‘Dearest Squirrel’ The Intimate Letters of John Osborne and Pamela Lane edited by Peter Whitebrook
‘Dearest Squirrel’ The Intimate Letters of John Osborne and Pamela Lane Edited by Peter Whitebrook Oberon £20 Oldie price £18.93 inc p&p
Here’s an answer to those of us who still think of John Osborne as Mr Nasty. Yes, he liked to hate. He rejected his only daughter and cruelly cut her on the street. Yes, he excoriated the fourth of his five wives, the actress Jill Bennett, in life and death, calling her Hitler and writing of his great regret that he didn’t spit on her coffin. Yes, he evolved from Angry Young Man into curmudgeonly old blimp, turning his blowtorch rhetoric onto anything fresh or foreign. And so his enemies – and I was one, having been selected for comeuppance when he formed his British Playwrights’ Mafia – might go on and on. And on.
Yet here’s another Osborne, touchy and difficult, but also warm, companionable and exceptionally generous. Without his continuing help and support, I suspect his first wife, also an actress, might have ended under Waterloo Bridge or at least a desperate bankrupt. He seems genuinely to have cared for Pamela Lane and she to have reciprocated, an amorous Squirrel to what she called her ‘savage, benign Bear’.
So they often signed themselves in the collection of mutual letters Peter Whitebrook, author of a fine biography of Osborne, has collected, interpreted and deftly placed in their contexts.
The names weren’t just cute affectations. They are what Jimmy Porter and his wife, Alison, call each other in Look Back in Anger when they aren’t warring. Alison was clearly based on Pamela, whom Osborne had come to love – ‘utterly, incredibly, insanely, yet so rationally’ – when they were acting in rep in her home town of Bridgwater in 1951.
By marrying Pamela, he defied the hostility of her mother – described in the play as a ‘rhinoceros in labour’ and, in a letter to a friend, as ‘a veritable monster, a beast trying to devour her daughter’. Acting commitments brought separations but in 1954 they were together onstage in Derby, where Osborne discovered his wife had been having an affair with a local dentist. Rows ensued, followed, in 1957, by divorce and Osborne’s marriage to Mary Ure.
Was that the end of it? Hardly. Osborne was already writing affectionate letters to Pamela and, with gaps, did so almost until his death in 1994. He also had an on-off affair with her up to and during his fifth, lasting marriage to the journalist Helen Dawson. And some of the exchanges Whitebrook publishes in this diverting, meticulously researched book are as passionate as fond. ‘You are as voluptuous and erotic,’ wrote Osborne in 1983, ‘as when I first saw that beautiful red head of hair and fell in love for ever.’
Whitebrook calls the letters ‘intimate’, and at times they left me feeling intrusive. From 1984, ‘Droitwich’ sometimes appears as a fake address, an acronym for Directoires Right On In Time When I Come Home. Osborne being Osborne, there’s the odd tantrum, as when Pamela signs herself ‘Yours, Squirrel’ instead of ‘Your Squirrel’ or fails to join him and Helen for Christmas. But he always helps her financially, even giving her royalties from Inadmissible Evidence, perhaps his best play.
Pamela was often unemployed, occasionally reduced to doing market research on the street, and sometimes seriously broke. She didn’t make it as an actress in London, at least not until long stints playing a cantankerous crone in the eternal Mousetrap, yet garnered excellent reviews in Leicester, Nottingham and other major reps, playing leading roles that varied from the stricken Mary Tyrone in O’neill’s Long Day’s Journey to the ferocious Martha in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ‘An outstanding actress,’ concluded the eminent director Richard Digby Day, who oversaw her Elizabeth in Schiller’s Mary Stuart, ‘much better than Mary Ure or Jill Bennett. She drew from reserves deep within her.’
Again and again, Whitebrook’s interviewees describe Pamela, who died in 2010, as pleasant, likeable, yet inscrutable, unknowable and deep. She never remarried and refused to speak about Osborne. However, she did respond when an acting student asked what she felt when she saw Look Back in Anger. ‘As though I had been raped,’ she replied.