According to McKellen, he was in bed with Sean in 1978 when he threw over to him a script which Robert Chetwyn had sent, asking ‘Should I do this?’ To this, Mathias replied on reading it with a highly enthusiastic ‘Yes’. The play was Bent by Martin Sherman. Mathias remembers this quite differently, telling Marianne Macdonald this never happened: ‘He was chivalrously courting me, it was two months before we went to bed. He’s wrong. The whole point was that he wouldn’t go to bed with me.’
Sherman was an American playwright who had had several plays performed in the States, including a try-out of this one in Waterford, Connecticut, in 1978. Jewish, openly gay, charming and much liked by everyone, he settled in England where he later enjoyed a long and illustrious career. The main character in the play is Max, who McKellen decided to play himself. Max’s father is a rich industrialist who is so appalled by his son’s sexuality that he disinherits him. Yet his father turns a blind eye to Max’s uncle, who practises homosexuality secretively. Ian’s enthusiasm grew strong. As he put it in publicising the play: ‘Such hypocrisy is current today in the argument that gays and lesbians should be seen and heard only when they pretend to be straight. Homosexuals are thus encouraged to disguise their true feelings. Is that why so many become professional actors?’ He made the plea that Sherman’s character embodied a universality of gay problems, but there were personal echoes, too, of his own situation.
Bent begins with a very contemporary feel. Max is shown as a misfit who drinks too much, is unable to pay the rent, and is a cocaine user. He is unfaithful to his lover, who earns a pittance dancing in a drag club run by a man called Greta. ‘Max may not be the sort you care for,’ admitted McKellen. If the beginning of the play suggests life today, it is soon clear we are in the brutal 1930s when Hitler has just disposed of the services of the murderous SA homosexual Ernst Röhm. The homosexual gangsterism of the SA or Sturmabteilung leaders was unambiguously cruel, just as its members were murderous thugs. Yet they carried out Hitler’s orders to treat homosexuals the same as Jews or the mentally ill. (Though Bent made no mention the SA leaders were homosexual.)
That Max refuses to acknowledge his love for Rudi, established in the modernistic first scene, does beg a few questions, especially as Rudi is to become a martyr for the modern audience. Horst, who is Max’s next lover, tests Max’s survival strategy because he has rigged himself up with a yellow Star of David claiming he is a Jew, instead of the pink triangle of a homosexual. The two central love scenes between them caused much consternation before the first night, for it was feared they would outrage the public and critics. The first love scene is quite graphic, but only verbally so, as Horst, wearing his pink triangle as a homosexual, and Max, cunningly hiding himself with the other side of his victim status in Nazi eyes, as a Jew, do not physically touch. They stand side by side facing and speaking out to the audience and bring each other to tumescence.
HORST: |
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Down … |
MAX: |
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Yes. |
HORST: |
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Down … |
MAX: |
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Yes. |
HORST: |
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Chest. My tongue … |
MAX: |
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Burning. |
HORST: |
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Your chest. |
MAX: |
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Your mouth. |
HORST: |
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I’m kissing your chest. |
MAX: |
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Yes. |
HORST: |
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Hard. |
MAX: |
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Yes. |
HORST: |
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Down … |
MAX: |
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Yes. |
HORST: |
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Down … |
MAX: |
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Yes. |
HORST: |
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Your cock. |
MAX: |
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Yes. |
HORST: |
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Do you feel my mouth? |
MAX: |
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Yes. Do you feel my cock? |
HORST: |
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Yes. Do you feel…? |
MAX: |
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Do you feel…? |
HORST: |
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Mouth. |
MAX: |
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Cock. |
HORST: |
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Cock. |
MAX: |
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Mouth. |
HORST: |
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Do you feel my cock? |
The restraint here was shockingly innovatory when one considers the more or less routine heterosexual bonking that had by now taken (and still continues to take) over stage and screen. Acted without them touching, it had an icy, intense purity. The second scene, equally remote, was tender and chaste, as it was played, but similarly linear or even naive.
HORST: |
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Just hold me. |
MAX: |
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I’m afraid to hold you. |
HORST: |
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Don’t be. |
MAX: |
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I’m afraid. |
HORST: |
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Don’t be. |
MAX: |
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I’m going to drown. |
HORST: |
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Hold me. Please. Hold you. |
MAX: |
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OK, I’m holding you. |
HORST: |
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Are you? |
MAX: |
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Yes. You’re in my arms. |
HORST: |
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Am I? |
MAX: |
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You’re here in my arms. I promise. I’m holding you. You’re here … |
HORST: |
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Touch me. |
MAX: |
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No. |
HORST: |
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Gently. |
MAX: |
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Here. |
HORST: |
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Are you? |
MAX: |
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Yes. Touching. |
HORST: |
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Gently. |
MAX: |
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Touching. Softly. |
HORST: |
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Warm me. |
MAX: |
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Softly. |
HORST: |
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Warm me … gently … |
MAX: |
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Softly … I’m touching you softly … gently … |
Both scenes moved audiences at the first Royal Court performance in May 1979, and later, in the transfer to the Criterion, to a standing applause for Tom Bell (who was full of qualms about them) and McKellen.
Bent opened just as Margaret Thatcher assumed power in Downing Street, and McKellen’s CBE, awarded a month later, was followed by what were now fairly regular awards, to which Ian submitted himself with customary good manners, perhaps checking the impulse he had to rebel with the comment, ‘I suppose there is a side to myself which the Establishment wishes to recognise.’
Bent brought visible validation to homosexual passion on stage, and gave McKellen an extra thrill in that it enabled him, as he declared in an Evening Standard interview years later when the play was revived, ‘to act out on stage the secret I refused to share publicly’. McKellen and Sherman went round from door to door handing out publicity about the play. Keeping his secret, he stopped short of public avowal. It might be claimed that quite publicly he was already acting out his gay commitment. He attacked the Telegraph critic’s contention that Bent was titillating, vulgar and shoddy much of the time, claiming its value was educational. It showed that gay people were vilely murdered by the Nazis in 1934 when Hitler saw that his homosexual enforcers of terror led by Röhm were no longer fit for purpose. Ian’s courage as well as Bent‘s riveting effect on audiences advanced McKellen’s standing in the theatre, the gay community and in society at large. Brian Cox described the admiration for Bent as ‘part of an expansion which had not been expressed before’.
Whatever the argument over dates between Ian and Sean, and who first suggested doing Bent, Mathias’s enthusiastic support was crucial. There was a Svengali element in Sean, who had great social ease and confidence, as well as a carelessness about what people thought of him, which sidestepped the explaining, self-justifying rationale of McKellen’s personality. He brought Ian out of his shell, but the view expressed by McKellen’s older friends, most notably by Ian’s lifelong friend Roger Hammond, who never had an unkind word to stay about anyone, was that Mathias, as Roger expressed gently, ‘was not very good for Ian’. Along the path of McKellen gaining confidence as an extrovert celebrity, Mathias had a strong influence. He helped Ian to enjoy and maximise his celebrity. Sean notes that McKellen was always ‘too mean on himself … When I met him, he was wearing old jumble-sale coats and driving a stupid old scooter, which I refused to get on. He didn’t have a licence to drive a motorcar.’ Sean encouraged him to take a driving test and earn some money to buy nice clothes. ‘People say that I styled him.’ Sean was far from the romantic pillion-riding Everett. He made Ian dress like a celebrity, give up his Vespa, groomed him into star behaviour. The common-or-garden bloke or everyman from Bolton lineage was subsumed in that of the star – but so far only of theatre, not of film, which always rankled a bit. Mathias encouraged Ian to socialise more and be seen with him by audiences at award ceremonies. It therefore became quite usual for Ian to be photographed with ‘a close male friend’. The love that ‘dare not speak its name’ was out in the open both in New York and London, some years before positively and very publicly it declared itself. Simon Callow had supper with Ian in Los Angeles in 1984 at about the time his book Being an Actor, in which he declared he was gay, was published. Ian asked him, ‘Should I come out?’ adding, ‘If I do, I hope to do it as gracefully as you did.’
At the Tony Awards in 1981, to which he now took along Mathias, McKellen said thank-you to the New York audience in true showbiz style – they ‘lift you so high that sometimes you feel you want to fly for them’. He said thank-you to colleagues. He said nothing about Sean, sitting next to him all evening. But now he was putting his private life first. Sean had a few more acting and film jobs but, his restlessness unfulfilled, he turned not only to writing but also to directing.
Ian could never see himself sustaining into permanence a homosexual affair, even though by nature he was monogamous and loyal. ‘He has to know what the motivating force of life is on an everyday basis,’ Sean commented. He self-confessedly was half Irish and half Welsh. ‘What a dreadful combination, full of the poetry and the alcoholism, the Dylan Thomas darkness and the mournfulness. Perhaps I am more drawn to the dark stories,’ he later told the Financial Times. Sean was never one to mince his words. He craved the urban, angst-ridden experience of London theatrical life. By contrast, Ian’s private life was rather austere.
Mathias picked on the puritan that came out in Ian, in contrast to the expansive figure: ‘He’s uncomfortable if people talk about sex in public … I love to do the opposite … But I don’t know. He’s the most extraordinarily private person. Very secretive. I’m sure I prised him open a lot as well … I used to have to pin him down to talk about anything that was to do with an emotion or life, really, before. Now I think he is more open.’
Everybody remembers the past differently, particularly about intimate relationships, according to their present mood and situation. Ian at one point blamed the fact he never came out as gay earlier, regretting leaving it for such a long time, on Sean: ‘Oh yes, it would have been much better to have done it earlier.’ He gave the reason he was inhibited was Mathias, just starting out as an actor … he felt himself to be the junior partner. ‘A lot of gay people don’t come out because their partner doesn’t want to be defined as being “the friend”. So only when we split up did I feel a free agent to come out, and shortly afterwards he found someone else.’
But this was to come later. After Bent, it was another ten years before he took the step to be open about his sexuality.