Short Run

...They supererogatorily identify people: "Sir Winston Churchill (18741965...

...In Tangier, where he and Kenneth had a long, and on the whole rather happy, last holiday, consorting with fellow pederasts and having sex with rows of Arab boys, the following incident took place...

...In the frequent lovers' quarrels the diary records, Orton represents himself as infuriated only a couple of times, whereas Halliwell gripes, rants, makes physical attacks, and threatens suicide or worse...

...When Kenneth Halliwell, Joe Orton's lover of 16 years, bludgeoned the playwright to death with nine hammer blows to the head and then took 22 Nembutals in grapefruit juice to end his own life rather more pleasantly, this was prime copy in England...

...His Introduction is adequate, albeit poorly written, and I am not even referring to such modish illiteracies as "parameters" for perimeters, only to such clumsinesses as "Halliwell had been completely taken over by the imperialism of Orion's fame," and such clichés as "Death made them [Ken and Joe] equal again...

...But how young?' I pressed...

...for Orton, emancipated from his lover, jail was a glorious beginning...

...It was the Hal and Hotspur story: As Orton's star rose, Halliwell's declined further...

...It is in his footnotes that Lahr fluctuates most wildly...

...The ultimate revelations, to be sure, are in the detailed descriptions of Orion's orgies in London public lavatories and Moroccan male seraglios, into one of which he and Halliwell converted their Tangier apartment...

...The couple took out some of their hostilities on library books...

...Vis-à-vis Halliwell, who was seven years older, middle-class, and had a fair education and some money, the 18-yearold John Kingsley Orton (Joe was an afterthought, to avoid confusion with John Osborne) felt inferior...

...Orton, looking at some women, raves on, "I hate this tight-arsed civilization...

...But when, after a lovers' quarrel, Rimbaud shoots Verlaine, that's pretty good, too...

...he is planning a fourth play to be called Prick Up Your Ears (an obscene wordplay on ears-arse, suggested by Halliwell...

...A hedonist, a narcissist, an egomaniac...

...Also from having tried, with very modest success, to make it as an actor in Leicester, and from going up to London to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and not quite making it there either—other than as the lover of Kenneth Halliwell, into whose unassuming flat he moved...

...A chap always gathering material as he listens to and jots down conversations overheard in public places, endlessly fascinated by human benightedness...

...They stole them, bedecked them with absurd or obscene alterations and additions, verbal and pictorial (for the latter, they vandalized art books), then smuggled them back to the shelves and watched the effect on other, unsuspecting borrowers...

...A fellow who cannot stand the successes of colleagues, but genuinely admires Pinter...

...There is a frightening quality about a man who reifies his sexual partners, as in the above-quoted "I'd be able to f— that in an Arab country...

...There are setbacks—the Beatles film will never be made, Loot wins the Evening Standard award yet closes after a relatively short run, Crimes of Passion fails—but things are coming along: productions (however unsuccessful) in New York, offers, options, promises...

...Women are a terrible drag to have around...

...On August 9, Halliwell commits murder-suicide...

...Twelve?' 'Oh no,' he said...

...But readers in search of exactly how he did it are in for a letdown...

...Italian poet...

...I'd be able to f— that in an Arab count ry...

...Quotations he adduces from other material by or about Orton are generally helpful and stimulating...

...When partners are perceived as objects, "something I can't have," and lust becomes "indistinguishable from anger, " a fundamental dehumanization is at work...

...Indeed, the publication of The Orton Diaries in England and now here is a bit of a sensation, better even than Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia Fraser's elopement as reported in Peter Hall's Diaries...

...On rare occasions, a camp sensibility clouds Orion's judgment, as when he asserts that "Waugh isn't up to Firbank, the source," or that a trashy book "has the quality of rubbish and great art of being readable," or when he dismisses Swift, or calls a poor play by Henry Fielding "rubbish, like most classical drama," though he retains the good sense to appreciate Congreve and Sheridan...

...Stan Laurel (Arthur Stanley Jefferson) (19801965...

...Scarcely less shocking are the appalling grammar, syntax and spelling that accompanied Orton to the end...

...French impressionist painter...

...Gary Hart, Claus von Bülow, Jim Bakker are hot stuff, and so is the inside dope on the sex lives of Sophia Loren, Rock Hudson, Cary Grant...

...who has no use for classical music and not much for classic drama, but who exhibits spurts of fine insight into dramatic, literary and cinematic works past and present...

...In the Diaries we can see clearly the source of Orton's rage and despair...

...Sex is the only way to infuriate them, " he notes as he works on Butler...

...Marcel Proust (1871-1922...

...Much more f------ and they'll be screaming hysterics in next to no time...

...How right the Arabs are about women...

...French cinematographer...

...And don't you ever forget it because I won't...

...John Lahr performs his editorial tasks mediocrely...

...According to his first biographer, Boccaccio, 'that singular splendor of the Italian race.'" Orton writes, "some painter of the stature of Renoir," and Lahr annotates, "AugusteRenoir(18511919...

...British prime minister and war leader...

...To Orton, who as a boy never saw his parents kiss or show any affection, sex became the all-important thing...

...When a friend called this a strange joke, Orton retorted (as he tells his diary), "It isn't a joke...

...No doubt, Orton was the charmer...

...Joe Orton was the most provocative comic talent in the English theater since Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett (and the first not to be Irish...

...In America, the event wasbarelynoted...

...There's no such thing as a joke...

...Halliwell, at best, was endured...

...French novelist...

...his debt to Halliwell and his loyalty were too great...

...But I wonder just how adjusted Orton was at this point, how controlled his fury was...

...Altogether, though, these notes are absurd...

...and at the same time a man of wit, charm, impulses of unexpected niceness...

...Yet a spirit fueled by anger and hate ("the general public are, where plays are concerned, ignorant shits") that he somehow managed to exploit profitably in a combination of satire and sex...

...Shane, but that in Pinter it rings false...

...This is verbal exhibitionism," Halliwell admonishes...

...His anger—shared by Halliwell in a slightly different, more self-destructive form—stemmed largely from society's interference with his sexuality...

...On a weekend with Kenneth at the Brighton house of his producer, Oscar Lewenstein, Joe is relieved that Oscar's children are unattractive, "For, when the boredom set in, rape would've been a pleasant alternative.' Some of this talk is mere bravado, mere joking, except that there's no such thing as a joke...

...Sloane, was a hit in London's West End...

...And also in such conversations as this one between Orton and a fellow pederast: "? like young boys.' 'How young?' I said...

...In Brighton, he sees a 15-yearold boy sunbathing prone and cries out enraged, "England is intolerable...

...In other places they parade irrelevant pseudo-learning: Orton mentions Dante, and Lahr annotates, "Dante Alighieri (1265-1321...

...later, Orton successfully rewrote it for the stage...

...not bad at all, despite a bit of jealousy, on the weaknesses in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg...

...In fact, he writes and rewrites sedulously, and comments more often than not perceptively on the books he keeps reading, plays and movies he is frequenting...

...Film comedian...

...Thanksto JohnLahr's tireless efforts, though (several articles, one biography, the co-producing of a movie biography), Orton's death— and to a lesser extent, his work—has become of interest again in the Englishspeaking world...

...He makes pertinent observations on writers as different as Tennyson and Pinter, and is right in noting that the second act of The Homecoming is cribbed from Entertaining Mr...

...he was getting nowhere as a writer and, moreover, had lost all his hair...

...Orion's salubriously wry comments on the world of show business are similarly welcome...

...If further proof were necessary that genius can spring up in the unlikeliest of places, this book would be it...

...Blessedly, he declares, "I've no theories about comedy...

...But he is no scholar, so where Orton writes, "Halliwell suggests that, for What the Butler Saw, the quotation from Juvenal 'Quis custodie!, ipso custodes' would be apt," Lahr, in his footnote, misquotes identically minus the comma...

...Sitting at a café table with his pals, Orton did his best to shock an American married couple at the next table with his loud, lewd remarks, commenting "They have no right to be occupying chairs reserved for decent sex perverts...

...from having little in common with his younger brother and sisters, except, much later, his youngest sibling, Leonie...

...The Diaries, covering the eight last months of their life, couldn't startmore in medias res...

...Complete sexual license is "the only way to smash the wretched civilization.' About Loot, in its premiere production, Eric Shorter wrote in the Daily Telegraph that "it never stops to let you see how nasty it is under the hilarious surface," but Orton did not distinguish between surface and core...

...They came from his growing up poor and frustrated in a loveless, fight-riddled, working-class home in dreary Leicester...

...Orton is hard at work on his third fulllength play, What the Butler Saw, which will fail in its posthumous premiere, although eventually it will be recognized as his best work...

...About fourteen.' 'Oh, perfectly natural,' I said...

...What makes Orion's plays valuable is that they are the works of a canny outsider who, for all his acculturation and sophistication, preserved the hard, hostile view from the gutter right up into the bourgeoisie's underbelly...

...For whom are such notes intended...

...Oliver Hardy (18921957...

...Repelled by his passive father more than by his gutsier mother, he tried a couple of unsuccessful flirtations with girls, only to end up a thorough misogynist and homosexual...

...These moments of yahooism are redeemed by self-awareness, as in this remark: "I'm from the gutter...

...What does Diaries display...

...Orton's second play in the West End, Loot, is a moderate success, and Brian Epstein and the Beatles have commissioned a screenplay from the talked-about author...

...I've no theories at all...

...Do we then believe Orton when he tells an interviewer that he has to force himself to write, that life is for living, and that " No one wrote anything in the Garden of Eden...

...Much has been made of Halliwell's anxiety at his foreseeable dumping by his lover, of his general frustration and growing obnoxiousness...

...A good Samaritan, too, helpful to neighbors and kind to friends...

...Conversely, John—or Joe—declared "I never feel guilty, whatever I do," and, unhampered by a bourgeois conscience, indulged his sexual appetites, far stronger than Kenneth's, in all sorts of promiscuous activities...

...The diaries abound in such entries as "Not a sign [in the Tangier streets] of a woman, which pleased me greatly...

...That enraged Orton...

...He is spot on demolishing Franco Zeffirelli's Much Ado and Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance...

...Many pages later, when Lahr gives us the actual epigraph from Cyril Tourneur that Orton affixed to the play, "Surely we're all mad people, and they/Whom we think are, are not, " he allows a stupid typo to creep in, changing "mad" into made, and thus making hash of the meaning...

...sometimes it is even thought-provoking or revelatory...

...Soon Kenneth was merely the secretary, housekeeper and frequently betrayed wife, patronized or ignored by Joe's posh new friends...

...Typical is the reaction of Terence Rattigan, the older dramatist who had given Orton a boost: "I'd have liked to go on seeing Joe, but if I was going to have to see Halliwell, too, no, that was too much...

...Orton often yearned to break off, but couldn't...

...By his death at age 34, he was already the author of three biting, idiosyncratic fulllength plays, as well as several notable one-acters...

...My editor at Time, some years ago, couldn't understand why I refused to make that shooting my lead in reviewing Enid Starkie's Arthur Rimbaud...

...I find lust an emotion indistinguishable from anger...

...from hating his ignorant and pretentious mother and, still more, his weak and unimaginative father...

...In 1962 they were caught, condemned to six months' incarceration, and sent to separate prisons...

...Orton is regretting that the police have stopped a man at a nearby window from jumping...

...Let a woman into the house, even a servant, and before long you're forced into an odd corner, and beg her pardon as you disturb her at her work...

...His—not Pinter's, Arden's or John Osborne's—was the most devastatingly critical-comical voice on the British stage, and it was fashioned, as true comedy always is, out of rage and despair...

...Oh, very young,' he said...

...Or, at least, anger predominates when I see something I can't have...

...These minor irritations aside, The Orton Diaries is amusingly gossipy reading despite certain necessary omissions and name changes...

...What Juvenal wrote is Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes...

...Increasingly acrid quarrels ensued...

...In 1963, Orton acquired an able literary agent in Peggy Ramsay...

...his sex life is in full swing: Royalty, he will remark later with invidious ambiguity, couldn't keep up with so busy a schedule...

...After sex between consenting males had become legalized by English law, minors remained taboo...

...The young playwright is being interviewed, invited out, asked to appear on talk shows...

...Father of film-maker Jean Renoir (18941970)," but somehow neglects to mention "Grandfather of Claude Renoir (1914...

...Was it really that one-sided...

...Not knowing in Tangiers what reviews one of his plays got in London, he writes: "At one moment with my c— in his arse, the image was, and as I write still is, overpoweringly erotic, and I reflected that whatever the Sunday papers have said...

...I dislike theories...

...The next day, July 29,1967, another young boy attracts him: "A great spasm of rage overtook me...

...was of little importance compared with this...

...Still, there may have been more than met the eye at a party where Halliwell, upon being called "a middle-aged nonentity" by the host, exploded, "All you people that are mad on Joe really have no idea what he's like...

...He became, defensively, even more arrogant than before: more querulous, violent, socially impossible...

...Reviewed by John Simon On the hit parade of salacious gossip, scandal in the world of the arts is right up there with dark doings in the spheres of politics, high society, popular entertainment, and religion...

...Here he wrote his first independent short play, which was bought by BBC television and produced in 1964...

...A young man or boy was another matter...

...In the England of the '50s, wherehomosexuality was a crime, Halliwell was full of middle-class guilt...

...A few days earlier in London...

...Film comedian and Hardy's comedy partner...

...very good at finding the holes in Laurence Olivier's Othello and The Three Sisters...

...Not for anyone who reads books...

...the following year, his first full-length play, Entertaining Mr...

...Halliwell painstakingly educated him, and the pair began collaborating on plays and novels that did not amount to anything more than their acting careers...

...1 could take him home and stick my c— up him...

...The humiliation was the undoing of the middle-class Halliwell...

...Nevertheless, The Orton Diaries is an interesting book in its own right...

...Some of his one-acters are being done on TV, and two of them, as the double bill Crimes of Passion, are about to be staged at the important Royal Court...