How a Noël Coward song survived almost a century—through secret longing, a television commercial, and one unforgettable face whose name has been lost.
A young man, still in his teens, was arranging T-shirts inside a clothes shop on Corso Porta Borsari in Verona. He straightened the rails, turned every hanger so it faced the same direction, then stood back to admire his handiwork.
As he worked, he hummed.
The tune was unmistakable.
Not because it is often heard these days, but because it belongs to another age entirely. Hearing it drift across a fashionable shop on a warm Italian afternoon was quietly disarming. It also hinted, perhaps, at something about the young man himself.
The song was Mad About the Boy.
Nearly a century has passed since Noël Coward wrote it, yet it continues to surface in the most unexpected places. It has survived changing fashions, changing attitudes and changing audiences, acquiring new meanings with each generation that rediscovers it.
For many people, that rediscovery came in 1992.
A memorable television advertisement for Levi jeans, directed by Tarsem Singh and inspired by the 1968 Burt Lancaster film The Swimmer, followed a striking young man as he dived from one suburban swimming pool to another. Each dive seemed to carry him into a different decade. There were immaculate post-war families tending barbecues, cocktail parties beneath tiki umbrellas and elegant suburban gardens that belonged to another America altogether. Time became as fluid as water.
Only at the final pool did he stop. A young woman joined him on the diving board before they disappeared together into an Olympic-sized pool.
Playing throughout was Dinah Washington’s recording of Mad About the Boy.
The commercial introduced millions of viewers to a song that was already sixty years old. It also transformed Washington’s 1961 recording into the definitive version, entering the British charts more than thirty years after she had recorded it with Quincy Jones.
Yet the young man who captivated millions simply disappeared from public memory. There’s something rather poignant about that. It echoes the song itself—everyone was “mad about the boy,” yet nobody seems to know who he was.
The song itself had always been more intriguing than most people realised.
When Coward wrote Mad About the Boy for his 1932 revue Words and Music, it appeared to be a witty lament sung by four very different women—a society hostess, a schoolgirl, a maid and a prostitute—all hopelessly infatuated with the same film star. It quickly became the show’s sensation.
Beneath its polished wit, however, lay something more complicated.
The lyrics speak of embarrassment, secrecy and sleepless nights. They even refer to the boy’s “gay appeal”, a phrase that meant something rather different in 1932, yet has acquired an unmistakable resonance with the passing of time. Long before homosexuality could be openly discussed, the song had become one that many queer listeners instinctively recognised as their own—not because Coward ever declared it so, but because the emotions it expressed were painfully familiar.
Coward himself only deepened the ambiguity.
After the London opening of Words and Music, he entertained Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., the actor often said to have inspired the song. Fairbanks later laughed off the suggestion.
“I always thought it was Gary Cooper.”
Whether the boy existed at all would remain one of the song’s enduring mysteries.
When Words and Music was revived in New York eight years later under the title Set to Music, Coward wrote an additional verse. This time the singer was not a woman but a respectable businessman whose increasingly desperate attempts to explain his fascination with another man became both comic and surprisingly daring.
It proved too daring.
The verse was cut before audiences ever heard it.
Mad about the boy, I know it’s silly but I’m mad about the boy, And even Doctor Freud cannot explain Those vexing dreams I’ve had about the boy. When I told my wife, She said: ” I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life! “ Her lack of sympathy Embarrassed me And made me frankly glad about the boy. My doctor can’t advise me, He’d help me if he could; Three times he’s tried to psychoanalyze me, But it’s just no good. People I employ Have the impertinence To call me Myrna Loy. I rise above it, Frankly love it, ‘Cos I’m absolutely MAD ABOUT THE BOY!
Imagine that Eddie Redmayne sat down beside you on the steps. He might do that. Soft-spoken, bookish and entirely unthreatening. His dandyish sense of style, expressive features and quiet politeness feel oddly familiar to me. He’s the perfect amount of gay—not in a sexual sense, but in that elusive way some men seem to embody a gentle elegance without ever feeling performative.
Fallen in love with …
Nineteen-year-old French student Didier Gaspard Owen Maximilien. Some people volunteer. Some climb Everest. Didier licked a straw from an orange juice vending machine, slid it back into the dispenser, edited the footage into a short film, and posted it with the caption: “city is not safe.” Singapore fined him S$600 (about $465). He’s either the villain in a public health campaign or the greatest shitposter of his generation. There is no middle ground.
Too beautiful to know it …
“It kills me to look at my old photographs of myself and my friends. We were such beautiful, sexy kids but we always felt bad because we thought we were ugly at the time. It was because we were such outcasts in high school and so unpopular. We believed what other people said. If any one of us could have seen how attractive we really were we might have made something better of our lives. I’m the only guy that I know who wanted to run away to be a prostitute.” ―Mark Morrisroe (1959–1989)
Mark Morrisroe. Self-Portrait (to Brent), 1982
The book I haven’t opened yet …
Why do I feel faintly guilty after receiving a copy of The Romance of a Choirboy from a friend in London? I haven’t even read the first page, yet it has already acquired that awkward quality of a book which almost seems to require an explanation simply for owning it.
Part of me wonders whether I should leave it exactly where it is.
John Gambril Nicholson wrote the novel between 1896 and 1905, although it wasn’t privately printed until 1916. It tells the story of Philip, an Anglican minister whose emotional and romantic fixation on a schoolboy called Teddy is presented with complete sincerity. More than a century later, it’s difficult to read the premise without immediately recognising the imbalance of age, authority and power. Today we would simply describe the relationship as predatory.
And yet, the novel refuses to disappear. It still surfaces in studies of late Victorian and Edwardian literature, less because people admire it than because it captures attitudes that respectable society often preferred not to acknowledge. Reading an uncomfortable book isn’t an endorsement of its ideas any more than visiting a museum is an endorsement of history. Even so, I suspect this is one of those books I’ll keep eyeing suspiciously from across the room before eventually deciding whether curiosity gets the better of me.
The boy you shouldn’t like …
A twenty-something, hard-partying gay fashion model who doesn’t wear underwear. I’ve come across a few of those.
That’s the premise of Proud, HBO Max’s new Polish drama series.
Ignacy Liss stars as Filip, a carefree young man who is forced to grow up almost overnight after a family tragedy leaves him the guardian of his late sister’s infant daughter, Tosia.
We should be angry with him. We should probably be disappointed in him too.
But we aren’t, because there’s something undeniably appealing about him.
Maybe it’s the soft jawline, the expressive eyes, or the raw vulnerability that slips through the bravado.
Liss, who is straight and, away from the screen, a married father, makes for an infuriatingly convincing bad boy.
Mark Morrisroe, Self-Portrait with Broken Finger, Christmas 1984
I would have fallen in love with him. No doubt about that. And he would have ruined my life.
But that never happened.
A bullet rolled out of his ashes. Shot in the back at seventeen. That was all that remained.
Myles Vale
Mark Morrisroe (1959-1989) was an influential American photographer, performance artist, and filmmaker who served as a central figure in the Boston punk scene of the 1970s and the New York art boom of the 1980s. When he was 17 years old, he was shot in the back, leaving him with a bullet lodged next to his spine for the rest of his life. He died of AIDS complications. His last words to his friends were “take my photo”. On the second click of the shutter he was gone.
Fabian Strachan Woodley (1888–1957) was a Bristol-born teacher, journalist, and poet whose wartime writing evolved from youthful patriotism to profound melancholy after a devastating personal loss.
In June 1916, his lover, twenty-year-old Lieutenant Myles O’Donovan of the Royal Munster Fusiliers, a native of County Cork, was killed by shellfire. In response, Woodley wrote To Lieut O’D (1916), a deeply personal elegy in his memory.
The poem marked a turning point in Woodley’s work. Gone were the optimistic patriotic verses of his early war years, replaced by a poignant meditation on grief and the waste of young life. He evokes O’Donovan’s vitality and laughter before the brutal interruption of a screaming shell brings his life to an abrupt end in the trenches.
To Lieut O’D was later included in Woodley’s 1921 collection, A Crown of Friendship.
To Lieut. O’D (1916)
See him standing at the corner, Cynosure of friendly eyes, Challenging their kindly sallies, Combatting with swift replies.
Eyes alight with Life and Laughter, Brown eyes full of mirth and fun; Fresh face tanned by months of warfare, Lithe limbs browned by summer sun.
Suddenly a shell comes screaming, Through the blue vault overheard, Strikes – His laughing lips are silent, All his splendid youth lies dead.
Death! whose arrow countless thousands And unerring aim have proved, Could you not have aimed untruly, Spared for me the boy I loved?
David decided to spend the afternoon on his own. Moments like this had become rare.
He had spent the morning writing, but his concentration had deserted him. Leaving Joshua creating something unidentifiable in the studio, he wandered towards Little Portugal and ended up nursing a cappuccino outside Starbucks.
Portuguese families had first settled around Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove before rising rents gradually pushed many south of the Thames. The neighbourhood around South Lambeth Road eventually became known as Little Portugal, although, today, there seemed remarkably few Portuguese about.
Places like this had always fed David’s imagination.
He would settle into his chair and watch the procession of strangers pass by; ordinary people following lives known only to themselves. He would invent those lives as they walked.
His attention always drifted towards solitary young men moving with effortless confidence. Summer had finally arrived and they appeared in shorts, T-shirts and trainers, a backpack slung casually over one shoulder. David had never quite lost his fascination with male legs.
Not long ago he had stumbled across an idea for a book.
It would require an entirely different kind of research.
He imagined choosing a young man at random. There was only one rule: he had to be someone David found beautiful enough to want to sleep with. Realistically, he thought, the feeling would almost certainly not be mutual. Most would be straight, but that hardly mattered. David would give each one a name, follow discreetly behind and see where life carried him. Every journey would become a chapter. Every stranger, a story.
So far, the idea had remained just that.
When he mentioned it to Joshua, he had received a look of genuine concern.
“You do realise you’re describing stalking?”
David had laughed, but the accusation lingered.
Even so, the idea continued to delight him.
When a handsome young man with thick dark curls appeared at the end of the street, David briefly wondered whether today might finally be the day.
Instead, his attention shifted to the table beside him.
An older man and a much younger one had just sat down together.
A couple? Father and son?
Before David could decide, a woman appeared carrying coffees.
Mother.
The younger man was exceptionally handsome. Tallish, blond, wearing a designer top, blue shorts and unexpectedly bright pink socks. The socks made David smile. Stretching his legs in front of him, the young man absent-mindedly stroked the smooth skin of one shin before rubbing the back of his knee as though it had begun to ache.
David found himself listening.
Only the boy’s voice carried.
It was unmistakably Home Counties.
“She’s strange,” he said. “And she walks funny too.”
His parents laughed. His mother replied too quietly for David to catch.
“I know what you’re saying,” the boy answered, “but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
David suspected she was trying to engineer a romance.
The father smiled with quiet satisfaction.
David recognised the expression immediately.
It was the face of a man who knew exactly how handsome his son was.
The longer David looked at him, the more he could imagine the father at the same age. Once equally beautiful. Once perhaps exactly the kind of man David might have taken home without a second thought.
The mother passed over a muffin.
The boy demolished it without the slightest concern for calories. Crumbs scattered down the front of his T-shirt before he brushed them away.
“We obviously flirt with each other,” he said, “but what’s the point of flirting with someone who doesn’t want you?”
My God.
How could anybody not want you?
He was exactly the kind of boy David loved to be seen beside. Someone impossibly attractive who might patiently sit in a garden listening to his stories while pretending to prune roses.
Then again, David suspected the illusion would disappear the moment he started talking about girlfriends.
Once upon a time, David had been that boy.
Only now did he realise how fortunate he had been.
At the time, he never knew.
His mother resumed talking while the boy scrolled through his phone, somehow managing to follow both conversations at once.
“It’ll take a month or so to grow,” he said, barely looking up.
Life would be much easier if parents never got in the way.
The father, who had spoken hardly at all, glanced towards David.
David instinctively lowered his eyes to his own phone.
The screen was still open on an interview with a twenty-something influencer from New York.
“The guys I fuck outside my relationship don’t look anything like my boyfriend. They’re all, like, fifty-five with massive tits. Why would I eat what I can get at home?”
David smiled despite himself.
Why don’t I ever meet people like that?
The thought faded almost as quickly as it arrived.
Another, quieter one took its place.
He was growing old.
Not suddenly.
Not dramatically.
Simply, unmistakably.
He imagined himself in ten years time.
An old man sitting alone on a bench. Shoulders rounded beneath the weight of time. Hands resting on his knees, or wrapped around the handle of a walking stick. A faded wool jacket buttoned to the neck. A flat cap pulled low across his brow. Scuffed trainers tied with thick laces.
Watching the world continue without ever asking him to join in.
A forgotten actor, a lost Hitchcock film, the lifelong companion of Beverley Nichols, and a pioneer of British television. The remarkable life of Cyril Butcher deserves to be remembered.
Cyril Butcher
Metaphorically speaking, I spent two days and one long night sitting opposite Cyril Butcher at Signora Bruschi’s kitchen table. I questioned him, shared my frustrations and searched for answers that never came. The only response was the occasional concerned glance from Signora Bruschi, who had begun to suspect that I was talking to myself.
I assured her it was research. Anyone who has spent hours buried in old newspapers, forgotten magazines and fading archive material will know how easily the outside world disappears.
The trail began with a copy of Film Weekly from 1930. There, among its yellowing pages, was a photograph of a dreamy-looking young man named Cyril Butcher. He was twenty years old and had just become one of two winners of a nationwide competition offering a six-month scholarship at Elstree Studios, worth £250 together with a weekly salary of £10.
There had been 6,783 entrants, although Film Weekly never revealed precisely what they had been asked to do. One winner was always a young man and the other a young woman. Butcher entered through the Picture House in Ipswich; his fellow winner, Aileen Despard, represented the Rialto Cinema in Raynes Park, south-west London.
Standing six feet tall, weighing eleven and a half stone, with brown hair and brown eyes, Butcher evidently impressed a formidable judging panel. Among them were some of British cinema’s most promising directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, Ewald André Dupont, Norman Walker and Walter Summers.
The prize was more than a scholarship. British International Pictures quickly placed the two winners in a ten-minute comedy short entitled An Elastic Affair, directed by Hitchcock himself. The film premiered at the London Palladium, where Butcher and Despard were presented with contracts by the studio’s founder, John Maxwell.
Ironically, An Elastic Affair was a talking picture shown in a theatre that had yet to install sound equipment. Audiences watched the performances in silence.
Butcher appeared simply as ‘The Boy’; Despard as ‘The Girl’. One contemporary reviewer described his performance as “amateurish”, before generously conceding that he had never acted before. After a further screening in Ipswich, the film disappeared from circulation. Today it is regarded as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s lost films.
Later that same year Butcher appeared as ‘Dancer’ Johnny in Richard Eichberg’s crime melodrama Night Birds. It proved to be his final screen role.
I showed his photograph to Signora Bruschi.
“Bel ragazzo,” she murmured thoughtfully.
Then, after another glance:
“Omosessuale?”
She had guessed correctly.
Two years after his brief flirtation with cinema, Butcher came to the attention of Beverley Nichols, already one of Britain’s best-known writers. Novelist, journalist, playwright, broadcaster, composer and public speaker, Nichols embodied the glittering world of the Bright Young Things while carefully concealing his homosexuality from public view.
The two met during auditions for a theatrical adaptation of Nichols’ bestselling novel Evensong, itself inspired by the celebrated Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba, whom Nichols had known personally during her later years.
Nichols was thirty-four. Butcher was twenty-two.
Their meeting would shape the rest of Butcher’s life.
He moved into Nichols’ cottage, Allways, at Glatton in Cambridgeshire, a picturesque Tudor thatched house whose gardens later inspired Nichols’ celebrated gardening trilogy beginning with Down the Garden Path.
Whether Fleet Street suspected the true nature of their relationship is difficult to judge. If rumours circulated, editors exercised remarkable discretion. Newspapers invariably described Butcher as a friend, visitor or business associate, never anything more intimate.
For more than half a century they remained together.
When Beverley Nichols died in 1984, after fifty-three years of companionship, Butcher inherited the largest share of his estate, valued at £131,750.
The public knew Beverley Nichols.
Very few remembered Cyril Butcher.
The obvious question is what Butcher himself made of it all.
The archives, frustratingly, have little to say.
His own voice is almost entirely absent. He left no memoir, no revealing interviews and no collection of personal letters that might explain the man behind the carefully posed publicity photographs. Almost everything we know comes from newspapers, theatre programmes and the lives of other people. It is enough to reconstruct his career, but rarely enough to understand his character.
Cyril Butcher
His family background was rather more remarkable than his modest film career might suggest.
Henry Ernest Butcher, Cyril’s father, was born in Ipswich and trained at the Royal Academy of Music before leaving England to pursue a career in German opera. For twelve years he sang across Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Poland, establishing himself on the Continental stage. In Cologne, in 1907, he married Gertrud Maria Maassen. Two years later, while the couple were living in St Gallen, Switzerland, their only son, Cyril, was born.
The First World War abruptly transformed the family’s fortunes.
As an Englishman working in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Henry Butcher found his contracts cancelled almost overnight. Effectively stranded in Vienna, he reinvented himself under the Germanised name Heinrich Butscher and spent three years playing imposing villains and heavy dramatic roles for Viennese film companies.
Meanwhile, young Cyril was sent to the relative safety of Switzerland, where he spent the war at boarding school. Although born abroad, he was brought up as unmistakably English, eventually returning with his parents when they settled once again in Ipswich in 1919.
The stage fascinated him from an early age.
Before that dream could become reality he spent a brief period as a cadet in the Merchant Navy, only to discover that life at sea held little appeal. He abandoned it for work in a gasworks while nurturing rather more glamorous ambitions. He hoped to become a dancer in musical revues and, failing that, imagined a career as a writer.
Then came the Film Weekly competition.
Winning transformed an unknown twenty-year-old into a national curiosity almost overnight. Newspapers delighted in reporting the details that today seem wonderfully quaint. He stood six feet tall, weighed eleven and a half stone, had brown eyes and brown hair, and apparently possessed exactly the sort of wholesome good looks that British International Pictures believed audiences wanted to see.
Yet the promise proved fleeting.
After An Elastic Affair and Night Birds, film producers looked elsewhere. The great cinematic career that had seemed so certain never materialised.
The theatre, however, proved more welcoming.
When his screen career faltered, Butcher found steady work in the musical revues he had always loved. In October 1931 he appeared as Captain Donegal in a revival of Florodora, followed by performances in This World of Ours, Fanfare and Noël Coward’s Words and Music. He was never a leading man, but he worked consistently, quietly building a respectable theatrical career.
It was during this period that Beverley Nichols entered his life.
Beverley Nichols
Whether Butcher genuinely fell in love with Nichols or recognised the opportunities that accompanied the relationship can never be known. The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive. Affection and ambition have often travelled together, particularly in professions where introductions and patronage mattered.
What is beyond dispute is that Butcher’s horizons widened dramatically.
Between 1932 and 1935 he wrote the stage and screen pages for Nora Shackleton Heald, editor of The Queen, the weekly magazine read by Britain’s aristocracy and fashionable society. When Heald moved to The Lady the following year, Nichols also became one of its occasional contributors.
Butcher was increasingly making his living not simply as an actor, but as a journalist.
He also wrote for The Sketch, contributing a series entitled The Worst Moments of My Life, in which well-known public figures recalled their most embarrassing or uncomfortable experiences. The articles were later collected in In Extremis: Worst Moments in the Lives of the Famous, published in 1934.
Then there was the matter of Brighton.
That year the town council published a promotional booklet about the seaside resort under Beverley Nichols’ name. It later emerged that the work had in fact been ghost-written by Butcher, with Nichols content to accept the credit.
It raises an intriguing possibility.
If Butcher could disappear so completely behind Nichols’ public persona once, might he have done so on other occasions?
The evidence simply isn’t there.
But it is difficult not to wonder.
The theatre remained Butcher’s natural home throughout the 1930s.
Between 1936 and the outbreak of the Second World War he appeared in a succession of musical revues and stage productions. He rarely enjoyed star billing, but there was satisfaction in regular work, and he increasingly found opportunities beyond acting.
Together with the pianist, composer and playwright Albert Arlen, he wrote and directed Counterfeit, a comedy thriller in twenty scenes. After previewing in Richmond it transferred to London’s Duke of York’s Theatre, where it featured a young Charles Hawtrey, years before the Carry On films would make him a household name.
The reviews, unfortunately, were lukewarm.
Around the same time, Beverley Nichols found himself under growing financial and personal pressure. In 1937 he sold Allways, the idyllic Cambridgeshire cottage that had inspired his famous gardening books. Publicly, the sale was attributed to the need to finance his latest West End production, Floodlight, itself destined to disappoint at the box office.
There may, however, have been another reason.
Village gossip had become increasingly hostile. Nichols’ frequent male visitors attracted attention, while rumours of moonlit skinny-dipping parties and young local men invited to the house circulated far beyond Glatton. Whether exaggerated or not, such stories carried genuine danger. Homosexuality remained a criminal offence, and a whispering campaign could destroy both careers and reputations.
War interrupted everything.
In 1940 Butcher joined the Royal Navy. Little has emerged about his wartime service, but once peace returned he resumed the theatrical life that had been placed on hold for six long years.
Nichols and Butcher settled at Merry Hall in Ashtead, Surrey, in 1946. The elegant Georgian house, surrounded by extensive gardens, would become famous through Nichols’ gardening books, although behind the scenes Butcher was contributing far more than readers realised.
In 1949 he wrote Dear Heart!, a comedy staged by the Playwrights’ Theatre Group at London’s Chepstow Theatre Club. By then, however, another medium was beginning to eclipse the stage.
Television.
Beverely Nichols and Cyril Butcher
When Butcher began writing a television column for The Sketch in 1950, the medium was still finding its feet. His weekly articles charted life inside the BBC’s Alexandra Palace studios and later recorded the birth of commercial television with the curiosity of someone who recognised he was witnessing history in the making.
Five and a half years later he crossed the divide himself.
Associated-Rediffusion, Britain’s first Independent Television contractor, recruited Butcher to write and direct drama. It proved to be the defining chapter of his professional life.
Today, when scenes can be filmed repeatedly until perfection is achieved, it is easy to forget how television drama was once created.
In the 1950s almost everything went out live.
A forgotten line, a jammed door, a misplaced prop or a camera appearing in shot became part of the broadcast forever. If a programme needed repeating, there was no videotape waiting on a shelf. The entire cast and crew returned to the studio and performed the production all over again from the beginning.
It demanded absolute concentration.
Between 1955 and 1960 Butcher directed episodes of The Granville Melodramas, ITV Play of the Week, ITV Television Playhouse and Murder Bag. Week after week he helped establish the grammar of British television drama at a time when the rules were still being invented.
His achievements have largely been forgotten.
Yet millions of viewers watched programmes that passed through his hands.
In 1953, while rehearsing Nichols’ little-known play La Plume de ma Tante at Bromley Theatre, Butcher left midway through production after being called away to direct a television adaptation of Evensong—the very work that had first brought the two men together more than twenty years earlier.
Life has a curious habit of closing circles.
In 1958 Nichols and Butcher moved for the last time, settling at Sudbrook Cottage in Richmond, where they would remain together for the rest of their lives.
By the end of the 1950s, Butcher’s career had begun to change direction.
For two years he served as Senior Director of Schools Programmes before returning briefly to drama. By now, however, the industry’s priorities were shifting. The man who had once directed ambitious live productions increasingly found himself overseeing factual programmes with decidedly less glamour. Titles such as Shopping For You, Shop on the Corner, election coverage and broadcasts from the Ideal Home Exhibition reflected the changing demands of commercial television rather than any decline in his ability.
His final appointment at Associated-Rediffusion was as Head of its newly established Commercial Production Department.
Then came an altogether unexpected opportunity.
Television in Ethiopia was in its infancy. The Ethiopian Television Service had only recently begun broadcasting when Butcher accepted the post of Director-General, moving to Addis Ababa in 1965. For two years he helped shape a national broadcaster from the ground up, an experience unlike anything he had previously encountered.
His contribution did not go unnoticed. Emperor Haile Selassie awarded him the Order of the Ethiopian Empire in recognition of his work.
By the time Butcher returned to Britain, the pace of his life had slowed considerably.
In 1967 and 1968 he and Beverley Nichols embarked on an extended journey through South Africa, Singapore and the Far East while researching The Sun in My Eyes. Nichols wrote the text; Butcher supplied the photographs.
The arrangement had become familiar.
One man occupied the public stage.
The other often worked quietly behind the scenes.
Retirement, when it finally came, was only partial. Butcher continued to review television for The Stage, lent his support to plans for a fringe theatre in Wimbledon and, in 1984, became the subject of Old Stagers, a BBC Radio 2 programme celebrating veterans of British theatre and entertainment.
It was a rare moment in which the spotlight fell, however briefly, upon him.
When Beverley Nichols died in 1984, Butcher inherited the greater part of an estate valued at £131,750. He continued living at Sudbrook Cottage, despite suggestions that the house might have to be sold to meet taxes and other liabilities.
It never was.
Four years later, in 1988, Cyril Butcher died at the age of seventy-nine.
The handsome young man from Film Weekly had long since disappeared.
There are still people who remember Beverley Nichols and who knew of his lifelong relationship with Butcher. Most biographies suggest that, by their later years, companionship had replaced passion. Nichols’ attraction to younger men is well documented, as are his discreet encounters with the “rough trade” of London, while Butcher appears to have accepted those indiscretions with quiet resignation.
What passed between them in private is known only to history.
It is tempting to wonder whether Butcher’s contribution to Nichols’ success extended beyond the few acknowledged examples. We know that he ghost-wrote at least one published work and spent decades living alongside one of Britain’s most prolific authors. Did other manuscripts pass beneath his pen? Did other ideas become Nichols’ bylines?
The evidence is silent.
Perhaps it always will be.
After two days and one long night sitting opposite Cyril Butcher at Signora Bruschi’s kitchen table, I know a great deal more about his life than I did when I began.
I know that he was the young man who caught Alfred Hitchcock’s eye and starred in one of the director’s lost films. I know that he spent more than fifty years beside one of Britain’s most celebrated writers, helped shape the earliest years of commercial television, accepted an imperial decoration from Haile Selassie and quietly contributed to British theatre, journalism and broadcasting.
Yet, in another sense, I know almost nothing about him.
The archives reveal the milestones of his life, but not the life itself.
They tell us where he worked, whom he loved and what he achieved, yet remain stubbornly silent on the questions that matter most: what kind of man was he, what made him happy, what made him laugh and, when the lights finally went out, whether he believed he had lived the life he wanted.
Perhaps that is the fate of those who spend their lives just beyond the spotlight.
History remembers the stars.
It is less kind to those who helped them shine.
As I left Signora Bruschi’s kitchen, I glanced once more at the photograph of the twenty-year-old Cyril Butcher.
For a fleeting moment, it felt as though he was looking back.
Signora Bruschi received a visit from an old neighbour, Signor Luigi Bevilacqua, an elegant man who owns a second-hand bookshop filled with volumes I cannot read because they are all in Italian. They sat together over coffee, exchanging news of people they had known for years. Signora Bruschi is not usually one for gossip, but she seemed happy to make an exception on this occasion.
Signor Bevilacqua belongs to the historic Bevilacqua-Lazise family, whose legacy includes Paolo Veronese’s magnificent Bevilacqua-Lazise Altarpiece, which I admired in the Museo di Castelvecchio.
Like Signora Scala next door, however, these old aristocratic families survive largely in name alone. Signor Bevilacqua is a man of modest means who shops at Eurospin and watches Un posto al sole on television. There was something rather pleasing about that contrast.
Curiosity sent me down the inevitable rabbit hole. The history of the Bevilacqua-Lazise dynasty is so extensive that it is easy to wander from one fascinating detail to the next until you realise you have strayed a very long way from where you began.
I suspect that Conte Alberto Bevilacqua may have been one of Luigi’s forebears. A member of the Bevilacqua-Lazise family, Alberto is best remembered as the youthful subject of an 1899 terracotta portrait bust by the sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen. The bust was acquired by Henry James, who displayed it on the chimneypiece at Lamb House in Rye.
James wrote:
“I’ve struck up a tremendous intimacy with dear little Conte Alberto, & we literally can’t live without each other. He is the first object my eyes greet in the morning & the last at night.”
The sculpture captures Alberto as a boy with an eager, inquisitive expression—not unlike Bianchi—and it remains at Lamb House today as part of the National Trust collection.
My favourite quote …
“I think that there’s something very, very severely neurologically deficient about the generation right under me. I think screenagers, as they call them now, are fucked. God go with them. Good luck.” – Katya Zamolodchikova
Coffee Before Country …
Lautaro bought me a coffee. It was a peace offering, as if to say, I might be from Argentina, but please don’t judge me. I turned my back on him and laughed, which, in truth, was rather childish.
Everything Sounds Better in Italian …
Sitting on the steps of an old Catholic church, I listened to a young man speaking with his mentor. He worked his way through a list of places where they might hold a meeting. He had clearly done his homework, arriving with notes and a carefully considered list of options. His mentor questioned each suggestion, and the young man answered thoughtfully.
They spoke in Italian that I could follow—slowly, passionately—and somehow this entirely mundane conversation sounded impossibly romantic.
The Church, the Ball, the Boys …
Late afternoon. I sat on an old bench, a memorial to Concetta Rossini, who died in 1996.
Teenage boys played football—World Cup heroes, though none of them Italian. Echoing thuds. The hollow knock of a plastic ball rebounding off weathered travertine steps and ancient wooden doors. Worn backpacks and abandoned electric scooters became goalposts against a sacred backdrop that had witnessed centuries of community life.
Sharp, rhythmic cries of “Lascia! Batti! Tira!” ricocheted off the high stone walls, mingling with the peal of the church bells. Apart from me, the only spectators were weathered marble saints, rose windows and towering columns, silently watching the fleeting, restless energy of youth.
The sharp, geometric shadows cast by the church’s Baroque façade slowly crept across the piazza, offering a cool sanctuary from the heavy afternoon heat. Just a few feet away, sunlight blazed across the cobblestones, drawing a glowing boundary as the game flowed in and out of the light.
To those boys, this might just as easily have been the San Siro or the Stadio Olimpico.
Great Freedom, Small Mercies …
I watched Great Freedom—Große Freiheit in German—with Bianchi. Franz Rogowski plays Hans Hoffmann, a man repeatedly imprisoned under Paragraph 175, the law that criminalised homosexuality.
Halfway through the film, Bianchi asked why Rogowski “spoke funny”. Irritatingly, he had a point. I later discovered that Rogowski’s distinctive speech is the result of surgery to repair a cleft palate and lip during childhood. I told Bianchi not to be so cruel, whereupon he kicked me hard with his bare foot, managing only to hurt himself in the process.
One character, Oskar, played by Thomas Prenn, immediately caught my eye. Unfortunately, my newfound admiration was short-lived, as he promptly fell to his death from a rooftop.
Bianchi noticed my disappointment and, in his own uniquely compassionate way, consoled me by kicking me with his other foot.
Given that Prenn’s character is German, I was surprised to discover that the actor was born in Innichen, Italy, before studying at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin. Fluent in both Italian and German, he would be the ideal person to translate between Bianchi, Severin and me—assuming he was available and prepared to tolerate us.
“I loved everything in this world. And all I had was my blank notebook under the sun.”
Sandro Penna, the Italian poet, believed his finest work consisted of only a handful of lines.
Why write a long poem when four lines will do?
A man after my own heart.
I leave my job filled With dry words. But at the gate The gods have set down for my joy A boy playing with boredom.
Penna also loved to walk—through fields and parks, but above all through the working-class districts of Rome, usually after dark.
We are left in little doubt as to what drew him there.
His friend, Pier Paolo Pasolini, knew that Penna was captivated by the same ragazzi who wandered the city’s outskirts.
The evening kidnapped My quarreling boys Their angel voices Warring. Now they stand In the mothering shelter of new lights In houses across the street.
Engraved in the bright sky The silent smudge Of a hero on a horse
Under the first star.
Penna’s way of life, however, also caused concern.
In 1956, he brought a 14-year-old street boy, Raffaele Cedrino, to the home he shared with his mother. The boy remained part of Penna’s life, on and off, until 1970.
I saw my dark haired boy Seated in the audience Smoking a cigarette He has the brightest eyes.
Penna died alone in the same house on Via della Mola dei Fiorentini in 1977.
In brief: Born in Perugia in 1906, Sandro Penna spent most of his life in Rome. Although he trained as an accountant, he never settled into regular employment, instead earning a living through newspaper work, proofreading, and dealing in art.
In 2014, Peter Valente described Penna’s verse as “candid, uncluttered, minimalist, and of profound lyrical intensity.” It is difficult to think of a finer summary.
Cola returned from Torricelle with important news. Signora Valenti had asked him for my mobile number. Why she wanted it, he had no idea, but he had seen no reason not to give it to her.
I could think of several.
“She will contact you,” Cola said before tucking into the meatballs his mother had prepared. As far as he was concerned, that was the end of the matter.
Bianchi sat opposite, his bare foot brushing against my knee beneath the table. He hadn’t quite followed the conversation and raised an eyebrow, waiting for someone to explain.
Signora Bruschi stood at the hob, stirring a pan with her back to us. Even so, I knew she was listening to every word.
She was a wily woman.
When Cinzia had pleaded for Bianchi to stay with me because Lorenzo was making life difficult for him at home, Signora Bruschi had seen straight through the lie. She allowed him to remain, but not with me. While I had been banished to Cola’s room, Bianchi had temporary use of mine. Now she was clearing out a room in the attic that would soon become his.
Signora Valenti wasted no time.
Later that evening a message arrived asking whether I was free to meet her for coffee the following day.
I read it aloud and was about to reply that I wasn’t available when Signora Bruschi wiped her hands on her apron and joined us at the table.
“It would be rude to refuse,” she said. “After all, you have no reason not to go.”
Signora Bruschi invariably had the final word.
“But,” she added after a pause, “I think it would be better if Bianchi came with you.”
Bianchi’s face lit up.
Cola grinned.
“She wants your body,” he said.
At eleven the following morning we arrived at Liston 12 on Piazza Bra, its terrace overlooking the Roman Arena. It was crowded with tourists, most of whom had no idea they could have paid half the price simply by walking a few streets farther.
I scanned the tables until I spotted Signora Valenti sitting in the shade. She raised a hand to attract our attention.
She wasn’t alone.
Edoardo sat beside her.
Valentina Valenti looked effortlessly glamorous. Her long blonde hair was tied back and oversized designer sunglasses concealed much of her face. She wore a pale pink summer dress and white Jimmy Choo heels.
She rose to greet us, kissing each of us lightly on the cheek. Bianchi’s appearance seemed not to concern her in the slightest as she motioned for us to sit before signalling a waiter for four espressos.
Edoardo remained where he was, idly turning the pages of a menu. He looked profoundly bored by the ritual of introductions.
After I introduced Bianchi, Signora Valenti inclined her head politely.
“I had expected you to send me samples of your work,” she said. “When you didn’t, I was forced to find it online. It wasn’t easy.”
“I’m sorry,” I replied. “I write under a pen name.”
“I know,” she said with a faint smile. “But I am well connected. I know people who are very good at finding whatever I need.”
She reached into an expensive handbag and produced a leather notebook filled with beautifully handwritten notes.
“I know you’re a travel writer. I’ve read several of your articles. They’re well written…” She looked up. “If a little dull.”
Across the table Edoardo gave a quiet snort of amusement.
His dark hair was slicked back as though he had only just stepped out of the shower. A faint scar ran across one cheek. The moment he realised I had noticed it, he covered it with his hand. It was his eyes that lingered with me, however—cold, watchful and instinctively unfriendly.
“I’d like to offer you a job,” Signora Valenti continued.
“A job?”
“My husband’s business has become extremely successful and is expanding internationally. I want you to write the history of the estate—from its modest beginnings to what it has become today.”
“Why me?”
The waiter arrived balancing our coffees with exaggerated care, placing each cup before us as though performing on stage. Signora Valenti dismissed him with an impatient flick of her hand.
“Why not?”
I searched for a polite way to decline without giving offence.
“Everything you need will be available to you,” she continued. “There are boxes of historical records at Torricelli that must be sorted through. Edoardo has agreed to help.”
Judging by the expression on his face, Edoardo had agreed to nothing. He was here because his mother had decided he would be.
The project held little appeal. Neither did the prospect of spending weeks in Edoardo’s company.
“I’m delighted that’s settled,” she said brightly. “I should have been very disappointed had you refused.”
She waited, knowing perfectly well no objection was coming.
“Excellent,” she concluded. “Then it’s agreed.”
A cigarette appeared from nowhere. She lit it with practised elegance and leaned back looking entirely satisfied with herself.
Bianchi looked equally pleased.
“This means you’ll stay in Verona longer.”
“Which creates one problem,” I said. “The rules say I have to leave Italy soon. I’m only here as a tourist.”
“Problems like that don’t exist in our world.”
It was the first time Edoardo had spoken. His voice was flat, almost bored.
“Exactly,” said his mother. “Now, let’s discuss your fee.”
The offer was generous.
Three thousand euros was considerably more than I had ever been paid for a commission, and although the project would take time, it would still leave me free to accept other work.
An Alfa Romeo belonging to the Carabinieri was parked outside Signora Bruschi’s house when we returned.
“Che ci fanno qui?” Bianchi asked.
Two uniformed officers were just leaving. The younger of the pair held the front door open as we approached, taking a moment longer than necessary to look us up and down.
He seemed vaguely familiar.
Tall. Handsome. Short-cropped hair.
Our eyes met for several seconds, as though each of us felt we ought to recognise the other.
E.M. Forster spent much of his life hiding a part of himself.
In a diary entry from 1964 he wrote:
‘I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more, but sex has prevented the latter’.
Between 1905 and 1910 he published four novels—Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, A Room with a View and Howards End. By the time A Passage to India appeared in 1924, Forster had grown weary of writing about marriage and the relationships between men and women. It would be the last novel published during his lifetime.
Instead, his imagination increasingly turned towards relationships between men. He wrote stories that explored same-sex desire but refused to publish them, convinced that the world in which he lived was not ready for them.
His novel Maurice finally appeared in 1971, a year after his death. It tells the story of Maurice Hall, whose love affair with his Cambridge friend Clive Durham ultimately gives way to a deeper relationship with the young gamekeeper Alec Scudder. Defying class prejudice, social convention and the threat of blackmail, the novel ends not in tragedy but in hope.
Forster wrote Maurice in 1913–14, yet he could never quite let it go. He revised the manuscript in 1932 and again between 1952 and 1960, repeatedly reworking the ending while remaining determined that the lovers should find happiness.
It is difficult not to wonder whether Maurice became the life that Forster wished he might have lived himself.
While at Cambridge he was infatuated with Hugh Owen Meredith, who is widely believed to have inspired the character of Clive. He was also drawn to working-class men and, in 1930, began a relationship with the London policeman Bob Buckingham that lasted for forty years. During his travels abroad he formed other relationships, reportedly experiencing sex for the first time with a soldier on an Egyptian beach when he was thirty-eight.
In 1970, the biographer P. N. Furbank observed:
“He achieved physical sex very late, and found it easier with people outside his own social class; and it remained a kind of private magic for him – an almost unattainable blessing, for which another person was mainly a pretext.”
The executor of Forster’s estate was Professor W. J. H. Sprott of Nottingham University, best known for translating Sigmund Freud’s New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Among Forster’s papers he discovered the manuscript of Maurice, together with the unfinished novel Arctic Summer, largely written in 1911, which also explored homosexual themes.
There were also a number of short stories written between 1903 and 1958. Published posthumously in 1972, only two had appeared during Forster’s lifetime; the remainder were either overtly homoerotic or explicitly gay stories that would almost certainly have been considered indecent by contemporary standards.
Within his closest circle, Forster made little attempt to conceal his sexuality. He shared successive drafts of Maurice with trusted friends including Siegfried Sassoon, Lytton Strachey, Edward Carpenter, Christopher Isherwood, Xiao Qian and Forrest Reid.
Beyond that circle, however, he was intensely guarded.
In 1962, John Bayley wrote in The Guardian that “the homosexual themes underlie all his novels.”
Forster replied:
“Are you aware that homosexuality is still a criminal offence, and any public implication of it therefore objectionable.”
As Kate Symondson notes on the British Library website, Forster was only sixteen when Oscar Wilde was sentenced in 1895 to two years’ hard labour—the maximum penalty—for homosexual acts. It was a warning that stayed with him for the rest of his life.
The dangers faced by Maurice and Alec were not merely fictional. They reflected the laws, prejudices and fears that shaped Forster’s own existence.
Only in 1967, with the passing of the Sexual Offences Act, were private homosexual acts between men over the age of twenty-one decriminalised in England and Wales. By then Forster was eighty-eight years old, and the novel that had meant so much to him still remained unpublished.
