Olivier (39 page)

Osborne was correct, however, in thinking that Olivier was over-awed by what he saw as Tynan’s intellectual superiority. When Tynan was appointed, Cedric Hardwicke sent him a telegram of congratulation, ending: “Don’t be too intellectual.” “Is Larry an intellectual?” queried Tynan. “No, but he wants to be,” was the reply. He did indeed want to be, but he considered that a university education was a prerequisite and that the chance was therefore lost for ever. He had read little, and though he
felt no urge to remedy the deficiency, he felt ill at ease in literary circles. When he was asked by a Miss Jepson to contribute to a collection of tributes to Max Beerbohm he confessed that the request filled him with shame. “It is true that I am a Maximilian, but it is also certain that I am by far the least qualified to be a member of that worthy throng … My knowledge and appreciation of his works is of the skimpiest and most unenlightened.” When Miss Jepson responded by sending him a copy of Beerbohm’s
Around Theatres
he appealed to his secretary to produce “a v. nice letter which I can copy out”. It is unlikely that he ever opened the book. He did not always suffer intellectuals gladly, having the perception to realise that some of them were fools. He apologised to Tynan for having been off-hand with a visiting Italian: “There is nothing so depressing to a non-intellectual like me than his particular brand of mysterioso. I get terribly bored by … trying to look knowing when the reverse is true.” But more often a reputation for being an intellectual inspired respect if not reverence. “You’re so much cleverer than I am,” he would say to his son Richard, meaning that Richard had been to university and so was supposedly better equipped to argue a case or to draw the right conclusion from some data.
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When intellectuals disagreed, Olivier had to choose between them. Gaskill and Dexter believed the Berliner Ensemble – the immensely influential company established by Bertolt Brecht in 1949 – to represent the pinnacle of repertory theatre. The Ensemble demanded a company without stars, or perhaps more correctly, a company containing nothing but stars, meshed together in practised fluency. Of course, some people would have to play larger parts than others, but it was the team that counted. Tynan believed in stars, whether from within the company or from outside it: big names that would attract big audiences. Though the gulf between the two points of view might seem insuperable, in practice it usually made little difference: decisions were taken on the basis of the needs of the day and of the actors and actresses who happened to be available. It was all very well to urge the merits of a coherent ensemble
which would operate as a permanent unit with no concern for the ambitions of the individual – Joan Littlewood almost brought it off in the Theatre Workshop – but a company the size of the National Theatre could not be staffed by automata and few actors are without personal ambition. Gaskill complained that Maggie Smith, for example, “kept going off to make films”. She was not alone. “Gradually the company gets watered down to people who are less than adequate. And that’s the problem. You can never have a large-scale true ensemble.” The result, as Olivier had known it would be from the start, was a compromise. Gaskill thought that too much was lost as a result. It was “a spurious kind of ensemble” which didn’t even have “the glamour of old-fashioned actor-manager theatre about it”. Olivier thought it worked and did not concern himself too much about the issues of principle that lay behind it.
²⁰

He was emphatic in rejecting any form of a “house style”. Again with the Berliner Ensemble in mind Gaskill and Dexter hankered after a uniformity of approach which, whatever the play, would make the identity of the company instantly apparent. To the argument that this required the genius of some superman like Stanislavsky, Gaskill retorted that Stanislavskys did not spring fully-fashioned from their mother’s womb but grew with their job: only if the National Theatre adopted the true faith would a British Stanislavsky have the chance of achieving greatness. Tynan argued that the National’s repertoire was too extensive and its staff too fluid to make any such rigidity conceivable, let along desirable. Here Olivier came down on Tynan’s side. “I wouldn’t have allowed a house style,” he declared. “You must find a style for each play, I said, right from the beginning. There’s not even a National Theatre Shakespearean style. I’m sure there is in almost all other countries in Europe, but I have a prejudice against it.”
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The key members of the personnel were designated or in place; the venue had been chosen; the issues of principle had been aired if not resolved: it remained to put on some plays.

“I
’m so glad you’re still bossing Chichester,” his sister Sybille told Olivier in July 1963. “This concentration thing is the very devil, I know. But you
have
it, alright.” He needed every bit of it. 1963 was bad enough, with the first production at the National Theatre scheduled to begin in October, but 1964 promised to be almost impossible. By 1963 he had given up any pretence that the Chichester Festival existed in its own right. “I quite deliberately created that second Chichester company for the National,” he admitted. Evershed-Martin was, or professed to be, content with this arrangement but was put out when it seemed that, even if the average performance played to a house that was three-quarters full, there might be a loss of £9,000 on the season. That would cost the guarantors £1,000 each: “While some could well afford it others, like myself, could not.” Olivier made soothing noises and in fact the season ended without a loss, but the goodwill which had reigned during the first season was wearing thin. It wore still thinner when the Chichester Board were offered only two seats for the opening night of the National Theatre. “With the proposed close link between us and the National, I should have thought it would have been a common courtesy to have offered all members of our Board seats for the occasion,” wrote an affronted James Battersby. The suggestion that the Board members should ballot for their seats was a sign of “unnecessary indifference”. There were simply not enough seats to go round, pleaded a spokesman for the National; even members of the National Theatre Board had had
to ballot for tickets. Battersby was not appeased.
¹

So far it was a question of
amour propre
. When it became clear that, in the 1964 season, Olivier was so preoccupied by his National duties that he could devote relatively little time to Chichester, Evershed Martin took alarm. “I doubt if you could possibly realise how much your actual presence during the last two seasons has created a feeling of trust and confidence in everybody that Chichester was of importance in the theatrical world,” he told Olivier. If Olivier did not play in at least one of the productions it would have disastrous results for the box office and for the prestige of the whole Festival: “Please, Larry, this is terribly important to me and all of those with me.” He would do his best, Olivier promised; at the moment the prospects looked good. In the event he managed to give them a month of “Othello”. But even by his standards the burden was too much. Early in 1965 he resigned, pleading the impossible pressure of life at the National Theatre. “The simple truth is that I have done all that I can, and I can do no more,” he wrote to Evershed Martin. “At least we have all got something on the map of English life, something which has been absolutely accepted into the landscape.”
²

The letter seemed to set the scene for a loving farewell, but things went downhill in 1965. Olivier had recommended John Clements as his successor, but Clements would not be available till the end of the year. Olivier remained nominally in charge, but in fact acted in nothing and paid little attention to what was going on. The company became so worried by the lack of direction that they telephoned John Dexter, who was in New York, and pleaded with him to come back and take charge. To add injury to insult they used the phone in Olivier’s room at a cost of £62. Olivier was outraged. According to Robert Stephens, he gave them “the most terrible bollocking, language you never thought existed … He played every single part you’ve ever seen him play, from Heathcliff to Henry V, shouting in that rasping tenor voice.” Stephens admitted that it was he who had called Dexter. “‘You cunt!’ Olivier screamed. ‘You cunt!’ I really thought he was going to kill me. He was totally out of control.”
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That final year soured Olivier’s memories of Chichester and its governing Board. “They are the stupidest bunch of people I ever had to work with in my life,” he said. “I was very unkind to them. I never asked the Board what I should do, I told them what I was going to do.” He maligned both the Board and himself: for most of the time they worked in harmony. At the time of his resignation he told the General Manager, Pieter Rogers, that they could look at each other “with a special glow of parenthood in our eyes, for between us we have brought [a] child of some significance [into being], and at four years old it looks to be a very bonny one too.” He never ceased to take a benevolent if distant interest in what he held to be his personal creation.
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When, several years later, Topol was enlisted to play in “The Caucasian Chalk Circle”, Olivier and Joan Plowright sent him a telegram: “Dear Hymie. Nobody ever died rich who played at Chichester. Loving wishes.” Certainly Olivier did not grow rich at Chichester, nor did his salary at the National Theatre enable him to support his growing family and considerable commitments. To supplement his income – and also because he enjoyed it – he slipped occasional films into his already bursting schedule. In the summer of 1965 he and Noël Coward together joined the cast of “Bunny Lake is Missing”, an inconsiderable thriller, directed by Otto Preminger, about a child who mysteriously disappears. Olivier was satisfied by his part – “it was perfectly alright” – but detested Preminger. “He’s the most awful kind of German there can be,” he once remarked. “He is a Nazi Jew; there can be nothing in the world more awful than that mixture.” The comment is of some interest as being the nearest Olivier is recorded as having come to anti-Semitism. In general he was free of racial prejudice. If he discovered that a colleague was Jewish, or for that matter Bolivian or Bulgarian, he would have considered it a matter of mild interest but no great importance – not a reason for liking or disliking him. The only complaint he had about Jews was their readiness to take offence at an imagined slight. A Jewish friend complained that a line in “Caesar and Cleopatra” could be construed as anti-Semitic. “I have in my own heart nothing but fondness for the
Jewish race,” Olivier protested, “and have never been able to distinguish it in my thoughts from any other. All breeds of mankind have their faults and the only one that ever spurs me to a feeling of regret in the Jewish race is this kind of sensibility.”
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Preminger had offended him by fawning on him and Coward and bullying the junior members of the cast. In fact, if anyone needed to be bullied, it was Olivier himself. He was not at his best. “Poor Larry had a dreadful time with his lines,” noted Anna Massey. “They were full of details of bus times and probing
non sequiturs
. We ended up doing extremely short takes. He felt defeated.” For Olivier to feel defeated was something so unusual as to cause real concern, to his fellow actors and, still more, to himself. Later the same year, when he filmed the Chichester/National Theatre “Othello”, he admitted “it was a very tired performance. I was retreating a bit from the big moments and I shouldn’t have.” The pressure seemed to be telling to a point where it was undermining his acting.
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Yet always he had something in reserve. In the six months between, when he seemed to be close to succumbing to exhaustion, he contrived to produce on the stage at the Old Vic an “Othello” that was one of the highest spots in his anyway mountainous career.

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As Evershed-Martin had realised, in Olivier’s mind
everything
was subordinate to the National Theatre. He had to produce from scratch, not just a company that would be capable of acting a vast range of contemporary and classical drama, but also an organisation that would sustain that company, provide the theatre and facilities, draw in the audiences, promote the productions. It was the work of the traditional actor-manager but conducted on an industrial scale. And on top of that, he had to play a primary role in the planning and building of the new theatre to which the company would move in the distant but, it was hoped, not too distant future.

The Old Vic provided an adequate auditorium, but it did not have the office space required for such an enterprise. Nothing too lavish
could be afforded for what would be only temporary occupation, but economy was carried almost to the point of absurdity. The headquarters of Britain’s National Theatre, in Aquinas Street, was a gaggle of squalid prefabricated huts ten minutes’ walk from the theatre through an unsavoury and crowded slum. The ceilings were low, the windows tiny; it was too cold in winter, too hot in summer; the walls between the cramped rooms were so thin that when Olivier was in full cry his voice could be heard in all the nearby offices. To operate efficiently in such surroundings was a challenge; to sustain morale a testing problem; to create an atmosphere of passionate enthusiasm in which every difficulty was an incentive for greater effort rather than a reason for discouragement was something of a miracle. That miracle was Olivier’s – not Olivier’s alone, for no man could conduct such an operation singlehanded, but one that could never have been brought about without his leadership and inspiration.
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“Leadership” is one of the most indefinable of qualities. It is to command loyalty, to make people feel that they belong, that they are part of a team, that they must do their best not just for their own good but for the sake of their colleagues who are also doing
their
best. In the armed services, where men must be expected to risk their lives in a common enterprise, it is above all essential, but it is also relatively easy to provide because soldiers, sailors and airmen have been taught from the moment they joined their service that they are part of an entity which is far greater than the sum of its parts. Actors, though they too have been trained to operate as a team, are the most individual of creatures. Every instinct tells them that they must assert themselves, make their own mark, establish their own public persona. The spirit of the hive depends for its potency on the docility and self-discipline of the bee; when every bee is different, every bee anxious to do its own thing, every bee quite ready to use its sting to protect its individual interests, the role of the queen becomes peculiarly difficult.