Olivier (59 page)

The reasons for this volte-face are obscure. Olivier much later told Kathleen Tynan that he had decided he wished to do his own book, “which was why he had been so tough on Ken”. This cannot be the whole story. Olivier was not to sign a contract to write his own memoirs for another eighteen months and even then took much persuading: it was the demise of Tynan’s project that led Olivier into undertaking his own book, not the other way round. Sarah Miles among others had been trying to persuade him to take on the task, but he had proved most resistant: “ ‘I can’t write my own book,’ he grumbled, like a fifth-former over Latin prep.” A series of gossipy articles in the
Daily Mail
had perhaps contributed to his reluctance to authorise Tynan’s book. These professed to be based on interviews, but were in fact culled from the tape recordings of an American journalist who had encouraged Olivier into indiscretions during a drunken dinner in Venice and secretly recorded them. No doubt these articles gave their victim a jaundiced view of any sort of publicity, but Tynan had no possible connection with them and their effect on Olivier’s attitude can have been no more than peripheral. The factor that seems to have been most immediately responsible was a piece in the
Evening News
in which Tynan’s wife, Kathleen, was quoted as saying that Olivier wanted “the whole truth” to be told about his relationship with Vivien Leigh. Worse still, the article implied that Tynan’s biography would be official, written with the authority and at the request of its subject. “The New York cocktail circuit is buzzing with rumours of the revelations Kenneth Tynan is going to make in his book on Larry,” recorded Peter Hall. A journalist interviewing Olivier at this time made the mistake of mentioning Tynan: “Olivier tightened up and was very frightening.” It took a few weeks before Tynan accepted that the cause was lost – “The Tynan work is, I think, at the moment, still waffling in the melting pot of altercation,” was Olivier’s characteristically opaque exposition of the affair when in May 1979 he turned down an offer to ghost his memoirs – but within a few weeks the altercation was over; the way was clear for Olivier to do the job himself if he felt so inclined.
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He had, in fact, envisaged the possibility some years before. Hamish Hamilton had written him a loving letter urging him to write a memoir for his “old and trusted friend”. If he failed to do so, Hamilton pointed out, then “vulgar opportunists like Weidenfeld” would go on putting out “undesirable quickies”. Olivier seems to have taken this to heart and even to have started work. “The difficulty I am up against,” he told Jill Esmond, “is that I am absolutely determined that every single word in it as far as I myself am concerned shall be the absolute and utter truth.” Perhaps this daunting prospect proved too much for him; there is no reason to believe that anything was written. In due course Tynan took up the baton. He then dropped it, or had it forcibly removed. The next thing an outraged Hamilton heard was that the “vulgar opportunist” George Weidenfeld had successfully signed up Olivier to write his memoirs for an advance of £100,000. “George wants you to feel absolutely free of any pressure and to write as much or as little as you feel inclined,” Olivier’s agent, Laurence Evans, assured him. The contract, though, was for a book of 80,000–90,000 words. 10 per cent of the advance was to go to Mark Amory, a young and talented writer, whose exact role was undefined but who was, in effect, expected to ghost-write the autobiography.
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Weidenfeld seems to have wooed Olivier with lofty talk of Kenneth Clark’s
Civilisation
, suggesting that his autobiography would be an important contribution to Britain’s cultural history. Olivier took the bait and, when Amory began his long series of interviews, he was disconcerted to find that his subject seemed concerned mainly to talk of Irving and Kean. He knew that this was not at all what Weidenfeld required. Joan Plowright saw what was going on and reassured him: “You’re having difficulty persuading Larry to talk about himself? I don’t think you need worry.” Sure enough, when Olivier warmed up he began to talk with alarming candour: the fifty or so hours on tape revealing what he really thought, rather than the emasculated version that appeared in his autobiography,
Confessions of an Actor
, are as rich a source as any biographer could ask for. Olivier later remarked that “he
liked Mark Amory a lot but couldn’t relax with him; he wasn’t one of the boys”. By this he presumably meant that Amory had no theatrical background and therefore could not join in the anecdotal ramblings in which Olivier rejoiced. He nevertheless conducted the interviews with great skill: if Olivier did indeed not feel relaxed then the imagination boggles at the thought of the indiscretions which he might have perpetrated if he had felt more at ease. Only once did he ask Amory to turn off the recorder: it was to protect his revelation that: “Joannie was no good at accents.”
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Then Olivier went on holiday and returned announcing that he proposed to write the book himself. Amory’s role became that of sub-editor, to point out omissions or suggest minor changes. The latter were rarely accepted. Something was “preciously valuable”, wrote Olivier. Did the word “preciously” really add anything? asked Amory. Olivier rolled the phrase around his mouth. “I like it,” he concluded. Once he had committed himself to the project he undertook it with characteristic enthusiasm and energy. “I am able to do absolutely nothing until the end of May but work on That Book,” he told Fabia Drake. “I shall not meet my deadline date if I think of anything else, so I don’t.” He reaffirmed his determination to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The book, he told Drake, would be “as ‘wide-open’ as anyone could wish, self-revelatory, with no holds barred, and I tried to be more sparing of all the other characters that came into my book than I am of myself”.
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When he submitted his text he was disconcerted to be told that Weidenfeld, supported by the American publisher, thought it was too long. Worse still, at certain points in the book Olivier had told the story by quotations from letters and other papers. One of these was the section on Hochhuth, which the editor considered was anyway too long and should be rewritten in narrative form. “Disagree!” wrote Olivier in the margin. The same was true of the passages relating to his retirement from the National Theatre. “Violently disagree!” wrote Olivier. Weidenfeld sent Olivier a version of his book edited in a way that he felt would have greater appeal for the general reader. “I am not willing that this
latest edition of the book should be published under my name,” stormed Olivier. “Your editors are clearly antipathetic to me, my life, my career and my story.” Weidenfeld’s response does not survive, but it must have been placatory. Olivier thanked him for his “infinitely kind reply to my querulous petulance”, but on the essentials he gave little ground. “Whatever criticism my writing deserves, it is at least mine, and comes straight from my mind and heart … I cannot and do not pretend to be a writer of distinction, only one of personal and individual images.” He had reworked the text with Mark Amory and this was his last word.
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It was not the lack of distinction to which Weidenfeld’s editors objected but the wordiness, the convoluted sentences, the vapid rhetorical flourishes. The final version, published in the autumn of 1982, was a good deal better than what had first been submitted, but it could have been much improved by further editing. It was, however, in its way a remarkable book. Olivier kept his word about being harder on himself than on any other character. He was quite as ready to describe what had gone wrong in his career as to extol his triumphs: “One thing that does come out is the essential modesty of the man,” wrote Michael Billington. “There is steel and iron in this man, yet there is an extraordinary humility as well.” He wrote about his personal relationships with sometimes startling frankness: it was “a most courageous book”, Ronald Pickup told him. “For those of us who know how truly you protect and value your privacy, I think the courageousness is particularly telling.” It also caused considerable offence to those who felt that Olivier, in his determination to expose himself, had not hesitated to expose other people at the same time. His elder son, Tarquin, felt that there was much in it that was untrue. In particular his picture of his first marriage was distorted. Olivier suggested that he had never loved Jill Esmond nor she him, something that Tarquin believed to be wholly misleading, at least so far as his mother was concerned. John Gielgud was offended by what he felt to be the coarse and over-candid revelations about Olivier’s life with Vivien Leigh. This was not the woman he had known, he complained. Max Rayne was so shocked by what he thought to be
Olivier’s misrepresentation of his last years at the National Theatre that he wrote to the
Sunday Telegraph
to protest. Everything, he said, had been done in a way considerate of Olivier’s susceptibilities and to suit his convenience: anything else would have been incompatible with “our relationship, not to mention the enormous respect and admiration I have always had for that great man”.
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Several critics commented on the curious artificiality of Olivier’s descriptive writing. He “
acts
writing”, wrote Craig Raine, “an uneasy mixture of the chatty and the belle-lettrist flourish”. John Carey made the same point: “His abject penitential routine belongs, you feel, to a stage voice – another acting role for the great impersonator to lose himself in.” But it was Olivier’s style that most offended Carey: “His sentences ramble and flounder, and he has a fondness for deeply thought platitudes which come thudding out like stuffed bison.” As for the jokes: “They stud the pages like wet washing.” He didn’t blame Olivier for having no sense of humour, he wrote, “but if you’re without one it’s best to avoid jocularity”.
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What Olivier lacked was not so much a sense of humour as the ability to project it on paper. A host of witnesses pay tribute to his wit and gaiety. Roger Furse spoke of “his wonderful sense of humour, fun and nonsense which have so often broken up tense or unhappy situations”. “I’ve never laughed with a man so much. I miss him. I miss the laughs,” remembered John Mills. “He had a wonderful sense of the ludicrous, a touch of Monty Python or the Goons,” said Anthony Havelock-Allan. His humour was the richer for being understated. “One has to be careful with Larry,” wrote Richard Burton. “He is a great deadpan leg-puller and one is never quite sure whether he is probing very subtly for weak spots or majestically sending one up.” To be a good raconteur and to laugh much and loudly is not necessarily proof of a sense of humour, but Olivier had a fine feeling for the ridiculous and was more likely to mock himself than anyone else. In a letter to Ralph Richardson in 1945 he described his performance in “Henry IV, Part One” one evening when he knew John Mills was in the audience. It was, he wrote, “one of
the most self-conscious performances of Hotspur on record – either in such good taste and underacting it can’t be heard, or else ‘Look at my red hair and flashing eyes – aren’t I
different
!’ ‘No’ keeps coming back from the blackness … The man sitting next to Johnnie said, as the curtains parted on that most carefully arranged careless posture, white tights, garter just-so, light through window hitting one at just that angle, and all things that go to make up my startling and awe-inspiring second appearance, ‘Oh, here’s old Ginger again!’ Christ!” The humour is, perhaps, not of the most sophisticated, but it was written by a man who was prepared to find himself absurd and to expose himself to others for being so. His memoirs would have been vastly improved if he had banished his inhibitions and let such irreverent fantasies run loose.
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What were almost but not quite his last words could also never have come from a man devoid of humour. The young male nurse, trying to give Olivier some liquid refreshment in the middle of the night, cut an orange in half, put it in a gauze and tried to squeeze some juice into his mouth. Olivier moved uneasily, the juice splashed onto his cheek and a dribble ran down into his ear. Memories stirred of a royal Dane sleeping in his garden and a murderous brother leaning over him. “It’s not fucking ‘Hamlet’, you know,” said Olivier.
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T
he months and years leading up to those almost-final words were singularly unpleasant. There are no absolutes about old age. Some people in their late seventies or early eighties are fortunate enough still to be energetic: walking vigorously, gardening, finishing the crossword puzzle, even writing biographies. Others withdraw from life, cease to take an interest in other people, switch off the light or let it burn very dim. Physical health plays a part in this: it is harder to engage fully with life if one feels perpetually debilitated. Olivier had had more than his fair share of illness: his spirit was undaunted, but his body and, in some ways, his mind were sadly handicapped. Something vital had been extinguished. “I hated the last few years, because it wasn’t Larry,” said John Mills. “It didn’t look like Larry.” It didn’t sound like Larry, either. Almost, one could say, it wasn’t Larry.
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He made valiant efforts to convince others, indeed to convince himself, that business was as usual. John Gielgud wrote to congratulate Cecil Beaton on rising above his miseries: “Larry and Michael Redgrave are both equally to be admired for their courage and determination. There must be something about the theatre … which manages to drive one, against all reason, to continue to be lively and interested and to refuse to lie down.” Olivier did refuse to lie down, but the opportunities for standing up became ever more infrequent and more erratic. His last and most bizarre performance in a theatre was in 1986 when he appeared in hologram as a disembodied head emerging from an
extraterrestrial egg above the stage of the Dominion Theatre at the start of a new Cliff Richard musical. “I am Akash,” the head proclaimed. “All your questions will be answered.” “Unfortunately they are not,” commented Sheridan Morley. “My questions would include, how does the greatest actor of our century come to be entering his eightieth year involved, even if only in facsimile, with what may well prove to be one of the worst musicals of this century?” Olivier’s reply would have been that he needed the money. He may have believed that this was the case but it was not the most important motive; he took on such ignoble tasks because he needed to convince himself that he was still relevant, still in demand, still capable of commanding an audience. Each time he showed more clearly that it was in fact beyond his powers. The last commission in which he was engaged when his final illness forced him to withdraw, was to read poetry on television. Kenneth Williams watched aghast as Patrick Garland handed sheets of paper “to the ancient lord for him to read aloud. It was a dreadful exhibition of senility. He quavered his way through bits and pieces like some poor old sod being made to audition.”
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