Sunday 13 July 2014

'The minute they got close, he ran'

Roger Lewis reviews Otherwise Engaged: the Life of Alan Bates by Donald Spoto

Charm - that fake brand of niceness - is a quality Alan Bates possessed. "He was one of those people everyone wanted to do things for," an associate told Donald Spoto. "He never seemed to have to make any effort." "Use people - use people!" was his guiding principle, according to his brother. How else could he have been so transcendent in those Simon Gray plays? And only a maestro could see off a long-term lover by announcing: "I really must dash to catch a performance of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet."

Bates, Spoto was told, "saves all his temperament for his acting". I met him once over Sally Lunn's buns in Bath. I recall his Halloween pumpkin head, carefully carved. He was vain about his hair - thick black tendrils, steamed and coiffed. He was as big-boned and barrel-chested as those yeoman farmers from Hardy that he impersonated so well. His hobby was restoring dry-stone walls. I didn't notice he was a homosexual, so he'd have judged our encounter a success.

We learn in this harrowing biography that Bates, his attitudes formed by a deeply conservative Baptist background in Derbyshire, dreaded exposure. During his affair with Nickolas Grace, a fellow actor, Bates made him hide under the back seat if they were travelling in a car.

Bates's father was a cellist of professional standard but worked as an insurance salesman and builder's clerk. He sank into clinical depression. Bates's mother was "slightly imperious, stately as a galleon". She gave piano and elocution lessons and had genteel pretensions. "Sometimes we felt suffocated," Bates's surviving siblings have confessed. When he was appearing on Broadway she'd send parcels of cakes.

"I was attracted to the glamour and the famous people," Bates was to recall of the theatre. Once launched in London, he'd write home excitedly of lunches with Noël Coward and Zsa Zsa Gabor. Bates was in The Entertainer with Laurence Olivier, and in the first production of Look Back in Anger as Cliff, Jimmy Porter's passive chum. "He conveyed a touching sensitivity," Spoto says, "a kind of tense tranquillity."

Less tranquil was The Caretaker, "a poetic exploration of the desire to dominate". Bates was in a relationship with Peter Wyngarde, known to the profession as Petunia Winegum, who as Petruchio put a banana down his tights during matinées. The liaison was a psychologically damaging, Pinter-style situation.

Bates would never again be so beholden. "The minute someone got too close to him, he ran," reports the playwright and director Arthur Laurents. "I'm going to have to ask you to leave," he told a partner of a decade's standing. "It's been very nice to have known you. I'm sure I'll see you around in London," he told a desolate Grace.

Alongside his furtive homosexuality there were always "social flirtations" which avoided "carnal compensations". When Princess Margaret was rebuffed, it is rumoured, she personally blocked Bates's knighthood. Quite the worst thing Bates did was to get married for the sake of his public image to the moody and anorexic Victoria Ward, who'd been raised by Barnardo's and descended into outright madness.

When she gave birth to twins, he moved her to a house in Hampstead (he owned five properties in London) where her "utter contempt for all accepted values" meant that nobody washed. She wouldn't put the heating on and the children were often found in sleeping bags "shaking with cold". She denied them access to doctors and dentists and the laundry was never done. Dirty clothes littered the floors, the fridge contained rotting food, and she'd cook only beans or cabbage. It amounted to criminal negligence. Why did Bates fail to intervene?

One of his sons got into drugs and died aged 19 of a heroin overdose in a public toilet. Victoria herself wasted away, getting to look like "a photo of a starving African child". She was 52 when she was found dead in a hotel. "Her body is in a chronic state of deterioration," commented the pathologist.

Bates's own end, too, was tragic. He'd had flings with the skater John Curry and (not mentioned by Spoto) the actor Ian Charleson, who both died of Aids. Bates's chronic symptoms included fluctuating weight, diabetes, "a nagging respiratory infection", "a nagging headache", perspiration, an arthritic hip, gastric distress, acid reflux, and "a deep lassitude".

His appearance altered until not even waiters at The Ivy recognised him. Inoperable pancreatic cancer and a stroke then came along and he expired in December 2003. He is buried with his son and wife in Derbyshire.

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