Keith McNally had a long-running affair with top British playwright Alan Bennett as a young man, the Balthazar and Pastis restaurateur reveals in his new memoir.
“I’ve had two homosexual relationships in my life. The first was with an actor when I was sixteen. The second and more serious one was with English playwright Alan Bennett,” McNally, 73, writes in “I Regret Almost Everything,” out Tuesday.
After leaving school at 16, McNally — who has, in recent years, become an Instagram provocateur posting extremely candid takes on celebs from James Corden to Lauren Sánchez — started acting.
He met Bennett, who has penned stage hits including “The Madness of King George III” and “The History Boys,” while appearing in his play “Forty Years On” in London’s West End.
“It wasn’t until the play ended that our relationship developed into something else,” McNally writes, saying that Bennett invited him to the theater and dinner at his house, something they soon made a weekly date.
Bennett, now 90, would then drive him home — but McNally would make him park “several blocks” away, “fully aware” of what his family would think, even though their relationship was still platonic at that point.
Six weeks later, McNally sensed Bennett was in love with him. “Sleeping with Alan felt like a natural progression of our friendship. It was uncomplicated and I never once felt guilty about it,” McNally writes.
“After the first night, I’d stay over two or three times a night. While I loved Alan, the attraction was never physical, and our nights together were more intimate than passionate. Soon after our relationship began, Alan told me that before meeting me he’d never slept with someone he was in love with.”
McNally adds: “My relationship with Alan enriched my life in ways I find hard to explain. I can’t imagine how my life would have turned out without it. “
Bennet even based a minor character in his play “Getting On” on him, he says.
“Keeping my liaison with Alan from my family and friends didn’t require my effort,” McNally writes. “The five years spent desperately avoiding my school’s communal showers had prepared me well for this kind of deception.”
Eight months after their romance started, however, McNally went traveling to Nepal and had a change of heart.
“Although I was still very close to Alan. I no longer wanted to continue a physical relationship with him. His feelings had become much stronger than mine, and I felt overwhelmed—almost suffocated-by — by them,” he writes.
When McNally returned home, he began dating a girl from his own East London background, while concealing his ongoing relationship with Alan. “I was back to leading a double—or rather triple—life,” he admits.
Things finally ended when McNally moved to America in 1975, although they remained “good friends” and the playwright would regularly visit him in New York. “Alan adored my first wife, Lynn [Wagenknecht, who was his partner at Odeon]. After Lynn and I divorced, the two of them became even closer,” McNally reveals.
When the restaurateur, who has five children with his two ex-wives, moved back to London in 2011, he and Bennett saw each other as much, however, because the playwright’s long-term boyfriend, ex-World of Interiors editor Rupert Thomas, “felt awkward around me.”
But they would still chat on the phone and make each other laugh.
“Hearing Alan laugh reminded me of all the times — some forty-five years earlier — when I’d delight in listening to him and [director and actor] Jonathan Miller laughing uncontrollably together in Miller’s basement kitchen.”
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