Lahr - Prick Up Your Ears

Prick Up Your Ears

The Biography of Joe Orton

John Lahr

To Anthea and Christopher:

Gravitys angels

JOKERS ARE WILD

Murder is negative creation, and every murderer is therefore the rebel who claims the right to be omnipotent. His pathos is his refusal to suffer

W. H. Auden, The Dyers Hand

MISS PRISM . The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

JOE ORTON AND KENNETH HALLIWELL were friends. For fifteen years, they lived and often wrote together. They wore each others clothes. Their wills each named the other as sole beneficiary. They shared everything except success. But on 9 August 1967, murder made them equal again.

The note was found on top of the red-grained leather binder which held Ortons diary. The words, fastidiously written, had none of the horror that the scene did:

If you read his diary all will

be explained.

KH

PS. Especially the latter part

Halliwell lay nude on his back in the centre of the room, three feet from Ortons writing desk. The backs of his hands, the top of his chest, and his bald head were splattered with blood. Except for his arms, rigor mortis had set in. Halliwells gory pyjama top was draped over the desk chair. On the linoleum floor near him was a glass and a can of grapefruit juice which had speeded the twenty-two Nembutals into his blood, killing him within thirty seconds. Halliwell had died sooner than Orton, whose sheets were still warm when the police discovered him in bed, his head cratered like a burnt candle.

At forty-one, Halliwell was no stranger to horrific death. When he was eleven, his doting mother had been stung in the mouth by a wasp and within minutes had choked to death before his eyes. Twelve years later, Halliwell came downstairs for breakfast to discover his father with his head in the oven, dead from asphyxiation. Halliwell was haunted by his fathers death. While studying at RADA in 1953, he told an actress who had tried to rally him out of one of his frequent depressions: Ill end up just like my father and commit suicide. Halliwell had no reason to trust life.

God laughs and snaps his fingers, he and Orton wrote in an unpublished novel, The Boy Hairdresser (1960). The only thing for man to do is to imitate God and snap his fingers too. Halliwells final fillip was nine hammer blows to Ortons head, a last crazy gesture of omnipotence in a life which from the time of his parents deaths had been out of control. The hammer lay above the bedcover on Ortons chest. Halliwell, who had once taken Marlowe as his stage surname, had dispatched Orton with a frenzied brutality typical of that Elizabethan playwrights blood-lust. He had walloped Ortons head so furiously that the vault of his skull had been bashed open and several lacerations on the scalp held the shape of the hammer. Ortons face was caked with dried blood. His brain had been splattered on wall and ceiling.

It was Ortons mindthe gorgeous, wicked fun it poked at the worldwhich made him irresistible and obsessed Halliwell. He had known that brain before it had been tutored by him in literature. Hed nurtured it, enjoyed it, provoked it to defy convention, edited its excesses. Marriage excuses no one the freaks roll-call. Halliwell and Orton both shared a tricksters suspicion of normality, but only Orton could give the anarchic instinct memorable shape in a sentence. His curious chemistry of anger, optimism, and erudition blessed him with a comic style unique to his era. The mind that was meant to be Halliwells cultivated and constant companion had acquired an independent life and vision. Often during the last months of their lives, Orton tried to reason Halliwell into a life of his own:

When we got home we talked about ourselves and our relationship. I think its bad that we live in each others pockets twenty-four hours a day three hundred and sixty-five days a year. When Im away Kenneth does nothing, meets nobody. Whats to be done? Hes now taking tranquillizers to calm his nerves. I need an affair with somebody, he says. He says Im no good. Im only interested in physical sex, not love. Your attitude to sensitive people is Victorian, he said. Basically, its Dr Arnolds get on the playing fields. You wont be so sensitive then. All you need is a field of interest outside me. Where you can meet people away from me

(30 April 1967)

Halliwells threats in the last year always tried to manoeuvre Orton back into the cosy unit hed outgrown:

Kenneth H had a long talk about our relationship. He threatens, or keeps saying, he will commit suicide. He says, Youll learn then, wont you? and What will you be like without me? We talked and talked until I was exhausted

(1 May 1967)

Had Halliwell killed Orton and himself four years earlier, their deaths would have been another short item in the local paper. Instead, they were headline news. Between 1963, when his first play was accepted, and 1967, when he died, Orton became a playwright of international reputation. His oeuvre was small, but his impact was large. By 1967, the term Ortonesque had worked its way into the English vocabulary, a shorthand adjective for scenes of macabre outrageousness. Orton wrote three first-class full-length playsEntertaining Mr Sloane, Loot and the posthumously produced What the Butler Sawand four one-act plays. In his short career, two films were made from his plays; and Loot was voted the Evening Standards Best Play of 1966. Ortons plays often scandalized audiences, but his wit made the outrage memorable. Ortons laughter bore out Nietzsches dictum that He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart. Orton brought the epigram back to the contemporary stage to illuminate a violent world: Its life that defeats the Christian Church, shes always been well-equipped to deal with death (The Erpingham Camp); All classes are criminal today. We live in an age of equality (Funeral Games). Ortons laughter created a panic. His stage gargoyles tried to frighten their audience into new life.

Ortons deathlaced as it was with the irony of his fascination with the grotesquehad special public interest. No playwright in living memory had met a more gruesome end. The news was reported on the front page of The Times and all the major English papers. The Times obituary (written by its drama critic Irving Wardle) called Orton one of the sharpest stylists of the British new wavea consummate dialogue artist, and a natural anarch. It was a better review from the paper than Orton ever earned in life. Almost instantly, Ortons death became more famous than his work. Many interpreted his death as retribution for the unrelenting anarchy of his laughter. But Orton was not hounded by society into a selfconscious martyrdom. He was not a victim of the gospel of ecstasy which burned out the lives of so many pop stars of the sixties. A voluptuary of fiasco, Orton died from his short-sighted and indecisive loyalty to a friend.

Halliwell had purchased the second-floor bed-sitting-room at 25 Noel Road, Islington, in 1959, so that he and Orton could have some security while they tried to write. But it was finally Orton who persevered, sitting at their glossy white desk and writing while Halliwell looked on. Even the financial balance which had given Halliwell so much power over Orton in the early years had shifted dramatically. It was now Orton who had the big bank balance of 20,222 and Halliwell whose inheritance had dwindled in support of them to 5,817. Joe has everything, doesnt he? Halliwell complained to Miss Boynes, the elderly lady who lived beneath them and to whom he went for scraps of conversation during the long days when Orton was absent from the flat. Halliwell, who longed to be an artist, had played midwife to his friends talent. His creative gesture was the source of his sadness and undoing. There was no visible sign of his contribution; and Halliwell, pathetically, was forced to substantiate his claims in language as if syntax could somehow bind him permanently to Ortons success. He employed the royal we when speaking of Orton and referred to his talent as a genius like us.