LOOK BACK IN LUST
REVEALED: The passion-filled love letters that show Look Back In Anger writer John Osborne carried on sleeping with his first wife through his next FOUR marriages — fuelled by their mutual obsession with silk bloomers!
WRITING to his ex-wife Pamela Lane in the autumn of 1983, the celebrated playwright John Osborne told her: ‘You are as voluptuous and erotic as when I first saw that beautiful red head of hair and fell in love for ever.
‘You are, always have and will be at the centre of my heart. I hope you don’t mind getting a 32-year-old love letter. Well — that old play of mine was, as you must know, a pretty anguished love letter.’
The ‘old play’ to which he referred was his masterpiece Look Back In Anger, which exploded on to the staid, post-war theatrical scene in 1956, and which was based almost entirely on his brief, tempestuous marriage to Pamela — even down to their pet names for each other: Bear for him, Squirrel for her.
When she first saw it, she confided later to friends: ‘I felt as though I had been raped.’
Yet a deep bond between them remained, finding its expression in an extraordinary series of secret letters exchanged over a period of more than 30 years — a correspondence that transcended their acrimonious parting, their divorce, Osborne’s celebrity and his subsequent four marriages.
Though many letters have been lost, almost 100 have survived and are to be published in a new book documenting the intriguing course of a relationship between two people who couldn’t live with each other — but could not apparently survive without each other either. They also reveal his enduring sensual fascination with her underwear.
From the outset, the couple’s union had been tempestuous. Meeting as 21-year-olds appearing in repertory theatre in Bridgwater, Somerset, they had fallen headlong in love and within three months, to the dismay of Pamela’s parents, had married.
Three years later they spent six domestically catastrophic months in a squalid flat in Derby, the experience providing the inspiration for Osborne’s bleak, so-called kitchen sink drama in which the volatile, ‘angry young man’ hero Jimmy Porter and his impassive, supposedly socially superior wife Alison destroy their marriage in front of their friends and the audience.
For Osborne and Pamela, the Derby episode was a disaster, their marriage suffering the same fate.
Osborne wrote sadly to her in 1954: ‘This is really goodbye, then. I really did love you too much, didn’t I?’
Two years later, when she and Osborne were separated but not yet divorced, Pamela went to the Royal Court Theatre in London to see Look Back In Anger, which had opened to huge critical acclaim.
There she had the unnerving experience of watching an only lightly fictionalised account of her own tormented marriage, in which Alison, the character modelled on her, was played by her estranged husband’s lover Mary Ure — soon to be the second Mrs Osborne.
But still their strange, complex bond endured. Hardly was the ink dry on the divorce papers than their decades-long correspondence began, starting in 1958 with a note on a bouquet left for Pamela at the stage door of London’s Savoy Theatre which read: ‘ Very good luck for tonight, darling. All love, Johnny’.
Just over a year later, with his marriage to Mary Ure already on the rocks, Osborne and Pamela were apparently getting on so well that they planned a romantic few days away together in Brighton.
‘Pam, darling,’ wrote Osborne in March 1960, ‘I don’t know the best arrangement for our accommodation. Unless you can think of something better, I suggest the following: I shall book a double room at the ROYAL ALBION for April 10 in my own name and you can book a single room in your name. Can you do this right away. Please let me know. Do hope you’re well. Longing to see you. Love, Johnny.’ History does not relate how their weekend in Brighton unfolded, but on January 17, 1961 Osborne was in touch with his ex-wife again.
‘I’ve been thinking of you and, frankly, wanting you again,’ he wrote. ‘I can think of nothing I’d like more than seeing you alone again, and being together, as we were in Brighton. If I picked you up after the show on Saturday, would you care to go somewhere — if only till Sunday?’
Whether or not he managed to whisk her away for a night or two is again unknown, but what is clear is that the now- single Pam, who never remarried, appeared to be reclaiming something of the thrill of her pre-marriage life.
‘She was wonderful to be with,’ recalls actress Julia Lockwood. ‘She drew people to her. She was very clever, very sexy.’
Little wonder, then, that she continued to exert such a powerful influence over her ex-husband.
On November 14, 1962, Osborne and Mary Ure were divorced and he moved in with the journalist and film critic Penelope Gilliatt, who would become his third wife.
But Pamela was still in his mind, and at the end of April 1963 he sent her a copy of his newly published Plays For England.
‘My dear John,’ replied Pamela, ‘Thank you for the Plays — I was pleased to have them. (Very sexy, too, not dull and boring at all).’
Her ‘very sexy’ comment refers to several passages in one of the plays celebrating women’s underwear — a subject in which Osborne had a playful, if rather juvenile, interest.
About a year later Pamela moved, with actress Hazel Coppen (the nature of their relationship was never revealed), into a flat in Kilburn, North London, where she lived the rest of her life.
Osborne’s diary entry for February 3 1965, describes an early visit: ‘ Pamela’s flat, 11.30am,’ he notes laconically.
‘Once again, easy glide between the sheets. Says weekly sums she got from her piece of Inadmissible Evidence had kept her going.’
Osborne had, it seemed, arranged for a percentage of the profits from his latest play, Inadmissible Evidence, to be passed on to his former wife. ‘ Pamela love,’ he writes in June 1965, ‘ you’ll be getting some of the profits from Inadmissible in the next few days, so buy yourself some new knickers or something. Hope all’s well.’
Whether Pamela used the money to buy underwear is not recorded, but in December she writes: ‘Thank you more than I can say for making 1965 so easy and comfortable for me: the income from Inadmissible has been welcome beyond words.
‘My love to you and Penelope — Ever, Pamela.’
Penelope, by now the third Mrs Osborne and the mother of his only child, his daughter Nolan — from whom he would later become estranged — had met Pamela and, as the letter suggests, the two were on good terms.
BUTOsborne was already tiring of his latest wife and had begun a relationship with the volatile actress Jill Bennett, whom he married on April 19, 1968. Pamela was vehemently against the relationship, believing (correctly, as it turned out) that the couple were entirely incompatible and urging him to walk away. Osborne was furious.
Although Pamela was a former wife, a close friend and occasional lover, he felt she had intruded uninvited into his private affairs.
Their friendship cooled, and they