Olivier (24 page)

Olivier was unmoved: he was resolved to work out the last six months of his contract and then to shake the dust of the Old Vic from his feet. In the meantime his main responsibility was the staging of a refurbished version of “The School for Scandal” which had been a great success on the Australasian tour. Cecil Beaton had done the costumes and Olivier’s lengthy letters to him illustrate the perfectionism and keen eye for detail which marked his approach to any theatrical enterprise with which he was associated. He did not spare Beaton’s feelings: Lady Sneerwell’s day costume was “a bit common”; Maria’s outdoor costume “honestly, dear boy, does not come off”; Charles Surface needed to be dressed in “a more crudely, hail-fellow-well-met fashion”. Almost as an afterthought, Olivier ended: “This letter does not convey to you one thousandth part of the brilliant success that your work has been.” Beaton swallowed the criticism, worked on the costumes and thought the results were sensationally successful. When he went round to see them after the London opening, however, he found, or thought he found, that Vivien Leigh snubbed him and Olivier was frigid: “No smiles, no back-thumping, and no ‘old mans’ or ‘old cocks’ … I knew that, such is my unforgiving, unforgetting nature, no matter how hard the Oliviers might try, one day, to make up for this evening, I would have no further interest in them.” He did, of course. The Oliviers were far more important to Beaton than Beaton to the Oliviers and he was frequently to work with
them in the future. Olivier, neither unforgiving nor unforgetting and not the most sensitive of men, probably failed to notice that Beaton had taken offence. But their relationship, at its best not close, would never be the same again.
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It remained only for Olivier to leave the Old Vic as gracefully as possible. His farewell speech contrived to say nothing critical of the Board while leaving a strong impression that he had been misused. Esher, for his part, wrote a letter of effusive insincerity to record the Governors’ “sense of loss at the termination of so stimulating a connection”, and to express his “confident hope that time will bring us together again”. It depended on what he meant by “us”. If he meant himself as an individual Olivier would have as little as possible to do with him; if he meant the Old Vic transformed into the National Theatre then time would indeed bring them together again in the not too distant future.
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The years between his severance from the Old Vic in 1949 and the opening of the Chichester Festival in 1962 were far from barren for Olivier – he played important roles, both in the theatre and on the screen, and established himself as an actor-manager – but in terms of his overall career they were a period of marking time. The one thing of which he professed himself certain was that he did not wish to undertake another tour on the scale of the Australasian adventure; occasional forays to New York and Hollywood or European tours were the limit of his ambitions. Nevertheless, at one point he seems to have been contemplating some sort of theatrical expedition to Africa. “Why on earth we do such things, I can’t think,” he told Sybil Thorndike. “We loathe these capers once we start on them.”
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That project was abandoned, but one caper nearer home proved almost equally testing. Olivier had conceived the idea of directing Vivien Leigh in Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” while he was still with the Old Vic. By the time he got back from Australasia, however, Binkie Beaumont had intervened. He told the producer Irene Selznick that Vivien Leigh was a very great friend and that she was
eager to play the role of Blanche Dubois. When Selznick asked whether Olivier would be ready to act himself, or at least direct the play, Beaumont was more evasive. “Well, that might be managed,” was the gist of his reply. “I detected less enthusiasm and no intimacy.” It soon became clear, though, that Leigh would only act if her husband were to be the director. A deal was done with Selznick and Beaumont. Rehearsals were scheduled to begin in the autumn of 1949.
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At this point Olivier had only glanced at the play. When he read it properly he realised that it was powerful, tragic and certain to cause trouble with the censor. His wife’s part was magnificent but harrowing, requiring her to play a vulnerable victim who gradually crumbles into insanity. He defended the play against those who dismissed it as obscene sensationalism. “It is a tragedy in the purest sense of the word,” he told one critic. “The object of the theatre is not only one of entertainment, or even only one of uplift, the basic object of tragedy is to shock the soul.” But he also thought it repetitious and verbose. He resolved to cut it, but found that the author felt it had been cut to the bone already. Twice the men met to thrash out the matter, twice they failed even to address the issue. Olivier then took the law into his own hands. “Surely it’s a director’s prerogative to take out anything he wants and to rearrange things as he sees fit?” he claims to have asked Irene Selznick. “Who’s going to stop me?” Whether or not he in fact expressed himself with quite such arrogance, he proceeded to take considerable liberties with the text. The author took fright: “See that everything possible is done to protect
us
and the play,” he cabled, “as distinct from Sir Laurence and his lady.” In the end a compromise was reached. Irene Selznick seems to have come off better; almost all the major cuts were restored. Olivier was dissatisfied. “If only real geniuses would listen to practical old craftsmen sometimes,” he cabled to Garson Kanin. All seems to have ended happily, though. When Williams came to London to see “Streetcar”, according to Olivier, he “saw for the first time how intensely amusing the play was for all its tragedy and stark grimness. He absolutely died laughing. He loved it.”
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The principal victim of the play was Vivien Leigh herself. Olivier believed that he had done a masterly job of direction. “If it hadn’t been for me Vivien would have been no good in ‘Streetcar’,” he claimed. “This sounds like a terrible lack of humility; I’m sorry … You sometimes need a guy who knows what the fuck he’s talking about and can tell you how to get it, and whatever else I am, I know the hell of a lot about the business. I’m very, very good at giving people the right advice.” But in claiming responsibility for her remarkable performance he also accepted responsibility for the damage it did her. Instead of shedding the burdens of the role at the same time as she took off her make-up, Leigh seemed somehow to have become locked into Blanche Dubois and was permanently scarred by the experience. “I think it was the beginning of the illness, the seeds of the illness,” wrote Olivier. It was neither the beginning nor the seeds of the illness, and on other occasions Olivier accepted that his wife’s condition could be traced back for many years, but the strain of playing the part marked a notable step in her disintegration.
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“Streetcar” was an immense success with the critics and, still more, with the public. More than ten thousand people applied for tickets on the first night; people were queuing for seats in the gallery three days before. Olivier came in for some criticism for sponsoring so shocking a play. In a speech J. B. Priestley remarked that the world of show business encompassed everything from the bearded lady or elephants playing hockey to Vivien Leigh in “A Streetcar Named Desire”. Olivier complained bitterly about this juxtaposition. It encouraged the sort of audience, he said, who normally went only to the Windmill (a Soho theatre celebrated for the display of naked women) and who “sat squirming, giggling, coughing, hoping for the worst to happen. This had made Vivien’s task, already cruelly arduous, almost impossible to bear.” It seems, in fact, unlikely that many habitués of the Windmill found their way to Vivien Leigh’s performance but criticism of this kind from so august a figure as Priestley increased her unease and made her still more vulnerable to the self-doubts that consumed her.
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The final curtain fell on “Streetcar” in June 1950. “I think I’m almost more grateful about it than she is,” wrote Olivier. “It’s been a most ghastly strain for her, poor darling.” The strain was not yet over for there was still the film to be made, but it was in the nature of acting for the cinema that the emotional pressure of the stage performance was relieved if not removed. It was also made more acceptable for Vivien Leigh by the fact that she was playing opposite Marlon Brando. It proved a memorable experience. Though far less experienced and versatile, Brando was one of the few actors who could match, even surpass Olivier for sheer explosive power. He also had a reputation for always sleeping with any actress who played opposite him. But not Vivien Leigh, it seems: he is quoted as having said, “I was so anxious to bed my co-star that my teeth ached,” but Olivier was also in Hollywood at the time and “I liked him too much to invade his chicken coop.” Brando, with Danny Kaye, Henry Ainley and others, is among the men with whom it is alleged that Olivier had a homosexual fling. Olivier to some extent brought this on his own head by his cryptic reference in his autobiography to his “nearly passionate involvement” with another man. He went on to say, however, that he had never had any sort of homosexual relationship. In his memoirs and elsewhere he frequently accused himself of far more serious offences; there is no reason to believe that he lied in this respect. He would hardly have bothered to deny the charge if it had been true: he saw nothing reprehensible about going to bed with another man, it was merely that the idea did not appeal to him. A high proportion of his theatrical friends and acquaintances were homosexual: not admitting publicly to it and thereby risking prosecution, but taking little trouble to conceal their leanings. Olivier was intrigued – he took a somewhat salacious interest in other people’s love lives and offended Alec Guinness by cross-examining him on whether Gielgud had or had not tried to seduce him – but he felt none the worse of them if their tastes lay in that direction.
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Gielgud himself was no less curious. He was fascinated to read in Donald Spoto’s biography that Olivier was supposed to have had an affair with Danny Kaye. “Quite unexpected news,” he wrote, but then he
remembered that Kaye had plied him with drink at his home in Hollywood. “Perhaps he conceived making a pass at me and thought better of it when he actually saw me … You never know, and I never shall.” Others among Olivier’s friends who were quite as well qualified to speak on such matters, thought they
did
know. Noël Coward, having established that his godson, Tarquin Olivier, was not on offer, confessed that Tarquin’s father had proved equally obdurate. Terence Rattigan tried to persuade Olivier to play Diaghilev: “Yes, I know … you’re frightfully normal and couldn’t bring yourself to love a mere boy … but there’s noone else who
could
play it or
should
play it.” Cecil Beaton, in his diary, said that he had seldom come across “someone who has so successfully mastered the conundrums of his life … He’s 100 per cent male and sure of the basic things in his life.” The evidence most often cited by those who claim Olivier was bisexual is a remark by Vivien Leigh to the effect that Robert Helpmann had shared a bed with her and her husband, but this, even if true, is no proof of homosexuality. Helpmann himself claims Olivier once said: “I’m sorry to say this in front of you, Cocky, but I don’t think there is any place in the theatre for queers” – a curious observation given the sexual predilections of many of those at the Old Vic but one which Helpmann claimed to understand.
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Olivier’s appetite for women, on the other hand, was rapacious and enduring. He could hardly wait to get every new acquaintance into bed. It has been said that, when he got them there, his performance was not particularly distinguished, but that does not seem to have stopped them coming back for more. “I don’t know anybody who had more sex appeal,” said Rosemary Harris – Elena to Olivier’s Astrov in “Uncle Vanya” in the celebrated Chichester programme: “Everybody, whatever sex you were, whether you were a cat, a dog or a mouse, you were in love with him.” “You were and are the DISHIEST man who ever lived,” announced Claire Bloom, who had a brief affair with him. To those unacquainted with theatrical mannerisms he gave some grounds for doubting his virility. He could be extremely camp; he was by instinct tactile, quick to lay an affectionate arm on the shoulder of another man or woman; his
epistolary style, even by luvvie standards, was extravagant – “Darling boy,” he began a letter to David Niven, ending “All my love dearest friend in the world, your devoted Larry”. Nobody who knew him well, however, can have doubted that he loved women, lusted after women and would have considered a sexual relationship with another man a pitiful substitute for the real thing.
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As a father Olivier knew he had been inadequate. Since his divorce from Jill Esmond he had barely seen his son. He dutifully sent foreign postage stamps to him when he was aboard, he was conscientious about birthday presents, but meetings between the two were rare. “Some years ago,” he told Tarquin in 1951, “I arranged my life so that I could never be a father to you in the accepted sense of the word.” Now he felt he should be making up for lost time. Vivien Leigh helped in the process; indeed, she was much better than he was at establishing a relationship with Tarquin. Olivier found it difficult to have any sensible conversation with a schoolboy. Jill Esmond urged him to make greater efforts: “He very much wants to get closer to you … He said that if in the next two years or so you and he still remain strangers, after that it would be too late … He has reached an age when Mum ought, for the time being at least, to take a back seat – his problems are male and should be discussed with a male.” Olivier was left with a feeling of guilt, but still had neither the time nor the will to do much about it. Nor did the business of dayto-day communication get easier. “I do hope you don’t mind my being untalkative,” he wrote apologetically. “I am rather prone to long silences, I know, which makes me jolly dull company at times.” Tarquin, of course, was left suspecting that it was he who was the dull company; an additional cause for unease in their faltering relationship.
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