Mine was one of the last published interviews (if not THE last)
with Joe Orton before he was murdered by Ken Halliwell. It is
called Money and Mr. Orton and got a three-quarter
feature spread in the London Evening News (E.N.), a couple
of years after Lootand when Orton was on the crest of his
wave. It's drawn on in Prick up your Earsand I am
annotated in the back bibliography. I've still got a copy of
it in my cuttings book and I think it would have been
1966/67.
I was a young journalist who lucked into a three-month trial on the
E.N.after the death of my partner, a documentary
film-maker, in PNG. I escaped to London to stay with his
parents and got the job, starting off with fashion bits and pieces
and quickly getting my own column (the strange ways of the English
from an antipodean point of view) and writing human interest
features centred around the news of the day.
Bill Green was the E.N.'s veteran show business writer and
he took an avuncular shine to me. He took me under his wing
and took me with him to first nights, meetings with stars, and a
number of working lunches at The Ivy. I met, interviewed, and had
published good interviews with people such as Fenella Fielding,
David Warner, Glenda Jackson, Tom Courteney, lots more at the time,
as Bill ('Bill Green in the Green Room') was really not up to
writing much at that stage. He may have been ill, I don't
know, but before he retired it was, for me, a three or four month
crash course in meeting and writing about the most marvellous
people in English theatre at the time.
Anyway, just shortly before I was to go on a six week holiday to
Spain, I interviewed Joe Orton. I think I must have got a
taxi there because it was in (Islington?), I don't remember that,
but I do remember getting a bus back to Fleet St. because they were
Cracking Down on Expenses.
The 'flat' was really a downstairs bedsitter with a little alcove
off where he made tea. The walls of the room, with two single
camp beds, were covered with a collage of clipped out photographs
and magazine photos (some of which I later learned were filched
from books from the local library ... or did he tell me that
himself? Don't know.) It was a dismal little place yet
it wasn't dismal. And Joe Orton himself was magnetic.
Like a sparkling-eyed gnome (he was small, but not THAT small) or
someone who could weave magic or mischief. He told me a lot
of lies that day but I took them all down in my impeccable
shorthand ... that he was married ... married twice ... had two
little daughters he adored ... that he lived alone ... that he had
left school at 15 (as had I) ... and that he had just come back
from Morocco where he was going to live fulltime one day and that
he was going back there in another two weeks.
There have been a few people in my life that I have instantly
connected with in a not very usual way. Some of them have
been in the personal realm and some through interviewing ('Weary'
Dunlop; Faye Dunaway; Josephine Baker, when she was a very old
lady, in a tiny room at the Savoy, on her last cabaret gig to try
and raise money for her orphanage in France) and Joe Orton was
definitely one of them.
I went on holiday with my friends to Formentera. This was the
little 'un-chic' island next to Ibiza over run by hippies of the
scruff, skint kind. We rented a farmhouse in the hills and
rarely came into 'town' - which was one main street, a post office,
a couple of stores and the main, filthy backpacker hotel where the
hippies smoked hash, drank flagons of rough red, and deposited
enough turds in the overflowing toilets to nurture hectares of
market gardens.
One day, though, we went into town to pick up mail from the post
office. I was walking ahead of the other three. It was
a hot and still morning. As I walked on, though, a wind blew
up. It blew a double page of a newspaper onto my feet.
The rest of the paper went barrelling on. I picked up the
paper. It was the front page of the Daily Mirrorwith the news of
Joe Orton's death.
I have a theory - totally unsubstantiated but truly felt - that
creative people do have a kind of key to other worlds - other
dimensions - and that Joe Orton's twinkling black gaze was/is a
part of it for me.
Patricia Johnson is an Australian
journalist, screenwriter and playwright, and was the STC Playwright
in Residence in 1984.
Loot, Drama Theatre,
Sydney Opera House, until 23 October, 2011.
Feature: Another Orton anecdote
Date posted: 6 Oct 2011Author: Patricia Johnson