George Carman: Wife-Beating Bisexual Drunk
Ron Turner
George Carman's son Dominic says he has written about his father's
wife-beating, alcoholism and bisexuality not for money but to break the years
of silence
It is extraordinary how surprised we are to learn that George Carman, the
celebrated QC, was an alcoholic, a compulsive gambler, bisexual and a wife
beater. Colleagues knew about the drinking, and some knew of his gambling,
though not the extent of it. Carman suppressed a lot about himself; he was good
at that, too.
That the truth is now in the public domain is courtesy of his only child,
Dominic, who, just a year after his father’s death, has written his
biography. It is a fascinating book, largely because it reveals the man known
in public for his urbane presence, his sharp wit and his devastating courtroom
presence, as profoundly troubled and unable to form normal relationships. That
the miserable details so carefully hidden by the father should be disclosed by
the son adds further intrigue.
The book will be serialised in The Times next week.
So when Dominic asks me not to mention the time his father was refused entry to
a restaurant because he was “the worse for wear” on arrival, the request
seems strange. He also avoids the word alcoholic, on the ground that his father
had a psychological dependency on alcohol — not, he says, a physical one. Yet
he describes the adjournment of Richard Branson’s libel appeal because the
great QC had been on a bender and was being sick. Neither does he shy away from
exposing his father’s violence: he beat his three wives. Dominic was the
product of the second marriage and from the age of four he was made to watch as
his father beat his mother. As he recalls the incidents again he closes his
eyes.
“I remember thinking again and again ‘please stop doing those things,
please be the person you can be much of the time’. I don’t know why he did
it. I rationalise why, talk to my mother and stepmother about why. I don’t
know what was in his mind and yet the next day it would be forgotten as if
nothing had happened.”
Surely not? “Forgive me, forgotten as a subject of conversation. I don’t
mean forgotten. He had strong principles with regard to what went on in court
but in his personal life he set his own rules, or simply didn’t have a rule
book.
“He was chaotic, self-destructive, destructive to those immediately around
him. Extraordinarily gifted in the court room and unable to reach the basic
levels of success in day-to-day living. It’s part of the flip side of
genius.”
So he excuses his father; this is the pattern of our conversation. Dominic is
supremely courteous, a mild-mannered magazine publisher of 40 who lives in
South London with his wife and their three young children. He also has a
teenage son from an earlier marriage. We meet in the tearoom of a London hotel
and he arrives carrying a crash helmet, which looks more exciting than the
scooter he rides, he says. He wears a high-street suit and broad wedding ring
and gives the impression that he wishes to please. He seems to have no guile
— if anything, he is a shade naive — and speaks in beautifully modulated
sentences.
His portrait of his father is of a lonely, depressed man driven by a compulsion
to win. “He wanted to win, win, win all the time,” says Dominic. “In the
context of relationships he quantified winning by total dependence on him. That
came with marriage, but once he had won, he got bored or disinterested or
abusive.”
So, unable to have satisfying relationships, he pursued success in the
environment where he could both win and be seen to win — the law. The rest of
the time he escaped through drink, gambling — on several occasions he sold
homes to pay his debts — and night clubs, where he would surround himself
with pretty girls and mix with people who, as Dominic puts it, enabled him
“to preserve the common touch”.
Such liaisons also fuelled his “absolute focus on the one thing he did
superbly well. He was one-dimensional, and much of his life was lived as a
dress rehearsal for being in the courtroom and if it wasn’t directly useful,
then it didn’t interest him.”
Yet as he erased his Blackpool background, of which he was ashamed, his tastes
remained unsophisticated by the standards of the establishment from which he
sought recognition. This extended to his casual relationships with women, says
Dominic, though there is no evidence that he slept with them. His marriages
were largely celibate; his first was unconsummated.
“I think he found physical intimacy very difficult,” says Dominic. “One
person, not one of his wives, described him as ‘not a sexy man’.”
Dominic suspects that his father was abused by priests at a Catholic school,
and refers to his bisexuality at Oxford and to a later homosexual relationship
he had in the 1960s.
“I first became aware that it might be an issue in the mid-1980s, when I saw
him in a nightclub. He was embracing another man — a kiss on both cheeks and
a big hug. Barristers of a certain age do not do that. It struck me as odd, as
did one or two things he said to me, though I never pursued it in conversation
— you don’t.
“After he died, several people confirmed certain things. I respect the
confidentiality of the person with whom he had a relationship in the 1960s, who
is alive. It may explain some elements of his angst. He flaunted his apparent
heterosexuality with knobs on, if you’ll forgive the metaphor.”
Could it be that George Carman was gay and spent his life concealing his
sexuality? “That may be true, but I don’t know enough to make a definitive
statement.”
Did he know how to be intimate? “He was good at communicating on his terms,
asking questions, often in a neutral way.” No, then; nor did he have what
most of us would call friends. “He had degrees of acquaintances. He wasn’t
able to expose to himself the vulnerable parts of his personality, which is so
inherently necessary to true friendship. People didn’t quite know what he
was, and if you don’t know what someone is, you can’t get close to them,
you can’t be their friend. And he genuinely didn’t trust people, there was
a natural suspicion and fear. What was behind that, I don’t know.”
I remind Dominic that his father beat his wives. “That may be part of it. It
may also be the childhood experiences at school, the culture of keeping
secrets.”
As a child, Dominic’s relationship with his father was unusual, to put it
mildly. In a strange reversal of convention George Carman depended on his son,
sought attention from him and used him as a sounding board, treating him as an
adult rather than a child. There were no hugs or kisses; the only physical
proximity happened when Carman took his son into his bed — for human warmth,
Dominic (and his mother) believes. “Innocent, yes, completely. Not in a
sexual context. It was to do with there being somebody else there when he
couldn’t be intimate in a relationship. It’s very sad really.”
Inevitably, though, Dominic was frightened of him. “My respect for his
ability was tempered by some of the things he did, realising that his ability
to be a normal person fell below what is normal. As a child I felt a
combination of fear and love. I knew he cared about me, because he talked about
me to other people with great pride, though he wouldn’t say it to me. That is
a form of love. I think that he did love me, he just didn’t vocalise it.
“I wish the beating hadn’t happened, but it has. Then you try to look at
causes. I don’t think it affects me much now. As a teenager it did. I
didn’t work hard and didn’t fulfil my potential. I shot myself in the foot,
leaving university, doing jobs I didn’t like, resigning. Then, in the late
1980s, I joined Euromoney (Publications). They gave me huge responsibility and
I realised that I had some ability. My father humiliated me for my lack of
achievement, but then I did achieve. Part of me was always trying to please my
father and if I couldn’t, it was because I hadn’t started out on the right
road.
“But maybe if he’d been a different person, I’d have gone down the right
road earlier. So I will guide my children, not push; encourage, not dictate.”
During the late 1980s, George Carman gave Dominic £12,000 as a deposit for a
house, and he paid off overdrafts and credit-card bills. By 1995, Dominic says
he was earning more than £200,000 a year, and that such support was no longer
necessary. Two days before Carman died, he changed his will, dividing his
estate between Dominic, his four grandchildren and his companion of 15 years,
Karen Phillips. Dominic’s share, something over £400,000, was left in trust
because of his father’s disapproval of his decision to set up a magazine in
1999.
“Karen Phillips has said that he didn’t trust me with money. He never said
that to me. He didn’t want me to invest in the business, and left the money
in trust so it can’t be invested in the business. I can use it for anything
else.”
He denies, too, that he is teetotal because of any difficulty with alcohol, or
that he gambles. “I last gambled in Aspinalls in 1990. I found it boring; it
didn’t grip me the way it did my father. For him, winning was everything. For
me, it’s not.”
Dominic’s relationship with Phillips appears to be one of mutual distrust. He
mutters that he still has not got his father’s letters of appointment as a QC
and a recorder, both willed to him. Phillips fascinated and obsessed his
father, he says, and the fact that she saw other men merely increased his
father’s determination to win her.
As he talks about her, it is the only time he sounds bitter. When he talks
about his father his tone is generous, even though many of the pages of his
book are not. Why did he write it? Not for the money, he insists. Suspending
his business for the eight months he worked on it has cost him more than he has
so far made from the book. His father asked him to write it, though it was a
casual request. His mother and wife thought that he should write it, and an
interview given to a newspaper by his father’s first wife was a
“Pandora’s box”, he says.
“If I hadn’t written it, someone else would have, but not as well. He knew
I knew him better than anyone else. There are personal reasons, too, coming to
terms with the past.”
But did his father expect him to be so uncompromising? “I don’t know. Maybe
he would have been horrified. In a sense it doesn’t matter. I think there’s
been enough silence. It tells a true and accurate story. Whatever one may
think, biographies written after people have died affect only the living.”
Does Dominic miss him? He pauses. “I do, yes. I loved him, I still love him,
but I certainly disliked many of the things he did. I wish he could have been
more ordinary. That’s all I aspire to be. The glittering heights he reached
out for so forcefully in life don’t interest me.
“He knew what he was doing more than I probably ever realised. He was a
manipulator, he had the power to move minds, as he would say, to ‘rearrange
people’s prejudices’.” Which is what Dominic Carman has, in turn, done to
perceptions of his father.
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God bless America!
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