Jack Gold (1975)

Getting on for fifty years after it was first broadcast (Wednesday 17 December 1975), The Naked Civil Servant remains a special piece of television film drama.  More than twenty years after his death, Quentin Crisp seems even more remarkable a figure than in his lifetime.

The man himself introduces The Naked Civil Servant, adapted by Philip Mackie from Crisp’s autobiography of the same name (first published in 1968).  Crisp says that he suggested to the film-makers the opening image:  himself as a child (Stephen Johnstone), wearing a cloak and crown, watching his reflection in a mirror.  Cut to the twentyish Quentin (John Hurt) doing the same thing, though more prosaically costumed and less impressed with what he sees.  Jack Gold follows him through the next forty years of his life.  From early adulthood, Quentin appears in public in outré clothes.  He also wears face make-up, nail varnish and his henna-dyed hair in a decidedly unmasculine style.  He’s frequently jeered at, sometimes beaten up.  As he stands at a bus stop in sandals exposing his painted toes, the man ahead of him in the queue stamps on his foot as hard as possible.  Over the decades, Quentin earns a crust as a male prostitute, a commercial artist and an unqualified tap dance instructor (he manages, he explains, to keep one step ahead of his lone pupil (Annette Badland)).  A former art student himself, he gets more enduring employment as a model for art-college life classes, for which he’s paid by the Ministry of Education.  Hence the title.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, he attends an army medical examination, peered at and questioned by a succession of men in uniform, each one glowering and scandalised until a psychiatrist (John Cater) arrives on the scene.  Smugly imperturbable at first, he’s soon bamboozled by Quentin’s eccentric logic and candour about his sexuality.  In a bid to have the last word, the shrink resorts to biblical quotation:  ‘Male and female created he them’.  ‘Male and female …,’ Quentin replies, ‘created he … me’.  He’s exempted from military service on account of sexual perversion.  Although frank about his homosexuality, he takes care not to get arrested – ‘Never looking at anyone unless they demand I look back, never speaking unless spoken to‘.  Until, that is, two plain clothes officers (Peter Sproule and Robert Gary) arrest him in the West End on a trumped-up charge of soliciting.  In a speech to the court, Quentin impresses the curious, not unsympathetic magistrate (Martin Boddey).  Friends from the bohemian London world that accepts Quentin – an actor (Harvey Ashby) whose hurried goodbye to him on the street has been used by the police in evidence against him; the ballet teacher (Patricia Hodge) whose Chelsea flat Quentin minds and lives in for years; the loyal friend from art school (Liz Gebhardt) who eventually becomes a nun – appear as character witnesses, and he’s acquitted.  In the closing scene, the sixtyish Quentin is accosted by a group of teenage boys (including a sixteen-year-old Phil Daniels) who threaten to report him for ‘fiddling with us’ unless he gives them a quid each.  ‘You can’t touch me, I am one of the stately homos of England,’ declares Quentin, who continues on his way.

Mackie’s script skilfully distils the episodic narrative into a sustained, extraordinary character study.  Gold’s direction is masterly.   The action is punctuated by title cards reiterating the key Crisp aperçus proclaimed in John Hurt’s voiceover – ‘Exhibitionism is a drug!’, ‘There is no great dark man!’ etc.  With its silent-movie associations, the device evokes the era in which Crisp grew up, as well as reinforcing the impression of a sui generis rites-of-passage story.  The use of voiceover is peculiarly effective.  It conveys the sense that Quentin Crisp, along with viewers of the film, is observing his life – with a degree of incredulity and from a retrospective position of safety he has seldom experienced living it.  Carl Davis’s music perfectly captures the protagonist’s distinctive qualities – a witty yet wistful individualism, a resilience rooted in dismay at what his existence has to be.  The plucky melancholy of the occasional trumpet solo is especially expressive.  Echoes in Davis’s main melody of ‘Little Man You’ve Had a Busy Day’ are touchingly apt.

As well as making a celebrity of its subject, the film took to a new level of recognition the screen career of the actor playing him.  John Hurt had done good work as Richard Rich in A Man for All Seasons (1966), created a brilliant portrait of Timothy Evans in 10 Rillington Place (1971) and, in the film version of David Halliwell’s Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs (1974)[1], reprised the title role he’d played on stage.  But The Naked Civil Servant made the difference, especially in raising Hurt’s international profile.  He does full, hugely entertaining, justice to Quentin Crisp’s flamboyance and practised theatricality.  He also shows – more than Crisp the autobiographer is prepared to do – his vulnerability, and in surprising ways.  Quentin, always physically at risk, uses words as mordant, cynical armour.  The throaty reverberations sometimes heard in Hurt’s voice suggest a depth of feeling Quentin doesn’t mean to expose.

The innocent wonder in Hurt’s eyes when Quentin is first approached in the street by Norma (Shane Briant) – who introduces him to other queer habitués (Roger Lloyd Pack, Adrian Shergold) of the Black Cat Café in Old Compton Street – is beautifully tentative.  Quentin’s first co-habitation after his rent-boy period is with a querulous office worker (Colin Higgins), known as Thumbnails, who chides Quentin for his domestic indolence and cosmetic experiments.  They bump into each other years later, in a crowd celebrating VE Night.  ‘You look terrible,’ scowls Thumbnails, vindictive and vindicated:  Hurt makes the silent distress in Quentin’s face very poignant.  In the film’s penultimate scene, one night in Portsmouth, he’s approached and surrounded by a group of five sailors.  As he explains in voiceover:  ‘It was the first, last and only time when I’ve ever been in a crowd of people where I was the centre of attention without feeling I was in danger. …  Nothing sexual happened, nothing was going to happen.  It was what I had always longed for and never elsewhere found.  A flirtation, an evening’s entertainment …’   Hurt’s luminous rapture eclipses the stars in a stylised night sky – the amusingly artificial backdrop to this singular, euphoric scene.

Not only is the lead performance wonderful.  Gold also works wonders to orchestrate the variety of acting styles in the supporting cast that complements it.  These range from virtual caricatures – Quentin’s no-nonsense father (Lloyd Lamble) and feebly protective mother (Joan Ryan), for example – to the more natural (and affecting) playing of John Forbes-Robertson as a civil servant very different from the title character.  Sober-suited and bowler-hatted, he routinely turns up for sex at Quentin’s flat until neighbours’ complaints to the police of what they see through the uncurtained window drive the man from the ministry fearfully away.  Among the bohemians, Stanley Lebor is memorable as an overbearing Polish émigré, although ‘Mr Pole’’s decline from (heterosexual) concupiscence to paranoid schizophrenia occupies too much screen time.

After Thumbnails, comes Barndoor (John Rhys-Davies).  (It will be clear that few characters have forenames or surnames, more have nicknames.)  A labourer type, he shares with his white-collar predecessor a boyish naivete when he’s content with Quentin and a childish petulance when the relationship, which lasts much longer in Barndoor’s case, sours.  For Quentin, life with him yields insights both philosophical and practical.  He’s proof that Quentin’s desire to be loved by ‘a great, dark man’ is doomed to failure (in giving this love, the great, dark man diminishes his own masculinity).  Barndoor’s physique teaches the lesson ‘Never share a narrow double bed with a wide single man’.  Colin Higgins and John Rhys-Davies are further illustrations of, respectively, cartoonish and more naturalistic acting in The Naked Civil Servant.  The film is remarkably able to accommodate both without strain or a sense of contradiction.

It’s not surprising Quentin Crisp became persona non grata with gay rights activists like Peter Tatchell, who claimed in an Independent interview in 2009 that Crisp became homophobic because embittered by jealousy – ‘He resented no longer being the only queer in town’.  It’s easy to understand why Crisp may have felt that gay men of a later generation had things comparatively easy, after changes to the law and because there’s (relative) safety in numbers.  Not that the physical brutality regularly inflicted on him was the usual fate of British homosexuals even pre-1967:  he was a deliberately unusual gay man of the period, determined to express himself – and as an effeminate homosexual.  The Naked Civil Servant features a scene in which Quentin is told to leave a clandestine gay club because he threatens to ‘spoil it for the others’.  The manager (Michael Bangerter) explains that, if the police put in an appearance, his clientele will claim they’re members of a straight gentleman’s club.  With Quentin in their midst, they’ll never be believed.

Crisp, who had outraged people for half a century simply by being himself, evidently felt compelled to keep on outraging once he was famous for it but his lifestyle no longer considered beyond the pale.  His one-man stage show in America always included a Q&A.  One night in 1983, in Chicago, an audience member asked him to comment on AIDS.   His notorious answer – ‘Homosexuals are always complaining of one ailment or another.  AIDS is a fad, nothing more …’ – was offensively stupid, even if it was tongue in cheek.  Although Tatchell’s characterisation of Crisp isn’t fully convincing, it is striking that their only meeting occurred as early as 1974.  According to Tatchell, the gay liberation badge he was wearing ‘prompted Quentin to retort: “What do you want liberation from?”  He continued in a similar vein, dismissing the idea of gay pride:  “What is there to be proud of?   I don’t believe in rights for homosexuals.”’   These remarks are more likely than the AIDS putdown to reflect Crisp’s real feelings because of when they were made – a few years after the publication of The Naked Civil Servant but before the screen version had brought him to wider public notice.  That said, Gold’s film suggests he always had a penchant – and flair – for shocking epigram.  The young Quentin informs his art-student friend that ‘I regard all heterosexuals, however low, as infinitely superior to any homosexual, however noble’.  She immediately says, ‘You don’t mean that’, and he admits as much:  ‘Well, infinitely luckier:  It’s always easier to be a member of the majority’.

Crisp told the Times in 1997 ‘that he would advise parents to abort a foetus if it could be shown to be genetically predetermined to be gay: “If it [homosexuality] can be avoided, I think it should be.”’  Although this is another of the knowingly unspeakable pronouncements of his last years, its more sincere subtext may be that Crisp’s own homosexual existence was, for most of his life, hellish enough for him to wish he’d never been born.  While that doesn’t excuse the remark, it explains it as something more than glib provocation.  Crisp’s ‘What is there to be proud of?’ question to Peter Tatchell can’t be dismissed in those terms either.  It may be hard for present-day gay sensibilities to understand – emotionally, at any rate – that a queer man of Crisp’s vintage couldn’t be immune from the moral pressure of the time to be ashamed, rather than proud, of his sexual nature.  Quentin talks in the film of deciding to deal with the ‘problem’ of his homosexuality by ‘turning it into a cause’.  In what he said to Tatchell, Crisp may also have been questioning the validity of what’s become (especially in the period since Crisp’s death) a tenet of identity politics – that you can, indeed should, take pride in who you happen to be.

He might have had greater sympathy with transgender people to the extent that they face a tougher path to self-expression, even if not as tough as the one he pursued.  In The Last Word: An Autobiography, written in the last two years of his life and published posthumously, Crisp wrote that, ‘The only thing in my life I have wanted and didn’t get was to be a woman.  It will be my life’s biggest regret.  If the operation had been available and cheap when I was young, say when I was twenty-five or twenty-six, I would have jumped at the chance.  My life would have been much simpler as a result.’  He then instantly clouds the issue by adding that, once he’d become a woman, he ‘would have told nobody.  Instead, I would have gone to live in a distant town and run a knitting wool shop and no one would ever have known my secret’.  This seems to imply that a sex-change operation would also have eradicated Crisp’s inveterate appetite for attention, allowing him to be content with mousy anonymity.  More likely, though, these two remarks were closely juxtaposed to ensure that, to the end, Quentin Crisp kept his audience – that’s surely how he determined to see the world – guessing.  He wanted to leave us, as all the best performers are supposed to leave an audience, wanting more.

12 November 2020

[1] The film’s title is Little Malcolm.