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During that same week in January in which the Beatles began recording ‘A Day in the Life’, Joe Orton was contacted by Walter Shenson, the producer of A Hard Day’s Night and Help!. Would he be interested in rewriting a script for the Beatles?

Orton – the most fashionable, witty and shameless young playwright of the day – tried to play it cool. ‘Well, I’m frightfully up to my eyes in it at the moment. I’m writing my third play.’

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‘I’d certainly love to have you take a look at this draft,’ said Shenson. ‘I’ve discussed it with the boys, I mean I mentioned your name to them. They didn’t react too much, I must say. But I think I can persuade them to have you.’

Orton had just been taken down a peg or two. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Please send the script over and I’ll read it.’

He found it dreary, but with scope for improvement, particularly as Shenson had said that the Beatles wanted to make it more challenging. In his diary Orton wrote: ‘Already have the idea that the end should be a church with four bridegrooms and one bride … but albeit in such a way that no one would object. Lots of opportunities for sexual ambiguities …’ He felt there were opportunities, too, for rehashing old material from a rejected novel he had written with his boyfriend, Kenneth Halliwell.

Over lunch, Walter Shenson told him that the Beatles had been thinking of doing a remake of The Three Musketeers.

‘“Oh, no,” I said. “That’s been done to death.”

‘“Brigitte Bardot wanted to play Lady de Winter,” he said.

‘“She’s been done to death as well,” I said.

‘“Oh, heh, heh, heh, boy!!” he said. “You certainly are quick.”’

Orton got to work on a new script, with the provisional title of ‘Up Against It’. By the end of the day he had completed the first two pages. He was ruthless in offloading a lot of old material onto the Beatles. ‘I’m not bothering to write characters for them,’ he confided to his diary. ‘I shall just do all my box of tricks – Sloane and Hal – on them. After all, if I repeat myself in this film it doesn’t matter. Nobody who sees the film will have seen Sloane or Loot.’

The next day, Walter Shenson phoned to say that Brian Epstein was ‘delighted’ he was on board. ‘You’ll be hearing either from Brian or Paul McCartney. So don’t be surprised if a Beatle rings you up.’

‘What an experience. I shall feel as nervous as I would if St Michael, or God was on the line.’

‘Oh, there’s not any need to be worried, Joe. I can say, from my heart, that the boys are very respectful of talent. I mean, most respectful of anyone they feel has talent. I can really say that, Joe.’

A week later, someone from Epstein’s office invited him to ‘meet the boys’ the following Wednesday. Orton’s report of his visit is characteristically comical: ‘a youngish man with a hair-style which was way out in 1958, short, college boy, came up and said, “… I’m Brian Epstein’s personal assistant.” It crossed my mind to wonder why the English have never got around to finding a perfectly respectable word for “boy-friend”. “I’m afraid there’s been a most awful mix-up. And all the boys’ appointments have been put back an hour and a half.” I was a bit chilly in my manner after that. “Do you want me to come back at six?” I said. “Well, no. Couldn’t we make another appointment?” “What guarantee is there that you won’t break that?” I said. “I think you’d better find yourself a different writer.” This said with indifferent success, though the effect was startling. He asked me to wait a minute and went away to return with Brian Epstein himself.

‘Somehow I’d expected something like Michael Codron.1 I’d imagined Epstein to be florid, Jewish, dark-haired and overbearing. Instead I was face to face with a mousey-haired, slight young man. Washed-out in a way. He had a suburban accent. I went into his office. “Could you meet Paul and me for dinner tonight?” he said. “We do want to have the pleasure of talking to you.” “I’ve a theatre engagement tonight,” I replied, by now sulky and unhelpful. “Could I send the car to fetch you after the show?”’

Orton arrived at Epstein’s Belgravia house ten minutes early, and walked around to kill time. When he rang the bell, an old man appeared. ‘He seemed surprised to see me. “Is this Brian Epstein’s house?” I said. “Yes, sir,” he said, and led the way to the hall. I suddenly realised that the man was the butler. I’ve never seen one before … He took me into a room and said in a loud voice, “Mr Orton.” Everybody looked up and stood to their feet. I was just introduced to one or two people. And Paul McCartney. He was just as the photographs. Only he’d grown a moustache. His hair was shorter too. He was playing the latest Beatles record “Penny Lane”. I liked it very much. Then he played the other side – Strawberry something. I didn’t like this as much.’

They chatted, and agreed that the film should not be set in the 1930s. Later, they went down to dinner. ‘The trusted old retainer – looking too much like a butler to be good casting – busied himself in the corner. “The only thing I get from the theatre,” Paul M. said, “is a sore arse.”’ Paul added that Loot was the only play he hadn’t wanted to leave before the end.

‘“I’d’ve liked a bit more,” he said. We talked of the theatre. I said that compared with the pop-scene the theatre was square. “The theatre started going downhill when Queen Victoria knighted Henry Irving,” I said. “Too fucking respectable.”’

The two men talked of drugs, magic mushrooms and LSD. ‘“The drug not the money,” I said. We talked of tattoos. And after one or two veiled references, marijuana. I said I’d smoked it in Morocco. The atmosphere relaxed a little.’

After dinner, they watched a television programme. ‘It had phrases in it like “the in crowd” and “swinging London”. There was a little scratching at the door. I thought it was the old retainer, but someone got up to open the door and about five very young and pretty boys trooped in. I rather hoped this was the evening’s entertainment. It wasn’t, though. It was a pop group called the Easybeats. I’d seen them on TV. I liked them very much then.’

At this point the French photographer Jean-Marie Périer arrived, bearing a set of photographs for the cover of Strawberry Fields Forever. ‘Excellent photograph,’ judged Orton. ‘The four Beatles look different in their moustaches. Like anarchists in the early years of the century.’

Orton engaged an Easybeat in conversation, ‘feeling slightly like an Edwardian masher with a Gaiety girl’, before deciding it was time to go home. ‘I had a last word with Paul M. “Well,” I said, “I’d like to do the film. There’s only one thing we’ve got to fix up.” “You mean the bread?” “Yes.” We smiled and parted. I got a cab home.’

The next day Orton spoke to his agent, Peggy Ramsay. ‘“We should ask 15,000 pounds,” I said, “and then if they beat us down, remember no lower than 10,000. After all whether I do it or not is a matter of indifference to me.” Peggy agreed. She said she’d ask 15 and try to get 12 and a percentage. “If they won’t pay us 10 they can fuck themselves,” I said. “Of course, darling,” Peggy said.’

Leaving Ramsay to sort out the contract, Orton got down to the writing, unashamedly plundering his unpublished novel Head to Toe for most of the action. He thought it ‘might have been designed with the Beatles in mind’, though even in 1967 he was probably overestimating their appetite for decadence.

Within a fortnight he had almost completed his script. After a vague suggestion from Epstein that they might get Antonioni to direct the film, Orton heard nothing more from either Shenson or Epstein; both failed to return his calls. A livid Peggy Ramsay described Epstein as ‘an amateur and a fool’. In his diary, Orton condemned him as ‘a thoroughly weak, flaccid type’.

After some time, he was informed that ‘Up Against It’ was being returned to him. ‘No explanation why. No criticism of the script. And apparently, Brian had no comment to make either. Fuck them.’ But in his heart, he knew full well why they had turned it down. ‘By page 25, they [the Beatles] had committed adultery, murder, dressed in drag, been in prison, seduced the niece of a priest, blown up a war memorial and all sorts of things like that. I can’t really blame them, but it would have been marvellous.’

Within a week, the producer Oscar Lewenstein purchased Orton’s rejected script for £10,000. On 9 August a chauffeur arrived at Orton’s Islington flat to drive him to Twickenham Studios for a meeting with Lewenstein and the Beatles’ old film director, Richard Lester. When there was no answer he telephoned Lewenstein, who told him to try again. Finally he looked through the letterbox, and saw the naked body of a bald man lying flat on the hallway floor.

The police found two corpses: Kenneth Halliwell on the floor, and Joe Orton on the bed, bludgeoned to death with a hammer. Orton’s brilliant success had exacerbated Halliwell’s already heightened sense of failure. After killing Orton, he had swallowed twenty-two Nembutals, washed down with a can of grapefruit juice.

At Joe Orton’s funeral in the West Chapel of Golders Green Crematorium they played ‘A Day in the Life’, which had been Joe’s favourite track. Some thought it too quiet; others disapproved of the way all the psychedelic references had been spliced out, on the un-Ortonesque grounds of good taste. On the way out of the chapel, one of the mourners pointed out that the booming piano chord at the end sounded just like the lid of a coffin being banged shut.

1 Theatre producer (b.1930), knighted in 2014.