PEGGY RAMSEY, the plan agent, was bitching one day with one of her playrights,
Peter Nichols, about another of her clients, John Mortimer, whom she described as "a tart". (Her extraordinary ramshackle office at 14a Goodwins Court used to be a brothel - "Spot the difference, darling," was her comment on his historical irony). "I said to John - darling, you're a whore. You are a harlot of literature."
At this point the phone rang. As was her wont, Peggy grabbed it and continued her in-office conversation, without a beat, with the unfortunate individual at the other end. If you're going to be a whore at least before you open your legs make sure you're properly paid. Hello?" The caller, perhaps appropriately enough, was Sam Spiegel, the producer of Lawrence of Arabia, written by yet another Peggy client, Robert Bolt.
Every one of Peggy's playwrights had his (her clients were mostly male) telephone stories. On one desperate occasion when I struggled to leave the room, an English playwright, very well-known indeed, was given an appalling dressing-down over the phone for the quality of his latest work; like all the great exhibitionists, Peggy directed her effects at the audience immediately in front of her and those absent were just part of the script.
She features, of course, in the Joe Orton film Prick Up Your Ears, played by Vanessa Redgrave ("She got the legs right, dear"), and although she is the reputed model of several of her playwrights' creations, it is hard to see how she could be fictionalised without caricature or a diminish meat of the real thing. What we are given instead in this superb biography is an analysis of what made her tick as an agent, and an account of her dealings with a list of prominent British playwrights.
Orton, her most notorious client, inspired her most complex reactions. She had serious doubts about the talent, in part because of fascination with his lover and killer Kenneth Halliwell, one of whose strange collages she kept on the wall of her flat. Halliwell bludgeoned Orton to death and then killed himself through an overdose. Peggy was the one brought in to identify the bodies.
For over thirty five years until her death from Alzheinier's disease in 1991, she "as one of the most powerful figures in British theatre. This went far beyond her own remarkable stable of playwrights- and included, for instance, her sponsorship of Waiting for Godot in London, Beckett being the one writer who could silence her into something like awe.
As an outsider I often threw the odd, risky question at her. Who do you think are the most interesting writers in British theatre, Peggy? "Arden and Bond," she replied, alphabetically and without hesitation. Then the grenade came back. "Writers, darling, not necessarily the best makers of theatre. Writers! Writers!" Followed by a small landmine: "But you'd appreciate that distinction, wouldn't you, dear?"
Colin Chambers is literary manager of the RSC, and his glorious book is a history of thirty-odd years of British theatre refracted through this outrageous, deeply sensitive, cruel and loyal person. She was the best reader I've ever met of an unperformed script.
PEGGY could be scathing about the critics, but was perfectly capable of manipulating them when it was needed. I saw this networking up close on one occasion, although it ended in a moment of Peggy farce. Richard Eyre, who directed the London production of my play The Death and Resurrection of Air Roche, tells the story in the book.
Peggy had invited us to lunch in the Cafe Royal with the critic Irving Wardle, whose review had brought the play over from the Olympia in the first place. A fierce argument developed over Brecht, whom Peggy loathed. She was reminded of the current London success of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. "But that's about Hitler," she answered, and then, after one of her splendid pauses, and in a clipped clarion cry that silenced the dining room so that you could hear the clinking in the kitchen, - she announced: "And Hitler is a fucking star!"