My father the sex-crazed masochist
Revered as a theatre critic, Kenneth Tynan was a cultural colossus. But as his daughter now lays bare, his savage rows, serial infidelities and taste for kinky encounters were the most astonishing drama of all
MY BEDROOM door was flung open and there stood my naked mother, her arms flailing. ‘Your father’s trying to kill me!’ she screamed. Awakened from a deep sleep, her words barely registered on me: I was too busy staring.
A moment later my father, dressed in a suit, put his hand on her shoulder and said calmly, ‘C’mon, Elaine, you’re disturbing Tracy.’
He tried to steer her away, but she jerked free and repeated: ‘He’s going to kill me.’
The door closed and their yelling continued, punctuated by the sounds of crockery breaking.
Why had she been naked? And why was she afraid of my father, who was so calm? The questions whirled in my head until I fell asleep. The next day no one mentioned it. That’s how it was in our house: furious storms followed by the calm.
During another night of shouting, I saw my partially clothed father perched on the ledge of their bedroom window. ‘I’m going to jump!’ he screamed. My mother, naked again, smoking a cigarette, moved through the room behind him. ‘Why the f*** don’t you?’ she said coldly as she climbed into bed. I was shocked; why was my mother being so mean to my father?
At that moment, I realised for the first time that I was fascinated. Without understanding the word, I had become a voyeur, mesmerised by my parents’ dramas. MY FLAMBOYANT father Kenneth Tynan, the theatre critic and writer, was one of the most prominent figures in post-war Britain, a man who revelled in his role in the vanguard of the new permissive society.
Supposedly the first person to use the F-word on the BBC, his erotic review Oh Calcutta! would scandalise the country and Scotland Yard’s Obscene Publications Squad with its full-frontal nudity.
And his public notoriety was matched by private dramas every bit as colourful – a litany of tempestuous rows, infidelity, and on his part, a proclivity for unconventional sexual practices.
In my mother, American novelist Elaine Dundy, he had found a partner who could give as good as she got, at least when it came to arguments and adultery.
None of this seemed to dim his brilliant and still burgeoning reputation. When I was a small child in the late 1950s, our London home welcomed a parade of actors, writers, directors, and musicians. My parents were the centre of a group that included Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh and Tony Richardson.
I knew these people were important because my parents made sure I knew: ‘Orson, a very famous director, is coming to the flat today,’ my father would announce. Or, barely containing his excitement: ‘Larry Olivier is coming over for a drink.’
‘Marlene [Dietrich] said she might stop by,’ my mother would add proudly.
Then, I knew only that these people were essential to my parents and somehow connected to their work; I now realise that my parents were the original celebrity hounds. It was a contact sport. They thought if they were around famous people, they too would become famous.
They had valid reasons: my father’s livelihood depended on meeting, knowing, and writing about them. But their obsession seemed like an addiction, a need to fill some bottomless hole in their psyches. They equated ‘ordinary’ with boring, and boredom was to be avoided at all costs. Far better to fight. Caught up in their crossfire, I was scared and confused. On one occasion my mother appeared stark naked in front of the au pair and her boyfriend. ‘F***!’ she exclaimed, swaying in the doorway clutching a bottle of champagne she was trying to pour into a glass.
‘Don’t you think you ought to put some clothes on, Mrs Tynan?’ suggested the au pair. ‘Aren’t you getting cold?’
Once I was reading a book in the living room while they rowed and looked for things to throw, hurling ashtrays and books at each other.
Then a maid eased her way into the room. Without missing a beat, they moved the battle into the bedroom. When they had exhausted themselves, my father stormed out of the apartment.
My mother turned to me and said, ‘What did you think of that?’
I coolly answered: ‘You’ve had that one before,’ trying to give the appearance of a blasé bystander.
A friend of my mother, the writer Judy Feiffer, told me about my mother arriving late one night at her apartment, her dress covered in spaghetti. ‘What happened?’ Judy inquired. My mother said: ‘Ken and I disagreed about a play.’
‘She wore it like a badge of honour,’ Judy later commented. ‘It was as though she wanted me to see what he’d done to her.’ IN 1962, when I was ten, my parents decided on an open marriage. To them, it seemed a solution to their constant infidelity, but it never succeeded in quenching their jealousy and anger.
One night, the Scots-born poet George MacBeth, a small, wiry man with horn-rimmed glasses, showed up late at our flat, demanding to see my mother. He leaned on the doorbell for two hours until the police carted him off. Afterwards, I would catch glimpses of George creeping in and out of the flat whenever my father wasn’t around.
One afternoon I came home from school and noticed men’s clothing strewn around the courtyard.
I asked my mother about them. She turned to my father and said: ‘Why don’t you explain it to Tracy?’ and walked out of the room. He began to mumble something that made no sense, and I didn’t pursue it. The clothing remained in the courtyard for months.
Only years later did I find out that my father had discovered George in the kitchen with my mother, dressed in nothing but a necktie. My father had thrown George’s clothes out of the window. It was a great gesture, except that when he insisted George leave, my father had to lend him a raincoat.
Meanwhile, my father was sleeping with a Chinese actress named Tsai Chin. My mother thought nothing of showing up at her flat while my father was there and starting to harangue him.
Friends were often called in as witnesses, allies and mediators.
Once, my father broke my mother’s nose, driving her into the reluctant arms of Orson Welles and his wife Paola, who gave her a cold compress and a drink and sent her on her way.
Both my parents seemed to revel in public humiliation, trying their best to be the new F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald with little thought for the daughter who would witness it all. It couldn’t last, of course. ON MY 13th birthday, just before bedtime, I was in my room at my Devon school, Dartington Hall, when the housemother, Kim, called me to the phone.
‘It’s your mother,’ she whispered. I thought she must be calling to wish me happy birthday; it was late, but I was glad she had remembered.
I could barely hear her over the static. ‘Hi, darling, I’m in Mexico… I’ve just divorced your father.’ I didn’t know how to respond.
‘Are you still there?’ she asked after a few moments’ silence.
‘Yes,’ I replied. I knew I was meant to say something. ‘I have to go to bed,’ I said, handing back the phone to Kim. I ran back to my bed. I didn’t cry. I felt numb. It was finally over. All the years of fighting and drama.
Maybe she meant the divorce to be my birthday gift. Lying in the dark, I began to hope that with my mother out of the way, I would have my father all to myself. Although I rarely saw him, I felt a bond with him that I did not feel with my mother. He made me feel special.
As time passed, my mother tried to reinvent her life in New York, living first in a flat in Greenwich Village belonging to film director Sidney Lumet and then in an apartment in the same building as her pal Tennes-
He sat on the window ledge and she said ‘jump’
see Williams. From the minute she moved into the place, her behaviour began to deteriorate. During visits I would hear them on the phone assessing their drug choices. A tough decision, but add a bit of booze into the mix, and it didn’t make much difference. Each time I saw her, she seemed in worse shape, more depressed, often incoherent.
IN THE early 1970s, I moved to America, ending up in a little apartment in West Hollywood. Just as I felt I was coming into my own, my father, his new wife Kathleen Halton, and my half-siblings Roxana and Matthew, moved nearby.
He was now in his 40s and diagnosed with emphysema, exacerbated by smoking. Doctors had advised him to move away from Britain and to quit smoking. Claiming to be a ‘climatic émigré’, he chose smoggy LA and continued to smoke at least two packs of Dunhill a day.
There my father wrote for The New Yorker, struggled to find backers for his screenplay about a ménage à trois and blithely told me about his affair with Nicole, a young actress he had met in London who shared his predilection for sadomasochism. He extolled the virtues of their mutual sexual satisfaction.
‘Does Kathleen know?’ I asked. ‘Yes, and she’s not happy. Don’t tell her I told you,’ he said.
Kathleen, meanwhile, told me my father’s sexual escapades were becoming more extreme, hooking up with prostitutes for sadomasochistic activities.
By 1980 he was in hospital – and I decided I wanted to tell him how I felt before it was too late. Emboldened by a few swigs of the champagne I had dutifully brought, I tentatively broached the subject. ‘You know, Daddy, I’ve never told you this but I… I… I… love you.’ He reached out and held my hand briefly, before adding: ‘Now let’s talk about something else.’
Pouring himself another glass of champagne, he said: ‘This is beginning to sound like a bad hospital movie.’ He drained the bottle. I sat there, devastated, overwhelmed by feelings of failure.
The hospital could do no more and he returned home a few weeks later. Kathleen gave a luncheon where he looked pale and thin, but seemed in good spirits, declaring: ‘I’m the doddering old man that everybody’s waiting to snuff it.’
The image I retain of him from that afternoon is of a frail, elderly man with tubes up his nose, attached to an oxygen tank, engulfed in an oversize white Cuban shirt. It was the last time I saw my father alive.
My mother, his greatest sparring partner, survived him by eight years before dying of a heart attack. The terrible truth, which I can barely admit to myself, is that over the course of our 56-year relationship, I often wished her dead. Now that she is, it’s almost as if I willed it so.
© Tracy Tynan, 2017 Tracy, 64, now lives in California where she works as a costume designer. Her book, Wear And Tear: The Threads Of My Life, is published by Gerald Duckworth and Co on February 23, priced £18.99. Order a copy for £14.24 (25 per cent discount) until February 19 at mailbookshop. co.uk or call 0844 571 0640.