At this juncture Ian fell in love with a glamorous film star. Peter Shaffer once called the stage actor, vis-à-vis the takeover of professional evaluation of reputation by film and television, the endangered species. Yet the stage provides the only proof, believed Shaffer, of whether an actor can act greatly. Ian was now a star of stage but not of screen.
This must have been about the Little India time or shortly after: it is not exactly clear when. No admission was forthcoming, or has ever been made. McKellen could be very tight-lipped, and there was quite a strict limit to his self-admissions or public confessions, although he could appear disarmingly indiscreet when it suited him.
A case in point is that kiss in Edward II in Edinburgh, when the stuffy city elders’ complaint sent the police to the Assembly Hall to see if it broke the law as an indecent act. It did not, and the police left the hall. But it is hard not to feel there was a deliberate teasing in the whole episode on McKellen’s part, for years later, on his website, McKellen proclaimed with a certain waggish provocativeness, not to be taken too seriously, that at the auditions at the Hampstead Theatre Club to cast potential Gavestons he had to kiss them. James Laurenson, an actor a few years younger than him from New Zealand, got the part. ‘I still recall the softness of his lips … It was a bonus throughout the run.’
Ian’s sexual drive, as witness his acting in Edward II, was never in doubt, and it sometimes dominated, as and when he allowed it to. It flooded his work over the next years. A particular peak of this was to come; to give an example, when he acted Giovanni in ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore in London, on tour and in New York for the Actors’ Company. About this Michael Billington wrote, ‘his body quivering with a restless nervous energy, he suggests a man whose bottled sexual passion might explode like a mechanical retort.’
Yet the devoted monogamous partnership with Brodie Taylor had lasted eight years; both faithful in their Kensington High Street love nest, or so it seemed, until someone else came into view. Ian was feeling restricted in this relationship, that Brodie was tying him down too much, and he wanted to spread his wings. This was the moment when the film star Gary Bond, a year younger than McKellen, entered his life.
One of the ‘most enduringly handsome actors’ of his generation, Bond ‘was also a resourceful and sensitive performer of wide range and polished technique’. Robertson and Cottrell had approached him in 1969 to play Edward II before McKellen took the role. He was the star from Anne of the Thousand Days and Zulu. He wanted to advance his career in classical roles so joined Prospect as Sebastian in Twelfth Night, Major Sergius Saranoff (the Olivier role) in George Bernard Shaw’s comedy Arms and the Man, and a highly personable and lively Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. To cap all these youthful, handsome appearances, he played the passionate and youthful Byron in Prospect’s The Byron Show. He was, if you talk to people of that era, a highly desirable man who was openly gay, quite promiscuous, and therefore an enormous centre of attention for the gay community, while ostensibly having Jeremy Brett, another handsome and desirable actor, as his long-term lover. Brett at fifty would become a romantic icon with his unnerving attachment to playing the ‘voluptuous baroque’ Sherlock Holmes on television and in the press has been dubbed a ‘misogynistic butthead’ and ‘a total sweetheart’.
Everywhere he went Bond turned female and male heads, but it was the latter he responded to, and not just one or two. He was, one might say, the Rudolf Nureyev of the theatre scene, with something of the ‘availability’ streak sometimes common to both great female and male actors (Peggy Ashcroft was an example of the other side of the coin). After his time with Prospect his fame became legendary, with long runs dominating the musical theatre from 1972 on, as the lead in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and then the narrator and character Che Guevara in Evita. A former lover of Bond tells me, ‘He was part of one of the first relatively out [gay] couples with Jeremy Brett, but theirs was an on–off liaison which lasted for years … Bond was irresistible, with an easy warmth of manner, wonderful humour and sometimes a wicked sense of fun. He was divine, lovely, and wonderful in bed.’ But, my confidant adds sadly, ‘Died early, ended up with an American artist.’
McKellen has kept silent about this sexual fling with Bond. At the time, when he was in the throes of his passion for Bond, he must have known the relationship with Brodie would not last. It could be that he was becoming restless and tired of the settled domestic life, and that this had already begun to decline. McKellen does say the relationship ‘changed’ in 1972, the date Bond opened in Joseph. He moved out of Earl’s Terrace, and bought a terraced house in Camberwell, south of the river.
It devastated Brodie, who screamed and shouted outside the house until McKellen had to threaten calling the police to make the break final. It brought to an end the settled years they had been together. Brodie remained tight-lipped about what had happened and who the other man was: ‘There really isn’t anything I want to get off my chest,’ he informed an earlier biographer of McKellen and today is quite reconciled and forgiving.
Bond brought about the final break-up with Brodie, to which McKellen referred obliquely with some self-denigration and understatement in 1971 to Michael Owen, that in his private life he was ineffectual. ‘I can’t make decisions. I used to be sure of myself and saw a distinct pattern for the future but now I am confused.’ Bond died aged fifty-five, from an AIDS-related disease in October 1995. Brett died exactly one month before Bond.
So now Ian found himself single, living alone in Camberwell, and an established star of the stage, if not yet the screen. And he worried about one issue in particular that had never bothered Bond. Would audiences take his acting seriously, as Romeo for instance, if they knew that in real life he fancied Mercutio rather than Juliet?