Mythmaker at Work

The year after he came down to London from Oxford's Magdalen College, Kenneth Tynan wrote: "I work on the assumption that I'll be dead at 30. That gives me eight years to do all the things I want to do." Tynan was determined "to become Britain's first postwar myth."

The road to mythology in Tynan's case was paved, perhaps improbably, with theater reviews. But he succeeded magnificently. Now 27, and with a full three years of life left, he has already written three books (on the theater and its personalities), moved from Lord Beaverbrook's Evening Standard (which called him "the greatest theater critic since Shaw") to the tabloid Daily Sketch (which billed him as "the liveliest writer of the day"). In August, Tynan becomes drama critic for the Sunday Observer (circ. 475,609), roughly the equivalent of the New York Times job now held by Brooks Atkinson.

Nakedly Plain. Tynan's rule for drama criticism: "Rouse tempers, goad, lacerate, raise whirlwinds." He carries out the rules with a vengeance, writing in a rich, sometimes overripe style ("My stylistic father is Horizon, my mother Vogue"). "With men who know rococo best," says one of his more cynical American admirers, "it's Tynan two to one." He has an unerring eye for the sorest point, whether it be an actress' weight or her unpleasing hands. After seeing Britain's venerated Dame Edith Evans play Shakespeare's Cleopatra, he wrote: "Bereft of fan, lace and sedan chair, Dame Edith is nakedly middle-aged and plain."

Tynan's enthusiasms are as strong as his dislikes. Recently, after he met Greta Garbo for the first time, he wrote: "What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober." Tynan sees little to respect in fellow reviewers. Drama critics, he wrote, can be divided into two groups: "The boozed eulogists at one extreme, at the other the starved, fasting mockers. They are drawn from the long and once respectable ranks of the nearly brilliant and they address themselves . . . to the suburban fortresses of semi-culture."

Critic Tynan has made sure that no one could ever say that about him. Pale and lanky ("He has the sort of face you would expect to see reflected in a spoon," says one acquaintance), he often dresses in flowered waistcoats and velvet-lapeled jackets with turned-back Edwardian cuffs, and a mink necktie. "It looks like a raccoon at my jugular," says Tynan. "People ask me, 'Who's your friend?' " At home, with his two-year-old daughter and his American-born wife Elaine Dundy, he sometimes wears leopard-skin pants.

Neither Tynan's dress nor his outrageous posturing is any accident. Born in Birmingham, the son of a merchant, he went up to Oxford at 18, well aware that "anyone who wants to play an eccentric to that crowd bloody well had better go about it like a professional." That is just what Kenneth Tynan bloody well did.

Dreadful Performance. Tynan's professionalism consisted of purple doeskin suits, gold satin shirts and floppy velvet cravats. At Oxford Union debates, where he starred, he occasionally turned a handstand on the speaker's rostrum. He celebrated his 21st birthday by hiring a barge and floating a party down the Isis. Oxonians were both so outraged and fascinated by his eccentricities that they burned him in effigy--in a plum-colored suit. In mocking outrage, Tynan got a car and drove headlong through the bonfire.

After graduation, he summed up his first year out of Oxford: "I have not been idle. I now pretend to know about 60% of what there is to know, which is roughly true." He worked on his books, produced and directed 28 plays in a repertory group and took to the stage himself. An Evening Standard critic saw him in a production of Hamlet, wrote: "Mr. Kenneth Tynan, who did the First Player last night, would not get a chance in a village hall unless he were related to the vicar. His performance was quite dreadful." Tynan, outraged at the review, wrote such a lively letter to the Standard ("My performance in Hamlet was not 'quite dreadful' . . . it was slightly less than mediocre") that the paper at once hired him, later made him its drama critic.

After two years, Tynan quit the Standard in a huff because the paper refused to stop printing letters criticizing his own acting. (Fleet Streeters also half-jokingly said that he infuriated his boss Lord Beaverbrook at a dinner party by blowing a smoke ring across the table into the Beaver's open mouth.) On Lord Rothermere's Sketch he found the tabloid an incongruous place for his erudite, allusive prose. But his new job on the more highbrow Observer is just the kind of spot that Tynan has wanted ever since Oxford. On the Observer, says one of Tynan's friends, he will continue to write "what other people may be thinking but wouldn't dream of saying out loud."

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