Word: clef
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Drame à Clef. Osborne uses the occasion to contrast the manipulative vampirism of the producer with the task and plight of the writer. At play's end, the band of esthetic fugitives receive word that their boss has committed suicide. Some English reviewers have interpreted the play as a drame a clef-Osborne's public vendetta with Producer-Director Tony Richardson after a recent bitter breakup of their long working relationship. Ordinary audiences, however, can hardly be expected to make sense of arcane theatrical gossip...
...publishing a string of sexual scenes for the sake of titillation." For what other purpose then? Says Geis: "There is a perfectly legitimate public curiosity about what goes on behind the scenes." Not that people really find out what goes on in the Geis version of the roman è clef. The formula does not require that the novel be based even loosely on truth or, for that matter, on gossip...
...resemblance to a real American family is coincidental - or, at any rate, deplorable. But Old Hearst Newsman Horan, who has knocked out 24 books (King's Rebel, The Great American West) since 1942, is obviously trying hard to create the impression that he is writing a roman à clef about the Kennedys. For this reason alone, his account of money as the lubricant of U.S. politics just might become the most ineptly written bestseller of the month...
Even before publication, Robert Daley's satirical roman à clef about a Great New York Newspaper set off much who's-who gossip in the city room of a Great New York Newspaper. Who, for example, is Paul Pettibon, the Paris bureau chief with the ego of a De Gaulle and a sense of insecurity to rival that of Charlie Brown's pal Linus? Who is Jack L. Banglehorster, the slow-moving, ruminative foreign editor who feels that his first duty is "to report the same news the opposition papers reported...
...irresistible bohemian painter who lures an upright schoolmaster (Richard Burton) away from his loyal blonde wife. When Star Burton first read the script, he remarked that "it hits pretty close to home." Director Vincente Minnelli exploits this possibility with unctuous professionalism, fielding his glamorous duo in a romance à clef that they appear to take seriously...