The life of Brian | Biography books

The life of Brian

Brian Masters knows everyone, so naturally I knew him - or thought I did. But reading his autobiography, Getting Personal, I realise that almost everything I thought I knew about him was wrong. I thought of him as a somewhat sinister toff with a gruesome interest in serial killers, who kept dinner parties agog with details of the Fred and Rosemary West case that were too appalling even for the redtops to print. The impression of sinisterness was much enhanced by the livid scar that cuts right across his cheek and lip - the on-dit was that he got it from 'one of his murderers' or perhaps an ill-advised adventure in rough trade.

Anyway, it turns out he is not a toff, but grew up in a prefab on the Old Kent Road. He has no interest in rough trade, and acquired his scar as the victim of a street mugging (typically, he rang for an ambulance, and then - with half his face falling off - rang the hostess he was meant to be having dinner with to apologise for cancelling). Nor, really, is he sinister - though I shouldn't like to live inside his brain. He is just very, very odd.

He certainly must have the world's oddest Christmas card list, ranging all the way from dear Andrew and Debo (the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire) to equally dear Lionel and Shari Dahmer, parents of the late Jeffrey Dahmer, serial killer. He no longer sends Christmas cards to Dennis Nilsen (the one who boiled human heads on his stove and shoved limbs down the drains) because Nilsen got bored with him a few years ago and stopped writing. 'He wanted fans. He's now got lots of people who write to him because they think it's thrilling to be in touch with a murderer.' He also wrote to Rosemary West for a while, but she, kind- hearted old biddy that she is in his view, suggested that he write instead to one of her fellow inmates who never received any letters. So, now Brian and the unknown prisoner exchange 'very banal' letters, mainly about cats.

All these friendships are the strange legacy of a promiscuous writer's life. I say promiscuous because Masters is one of those useful writers who can produce a volume on almost any subject. Getting Personal is his 26th book; his previous subjects range from French literature and philosophy (which he studied at university), to dreams about the Queen, mistresses of Charles II, dukes, actors, Marie Corelli and John Aspinall. But the books which - rather to his regret - have made him famous are the ones about murder: Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen; The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer; and She Must Have Known: The Trial of Rosemary West. I fully expected him to be hard at work on Harold Shipman, but he said no, he is finished with murderers. He is not even sure that he will write another book because, at 63, after treatment for bladder cancer, he lacks the energy for sustained research. (When he had his bladder removed, the nurse warned him, 'Do you know there are repercussions? You will never have another erection.' He said, 'Darling! I've had thousands, I couldn't care less.')

He has four homes - one in Hammersmith, one in Surrey, one in France, and then the Garrick Club, which he loves best of all. In London, he is wildly gregarious, eternally in demand as a dinner party spare man. But increasingly, since his operation, he stays in France alone, and it was there that I went to see him. His house is in a little village near Montpellier and is full of photographs of Brian and his friends - Natalia Makarova, Penelope Keith, Judi Dench, endless Duchesses and Marchionesses. The sitting room is hung with prints of the Garrick Club and Chatsworth and he has old Christmas cards from the Devonshires and John Aspinall still on display.

He speaks perfect French. More surprisingly, he speaks perfect toff. At times he sounds almost like Donald Sinden (another of his friends). He says he didn't deliberately change his accent, and he doesn't know quite how it happened. Until his teens he was talking Old Kent Road (which he says is different to cockney - harsher) and then one day his mum suddenly said to him, 'Gor blimey, Brian, you don't half talk posh!'

He had a poor, and also pretty miserable, upbringing. He wet his bed regularly till he was 13 and had to sleep on a bare rubber sheet - consequently, he jokes, rubber fetishism has never held the slightest appeal. He thinks the bed-wetting came from anxiety, a sense of 'not being right, not fitting, not being what was expected, being a disappointment to my father. Just being the wrong person - which is the worst kind of anxiety, because there's nothing you can do about it.'

But he was bright, which was his salvation, and was born just at the right time (1939) to reap all the benefits of the post-war welfare state - not only free grammar-school education but free uniform and books, and generous living expenses when he went to university. 'If I hadn't had that luck, if I'd been born five years earlier, God knows what would have happened. I'd still be in the Old Kent Road, probably a dustman.' It doesn't seem to have made him socialist, though.

He was always attracted to fame. As a schoolboy, he hung around stage doors collecting autographs - he got Marilyn Monroe's and struck up quite a friendship with Zsa Zsa Gabor. But his big star friendship happened when he was 16. He launched a school magazine and wanted to interview someone who never gave interviews. He thought of two possible candidates - the Queen or Gilbert Harding. Gilbert Harding, though forgotten now, was huge in those days, the Great Brain of radio and television, star of Twenty Questions, Round Britain Quiz and What's My Line? He was famous both for his apparently encyclopaedic knowledge and for his filthy temper, much exacerbated by drink. So it was brave of Brian to write asking to interview him for the school magazine. Harding rang his headmaster the next day, and invited Brian to tea. It was the start of a very strange friendship.

Brian was invited to tea several times, then invited to stay in the school holidays to give Harding's secretary Roger a break. Brian's job was to get Harding up around midday, give him breakfast and try to control his drinking, deliver him to whatever television or radio studio he was supposed to be in, and carry around the huge oxygen cylinder he needed for his asthma. Brian plus oxygen cylinder accompanied Harding to the famous Face to Face interview in 1958 when John Freeman asked him if he had ever watched anyone die and Harding broke down and cried, remembering his mother's death. It was one of the cruellest - and most rivetting - moments in television history.

Harding made it his business to educate Brian. He taught him about books and music and theatre. Above all, he taught him the art of conversation, by inviting him to dinner parties with his famous friends. There was one particularly memorable dinner party when Harding told Brian that one of the guests would be Peter Daubeny, a theatrical impresario who had lost an arm in the war. Daubeny, he warned, was very sensitive about his missing arm, so Brian must be careful not to stare at his empty sleeve. Brian sat through most of the dinner with his eyes on his plate, but eventually piped up, 'Oh, Mr Daubeny, what have you got up your sleeve for your next production?'

According to Brian, Harding's influence was entirely benign. 'I think he thought, "Here's a young man who's not going to make the mistakes I made. I'll make sure that he doesn't."' Harding always regretted, for instance, that he only got a third class degree, so he urged Brian to take his studies seriously, go to university and get a first. Unfortunately, Harding died of a heart attack in 1960, the year before Brian achieved that goal.

Presumably, Harding's motives were to some extent paedophile but the most he ever wanted of Brian was to be allowed to watch him take a bath. What did Brian as a schoolboy make of this? Didn't he at least wonder if Harding was homosexual? 'I suppose it must have crossed my mind,' Masters says coolly. 'But when you're 17, you don't think that a man of 50 is sexual at all. In any direction. It's unthinkable.' And he quite liked it when Harding sat in the bathroom handing him towels. 'I thought it was rather endearing. It was unthreatening - that's what I felt most of all. Had an older person - man or woman - tried to enforce some kind of intimate contact, then one would not have known how to respond. But Gilbert just sat there on a stool, handing me a towel - it was the most good-natured compromise. I realised that it gave him pleasure and I realised that it did me no harm.'

This is crucial - that it did him no harm - because Brian admits in his autobiography that he has often wanted to play the Gilbert mentor role. He very much enjoyed his year teaching in France as part of his degree course, and became very close to one of his pupils; so close, in fact, that they slept together. Anyway, he finally decided that schoolteaching was too dull a career and he wanted something more exciting.

For the next few years he made his living as a travel guide, organising educational tours for American students. And then someone suggested he should write a short book on Molière, and this led to others on Sartre, Saint-Exupery, Rabelais and Camus. He says now that these early books were straightforward cribs with no originality, but they had the virtue of clarity which is not to be sneezed at. Then the publisher Anthony Blond suggested he should do a book called Dreams about HM the Queen and Other Members of the Royal Family and this led to The Dukes - a well-researched account of all the ducal families, which gave him his entrée to the aristocracy. He gets terribly upset if you call him a snob, but he does absolutely adore titles. Socially, he had arrived.

Sexually, though, his life was a mess. He was never sure that he was gay and in fact he says, 'I still think it can go either way. Not that I'm pretending that I'm likely to marry next week. But I don't think that these categories and labels are quite so solid as everyone would like them to be. At no point was I able to say: "Look. This is it. I'm a queer and I'm never going to be anything else." However, it would be dishonest of me not to admit that one has always been more easy with a male relationship, and a female one has always felt a bit of a threat. A male one is safer.'

And yet he says in his book that he still regrets not marrying Lady Camilla Osborne, whom he met at a party and got on with like a house on fire even before he knew she was the daughter of the Duke of Leeds. They loved each other and he believes she would have married him, but he never proposed, and she went on to marry Nigel Dempster. The sticking point was what he calls 'congress'. 'There was fear involved in congress and I suppose I never completely conquered the fear. I have conquered it occasionally, but never to such an extent that one was at ease. And the risk of my leaving her disappointed, unwhole, was too great to take.' But now - too late - he wishes he'd had more courage.

He was upset when James Lees-Milne's diaries quoted his friend Selina Hastings saying she thought he was a masochist. He says he is certainly not a masochist in any physical sense - he can't stand pain (or inflicting pain). But he thinks maybe he is an emotional masochist - he seems to get drawn into relationships which end up causing him great distress. The most notorious was with Gary, a delinquent boy who lived with him for two years. He wrote a very weird book about him, called Gary, in 1990.

He met Gary by pure chance, when he was 37 and Gary was 13. One of his colleagues at a summer school said he couldn't tutor Gary one day because he had to look after his wife's grandson. Brian said, 'Oh well, send him round to me,' and thus Gary arrived at his Hammersmith home. '[He] had all the beguiling attraction of youth, the soft indefinite features, the unlined innocence and gentle demeanour, but they were overlaid by a harshness that was worryingly anarchic.'

Gary enjoyed his day at Brian's house and asked if he could come again. Soon he was coming frequently. Eventually Gary moved in. Masters ensured that he went to school and also had private tutorials. He cooked his meals, enforced his bedtime and even tucked him up in bed. He enjoyed the sensation of 'instant parenthood'. He let Gary sit in on dinner parties with friends like the Duke and Duchess of Richmond, Natalia Makarova and Rudolf Nureyev. But Lady Camilla Osborne never warmed to Gary, especially when she found out he had stolen a pair of her knickers.

Amazingly, the authorities not only allowed Masters, but positively encouraged him, to foster Gary. He attended a case meeting and was asked if he had ever been married. He said no and, 'they left it at that. I suppose the individuals on that particular committee on that particular day had enough discernment not to be stupid about it.' But in his book, Gary, he claims that he told them: 'Were there no homosexual element in my emotional furniture it is doubtful that I would have noticed the boy at all.' Anyway, the end result was Brian officially being confirmed as Gary's foster-parent.

Gary lived with him for the next two years. His schoolwork improved, but Masters increasingly realised that Gary was often lying to him, and also shoplifting and stealing money. Moreover, he was violent - there was one incident at school when it took three teachers to hold him down. Then Gary attacked one of Masters's friends with a carving knife. Masters was so worn down with worry that one day, when he went to a psychiatrist supposedly to talk about Gary, he just burst into tears.

Luckily, Gary by this time had acquired a girlfriend and said that he would like to live with his girlfriend's parents. So, at l6, he moved out. He kept in touch for a few years but then he married and had his own family. When Masters decided, 15 years later, to write a book about Gary, he tracked him down and they met in a hotel. Gary said it was fine by him if he wanted to write a book but that was the last Masters heard of him.

Does he think Gary benefited from their contact? 'Ultimately, probably not. But briefly, yes. People began to like him rather than being wary of him. I hope there are still echoes of something I was able to implant.' The whole episode possibly had a deeper effect on Masters than on Gary. He says in his book: 'I resolved never again to allow myself to be hoodwinked by charm, always to nurture detachment, always to retreat from dependent closeness with other humans. I began to feel that human relationships were inherently dangerous.'

However, he did subsequently form a long relationship, with a Spanish waiter called Juan Melian. They met when Juan was working at the Chanterelle restaurant and asked Brian what he wanted next. Brian - to his horror - heard himself saying, 'Oh well, I think after that I should like to have you on toast.' Juan was amenable and they lived together for many years, and bought a house in Surrey where Juan now lives. Brian stays with Juan when he is in England - but again he bridles when I ask if I should describe Juan as his 'partner' - he hates any such labels. But he concedes, 'In the sense of a companion who knows one better than anyone else, and who I know will look after me when I'm old and decrepit, who will never let me down, then yes, you could call him that.'

A few years ago, Masters appeared on Anthony Clare's In the Psychiatrist's Chair and managed to resist or deflect all Clare's questions. But after the interview he regretted that he hadn't taken the opportunity to explore himself more deeply. So he started writing his autobiography; and then almost immediately was diagnosed with cancer. 'And the writing suddenly became a quite different exercise. Because that kind of surprise not only changes the future, but it also changes the past.' He says Getting Personal is as honest as it can be : 'If there's more to discover, it's not because I've avoided it, it's because I haven't got there yet. Anyway, you weren't bored by it? So there you are. If it gives a reader a couple of hours' pleasure, why not, even if they do think there's something peculiar about this man.'

· Getting Personal, by Brian Masters, is published by Constable on 5 September, price £16.99.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e5FpZ2tnkaq0cH6UaJmip5enrrG02Gednpmkqr%2Bmv5A%3D