September 27

Murder of Biographer Pope-Hennessy
By "Rough-Trade" Gay Prostitutes

I received a hardcover book for my birthday (back in February) that I just got around to reading -- but I bailed before finishing it. For the most part, I find books about the British royal family stultifyingly dull. The author, on the otherhand, had a life that was anything but. To wit:

Noted biographer James Pope-Hennessy (1916-1974) was the grandson of Irish politician and colonial administrator John Pope Hennessy, a member of the Anglo-Irish landowning gentry who served as the eighth Governor of Hong Kong from 1877-1883. Grandson James, however, was born in London, not taking Irish citizenship until he was in his fifties. He was known for two things – being the biographer of Queen Mary and being beaten to death at age 57 by homosexual prostitutes who were attempting to rob him in his own home.

During WW II James was a member of British intelligence stationed in Washington, DC, returning to London in 1945, when he shared an apartment with Guy Burgess, a gay man who notoriously defected to the Soviet Union in 1951. In the ensuing years James wrote biographies and travel accounts that formed the basis of a solid career as a writer.

James became famous after writing what many regard as the best royal biography ever written, Queen Mary, published in 1959, only six years after the queen’s death. It was an astonishingly candid book, considering that it was published at the time when royal secrets were tightly shielded from public scrutiny. Amazingly, Pope-Hennessy was given rare access to the private diaries Queen Mary had kept during her lifetime. A collection of the notes, letters and interviews used to research this biography was published as The Quest for Queen Mary in 2018, and the original 1959 biography was republished in a paperback (and Kindle) edition earlier this year.

Actually, James didn’t want to write the biography when first asked by royal librarian Owen Morshead. Pope-Hennessy was an unlikely choice, described as “two characters lodged in one shell”. One was the hard-working professional writer, the witty raconteur and confidante of smart society women. The other was a heavy drinker, a man driven by “unremitting homosexuality” into low life, consorting with male prostitutes of the ilk known as “rough trade”. In fact, one of the youths he picked up for sex moved into his house and instigated his murder several months later.

In 1974 his London apartment was “broken into” (the official version*) by three men after one of them overheard him boasting about an advance of $150,000 he had received to write a biography of the celebrated homosexual playwright, Noël Coward. They thought the cash was in the apartment. It wasn’t, but Pope-Hennessy was nevertheless brutally beaten to death.

*In actuality, this was an inside job, since one of the three assailants was living with James at the time.

If ever an account of a high-born member of English society dipping into the low-life realm of homosexual prostitution were ripe for the basis of a TV miniseries, this is it. I want Jonathan Groff for James and Russell Tovey for the live-in assailant.

 In the swim*:

*"In the swim" was a phrase from the 1940s referencing fashionable people or places, or objects that were trendy.

"For my rich uncle Max, winters in Palm Beach and summers on Nantucket were in the swim."

Frat house memories:

Oktoberfest continues through Oct. 6: