The Mail on Sunday

SIR ROY’S STILL GOING STRONG... AS HIS OWN GREATEST ADMIRER

- 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 l ooms 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 i s 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, t o which t he Queen and t he 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’.

Even the poor old Dean of St Paul’s doesn’t come up to scratch: ‘a bit of a disappoint­ment, somewhat dull in fact’.

Attending the wedding of William and Kate in 2011, Sir Roy sniffs that the Duke of York’s daughters ‘are desperatel­y in need of fashion counsellin­g’, while ‘the prize for the most inappropri­ately dressed woman from where I was sitting went to Mrs Bercow, whose plunging neckline suggested that she’d mistaken the occasion’. But he is equally happy to abuse those who will never be household names. Sitting next to a Mrs Durrant at a large dinner, he is upset by the fact that she does not know who he is. After she has described herself as ‘a corporate wife’, he writes in his diary: ‘Yes, of the most boring variety.’

For all his talk of growing old gracefully, age has not dimmed his vanity, nor his sense of competitio­n.

Much of the book is spent extolling the glories of his grand garden in Herefordsh­ire, which the similarly waspish Hardy Amies once described as ‘Mr Pooter goes to Versailles’. Sir Roy is convinced that the National Trust should take it on, and is furious when it turns down his offer – ‘a horribly wrong decision based on the malice and envy of a few’. For him it knocks spots off other, more famous gardens. ‘Visitors heap praise on it, saying again and again, “Better than Highgrove.” ’

His get-up-and-go in old age is admirable. He learns to bicycle for the first time in his 70s, and is always coming up with absurd new media projects, like ‘a fun series in which I “educate” someone. That started with the idea that I should relive the Grand Tour with Russell Brand’.

One or two of them even get made. In 2008 he hosts a reality TV show called The Diets That Time Forgot, in which ‘nine fatties’ are put on a diet and exercise regime from the 1860s, and he acts as their bossy supervisor. Inevitably, the contestant­s fall short of his own high standards. ‘Virtually none of them had any idea of table manners… Most didn’t know how to hold a knife and fork.’

Sir Roy emerges as his own best friend, always at hand to shower himself with praise. ‘I was on top form,’ he notes after appearing on Radio 4’s Midweek. ‘I sat down to a huge wave of applause,’ he reports, after a brief after-dinner speech. So let’s all praise these diaries. After all, if we don’t, then he most surely will.

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 ??  ?? MAN OF MANY GUISES: In a previous book, Sir Portrait, Sir Roy Strong reinvented himself as celebrated figures from the past, including Isaac Newton, main picture. Above: The real Sir Roy
MAN OF MANY GUISES: In a previous book, Sir Portrait, Sir Roy Strong reinvented himself as celebrated figures from the past, including Isaac Newton, main picture. Above: The real Sir Roy

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