CRAIG BROWN MEMOIR
Types And Shadows: The Roy Strong Diaries 2004-2015
Roy Strong
W&N£25 ★★★★★
Roy who? As Roy Strong admits in this, his third volume of diaries, only those beyond a certain age will recognise his name. ‘I’m just an old gent living in the country,’ he writes in 2013, ‘and you’d have to be pretty old to remember my museum era.’
His fame reached its height back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when, at the tender age of 32, he became director of the National Portrait Gallery. He then went on to be director of the Victoria & Albert Museum. He regularly appeared on radio and TV, and at all the swishest parties.
He was very much a man of his time, mixing with film stars and royalty. Never backward in coming forward, he cultivated a Jason King gaucho moustache and would pop up on telly wearing fedora hats, kipper ties and Tommy Nutter suits.
Half a century on, he recognises, or at least half-recognises, that his is no longer a name to conjure with. Publishers have turned down his proposals for a second volume of autobiography and a book about King Charles II. ‘And I’m an established author with a large following!’ he harrumphs.
After lunch with a crippled Lord Snowdon in 2005, he reflects: ‘I think that he feels “out of it”, but you are when you’re over 70. Accept it and be gracious. The pantheon has changed: be grateful that you were part of any pantheon at all.’
Yet at the same time, he is determined to keep going. He remains an inveterate party-goer, even if most of the parties are now attached to funerals and memorials. Where once he cast his unforgiving eyes on the young and the with-it, he now spends his time clocking the thinning hair and stooping bodies of ageing mourners as they shuffle up and down cathedral steps. ‘These gatherings are in a way ghastly, as everyone is getting older and older and more and more decrepit and unkempt.’
He notices every new wrinkle, every falling hair, every expanding waistline. David Starkey is ‘somewhat running to seed’. Vivienne Westwood is ‘rather raddled these days’. Elton John is ‘saddled with features that aren’t that good and now he’s in his 60s he’s showing it a bit’. Carla Powell, partygoing wife of Margaret Thatcher’s old adviser Charles, may be ‘all shimmer and glamour but you can’t do anything about withered hands’.
In the street, Sir Roy glimpses ‘the shadowy bent and decrepit figure of Norman St John-Stevas climbing on to another bus’.
Even death proves no refuge from his strictures. On April 19, 2013, Patricia Routledge rings to tell him that the theatre director Patrick Garland has died. Sir Roy immediately takes to his diary. ‘He didn’t wear well with age, being very pretty when young but all that had long gone.’
The shadow of mortality looms over these diaries, not least because Sir Roy’s beloved wife of 32 years, the set designer Julia Trevelyan Oman, died in 2003, three months before he embarked on this present volume. His devotion to her shines through, and the book is peppered with his sudden attacks of grief. Working alone in the garden they created together, he looks at the swathes of snowdrops and aconites, and is ‘overcome with memories of Julia’. He recalls walking back to his London flat after a swanky dinner at the German Embassy. ‘Suddenly I was seized with compulsive grief and tears en route. Still howling, I got into the flat and rested my head on a wall, clinging to it with the tears falling. Oh God, how I miss her.’
These are rare glimpses into the interior world of Sir Roy, who, for the most part, is content to play along with the camp, effete, catty persona he constructed for himself back in his heyday.
Of the marriage itself – the subject of much gossip and speculation among both his friends and his enemies – he is rather more guarded. ‘I did fall in love at thirty-five with Julia and to me our marriage was sacred and fulfilled in every sense. I can write with truth that I have never been to bed with a man but, yes, I have with a woman. But sex was never the driving force of that marriage, although it was certainly part of it.’
As that passage suggests, this is very much a public diary, written with publication in mind. Moments of personal revelation are few and far between.
In his last volume he wrote candidly of the death of his dissolute and shambolic brother Brian, a compulsive liar who ‘exerted power by brute force’ and was in and out of prison. ‘It was as if a weight, a curse, a threat had at last been taken away from me… Looking back, the whole of my life has been fleeing that family, struggling to detach myself, to get far enough away to make a life and a home full of the old-fashioned virtues I was never surrounded with as a child.’
For all his armoury of cattery and campery, Sir Roy emerges as a stoical, old-fashioned figure; he eschews self-pity, preferring to put his best foot forward. Are all his dismissive attacks on others a throwback to his early years, when he was forced to fend off bullies? A striking number of the snobbish insults he delivers are exactly the sort of thing others would once have directed at him, the geeky son of a commercial traveller.
The Countess of Wessex is ‘a suburban girl made good’, and Princess Anne’s children ‘look like something from an estate of 1920s semis’. Meeting J.K. Rowling, ‘I told her that I hadn’t read a thing she’d written’.
If he can combine a name-drop with an insult, then so much the better. ‘I was asked to a dinner by the Archbishop of Canterbury, to which the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were coming,’ a 2007 diary entry begins. At that same dinner, he peers beadily at the Queen and concludes that she ‘must have done her own make-up, for her face was a mass of pink powder’.
Camilla is ‘a slightly hunched, short figure, like the wife of a public school headmaster’. Charles has ‘the face of tragedy, haunted, lined and browbeaten… he’s not worn well’.