I knock on the front door. The docklands home of Ian McKellen is in a terrace, on a road with double yellow lines either side, and through which hardly more than one car can pass at a time. The blue door opens as if by itself onto a view of books on shelves. No sight of McK.
‘Come in! I’ll be with you in a moment,’ a familiar voice calls out. At a glance the house is narrow, with a long room running its length to a full-width window with a step or two up to a riverside balcony and a bust of Shakespeare. It is on five floors, a lower floor, a ground floor and bedroom storeys. Elegant with stripped wood, the aura is Victorian. It resembles a cabin; reverse the house through ninety degrees, and I can well imagine it as the below-deck of a royal river-boat: like Cleopatra’s barge, the burnished throne which burns on the water.
There’s a clump, clump, clump behind me from heavy shoes descending a wooden staircase.
We hug. We are like family, friends from Cambridge, but haven’t seen each other for a few years. I have written to him to request an interview. Although I have known McKellen since 1958, I am here for the first time on a mission, that of would-be chronicler or interviewer.
A moment of uncertainty. My eyes move to the window. The image I have is hardly that of ‘a sweet Thames that runs softly while I end my song,’ for there’s a sight of dark water. I think of the strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable – T. S. Eliot’s Thames. The vibes are of Shakespeare and Eliot, not inappropriately given McKellen’s lifelong love affair with W.S.
‘I know,’ McKellen says, as if picking up my sense of the view. On this cold grey March day this is something of an anticlimax. Gulls wheel in the air above. Downriver on one side is Greenwich, while on the other we just get a glimpse of Tower Bridge. We speak briefly of the sheer expanse of water and the industrial landscape on the opposite bank.
As if to grace the river with beauty he has since acquired an Antony Gormley sculpture of the human body similar to Gormley’s Crosby Beach sculptures in Liverpool, which stands on the tidal beach below.
We are about the same height, five foot eleven, but he is more solidly built than me, so probably heavier, and strong in physique with a well-toned skin. He was very good-looking at Cambridge, where most of us never thought of him as gay, or didn’t really think about it at all, but now his looks have a rugged authority, encrusting still a basic handsome and youthful presence. His shoes have iron heels. His jeans are well worn and have holes and glitter adorning them. He sports a heavy-studded metal belt, and an open-neck white shirt, which reveals his chest, a slight butch or Gothic feel to the image. He exudes an easy-going healthiness. It’s a real power-dressing display, far from the duffel-coats of his younger self.
A dentist’s chair, a favourite personal effect, a friend tells me, has accompanied him from his previous home in Camberwell. I look around. A not very pleasant but brief thought flashes through my mind – of Laurence Olivier playing the Nazi dentist Szell in Marathon Man with Dustin Hoffman as his victim. I don’t ask.
‘I’ll make coffee. How do you take it?’
‘Black with a dash of cold milk. Thanks.’ He departs to the mauve kitchen where there’s a black marble counter. I am by the balcony and climb the steps, looking over at the low-tide pebbles. He once found stranded there an animal corpse, hairless, waterlogged and bloated. He asked himself if it was a calf or a sheep or a goat or a dog. He stared at it until the tide came in. And for the next twenty-four hours he was off his food. He could not face meat after this and became vegetarian.
Still, this is not the time to bring up an unidentifiable, decomposing body on the beach. But with Ian there is always a degree of darkness as well as light. ‘Uncomfortable’ is how a close friend has called him, but had they meant that he was uncomfortable in himself, or that this was how he made you feel?
We sit down to coffee. We would start with Cambridge. This was his first step on the ladder to professionalism. I am at once aware in him of a difference that I hadn’t thought of before, a difference from so many of the leading lights there at the same time, among them Julian Pettifer, Clive Swift, David Rowe-Beddoe, John Drummond, Antony Arlidge, John Tusa, John Tydeman, to name but a few.
‘If I may start with a leading question. Why did you feel so different from most others who were up at Cambridge?’ I mention some of the names.
‘Yes, you are right. I suppose it was my age. I was nineteen. Just at that age one year made a big difference.’
It was National Service. They were two years older. Drummond had been in the navy, learning Russian, John Tusa a Royal Artillery officer in Germany, Tydeman an Artillery officer in Malaya, Rowe-Beddoe a lieutenant in the navy, Tony Arlidge an RASC corporal in the Army Legal Service in Berkeley Square – me a sergeant in Brighton in the Education Corps.
‘They’d seen the world. I was away from home for the first time, with a foolish accent. Rowe-Beddoe and Tydey – they were more mature, so much more mature…’ Is this the characteristic self-put-down of the celebrity?
I look at the face, which is a narrative in itself. The eyes engage one with a quizzical and somewhat defensive look, but when I look back inquiringly, this is quickly replaced by a smile. The eyes are surrounded by wrinkles that change with and emphasise each mood. One feels there is an enormous well behind, filled with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking, but their surface is sparkling with the present, like the outer leaves of a vast tree. Who is this now? Which from the gallery of characters he has been? Not hard to guess. Gandalf.
A moment later there is shadow, a queer look comes into the eyes, a kind of wash, as if the deep wells are covered over. This for a moment could be Ian McKellen at twenty, playing Justice Shallow in Henry IV Part 2, when I acted in the same production for the Marlowe Society at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge. The blue eyes are the same, or nearly the same, at forty, fifty, in the various roles on stage or on film, and will be the same at eighty on stage or in the dressing room, on screen or off, recorded by private individuals by phone, camera, by the press … There’s the piercing power stare of Magneto, the envious certainty of Iago spinning his lies to make Othello jealous …
‘I didn’t really know who I was – a closeted gay. Cambridge was great for me … all the many parts I had played there, as I loved for the first time going out in public and displaying my emotions. I enjoyed disguising myself as a closeted gay boy.’
He relaxes to enumerate the virtues of being an actor at Cambridge among so many talented people, and to point out that ‘it was not about being the best. The point is that the playwrights have written the best plays, and it was a great privilege to do them with your friends and colleagues.’ Memories of performances and the virtues and strengths of that great period flow easily.
The face and person change all the time yet never change. It is no one and yet everyone. He may claim, as he has, that he feels on his own, a bit of an orphan. No partner, no family, living by himself.
‘For a good reason,’ I say to him, ‘we have been called a mafia, a family.’
‘Yes, I suppose we were a mafia, something like that. You could call it a mafia…’
Ian told me, ‘I’m not going to get involved in any book.’
He expressed reluctance to be made the subject of a book when I broached the idea early in 2017. He had already told me five years before about Derek Jacobi’s As Luck Would Have It. ‘I can’t understand why he wanted to do it.’ ‘I don’t want to sound unkind, but it would be impossible. I couldn’t work with you, I would interfere with everything you wrote. Look … I’ve only got a few years left, and I’m not going to get involved in interviews. When I was asked to write my autobiography, the publishers sent me a three-page letter listing the people they wanted me to talk to, and where they wanted me to agree to go around the world to be interviewed. I just couldn’t do it. I just could not go around talking about myself.’ Nevertheless, with the publishers Hodder and Stoughton, he had gone quite far down the road, accepting an advance, which he returned.
‘If I did it with you, I’d be wasting your time, my time, correcting and disputing things, and changing things. I don’t want to … I haven’t got the time to write it myself … I can’t of course stop you … Write it after I’m dead. Go and find someone else … It would be too painful, writing about myself.’
Later, he related to the Sunday Times, ‘Edna O’Brien said to me –’ he imitates the writer’s soft Irish burr, does a kindly tilt of the head – ‘“Now, you write it for your mother,” who died when I was twelve, “and you’ll tell her what’s been going on.” But it was a big block, a big difficulty.’
I rather agree with him that he is not the right kind of person to do it himself, although I did not believe that he would be difficult to work with.
And so we ended, with him friendly but regretful: he reaffirmed he could not stop me doing this. The conversation might continue another time. He has not read the three books written about him. A previous subject of mine, Alec Guinness, the subject of my books Master of Disguise and The Unknown, liked to quote A. E. Housman’s, ‘Worse than the practice of writing books about living men is the conduct of living men supervising such books.’ I take consolation from this. As for delay, there is Dr Johnson’s famous exhortation in The Rambler: ‘If a life be delayed till interest and envy are at an end, we may hope for impartiality, but must expect little intelligence; for the incidents which give rise to biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory.’
Ian has a very matter-of-fact, grounded documentary side of his mind. I am not surprised this had drawn him before he left school to consider becoming a journalist. Although repeatedly approached to write about himself, he says he failed to raise any enthusiasm, although he has penned many biographical articles and opinion pieces. He has always been curious about life and people, and about himself and his own reactions, and while sometimes narrow in his focus he stands up for, believes in truth, and the liberating value of truth. He has, too, the essential quality of a good journalist, of listening and trying to be fair, which is why he is so often on an excellent rapport with first-class journalists and critics such as Michael Billington, Michael Coveney, Bryan Appleyard, John Lahr and many others who have interviewed him at considerable length and more than once. As a good journalist does, he takes every question seriously.
In Stratford when playing less demanding roles in the late seventies, he wrote a couple of chapters, and observed at the time, ‘I suppose I could take the weary old pages out and see what they are like. I wonder if it is worth spending two years on a book which disappears into the remainder sales within three months of publication.’
In the autumn of 2014, after his friend Derek Jacobi’s As Luck Would Have It was published, Ian’s agent started wooing publishers with a simple paragraph proposal. In June 2015 Richard Brooks reported in the Sunday Times: ‘The actor Sir Ian McKellen has turned a one paragraph outline of his proposed memoirs into a payday worth close to £1m. After lengthy negotiations involving several publishers, McKellen, 76, had sold the as-yet-unwritten book to Hachette.’
As Ian explained to me, he actually did more than reject the offer straight away. He cleared his schedule to do the task, as he also told the unlikely-named Boudicca Fox-Leonard in the Telegraph, ‘only to realise he didn’t want to do it’. For after his lifetime of telling stories this was one role he did not fancy.
He gave back the £1.2m advance, as it had apparently become, rather than reflect on his life, telling Boudicca he could not remember most of it. ‘It didn’t seem very interesting to me. I didn’t know who I was writing it for. I certainly wasn’t writing it for myself. I don’t want to go on a voyage of discovery.’
After our 2006 meeting I had found myself drawn into exploring and investigating McKellen’s life, challenged to show this complicated and complex man in all shades and colours, yes, with drawbacks and faults, but also extraordinary virtues and strengths. The confrontation between Guildenstern and Hamlet in Act Three, Scene Two of Hamlet is the perfect pointer to the challenge. Hamlet presents Guildenstern with a pipe and asks him to play upon it. Guildenstern says he knows no touch of it, and Hamlet answers,
‘It is as easy as lying … Look you, these are the stops.’
Guildenstern protests he cannot command these to any utterance of harmony, as he ‘has not the skill’. Hamlet answers,
‘… You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass, and there is much music, excellent voice in this little organ yet cannot you make it speak…’
Forgive me, Ian, if I play on your stops! Here is the height, the presumption of my endeavour: to ‘pluck out the heart’ of the Ian McKellen mystery – how any single being could create a monumental career of such depth and span; where the ever-recharging source of his energy comes from; and how his personality and character have continued to develop and change throughout his life. All in all to make it speak as it never has before, to ‘sound him from his lowest note to the top of his compass’.