JOE ORTON TELEVISION INTERVIEW (1967)

Following Saturday’s post, here is the only known surviving video footage of Joe Orton. Broadcast on 23rd April 1967, Joe proudly tells Eamonn Andrews of his library book escapades.

MALICIOUS DAMAGE: THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF JOE ORTON AND KENNETH HALLIWELL IN ISLINGTON

Last February I wrote (here) how budding writers Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell helped themselves to books from Islington libraries to create collages on book jackets before placing them back on the sleeves to watch the reaction of browsers. This protest over “rubbishy books” and an early version of guerrilla art, along with wallpapering their flat with torn out pages, earned them both a six month stretch in 1962. The following five years saw Orton’s star spectacularly rise as a successful and award winning playwright (Entertaining Mr Sloane ran on Broadway and Loot won the Evening Standard best play of ’67), Halliwell, previously Joe’s mentor, became marginalised and struggled with jealousy and depression, culminating in nine murderous hammer blows to Joe’s head and his own suicide in their tiny 2nd floor Noel Road flat. Orton was 34, Halliwell 41.

Islington Council were none too impressed by having their book stock “attacked by predators” 50 years ago but now they celebrate their former residents with an impressive exhibition within the borough’s museum. The main focus is on the books they altered. All forty of the surviving ones are displayed as framed works of art rather than the perceived acts of vandalism that resulted in an eighteen month investigation by the council’s legal clerk Sidney Porrett who is quoted as saying “I had to catch these two monkeys”. Monkey heads and cat heads were regular replacements on many books. Some aren’t especially interesting yet others show a mischievous camp humour: John Betjeman is replaced by a tattooed man; Queen’s Favourite is decorated by two topless men grappling on the floor; and best of all, The Steel Cocoon by Bentz Plagemann (which sounds like a name Joe and Kenneth would’ve created but is the genuine author) has a prominent well-filled jockstrap as the new design. There are copies of the original jackets but there’s no comparison really.

It’s wonderful to see the typewriter Joe bought in 1967 for the not inconsiderable sum of £80, and on which he wrote What The Butler Saw and the rejected Beatles screenplay Up Against It, but even that is upstaged by lists of ideas for prospective book and play titles and a volume of his infamous diary covering a holiday in Tangier. I first read his plays and diaries many years ago and being young and green was rather shocked to read such explicit accounts of promiscuity and gay sex. The page open here is typically frank account of a sexual encounter which Joe describes as “very goatish”, which is a new one on me but a phrase I’m looking forward to using at the earliest opportunity. Joe’s diary became a cause of added anguish for Kenneth during their final year until he, in the words of Orton’s brother, “went crackers”. His suicide note simply read: If you read his diary all will be explained. KH. P.S. Especially the latter part.

Malicious Damage is at the Islington Museum, 245 St John Street, EC1 until 25 February 2012.

JOE ORTON and KENNETH HALLIWELL at the ANCIENT & MODERN GALLERY

I wonder what playwright Joe Orton would’ve made of the current plans to close our libraries.

Exactly two months before lover Kenneth Halliwell smashed in his skull with a hammer in August 1967, Orton told The Evening News “Libraries might as well not exist; they’ve got endless shelves of rubbish and hardly any space for good books.” Whether it their disgruntlement at the available reading material or their natural flair for mischief, Orton and Halliwell’s relationship with the libraries of Islington and Hampstead played an intriguing role in their lives pre-Orton’s success with Entertaining Mr. Sloane and Loot on the London stage.

Joe and Kenneth began stealing library books in 1959 and continued until their arrest in 1962. They doctored dust jackets with simple collages and placed them back on the shelves to watch people’s reaction as they’d pull out The Collins Guide To Roses and wonder why an open mouthed gorilla was staring at them or if Emlyn Williams really did write plays entitled “Knickers Must Fall” or “Fucked By Monty”. Both of these examples of their handiwork, and four others, have been displayed in the Ancient and Modern Gallery this week. Agatha Christie’s The Secret of Chimneys is decorated with a cutesy cats getting married and the author Richard G. Stern has his portrait replaced with that of a prim looking woman.

As well as “improving” books, they also removed 1,653 plates from art books which they used to create a collage across the walls of their Noel Road flat (something I studiously copied for my teenage bedroom - but from legit sources). For this terrible crime of theft and criminal damage totaling £262 they received a sentence of – wait for it – six months imprisonment, starting off in Wormwood Scrubs.

Adam Gillam, Joe Orton/Kenneth Halliwell at the Ancient and Modern Gallery, 210 Whitecross Street, London, EC1 until 26 February 2011.