Mum's the Word

...Worse, she reminded him of his stony, mocking mother...

...One found Porter "a caricature of the sort of frustrated left-wing intellectual who, I thought, died out in the war...

...In this entertaining new biography John Heilpern looks squarely at the many flaws of the first Angry Young Man without losing sight of his good points...

...Most of his days were spent poring over the huge office dictionary...

...the man who brought up Osborne's castoff daughter was none other than the old Times critic Vincent Canby who, when asked for comments about the playwright, replied, "I've nothing to say about the bastard...

...Its profits today would be the equivalent of $247.7 million...

...You're trying to take notes and make them come out in a way that moves you...

...Lawrence, George Orwell—he died young of tuberculosis...

...Before leaving Bennett, Osborne suffered a nervous breakdown, during which he mused: "'Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.' Is that right...

...every time his wife opened her mouth, he winced...

...It was with his third wife, Penelope Gilliatt, film critic for the New Yorker, that Osborne had his only child, Nolan, whom he would later disown after he discovered that she preferred the company of her teenage girlfriends to his...

...The reviewers were equally unsympathetic...

...What most galled him was her refusal to show him the maternal love he craved...

...Osborne himself was nearer the mark when he said: "At least a man who hates his mother has a standard of excellence in mind...

...If there is an apt jazz parallel to Osborne's work it is not the swinging aplomb of Artie Shaw but the cacophonous banality of Ornette Coleman...

...Like Archie Rice, the down-at-the-heels vaude-villian played so brilliantly by Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer, John Osborne could never resist seeing his life as a bad Music Hall gag...

...A pretty awful fiction...

...1994) are full of salutary diatribes against the English nanny state...

...In Look Back in Anger he has Jimmy Porter say: "For twelve months I watched my father dying when I was ten years old...

...To try to describe Osborne the playwright, Heilpern quotes Artie Shaw describing how he approached playing the clarinet: "You're trying to make a sound that no one ever got before, creating an emotion...

...It is remarkable how many of his wives came to bad ends...

...Wife number four was another of Osborne's leading ladies, Jill Bennett, with whom he would have a bruisingly destructive marriage, fueled by drink and venom...

...To an audience response was fond of the witty badinage of Noel Coward, the clever plot twists of Terence Rattigan, and the modern morality plays of T.S...

...but he could also be remarkably generous and good-hearted...

...His mother, Nellie Beatrice Grove, was an enterprising cockney who began work as a charwoman in an orphanage, did a stint as cashier in Lyons Corner House in the Strand, and finally became a popular barmaid known for her lewd patter...

...If it moves you, it's going to move others...

...When it came to marriage, Osborne's motto was "Eat, Drink and Remarry...

...Heilpern's evenhandedness underscores the radical contradictions of the man...

...And I can never forget it...

...After being expelled from school for punching one of his masters, Osborne worked as a copy editor for a trade magazine called Gas World...

...Another took Osborne himself to task: "When he stops being angry—or when he knows what he's angry about— he might write a very good play...

...When she died at age 87, he began an article for the Times, "A year in which one's mother died can't be all bad...

...Notebooks from this period abound with word lists: "Acolyte, addled, alchemy, blancmange, bumbling, burgeon, bollocks, clammy, coverture, conk . . . . " But it was not until he escaped journalism for repertory theater that he put his love of words to the test...

...Osborne himself recalled the first night audience as "mostly adrift, like Eskimos watching a Restoration Comedy...

...Housman-land—about which he would remark, "I may be the poorest playwright in England but I've got the best view...

...I take back what I have said about the Irish...

...Heilpern sums up matters rather lamely in an otherwise insightful biography by saying that "his cause was always the triumphant domain of the English language where words alone are certain good and man grapples with defeat and sadness...

...In many respects, Osborne was a monster...

...After they divorced, Osborne married Mary Ure, his beautiful leading lady, who was playing Alison at the time...

...Like many of the artists Osborne admired—Anton Chekhov, Aubrey Beardsley, D.H...

...Osborne claimed that he hated his mother because she was "the grabbing uncaring crone of my childhood," berated him publicly when he was growing up, and showed no grief when his beloved father died...

...Lane's middle-class parents strenuously objected to the match, and Osborne pursued it largely to spite them, just as Jimmy Porter marries Alison to spite her parents...

...That John Osborne should have been virtually bankrupt in the last decade of his life was proof of his extravagance: His lavish homes in London and the country, his cars, wives, many generous handouts to friends and colleagues down on their luck, drink bills—"Osborne and champagne," Heilpern writes, "were as inseparable as Fortnum and Mason"—and bills from his Savile Row tailor whittled away a sizable fortune...

...So what can be said about this impossible, gifted, unhappy man...

...After its collapse, Osborne formed something called Adolfs Anonymous, "Adolf" being his nickname for Bennett...

...Nevertheless, even for those skeptical about the merits of Osborne's work, this book is worth reading...

...You see I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry—angry and helpless...

...When Lane saw the play, she was amazed by its fidelity to their marital nightmare...

...It feels just right at this moment in time...

...Tynan's review claimed that "I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger: it is the best young play of its decade," and the production was saved...

...In his prime, he made money hand over fist...

...Osborne became famous overnight...

...He repaid her cockney cruelty with something of his own cockney vindictiveness...

...When Osborne followed up his unexpected success with The Entertainer (1957) and Inadmissible Evidence (1964)—which gave memorable expression to his sense of loss and futility—he proved his staying power, though later he would write several plays that should never have left his notebooks...

...After his talent for playwriting dried up, Osborne was forced to write for The Spectator to keep the local tradesmen at bay, prompting the Angry Old Man to complain: "That's how you end up: A f—g journalist...

...Gilliatt spent most of her adult life telephoning William Shawn with late edits and drinking herself to death...

...In trying to account for why he was such a serially poor husband, he explained, "I often confronted problems like an improvising chimpanzee faced with the dashboard of a jumbo jet...

...But then Kenneth Edward Short's forthcoming book on John Henry Newman and his contemporaries will be published by Continuum...

...I feel like a figment...

...Osborne went to his grave adoring his father, even though his most vivid memories of him were of his coming home "after supper full of Waterloo buffet whiskey, Guinness or Moussec playing the upright piano and singing 'Red Sails in the Sunset.'" On such crumbs did Osborne feed his filial love...

...Many walked out...

...Look Back in Anger was not his first but his fourth play, and drew on much that he had learned as a repertory actor...

...Nevertheless, the columns collected in Damn You England...

...In the all-important calculus of class, he married beneath himself and regretted it...

...Eliot, the scattershot invective of Jimmy Porter, Osborne's hero, seemed tedious and offensive...

...Anyone tempted to marry Jill Bennett could ring the organization day or night and be talked out of it...

...Although a talented actress, Ure would later descend into madness...

...Bennett would eventually commit suicide...

...Osborne's father, Thomas Godfrey, was a frail, asthmatic Welshman, a commercial artist who had wanted to be a real artist but never managed it...

...Others were more straightforwardly abusive, calling the play "putrid," "sickening," and "self-pitying...

...Osborne's fifth and final wife was Helen Dawson, arts editor for the Observer, with whom he shared estates in Shropshire and Clun—A.E...

...Osborne later admitted that he married Ure because she reminded him of Lane, which prompts Heilpern to remark: "The man who thinks of his first wife while marrying his second gives nostalgia a bad name...

...It re-creates a theater that has all but vanished, and a rackety life hobbled by hate...

...Yet Osborne's plays exhibit too much emotion: Structurally ramshackle and devoid of any sustained thought, they are often little more than staged jeremiads...

...John James Osborne (1929-1994) was born an only child in Fulham...

...Like Piers Paul Read's brilliant biography of Alec Guinness—another flawed man of talent—Heilpern's book shows his subject unusual compassion...

...Osborne's first marriage to fellow actor Pamela Lane supplied most of the materials for Look Back in Anger...

...Since half the profits went to Woodfall Films, owned jointly by Osborne and director Tony Richardson, Osborne was a multimillionaire by the time he was 35...

...Several of his plays were box office hits in Britain and around the world, and Tom Jones (1963), for which he wrote the screenplay, was one of the most successful films ever made...