Secret girl – I want to clasp you, adore you, touch you
HE WAS a celebrated playwright, she was the beautiful TV star, and together they conducted a seven-year affair while married to others.
The secret relationship between Harold Pinter and Joan Bakewell during the 1960s inspired his play Betrayal.
Their affair was only revealed to the public a quarter of a century after they parted, but now the passionate love letters Pinter wrote to the broadcaster are available for the world to read.
They are among a collection of papers transferred by Joan Bakewell to the British Library. They span the affair, which lasted from 1962 to 1969, and often exhibit the sparse, staccato style for which the playwright was famous. In the erotically charged correspondence, Pinter – whose plays The Caretaker and The Homecoming made him a giant of the 1960s stage – writes that he ‘bleeds’ to see the woman he dubs ‘my secret girl’ and ‘Dear Miracle’.
In one letter in 1967, the playwright says: ‘Oh love. The dreams. Making love to you. All the images of it. You darling under me. Over me. Always always always. I can’t tell you. O my dear speak to me.’ In another letter he writes: ‘Want to clasp you, adore you. Touch you. Your fingers. Your eyes… All you do. Secret girl. I can’t speak, only look. Looking at you now. See you now. In your hotel room, bending, moving, talking…’
The pair grabbed precious moments together in London and relied on their letters to keep their love alive. To maintain secrecy they would often write to each other through intermediaries, including actor Henry Woolf, who also allowed them to use his bedsit.
By the mid-1960s, Pinter’s success meant he was spending more time in the US and he describes the absences as ‘agony’. The affair ended in 1969.