My father’s ‘cure’ for me being gay? Jacqueline Bisset!
After all (he assured me) a similar gambit worked for Prince Charles ...
BOOK OF
THE WEEK KID GLOVES: A VOYAGE ROUND MY FATHER
BRIAN VINER
(Particular Books £16.99)
On new Year’s eve 1977, novelist Adam Mars- Jones told his father he was gay. He was 27 at the time, so hardly a tremulous teenager. But, still, he was full of apprehension — not least because his father, High Court judge Sir william Mars- Jones, was practically the embodiment of the hidebound, homophobic establishment. A decade earlier, he had opposed the Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalised homosexuality.
Sir william did not explode with horror. He went to bed, saying everything would be all right. But what he meant by this, it emerged the next day, was that he felt certain his middle son could be cured of these regrettable predilections by being initiated into the joys of natural love by an older woman.
That, he said mysteriously, had ‘done the trick’ for Prince Charles, whom he had met, and whose investiture as Prince of wales he had, as a distinguished welshman, attended.
‘That was his first gambit, the Princely Parallel,’ writes Mars- Jones in this glorious memoir — funny and poignant in equal measure — of life with his late father.
‘There were others over the next few days: the Auntly Ambush, the Bisexual Fork, the Bisset Surprise.’ The ‘Ambush’ was the order to phone old aunt Mary, a stern welsh Congregationalist, to tell her the news, in the hope that such an appalling prospect might shock Adam into a life of heterosexuality.
THe next ploy, the ‘Bisexual Fork’, was — rather than a reference to cutlery — a sly bit of courtroom sleight of logic. One day, Sir william shocked his son by admitting that perhaps the only reason he himself was heterosexual was that all his experiences to date had been with women.
Perhaps Sir william could yet — ‘wouldn’t you agree’ — find himself attracted to a man? If that were so, was there any reason why the equation couldn’t work in reverse, if his son were to just give women a try?
Sir william’s final throw of the dice was to point out that they had once been to the cinema together to see a film starring the actress Jacqueline Bisset and that, as he recalled it, his son had played with himself whenever she had appeared on screen, plainly demonstrating that he was healthily attracted to the opposite sex.
It must have perplexed one of the finest legal minds of his generation that none of this reasoning worked.
Adam stayed gay and Sir william had to cope as best he could, summoning up all his magnanimity when his son’s 26-year-old lover died of Aids to say, stiffly, over the phone: ‘I was sorry to hear about Michael. You’ve been a good friend to him . . . ’ Death looms large in this story. After Adam’s mother died of lung cancer, ‘something she did with self- effacing briskness in little more than a month’ in 1998, Sir william needed a live-in companion.
That fine mind was showing the early stages of dementia, which Mars- Jones describes elegantly as a state closer to withdrawal than delusion.
A man who’d never shied from sharing his robust opinions now followed conversations ‘without taking an active part, in the time-honoured, head-swivelling fashion of the tennis spectator, happy to watch the interplay with no presumptuous thought of raising a racket himself’.
Adam moved into his father’s flat, administering the kind of love that he had certainly never received.
Sir william died a year later, and this is probably not the posthumous literary tribute he would have liked. Yet for all the gentle fun Mars- Jones pokes at the old man, it is full of respect.
Sir william did some important things in his 83 years. He helped prosecute the Moors Murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, and, in 1986, passed the longest single sentence ever imposed in this country — 45 years — on nezar Hindawi, for attempting to blow up an Israeli plane by planting a bomb in his pregnant girlfriend’s luggage. Less
momentously, he once defended a man accused of sheep -stealing, and was introduced by the prosecution as ‘ my learned friend, Mr Ma-a-a-a-s- Jones’.
It was an affectionate but mischievous swipe, for the double barrel was an affectation — the Mars had been added to the surname Jones because it appeared on a locomotive name - plate that had been an exhibit in a case Sir William successfully argued.
It’s the small details, not the big , that make this book such a treat. Sir William, from a modest background in North W ales, was a monumental egotist and snob, who once, on the phone to American Express, negotiated how many of his honorifics — MBE, LLB and so on — could be squeezed on to his gold card.
He never apologised after family rows, incensing his sons during their teenage years by choosing his words with forensic, lawyerly care, making sure not to admit liability, if needs be by citing amnesia.
EXHIBIT A: ‘Sheila [his wife] tells me that you were upset by something I said last night . . . Idon’t remember what it was, but all I can say is . . . you can be very annoying.’
Other tendencies were less in keeping with the image of a crusty old judge. He was an incorrigible flirt, for example, referring to women he admired as ‘sparklers’.
He was also a fervent fan of The Beatles, insisting on buying his sons all the albums as soon as they came out — at least until the White Album in 1968, which ‘ displeased’ him with its experimentation.
Less improbably, given his mastery of language, he eschewed swearwords and would describe any man who was free with expletives as ‘a four letter feller’. But there was no such moderation in his alcoholic intake, especially after he retired, and Mars - Jones employs all his own mastery of language to describe his father’s arrival home after a skinful with his friends at Gray’s Inn.
‘ Sometimes, he would remain roughly vertical until he reached the bedroom, then topple slowly sideways without distress to the floor , perhaps pulling some bedclothes with him in what was more a slide than a fall, a controlled descent with a touch of the maladroit grace of the performers he most admired — Max W all, Tommy Cooper, Ralph Richardson.’
Above all, Sir W illiam was a man of contradictions, who abhorred racism as vehemently as he loathed homosexuality and loved to see his family enjoying themselves — as long as it was on his narrow terms.
He was much more than a great lawyer and, indeed, much less. W ith this book — its subtitle borrowed from another famous lawyer’s filial reflections, John Mortimer’s 1963 play — his son has done him full justice.