The brutal true story behind Benedict’s drink and drug-soaked new drama
Sherlock it isn’t. Viewers will see a very different Benedict Cumberbatch tonight in a darkly tragicomic study of aristocratic cruelty
DISSOLUTE, drug- addled, drunk, Patrick Melrose lurches across the penthouse suite of a Manhattan hotel and claws at the glass. ‘What’s the point of a window if you can’t jump out of it,’ he rages, struggling to focus on the traffic hundreds of feet below. For his next trick, Melrose, already high on a cocktail of heroin, cocaine, Quaalude ‘downers’, bourbon, Valium, wine and enough martinis to slay an elephant, cooks up a fix in a hotel spoon and injects a massive overdose in an attempt to end it all – yet somehow manages to wake up among the wreckage of his room the following day.
Welcome to the unsavoury and barely believable world of heart-throb actor Benedict Cumberbatch and his strange new character.
Unsettling, comic and darkly glamorous, the new drama is hardly the pipe-and-slippers comfort viewing you’d expect from Sunday night television. Think Cumberbatch’s Sherlock with added sex appeal and venom – plus pharmaceuticals.
Wealthy, sharp- tongued, charming, Patrick Melrose spends five compelling episodes mired in drugs, debauchery and family demons, and the result is a study in upper-class cruelty delivered with both stinging wit and sadness.
Laughably improbable as it might seem, Patrick Melrose is based on a reality every bit as outrageous as the events portrayed on screen – and that is the extraordinary story of author Edward St Aubyn. When we see Cumberbatch’s Melrose
It is a world where kindnesses were despised
sweating profusely, gripped by horrifying flashbacks, we could well be watching Teddy St Aubyn struggling with his past. Like his character Melrose, St Aubyn had been repeatedly raped as a child by his domineering father before lurching into a lost decade of drug abuse and multiple suicide attempts. It was only by committing it to paper and writing his widely admired novels that he could turn his life around.
Edward St Aubyn, now 58, hardly seemed destined for such a troubled existence, indeed by most standards he was born with a gilded spoon in his mouth.
His father, Roger, was a former Hussars officer with impeccable haute bourgeois credentials. There was an earldom in his extended family, and a forebear who’d come over with the Conqueror.
Teddy’s American mother Lorna – reputedly born as Cole Porter played the piano in the room next door – was an heiress to a vast Ohio fortune, even if it was based on pig fat. Self-obsessed and well connected, she had a Scottish grandfather who was a close friend of the Duke of Windsor.
Even the physical circumstances of Teddy’s upbringing seemed propitious. Soon after his birth, the family moved to the sunshine of Provence, where, thanks to Lorna’s wealth, they bought Le Plan, a sprawling, beautiful, 80-acre estate near Toulon which included a 17th Century convent, chapel, and a clump of seven houses, all with stunning views of the mountains.
And it was in that seemingly perfect environment that the full horror of the St Aubyn family was played out.
Roger, who had trained as a doctor, was a frustrated concert pianist, a restless, overbearing snob and, much, much worse – a sadistic bully who sodomised his son from the age of three.
It is a world, portrayed in his first Melrose book, where Teddy was bullied, belittled and abused; where his frustrated father would attack his terrified mother in drunken psychotic rages; where feelings were pitilessly suppressed and repressed. It is a world where kindnesses were despised and conventions trampled.
Visitors to Le Plan included the family of psychologist and broadcaster Oliver James, who would become a close friend.
In one telling anecdote, James r e members an eight- year- old Teddy reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica before going to bed.
‘I said: “What on earth are you doing?”,’ James recalled, and Teddy replied: ‘I have to read six or seven entries of the Encyclopaedia Britannica every night, and my father is going to test me in the morning.’
Nick Ayer, son of the philosopher A J Ayer, was another to experience t he poisonous at mosphere of Le Plan, although for him it was nothing new.
‘ My parents were vile to one another – all my friends’ parents were vile to one another,’ he said. ‘So Lorna and Roger being vile to one another was no different.’
The young Edward found refuge in the woods, vineyards, orchards and ponds of the estate, and it was there he learned to survive by distancing himself emotionally – a distance some still interpret as a lofty hauteur. One of his female friends told me recently: ‘I have this image of him sniggering with his clever friends about how thick I am.
‘ I think he values intelligence over everything else.’
It seems there was no protection from his mother, Lorna, who eventually divorced Roger in 1968. She professed to be a spiritual person devoted to alternative wisdom, yet she turned a blind eye to the abuse of her son, living instead in a protective bubble of denial.
When, at the age of 31, he finally told her that Roger had raped him, she deflected the conversation with a dismissive: ‘Me, too…’
It had been left to the child himself to stand up to his predatory father. St Aubyn has described how at the age of eight he brought the sexual abuse to a stop in a hotel bedroom. ‘I thought, “He’ll probably kill me but I can’t… I’m going to stop him if I can,” ’ he said.
Adopting a boxer’s pose, he told his f at her: ‘ I don’t want to do that anymore. ’ In the aftermath of the confrontation, his father ‘collapsed’.
The brave act of saying ‘I don’t want to’ had destroyed the abuser’s power and it was more in pity than anger that, as time went by, Teddy watched the old tyrant slip into decrepitude in the weed-choked modern villa that became his last home until his death in 1985. ‘It was spooky,’ Teddy recalled. ‘Poverty and dereliction, and selfneglect, and nobody ever visiting. My father was too depressed to speak, a lot of the time, and if he did he talked about suicide. In a way, he was showing me what I had done to him, by refusing to continue to be abused. ‘He was reproaching me, saying, “Look what you’ve reduced me to – from being this master sadist, I’m now this ruin.” ’ From France, 11-year-old Teddy was sent to Westminster School. A disturbed, defensive, difficult child, who by his mid- teens was already ‘speedballing’ – injecting heroin and cocaine. Oliver James has recalled that he once saw his friend teaching others how to do it, the t first steps on a journey of self- s loathing and extraordinary n self-destruction, although with w it came great charisma. ‘He’s a tricky character,’ said a male m friend. ‘But when he shows an interest in you, he kind of devours you with w his big brown eyes. It’s very ve flattering.’ At A 16, Teddy left Westminster and an headed for Paris then New York, Yo commencing a 12- year narcotics na binge on his way to several se suicide attempts. At f i rst he l i ved i n squalid flea-pits, but when at the age of 18 he inherited several million dollars, Teddy moved to the luxurious Pierre Hotel overlooking Cen
tral Park, and spent $5,000 a week on drugs.
Some instinct for self-preservation led him to move to England, where he bought a flat and then a house. He enrolled at a London crammer and won a place to read English at Keble College.
Urbane, with hooded eyes and the air of a fallen angel, he cut an exotic figure at Oxford, murmuring his bons mots and put-downs through crushed vowels and barely mobile lips.
Constantly overdosing, he later described heroin as ‘the perfect halfway house between l i ving and suicide’. ‘ Girls would throw themselves at Teddy,’ says a university contemporary, who describes how a fellow student, now a grande dame of fashion, used to sleep across his doorway like a faithful pet. Another comments: ‘ He’s alert to every nuance of life’s comedies and tragedies – a ruthless observer.’
With Oxford and the wider world goi ng t hrough a ‘ Brideshead moment’ – remember Anthony Andrews and Aloysius the bear – St Aubyn was perfectly placed.
‘ He was like a throwback to Auden and the 1930s,’ the friend continues. ‘Always dressed impeccably in Savile Row suits, exuding a dark glamour.’
He was part of a year group that included Hugh Grant and Nigella Lawson. He took heroin with t he writer Will Self – a friendship that has now cooled – and says he snorted some secreted in a Biro tube while taking his final exams, which he left after 40 minutes.
After graduating from Oxford in 1982 with a stylishly awful ‘ pass’, he had enough money to ensure he never needed to consider anything so mundane as a profession, although he occasionally wrote caustic pieces for Tina Brown’s Tatler.
And so, despite feigned attempts to kick his habit, he pursued his downward spiral through young adulthood – until a Damascene episode in 1985 where Teddy found himself visiting New York to bring home the ashes of the father who had tormented him.
The horror of that trip is related in tonight’s first episode of Patrick Melrose on Sky Atlantic.
Cumberbatch is seen careering around New York, lurching from backstreet drug dens to an uptown gentleman’s club, where he slurs addled insults at his father’s old chums, and upmarket restaurants where he snarkily berates the staff, offends fellow diners and makes a clumsy, unsuccessful and barely coherent pass at a beautiful blonde.
In reality, the death of his father had caused something to click in Teddy’s head. He knew he had to write.
He went into therapy with Oliver James’s psychoanalyst father and entered into a brief marriage with his student crush, Nicola Shulman, the sister of the former Vogue editor, Alexandra.
By 1988, he had kicked the drugs – he was 28 years old. If booze was now his crutch of choice, it was something that in time he learned to moderate.
Most of all, he spent four years feverishly writing what was to become his first novel, Never Mind, which was published in 1992, and Bad News, that same year.
He has said he made a pact with himself either to write or to take his own life.
He scribbled in long-hand, tortuously reworking every page, and wrapped himself in towels because the exertion – and the shame – made him sweat so much. Ana Corbero, Spanish beauty and artist, was Teddy’s girlfriend after he split from Shulman, and gave him the confidence and support to get Never Mind – the most painful to write – down on paper.
Herself a victim of sexual abuse, they were kindred spirits.
‘Of course, I was willing to type the whole book out for him and to call him out on his “writer’s block”
‘He devours you with his big brown eyes’
A pact to either write... or to take his own life
and to cajole him out of it by any means,’ she said a few days ago.
‘I felt the story needed to be told, and I thought he would tell it well. And he did!
‘We had lunch a couple of months back, after not seeing each other for decades, and it was familiar and somehow healing. We were older and even more bruised.
‘I guess we were victims of our history, like our own families.’
St Aubyn turned out to be a rare talent, skewering the vapid, brittle world in which he was raised, his writing shot through with psychological insight. Literary grandee Francis Wyndham saw in him a talent of genius.
Some Hope, in 1994, was originally intended as the last of a Melrose trilogy. Ending in a qualified redemption for Patrick, and no doubt reflecting the author’s own hard- won equilibrium, the book has as i ts centrepiece a country-house ball attended by the late Princess Margaret.
A breathtakingly funny attack on social climbing and entitlement, with a poisonous take-down of the princess, Some Hope should have won the Man Booker Prize.
But St Aubyn would have to write three more novels before he was nominated.
Indeed, until he first discussed the autobiographical element of his work with a journalist – with me, actually – his novels had not attracted the attention they deserved. Since then, his true story has inevitably and understandably added a layer of interest to his work and a certain frisson.
But even then, his chaotic family life continued to haunt him. Before her death, Lorna wanted his beloved Le Plan to become a New Age retreat, before finally agreeing to sell it to Teddy.
Today, Edward St Aubyn lives alone in a house in London and has two children by two separate mothers. Like his parents, he is impeccably well connected – Mick Jagger is a friend, as are various Shand-Kydds and Guinnesses. He is godfather to one of Earl Spencer’s children.
Fatherhood, he says, has been ‘massively enjoyable and redemptive. I have children who are happy, and we all love each other’.
‘It’s incredible and so unexpected. I mean, I’ve had to make the whole parenting thing up, with help from their mothers.’
Watching the Sky Atlantic series, it’s impossible not to feel that the author, in his younger days, was a much more elegant and exotic package than even a Cumberbatch tour-de-force manages to portray.
However, he recently j oked: ‘After 25 years of being asked if I’m Patrick Melrose, it is a huge relief to say, “No, Benedict Cumberbatch is.” ’