John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man by John Heilpern

Author:John Heilpern [Heilpern, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Performing Arts, theater, playwriting, Literary Figures
ISBN: 9780307557179
Google: TphgNnAvJL8C
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-04T00:23:50.873523+00:00

28

Another Perfect House Party

I search out scraps of you, seek out shreds of you. I sit and walk and lie and I burn for you.

Osborne letter to Penelope Gilliatt, 12 August, Valbonne

The tall stone farmhouse in the South of France stood in a remote hollow among olive groves and sweet-smelling lavender, and they could see the ocean from the swimming pool tucked into the parched landscape. Osborne had long planned a summer holiday there with Rickards, sharing the luxurious retreat in the hills of Valbonne with Tony Richardson. It would be another perfect house party.

La Beaumette, as the house was called, belonged to Lord Glenconner, one of the Tennant family, and had its own staff. Osborne and Richardson had rented it for most of August and early September. But Rickards was now reluctant to go and Osborne had to persuade her out of her sullen mood of mute attrition. He reasoned with her apologetically that she deserved a holiday after all the upset, and a break in the sun would do them both good. He would even arrange for a friend of hers, Jane Sprague, a fashion model, to join them.

Thus persuaded, Rickards set off with him for the Côte d'Azur in his convertible blue Alvis, fortified like a chic tank by fifteen hundredweight of custom-built coachwork. But this time there was no lingering on the escapist back roads of France as there had been when they first fell in love and fled London for the sanctuary of Graham Greene's villa in Anacapri. Many others were also descending on the secluded farmhouse in the hills where the hyperactive Richardson had already arrived, impatient for drama and diversion.

Jocelyn Herbert, with two of her children from her marriage to the solicitor Anthony Lousada, was meanwhile driving Richardson's red Thunderbird from London to the house where her lover, George Devine, would join them later. There was always an undercurrent of class warfare between the uppermiddle-class Herbert and Osborne, who mocked her resemblance to Virginia Woolf as a mask of permanently weary saintliness. The Royal Court's distinguished set designer in turn patronized Rickards as “an intellectual's moll,” and Rickards herself was never at ease in the controlling company of the feline Richardson.

Oscar Beuselinck was also heading eagerly into the maelstrom, bringing with him his teenage son. “Well, what are we all going to do today?” Beuselinck would ask, patrolling the pool impatiently in his baggy bathing trunks. John Addison, who composed the music for The Entertainer and would win an Academy Award for his score of Tom Jones, was also en route with his wife and children. Rickards's friend, Jane Sprague, was flying in from her home in Los Angeles. Christopher Isherwood and his lover Don Bachardy were expected before travelling on to Somerset Maugham's palatial Villa Mauresque at Juan Les Pins.

“Well, I didn't invite them all, did you, Johnny?” Richardson complained to Osborne when he arrived in the Alvis churning up the gravel. “I mean, what are we going to do with them

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