Mantel Pieces

Thereafter the hostility of his audiences fuelled his talent; so did rows with the Lord Chamberlain. The list of cuts required to The Entertainer has a strange poetry of its own: ‘Page 30, alter “shagged” … page 43, omit “rogered” (twice) … Act III, page 21, omit “balls”.’

If the balls were omitted, this book would be nothing. It is essentially a book of vitriolic gossip. It does not pretend to be a history of the Royal Court – which is just as well, or we’d never hear the end of the disputes about who said what to whom. (Did Lindsay Anderson really try to ban critics from the Royal Court? Lindsay Anderson doesn’t think so.) It tells very little about how Osborne and his contemporaries went about freeing themselves from the constraints of the theatre as they found it; Brecht’s influence barely merits a nod.

Indeed, the book tells us less about Osborne’s work than about other people’s reactions to it, and less about applause than condemnation. After the opening of his musical satire The World of Paul Slickey, the New Statesman said with restraint: ‘It has almost every fault.’ Playgoers, less circumspect, chased him up Charing Cross Road.

His attitude to his audience is always uncompromising: ‘Their pleasure inflames my prejudice, their indifference stirs my rage.’ In hindsight, Osborne takes a gloating pleasure in trashing his best efforts. Yes, there was a theatrical revolution – the barricades manned by lecherous petty-minded egotists. Yes, the Angry Young Men were political radicals. But this radicalism, he tells us now, was a gigantic self-deceit. They were duped by traitorous fanatics. When, the reader wonders, did Osborne become so discerning? When did he become able to see the true nature of things? It is only the development of some cooler qualities that gives a point to retrospection: since he is as angry as ever, is he any more likely to be right now than he was then? There is no particular reason, of course, why people who write their lives should be fair to themselves or other people. It is more diverting if they aren’t. But when revenge seems the major motive for writing, diversion soon becomes mixed with disgust.

His portraits of colleagues and contemporaries are bilious. Tony Richardson’s ‘duplicity was so sinewy and downright that he was able to deceive friends and adversaries effortlessly’. Freddie Ayer had an ‘organ-grinder’s monkey’s brain’. Olivier gets off comparatively lightly: he is chronically adulterous and manipulative, but so is everyone else Osborne knows. At one point Olivier sings, to the tune of ‘John Peel’, a merry song about buggery.

Women come off worse: Vanessa Redgrave, for example, ‘Big Van’ with her incontinent Yorkshire terrier. ‘Loyal’ is often the best adjective he can find for a woman; it is a trait more often valued in dogs. He may despise the women who cross his path, but doesn’t refuse them. George Devine, who was such an influence on his career, would ‘pull on his pipe lingeringly at the sight of a pretty girl’; Osborne was also a pipe-man. Back in his Gaycroft School days he had run away from a fiancée who worked in a building society – run away from the £12 Bravingtons engagement ring, and the Saturday promenade to look at furniture in the High Street. He married Pamela Lane, who he met in rep in Bridgwater, but their work took them to different parts of the country, and the relationship expired from lack of interest.

His next wife was Mary Ure, who played Alison in Look Back in Anger; even in his description of the wedding ceremony, Osborne is sneering at the bride. She is accused of having a large family, and of having bought a going-away outfit which would ‘photograph pretty disastrously in the departure lounge’. When once again it is time to ‘pump out the blocked drain of matrimony’ he moves on, via mistresses, to Penelope Gilliatt. ‘Why do you keep marrying these women?’ the agent Peggy Ramsay asked him. ‘I’m sure they can’t possibly want to marry you.’

It is not long before moaning and sneering again dominate the text. Gilliatt is accused of nothing much worse than ‘dumb pedantry’, self-importance, spending too little time on her husband and too much on her Observer film column – and of not knowing how a writer works because she is not a proper writer herself. The actress Jill Bennett arrives on the scene. Osborne doesn’t like her much – but why should that impede his career as what he likes to call a ‘cocksman’?

Here the reader’s mind may go back to A Better Class of Person. Early in his acting career Osborne worked with Lynne Reid Banks, who went on to write The L-Shaped Room. Pronouncing her ‘unspeakable’, he saved up his hatred until ‘some time later at an improbably posh party in London I offered her a sandwich. I had taken some trouble to insert among the smoked salmon and cream cheese … a used French letter. The unbelieving repulsion on her face … was fixed for ever for me.’ An unbelieving repulsion steals over the reader too, who begins to wonder whether Osborne is – and one must phrase this delicately – faintly deranged. Through this new book, the question is constantly posed, and for some people it will answer itself when Osborne in a ‘fast forward’ takes us to 7 October 1990, the day after Jill Bennett’s death. Falling upon her newspaper obituaries, shredding them line by line, he denounces ‘this whole rotting body of lies and invention which was her crabbed little life’. He tells us that she ‘was a woman so demoniacally possessed by Avarice that she died of it’, and quotes Tony Richardson’s judgment that she was ‘the worst actress in England’.

At this point, the pious reader may wish to pray, the queasy reader vomit, the prudent reviewer consult the libel laws. Adjectives stored up – ‘fascinating’ perhaps, or ‘scurrilous’ – don’t seem worth using. It no longer seems possible to make a literary judgment on this second instalment of Osborne’s life; the author forces from his reader the moral judgment which he has worked so hard to elicit.

Harold Hobson, writing about him in the Sunday Times at the peak of his fame, said: ‘Self-loathing appears to be the driving force of his art. He should control it; he is not as bad as he thinks he is.’ I don’t know about that.

Draft caption by Mary-Kay Wilmers for a (rejected) cover for the 23 April 1992 issue of the ‘LRB’.

Plain Girl’s Revenge Made Flesh

In Bed with Madonna

1992

CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN’S book begins, as it should, with the prodigal, the violent, the gross.[1] But what do you expect? Madonna’s wedding was different from other people’s. The plans were made in secrecy, and backed by armed force. ‘Even the caterer … was kept in the dark until the last minute.’ You also, you may protest, have been to weddings where the caterer has seemed to be taken by surprise. But we are not talking here about a cock-up with the vol-au-vents. We are talking about something on the lines of Belshazzar’s feast: but more lavish, and more portentous.

When Madonna married the misanthropic actor Sean Penn, ‘reporters were stopped at the kerb by a guard armed with a .357 magnum handgun … an army of journalists descended on 6970 Wildlife Road, the palatial $6.5 million cliff-top home of property developer and Penn family friend Dan Unger. Armed security guards scanned the horizon with infrared binoculars.’ Overhead, press helicopters competed with the ocean’s roar. Inside the steel gates, sushi and champagne were served – sometimes by journalists impersonating waiters. No writing appeared on the wall. Instead, Penn ran down to the beach, and scrawled his message to the world in twenty-foot letters in the sand: FUCK OFF. Madonna wore a ten-foot train and a bowler hat. They exchanged vows on the brink of a cliff: ‘Prophetically,’ says the author. He is not a man to let a symbol give him the slip.

The unblushing bride was born in 1958. Her mother, also called Madonna, was a French-Canadian X-ray technician; her father, the son of Italian immigrants, was an engineer. The family was large but affluent, and Madonna grew up in pleasant suburbs: the blue-collar upbringing she claims for herself is one of her inventions, it seems. Andersen makes Madonna’s early years sound like those of St Thérèse of Lisieux. Surely Catholic childhood in 1960s America was not quite so stifling and bizarre? We can be sure it featured crucifixes and rosary beads, all the jolly props which Madonna would later find so useful, but when the author quotes Madonna on her formative influences, he doesn’t try to discriminate between what she thought then and what she says now. ‘Crucifixes are sexy; there’s a naked man on them.’ If Madonna went to a postmortem, would she find the corpse sexy too?

Is there any point in trying to write about Madonna’s life in the conventional way? One thing everybody knows about the woman is that she has invented herself: it is a commonplace. When constant revisionism and reinvention is under way, what does it profit a biographer to drag the weary ‘facts’ before us? Something sterner is required: whole blank pages, paragraphs of exclamation marks. Andersen’s mode is conventional, his style good enough for his subject matter and appropriate to it. His technique, though, is sneakier than at first appears. You may grow infuriated by what seems an uncritical, gormless narrative: but if you stop reading for five minutes and rehearse what you have learned, you realise that anything you now know about Madonna is entirely to her discredit. Yet this is as it should be. Didn’t the girl herself, in high school, ask her friends to call her ‘Mudd’?

Still, let’s truffle with Andersen on his dogged path. When Madonna was five years old, her mother died of cancer, and her father married again. Cue self-examination on the superstar’s part: ‘Like all young girls I was in love with my father, and I didn’t want to lose him. I lost my mother but then I was the mother; my father was mine.’ Andersen refers us – as he often must – to the film In Bed with Madonna, in which his subject explains how she would often crawl into bed with her father. ‘I fell right to sleep after he fucked me.’ Inane giggle. ‘Just kidding.’ The pause is fractional, not long enough for a reaction from the viewer. The girl knows when she’s gone too far. At the age of six or so she would say to Papa: ‘If you ever die, I’m going to get buried in the casket with you.’ This Donne-ish sentiment Tony Ciccone found ‘really disgusting’. Poor man! His disgust threshold will have to rise. When he reaches 59 his daughter will drag him onto a stage to sing ‘Happy Birthday’, her navel exposed and a pattern of laces, like evil stitching, covering her private parts.

The pages concerning Madonna’s childhood are far more interesting than those which follow: but is this not often the case with biography? The relation of mature achievement, in any contemporary life, becomes a dreary procession of dates and places and figures; even the potential excitements of a life like Madonna’s seem to melt away under scrutiny – another day, another million dollars. Madonna Unauthorised is full of names of people who were forgotten by the time they reached the page, or which belong to people who were never more than a footnote in the subject’s great narrative. And most people are a footnote to Madonna, who is no nurturer of other people’s reputations. A great many people who have passed through her life have been famous for 15 seconds; or less, if she could manage it.

It would be good to feel human while you read her life; it would be good to feel pity where pity’s due. But you are prevented. Here is Madonna on her mother’s death and its implications:

It was then that I said, okay, I don’t need anybody. No one’s going to break my heart again. I’m not going to need anybody. I can stand on my own and be my own person and not belong to anyone.

Each line of this sounds like a trawl for a song title: sounds like some awful, thumping, monotonous chart-topper.

Until she was 12, Andersen tells us, Madonna wanted to be a nun; and he tells us in a way that makes it clear that he expects us to throw up our hands and say ‘Lawdie me!’ In fact, most intelligent Catholic girls go through a phase in which they would rather be like Mother than like mother: but then their eyes are opened to wider possibilities. (Besides that, Madonna naturally feels that ‘nuns are very sexy.’) One feels that Madonna’s onstage antics with Romish paraphernalia have never brought her quite the odium she craves. Perhaps we all recognise that the faith lends itself readily to vaudeville productions. Catholic vaudeville is divisible: Waugh and Greene purveyed the intellectual version, and Madonna has done it for simple souls.

In her early teens, by Andersen’s account, Madonna gives up on Thérèse of Lisieux and turns into a Tyson. When she chases a boy, it’s no figure of speech. ‘At one point she ripped off her blazer and blouse and began pursuing a boy named Tommy around the playground.’ Still, sex and religion are very much confused, as she tries to fathom the still unfathomable riddle of her gender. ‘You know how religion is … Guys get to do everything. They get to be altar boys … They get to pee standing up.’ Determined to do something about this Vatican-sponsored inequity, Madonna ‘experimented with ways to urinate without sitting down’. Andersen does not go into much detail, or tell us what success she had. But he describes with diligence her early sexual relationships with boys and girls: in one case, a beau ‘asked her if she wanted to take a walk through Samuel A. Howlett Municipal Park’. And she did, it seems; she did not deem it too exciting. One of her swains reports: ‘I realised I’d actually kissed a girl, though in my case it happened to be Madonna.’ However, when party-going, ‘she guarded her virginity by sometimes wearing a purple turtleneck leotard.’ There is a point where the reader loses interest in Madonna, and becomes ambitious only to meet the man who can paint such a word-picture.

There is nothing else in Andersen’s book that comes near to the pleasure he gives the reader in these early pages. The account of Madonna’s defloration is an anti-climax in every way. Notoriously, she has described the loss of her virginity as a ‘career move’, which one took to mean that she had preserved her hymen until she met someone prepared to pay to shred it. But if Andersen is to be believed – and why not? – the fateful evening began at Knapp’s Dairy Bar, and Madonna yielded to the caresses of a 17-year-old schoolboy who had trouble with her bra strap; a veil is drawn over what he made of the rest of her. He is quoted as saying: ‘I had this great urge to laugh, but Madonna was pretty methodical about it.’

Madonna was now missing Sunday Mass in favour of trysts at Dunkin’ Donuts. Soon, too, she would meet the gaiety, in the shape of a dance teacher, who took her to museums, concerts, art galleries, and also to places where ‘she felt strangely at home as the only female among hundreds of writhing men.’ Andersen may mean they were dancing, but perhaps it depends at what point in the evening she arrived. Madonna has a prurient fascination with male homosexual activity. The film In Bed with Madonna (the film, if you need to know, of her ‘Blonde Ambition’ tour) shows how she likes to encourage it amongst her friends and co-workers. One of her other biographers, Douglas Thompson, quotes her as saying that she thinks of homosexual men as her ‘alter ego’. This is interesting, but Andersen does not pursue it. He is more concerned at this stage to describe her intellectual development. She had decided to grow the hair on her legs, he tells us, believing that this indicated a bohemian cast of mind. She won a dance scholarship to the University of Michigan: ‘Keeping herself to herself, Madonna devoured the dark poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.’

An axe-murderer couldn’t carve up the girl more efficiently. But is it a case of diminished responsibility? One would like to think Andersen is of sound mind, that he writes with premeditation and intends the consequences – but then again, who wants to brand a family man a killer? The blurb tells us that the author ‘lives in Connecticut with his wife and two daughters’. He has previously written ‘highly praised’ works on Katharine Hepburn and Jane Fonda. This does not seem adequate preparation. Perhaps life’s ambiguity has passed him by, or he has come by praise too cheaply?

So: Madonna went to New York. Her dance teacher persuaded her she needed the larger stage, and so she took herself off in search of fame, living in slums and foraging in dustbins for her food. Andersen brings tears to the eyes with his account of her early struggles, but does not feel for her so much that he suppresses the verdicts of her various teachers and colleagues. No one seems to have liked Madonna, or seen anything in her, or thought she had much talent. But – unaccountably – she was taken up by two French music producers, who spirited her off to Paris in the hope of turning her into a disco queen. But Madonna wanted to be a punk: so when they gave her a car, a maid, a secretary and a voice coach, she sulked and sulked until she found herself back in New York.

And then … but come now, if we go at this pace we’ll be here all day. When Madonna got back to New York she joined a band. There was a female vocalist who performed in her underwear. Madonna got her sacked, and took her place. From there she made the progress of which we are all aware. The received wisdom is that even if you have talent, you still need luck; even if you’re lucky, without talent you’ll be found out. Madonna shows that energy can be a substitute for talent; and she has made her own luck. She is thorough: ‘she asked me,’ says one of her friends, ‘to teach her how to spit.’ And spit and spit she did, over and over, till she spat like a veteran. Someone else taught her how to smoke. From Michael Jackson she learned how to grab her crotch. Are these not accomplishments, hard-won for a girl from a nice family? So often Andersen seems to miss the point. He will, persistently, describe Madonna as a transcendent beauty, when, as everyone can see, she’s the plain girl’s revenge made flesh. Madonna has cultivated ardently – apparently without humour or irony – her identification with Monroe: he mentions that she is said to have purchased an adjacent crypt, so that their dust may mingle, but he does not insist on this as fact.

If he recognises pastiche, he never says so. If he identifies id-in-boots, he doesn’t let on. His book has photographs, but he is almost perversely unable to set down, in words, what Madonna is like. And the truth is that three hundred pages, however well composed, could not convey what three minutes of In Bed with Madonna make explicit. Our heroine is charmless, foul-mouthed, will admit the camera and the sound-recordist everywhere, except into a business meeting. We know that in this film we are seeing the real Madonna – for we know from her other films that she cannot act. And also, that she sees no need to: for she has tapped, somehow, into a rich deep vein of fantasy and cash, and all she needs to do is mine it. A proper inquiry might be instituted into what Madonna means: perhaps a joint inquiry, to look into the question of Michael Jackson too, for they seem of a kind. Their appeal is to children ten or twelve years old, too young to know who or what they are, aware of sex as a waiting, empty arena, desperate perhaps to burrow back into a childhood of fantasy and irresponsibility. Madonna has always wanted to be black, if we are to believe Andersen, and she looks like a female impersonator. Michael has transformed himself from a black man into a white-ish female child. They have dined together (‘vegetarians are paler,’ Madonna says) and appeared together at award ceremonies. But it seems they are locked in competition, about who has the more formidable publicity machine.

The most interesting moment of In Bed with Madonna shows the star before a mirror, her make-up lady hovering at her shoulder. Face white, blank, hairpiece cosied on her skull like the top of a cottage loaf, she waits for experience to be layered over the impersonation of innocence; she could, you think, become anything at all. Madonna says: ‘I will be a symbol of something … Like Marilyn Monroe stands for something. It’s not always something you can put a name on, but she became an adjective.’ For anyone who wishes to become an adjective, Madonna is an inspiration. On stage, her little muscly body twists itself in a parody of sensuality: her mini-soutane rides hip-high, her voice wavers on and off-key; up and down she dips, over the supine body of a spreadeagled semi-man. It all happens too fast for words, and it repels or excites at too deep a level for any writer who has offered his services so far. Madonna is not a subject for easy writing. She is a commentary on something, but God knows on what. Andersen doesn’t, that’s for sure.

‘LRB’ cover, 28 May 1992

Rescued by Marat

On Théroigne de Méricourt

1992

IN 1817, at the asylum of La Salpêtrière in Paris, a longterm inhabitant died of pneumonia. Her malnourished, oedematous body was taken away for autopsy. For some years before her death she had been intractably and violently psychotic. She had crawled on the floor like an animal, eaten straw. She stripped off her clothes in freezing weather, and did not mind (her keepers noted) if men saw her naked. She threw icy water on her bedding and her person, and on the floor of her cell.

Her madness was not without eloquence. Until the last years of dementia, she talked all the time. She denounced her keepers as royalists, and spoke of decrees and government measures, addressing her words to the Committee of Public Safety. But the great committee was long since disbanded, its members guillotined or in exile. For Théroigne time had stopped sometime in 1793. Trapped in the rat-infested cell that was her last home, she spoke always of liberty.

The woman whom the press called Théroigne de Méricourt was born Anne-Josèphe Terwagne, in the village of Marcourt, not far from Liège. She was therefore not a Frenchwoman, but a subject of the emperor of Austria. Her family were of peasant stock, but comfortably-off. The train of disasters in her life began when she was five years old, with her mother’s death. She and her two younger brothers were parcelled out to relatives. (About the same time, in Arras, four motherless children called Robespierre were being bundled from one household to another.) Théroigne was taken in by an aunt, who appears to have treated her as a servant. She returned to her father, and got short shrift from his new wife; through her adolescence she trooped from one family to the next, often with her younger brothers in tow, always hopeful of being wanted, and doomed to disappointment.

The family drifted into money troubles, and its most vulnerable member slid sharply down the social scale, spending a year as a cowherd. After this, she secured a post as a governess, Elisabeth Roudinesco claims – though she goes on to tell us that at this stage Théroigne had not learned to write.[1] More likely, as her 1911 biographer Frank Hamel says, she earned her living as a seamstress. But then in 1778, when she was about 16, her luck changed. She met a Mme Colbert, who engaged her as a companion, arranged music lessons for her, and took her around Europe.

Théroigne had considerable musical talent. She was a pretty young woman, petite, with blue eyes and chestnut hair, and a sharp intelligence to make up for her lack of formal education. She had, in fact, all the qualifications for a romantic heroine, or romantic victim. Accordingly, four years after her stroke of luck, there came along a fateful Englishman. Something between an elopement and an abduction occurred. The cad took her to his estate, procrastinated about the marriage he had promised; then they flitted back to Paris, where between them they ran through his money. ‘Yet she knew neither carnal passion nor genuine affection,’ Roudinesco sighs. After that she seems to have taken up with a number of men, including an elderly marquis who gave her an annuity. Roudinesco describes her as ‘uneasily suspended between literary bohemianism, polite society and moral degradation’.