Keith McNally Claims He Had Teenage Affair With Alan Bennett in Explosive Memoir

Controversial restauranteur Keith McNally is said to have wrecked his 50-year friendship with author and playwright Alan Bennett by revealing the two were lovers when he was still a fresh-faced teenager, The National Enquirer can exclusively report.

Twice divorced McNally – who thrives on making headlines with his often-savage social media attacks on the rich and famous – opens up on his previously unknown homosexual affairs in his forthcoming memoir, I Regret Almost Everything.

His own public ‘outing’ of a relationship with the notoriously reclusive Bennett, now a sick and frail 90-year-old, is said to have caused huge friction between the two men. Friends claim they are no longer on speaking terms. Bennett’s partner of 23 years, magazine journalist Rupert Thomas, is said to have taken great exception to the revelation because of Bennett’s failing health.

In his soon-to-be-released memoir, McNally, who notoriously branded comedian James Corden a ‘tiny cretin of a man,’ and described Lauren Sanchez, fiancée of world’s richest man Jeff Bezos, as ‘absolutely revolting,’ reveals he had a year-long teenage affair with Bennett, who is widely recognised as one of England’s greatest living writers.

That they had always been extremely close is well documented. McNally has regularly posted photos of them together on his Instagram account, where he has nearly 150,000 followers, and Bennett is known to have been an investor in some of McNally’s hugely-successful restaurants.

But now McNally has revealed that he was just 17, but could easily have been mistaken for a much younger boy, when he first caught the eye of Bennett, who in his mid-30s. The boyishly good-looking McNally had just appeared in The Life and Times of Charles Dickens, with Sir John Gielgud, having been plucked from obscurity while working as a bellhop at London’s Park Lane Hilton by an American producer who felt he would be perfect for a small role in the play.

McNally’s mother, Joyce, who worked as a cleaner, was far from impressed when her son told her he would be on the stage with Gielgud, bursting into tears and telling him, “You’re going to be working with a homosexual!” Gielgud, who died in 2000 aged 96, was in 1953 arrested and convicted for ‘importuning men for immoral purposes,’ a term used at the time to describe homosexual acts. With such strong homophobic feelings, it is probably just as well his late mother never got know the depth of the friendship that ensued between her son and Bennett.

It seems Bennett, who in his autobiography describes himself as a ‘homosexual who enjoyed the odd fling with a woman,’ instantly took a shine to McNally, casting him as a schoolboy in his first West End production, Forty Years On, starring John Gielgud at the Apollo theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue.

McNally says Bennett was instantly smitten, taking him under his wing and treating him to his first ever restaurant meal at Bianchi’s in Soho. McNally has previously recalled choosing melon and steak – because they were the only things he vaguely recognised on the all-Italian menu. He was baffled by the silverware and petrified of using the wrong cutlery. He has recounted many times how the maître d came to his aid, tapping him on the shoulder and whispering in his ear that it was not necessary to eat the melon’s rind.

But McNally says the affair, which he describes as a ‘physical relationship,’ became ‘overwhelming’ and ‘suffocating’ and he broke it off by deciding to travel abroad for a year. He said Bennett’s feeling had been much stronger than his own, but they remained friends and Bennett wrote frequently to him on his 12-month journey on the ‘hippie trail’ across India, Pakistan, Nepal and Afghanistan.

On returning from his travels, McNally began working the lighting board at The Rocky Horror Show. He also moonlighted as the stage manager at the Nell Gwynne strip club in Soho – and resumed the relationship with Bennett, though it was less intense.

He also reveals he had another gay affair, before Bennett, with an actor who he doesn’t name. There is some speculation that it could have been with Gielgud, who never publicly discussed his homosexuality.

While father-of-five McNally, 74, is candid about some aspects of his past in his memoir, he is less so about his two failed marriages, both of which ended in divorce. Ex-wives Lynn Wagenknecht and Alina McNally both accuse him of cheating and abuse, yet there is no mention of that. In fact, he points the finger at Alina for the breakdown of their marriage, claiming she no longer wanted to care for him after a debilitating stroke in 2016 left him paralysed down the right-hand side of his body. He has never spoken about the real reason for his first divorce from fellow restauranteur Lynn, blaming only his ambition to make movies after they moved to Paris in 1990.

McNally, a working-class East End boy who grew up in a Bethnal Green prefab, leaving school at 16 with just one ‘O’ level, has made millions from a string of high-end restaurants in London and New York, including Balthazar, Pastis and Minetta Tavern. It allowed him to buy multi-million-pound homes in Notting Hill and Manhattan, a beautiful restored farmhouse in the rolling Cotswolds’ countryside, and a farm on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, the playground of American presidents.

He did give an inkling into his homosexual past in a 2002 newspaper interview, meant to be on the subject of food. McNally inexplicably leapt to the defense of Jonathan King, the shamed DJ and music mogul, who the previous year had been jailed for seven years for a string of sordid sexual assaults on teenage boys. He was convicted of six offences of indecent assault, buggery and attempted buggery against five schoolboys, aged 14 to 16, in the 1970s and 1980s. In total, 27 young men had come forward claiming to have been victims. King himself admitted ‘thousands’ of youngsters had been in his home over the years as part of his ‘market research into teenagers’ musical tastes.’ McNally, it transpired, was one of them.

Quite how he got to know King, or exactly what happened between them, is not known. But during King’s trial, it was revealed that the usual fate of his grooming victims was to be plied with alcohol while being shown pornographic movies, lured to his bedroom, then buggered, or have sex acts performed on them. Prosecutors said King would cruise Soho in his brown Rolls Royce looking for victims, or pick them up at the notorious Walton Hop teenage disco in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey. He would then drive them back to his mews home in Bayswater, central London. When he was done with them, he would give the boys signed books, records and concert tickets, sometimes cash, then send them on their way.

King later admitted that his attitude was “if boys were over 16 – the age of consent for girls – and they wanted to do something with me, I’d do it.” At the time, the legal age for homosexual acts between consenting adults was 18. Asked what if they were under 16, King responded, “If they were 15, male or female – because I am bisexual, I wouldn’t. If I could be sure.”

In McNally’s August 2002 interview, he told the The Observer newspaper: “I was one of those boys. I went back to his apartment when I was 16 or 17. Big deal. Nothing much happened. What I remember most was that he was quite erudite and very, very witty. If he was going to get seven years it should be for his bad music – but touching boys: who cares?”

He had no sympathy for the boys who came forward saying the abuse by King affected them for the rest of their lives.

“He got seven years, and for what?” said McNally. “For touching the private parts of 15-year-old boys! To me that’s a draconian sentence. Draconian. Fifteen-year-old boys are not angels. Half of them are bashing in the heads of other football fans, the other half are masturbating all day. Eight, nine, 10, 11 – that’s totally different. And all of it happened 30 years ago. I had that experience with him, and nothing was forced. I haven’t suffered in any way at all. I really think I’ve benefited from those few visits over to his house. He’s a very funny guy.