Gossip and gunshot

Hamilton, #14.99 (pp 224).

DURING his lifetime Tom Driberg's main claim to fame was as

Beaverbrook's first and finest William Hickey columnist on the Daily

Express. After his death, at the age of 71 in 1976, he claimed

considerable infamy with his posthumous autobiography Ruling Passions.

The former Labour MP and later Lord Bradwell came rushing out of the

chamber as a roaring homosexual, an affluent gentleman with a penchant

for rough trade, especially Scottish rough trade (his mother was

Scottish). ''His homosexuality truly was his ruling passion,'' observed

Michael Foot in a postscript to the autobiography.

As an exceptionally gifted gossip, Driberg intended his own account of

his homosexual adventures to entertain rather than offend. There was the

charge of indecent assault on two Scottish miners, Driberg being cleared

with a little help from Beaverbrook. There was the incident in Edinburgh

when he was caught with a sailor in Princes Street Gardens: on telling a

shocked policeman he was William Hickey he was let off with a warning, a

tale he told to Bob Boothby who told it to Compton Mackenzie who used it

as the basis for his novel Thin Ice. There was the night of passion with

a Black Watch soldier (''a sandy-haired Scot of remarkable beauty'') who

assured Driberg ''Only sissies like women''.

Francis Wheen retells these tales with relish in his biography, adding

his own interpretative explanations. For example, in the case of the two

Scottish miners, Driberg claimed he was innocent of any erotic

intention. Wheen is not so sure: ''It would be just like Tom to give one

of the men an exploratory fondle,'' he says. Not exactly

earth-shattering stuff, you might think, and the same can be said of

other (obviously apocryphal) anecdotes about the private parts of Nye

Bevan and Jim Callaghan. More amusingly Driberg, who tried to persuade

Mick Jagger to stand as a Labour candidate, remarked, on scrutinising

the singer's trousers, ''Oh my, Mick, what a big basket you have!'' No

wonder Jagger blushed.

A pugnacious journalistic gossip in the Driberg tradition, Wheen

answers various allegations against his hero, not always plausibly. It

has been assumed that Driberg married Ena Blinfield in 1951 (''buggers

can't be choosers'', joked Churchill on seeing a photograph of Ena) as a

respectable cover for a possible ministerial post under Attlee.

''Nonsense'' insists Wheen: Driberg knew he had no chance of becoming a

cabinet minister, pointing out in Ruling Passions that Attlee (like

Harold Wilson after him) was a ''deeply prejudiced'' puritan who

detested homosexuals. Driberg, Wheen believes, married to gain a

companion to share Bradwell Lodge, his stately home in Essex. Yet the

marriage was a predictable farce that took on tragic overtones as Ena

tried to cope with the strain of Driberg's pursuit of young men. If

Driberg only wanted a domestic companion it is obvious he should have

chosen a compatible one, presumably a uniformed youth. I still think the

marriage was a foolish plan for political promotion.

On another issue Wheen is more convincing. Two years after Driberg's

death, Chapman Pincher's book Inside Story suggested the late Labour MP

and former Communist was possibly a KGB agent. Driberg had written a

sympathetic biography of his friend, the Soviet spy Guy Burgess, in

1956, and Pincher drew his own conclusions. ''But,'' declares Wheen

indignantly, ''Pincher is hardly the best judge: as urinal to the men of

M15 and M16 he cannot rid himself of the stench imparted by his patrons'

acrid piss.'' In Wheen's opinion, the book on Burgess was no

KGB-inspired tract but a text reflecting ''Tom's genuine

preoccupations'' with justice and Christian socialism.

It is Wheen's contention that Driberg, evidently more sinner than

saint, was both promiscuous homosexual and sincere Christian. Wheen

argues his case eloquently, leaving an impression of Driberg as a

victim, not a villain. This is exactly the kind of affectionate

biography Driberg would have wished on himself, though the heterosexual

reader will find the special pleading a shade too pious.

Quentin Crisp, a less desperate homosexual than Driberg, has

profitably made an exhibition of himself in print, on film (vicariously,

courtesy of John Hurt) and on stage. Now, in a sequence of short essays

reprinted from Christopher Street magazine, the pun-loving, movie-mad

''effeminate homosexual'' offers characteristically crisp comments on

his favourite cinematic exhibitionists. His aesthetic criteria are

simple enough: a film should be larger than life (television is

dismissed because it ''diminishes the scale of our fantasies'', a

filmscript should be unashamedly escapist (''We ought to visit a cinema

as we would go to church''), a filmstar should be a colossal fantasy

figure (''an ideal of virtue of mystery or depravity''). He loves

Crawford, Davis, Dietrich: all the movie monsters.

According to Crisp, Hollywood, once ''a lacquered pavilion of women,

an exotic aviary of actresses'', is currently ruled by men, money and

machines (''Producers no longer need women; they have robots''). When

Crisp is not waxing nostalgically about the glory that was Hollywood, he

is scattering his eccentric opinions like gunshot, often missing the

mark by a mile. Discussing the film A Bigger Splash, he recognises only

four great painters of the twentieth century, namely John, Dali, Warhol

and Hockney, which is bad news for admirers of Picasso, Leger and the

like. Turning to Prick Up Your Ears he explains that Joe Orton was

murdered because of his ''heartless, strident and masculinity'' and

describes the dialogue as Pinteresque when Alan Bennett's script is

superlatively Ortonesque.

Film buffs will find Crisp's perception of movies as fantasy-factories

too trite but fans of Crisp will enjoy provocative remarks which always

say more about the star-struck author that the phenomenon of film