Olivier (12 page)

Olivier, always the perfectionist, was outraged by what he saw as Korda’s slapdash practices. The most important scene was the one in which he said goodbye to Lady Hamilton before leaving on what was to be his final voyage. For some reason he made a fearful hash of it. Twice he dried up, once he caught his scabbard in his cloak. To his dismay, Korda then called for the next shot. “Alex,” said Olivier. “You must be mad. It’s the worst acting I’ve ever done in my life. I must have another go at it.” “Larry, my dear boy,” Korda replied, “you know nothing about making pictures. Sometimes there must be bad acting. Next shot.”
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“It was a damned good film,” Olivier concluded. “It stands up.” He did not find it an easy part to play, though. It was “quite fraught with traps and dangers”. It is probably true to say that, if the traps and dangers had not been there, he would have invented them. “I can’t remember if I ever found a part simple,” he once said. “Each one has always been a delicious problem, there’s been something always to fight a way through.” Each play or film for Olivier was an enemy, to be confronted, outwitted, battered into submission. The stiffer the resistance, the more Olivier loved it. That is why he believed “Hamlet” to be the greatest play ever written; because however many times he thought he had defeated it, it would reveal some unexpected and inexplicable subtlety, would escape from him again. “Lady Hamilton” possessed no comparable delights but it was good enough to be getting on with. It won him a powerful admirer. Churchill thought it the best film about war ever made and watched it seven times, though it was probably the battle
scene which appealed as much as Olivier’s performance. He even sent a copy to Stalin who had notched up three viewings by the time he discussed the film with Churchill at a dinner during the Tehran Conference in 1943. The critics were not quite so enthusiastic, though they were generous enough: James Agate had little good to say about Vivien Leigh’s performance but thought Olivier made “a brave, unaffected and successful Nelson”.
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This was not the only patriotic rodomontade in which Olivier became involved. The Ministry of Information asked Michael Powell to make a film that might help persuade the Americans to join in the war. He came up with the story of a group of survivors from a U-boat which had been sunk in Hudson’s Bay, who decided to make their way across Canada to the United States. “Goebbels considered himself an expert on propaganda but I thought I’d show him a thing or two,” remarked the screen writer, Emeric Pressburger, and the Germans were portrayed as a bunch of murderous thugs. Olivier, who charged only half his ordinary fee as a contribution to the war effort, played a French-Canadian trapper who was one of the Germans’ victims as they savaged their way southwards. His part was a small one but made memorable by his singularly bloody death. His sister Sybille asked him how this had been contrived. “I’m a marvellous actor, my dear,” he answered. “I can cough up a haemorrhage whenever I want to.” Pressed for further details he confessed that two tablespoonfuls of liquid chocolate – the film, “The 49th Parallel”, being shot in black and while – had provided the basis for his spectacular demise.
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Their films, though not vast money-makers, had helped Leigh and Olivier to build up a comfortable reserve which would suffice to support their respective children when they arrived as evacuees. They managed to lose most of it in an ill-fated venture in the theatre. It was George Cukor who suggested that if they wanted to make a lot of money quickly and at the same time burnish their theatrical reputations they could not do better than act together in a production of “Romeo and Juliet”. How could it go wrong? “Never has there been a happier and more
colourful combination of principals and production,” wrote one interviewer. “Two internationally famed lovers of fact projecting themselves into the two most famed lovers of fiction.” Olivier flung himself into the enterprise: selecting the cast, fussing over the costumes, planning the provincial tour that would precede the New York opening, even providing the music. “Larry has suddenly started
composing
music and nothing will stir him from the piano,” Vivien Leigh told her mother. He had completed his own entrance music and was now doing the same for Juliet – “unless I can do it myself,” Leigh concluded.
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One result of this was that Olivier wore himself out. He was never fully able to accept that there was a limit to what he could achieve and in 1940 he had not even begun to learn the lesson. By the time the play opened in San Francisco he was mentally and physically at his limit. The result was a debacle. For the end of the balcony scene Olivier had devised a dramatic exit from the Capulet garden which involved him bounding lithely over the wall and disappearing into the night. Unfortunately he was so much weakened by his efforts that he missed his footing and was left floundering, clinging to the top of the wall but quite unable to surmount it.

After this unpropitious start, things improved. “By dint of strenuous rehearsals it is getting better and better,” Vivien reported, “and by the time we open in N.Y. it should be alright.” What they did not take into account was that, while the reviews were reasonably friendly, the newspaper coverage which they received, particularly while in Chicago, was having the worst possible effect in New York. “See real lovers make love in public,” had been the tenor of the reporting. A squalid romance was being vulgarly exploited, was the response of the more austere New Yorkers. Besides, Olivier and Leigh were known in New York as film stars; “Gone With the Wind” and “Wuthering Heights” were playing to packed cinemas. It was deemed significant that the venue where “Romeo and Juliet” was to appear, the 51st Street Theatre, had been known till recently as the Hollywood Theatre. The case was proven. Something very remarkable would have had to have happened between
Chicago and New York for the critics to treat the production with even a degree of charity.
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Up to a point their complaints were justified. Olivier, by his own admission, was not at his best. Edmund O’Brien, who played Mercutio, agreed that it was a lifeless performance. Not for the first time, Olivier was accused of muting his performance so as to enhance the showing of Vivien Leigh. “He thought the whole thing should be Viv’s show,” O’Brien said. “Olivier believed the pure power of his stage presence would carry him through, and that American audiences wouldn’t know the difference between a great portrayal of Romeo and a lacklustre one.” If Olivier really thought this he was swiftly disillusioned. The critics denounced his performance: “Sheer, savage, merciless cruelty,” he described their judgment. Brooks Atkinson of the
New York Times
, most influential of all American theatre critics, was one of the more temperate. “Mr Olivier in particular keeps throwing his part away,” he complained. “The superficiality of his acting is difficult to understand. He is mannered and affected, avoiding directness in even simple episodes. As his own director,” Atkinson concluded, “Mr Olivier has never heard himself in the performance. This is just as well; he would be astonished if he did.” In the course of his career Olivier was often to direct plays in which he played a leading role. It was always a risky business, but his astonishing energy and ability to keep an almost impossible number of balls simultaneously in the air usually carried him through. In 1940, inexperienced and perhaps distracted by the need to sustain a faltering Vivien Leigh, he met with disaster.
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If they had had any doubts about the scale of their failure these would have been dispelled the night after their opening when they went to a “War Relief” Ball that Noël Coward had organised. Coward greeted them with a sympathetic but embarrassed smile. “My darlings,” he murmured, “how brave of you to come.” Goldwyn put it more brutally. After the first night Vivien Leigh told him that she would not be able to make another film for him as they would be leaving for London once the run was over. “So soon?” replied Goldwyn. The public read the reviews
and flocked to the theatre to cancel their bookings and get their money back. “Let them all have it,” Olivier instructed. In her draft biography his sister suggested that he did this because gangsterism was rife in New York and, if he had offended too many people, he risked having the theatre burned over his head. “No, no, no,” Olivier protested in mock American. “It was only for the first two weeks of the run we handed the money back … but after two weeks I stopped it, as pride was becoming too expensive. It wasn’t that we were sceered, it was that we was proud.”
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“Romeo and Juliet” struggled on for several weeks. Vivien Leigh was horrified by the reviews and in no way comforted by the fact that, on the whole, she had got better notices than Olivier. Whenever she was not on stage she hid in her dressing room, leaving it to Olivier to do what he could to sustain morale. “He continued to behave as if everything was fine,” said Joan Shepard, a member of the cast, “inspecting everyone’s make-up and costumes each night and treating everyone with the utmost courtesy.” It was a gallant effort on his part, to cover what had been a most painful shock. It was one of the few times in his life that he had been guilty of over-confidence. “We still feel that at any moment the laughter will stop and the tomatoes will begin,” he wrote many years later when describing life on the stage. “I don’t think that there has ever been any true actor who has not felt this. To this day I still feel it.” On the whole he escaped with a small proportion of tomatoes against a mountain of adulation; the failure of “Romeo and Juliet” was the most unpleasant and the most unexpected exception.
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It was also among the most costly. “Larry has just lost $40,000 on ‘Romeo and Juliet’,” Jill Esmond told her mother, with what one suspects might have been mild
Schadenfreude
. “Vivien did not put one penny of
her
money into it. She has more sense.” Olivier found himself short of money. Any satisfaction Jill felt at this must have been diminished by the fact that she and Tarquin had by now crossed the Atlantic and so would be dependent on Olivier for financial support. She met him in Toronto in July 1940. “He is quite the film star now and suffering from
a persecution complex,” she reported. “He is terrified of being recognised and distrusts everybody … He got on very well with Bumpin [Tarquin] but didn’t seem really very interested, in fact he seemed lacking in interest in almost all things except himself and his point of view.” Things were little better when she called on him in New York. Vivien Leigh came in while she was there: “Her eyes were hard and cruel. We were
so
charming to each other and so insincere. She left me quite cold – I might have been talking to a fish.” Jill had no idea why Olivier had wanted to organise the meeting; it had been a waste of time and “I gained nothing from it except the fact that he meant nothing to me and I don’t want to see him again”. She had to admit, though, that he was being as generous as he could be on the financial front and that he appeared genuinely concerned about the well-being of herself and their son.
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By the time they met again, on Christmas Day, the divorces had come through and he and Vivien Leigh had been married. The fact that the situation had thus been regularised seems to have removed some of the restraint that had soured his relationship with his former wife. He was “charming, quite his old self”, Esmond told her mother. “I still think he’s a nice person. I don’t think I would have loved him if he hadn’t been really nice – he was just
very
weak, and still is.” Even though her sexual tastes developed in different directions and she grew further and further apart from her former husband, she never ceased to love and miss him. She wrote to her mother comparing the love which she had had for Olivier with her mother’s feeling towards
her
former husband. “Both our lovers had their faults and gave us great pain in various ways but at least we had a hell of a good time while it lasted and we both had a completeness of both body and soul that comes to very few … We have been very lucky that we have known the best that life has to offer.”
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Olivier and Leigh had been married at the end of August 1940. “I hope he finds happiness, but I very much doubt it,” wrote Esmond grimly. The relationship had for the first time come under strain some months before when Leigh won an Oscar for her Scarlett O’Hara while
Olivier was passed over for Heathcliff. Olivier stoically survived the banquet and preserved an expression of feigned delight when Vivien was receiving her award, but his suffering was dreadful. On their way home together, he told Tarquin many years later, he took her Oscar from her: “It was all I could do to restrain myself from hitting her with it. I was insane with jealousy.” He no doubt exaggerated his resentment, but the pain was very real. By the time of their marriage the offence had been forgiven if not forgotten, but his new wife can have had no doubt that, earnestly though he might seek to advance her career, there were limits to the level of competition he could endure.
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For their marriage they slipped away to Santa Barbara where they could escape the attention of the press. They were so far successful that by the time they had joined Ronald Colman on his yacht at San Pedro an hour or two away not a word had been heard in public about the wedding. Olivier congratulated himself on his cunning and professed to hope that the silence would continue. A news bulletin made no mention of the marriage: “Excellent,” said Olivier, in mild dismay. An hour later there was still silence. The Oliviers were patently disconcerted. “We certainly pulled it off, didn’t we?” Colman said. “We certainly did,” agreed Olivier gloomily. At last, at ten o’clock, the story broke. “Too bad!’ said Olivier, with evident relief. “Too good to last,” sighed Vivien with an incandescent smile. “After that we had a very happy evening.”
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The delay had proved worthwhile. People in Great Britain in September 1940 had things on their mind rather more urgent than the matrimonial vicissitudes of even their most celebrated actors and actresses. Olivier received a handful of letters, written more in sorrow than in anger, reproaching him with breaking sacred ties, but there was nothing like the torrent of abuse he had anticipated. They had no reason to expect any violent reaction when they returned to Britain. Six weeks earlier, Lynn Fontanne had told Noël Coward that the British Government had ordered Olivier home: “He doesn’t know when, as there are a hundred thousand young men of military age in America and
they must wait until the facilities for getting them over are completed.” In fact there was no question of an order: the British Government would have been content if he had chosen to remain in the United States; might, indeed, have preferred it. The facilities were a problem, though. It was the very end of 1940 before the Oliviers got berths on the American ship
Excambion
destined for Lisbon. It was an uncomfortable voyage, not least because the captain was a German and most of the other passengers seemed to be German or German sympathisers. Olivier feared lest the ship be intercepted by a U-boat and the British passengers taken off into captivity. All passed off peacefully, though, and after a few days in Lisbon they managed to board a plane for England. This stage of the journey was no less hazardous: Vivien Leigh’s co-star in “Gone With the Wind”, Leslie Howard, was to be shot down and killed on the same flight the following year. But without mishaps, they arrived in Bristol on 10 January, 1941. An air raid was in progress and the anti-aircraft guns were firing. They spent the night in a bomb-damaged hotel without heating and with the outside wall of the building replaced by a flimsy tarpaulin. They had come home.
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