by John Osborne
REGINE: I want mine. Order another. I’m not sure these joint accounts are much good.
STAN: Depends on who makes the most bread. Man usually.
REGINE: These are valuables, evidence, bombshells; the key to revolution! When I finally walk into that bank for the deposit boxes, it’ll be like Lenin arriving at the Finland Station.
STAN: Ms Lenin, more like. Anyway, you hate unloading all that pile of stuff.
(WAIN, the butler, appears.)
REGINE: Yes, Wain.
WAIN: Miss Shrift is here, m’lady.
REGINE: Send her in. She’ll get impatient and I’ll find myself in her column on Monday.
(WAIN goes.)
‘Come off it, Lady Germaine-Frimley Pankhurst. As far as women’s rights are concerned, you’re just a titled show-off who needs a good, properly-paid job of work like the rest of us ordinary nine-to-five housewives. Do your good works like the rest of us try to – even with the kids.’ Ten thousand quid a year she gets for that. Still, she’s got a following – what they call hard-hitting popularity.
(STELLA SHRIFT is ushered in by WAIN. She is about forty, rather over-dressed, ‘hard-hitting’ indeed and irrevocably, irremediably in a Fleet Street Rose convention)
Stella, darling! What a relief. You are the first to arrive. I wanted to explain some things.
STELLA: Always on time. Have to be in my job. No time to stand and stare. Don’t get copy that way. Oh, who’s got ‘hardhitting popularity’?
REGINE: The Vicar’s wife, oddly enough. She wants to sack the choir-boys and use girls. She says the boys just pick their noses and play with themselves under their sweet little surplices. She says they’re so stained the church can’t keep up with the laundry bills.
STELLA: I’ll bet. Mind if I use that? Might be worth an inch or two.
REGINE: Appropriate phrase. Oh, yes, she’s very militant.
STELLA: I hate those angelic little, well-brushed dirty little devils. Church propaganda for the innocence of man in his youth. Two of them jumped on me and ripped my gym-slip off and all but raped me.
REGINE: Poor girl. Well, get on, Stan. Oh, this is my er –
STELLA: Hullo, Mr – er – Frimley.
STAN: Way out, Miss Shrift.
STELLA: Way out? Does he mean hanging out?
REGINE: He’s always catching up with last year’s Melody Maker. Well, get on, Stan. And don’t forget that key.
STAN: Right. See you, Miss Shrift.
STELLA: I’ll be breathless.
(He goes out.)
REGINE: Drink or tea?
STELLA: Nothing, thanks. I may not stay long.
REGINE: I think you will. Sit down, darling. Anywhere. You can go, Wain. Keep an eye out for the other guests. (He goes)
STELLA: I may not be able to stay, as I say. I might look in at the Hunt Ball Fashion Show. Sure to be a drag but the readers like a bit of how-the-other-half-lives. Especially the upper classes or their hunt followers and hangers-on fooling about with champagne; old-clothes couturiers turning the place into a flunkey’s bazaar for nancy photographers and the general debs’ drugs.
REGINE: I said the Vicar’s wife was militant but not on your scale of power and influence. Don’t they – I mean those sweaty men in El Vino, or whatever it is, call you the Black Fleet Street Rose?
STELLA: Not to my face. Now, what do you want from me? Not a polite country-house guest.
REGINE: What I think we’d both like.
STELLA: Which is what?
REGINE: I think I will have a drink. Do you mind?
STELLA: Be your guest. REGINE: Rather a long stay.
STELLA: Not too long, I hope. My stuff’s short and to the point. That’s my house style.
(REGINE fixes herself a drink while STELLA cases the room)
REGINE: Now, Stella… do you mind if I call you Stella?
STELLA: Thousands do. Quite a place you have here. Stables and grooms too, I see.
REGINE: I’ve always liked to live in the manner I’m accustomed – especially in the country.
STELLA: Were you always accustomed to such gracious living?
REGINE: Not on anything like this scale. But I always followed country pursuits eagerly.
STELLA: I’m sure. And got pursued for it.
REGINE: And then my late husband loved the country. He was Joint Master.
STELLA: Quite a nice cut off the joint all round. I shouldn’t think Stan goes in for these – pursuits. Or girl grooms?
REGINE: (STELLA couldn’t put her down.) He’s always busy. He shouts a bit, goes to the races, a bit of photography – not for magazines –
STELLA: No. Home movies?
REGINE: Yes. Quite recently that. Oh, and he’s very interested in pop. He managed a group for a while.
STELLA: Name?
REGINE: The Wheelwrights was one. Then I think it was The Vendetta.
STELLA: Doesn’t ring a bell.
REGINE: Not much with me either. But he’s very keen on ‘young people’. I can’t say I am myself. I don’t think youth is its own reward any more than virtue. Being young in itself is hardly an achievement. Any more than having brown hair. I never liked young people when I was a ‘young people’ myself. But then he likes clichés, which is what young people are, of course.
STELLA: You couldn’t read newspapers without them.
REGINE: Nobody would understand them then, would they? But I’m afraid Stan is a bit of a cliché himself, wide open to popular fashion. I suppose people who are clichés must be certain to learn others, even in their speech. He doesn’t talk a lot but when he does I often don’t understand him at all. He even uses ones he doesn’t understand.
STELLA: Like?
REGINE: Oh, he understands the usual ones: like – funky; cool it – I think that’s out – ; bad trips; being in some sort of ‘scene’ – sounds like a part in a play to me; having hangups – he has lots of those I believe; chicks, birds, calling everyone ‘baby’; saying ‘fucking’ because he doesn’t know any other adjectives – or hardly; chart-buster; he’s picked up some he doesn’t grasp at all from some of the girls with social consciences, in particular. Oh, you know the sort of thing: street action groups; committee jargon; lobbying the council; even ‘growing resentment’ – you might read that in The Times even; play communities, play centres, play groups, centres for; centres of all kinds from ‘pig bashing’ to ‘aggro’ and ‘agit-prop’; playgrounds, parks; talking about his groups as if they were the Amadeus Quartet…
STELLA: Seems to me you don’t like many things. Including Stan.
REGINE: Oh, but I do. I don’t believe in hiding one’s malice. I like women and some men; sex now and then, preferably in private; horses –
STELLA: Naturally.
REGINE: – some dogs, most cats; champagne, chip butties, Guinness; oysters, gulls’ eggs; opera, stand-up comics – not drag acts though; some older homosexuals; Jane Austen not Conrad; a certain religiosity if it’s comic enough; silver – you might like to see my collection; motor bikes, roller-skating and, still, I’m afraid, Monte Carlo; rock and roll if it’s the older, more primitive sort; Hell’s Angels. Oh, I can’t think…
STELLA: A picture emerges.
REGINE: Oh, hate crosswords, chess and bridge and all the people who like them.
STELLA: You seem to like mirrors too, I see.
REGINE: Adore them. Even when I look awful, which is most of the time.
STELLA: For what you see in them? Or through them? Come, Lady Frimley, you didn’t invite me all the way down here to give an interview. We’re not each other’s scene.
REGINE: I think we might be.
STELLA: Look, let’s get down to it. I may still have to go to the huntin’, shootin’, fashion show. Is it true what I hear that you run a call-girls’ establishment for randy, big-name weekenders?
REGINE: Yes.
STELLA: Right. Now what do you want?
REGINE: Don’t you want what Evelyn Waugh called
a scoop?
STELLA: Listen, Lady Frimley, I know you think you’re something of a two-way personality smart-ass. But I don’t think you’re a fool. Some sort of kooky revolutionary, classic English eccentric – which you couldn’t be. Oh, yes, I’ve looked around about you.
REGINE: Naturally. How professional of you.
STELLA: Don’t play games with me. I know them all and the rules, even the ones to break. All right, we all know you’re a phoney. Name, background, publishers, the lot. You’re not thirty-eight and you’re a Jewish girl from Hackney with a goodish plastic surgeon. And your name is Myra Steinitz.
REGINE: Right. Absolutely. Every detail. Nice of you not to mention my other marriages. Still, they’re fairly common knowledge. No, you see, I am something of a cliche myself.
STELLA: So then: what’s the set up here?
REGINE: Well, it’s not quite what you imagine. I think it’s a trifle more sophisticated, both in function and intention. It is what you say – in a few column inches that is to say. Yes, the mirrors are two way. What insights into life ‘as it is really lived’ the profession of journalism gives a young girl – as time goes on. I have been running this ‘place’, if you like, for quite some time. Quite long enough for me, and if as you say, there are already rumours about it where you come from, it’s high time to pack up the operation and plan for the next and most important stage.
STELLA: And that is?
REGINE: Oh, some sort of frolicsome revolution or simple old shit hitting the world’s fan. I have run this ‘establishment’, if that’s the word, to have enticed almost every man in England.
STELLA: I don’t believe it. Men always cover up. And in their numbers there’s safety. How ever many have you got? You know there are scoops and scoops; the law of libel.
REGINE: English libel. An old dog in his corner of the world. There’s the world press. German magazines, French ones, Dutch, Swedish television companies, America. Russia. I’ve got quite a missile here, as an American general said to me once.
STELLA: Go on.
REGINE: This makes Watergate three-day cricket for baboons. I’ve got film, thousands of MILES of it. And with what a cast. Well, all the obvious ones, I needn’t tell you. Parliament. I didn’t know we had so many members. Sorry, but it did seem more than six hundred. Judiciary, of course. Press but enough and not more. Civil Service, Armed Service. Royals. Footballers. Daft ones, gay ones, rotten ones, distinguished. Oh yes, the Church, but they don’t count for much. Tapes, stills. Too much material, of course. But used superbly. We can’t make it so all-embracing that everyone will yawn and get down to it themselves. What we need is a superb team; team, yes, of directors, Eisensteins, Orson Welleses, John Fords, to put it all together. A sort of works of Shakespeare, Ivan the Terrible in epic parts. How does it begin to strike you?
STELLA: Interesting.
REGINE: Remember. Think of us. Us. Women. Half the world. That rocked the cradle could bring down the chop for all time. Or long enough.
STELLA: As simple as that?
REGINE: As all discoveries of genius. Banally simple. Like Leonardo, the wheel, iron weapons, the workers overthrowing the ancien régime. And the régime is certainly ancien, I’m sure you’d be the first to agree. Pure organisation. Apparently, again, too true for the words of even the simple clichés of Stan. I recreate a very English cliché. The Country Weekend. This is the Garsington of Lechery – instead of Literature.
STELLA: Garsington?
REGINE: Garsington. It was the rather spinsterish, on all sides, world of Ottoline Morrell. The world of Asquith, Keynes, Duncan Grant, Virginia Woolf and Leonard, Lawrence –
STELLA: I know. I know. I don’t just read newspapers, you know.
REGINE: All very respectable. Waspish witticism and music and banjos and economics, flirtations and politics. People can’t flirt any more, can they? Pity; I enjoyed it once. Saved you from all that thrashing about after and perspiration and excuses and making calls from phone boxes instead of your house. All quite different from your mustachioed Edwardian adultery festivals and the Countess of Warwick and bedroom keys and nightgowns and brandyport filled men slipping down those long, cold corridors to the heavy warmth of another’s heaving feather four-poster.
STELLA: What have you got apart from thousands of miles of unedited film and so on?
REGINE: Stars, you mean: oh, about a thousand of what used to be called pillars of society, paragons of public life.
STELLA: Simple. You get the stars and the equipment. What about the girls?
REGINE: Fresh picked. To them it doesn’t matter. If they go along with the principle, they’ve nothing to lose.
They’re the heroes. They caught out the cancer. They’ll be the Provos of Womanhood all over the world.
STELLA: Maybe the other women won’t buy it.
REGINE: They will. They’ll have to. You know the way it’s going. And in such a short time. The star is in the firmament. And it shines for us. The revolution will come. Then we’ll see. It’ll find its Robespierre.
STELLA: And you its Danton?
REGINE: I’ve had a good life. I expect it to be better, for a while, at least.
STELLA: Where’s all this vast production-script?
REGINE: In the bank vaults. Stan does that. He’ll do anything for money. To him it’s just a new cliché of history. Like 1066, 1789 or 1914 – if he knows them.
(STELLA pauses for thought.)
Your presence. This must be the last weekend. You could be our link with ‘the media’ (cliché.). Stay and see what you feel. It’ll be more rewarding than the Hunt Ball Fashion Show.
STELLA: (Intrigued now.) Tell me some more.
REGINE: This is the time to strike. We’ve got all we need. First, the girls will come. I’ll brief you on them but I doubt you’ll need it. The men you’ll know about.
STELLA: So you think the soldier’s pole is about to fall, pulled by you? You see, I do know my Shakespeare. I wonder. Like all these things. Some will like it. Some will hate it. There’s one thing for certain, Regine. There’s no going back.
REGINE: Welcome, my friend. As you say, there’s no going back. We don’t need to draw in any more if we don’t want to. We’re the girls’ Jesuits. Give us a girl for the first of her grooming, her indoctrination, and I’ll make her first a whore and then her whole self, her self for life. The prick is just where it is. The cunt is where the heart lies.
STELLA: Yes, all that shit about envy. Who’d envy that!
REGINE: Yes, it helps them in their endless romanticism about you. His balls are where his brains should be. That’s why he used up what his mettle should be. Lyrical poetry, desire failing, laments for lost love, inaccessible troubadour mistresses without a servant. If only they knew how they sickened us with their schooldays, memories, endless, endless memories. Their peacock regimentals, their desperate fetishes and paltry pornography. Why? They are hollow, empty wooden horses all dressed up or undressed with nowhere in the universe to go. No Troy to infiltrate let alone penetrate. And what you said about envy. Envy! My God.
STELLA: (Getting exhilarated) No wonder the Victorians in their wisdom voted for fig leaves. David. Greek gods. Ugh! A schoolgirlI’s giggle round the V and A. It was true aesthetic judgement, not a moral one.
REGINE: See it dangle, dingle dangle, jingle jangle in its usual petulant pendulance. A sorry, blue-veined pork sword looking like an unripe, yellowish Stilton. Lying against its horse-hair sack, wee bag, of a million million pestilent tadpoles looking for a muddy pool to rest in. Throbbing for all the world’s distaste like a turkey’s gobbling neck.
STELLA: No wonder they call it a ‘gobble job’.
REGINE: Erect, well now, that’s a sight, if they can get it up without your thumbs splitting and fingers inflamed with corns, more horn than they could ever manage with that. Erect as an Irish volunteer, blind, hopeless, eyeless in girls’ Gaza. These footling frail inches of phallus, trying to ascend Everest like a Mick navvy
without enough scaffolding.
STELLA: Perhaps that’s what Disraeli meant by ‘the greasy pole of polities’.
REGINE: Rather keen on poles, aren’t they? Well, that flag won’t fly much longer. It’s coming down. In all its tatters and tyranny. We will be the mast, the mast, mast of woman, flying our flag. Greasy indeed! Mrs Disraeli must have known the real truth behind that bit of front bench grandiloquence.
STELLA: And their awful jokes. You can imagine the stuff I have to listen to, Black Rose or not.
REGINE: Men invented bordellos, but women perfected the running of them.
STELLA: Like you I will have a drink, after all. We’ll drink to the weekend. To the revolution. To the scaffold agleam with male unreconstituting blood.
REGINE: Here’s to us all.
STELLA: (Relaxed now) This joke, this journalist who called me Black Rose because I wasn’t having his whisky head snoring on my breast. He told me this. Supposed to be sophisticated and male fun. Right? Ready?
REGINE: Ready. If you tell it well, I warn you, I might –
STELLA: They hate us because we can’t tell jokes. Should be cut like a good jacket. No joins. All that stuff. Male joke! In this case Red-nosed Rose of Yorkshire. Bugsy meets Louie. That’s right. You see, I can tell it to you, like my hairdresser. Bugsy says to Louie, say, Louie, you’re looking great. Great. Why it’s years since I seen you. (All in gangster accent) Must be, what, eight – eight years. Yeah. Long stretch. Say, where you living now? Florida. Great. Miami Beach. Suits you. You look great. Great. Say, whatever happened to that little broad – er, chick – girl you were so keen on? What was her name? Rochelle. That’s right. Great kid. Gee, Louie, you’re looking great. Say, whatever happened to – er her, Rochelle… I married her… Married her, married her, but that’s great, Louie. Really great. Say, how is she, Louie… She’s dead. (How’m I doing?)
REGINE: Great.
STELLA: Dead! But, Louie, that’s terrible, that’s awful! Gee, Louie… What’d, what she die of…? CRABS… Crabs! Jesus Christ, Louie, people don’t die of CRABS… They do if they give ‘em to me.
(She gives an imitation of George Reft with his cigar)
REGINE: I told you I’d laugh at one of your jokes. Even at one of – those. The point is there’s a General Amin in man bursting, brown or white, to get out. Ah’m a good marksman.’ So he can make twelve piccaninnies.
