Paul Bryant's Reviews > Charles Hawtrey 1914-1988 : The Man Who Was Private Widdle

Sometimes we fish in murky waters. Here's a tiny fragment of a book about the weird and not wonderful Charles Hawtry, a hideous caricature of an actor remembered only for being one of the abased grotesques in the grim, revolting, bargain-basement, so bad it's just bad, not good-bad Carry On series, famous world-wide. To call the Carry Ons puerile would give a bad name to puers. I sometimes imagine a bunch of intellectuals in, say, Bombay, watching Carry On Up the Khyber and saying to each other - gor blimey o'reilly - these were our colonial masters!
In the painful Carry On crew Charles Hawtrey was the perpetual schoolboy with the big glasses who would dress up as a woman quicker than you could say "in this scene you have to dress up as a woman". He was the very definition of what most men thought homosexuals were, even camper than Kenneth Williams, and that's saying a lot. Here’s Roger Lewis’s wonderful description of Kenneth Williams :

an appalling actor, affected, caustic, shrieking like a peacock and with no sense of dramatic rhythm. Sinuous, snaky, serpentine, his voice and body coil and writhe across the screen, his forked tongue flickering, his nostrils looming and threatening to engulf you like railway tunnels

Yes, don’t get on the wrong side of Roger Lewis. But he likes Hawtry. Here he is liking him :

he’s a manifestation. Everything about him – his bony witch’s fingers, his round spectacles, his skin which was like tracing paper, his coal-black lock of hair – was picturesque; it’s the stylization of a silent movie. He’s like a drawing by Beardsley or Cocteau, a sketch in pen and ink, a few contours and curlicues, held together by nervous tension…. in his work there is enjoyment, a winningness; in his life furtiveness, pride, cynicism, boredom and hatred, a strain of discord forever creaking and snapping beneath the surface

Why write a book, even such an afterthought of a book as this one, which is more of a long pamphlet, about such a benighted creature? But that’s the beauty of it – we’re human, and are therefore part Laurence Olivier and part Charles Hawtry, part Meryl Streep and part Paris Hilton, we dream among the stars and we smirk behind our hands. I think Shakespeare says something similar somewhere. And we can write about what we like. And sometimes we like very odd things.

Charles Hawtry’s life is not pleasant to contemplate – he wanted big ruff tuff masculine boyfriends but never got any unless money changed hands. He propositioned every taxi driver who took him home when he’d been slung out of a pub for propositioning every other man. He had no friends, he had a Psycho-style relationship with his mummy (talking to her aloud after she died). It seems he was never happier than when he was wearing female clothing. This is just the kind of screwed-up individual they had in mind when they tried (and still in some places try) to de-program gay people. You want your kid to be like Charles Hawtry? Huh? Well, no – I really don’t.
The cross-dressing gender-bending aspect of gay culture has always given me the willies (oo-ah ducky). Firstly because it permeates British culture, particularly comedy, and is enshrined in the dame in the panto we all troop off to see every Christmas (note – girls dressed as boys is a whole other thing, I never mind that!). There's hardly a British comic who hasn't been a cock in a frock at some point in their career. And second because it gives me the pernicious idea that gay men are actually all just simply transgendered, they’re females born into the wrong body, that’s why they want to wear mascara and camp about. (And same goes for the masculine lesbians too). But I actually don’t believe that, I think that’s completely wrong-headed way to think about the whole thing. As I say, these are murky waters in which to fish.

One thing I learned in this book was that male homosexuals often had female travelling companions which they described as a “beard”. As in “Are you taking a beard?” This was (then) gay slang. Beard = false beard, as in acting a part. The female was acting the part of the gay man’s wife.

I admit to being embarrassed that this review is as long as some reviews of The Brothers Karamazov.