Death of a Playwright

Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell were the very best of friends. They met at a London drama school, and for ten years they lived together, visited friends together, took their vacations together. In 1962, they were even arrested together--for putting obscene pictures in library books. They shared everything they had, and they made out their wills to each other. Then they died together, and a coroner's jury last week determined why: their friendship had ended.

The problem was Orton's sudden success as a playwright. His first effort, Entertaining Mr. Shane, was a homosexual, black comedy (boy meets girl, boy bludgeons girl's father, boy runs off with girl's brother) which London critics voted the best play of 1964. Orton's next plays, Loot and Crimes of Passion, were just as black and just about as successful. Instead of spending his days with Halliwell, Orton became caught up in a social whirl of producers, directors and stars. Halliwell was shattered. He tried to become a painter, but got nowhere. He chain-smoked hashish, then tried eating hashish hash. Nothing helped.

Last month Orton made a five-day trip to Leicester to see his father, a gardener. Unlike the old days, he left his friend behind. When he returned to London, Halliwell was waiting. According to the coroner's jury report, Halliwell waited until Orton was asleep, then clubbed him on the head at least nine times with a hammer. After that, Halliwell swallowed "an enormous overdose" of barbiturates and curled up nude close to his lost friend's body. It was, ruled the jury, a "deliberate form of frenzy." So, in a way, was Orton's funeral (Halliwell was buried separately). Instead of organ requiems, the service was accompanied by a recording of Orton's favorite song, the Beatles' A Day in the Life. Playwright Harold Pinter read a few lines of poetry and Actor Donald Pleasence delivered an ode he composed himself--a reminder that in his plays Joe Orton had treated death as a grisly gag:

Some met together when he died,

Not in the name of any God,

But in his name--

Whom they lost to the coffin,

The box which caused his endless mirth,

His lesson, which he could not read again.

Hilarity in death.

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