Ferdinand Mount

Looking back in judgment

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The heart starts to sink on the very first page, p. xiii to be precise, because this is still the Preface: ‘When I began work on Osborne’s biography, hoping for the best, I asked his wife Helen, “What does no one know about your husband?” ’Already you can see the gleam in the biographer’s eye, the headline on the review front: Angry Playwright’s Other Life, Secret Shame of John Osborne. By p. xiv we have sunk lower: ‘What caused his depressions would send me in time on an obsessive search for the one explanation of Osborne’s torment and fury that might account for everything — “the Rosebud Theory”.’ So the Fleet Street sleuth is also a Hollywood shrink — Geoffrey Levy meets Orson Welles and the analyst comes too.

Helen Osborne was the Katharine Parr in The Five Wives of John Osborne —divorced, died, died, died, survived. The middle three — Mary Ure, Penelope Gilliatt and Jill Bennett — were also divorced, and all three more or less killed themselves by drink and drugs. Helen was the only one to take his name. She endured his tantrums and his glooms, coped with his drink and diabetes, matched him joke for joke and glass for glass. In this scene of carnage as full of corpses as the end of Hamlet, she alone, the chain-smoking, wisecracking Widow of Oz, as she styled herself, was left to tell the tale. Except that she didn’t and John Heilpern did. Which is a pity.

No human being in recorded history stands in less need of further revealing than John Osborne. To say he wore his heart on his sleeve is a genteel understatement. He flayed himself alive in public at regular intervals. Even before the first word is spoken in Look Back in Anger, the stage directions describe Jimmy Porter in precise terms which fit his creator as near as dammit:

He is a disconcerting mixture of sincerity and cheerful malice, of tenderness and freebooting cruelty; restless, importunate, full of pride, a combination which alienates the sensitive and insensitive alike.

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