A Hell of a Fade-Out; Suffering from emphysema, the great British theater critic Kenneth Tynan arrived in Santa Monica in 1976 with his dazzling second wife, Kathleen, their two children, and hopes for a new beginning.(Biography)

Byline: Sam Kashner

In October of 1976, sun-drenched Santa Monica was about to receive some unlikely guests: the English drama critic Kenneth Tynan, his beautiful wife, Kathleen, and their two children. Tynan, widely regarded as one of the greatest-and most feared-theater critics of the 20th century, had established his reputation at two London newspapers, the Evening Standard and The Observer, while still in his 20s.

A self-described "talent snob," Tynan had formed friendships with Marlene Dietrich, Richard Burton, John Huston, Noel Coward, Orson Welles, Katharine Hepburn, Tennessee Williams, and Sir Laurence Olivier, whom he worshipped and at whose side he mapped the direction of London's National Theatre from 1963 to 1973. But at the age of 49, this quintessential London aesthete, suffering from emphysema aggravated by a two-packs-a-day smoking habit, decided to jump the pond, packing his bags for America.

They rented a $2,200-a-month house in Santa Monica that belonged to the American screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. (The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor)-"a glorious, sprawling Spanish-style house at the end of Kingman Avenue," wrote Kathleen in her 1987 biography, The Life of Kenneth Tynan. "It was more than we could afford, but it was a luxury I felt we needed to launch our new life. The place had thick-walled privacy, and silence, except for the cooing of pigeons and the sound of the children splashing and squealing in the swimming pool. We were close enough to the ocean to be free of smog, and the air smelled of eucalyptus and orange blossom, and, at night, of woodsmoke from the open fire in the high-beamed living room."

Tynan wrote to Marlene Dietrich, "Santa Monica is very strange after London. Every morning a large golden disc appears in the sky.... People remove their clothes and jump into pools of water. It is all very odd." In this blissful setting his health seemed to improve, and he and Kathleen launched a very social life of party-giving and party-going.

"The Wilders and the Tynans had the only salons left in the 60s and 70s," says Sue Mengers, the most powerful Hollywood agent of the era. "I remember being seated at Thanksgiving dinner-it was at the Billy Wilders', seated between George Burns and Ken Tynan. During dinner, Ken put his hand down the back of my dress, and he was just fondling my buttocks. Ken loved buttocks, and in my case, there was a lot to love. I mean, [he was the producer of the 1969 Off Broadway erotic revue] Oh! Calcutta!, after all. He whipped buttocks! What's the big deal? Ken was not content with the ordinary."

"He was wonderful company and was always asked back," Kathleen would later write. "Ken noted that in London, he wore a dinner jacket roughly once a year, whereas in Los Angeles, during the course of one week, he had worn black tie to the premier of The Last Tycoon, to the wedding of Marisa Berenson ... and to a dinner given by the agent Swifty Lazar and his wife."

Lazar's party was a mix of Old and New Hollywood: Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Huston, Liza Minnelli, Warren Beatty, plus Dinah Shore, producer Ray Stark, and a magnificently preserved Merle Oberon. Mengers recalls being present, angry that Lazar had poached her guest list for a party she had planned for the following night. She hissed into Tynan's ear, "That goddamned Swifty! He swore to me he wouldn't ask Warren, and guess who just walked in the fucking door! ... I'll show the bastard: I'll get Streisand tomorrow, so help me!"

And so she did, along with Ryan O'Neal, Steven Spielberg (fresh from the success of Jaws), James Coburn, Dudley Moore, Tuesday Weld, and Tina Sinatra.

"Dudley ... was a welcome relief in a room criss-crossed with hostile emanations from so many warlike egos," Tynan wrote in his diary.

As a young man at Oxford, Tynan had been a dandy (known for his dove-colored suits and-later-his leopardskin trousers, worn on a gaunt, elegant frame). At the age of 23, he published his first book, He That Plays the King, for which he had flattered Orson Welles, one of his idols, into writing the introduction. Throughout his career, he delighted his readers with witty descriptions of actors: "What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober"; "[Anthony Quinn] always acts as if he were wearing a suit for the first time"; John Gielgud is like "a tight, smart, walking umbrella."

By 1955, Tynan was so much a public figure that Alec Guinness spoofed him in The Ladykillers, by aping Tynan's habit of effetely holding a cigarette between his middle and ring finger. He would come to be known, as well, as a connoisseur of wine and food-of what his friend and frequent dining companion Gore Vidal referred to as "the higher piggery."

In his 30s, Tynan left The Observer to become the dramaturge of the newly founded National Theatre, under Laurence Olivier's direction. He was also largely responsible for dragging English theater into the modern age by championing "Angry Young Man" John Osborne's 1956 drama, Look Back in Anger, and extolling American playwrights Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. He was the creator and impresario behind Oh! Calcutta!, which the Guinness Book of World Records listed as "the longest running revue." He created a national furor and was denounced in Parliament when he uttered the word "fuck" on a BBC broadcast about censorship. (Although, as Gore Vidal recently pointed out, given Tynan's noticeable stammer, it was more like "f-f-f-fuck.")

Tynan had lived in the U.S. briefly in 1958, when he accepted a stint as theater critic for The New Yorker. He brought along his first wife, the American novelist and heiress Elaine Dundy, to New York for two theatrical seasons, after which the couple returned to London. By then Tynan was exhausted by this long, bitter marriage, which had been a punching match characterized by infidelities on both sides. In December of 1962, he met Kathleen Halton, who was working on an arts-news column at The Observer.

At 24, Kathleen was tall and slim, with a wide smile and a mane of dark silky hair. Though she described herself as middle-class, she had a somewhat aloof, aristocratic air, and she was the kind of woman who lit up a room. "She was the image of perfection-physical perfection. Men were just absolutely riveted to her," says Mengers. The London-born daughter of a Canadian journalist, Kathleen had just six months earlier married Oliver Gates, the scion of an aristocratic English family, but after eight months of being wooed by Tynan she left Gates.

Married in June 1967, Ken and Kathleen launched their exuberant life together at 120 Mount Street, where their huge parties helped define Swinging London in the 1960s. Norman Mailer, Duke Ellington, theater director…