Edna O'Brien - BBC
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Edna O’Brien the 88 year old enfant terrible from Dublin has just won £40k David Cohen prize for a life time of achievement in literature. It is widely felt that this is a forerunner for the Nobel Prize.
Putney gives four cheers. For after her divorce and her flight from Mordon and her success with Country Girls she spent a few wonderful years in Putney celebrating the 1960s. In riverside Deodar Road, also famous for hosting Desert Island’s Roy Plomley. But we know who had the best parties, the most fun and outside the studio, the best guests.
Party street Deodar Road - Google Streetview
She threw parties every Saturday night. Author and friend Nell Dunn described her as a “generous and brave party giver”. And everybody came: Princess Margaret, Marianne Faithfull, Sean Connery, Shirley MacLaine, Judy Garland. “She looked around and then left,” she recalls. “She was a very frightened creature. Like an antelope, she was gone.” One night Richard Burton pitched up and recited Shakespeare. On another, Paul McCartney took her home from a party and sang “Those Were The Days” to her sleeping children.
There were lovers too, though nowhere near as many as people have assumed. But O’Brien did spend the night with Robert Mitchum. “Yes that’s a nice story,” she says. “He had total style and a natural ripe intelligence. And he was very funny. He pretended to read my hand the next morning and then said:'we’ll meet again baby’.” She also spent the night with Marlon Brando but rather disappointingly nothing happened, though he did give her a spotted handkerchief. “I was probably in love and when I’m in love I’m very faithful,” she explains. “He was amazing, let me assure you, and vastly intelligent. He had a lethal quality. He was alert the way an animal is alert – both waiting for danger and waiting to wield danger.”
One of Putney’s other grand heroines is the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft who famously threw herself off the old wooden Putney Bridge after her lover and father of her child had ditched her. She lived and was resuscitated in the Dukes Head. When O’Brien having just walked out on her husband crossed the modern Putney bridge she contemplated Woolstonecraft’s grand gesture and thought “How absurd”.
But in the end Putney was never grand enough.She bought a grand house in Chelsea where she threw yet more parties, dancing with Harold Wilson and welcoming Ingrid Bergman through the door. It is where she lives today. A life well lived.
Hugh Thompson
December 2, 2019
