Family matters
Writers take different looks at Redgraves
The House of Redgrave: The Secret Lives of a Theatrical Dynasty
By Tim Adler Aurum
336 pages (March 1)
The Redgraves: A Family Epic
By Donald Spoto Crown Archetype
349 pages, $31
There have been quite a few books by and about the Redgraves — Michael and Vanessa both published autobiographies — and now two writers have tackled them as a family: Tim Adler, a British journalist, and Donald Spoto, an American biographer.
In The Redgraves: A Family Epic, Spoto thinks “dynasty” is “not the appropriate word to describe them,” apparently for no better reason than Vanessa objected to it. Meanwhile, in The House of Redgrave: The Secret Lives of a Theatrical Dynasty (in stores March 1, 2013), Adler thinks it is appropriate.
We tend to side with Adler on this, as for generations the Redgraves and their connections — they have married actors, producers and directors — have been a powerful force in “the business,” and have between them appeared in more than 2,600 plays, films, television and radio performances.
Adler and Spoto also differ in other ways. They both write at length about Vanessa, Lynn, Corin, Natasha and Joely, but Spoto builds his book around the patriarch Sir Michael (19081985), whom he regards as a greater actor than Olivier and Gielgud, while Adler concentrates, somewhat eccentrically, on Vanessa’s husband Tony Richardson (1928-91), who with his work at the Royal Court swept away the “Anyone for tennis?” regime of “Terry” Rattigan and “Binkie” Beaumont.
Both authors agree that adultery and homosexuality are, as Adler puts it, “twin strands wrapping around the Redgrave DNA;” Roy Redgrave, Michael’s father, apparently made at least one bigamous marriage. Adler reveals that Michael’s sexual tastes became “increasingly kinky” — he enjoyed clanking around naked inside a suit of armour, so it cut him — and that the joke in Hollywood was that Richardson only married Vanessa so he could wear her clothes.
Spoto is exhaustive in his investigation of Michael’s homosexual affairs, which seem to have been innumerable.
Noel Coward, a frequent partner, was strolling across Leicester Square one day with a friend when he noticed that the Odeon was advertising Dirk Bogarde and Michael Redgrave in The Sea Shall Not Have Them. “I don’t see why not,” he said. “Everyone else has.”
Adler’s approach is more analytical, and his first chapter covers most of the material included in Spoto’s book. The latter has difficulties with some of the nuances of British life. He has Corin boarding at a primary school, for example, and Michael taking a “baccalaureate degree” at Cambridge.
Spoto is indignant that Vanessa was for many years effectively blacklisted in America for her political opinions, while Adler is more alive to her hypocrisy in calling for armed insurrection while shopping at Harrods and sending her children to private schools.
Spoto praises Vanessa and Corin for their “deep humanitarianism” while Adler dissects their unfortunate infatuation with Gerry Healy, leader of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP), whom they continued to defend even after the party newspaper denounced him for “cruel and systematic debauchery.”
Corin, who had accepted hundreds of thousands of pounds from Colonel Gadhafi for the WRP to spy on British Jews, and once threatened to shoot his family if they stood in the way of revolution, declared that he was “neither for, nor against rape.”
So it was no wonder that Lynn, in a speech at the launch of her dieting book (she suffered for years from weight problems), said that she had many people to thank, “but most of all, I’d like to thank my sister Vanessa and my brother Corin for not being here.”
Arthur Miller may well have been right when he called Vanessa the greatest actress of our time, and Bernard Levin (who was in love with her) when he described her voice as “a golden gate opening on lapis lazuli hinges.” But Tom Stoppard also had a point when he suggested that actresses, when not performing, should be locked in wardrobes.
Both these books will be of interest to Redgrave fans, theatrical historians, and lovers of gossip, but Adler’s is much the better written, and very moving on the tragic death of Natasha, who seems to have been an exception to Stoppard’s rule.