A Man of Parts

The enduring image of John Gielgud is that of a grand and dignified English gentleman. Think of that sonorous, burnished voice, those proud, aristocratic features. Then try and imagine him writing "[The] young men are certainly attractive, and of course they are mad costume and uniform fetishists, so my eye was continually titillated with corduroy, breeches, jackboots, et cetera!"

That frisson of conflict between public and private man is part of the irresistible appeal of Gielgud's Letters, published this week. The 800-plus missives, written between 1912 and 1999, reveal a complex, often outrageous, character. Not only is Gielgud open to his closest confidantes about his sexual proclivities, he is a gleeful gossip. He delights in mentioning that his great rival Laurence Olivier, for instance, had extramarital affairs with actresses Peggy Ashcroft and Dorothy Tutin, and relates a tale about Alec Guinness on a rack in a dominatrix's dungeon.

But there is far more to the book, and to Gielgud, than dish. The scope of his life was epic; he lived from 1904 until 2000, working almost to the end — his last major film [an error occurred while processing this directive] role was as late as 1996, as the piano teacher in Shine, and he starred in a TV version of Beckett's Catastrophe the year he died. He knew so many historical figures — George Bernard Shaw, Edith Evans, Orson Welles — it's hard to keep track; one 1952 note alone manages to mention meetings with Charlie Chaplin, Igor Stravinsky and Noël Coward.

Editor Richard Mangan has mostly concentrated on the correspondents with whom Gielgud was intimate — including his mother, his onetime lover Paul Anstee, the actress Irene Worth, photographer and designer Cecil Beaton and the playwright Hugh Wheeler. The early part of the volume is dominated by correspondence to his mother (the only family member who figures prominently), and is full of excited career talk as he achieves success. Then comes the romance with Anstee — tarnished by Anstee's jealousy and Gielgud's insistence that "I can't really share my life completely with anybody." Finally, true love arrives with a Hungarian, Martin Hensler, and Gielgud's letters become saturated with a new, blissful sense of mutual dependence.

It makes for a bitter end when, after Gielgud has seen most of his friends die, Hensler succumbs to a "really horrendous" battle with cancer. After the richest of lives, the nonagenarian's final letter movingly depicts the ravages of age: "Everything is such an effort and I have to be helped around still on my two wretched sticks … I crawl about from one room to another and try not to let me down."

His long life's journey is dazzling and his pen nimble. And he is unhesitatingly honest in a treasurable series of compact character descriptions. Oscar Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, claimed to have written most of the legendary wit's best lines: "Of course Douglas had quite lost his looks and I thought that must have been a great tragedy for him," writes Gielgud. Marlon Brando, filming Julius Caesar in 1952, is "a funny, intense, egocentric boy of 27, with a flat nose and bullet head … he has very little humor and seems quite unaware of anything except the development of his own evident talents." His assessment of Olivier and his wife Vivien Leigh, whom he directed in Twelfth Night in 1955, is typically memorable: "He is a born autocrat and must always be right … He dares too confidently (and will always carry an undiscriminating audience with him) while she hardly dares at all and is terrified of overreaching her technique and doing anything that she has not killed the spontaneity of by overpractice."

Despite such acidic remarks, the book is permeated with a certain sweetness: Gielgud's appreciation of his friends, the absence of spite toward his few enemies, and his constant enthusiasm make him a delightful companion for a stroll through nearly a century's high life. "I can't write letters," he complains to Wheeler. How wrong, for once, he was.