The Last Joke

By Gerald Clarke

PRICK UP YOUR EARS

by John Lahr

Knopf; 302 pages; $15

"I have high hopes of dying in my prime," Joe Orton confided to his diary in July 1967. Less than a month later Orton, who was only 34, was granted his wish. In a scene that could have occured in one of Orton's dark farces, the playwright's male lover smashed his head open with a hammer, then committed suicide with a lethal draft of grapefruit juice and Nembutals.

Orton's grisly end and stark beginnings enclose one of the most compelling biographies of the past year, a psychological study of egos in conflict, marred but not destroyed by Author John Lahr's overlong digressions into literary analysis.

Orton liked to claim that he grew up in the gutter, but the Saffron Lane Estates, a 1920s-style low-income development in the industrial town of Leicester, were in fact too dreary and anonymous for such a colorful description. His father was a city gardener who had long since given up his manhood; his mother was a tyrant who raged through a house that smelled of grease and damp. Young Joe, the eldest of four, tried acting and found his haven in the fantasy of the theater. At 18, he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London.

It was there that he met his lover and murderer, Kenneth Halliwell, who was seven years his senior and who came from a similarly afflicted family. Halliwell's mother had died when he was a child, and his unloving father had killed himself twelve years later, leaving a modest inheritance. It was with that money that Halliwell supported young Orton and bought the tiny North London bed-sitter where they lived and died.

At the beginning Orton sat at Halliwell's feet, content to type his novels. Gradually he began making suggestions, then started collaborating. Finally he struck out on his own, demonstrating a talent for the comic and bizarre that Halliwell could admire but never imitate. As Orton's confidence grew, Halliwell's diminished, leaving, at the end, only the dangerous embers of envy and resentment.

Fame took its time, but when it finally arrived it compensated for past neglect. Orton made his breakthrough in 1964 with Entertaining Mr. Shane. Like all of Orton's comedies, it teased polite British hypocrisy, and even audiences of the '60s were shocked by his placement of outrageous behavior in a conventional setting. Loot followed in 1966, and What the Butler Saw posthumously in 1969. Success liberated Orton's talent, and in the months before he was killed, his prodigious mind was bursting with what Lahr calls "gorgeous, wicked fun." What Orton might have accomplished remains a tantalizing conjecture. What he did achieve is clear enough, however, and perhaps Lahrs biography will bring him the American recognition he deserves but has never had, a memorial to the comic genius that was and might have been.

--Gerald Clarke

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