Profiles
Tynan, Kenneth
profoundly in the interest of the country and the president-elect." Wicker writes: "There's no doubt that he almost won; it may even be that he did win." He had won the prize, "only to see it...
...The first publisher who has the brains to reissue Tynan's quotidian critiques in book form will earn a zillion dollars: with any luck, the present profiles—largely magazine rather than newspaper journalism—could sell well enough to make such a reissue possible) Why would anyone read or attend Titus Andronicus, notoriously Shakespeare's most awful play (if indeed Shakespeare wrote it), in preference to perusing Tynan's description of Vivien Leigh exacerbating its awfulness...
...How else to explain his metamorphosis into a creature that future paleontologists will know as Tynanosaurus Sex: predatory, dumb, and very extinct...
...Kelley lists the names of these alleged sources in the book's acknowledgments, yet with every day the number grows of those who, having learned they are named as sources, deny they ever talked with the author or her assistants...
...Reagan's] place in history...
...A Kelley fact is at best a factoid...
...Aged ten, I saw [The Petrified Forest] when it opened in Britain, and immediately wrote a letter to a movie magazine, begging Warner's to give us more of this untamed man with the warning eyes and K itty Kelley enjoys deep kissing with goats...
...Our initial plan was to take turns working three and two days a week in Los Angeles...
...Such fervor K enneth Peacock Tynan reversed the Two Literary Ages of Man...
...We proposed it to the Reagans in October of that year...
...from Miles Davis to Mel Brooks via Marlene Dietrich—are sane and sharp...
...TYnan's attitude was of the refreshing, old-fashioned sort visible in the 1950s New Statesman, which took it for granted, as did 1950s Britain in general, that leftists could not only construct grammatical sentences but also, on occasion, write poems that rhymed and scanned...
...combined with the equally boundless blessings of Lenny Bruce, Bertolt Brecht, proletarians, and erotic liberation...
...To take one example involving this reviewer: Discussing Ronald Reagan's final year as California governor (1974), Kelley writes: "[Mrs...
...He could be obnoxious with the best of them, but his compliments were as fiery and as imperious as his insults...
...They were noisy, joyful assemblies...
...than did any of his subordinates...
...Surely Tynan realized what excellence his most searching articles had reached...
...By the late 1970s he seemed more of a bad joke than anything else: ardently and unsuccessfully endeavoring to ascertain the Masturbation Fantasies of the Rich and Famous (with a view to publishing them in book form), ritually flogging the girls foolish enough to take up with him, and apt to sing the praises of Wilhelm Reich to any hearer who had not crossed the street first...
...No, he didn't...
...They are not crammed with aphorisms, as Tynan's theater reviews were, though his comparison of Charles Laughton's gait to that of "a salmon standing on his tail" and his account of Noel Coward "baring his teeth as if unveiling a grotesque memorial" are unforgettable...
...for what she calls, in quotation marks, "luncheons," just to make sure we'll know they weren't...
...Meanwhile, to anyone who knows the Reagans or was there, the Kelley scenario can only appear laughable...
...These bons mots were mild by Tynan's standards...
...Our firm was established as a public relations/public affairs firm, not as a political consultancy...
...I can only tell you what transpired up to that point...
...Reagan's recent memoirs...
...She describes Sinatra as coming in by a back door (find me one at the White House...
...What in Marlowe is more memorable than Tynan's summary of Marlowe's Tamburlaine as "an orgy of sadism by the light of meteors...
...At its best, it has been a story of will, and a strange grandeur—as in that final defiant wave from the helicopter on August 9, 1974...
...This view was taken seriously by some members of the press, including one in the Los Angeles Times, who may have inadvertently hit upon the book's underlying motive when he said the book "deals yet another blow to [Mr...
...yet, even as he did so, he would have been shaking his head in teeth-gritted wonder at an adolescent capable of authoritatively using words like "feuilletonists" and "imprecation...
...The typical writer begins in high school, when he scribbles effusions that would disgrace a lavatory wall, and only after years of grueling apprenticeship attains (if he is lucky) brilliance...
...Tynan started off brilliant, and only after years of grueling apprenticeship did he descend to the level of a lavatory wall...
...The wish was "not serious," we're assured, though as it happened a certain Midwestern mayor came through, and offhand one doesn't recall any stunning Times investigative pieces or Watergate-scale books on The Stolen Election of 1960...
...That is what her late cleaning lady said the window washer told her...
...from Gielgud to Greta Garbo via Graham Greene...
...In the round of interviews and parties during the initial promotion of the book, she repeatedly claimed to have conducted more than one thousand interviews for the book...
...Kelley is said to have received a $3-4 million advance from value-free Simon and Schuster, who also happen to be the publishers of Mr...
...But because the business grew, we soon were working in Los Angeles (or on the road) all week most weeks...
...TAinan's expertise did not extend to showbiz law, and thus he made less money from Oh...
...The book is so wildly overstated as to make the subject unrecognizable to those who actually know her...
...The cleaning lady told her cousin (or at least a woman claiming to be her cousin) who told me...
...and memorable, too, even if only for Alec himself, crooning in some ghastly baby language: "EVWY day my pwayers I say, I learn my lessons EVWY day"—until his opponent happened to throw double sixes, whereupon he would scream a shrill and profane imprecation in tones of apparently ungovernable fury...
...It was my debut in print...
...His fine and illuminated intellect grasped, held, and assessed...
...M ost pornophiles are cradle-tograve losers...
...erhaps it was inevitable that an English boy who could write this well should shine as a student at Oxford...
...24.95 Peter Hannaford 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991...
...quel cul Ors...
...Kennedy, moreover, had the advantage of a quite different upbringing and life experience, but still had his own calculations, maneuverings, dark spots and tasteless moments—particularly with women—to answer for...
...Matters carnal eventually dominated his thought to the virtual exclusion of other topics...
...Sinatra, nor did I interview Mrs...
...Kelley exploits any such differences in order to present a woman who is power-mad, vain, conniving, and without a single redeeming quality...
...29.95 R. J. Stove THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 39 French phrase Oh...
...Tynan had the talent to be a cradle-to-grave winner, but he chose to destroy himself as spectacularly as Yukio Mishima did, while lacking even the decisiveness and physical valor which lent a suggestion of dignity to Mishima's horrible end...
...Nineteen sixty-nine witnessed the first session of his musical Oh...
...Imagine a chain-smoker being allowed to hold court in chic restaurants these days...
...as the fruit of his prodigious youth...
...The central fact of the saga, writes Wicker admiringly, is that Richard Nixon succeeded in his "long, lonely search for the Grail...
...Reagan...
...Tynan, a leftist, never permitted his T politics to serve as an excuse for incompetent or otherwise unreadable writing...
...At one point, for instance, she drags in, for no apparent purpose, a discussion of lesbianism at Smith College back in the forties, when—pow!—she connects: "A secret but romantic 'best friends' relationship developed between Nancy Davis [Reagan] and a classmate who later became an avowed lesbian...
...Then there's a reminder of just how Nixon became, as Wicker describes him, so darned "paranoiac...
...His erotic liberation, that is...
...Kelley seems desperate to be taken as a serious historian...
...Already the stuff of folklore is Kelley's suggestion that Mrs...
...Orson Welles's Othello goaded him into his most publicized and lethal one-liner: "Citizen Coon...
...Fat chance...
...A sequel, Carte Blanche—"tat for tit," Punch derisively called it—inflicted still more fmancial damage on its creator...
...For example, Tynan died—in 1980—of emphysema caused by willful and unabashed chain-smoking...
...two bedrooms, not one...
...Reagan and Frank Sinatra were carrying on in the White House...
...Reagan originated with Mike Deaver and me over a period of several months in 1974...
...Furthermore, he repeatedly visited Franco's Spain, simply in order to relish its bullfights, on which he wrote with a bloodlust unsurpassed since Old-Bull-in-the-Afternoon Hemingway...
...From his desk at the New York Times on Election Day 1960, Wicker watched managing editor Turner Catledge pacing about and wishing aloud "that a certain midwestern mayor would steal enough votes to pull Kennedy through...
...at its lowest, it isa story of needless compromise and surrender to the drama of the moment—as in those effusive and self-abasing toasts to Mao in Peking...
...At his death, the biography of Reich with which he was going to stun mankind remained unfinished, a fact that inspired regret in absolutely no one...
...Okay, I made the story up, but only to illustrate how easy it is to mimic the research methods used by Kitty Kelley in compiling her gossip-and-venom-filled volume on the former First Lady...
...And on every other page of the Bogart dossiers there are tributes from colleagues that bring me out in a sweat of incredulous embarrassment...
...She takes a kernel of truth, embroiders it with supposition, and then draws a weird conclusion...
...As Lavinia, Vivien Leigh received the news that she is about to be ravished on her husband's corpse with little more than the mild annoyance of one who would have preferred foam rubber...
...Calcutta...
...Politics isn't supposed to bring us Grails or expiation or "peace at the center...
...But cigarettes and bullfights could not distract Tynan from expounding his deepest rent-a-crowd convictions: the boundless wickedness of censorship, South Vietnam, World War I, and capitalism...
...The relentless author remains coy: "I take the reader to the bedroom Peter Hannaford, author of The Reagans: A Political Portrait, is head of a Washington-based public affairs firm...
...As for Taman the industrious hater, he appears at his most devastating in a 1966 analysis of Humphrey Bogart written for Playboy: I have now read about eighty-three accounts of him, in magazines or books, and I still cannot find it in me to be mesmerized by Bogart the Man...
...He had won the prize, "only to see it snatched away by the kind of privileged and advantaged man who represented in his person Nixon's worst nightmares about his own inadequacy...
...Ever the optimist, he planned to recoup his losses by writing a pornographic movie script, only to discover that his own mighty efforts in effecting the permissive Utopia had ensured a lamentable oversupply of the very product he was now trying to sell...
...Let one of Tynan's wives or mistresses so much as contemplate making whoopee with someone else, and Tynan would have to be physically restrained...
...makes for compelling spectacle, but ends in messianic absurdity, like the post-assassination editorials and sermons that explained how Kennedy had "expiated" our national sins in Dallas...
...It wasn't, in other words, a manipulative Nancy Reagan who kept us from our families, but a combination of business decisions and coincidences...
...To hate phonies and prize loyalty is a fairly common attribute, even among the untalented...
...It is a mystery that London playhouses managed to attract any audiences whatever during Tynan's reviewing reign, because the performances given in the theater at an opening night were liable to furnish much less entertainment than the performances Tynan gave on the printed page the following morning...
...One's first reaction is to assume that chronological skullduggery is afoot, that an unscrupulous veteran of letters is trying to palm off a brand-new essay R. J. Stove writes for National Review, the Weekend Australian, and Quadrant...
...It is a sobering experience to read TYnan's Profiles, and not just the ones that amaze by their author's precocity...
...Would-be historian Kelley slipped when she told the Washington Times, "This is the best journalism there is...
...As we had enough capital to staff only one major office, we chose Los Angeles, where our most active client would be located...
...If anything, the politically preoccupied—not only the seekers of "the Grail" but those who chase after them with recorders and notepads—seem to be rushing in just the opposite direction...
...W hen one has been in the public eye for much of four decades, a personage like Nancy Reagan will have, no doubt, a number of people eager to redress real or imagined slights...
...Sounds like they've become the latest practitioners of the "greed" unleashed by Reaganism...
...the rasping voice...
...Her mastery of salacious innuendo will send the supermarket tabloid industry back to the drawing board...
...Too bad everyone also knows that this bit of speculation is recycled from her earlier book on Sinatra...
...Nor was this the sole aspect of Tynan's character that would incense today's Chattering Classes...
...Not bad, if I may say so myself...
...present-day pressure-groups can draw no comfort from him...
...Early or late, these tributes to the sacred monsters that peopled TYnan's imagination—from James Cagney to James Thurber...
...Yet the profiles are uniformly enriching, at times poignant: there is any amount of appropriate desolation in the pieces on Graham Greene and Tennessee Williams...
...Compare what tripe the rest of us furtively confided to notebooks at sixteen—the tenth-rate Dylan Thomas, the bargain-basement Rimbaud, the all-tooplausible attempts at out-self-pitying Sylvia Plath—with what Tynan was producing at the same age (this from an obituary of Alexander Woollcott): [He] was an all-embracing, non-respecting, joy-loving genius...
...Successful hard-drinking iconoclasts who can't act frequently express the same opinions as successful hard-drinking iconoclasts who can (such as Bogart...
...Since her scholarly text contains no footnote notations (how convenient), this documentation turns out to be forty-two pages of "notes," organized by chapter and presented in long batches containing even gamiermaterial than appears in the main body of the work...
...it is more surprising that Tynan, far from being a case of early burnout, became one of the few Oxford graduates ever to experience fame after his graduation...
...a great dramatic critic, a brilliant wit, "full of subtile flame," a teller of unmatched short stories, and the most expert of feuilletonists, he was the omnipresent pivot of literary and theatrical life in the seething, sky-scraping metropolis that is New York City...
...ne can only speculate about the author's motives...
...in July 1943, and Tynan was born April 2, 1927...
...To meet these growing demands on our time, we took an apartment—in Santa Monica, not Brentwood...
...Lady, I don't think you can tell us anything...
...Citing Kennedy's dismissive remark-Nixon doesn't know who he is and went out as he came in: no class"—Wicker writes: This was a good if not particularly original insight into Nixon from a man who clearly knew who he himself was—though not always: the Kennedy who supported Nixon against Helen Douglas, who was reluctant to condemn Joe McCarthy and who exaggerated his claims to have written Why England Slept and Profiles in Courage, may not have known himself so well as the Kennedy who ran for president in 1960 seemed to...
...its title was a labored pun on the PROFILES Kenneth Tynan/HarperCollins/437 pp...
...And how many theatergoers, recollecting the last vile updated version of a classic they were forced to sit through—Macbeth transplanted to El Salvador, say, or Congreve's The Way of the World reset in a Paris nightclub—will be able to suppress three hearty cheers at Tynan's great epigram "They were dressed to kill, and what they were dressed to kill was the play...
...True enough, but it is always a little depressing to read of a politician's quest for "the Grail," or for that matter to find religious imagery applied to any purely political pursuit...
...Not so: the Woollcott elegy appeared (in Tynan's school magazine...
...Perhaps someday our journalists will learn that, what with their deadlines and short horizons, they rarely affect the judgments of history...
...I did not go into the bedroom...
...NANCY REAGAN: THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY Kitty Kelley/Simon and Schuster/603 pp...
...The source of this disdain: Nixon had used "unseemly" tactics to beat Harriman's friend Helen Gahagan Douglas in their recent Senate race...
...I did not interview Mr...
...Endowed with tons of charm charm, a hypnotic stammer, and a prose style that at its best practically glowed in the dark, Tynan soon emerged as Britain's best drama critic since Max Beerbohm...
...It's all [documented] in the back of the book...
...1:1 door of the First Family's living quarters...
...Reagan] encouraged Michael Deaver and Peter Hannaford to leave their families in northern California and move to Los Angeles to start a political consulting firm with Reagan as their main client...
...So Deaver and Hannaford lived together during the week in a one-bedroom apartment in Brentwood and on weekends commuted to their families in the north...
...As maitre de salon, too, he was supreme...
...She would have us believe that Ronald Reagan spent his eight years in the White House as a puppet to an all-powerful wife (except when she was "lunching" with Frank Sinatra...
...Her source for the lowdown is—ah, too bad—anonymous...
...She said he said he witnessed it through the bedroom window...
...The proudest boast in his Who's Who entry was not of his palpable journalistic achievements but of his having been the first person to use the F-word on British TV...
...Read on a bit to Wicker's account of the 1968 presidential election, and there's old "Av" the highminded statesman pleading with President Johnson to contrive a "major breakthrough" in the Vietnam negotiations—any breakthrough—to push Humphrey ahead before Election Day...
...If one knew nothing about him except what these profiles reveal, one would take him for an eminently sensible pyrotechnician...
...And indeed the dramatic diplomatic initiative was duly announced, but too late...
...With characteristic originality, 'Tynan then turns the tables on every reader who assumes that the foregoing presages a hate-Bogart tract: If I seem to knock the cult of Bogart the Man, it is because I invented the cult of Bogart the Actor...
...Sure, a diligent editor might have blue-penciled a few of Tynan's wilder metaphors and shortened the occasional sentence...
...Averell Harriman, the quintessential "Franklin" type, arrives at a Georgetown party in 1951 and, spotting Nixon sitting alone in a corner, loudly announces: "I won't sit with that man...
...Calcutta!, complete with nude cast...
...That is Tynan all over...
...True, except for a few "details": The idea of managing a post-governorship program for Mr...
...W hether, in the end, all this adds up to the "sublime" life promised by Longfellow and Grandmother Milhous, to "peace at the center," one cannot say...
...Clad in insecure egg-stained pyjamas, he would preside over an animated crowd of backgammon-playing, talking and eating guests...
...little indeed was beyond his wit, the wise and jetting laughter of a corkscrew of a brain...
Vol. 24 • June 1991 • No. 6
