Looking back in judgment

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The heart starts to sink on the very first page, p. xiii to be precise, because this is still the Preface: ‘When I began work on Osborne’s biography, hoping for the best, I asked his wife Helen, “What does no one know about your husband?” ’Already you can see the gleam in the biographer’s eye, the headline on the review front: Angry Playwright’s Other Life, Secret Shame of John Osborne. By p. xiv we have sunk lower: ‘What caused his depressions would send me in time on an obsessive search for the one explanation of Osborne’s torment and fury that might account for everything — “the Rosebud Theory”.’ So the Fleet Street sleuth is also a Hollywood shrink — Geoffrey Levy meets Orson Welles and the analyst comes too.

Helen Osborne was the Katharine Parr in The Five Wives of John Osborne —divorced, died, died, died, survived. The middle three — Mary Ure, Penelope Gilliatt and Jill Bennett — were also divorced, and all three more or less killed themselves by drink and drugs.