![]() In his middle years he travelled a great deal and his list of friends is impressive Garbo, Capote, E M Forster, Cecil Beaton, Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather (he was a great supporter of her work). He is also the model for Cedric Hampton in Nancy Mitford's novels. He certainly worked at it and his flamboyance was captured by Evelyn Waugh he was the model for Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead. When his father asked a very young Stephen what he wanted to be when he grew up, he replied: Tennant's life was set from the beginning. I believe he did a good deal of research! He also did the artwork. He attempted poetry at times and spent much of his life writing a novel called Lascar set in Marseille and about the life and culture of the sailors there. ![]() ![]() He had a relationship with the war poet Siegfried Sassoon and famously spent a good part of his later years in bed. He is a bit of an enigma he had bright purple hair a long time before punk, he was one of the bright young things in the 1920s, openly gay at a time when it was really not safe to be so. Tennant was born at Wilsford Manor, his family home in Wiltshire and he died there in 1987 aged 81. I was torn between fascination (an interesting and colourful character) and irritation (a life lived in a totally self absorbed way talent wasted) ![]() Excellent biography of one of England's great eccentrics. ![]()
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