Ken Tynan

Ken Tynan was the most iconoclastic, irreverent, libertine, unabashedly epicurean, outrageous, combative and utterly original theatre critic of all time. He blazed a trail for other literary rebels. Ken was an aesthete who liked nothing better than to feel the shockwaves he had created reverberating back to him. It pleases me no end that my lifetime overlapped with his even if only by a few months.

Tynan was born in Birmingham, in the West Midlands of England in 1927 into a middle class household. His father was English and away on business most of the time. Ken’s mother was Irish. Birmingham was and is the second largest city in the United Kingdom. Though it is a quarter of London’s size it has not a hundredth of London’s visitors.

Ken has a stammer all his life. He had also wet his bed. He was a fan of Orson Welles. He was later to meet his idol.

The Tynan family was not short of cash. At the age of 9 he asked for 100 books for his birthday. He was bought them.

Ken was a child whose intellectual precocity was noticed early. He was never one for mindless conformity especially when it had the cheek to call itself ‘good taste.’ He was forever questioning the pieties of the British bourgeoisie. He became a teenager during the Second World War. Ken’s vocal scepticism about hurrah patriotism, the armed forces and the monarchy were not well-received.

King Edward VI School had the immense good fortune to educate Ken Tynan. It was the most notable school in the city. It was also the alma mater that produced one of Tynan’s many bugbears: Enoch Powell. Powell was a classicist, reactionary and racist. Ken was avowedly a modernist, radical and xenophile.

Ken was blessed with incredibly good looks. He had high and well-defined cheekbones. He was slender but not weedy and had thick and sensuous lips. His intelligent and liquid eyes could bore through people.

In school debates Tynan infuriated polite society by advocating for the de-criminalisation of homosexuality. Such a viewpoint let to suspicions that he might be gay himself. This was a very valiant thing of him to do. His opining was not merely epater le bourgeois.

In October 1945 Tynan went up to Magdalen College, Oxford cocksure. He was there to read English. The war had only just ended two months earlier. Tynan arrived up at his college with blond hair down to his shoulders and clad in a plum coloured suit, a lavender tie and a ruby signet ring. The general effect was staggering. After six years of wartime austerity such extravagance seemed scandalous. Ken was determined to ‘hit’ Oxford in his first week and he did! He later said, ‘’I recreated Oxford in my own image.’’ He was mordantly humourous.

Many of the other freshers were veterans of the Second World War. They were almost all ex-officers. Ken’s flamboyance seemed scandalous. How did he get all those clothes considering that clothing was rationed.

Ken was soon the talk of the town. Some dons were enamoured of him but others loathed him. He had plenty of groupies as well as admirers both male and female. 90% of undergraduates were boys. Homosexual acts were illegal but were quietly tolerated at the university so long as gay men remained discrete. Ken was bisexual and indulged his predilection for both sexes at Oxford.

Not everyone took kindly to Ken. He was overbearing, conceited and a show off. He often strode around in a purple suit. His foes once tried to throw him into the River Cherwell.

It thrilled Ken that he had come up to Magdalen precisely 80 years after his idol: Oscar Wilde. The similarities between the two are striking. Both were of mixed Irish and English stock; both were bisexual; both were snappy dressers; both were playwrights; both were socialists; both were flamboyant, both were exceptionally arrogant and both came from the provinces. Ken’s bedroom was directly above the one that Wilde had had.

C S Lewis was the most prominent don at Magdalen. Ken and Lewis struck up an unlikely friendship despite the 47 year old fusty, asexual Christian fundamentalist being poles apart from the teenaged hellraising bisexual and avowed atheist.

In 1948 Ken’s father died. Ken’s mother told him, ‘’we shall have to return your father’s body to his wife.’’

‘’His wife?’’, Ken must have ejaculated. It was only then that Ken discovered that his parents were unwed. His father had been living a double life. Ken’s father’s surname was not ‘Tynan’ but Peacock. The father had been away on ‘business’ most of the time because he was going to Warrington to be with his wife and children. Even more astonishingly, Peter Peacock was Mayor of town! He was Sir Peter no less having been knighted by the king. Ken discovered that he was an aristo!

Why ever did Ken’s parents not tell him before the age of 21 that they were unmarried? They feared that he would be ashamed. It was an era when the unnuptually solemnized were dubbed ‘bastards.’ But ashamed? Au contraire: Ken said it was the most romantic thing he had ever heard of. He was immensely proud that his parents had contrived to be together when Victorian bigotry would have kept them apart. It was not ‘do’ for a politician – particularly a Tory one – to get divorced in the 1920s. So his parents constructed an elaborate confabulation to protect their reputations.

Ken’s mother later turned mentally ill and was committed to an institution. There she died.

Labour was in the ascendant in Ken’s adolescence. He proclaimed himself to be a Labour supporter. He never joined the party. He was the archetypal champagne socialist. His much vaunted desire to abolish pauperism never extended to him giving a single penny to the needy. His money was to be spent on champagne for himself. Ken remained a leftist all his life but often voiced his disappointment that the British Labour Party lacked the courage of its convictions.

In Ken’s last year at Magdalen the play put on in the quad was The Mask of Hope. Ken played ‘Fear’. Who was in the audience? Prince Elizabeth: the future Queen Elizabeth.

When Ken went down a poem was published: ‘’the golden age is finished/ Where is the grace?/ Who can fill Ken Tynan’s place.’’

After graduation Ken was summoned for National Service. All young males had to do two years in the armed forces. The military represented everything that Ken reviled: monarchism, mindlessness, bullying, philistinism, machismo, regimentation, uniformity, brutality and oppression. Therefore, he contrived a reason to be excuse National Service. He was called to an interview. He wore gallons of women’s perfume, makeup and comported himself in a jaw droppingly camp manner. The army officer was so appalled that he wrote that Ken was morally unfit to wear the king’s uniform. Ken’s ruse had worked!

Ken produced a play but was sacked. He was briefly a theatre critic in the provinces.

Ken made his way to London. He was determined to make a name for himself in literary circles. He worked as a freelance journalist. Though Ken had had sexual relationships with other males he was not deeply emotionally attached to them. He remained bisexual all his life and had occasional encounters with men but his preference appeared to be for the opposite sex. In 1951 he wed an American novelist. They soon had a daughter.

Bertolt Brecht was the playwright of the epoch for radicals. Ken saw Mother Courage and was deeply impressed. Ken called himself a Marxists but may never have opened a page of Marx. He did not seem to have a social conscience.

It was the Observer that Ken mostly wrote for. The reviews that Ken wrote were superb in evoking the performances of actors and actresses. His work was outstandingly perceptive, lucid and droll. The lyricism and freshness of his review work was eye catching and vivid. He was the man who terrified playwrights, directors, producers and actors alike. For Ken, glib politeness was to be avoided at all costs.

In 1950 Ken published He that plays the king. It was a broadside against the theatre criticism establishment. He said they were bland, stilted and dishonest. Ken believed that British drama need to be updated. British theatre was backward looking, nostalgic, unrealistic, chintzy and ‘safe.’ The unchallenging British theatre did not reflect the enormous changes wrought since the Second War War had broken out. Ken called for plays that depicted working class life in the provinces and that tackled contentious questions.

Ken was living the high life. He attended the most glamorous parties and was always elegantly attired.

British theatre until the 1960s was censored by the Lord Chamberlain’s office. Swear words, smut, heresy, blasphemy or anything reflecting discredit on the royal family was strictly forbidden. Crudities were underlined in blue and had to excised. The BBC’s official guidelines said, ‘vulgarity it to be cut. It is not to be compromised with. It is to be cut!’

The drudgery of fatherhood was not for Ken. As his daughter recalled, Ken liked to be a friend to his children and did not always act as a father should. But by the standards of the 1950s he was remarkably indulgent and non-judgmental.

Ken became the theatre critic of the Evening Standard. He watched every production in the West End. He skewered what he saw as unimaginative and overworked productions set in country houses. Ken was a compulsive controversialist. He slaughtered every sacred cow. His literary courage was suicidal. Considering how offensive his articles were it is extraordinary he was published at all.

Going to the theatre every night and often joining the cast at an after party necessitated very late hours. Ken was a smoker since his early teens. There were then no restrictions on tobacco. He also imbibed Lucullan quantities of hard liquor. None of this was good for his health, his marriage or his relationship with his children.

The performance of Othello by Orson Welles on the London stage was hailed by many as a masterpiece. Ken just had to skewer it. His notoriously bitchy review called it ‘Citizen Coon.’ It has gone down in theatrical legend for its scorn and vitriol. Ken had learnt that it was must easier to make a name for himself by being nasty than being nice. It was also hugely more fun.

Having excoriated Orson Welles, Ken went around to Orson’s dressing room as though nothing had happened. Orson promptly told Ken to get fucked. Ken was nonplussed. Wasn’t it his job as a provocateur to be rude?

Ken was later to encapsulate his attitude in this bon mot: write heresy, pure heresy. It was a commandment from which he never deviated. What would have been like had he been born in a totalitarian society? There the cost of dissent was harsher than the harrumphing he provoked in the United Kingdom.

One of Ken’s many debilities was his low boredom threshold. He was also obsessed by seduction. Where did these demons come from? He had himself psychoanalysed in the 1960s.

Ken Tynan was an advocate of Look Back in Anger by John Osborne. It was a convention busting play that looked at a segment of British society and an issue that most playwrights dared not touch. It was the play that made the decade. Ken said the play was a ‘slap in the face for many people I had been longing to see slapped.’

Ken had always been an insatiable reader. His vocabulary stunned even fellow literati. Almost everything he wrote was sensational. Abive his typewriter he had the motto: ‘’rouse tempers, goad and lacerate; raise whirlwinds.’’ He certainly lived by this.

By 1958 Ken’s marriage was on the rocks. His experimentation with sadomascochism was galling for his wife. She said he loved whipping, caning and spanking women. Ken also asked to be spanked himself sometimes. His enormous alcohol intake and frequent infidelities were more than his long suffering wife could forgive. His wife had also had affairs were several men but had striven to keep these secret. They divorced. Ken was a self-proclaimed epicurean and therefore did not even try to resist any temptation.

Just as Ken divorced an American he went to spend some time in the United States. He spent two years in the New York City. He had begun to feel that he had had a surfeit of theatrical critiquing in London. He said 9/10ths of what he saw there was of medium standard.

Whilst in NYC Ken became friends with Gore Vidal. He came to knew everyone on Broadway.

In 1963 Ken became the literary manager who helped to found the National Theatre, London. It set up in the Old Vic. It occupied that building for years before moving to its current site. Sir Lawrence Olivier was to be in charge in the National Theatre. Ken had been publicly scornful of Olivier’s accomplishments and had savaged Olivier’s ex-wife Vivien Leigh in a review at a time when she was suffering severe mental ill-health. Though Olivier and Vivien Leigh were divorced by that time the two were still on very amicable terms. Olivier took it badly that Ken contemned him and had aggravated Vivien’s already fragile state of mind.

Notwithstanding the shakiest of starts, Olivier and Ken managed to form a rapport. Their theatrical partnership bore fruit. Ken was for once deferential. Whilst working under Olivier, Ken no longer savaged him.

Ken was the most renowned theatre critic in the world. He was more important than any playwright. He was the one reviewer that theatres feared.

Did Ken do his reader’s the service of stating his unvarnished opinion? It seems he was sometimes meaner in print than what he truly believed. He was an attention seeker.

By the mid-1960s Ken was regularly on TV. This was a major achievement when the UK had only two channels. In 1965 he was allegedly the first person to ever say fuck on British television. The BBC issued an effusive apology and it was censured by the House of Commons.

Ken called for a production of a play entitled Soldiers at the National Theatre. The play contended that British troops had committed war crimes in Germany on Churchill’s command. The play advanced the thesis that the British had assassinated the Polish Prime Minister Wladyslaw Sikorski in 1942 by blowing up his plane when it took off from Gibraltar. A play that took aim at Britain’s national hero only a few years after his death was egregiously contentious. The play was so incendiary that the theatre cancelled the play after a few productions. In an era when the Second World War was so recent it was a gallant decision of Ken’s to try to make the UK face up to the moral complexities of war. He did not want Britain to be too smug and self-laudatory.

In 1967 Ken married Kathleen Halton. The British-Canadian journalist had been his girlfriend for a few years and was 6 months pregnant when the married. Ken was elated that one of their witnesses was Marlene Dietrich: a German actress who had fled Nazism to move to the USA.

With Kathleen Halton, Ken had a daughter and a son. But he remained unpaternal.

Ken’s second marriage came under strain when he demanded fidelity from his wife whilst insisting he have the right to have sex with anyone he wanted. He also brought in hookers to take part in his carefully choreographed orgies. Ken was fixated with sex. He expostulated the theory that Queen Victoria wore no knickers at her coronation.

In 1969 Ken put on a production of his play Oh Calcutta! It is a pun on the French ‘ah quelle cul tu as’ (what an arse you have). The play involves most of the cast – both male and female – being stark naked on stage for most of the time. This caused some comment! The play was a hit. But some panned it as little more than a strip show. The play had scenes in it written by John Lennon, Samuel Becket and Edna O’Brien.

Oh Calcutta ran for 13 years and remains the longest running review of all time. It was an international smash hit. It came out just a few years after the end of theatrical censorship. Some thought it low, dreary, puerile and uninspiring.

Ken was on a quest for novelty. He was attracted to everything audacious and experimental. He loathed the cautious and the traditional.

Ken was a friend of the French-Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski. He helped him edit the script of Macbeth for Polanski’s film version of MacBeth.

In 1973 the National Theatre moved out of the Old Vic. Ken lamented that the National Theatre had become staid and only put on a play by one new playwright in ten years.

Ken was an erotomaniac. In the 1970s he tried to publish a compendium of masturbatory fantasies from many different contributors. But the book never saw the light of day. He was an outspoken defender of pornography and live sex shows.

In the 1970s Ken reverted to his teenage habit of keeping a journal. These were published after his death. He had financial difficulties and had to take any work that was offered. Ken found himself writing about what he thought were tedious topics. He was commissioned by the New Yorker to write pieces of 2500 words on Tom Stoppard, Johnny Carson and Sir Ralph Richardson.

Ken produced three plays in the 1970s but they were poorly received. The theatrical establishment had been keen to exact vengeance of the wounds it bore from Ken’s many brutal reviews.

Despite his infamously cruel reviews he was to some extent coopted by the establishment. He had been around for quite a long time. Magdalen even invited him back to give a talk.

In 1976 Ken was diagnosed with emphysema. Unbeknownst to him he had been born with a condition that greatly aggravated the damage done by tobacco.

In the 1970s Ken was dividing his time between Los Angeles, California and New York. Both were smoggy cities and exacerbated his illness. Ken Tynan was almost out of money.

By 1980 Ken was patently a dying man. On his deathbed he granted an interview in which he said, ‘’Yes, I am a bastard’’. He meant it in both senses.

In 1980 Ken died in Santa Monica. He is interred at Holywell Cemetery, Oxford, UK.

I have tried to find his grave but cannot.

Ken is a role model for the likes of Milo and other thought provoking but self-indulgent and perhaps dishonest opinion formers.