DIARY
Inever thought I would live to miss Binkie. 'Who?' readers may ask. Hugh 'Binkie' Beaumont, General Manager of H.M. Tennent, was the Scargill of the iron-lilac Stage Establishment for almost 30 years. Feared and fawned upon by gonged actors, famous playwrights and even the Arts Council, of which he later became a member, Binkie dominated theatrical fashion as long as I could remem- ber. Dealing with one of the subsidised managements last week made me remem- ber almost fondly his formidable and Poisonous efficiency. I dined at his re- nowned house in Lord North Street early in 1957. A dutiful crone of a housekeeper was serving me disapprovingly when he turned to her and said: Wow, Mrs Crocker [pre-Pinter pause], Mr Brendan Bracken has just died and his house is up for sale. Don't you think Mr Osborne should buy it?' She looked down at me and, after a gimlet glance, replied very emphatically: 'No!' Binkie's lizard lips fluttered beneath the folds of perennial sunlamp tan. 'Real- ly? But why on earth not, Mrs Crocker?' 'Because', she explained huffily, `E's not ready for it yet.' Game and set to Binkie. Shortly before his death, I spent an even- ing with him a trois, as the other guest, Noel Coward, might have said. Binkie berated and accused me professionally and Personally throughout the evening, ending Up on his knees, drunk, his face in the fireplace of his most elegant drawing room, smoking jacket awry and monogrammed Slippers discarded, his behind in the air. Coward watched him irritably but, I thought, with some satisfaction. He had himself been an unadmitteS victim of that silken Judas. 'Oh dear', he clipped over his cigarette holder. 'What a thoroughly dis- agreeable evening!' It was my last glimpse of either of them.
n Holy Saturday, Channel Four Showed a film called God Rot Tunbridge Wells! It was certainly a 'flawed work' as they say. (I often wonder what is deemed to be 'unflawed'. Orson Welles has been hobbled by his 'flawed' genius all his life.) It was, if nothing else, a reverent, almost devotional testimony to George Frideric Handel, produced and directed by Tony Palmer, wiih Trevor Howard as Handel and written by myself. The result, if a bit over-energetic and robust for some maidenly tastes, patently displayed our shared admiration for a God-given, devout and joyful worshipper of life itself. The reviewss were almost uniformly dismissive If not hostile. The Old Buck still seemed hedged in by Victorian pieties from undev- out journalists. Predictable enough and by Easter mid-Monday I had almost forgotten an unremarkable incident. Within hours I was swiftly despatched in 'a state of coma to
JOHN OSBORNE
an intensive care unit. A few weeks after this event, I watched a programme about the same subject, so banal and lifeless that it could have been intended for the Open University on one of its Social Science courses masquerading as English History or possibly Baroque Music and the Work- ing Class Movement. A critic on an Arts Game show compared it most favourably to the 'Palmer-Osborne outrage.' Par for the course again and no surprise to anyone. However, my critical shock had already visited me three days after Easter when I regained consciousness. I looked up to a young, pretty nurse astride my chest screaming, `Do you know where you are?' 'New York' I suggested 'No' she yelled, beating me alive with her fists. 'No?' 'You're in — Tunbridge Wells!' Perhaps that's what critics mean by a Kafkaesque experience. In my screenplay I had GFH saying: 'Mediocrity is a great comforter.' It had never occurred to me that God might support mediocrity's devotees so ferocious- ly, almost in the manner of York Minster, and strike me down thus. How, I pon- dered, did the citizens of that opinionated Spa and a bunch of hireling scribblers command such a divinity unto themselves? Moreover, a lifelong, paltry pleasure in the erotic properties of nurses has, like other careless delights, begun reluctantly to fail. As a haggling madame in Mexico once said to a friend and myself: 'If I was a man, my balls would ache'.
ace relations of yesteryear. Talking of these things, as people seemed con- strained to do, I once took my mother, the maligned Nellie Beatrice, to supper with Paul Robeson. Perhaps fortunately she did not wear what she called her nigger-brown and coral 'rig out'. This consisted of a 'costume', with matching hat and shoes in the same fashionable shade of nigger, 'accessoried', as BBC commentators now say at Ascot, with coral gloves and hand- bag. She was genuinely admiring and in awe of this great Blakean figure, but possibly wondering why he wasn't clad in one of Lord Sandy's left-over leopard skins. Eventually, at the main course, she spoke up in her most strangled, ingratiating-the-headwaiter voice: `Oh, Mr Robinson. It's such an honour for us to meet you.' Mr Robinson beamed kindly. 'My son is such an admirer of yours. You see. . .' She looked around the restaurant, then said with deferential confidence, 'You see, Mr Robinson, he's always been very sorry for you darkies.' The smile never left his eyes. In those days, innocent of racial policing, cheerfulness did have a way of breaking in. Perhaps I should have tried her on a Hampstead Hostess if I had known one then.
The Literary Manager — known as a Play Reader and paid 30 bob a week when I did it and took home 50 scripts a night; now £10 per script, or £2 a minute — at the Royal Court Theatre told me not so long ago that she had in her possession 100 plays, all produceable, by women writers. Michael Hastings, the male plyawright, publicly attacked Sir Peter Hall with pos- session but not production of 20 such feminist works. Sir Peter promptly burst into tears. Where are all these works, the size of the century's entire dramatic out- put? What became of these treasures? buried in a sexist vault?
Who Would Your Rather Sleep With' is not the title of a Ray Cooney farce but an idle game Tony Richardson and I have enjoyed since our earliest Royal Court days. I hate 'games' but I find this one agreeably trivial, even soothing. His- torical change and the caprice of fashion cannot affect its simple appeal, enlivening the most right royal traffic tail-back or fractious railway journey, a diversion from the receding shadows of 'A'-levels in bored or travel-sick young minds. Played strictly to the rule that you must reply affirmative- ly to either choice, it endorses Ken Living- stone's assertion that we are all naturally bisexual.
Who would you rather sleep with?
Nancy Reagan or John Junor? Lord Gowrie or Colin Welland? Fay Weldon or Salman Rushdie? Glenys Kinnock or Boy George? Andrew Neil or Kenny Everett? Joan Collins or the Bishop of Durham? Woody Allen or Caryl Churchill? John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy or Torvill and Dean?
Irma Kurtz or Frances Morrell (ILEA) And so on — pastoral, tragical, comical. As the Aussies say, put a paper bag on their heads and think on it as you sweat to the the seaside. Only remember, never break faith with bad taste.
Next week: Historical, literary.
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