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| Critics called him 'ruthless bitter' Mary Ure called him 'sweet, gentle kind'
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JOHN OSBONE: The story of a rebel
An angry young man falls in love by GORGE SCOTI
WOMEN everywhere are fascinated by a rebel. And in John Osborne, with his tall, romantic good looks and brilliant talent, they found a new idol. His writing has thrilled millions, but his life holds even more drama than his plays.
After a chequered career of poorly paid jobs in repertory and weeks on the dole, he poured all his bitterness and resentment into his play, Look Back In Anger.
This play startled the world, and brought him wealth, fame - and romance. Romance with its lovely blonde star, Mary Ure.
John Osborne had first seen her in a film some time before his play opened in London's west End, and said then: "She looks like some old woman's mother. Awful!"
But later when he met her at a party he was so impressed by the young actress that he offered her the role of Alison, Jimmy Porter's wife, in Look Back In Anger.
Mary rose to the challenge and her brilliant performance helped to push Osborne right to the top.
Soon it was noticed that John and Mary were spending a lot of time together. They were seen at first nights, at restaurants and parties. John Osborne Productions Ltd. and Mary Ure Ltd. shared the same office. And, it wasn't long before they were being asked: "Are you going to marry?"
"I am definitely not in love with him," said Mary." And I have no intention of marrying him in the near future."
Romantic at heart
BUT John gave a different answer. "Though people think of me as an Angry Young Man and identify me with Jimmy Porter" -the ruthlessly honest 'hero' of Look Back In Anger-"I am a romantic at heart. I would like a secret wedding without any fuss."
Friends knew that they would marry when John's divorce came through-he had been separated for some time from his wife, whom he had married when he was 21.
The months went by. John's success took him away from England, first to Sicily to work and relax, then to Moscow, where Look Back In Anger was to be staged at the World Youth Festival. Mary Ure was filming. This was the summer of 1957.
A few days after John's return, from Russia, on a Sunday, he and Mary were married quietly, by special licence, at Chelsea Register Office, just round the corner from his mews fiat.
Mary explained why she had denied so many times she was going to marry John.
"I was covering up," she said. "We. have been meaning to marry for a long time. But with John in Russia and me filming, it was difficult. Sunday was the only day."
Champagne and compliments
THEY gave a reception for a few stage friends at a French restaurant in Chelsea.
John smoked a large Havana cigar, sipped champagne, and looked benign. "This is the nicest day of my life," he said.
"I get furious," said Mary, "when anyone calls John an angry young man. He is the sweetest, gentlest, kindest and nicest person I have ever met."
And to John she said: "You must be gentle so that they cannot call you angry any more."
They had hoped to keep their wedding secret. They had booked seats on a plane to the French Riviera for their honeymoon under assumed names. A honeymoon of less than a week, snatched from work.
When she was recognized at the airport, Mary wept a little. She knew she was playing truant from filming at Pinewood, where she was acting the part of the doctor's wife in Windom's Way.
She had not even told the Rank Organization, her bosses, that she was getting married. She said she was expected on the set at Pinewood the next morning.
But on that Monday she and John were on the shores of the Mediterranean, baking in the sunshine. Her film bosses easily forgave her.
As soon as they came back from their honeymoon, they were both hard at work again.
Mary spent long days at the film studios, leaving home in Chelsea early in the morning, and coming back in the evening.
And John was basking in the triumph of his second play, The Entertainer-the play that starred Britain's top dramatic actor, Sir Laurence Olivier, in the most unexpected role of his long career.
Osborne tells how this came about.
"Larry came to see Look Back In Anger and loathed it," he says. "He went up to George Devine-the artistic director at the Royal Court-and asked him: 'What do you mean by putting on this sort of stuff?'
"Well," Osborne continues, "some time later Olivier's manager, Cecil Tennant, told him he had made a big mistake about the play, and said: 'Hop in a taxi with me now, and we'll go and see it.'
Lucky mistake
"SO they got in a taxi, went to the Royal Court, put their money down, took up their seats, and the curtain went up-on a different play altogether." They had chosen the wrong night.
"Anyway, they were there," says John, "and they were stuck for the night, and they stayed. I happened to be acting in that play, and they came round to the dressing room to see me afterwards.
"Well, you know, Larry was very nice and we sort of talked-not very easily, because he's not easy to talk to, and I'm not either. And then he said: 'I'll be honest; I didn't-like Look Back In Anger, but Cecil says I was wrong. Maybe I was in a bad mood, so I'll come again.' "
Olivier did come again, and brought Arthur Miller, the great American playwright, who was in England with his wife, Marilyn Monroe.
Sir Laurence asked Osborne: "Well, is there a part for me in your next play?"
And Osborne, not taking him seriously, said: "Yes, ha-ha-ha"-and forgot all about it.
Then, a few weeks later, George Devine telephoned John Osborne.
"Oh, Larry rang me up," said Devine. "He said: 'How's the play going? '"
Osborne could scarcely believe it. But, nevertheless, he sent the first two acts of The Entertainer to Olivier, who liked it.
What is more, Sir Laurence, who not long before had turned down something like £100,000 (about $281,000.00)? to play in Hollywood's version of Terence Rattigan's play, Separate Tables, now agreed to appear at the Royal Court Theatre for about £90 (about $252.90)?: a week.
Before the first rehearsal of The Entertainer, Olivier did not sleep a wink.
"I am always like that before the first rehearsal," he said. But perhaps there was an even stronger reason. To play the part of Archie Rice, the seedy, shambling comedian, with the blue jokes, and the nudes posing behind him, presented Olivier with an immense challenge.
The gossip began. . .
HIS renown as a great, serious actor was supreme. But to fail in this part would certainly damage his reputation.
Olivier did not fail. He was a huge success. And so was John Osborne.
Success followed success. Just a month after his marriage to Mary, Osborne was off to America to prepare for the Broadway opening of Look Back In Anger.
And that started off the gossips: . . "They've only been married a few weeks and now he's off to America-I can't see" them staying together long. . . "
The malicious tongues wagged on and on. Frequent and often long separations are inevitable in such a marriage. Hear what John Osborne has to say about them :
"They are, to me, one of the necessary limitations on marriage. I welcome it, in fact. I’m delighted that Mary has a career. I'm delighted that we both have careers that take us away from each other. To me it's the only possible thing. It suits me, anyway.
"It depends on your requirements," he explains. "But for me the so-called normal idea of marriage-being together hour after hour, day after day- is too all-embracing. There must be some kind of self-preservation.
"I hate people who are 'professional' married people, who talk about 'us', and 'we went', and 'we did'. Nothing bores me more than if I go somewhere and I'm talking to husband and wife. I don't want to talk to husband and wife. I want to talk to him, or to her. I hate that merging of identities. This 'togetherness' nonsense. I think it's dangerous and impoverishing."
New worlds open
I ALSO asked him, with his notions of marriage, what made him decide to get married again. John put on his most deliberately shocking expression, and laughed loudly. .
"Oh, I think I’m just a compulsive marrier," he says. "Probably I ought to do it every ten years or so!"
The trip to America, which gave the gossips so much to talk about, opened exciting new worlds to Osborne.
He stayed at the Algonquin Hotel in mid-town Manhattan, the rendezvous of New York's theatrical set. A few blocks away was the Lyceum Theatre, where the title of his play and his own name were going up in neon lights.
The lights soon shone brightly with another success for him, his first in America: There is no other place in the world that welcomes the successful so warmly as New York. And John Osborne loved the city.
He was recognized in the smart restaurants of Manhattan, he was swamped with invitations to big-name parties, and he was besieged with offers to write -to write almost anything so long as it had his name on it.
"I felt a success there for the first time," says Osborne. "A pleasant sensation. After all, who doesn't enjoy success? It's all a matter of attitudes. In America, they don't envy success they admire it.
"I like expensive clothes and all the other things that money can buy. Anyone who says he doesn't is a fool. And in New York I can at least walk down Fifth Avenue, wearing a new suit, without sneers. In America, they think success is fun. Well, it is. . . ."
Beginning to live
JOHN OSBORNE was in defiant and exuberant spirits when success bubbled before him in America for the first time. His humour sparkled: "I feel I'd love to have a really enormous Cadillac with built-in dancing girls. Nothing special. But," he added, "I’m still suspicious about money."
At the beginning of his stay, he found the city almost too much for him. He put it this way to me: "I thought, 'My God, I haven't been living before'."
But then the young man who had struggled with his plays responded to the challenge with his own immense energy and vitality.
What he felt then, he still feels now. "New York is, to me," he says, "the most stimulating place in the world, where I walk round the streets like a child, full of excitement. There's a tremendous feeling about it . . .. everyone bursting with a naive energy."
He came back to London in time for Christmas. "And everybody and everything seemed dead. I felt like a guy" who's been to a slap-up party and comes home to a nagging wife . . . London seemed so parochial, so petty."
And in January of the following year, 1958, John Osborne rushed back to America. All the doors there were now open to him. Broadway wanted to stage his other plays. Hollywood wanted to film then.
Osborne made a trip to Hollywood "to set up a film deal for Look Back In Anger." He went there as boss of his own company, Woodfall Productions Ltd., which was going to make the film.
Part of the deal was that his wife, Mary Ure, who had starred in the original stage production, should be in the film. The other two stars were Richard Burton and Claire Bloom.
Shared success
HE also arranged that Tony Richardson, who had never directed a big feature film, should be given his chance to do so.
Richardson had been John's friend in the days before his success. He had loaned Osborne money and bought him meals only two years before when the young playwright was broke. Richardson also produced that first performance of Look Back In Anger at the Royal Court Theatre.
Like any other young writer and actor, John had been excited by the legend of Hollywood, the place where everything seemed to be on a bigger-than-life scale, and where beauty and success were a kind of permanent exhibition for the rest of the world to gape at. But he was disappointed by the modern Hollywood.
"The legendary Hollywood doesn't exist any more," he says. "It's a very boring place now. Very dull. Oh, and not just dull, it's an almost frightening place to be in for very long. Everyone's so respectable."
In Hollywood, where he stayed for a week, Osborne saw nobody except a few film directors and producers. He spent most of his time at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the Pacific Coast's smartest hotel, sitting by the swimming pool, or just lying in the sunshine.
On his way back to the East Coast of America, he stopped at Las Vegas, seeking some of the excitement he had hoped in vain to find in Hollywood.
During his two days in that gaudy, wild, wide-open city in Nevada where anything goes, Osborne went to two shows a night and had a fling at the gambling tables.
"I risked a few dollars," he says, "although I don't get any kicks from gambling. Amazingly, I won five dollars. I never knew you could gamble for so long and risk so little." In trying to describe Las Vegas, even John Osborne is almost at a loss for words. "Fabulous. Fabulous," he says.
It seemed as though nothing could go wrong for John Osborne now. In that same January, his play, The Entertainer, opened in the East Coast city of Boston.
An extra-row of seats had to be fitted into the auditorium of the enormous Schubert Theatre there. The newspaper critics raved about the play, and it broke all box-office records at the theatre.
'She's so brave'
THEN John flew to Jamaica to work on a new play. While he was there, his first wife, Pamela Lane; was acting in Look Back In Anger at the New Theatre, Bromley, Kent. Six months before, when the company had first produced the play, she had refused a part in it. "It would have been too painful," she said then. But she added: "I don't begrudge John his success. He deserves it. My ambition is to succeed on my own, not by trailing in his wake."
(Last year, when Pamela Lane was in a play in London, John said to me: "I’m glad to see they've said good things about her. She's very talented -and very brave. ")
The Entertainer moved on to Broadway, to repeat the success it had in Boston. Look Back In Anger was still running at another theatre on Broadway, and between them Osborne's two plays were earning £20,000 (about $56,200.00)? a week there.
That spring, too, the New York Drama Critics Circle, composed of men who have butchered many an innocent young play, chose Look Back In Anger as the best foreign play of the season.
And although John Osborne did not like Hollywood, Hollywood liked him. He went back there to fix another deal, this time to film The Entertainer: And Sir Laurence Olivier, who scored such a tremendous triumph as Archie Rice in the original stage production, agreed to play the same part in the film.
It seemed now as though everything John touched or did must turn into a success. Could nothing go wrong for him?
© George Scott, 1960
NEXT WEEK: John Osborne faces bitter failure when he is at the very height of his career.
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