Olivier (26 page)

Whatever one thought of it, Notley was grand and intended to be so. “It is very romantic in a medieval way,” Cecil Beaton told Greta Garbo. “The life they lead is most suitable for Shakespearean actors. The whole atmosphere of the place is suitable for performances of ‘Twelfth Night’, ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and ‘Hamlet’.” It was designed for entertaining: without company it was diminished. Vivien Leigh made sure this rarely happened and her ferocious energy ensured that her many guests had a taxing as well as enjoyable experience. The author Godfrey Winn described a typical weekend. The party drove down after the theatres closed on the Saturday night and a substantial dinner was served at 1.30 a.m. Lilli Palmer, another guest, then “caused some surprise and dismay by going to bed”. Winn stuck it out for another hour or so: he hoped to sleep on in the morning but was woken early to be told that Leigh, “looking as fresh as a girl of eight”, was recruiting him for a game of bowls. There had been talk of an early night for Olivier on Sunday, but it was not to be: it was 2.00 a.m. before supper finished and he had to leave early on Monday morning for the film studios. He returned at lunchtime and the remains of the party left for London in time for the evening performances. “Thank goodness we can have an early night this evening and go to bed directly after the show,” said Olivier with relief. “Oh, Pussy, not tonight,” cried Leigh in dismay. “It’s Bea Lillie’s opening at the Café de Paris, and we promised to go to her party afterwards.” The clash between Leigh’s supernatural energy and hunger for diversion, and Olivier’s all too natural need for privacy and a decent amount of sleep was one of the factors that undermined their marriage.
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Olivier at Notley took particular delight in the grounds and the farm. He planted avenues of trees, acquired an impressive knowledge of the Latin names for trees and shrubs, put up greenhouses. More land was bought and a herd of Jersey cattle established, all given the names of Shakespearean heroines. Olivier used to train his voice by bellowing at his cows: “It was a glorious, warm sound,” remembered Tarquin. “Not a snarl, more like the roar of a lion.” It was a place where, if only he could escape his wife and her guests, he could learn his parts and rehearse in peace. With John Mills he took a boat onto the River Thame so as to be able to rehearse “Othello” without interruption. They became absorbed in their task and had drifted five miles downstream before they noticed what was happening.
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Delightful though such pursuits might be, they did not cure the malaise that was poisoning the Oliviers’ relationship. No two people of their skills, ambitions and restless temperaments would have found it easy to share a life. “Have you read Henry James’s
The Turn of the Screw
?” Eileen Beldon, an Old Vic actress who had been on the tour of Australasia, wrote to Sir Barry Jackson. “Larry and Vivien remind me of the two children – charming, talented, exquisitely mannered, diabolical and bewitched and completely immature.” Immature or not, Olivier was protective towards his wife and constantly worried about her state of health, psychological as well as physical. Sally Anne Howes remembered that, when Leigh was playing Anna Karenina, Olivier used to telephone every morning at eleven and every afternoon at four to ask how she was. Equally, he was often exasperated by her selfishness and indifference to his needs. Even before her breakdown became apparent he was more sinned against than sinning. Then, in the spring of 1949, when they were sitting in the porch at Durham Cottage, out of the blue if Olivier’s version of events is to be accepted, Leigh almost casually remarked: “I don’t love you anymore.” “I felt as if I had been told that I had been condemned to death,” Olivier wrote. “The central force of my life, my heart in fact … had been removed.” Olivier was never one to underplay his emotions. It is easy to suppose that both Leigh’s
statement and Olivier’s reaction have been overdramatised. Richard Olivier, however, his son by his third wife, Joan Plowright, took his father to a homeopathic doctor some months before he died. After various tests the doctor announced that Olivier’s series of crippling illnesses had their origins in “a massive trauma to the heart” which he had suffered in March 1949 or thereabouts. Olivier, when told this, claimed not to have had any special problems around that date, but Richard worked out that it might have stemmed from the moment at which Vivien Leigh told her husband that she no longer loved him. This, of course, proves nothing. Whether it is even evidence of anything depends on the importance one attaches to the opinions of homeopathic doctors in general and this one in particular. But from about this time, the marriage took a sharp turn for the worse.
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She was not in love with anyone else, Leigh explained, but she now looked on Olivier as a brother. “Somewhat to my surprise,” he commented drily, “occasional acts of incest were not discouraged.” Peter Finch was now on the London scene, but though Leigh thought him attractive and good company it does not seem that at this point the relationship was more than friendly. Then came “Streetcar”, with all the pressure that that involved. The marriage limped on until, at the end of 1951, the couple found themselves acting together in New York in the two “Cleopatras”, which had already been a substantial success in London.
It was at this point that Leigh’s illness ceased to be a threat grumbling in the background and took over her life. The terrifying swings between elation and black despair, which marked what we used to call manic depression but now know more prosaically as bipolar disorder, overtook her life. In New York above all it was a time of despair. They were staying in Gertrude Lawrence’s elegant but rather depressing flat. Olivier would come back to find his wife “sitting on the corner of the bed, wringing her hands and sobbing, in a state of great distress”. Olivier would refuse invitations to parties knowing that they
would be too much for her; she would acquiesce but would then search frantically through the papers to see if their absence had been noted. In the theatre, Olivier claimed, she never gave more than 85 per cent – “which was worth their bloody money” but not good enough. Then her condition became still worse: “it started to become manic. I tried to be patient. I tried to make everything alright.” For him the problem was exacerbated by her ability, except when she was at her worst, to put on a convincing display of normality. Olivier told Noël Coward that he thought his wife was having a bad nervous breakdown: “Darling boy,” he asked, “what do you think I ought to do about Puss?” Nonsense, Coward retorted. “If anybody’s having a nervous breakdown, it’s you.”
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At the end of 1952 Leigh was asked to play in a film called “Elephant Walk” which would involve much filming in what was then Ceylon. Olivier was invited to co-star. He refused but was indignant when someone suggested that he had turned down the invitation because he was exhausted: “I’ve never been exhausted by anything in my life. I just thought it was a fucking awful film.” He was also engaged on other projects; something which Leigh presumably knew when it was suggested that he should join her in Ceylon. When Korda asked her who she would therefore like as her leading man, she replied, “in altogether too airy a voice”, that she thought Peter Finch would fit the bill. Asked later whether he thought that there was already some romantic attachment between his wife and Finch, Olivier replied: “If there wasn’t, it was very clear to me that it was imminent. As soon as they got to a nice location in the heart of Ceylon, there was no question what would be going on in the bushes.” Finch seems to have had some pangs of conscience; he told one of the senior technicians that he was “well aware that he owed more to Larry than anyone in the world”, but that he found Leigh “totally fascinating”. The compunction does not seem to have run deep. Finch is said to have asked Olivier’s biographer, Thomas Kiernan: “Is it my fault that Viv picked on me to cling to? I was just trying to act in Larry’s best interests. Would he rather have her fall into the clutches of some assistant cameraman?”
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A few weeks into filming, when Olivier was staying with William and Susana Walton in Ischia, there came a frantic message from the producer in Ceylon: Vivien Leigh was impossible, the work on the film was being disrupted, could Olivier please come out and try to help? Olivier was pretty certain that nothing he might be able to do would make any lasting difference, but dutifully he flew to Ceylon and did what he could to talk his wife into reason. He seems to have had a little success: the caravan moved on to Hollywood to continue filming and Olivier went back to Ischia. Within a few days he was told that his wife had suffered a still more catastrophic breakdown. There was little possibility of resuming filming; there was talk of summoning Elizabeth Taylor to take her place; in the meantime Leigh was in need of rescue. It was back to the aeroplane. Olivier found his wife wholly out of touch with reality: “When she spoke to me it was in the tone of halting, dreamlike amazement that people in the theatre use for mad scenes.” With the help of Stewart Granger and David Niven – “I had always thought of David as a darling person but definitely a fairweather friend, but he turned out to be the most fantastic friend I’ve ever had” – he managed to get his wife sedated and on an aeroplane back to England. From there it was a nursing home and the promise that she would be unconscious for three weeks or more. Emotionally and physically more exhausted than he had ever been before, Olivier returned to Ischia.
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It was to be the best part of ten years before the Oliviers finally divorced. During this period they put up a convincing display of marital unity, they appeared in public together, they acted together, for most of the time they cohabited in reasonable if imperfect harmony. But the marriage, in its full sense, was over. After the nervous breakdown, Olivier remembers, “She was an entirely different person. I never really knew her again.”
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One of the most successful of the Oliviers’ joint enterprises had come in 1951. Olivier’s original project had been a gala revival of “The School for Scandal” which would put him and his wife on a stage with Richardson
and Gielgud. Gielgud in principle welcomed the idea of doing some play with his two great rivals – “there is again some murmur of ‘Caesar’ with Ralph and Larry which would greatly appeal to me if it could be arranged,” he told his mother – but he decided against this particular project on the somewhat contradictory grounds that it would be a mistake to combine such talent in a single theatre, thus dooming the rest of the London stage to mediocrity. “Of course, dear fellow,” Olivier replied, “your whole attitude is entirely and absolutely understood by me.” He cast around for an alternative. The Caesar motif still appealed to him: Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra” would provide a wonderful part for Vivien Leigh and suit him well. But was it challenging enough to catch the imagination of the public?
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It was Roger Furse who suggested that Shaw’s play could be doubled with Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra”. He advanced it partly as a joke – the company would save on advertising costs by having two Cleopatras – but the idea appealed to Olivier. Vivien Leigh was initially horrified at the thought of playing the Shakespearean role, but her husband persuaded her. “You’ve got to do it,” he told her. “We’ve got to make one hell of a mark in the West End.” John Mason Brown, most eminent of American critics, claimed that the two plays complemented each other admirably, “fitting together as neatly as if they were instalments in a novel”. Olivier was not concerned about the logic of the enterprise: he saw two splendid parts for both the stars and an eyecatching project that would be sure to draw large audiences. He had reservations about “Antony and Cleopatra” as a play, however, thinking it dragged on after Antony’s death. Nor was he entirely happy about the traditional rendering of Cleopatra’s character. She was much less complicated, he believed, than she was usually portrayed. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, after all, would have been played by a boy of fourteen. Given that, he told the Shakespeare scholar John Dover Wilson, “I can’t quite believe that all the various vicissitudes of character attributed to Cleopatra by many purists can really have been intended.” He sent Wilson a list of his proposed cuts and changes, admitting that
he knew he would be charged by some with vandalism. Wilson was not among them; he took exception to a few of Olivier’s alterations but agreed that, on the whole, the changes were for the better. Encouraged, Olivier went ahead.
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His readiness to take direction, always meagre, was soon tested beyond its limits. He fell out with the director, Michael Benthall, with whom he had worked amicably in the past but who seemed to him to be adopting a wrong-headed approach to the two Cleopatras, particularly Shakespeare’s version. Either you must accept his way of doing things or take over yourself, advised Glen Byam Shaw: “If you try to muddle through I think it will be very dangerous and the Company will be confused, nervous and unhappy … I suspect that if you take away his confidence he may collapse. You must remember the enormous power of your personality and authority, particularly in your own theatre.” The warning was a wise one. Olivier’s was an overwhelming presence and if he chose to exert it there were few indeed who could stand up to him. It is to his credit that, provided whatever opposition there might be seemed to him based on sensible premises and was well argued, he was almost always ready to give it a hearing – not necessarily to accept it wholly or even in part but at least to take it into account. That seems to have been the case with the Cleopatras: Benthall remained in charge and the rehearsals, if not always uncontroversial, went off without too much acrimony or the demoralisation of the company.
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The success of the enterprise would depend above all on the two stars. Even under pressure Vivien Leigh was professional enough to ensure that they seemed to act together in well-drilled harmony. No member of the public would have had reason to suspect that the relationship was fraying. Even within the company there was little speculation about the marriage. Yet there were signs that all was not well. Vivien Leigh was “sensational”, thought Maxine Audley, but “there were definite undercurrents that she and Larry weren’t getting on too well together. Now and again there were little flare-ups.”
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