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Sexy self-image that revved up Dirk Bogarde

This article is more than 19 years old
Candid memoirs of fellow actor John Fraser reveal how reclusive star became a Narcissus seduced by his own leather-clad likeness

The billboard outside the Odeon cinema, Leicester Square, said: "Michael Redgrave and Dirk Bogarde in The Sea Shall Not Have Them". Passing by, Noel Coward said: "I don't see why not. Everyone else has."

As the actor John Fraser suggests in his remarkably candid memoir, Coward's quip would have baffled the film's audiences. Redgrave's bisexuality remained unknown during his lifetime. Bogarde had hoped to have taken the secret of his sexuality with him to the grave when he died five years ago.

But Fraser - in his book due to be published on October 8 - goes further than any previous author towards unravelling Bogarde's secret.

Bogarde, says Fraser, indicated to him that the physical side of his homosexual affair with his long-term companion, Tony Forwood, had ceased but that he dared not take casual lovers for fear of publicity.

Then the top British romantic screen star of the post-war era gave the younger actor a demonstration of the substitute he had found to turn him on: high-revving a static Harley-Davidson motorcycle in his loft while gazing at a poster of himself clad in crotch-hugging leather trousers as a Spanish bandit in the 1961 film The Singer Not the Song.

"It looked like a Narcissus fantasy come to life," Fraser said yesterday.

Fraser was one of the most handsome UK leading screen actors of the 1950s and 1960s. His best-known role was as Lord Alfred Douglas in The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960), opposite Peter Finch. He acted with Bogarde in The Wind Cannot Read (1958). Fraser's own gay orientation was unknown to audiences.

His autobiography, Close Up: An Actor Telling Tales, though intelligently generous about his contemporaries, is also exceptionally open in portraying some of the celebrities he worked with:

· Bogarde lived in "a wonderland sustained by doting fans";

· The British star Laurence Harvey was "a whore";

· Harvey's lover and career booster, the producer James Woolf, joint boss of Romulus Films, whose output ranged from The African Queen to Room at the Top, used the casting couch to snare young men;

· Rex Harrison, star of My Fair Lady and of films stretching back to the 1930s, "was a cruel, manipulative man";

· Harrison's fourth wife, the actor Rachel Roberts, was "a wild Welsh witch to whom moderation was a stranger";

· The dancer Rudolf Nureyev - "bewitching, vulnerable, generous, and above all, scruffy" - often made love to Fraser without showering after a performance or workout.

Fraser, now 73, lives in retirement in Tuscany, writing books. Yesterday he said in an interview: "I am old, and I live in Italy, and, I suppose - what the hell?

"Most of the people I write about are dead. It seems mealy-mouthed not to tell the truth. Honesty is one of my first priorities, although kindness is even higher. I paid to be psychoanalysed when I was 20. It gave me a lot of understanding of other people."

In the book, he describes supper with Bogarde and Forwood at their mansion near Pinewood in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, in one of a series of visits after filming The Wind Cannot Read. This was at a time when consenting homosexual relations between adults were still illegal.

Fraser's then lover was with him. "I was in my 20s at this time, and both Dirk and Tony, though supremely handsome men, seemed to me settled and middle-aged", he writes.

When he and Bogarde were alone, he asked: "Do you and Tony still make love?" Bogarde, smiling, answered: "We've been together a long time. Now, we're like brothers."

Fraser asked: "What do you do for sex? Do you have casual affairs?" Bogarde said: "God, no. How could I possibly in my position?

"Everyone knows me. I can't go anywhere without being recognised. There's blackmail ... the News of the World. I would be ruined."

According to Fraser, Bogarde, shaking his head sadly, added: "Completely, utterly out of the question."

Fraser says he asked the star in wonder: "Do you reckon it's worth it, money, fame, all the rest of it, if you have to live like a monk?"

Bogarde gestured at the mansion and grounds: "Don't you think it's worth it - for all this?"

Then, taking Fraser up to the loft, he said: "Let me show you something ... Isn't it magnificent?" There, on a plinth, was the Harley-Davidson.

Fraser writes that the star said: "This is my playroom," his voice thick with feeling. He climbed on, kick-started and rode for 10 minutes, "his expression like the rapture on the face of a medieval saint". Afterwards, he slumped over the handlebars. Dismounting, wiping sweat from his forehead, he said: "Now you know".

Fraser writes: "Dirk's life with Forwood had been so respectable, their love for each other so profound and so enduring, it would have been a glorious day for the pursuit of understanding and the promotion of tolerance if he had screwed up the courage ... to make one dignified allusion to his true nature. Self-love is no substitute for self-respect."

In his authorised biography of Bogarde, published earlier this month, John Coldstream wrote of the actor and Forwood: "The truth is that no one will ever know what the precise relationship between the two men was."

What Fraser says about ...

Rudolf Nureyev
I will be misunderstood, misquoted, and perhaps even reviled if I explain something. He was scruffy. He smelled sublime, not of deodorant or cologne, but of sweat.

And he would often put on a shirt that he had worn the day before, that had a tide-mark round the collar. After class or rehearsal, or after a performance, he didn't always shower straight away."

This icon, this creature of such animal perfection, this love-god to millions, in private had no vanity whatsoever. He was sloppy and neglectful of his appearance - a trait which I found utterly irresistible.

Peter Sellers
He had never grown up, which of course was at the root of his genius. And it was also the reason why he behaved like a love-sick teenager. Sophia [Loren] was happily married to producer Carlo Ponti, a father-figure much older than Sophia, a foot shorter and as bald as an egg; and despite her sexual allure, she was known to be chaste and unavailable for casual affairs. Perhaps this fanned the flames of Peter's ardour.

He would regale me about the nights he had spent gazing up at the cracks between the curtains of her apartment when he had been refused entry for the umpteenth time.

Alec Guinness
Since [the 1960 film] Tunes of Glory was set in a Highland regiment, everybody had to wear kilts. Alec was self-conscious about the pallor of his legs, so he applied "Man Tan" liberally to the sections of his legs between the bottom edge of his kilt and the top of his stockings _ Armed, or legged, with his new tan, Alec strode about as if his knees were blushing. To me it conjured up images of Major Jock Sinclair [his film character] spreadeagled on the battlements of the castle, coyly lifting up his kilt to let the sun caress his hairy legs.

Laurence Harvey
It was well known in the business that Jimmy [Woolf] was in love with Laurence Harvey. He had put his protégé into film after film, all of which had flopped, until he bought the film rights to John Braine's bestseller [Room at the Top], contracted the great Simone Signoret to play opposite Harvey, and finally made his lover a star. But Harvey kept marrying to further his career. Larry's whoredom was so blatant it was disarming. As a teenager, he started out living with Hermione Baddeley, a ... blowsy star of intimate revue more than twice his age. Then he married Margaret Leighton - old enough to be his mother, but a woman of style ... when this marriage was over he married Joan Cohn, widow of the managing director of Columbia Studios ... and throughout all these career marriages, he still managed to string Jimmy Woolf along.

· Close Up: An Actor Telling Tales, Oberon Books, £21

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