I fought off the amorous advances of Brando, Noel Coward — and ronnie Kray
Another day. Another tawdry celebrity sex-pest scandal. But nothing surprises showbiz veteran MICHAEL THORNTON who in this rollicking account reveals . . .
But succumbed to the duchess of argyll in a giant pink bath
FAME, as the celebrated novelist Graham Greene once observed, is the ultimate aphrodisiac. But the downside of acquiring any form of celebrity is that it separates a man or a woman from the rest of society, often resulting in isolation, insecurity and a gnawing loneliness.
Perhaps this is what caused Kevin Spacey to behave as has been claimed. In what sounds like an eerie prophecy of the disaster that has now engulfed his glittering career, the two-time Oscar-winner once reflected: ‘Success is like death. The more successful you become, the higher the houses in the hills get and the higher the fences get.’
Whatever the case, those fences have come crashing down in the wake of the Weinstein scandal, with a flood of accusations against Spacey of inappropriate behaviour with young men.
He has been dumped by his Hollywood agent and his publicist, as well as by Netflix, producers of his $60million TV series House Of Cards, which they have now axed.
The 58-year-old’s forthcoming film, Gore, in which he was to have played the bisexual American writer Gore Vidal has been jettisoned, while Spacey’s scenes in the Ridley Scott flick All The Money In The World, due to be released on December 22, are to be re- shot with Christopher Plummer replacing him.
He now faces the possible loss of his honorary CBE and knighthood.
If what he is accused of is true, he deserves all the opprobrium he gets. But I have to say, as someone who has spent half-a-century mixing in showbusiness and society circles, and writing about them, that many a sexual predator before him has clean got away with it. I know this, because I encountered a good number of them, sometimes only just escaping their clutches — and, on the odd occasion, failing to.
I was 17 when I unexpectedly lost my virginity while standing naked in a bath that resembled a giant pink seashell at Inveraray Castle, ‘the Versailles of the Western Scottish Highlands’, and the stronghold of the Dukes of Argyll.
ONA sweltering summer day in 1958, when I was on vacation from my school in Brighton, I was introduced in the street in Oban by a friend of mine — a member of one of Scotland’s oldest landed families — to the devastating society beauty of her era, the reigning Duchess of Argyll, formerly Margaret Whigham, the most celebrated British debutante of all time.
She invited us back to the castle, which she pronounced ‘Inverarer’ and on our arrival, offered the use of her private bathroom for a shower.
I was cooling off in the giant pink seashell when the Duchess, to my alarm, stepped into the bath. It took me several seconds to register the fact she had no clothes on.
‘I thought I would join you,’ she said, in a charming manner that suggested taking a bath with a naked man she had met only an hour or so earlier was a perfectly normal occurrence.
The Duke of Argyll was not in residence on the day in question, but word of what had taken place in the pink seashell was to reach him in due course, and he wrote bitterly to Margaret’s father: ‘Like many middle-aged women, she has developed a taste for the attentions of young men of her children’s age.’ (I was eight months younger than Margaret’s son, Brian Sweeny).
Within weeks of that alarming encounter, the Argyll marriage was in terminal meltdown. The Duke compiled a list of 88 men whom he believed he could cite for adultery. To my relief, my name, and that of another young man Margaret seduced only three months after me, was removed from the list.
The marriage ended in 1963, in the most sensational and explosive divorce case of all time.
Back at school in Brighton, I began to receive the unwelcome attentions of the novelist and playwright Robin, Viscount Maugham, 25 years my senior, and the son of a former Lord Chancellor.
His predatory pursuit of teenage boys in the town, where he resided in a flat on Hove seafront, had become notorious. Robin, alcoholic, bipolar and plagued by a huge inferiority complex caused by the vastly superior fame of his Uncle Willie — the novelist and playwright William Somerset Maugham — was not an attractive character.
But after I became a 19-year-old history undergraduate at King’s College London, I persuaded Robin to give me an introduction to his uncle, who was in London staying at the Dorchester Hotel.
Somerset Maugham was then 86 and already sliding into dementia. He looked like a human lizard, with libidinous black eyes and incredibly wrinkled, parchment-like skin.
After his ancient hands had wandered where they ought not to have been, he stammered: ‘You c-can s-stay to dine with us if you wish, but you will be expected to s- sing for your s- supper.’ His meaning was unmistakeable.
I had no intention of ‘singing for my supper’, and pleaded a prior engagement. But I promised to return if he would do me the kindness of introducing me to Noël Coward, who was staying in the same hotel.
He agreed, and Coward, universally known as ‘The Master’, asked me to go up to his suite, where he emerged tall, with a hairless dome of a skull, huge Toby- jug ears, nicotinestained teeth and heavy-lidded eyes. He was 60. I was 19. ‘ Come here,’ he said, and patted the bed. I sat down with reluctance. ‘Hmmmm,’ he said, dragging on a cigarette as if his life depended on it and exhaling a cloud of smoke that seemed to engulf me.
‘You are younger than I expected,’ he said in that clipped staccato voice used by a legion of imitators. ‘But you are very, very pretty!’
It was about the worst chat-up line I had ever heard, and I had by then heard a few.
We surveyed each other in silence. Was it really conceivable that he expected me to enter into a liaison with ‘ an ancient Chinese madam’ — his own description — and someone whose ears, from
certain angles, resembled Dumbo the elephant?
Trying not to laugh in the great man’s face, I looked down. He mistook this for compliance. Embarrassed and irritated, I was forced to set boundaries between us. He nodded, sighed and walked into the drawing- room of the suite.
With time, I gained some respect and sympathy for him. I discovered, not from him, that two years earlier he had suffered a serious breakdown. He fell in love with a young American actor, William Traylor, then 27, who played a small supporting role in the Broadway production of Coward’s play, Nude With Violin.
Bill Traylor was a devout Catholic and not in the least gay. He found Coward’s physical overtures deeply repugnant. Urged by friends in the theatre to play along for the sake of his career, he became desperate. ‘I can’t!’ he said. ‘I’m a Catholic. I just can’t!’
Coward, attempting to overcome his objections, plied him with Stinger cocktails (a lethal combination of cognac and white crème de menthe).
The result was that Traylor took an overdose and was taken to hospital in a straitjacket. Traylor honourably never mentioned Coward publicly, nor sought to profit in any way from their disastrous relationship. He married happily and had two daughters. He and his wife together ran an acting school whose pupils included Sean Penn, Johnny Depp and Michelle Pfeiffer.
Coward never entirely got over the rejection, but continued his disastrous tendency to fall in love with people who, like myself, were not in the least attracted to him.
HE
PURSUED me for six years, long after I had become London’s youngest film and theatre critic for the Sunday Express, under the inflexible editorship of the homophobic John (later Sir John) Junor, whose proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook, hated Coward.
Convinced that Coward was corrupting his young critic, Beaverbrook hired private detectives to follow us at all our meetings, one of whom I discovered at the next table to us at the Savoy, busily taking down notes of our conversation.
But Coward was not alone in his pursuit. The Conservative peer Lord Boothby, who lived in homosexual bliss at 1 Eaton Square with a young blond cat burglar, Leslie Holt, attempted to recruit me as a toyboy for his crazed associate, the East End gangster ronnie Kray, who had dead black eyes that resembled a killer shark’s.
I later found myself sitting at dinner at London’s Society restaurant opposite the glaring, horn-rimmed ronnie, and then went on to Esmeralda’s Barn, the Knightsbridge club he ran with his brother reggie. There, drink having been taken, and my temper having exploded, I told the monstrous ron to get lost in two short, sharp words, in spite of the efforts of the actress Diana Dors to get me to ‘Cool it, babycakes!’
ronnie responded by opening his jacket to reveal that he was ‘tooled up’, dragged me into a corridor and pulled a gun on me.
His brother reggie came to my rescue, came between us, handed me a £10 note and told me to leg it, which I did.
ronnie persisted in his attempts to seduce me and, when I refused, he sent two of his minders round to my home in Bryanston Mews East, a visit that ended with me having 22 stitches in my head.
I was saved from being scarred for life by the actress Evelyn Laye, who presented me with a bottle of witch hazel and a bag of cotton wool balls and told me to soak the wound morning and night and to leave it wet. ‘You will find that the scar will fade and will eventually disappear,’ she assured me, and she was right.
The most bizarre sexual harassment I experienced was when I went to the Savoy Hotel in 1967 to interview Marlon Brando.
The door to his suite was opened by the handsome, dark-haired French actor Christian Marquand, who said: ‘Bud [his pet name for Marlon] is resting. He wants to know if you would mind interviewing him in bed.’
‘Sure,’ I said. By now, absolutely nothing could surprise me.
There was Marlon, lying on the bed in only a pair of boxer shorts. Marquand, to my amazement, climbed up beside Brando and began caressing his neck. It was immediately obvious that they were closer than close.
Brando looked at me and grinned. ‘You’re younger and kinda different from what I was expectin’ . . .’ he drawled. ‘Sit down, kid, take off your jacket and have a drink.’ He handed me a tankard of champagne.
In his early 40s, Marlon was no longer the devastating primeval hunk of The Wild One and On The Waterfront. He had filled out and a pungent whiff of stale sweat enveloped him. He was dishevelled and had dirty fingernails.
A seemingly endless series of trolleys crammed with junk food was wheeled in and out and devoured by Brando like a feeding frenzy at the zoo.
The room stank of marijuana and another aroma that was harder to place. After some while, I realised that it was amyl nitrate, more familiarly known as ‘poppers’, the favourite aphrodisiac of the Swinging Sixties.
When he wasn’t nuzzling Marquand, Brando slagged off his co- star in his latest film, Sophia Loren, complaining constantly about the black hairs he said grew out of her nose. He spat bile about the legendary Charlie Chaplin, the director. He was rude about Frank Sinatra. He was vicious to just about everyone.
After an hour, I had nothing that was even remotely printable. So I begged. ‘ Please! Will you say something I can actually print?’
He grinned and said: ‘Well, kid, here’s the deal. If you play strip poker with us, I’ll talk.’ By now, I was so desperate that I would have done nude handstands in the Savoy ballroom.
I have always been lousy at poker. One scene remains etched on my memory. A waiter, Sphinx- like and seemingly oblivious, wheeled in yet another trolley of junk food to find three men sitting on the bed stripped down to their jockstraps, and reacted as if it was the most normal scene in the world.
BRANDO
pulled down his jockstrap and urinated into a coffee pot. By now, a surfeit of champagne and junk food had made me nauseous. I started to heave, raced for the bathroom wearing only socks and underwear, and threw up. Someone, equally undressed, took hold of me with surprising tenderness and held me, turning the cold shower on to me. I looked up to find it was Brando.
I emerged from the shower, holding my wringing socks and jockstrap, and knowing in that moment that no matter what explanations I attempted in the future, no one would ever believe how and why I had ended up naked in Marlon Brando’s bathroom.
I went home and had a hangover for three days, but I did write a sanitised version of the article — minus Brando’s boyfriend, the strip poker and the shower scene. It was so boring, it never appeared in the paper.
As Greene reminds us, fame is the ultimate aphrodisiac. And while the alleged behaviour of Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey is deplorable, we should never allow ourselves to be deceived about the behaviour of some stars — present and past — we continue to revere.
Weinstein’s sexual excesses got him expelled by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and his membership of Bafta suspended.
Perhaps the British Academy ought now to look at the detestable private life of the inaugural recipient of the Bafta Fellowship in 1971, the late Sir Alfred Hitchcock.
Throughout his career, he forced perverted practices on his leading ladies in films, especially those who happened to be blonde.
When he had drunk too much, he would paw a woman or grab at her behind. One of his tricks was to kiss a woman hello or goodbye, then surprise her by thrusting his tongue inside her mouth.
Should not Bafta now strike him off — and leave his reputation in tatters, too?