days in California am still disorientated. K. has rented a huge movie-star-type house for us in Santa Monica. The sun pours down at a daily 90. What have I done - more ominously, what am I going to have to do to deserve all this?

A joke for which I must find a funnier context. Asking whether Martin Landau had yet paid me the promised JT 1,000 still outstanding (he hasn't) K. says: 'I wish he'd put his money where his mouth is.' I reply, 'In that case it would be up George Weidenfeld's arse

Bianca Jagger, who has never done anything, is a media star; Ellen (Holly), after eight years of TV exposure, five days a week, is not. Hers is one of the so-called 'adult soaps' - i.e. abortion and pre-marital sex can be mentioned in it - and she argues persuasively that soaps of this kind are as close, in their development of character and exploration of social groups over long periods of time, as America has ever come to epic. (Ellen has other causes for bitterness. Her skin is pale enough to pass for white with a little make-up; and she has frequently been offered parts in shows on condition that she pancakes her face and tactfully refrains from mentioning to the sponsors that she is black. Being a brave and militant girl, she has never yielded to such temptations. Yet - mysteriously to me - she is a passionate supporter of Jimmy Carter, on the grounds that white Southerners 'understand' blacks more deeply than Northern liberals.)

Aren't there dates for this?

How can you post a diary without dates?

Drive 260 miles to Las Vegas in resplendent new car, a Buick Riviera on lease. We stay with Shirley MacLaine and Pete Hamill.' Shirl is performing at Caesar's Palace. I haven't been to Las V. for about eighteen years and am knocked out by the leaping, loutish, shameless, shattering, gargantuan folly of the city as it now is. Grand Hotel, the huge MGM hostelry, with its 2,000 rooms, the largest on earth, is like an outsize realisation of the hotels Bunchmans used to caricature; its gigantic silver-glittering awning is deliberately designed to dwarf the three or four hundred people who can shelter under it. We dine before Shirley's show in the new French restaurant at Caesar's Palace -beginning with some superb beef marrow in pastry with a truffle sauce, followed by a pair of plump quails en casserole. Wines equally good; although all the food is flown in, the chefs are from Maxim's and the results show it

I have this diary but I remember nothing listed above, is this the same guy who gave himself a Vodka enema?

In London I wear a dinner jacket roughly once a year. Here, in casual, informal California, I have worn a black tie three times in the past week.....The plump Miss Mengers sits seething on a sota. 'That goddamn Swifty!' she says between gntted teeth. 'I'm giving a party tomorrow night and he's asked the exact same people. He swore to me he wouldn't ask Warren and guess who just walked in the fucking doorl I could spit. Well, fuck him, I'll show the bastard, I'll get Streisand tomorrow, so help me.' She is perfectly serious. Later she sidles up to me and hisses: 'And Johnny Carson too, goddamnit!' It is all very strange.

Half as good as her word, Mengers strikes back with Streisand (though she arrives too late for the stuffed squab - resembling a scrotum filled with wild rice - which passed for dinner). The supporting cast includes: Warren Beatty, Swifty Lazar, Peter Bogdanovich (still nice), Ray Stark, Ryan O'Neal, Tatum O'Neal, Steven Spielberg (who directed Jaws), James Coburn, Dudley Moore, Tuesday Weld, Angie Dickinson, Tina Sinatra ...

Over dinner Gore confides that Noel Coward invited him to bed in Italy. When he entered the bedroom Graham Payn was already naked between the sheets. Noel bustled in and stripped; Gore buggered Graham, and Noel masturbated with his prick against Gore's bottom. Having rapidly come, he rose and dressed within seconds and went off to work, leaving Gore and Graham to share the post-animal tristesse.

Went to an 'enema clinic' advertising spankable girls. The sweetheart assigned to me turned out to be a huge black girl built like a Watusi warrior with an Afro hairdo like a geodesic dome. She was under the impression that I wanted to wrestle with her, and opened the conversation by menacingly informing me that she cycled twenty miles to work every day and twenty miles back home. I swallowed hard and went through the motions of putting her over my knee, but it was about as enticing as spanking King Kong. (Her buttocks were like black marble.) Apart from anything else, I have never derived any pleasure from spanking black girls: it conflicts with my belief in civil liberties. Now there's a situation for a Feiffer sketch . . .

....

Bizarre dinner with Sue Mengers, who greets us with monologue about the horrors of water conservation (there has been a drought in California and legislation against waste is being enacted): 'What's going to become of us rich Jews and our swimming-pools? And what about the toilet? I'm so fucking clean that every time I pass the toilet I flush it, just on principle.'

Other guests: Ryan O'Neal (whom at last I appreciate and find very funny), Sammy Davis and his ravishing wife, Barry Diller (head of Paramount), somebody von Furstenberg (an expensive seamstress who irritates me by taking flash pictures all evening), and Truman Capote, with whom I haven't spoken since our famous altercation twelve years ago I am slightly apprehensive, but need not have worried; as he arrives he whispers to Sue that the two people who hate him most in the world are here - the other being Sammy, whom (I learn) he described on the Carson show as an untalented nobody.

Conversation at dinner is spotty, to put it mildly: Ryan and I use each other as springboards and are quite funny, but Truman talks only to Sue and nobody else talks much to anybody. Sammy laughs nicely at Ryan and me. Meanwhile the seamstress flashes away. Sammy and wife leave (escape) early. Sue declares jovially to Ryan and me: 'Boy, did I make a ballsup!' A colourless young model whom Truman brought with him is captivated by Ryan and stays, presumably to go home with him.

I learn on the i i p.m. news that Jim Jones' is dead. So another friend is gone from the group of Americans who made Pans in the fifties so much fun to visit: gruff, gentle Jim, with the big chin and bashful smile, shorter than he would have chosen to be, and perhaps less belligerent, too: uxorious towards his busty and beloved Gloria as few husbands I have known have been towards their wives: always keeping open house in his apartment opposite the Tourd'Argent (where I once heard him benignly say to a snobbish young girl who asked him: 'What are you doing this summer, my dear fellow?' —'I'm having my asshole sewed up to see if I can shit through my armpits').

There was the hot summer in the fifties when I went alone to Paris, met the Jones' closest girlfriend, Addie Herder, started fucking her the same night, and spent the next six weeks with them as a quartet - partly in the emptiness of off-season Paris (which I have ever since adored) and partly in Berlin, where I introduced Addie, Gloria and Jim to the Berliner Ensemble. Then there was that later summer when Elaine and I (our last summer abroad, I think it was) went on a quick gastronomic spin through France with Gore

It was during that trip that Elaine confessed she had had an affair with Kingsley Amis: I caned her, one stroke for each letter of his name, and made her confess to the Joneses that she had been whipped. (They were intrigued but unshocked.) Kathleen, I recall, was waiting in the South of France that I would leave Elaine and join her; at the last moment I backed down, postponing the amputation

Rita Moreno on the Merv Griffin show - bristling with energy at forty-five - my mind and prick go back to 1964, when she w as the last woman to make me cry. (Much as we adored each other, there was too much spanking for her to take, and too many career chances in America.) Rita, whose anus I licked in Bnstol, London and Newcastle (where we flew to see Larry's pre-London tour of Othello); whose firm, tawny bottom I joyfully smacked; who sucked me off by daylight in a train as it passed through Royal Oak station, a minute away from arrival at Haddington. Has she gained energy since then? Or is it merely that I have lost it? Because now I would shrink from the thought of bedding that ravenous, tireless-looking vixen, whom once I truly loved. She says on the show that constant fucking has kept her young. I believe it

I have had no sexual contact with anyone or anything (except my own right hand) since I was in London, is really too much. Bankruptcy, emphysema, paralysis of the will - and now this! Feel that God is making his point with rather vulgar overstatement

A blood test some weeks ago at UCLA revealed that I have a genetic enzyme deficiency (quite rare: about .001 per cent of the population has it) which renders my lungs specifically vulnerable to tobacco. It I smoke, they degenerate tar more swiftly than other people's, and death is immensely hastened.

Lunch with Larry at the Bel-Air: he's here filming Betsy and then going to Brazil to make another picture. His energy continues to daunt me. He tells me he learned his speech to the Queen at the opening of the Olivier Theatre by heart against the advice of Joan, who begged him to read it from notes and not run the risk of drying. "But.' he says. 'I knew that smarmy bastard (i.e. P. Hall) wouldn't be using notes, and I was damned if I was going to let him outdo me. So I went to the theatre three times, the week before the opening, at eight in the morning and rehearsed the speech to the cleaners until I had it word perfect.

Evening: party at Lazar's to signal departure of Freddie de Cordova' and wife, who are going away for about ten days. (Any excuse will serve for a Lazar party.) Many guests arrive high on cocaine and many others get drunk; some are both coked and sodden. I meet and like Elizabeth Ashley (coked) whose mother, if I understood her correctly, was a circus aerialist, while her father pushed dope. Noticing that she clenches her thumbs inside her fists as she talks, I tell her to take them out: 'If I do,' she says, I'll only suck them.' She is nutty, frenetic but very nice. Johnny Carson is there, without Joanna, about whose whereabouts he seems unclear. He is cool always. I decide that Carson is the visible tip of an iceberg named J. Carson. Tony Curtis, Tony Randall, Richard Brooks and the Gregory Pecks among guests.

Greg, rather drunk, is very defensive since he has just starred in an idolatrous film about General MacArthur and, as a one-time liberal turned conservative, is hyper-sensitive to accusations of being a reactionary. He plunges into unprovoked explanation of how MacArthur brought democracy and agrarian reform to Japan. I suggest that he is protesting too much. He complains that people treat him as if he had played Richard Nixon. 'That's different,' I say. 'Nixon only conspired to pervert the course of justice. MacArthur conspired to pervert the course of history.' 'I see I've fallen into a hot-bed of liberals,' says Greg

He goes on to tell me the astonishing story of MacArthur's son and only child, who was encouraged by his parents (from infancy) to dress up in his mother's clothes. At dinner parties, when aged seven or eight, he would be told to put on Mom's things to entertain the guests. 'What a cute little fella!' they would cry. The result is that he became a full-time transverstite and now lives in Greenwich Village, a middle-aged drag queen. The bizarre thing is that MacArthur seems not to have objected, and would visit him in his apartment, imperially sipping a drink while a throng of transvestites cavorted around him. The tableau reminds one of a typical brunch with Tiberius at Capri.

Was MacArthur (a) too innocent to know about transvestism and homosexuality or (b) too tolerant and sophisticated to care? Fascinating question for some other film to answer: needless to say, Greg's movie avoids the whole subject.

Thanks, Op!

Aram Saroyan wrote the book Trio about his mother, Carol Marcus Saroyan Matthau, and her closest lifelong friends Oona O'Neill and Gloria Vanderbilt. It's a frothy read, a love letter to these women in whose midst he grew up. In various anecdotes, Carol details Kenneth Tynon's longtime pursuit of her (complete with endless proposals of marriage.) She mostly held back until one night in Spain. Then all hell broke loose.

Tynan, not Tynon.

I thought the Datalounge had declared Tynan gay?

But no, all he cares about is spanking girls.

Fuck Kenneth Tynan. He had no talent and was jealous of those who did. And because of his stupid love for Look Back in Anger we got all those horrid kitchen sink dramas.

Oh, and he didn't wipe well.

More!

R52 It may have seemed at the time that he loved horrid kitchen sink dramas'; it was just that he was always seeking things that were shiny, new and shocking even in to his maritally-confused later life.