Odd this day
Today is the 103rd anniversary of the birth of Roderic Fenwick Owen, who, in a life packed with incident, wrote a biography of an RAF commander, married a Tahitian princess, picked up men all over the world, became court poet to the sheikh of Abu Dhabi, turned down a Jackson Pollock painting, and spent a night with Sean Connery…
Roddy begins his memoir with an account of his arrival in the world:
At 6.30 a.m. on 27 March 1921 — Easter Sunday — a delivery boy from Harrods rang the bell of a white porticoed town house in Prince’s Gardens, Knightsbridge. His cargo was an enormous chocolate egg ties with blue ribbon, which was opened on the chequered hallway tiles to reveal a boy called Roderic. What a lovely surprise all round.
…and before the end of page one, he’s announced that his grandmother was “a notable harlot in Edwardian society”, very much setting the tone for what follows.
As a schoolboy at Eton, he meets Marlene Dietrich in a tearoom, and has various frolics with his schoolmates. He goes to Germany in 1939, gets a crush on a young man called Werner, and gets back to Blighty only a day or two before war is declared. Initially a conscientious objector, he joins the RAF, goes to Egypt, and one night in Luxor, his guide Ali shows him
the god Min, Lord of the Erect Phallus, with his chief attribute protruding parallel to the ground.
Ali then takes him behind a statue of Rameses II and
let himself go; and I didn’t object in the least.
In Tahiti in 1949, he meets Turia, who massages him with coconut oil until he loosens his pareu (a kind of sarong) and
lay there erect and pulsating
(Roderic does not stint on detail, and when approached by a publisher who wanted to edit his million-word memoir down agreed on condition “that nothing be cut on the grounds of decency”.)
In New York in 1950, he shares a house with an artist — “Jackson something-or-other” — who offers him the chance to “take one or two of my paintings back to England with you”. Roddy, though, has privately decided they look “like segments of an old wall” and declines. In 1954, on a jaunt to the Middle East, he becomes — quite by accident — court poet to Sheikh Shakhbut bin Sultan, ruler of Abu Dhabi, and remains in the role for 30 years, despite spending most of that time in Britain.
By this point, he has decided that
After swinging like a pendulum between the two inherent sides of my nature, I was coming to rest mainly among the men.
…a point he emphasises with the tale of the Vic Wells Ball at the Lyceum in 1952.
In the early hours of the morning, I spotted a pirate, dancing clumsily. What did that matter? He was very good looking in a swarthy, piratical way, with broad shoulders owing nothing to padding.
Roddy asks
for the pleasure of the next waltz. He smiled back boldly, yet shyly, as though not too sure of himself, before saying in a Scottish accent, “I can only dance as a man, you know.”
“Oh, that’s my line too!” I said. “We’ll just trot around the floor. We’ll manage!”
(We are definitely in Julian and Sandy territory here. This mysterious Scottish chap almost certainly had thews like an oak, and bulging lallies.)
Anyway, after being told off for dancing together (“Those are gentlemen with gentlemen dressed as ladies. That’s quite in order! It’s two gentlemen dancing together dressed as gentlemen that’s forbidden”)…
He told me that his name was ‘Shone’, which I supposed was his way of pronouncing ‘John’, and that he’d come to the big city hoping to find a job in the theatre. It seemed rather an unlikely aspiration for someone looking like a garage-hand, but what a splendid garage-hand! Good physique, doggy eyes and an attractive brogue…
He invites the man back to his house
where without further ado we hopped into the double-bed.
Alas, it was not to be the night Roddy hoped for
“I don’t mind a bit of sky-larking, Rod,” he said. “But I’d be happier with the lights out.”
A pity. He was hairy in all the right places, and muscular, with another attraction, a soft/hard manner uniquely his own … Who could have guessed that he would shoot up as spectacularly as he did, showering an admiring world with thunderclaps? One of the great heart-throbs of our times, even voted ‘the sexiest man alive’.
As a footnote points out:
All the clues point to this being Sean Connery, who would have been in his early twenties at the time, seeking to become an actor after an early career as a body-builder.
(Roderic’s memoir was published in 2022, when Connery was safely dead and couldn’t contact any lawyers.)
You may not be surprised to hear that Roddy thought Lord Wolfenden’s publication of 1957 rather welcome.
Life after his report promised to be — and was — just that little bit better for adventures, and much, much better for misadventures.
Appropriately, in 1967, the year of the Sexual Offences Act, he met the love of his life, then working behind the bar in Kensington Close Club. He and Gian Carlo Pasqualetto spent many happy years together, grateful
not just to Lord Wolfenden but to God, for the deep and joyous contentment which was to be ours, through thick and thin, in sickness and in health
…and he meant every word, caring for Gian Carlo throughout his alcoholism until his early death in 1995.
Fenwick Owen himself died in 2011, just shy of his 90th birthday, and his funeral address was given by Rabbi Lionel Blue.
They’d met in a bath house sauna.
There’s more about his extraordinary life here:
…and in the memoir
(although, remarkably, even edited down, and even with all the salacious bits left in, there are still parts where it feels more could be cut).
