Biography: John Mortimer, defence lawyer, novelist and playwright, champion of liberality and - one must say it - bon viveur, gave John Osborne's biographer a neatly turned and, it would seem, entirely accurate thumbnail sketch of the original Angry Young Man and author of Look Back in Anger; Osborne, Mortimer said, "was an affable, lovely, champagne-drinking man" - pause - "and an absolute s***, of course."
John Heilpern, in his turn, describes Mortimer as "a convivial, Rumpoleish man, particularly over lunch", and reports him as adding about the notoriously vengeful Osborne that "He was always very nice to me". However, Heilpern points out, "the same was said by admirers of Stalin".
There were and are many in the theatre world who would consider Osborne to have been a Stalin and a Hitler rolled into one. The playwright who began his career - Look Back in Anger was first staged in 1956 - as a scourge of the establishment, rapidly turned himself into a larger-than-life Little Englander, with an estate in Shropshire, a fleet of motor cars that included a Bentley, a Cadillac and a vintage Alvis, a bevy of ex-wives and mistresses and at least one professional, paid lover, and a set of political views, loudly and frequently expressed, that Margaret Thatcher would have considered a trifle extreme - though Heilpern sees him as an old-style English patriot, hence the title of his book.
John Osborne achieved success beyond the dreams of his fellow dramatists, turning, almost literally overnight, from a third-rate rep actor into one of the highest-earning playwrights of his time. At the beginning of May 1956 he was being paid £12 a week as a bit-player at the Royal Court Theatre; within a month or so of the opening at the Court of Look Back in Anger, his first produced play, he was earning £3,500 a week in royalties, the equivalent of about £28,000 (€41,000) in today's values. Yes: a week. Later on he would earn millions from the screenplay for his loved and hated pal Tony Richardson's movie of Tom Jones, yet he still managed to die broke, and worse than broke: "Try to hold on to the house," he begged his wife Helen on his deathbed.
It could not be said of Osborne that he had shown early promise. He was by most accounts an indifferent actor, and his first attempts at dramatic writing embarrassed even his first wife, Pamela Lane, a fellow thespian who never broke out of the provincial rep circuit - and whom the supposedly unforgiving Osborne supported financially for many years after their violently rancorous separation. However, he knew what was wrong with English theatre, and by extension English life, even if he did not at first know how to tackle the rot.
His lower-class background made him a natural outsider in the genteel world of the English stage, ruled as it was by the iron dictates of Terence Rattigan's infamous "Aunt Edna", whose invention Rattigan - the ultimate professional playwright, author of such staples as Separate Tables and The Winslow Boy, and described by Osborne in his notebooks as "the Landseer of British theatre" - was to live to regret bitterly.
Aunt Edna made her debut in 1953 in the introduction to a volume of Rattigan's Selected Plays. She was, he wrote, "A nice respectable, middle-class, middle-aged maiden lady with time on her hands and the money to help her pass it." Aunt Edna was the kind of figure who a few years later would be an object of derision for the new breed of post-Look Back in Anger playwrights, and satirists such as the Beyond the Fringe team, but Rattigan - who, to his credit, eventually recognised the quality and revolutionary nature of Osborne's work - had only the barest tip of his tongue in his cheek when he put her forward as the kind of playgoer that dramatists should be aiming to please. For Osborne, though, Aunt Edna was more of an Aunt Sally. In 1953, when he was still an unknown 23-year-old repertory player, he wrote in his notebooks:
English theatre isn't merely dying, it's being buried alive to the rattle of Aunt Edna's knitting needles. Aunt Edna herself is one of a long line of swindles handed down on tablets of white tiling from the summits of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Rd. She is merely the New Testament version of the old fundamentalist religion of theatrical management with its dread of the original sin of being articulate. Aunt Edna, poor thing, is the latest, self- conscious and uneasy Messiah who brings the glad tidings of What the Public Wants. Public taste is created, never forget that.
Osborne, the lower-class lad who had been to neither Oxford nor Cambridge, who indeed had not been to any university, but had left school at 15 to become an apprentice journalist on the trade journal Gas World - had he been Irish he would no doubt have appreciated the unintentional pun - wanted a theatre that would reflect the England that he knew, the down-at-heel England of poor housing and outside privies, of brown ale and fish-and-chip shops, of sing-songs around the piano and, above all, of the Saturday-night music hall. Even in his lordliest period, when he was playing the landed gent in tweed cap and Norfolk jacket, he never lost his love for the comedians and hoofers and trick cyclists who had injected so much gaiety into the otherwise dark years of his childhood. Max ("The Cheeky Chappie") Miller was a lifelong hero, and the model for Archie Rice in Osborne's other great stage success, The Entertainer. Miller was, Heilpern writes, "rude, he was racy, and he didn't give a damn", a comic genius who Kenneth Tynan compared to a man unzipping his fly in a nunnery. In 1975, when he was still riding high, Osborne cast another of his heroes and another Max, "the wrecked comic genius" Max Wall, as Heilpern describes him, in a revival of The Entertainer. Wall wanted to insert into the play that great worst line in comedy, "Take my wife - puhleeze", and Osborne was delighted to agree. He was that kind of playwright.
Certainly, the boy Osborne needed some laughter in his life. He was born in London in 1929, and in his autobiography, A Better Class of Person, he mapped out the dour surroundings of his youth:
The boundaries of my earliest territory extended from Hammersmith Broadway, with its clattering trams and drunken Irishmen, to the Fulham Palace Road, a long road leading to Putney Bridge. On the left there is a huge cemetery (containing first my sister and then my father), a stonemason's scrapyard of broken tombstones and dead daffodils in milk bottles. It stretches as far as Fulham Broadway where my mother would walk past my sister's grave on her way to pay the bill at the Gas, Light and Coke Company and my father took me off to the old Granville Theatre or dropped in at Lyons for his favourite black coffee and brown bread and butter on the way to his regular visits to the Brompton Hospital.
Osborne's Welsh father worked as an advertising copywriter and commercial artist on Fleet Street until he contracted tuberculosis, which in those days was a death sentence. "He was," Heilpern writes, "an ailing and reticent figure, prematurely old with white hair in his twenties, a sympathetic man who enjoyed good books and pubs, and played the piano during family sing-songs. He was Osborne's one protector-figure in the family. "Leave the boy alone," he would say during the domestic rows.
His mother, the remarkable Nellie Beatrice, came from a family of publicans, and began her working life scrubbing floors in an orphanage. She was working as a barmaid when she met her future husband, and indeed continued in her trade long after her son's theatrical success: in 1960 a reporter discovered her still cheerfully tending the bar of a hotel in Ewell and splashed the story under the headline "ANGRY YOUNG MAN'S MOTHER PULLS PINTS."
Osborne professed to hate Nellie Beatrice and lost no opportunity to revile her, in private and in public, yet he took her to all his first nights, and even to parties at the houses of his grand friends - Heilpern recounts a wonderful anecdote of Nellie Beatrice at a house-warming at the Oliviers', trying "slyly to hide her portion of priceless beluga by grinding it slowly into the newly laid carpet with her shoe". When his mother died in 1983, aged 87, Osborne began an article for the Sunday Times: "A year in which my mother died can't be all bad." The article was spiked. But despite all her son's complaints and cries against her, she was loyal and loving to the end. "Nemmind, eh?" she said to him when the initial, adverse reviews of Look Back in Anger appeared, "Perhaps you'll be in the limelight the next time."
Osborne's Trouble with Women was legendary. When he had got rid of his first wife Pamela Lane he married the actress and beauty Mary Ure. They were for a while the "golden couple" of the English stage, but Ure was desperate to have a baby, and had an affair with and eventually married the far more fertile Robert Shaw, who had children all over the place. Next Osborne married, disastrously, the actress Jill Bennett - they were Martha and George out of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - who after eight tumultuous years he left for the film critic Penelope Gilliat. Gilliat bore him his only child, Nolan, the daughter he would repudiate when she was 16.
At last, in 1978, he married Helen Dawson, arts editor of the Observer, with whom he lived happily until his death on Christmas Eve, 1994, at the age of 65, from heart failure brought on by diabetes and a lilfetime of heavy drinking - at the time he met Dawson his daily intake was, according to Heilpern, "a bottle of vodka, a bottle or two of wine, champagne on tap [champagne in the Osborne households was known as "some", as in "Let's have some"], along with various amphetamines, codeine and sleeping pills". The last word he spoke was "Sorry", and the last line he wrote was "I have sinned", scribbled on a cigarette packet which his wife found beside his deathbed.
And sinned he had. In Heilpern - irreverent, contentious, blowsy of style and with a taste for low comedy, a chappie as cheeky in his way as Max Miller - Osborne has found his ideal biographer, one who will defend his subject even unto the thoroughly indefensible; however, some things there is no excusing. Of the many enormities of which Osborne was guilty - such as his treatment of his mother and the posthumous vilification of Jill Bennett - surely the worst was his rejection of his daughter, who he threw out of the house apparently for no better reason than that she was behaving like most 16-year-old daughters behave. He wrote her a letter, telling her he was withdrawing her from school and would pay no more fees, that he had informed her landlady of this and had closed her bank account, and ordered her to leave the house immediately:
Don't bother to come here. A life of banality, safety, mediocrity and meanness of spirit is what you are set on. You have never asked for my confidence. Don't ask for it now. Above all, don't underestimate my resolve or anger. I see you lying, cheating, dissembling, stealing daily. It is not a spectacle I wish to watch any longer.
He closed this terrible missive by wishing her "Happy 1982. This is where the long road really starts - On Your Own". No extremes of childhood unhappiness or adult depressions could excuse this father's anathema upon his daughter, his only child. In the letter he had quoted Lear - "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child" - but seemingly missed the resemblance between himself and Shakespeare's foolish and deluded king.
Leaving the house, Nolan threw herself on the mercy of a local clergyman whose daughter was a friend of hers. The Rev Guy Bennett took her in and treated her thereafter as one of the family. Some years later, however, Bennett was found guilty of indecently assaulting three 11-year-old girls. Nolan appeared as a character witness, describing him as "the most caring and unselfish person I have ever met". Nevertheless, Bennett was sentenced to nine months in jail and his name was put on the Sexual Offenders List. No doubt Osborne looked down upon, or up at, the proceedings with gleeful and malicious satisfaction.
Osborne suffered for his sins. The account Heilpern gives of the final years makes for painful reading. The sometime king of the Royal Court and toast of Broadway could no longer work - he had taken to signing himself "John Osborne, Ex-Playwright" - and managed to sabotage almost every attempt by his friends and professional colleagues to bring his plays to the attention of a new generation of theatre-goers. He became embroiled in public squabbles, in the press and in restaurants, and was reported upon by the newspapers as being drunk and incapable - though Heilpern gallantly insists that much of his condition was due to his forgetting to take his insulin injections.
How good an artist was he? Probably his talent was not so great as his great successes would make it seem. It could be said of him that he was enormously lucky to have been in the right place at the right time, articulating the dissatisfaction and longing for change of a generation that had come to recognise the poverty of life - spiritual and moral - of 1950s England. Of his plays, the one that is most likely to live is Inadmissible Evidence, in which the protagonist, the solicitor Bill Maitland, spiralling down into spiritual and emotional disaster, utters what might be Osborne's dying lament: "I succeeded in inflicting, quite certainly inflicting, more pain than pleasure. I am not equal to any of it. But I can't escape it, I can't forget it. And I can't begin again. You see?"
John Banville's The Sea is now out in paperback (Picador)
John Osborne: A Patriot for Us by John Heilpern Cape, 528pp. £25