Olivier (60 page)

Emboldened by the friendly reception which his autobiography had received, Olivier decided to write another book.
On Acting
was to be the repository of a lifetime’s experience, the wisdom and understanding which he had gleaned and which he was uniquely qualified to pass on to the world. For many hours he talked to Gawn Grainger, a young actor who had become Olivier’s confidant and close friend, and who was expected to do most of the work of putting Olivier’s thoughts on paper. There was to be no repetition of the moment when Olivier thrust Mark Amory aside and took on the business of writing his autobiography himself. He knew that the task was beyond him.
On Acting
was interesting and modestly instructive, it was better written than it would have been if its originator had undertaken the task himself, but Olivier did not put one word of the main text on paper. He wrote in his preface that, when he finished
Confessions of an Actor
, he thought that he had done with writing for ever, but now, here he was, “sitting with my nose
buried into the blank page again”, suffering all the agonies of authorship. “I typed the bit about the writing of his book with my teeth clenched,” Olivier’s secretary told Gawn Grainger. “However, you and I know, don’t we? As long as there’s two of you it doesn’t make it quite so bad.” At least, in his will, Olivier left the royalties for
On Acting
to “Gawn Grainger, who wrote the book with me”.
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David Niven wrote to tell Olivier that he had been diagnosed with motor neuron disease. The end result could be quite horrid, he said: inability to move one’s limbs or to talk but with the brain still clear. “I’m afraid, dearest friend,” he went on, “that I have discovered that I am made of different stuff from you. Your shining example of blazing courage in the face of one vicious piece of bad luck after another
should
have inspired me; but alas! I know myself for what I have always suspected – I am a gibbering coward!” Olivier’s courage still blazed but with every month that passed it seemed that there was less and less for it to feed on. Olivier was bored. He lacked the intellectual hinterland which would have provided a profitable resource: he had lost the habit of listening to music; he read few books; he found abstract discussion tedious if not impossible – he knew how to act and to direct other people in their acting, that was all. At home, at the Malt House, he would fitfully revive when old friends came who would gossip with him about the theatre; then he would sink back into a stupor, not actively unhappy but getting little joy from life. Much of the time he was alone. Joan Plowright’s career meant that frequently she was in London. His children had full lives of their own. When people did come he sometimes tended to be contentious and bad-tempered. Matthew Burton stayed with the family as a teenager. He remembered how Olivier enjoyed outraging his wife and daughters. “Women are no bloody use in a film set when they’ve got the Curse,” he would complain; then, not yet satisfied that he had been sufficiently annoying, would continue: “They are
incapable
of work one week every four!” “Being cantankerous was both sport and revenge for him,” said Burton. “He was regimented, medicated, exercised and mollycoddled and, although
he needed help, he hated being thought incapable.”
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It was the powerlessness which most distressed him. For years his son Richard had been taking over responsibility for his affairs and estate, proceeding more and more without reference to Olivier himself. He remembered “the flashes of bitter resentment” that would cross his father’s face when he saw his wife and son busily making plans for him and admitted to deriving some sadistic pleasure from speaking softly so that Olivier was excluded: “I revelled in the opportunity to punish him, for being away, for being ill, for taking mother away to work, whatever it was.” At first Olivier would revolt, protest indignantly, storm out of the room in injured dignity; gradually he became apathetic, accepted his exclusion with sullen resentment. His memory got worse and worse. The
Daily Mirror
reported that he was using a teleprompter for his television roles; Olivier was offended but he knew that it was true. When at home, he found that he was constantly uncertain what he was supposed to be doing next. Was he going to London that afternoon? Or tomorrow morning? “I daren’t keep asking because I know I’ve asked at least three times … I daren’t ask Joan; Dickie gets impatient; Oh God, it’s so awful!”
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His memory, though faltering, was not yet defunct. When Tom Stoppard arrived at one of the parties given to celebrate Olivier’s eightieth birthday, he was greeted with: “I remember you. You’re the one with big teeth.” The birthday was at least a landmark in his ever less eventful life, even if it reminded him of something he would far rather not have known. They had laid on a spectacular jamboree in his honour in the Olivier Theatre: John Mortimer devised the entertainment; Geraldine McEwan, Peggy Ashcroft and Albert Finney took part; Peter Hall appeared as Shakespeare. When Olivier arrived, wrote Hall’s successor as Director, Richard Eyre, “there was a wail from the crowd of almost Iranian intensity, and out of the car stepped Olivier, smaller, almost unrecognisably so, a very, very frail man supported by Joan Plowright”. At the climax of the evening a large white birthday cake was carried in, out of which erupted his daughter, Julie-Kate, to wish her
father a happy birthday and to start the singing. The audience turned to Olivier and launched into a standing ovation that seemed as if it would never end: “He smiled, an enchanting childlike smile of pure pleasure. He was a man for whom applause was almost better than life itself.” And then it was back to seclusion at the Malt House and wondering what, if anything, was going to happen next.
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Richard Olivier, worried about his father’s deepening depression, persuaded him to see a Jungian analyst, Desmond Biddulph. Olivier welcomed his visits, clearly viewing him as an audience for his anecdotes rather than a physician. Biddulph found that he was always impeccably dressed and very much in control of himself. His short-term memory had almost gone, however, and he lived very much in the past. He reverted constantly to his life with Vivien Leigh and reproached himself for not having played a more active role at the time of her first serious breakdown. He took modest pride in the achievements of his children, but seemed to view them, as indeed everything else, with uneasy detachment. His closest relationship, Biddulph judged, was with his ginger cat.
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His relationship with Joan Plowright was tenuous. They had been living largely separate lives for the last ten years. He was convinced that he was being excluded from the inner family. Once, when Plowright was talking to Derek Granger at one end of the dining table, Olivier asked what they were discussing, then got angrily to his feet, demanded “Does anyone know where an unwanted old man can go to find a home?” and stalked from the room. He allowed himself to be coaxed back by one of his daughters, but made no attempt to conceal his resentment. Plowright accepted her responsibility for his welfare and preserved the proprieties. To an outsider it seemed a united ménage. “I was so moved by your spirit and tenderness to him,” wrote a friend after his death. “What a sadness to lose him, and what patience and love you showed during his time of illness.” Patience certainly; love, perhaps less. “I still loved him,” Plowright insists. “The love was a bit squashed and battered, but it was still there.” But there is a limit to the amount of squashing
and battering that even the strongest love can survive. For years before he entered the final phase, he must have been difficult to live with. He became obsessed with the idea of suicide. He did not go to Joan Plowright’s first night in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” but instead interrupted the dinner party after the performance with a telephone call. How should he kill himself? he asked. Gas? Stones in the pocket and a plunge into the river? He reverted to the question at dinner at home and insisted on conducting a discussion on the subject. Plowright once told him that she could not endure this sort of life much longer. He launched into a bitter analysis of his own shortcomings: “The fact is that I don’t know who I am … I’ve played all these parts and I don’t know who I am. I’m a hollow man.” The worst thing was that to a great extent she agreed with him. In the last few years of Olivier’s life Plowright was increasingly asking herself whether she was sharing her life with a real human being.
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It seemed for a moment as if religion might provide part at least of his needs. At the end of 1983, when Olivier was in hospital recovering from the removal of kidney, Alec Guinness called on him, armed with a handsome jar of caviar. He had intended just to leave the caviar with a suitable message, but to his surprise – “After all, I was not an intimate chum” – Olivier insisted on seeing him. He was most affectionate in his greeting. “Thank God you’ve come! I’ve been thinking of you so much. Help me! Help me! I want to become a Catholic.” Guinness havered, but eventually suggested that Olivier should see Father Nugent from Farm Street or some other sophisticated priest. “I have an idea he thinks it was all just a question of acknowledging the Pope’s supremacy. He said a couple of times: ‘I believe in transubstantiation, you know’. He was very sweet and I felt easier with him than I have in forty-eight years.” A few days later he wrote to suggest another man whom Olivier might like to consult. “I’m a pretty lousy Catholic,” he admitted, “though I love the Church (in spite of some of its ghastly supermarket modern ways) but if you want me to call on you for half an hour or so when you are out of hospital, I’d be only too happy to visit you and chat.”
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Olivier does not seem to have taken up the invitation. Nor was there much further evidence of his new-found quest for faith. He had told Denys Blakelock as long ago as 1931 that he felt he could “no longer throw in his lot with any organised religion” and from that time he had done little more than conform to the social shibboleths of the Church of England. At some point during the war Vivien Leigh told Cyril Cusack that “Larry was going through a religious phase”. “But I’ll soon get him out of that,” she added. She seems to have succeeded. Max Adrian, for one, noted that he was certain Olivier had “found great solace in religion when he has been troubled emotionally”. But it does not seem that this amounted to much. The prevailing picture is of one who was not prepared categorically to deny the existence of a deity but who gave the matter little thought. The Revd John Hencher had once been an actor, then had joined the Church, but in 1963 wanted to revert to the stage. Olivier advised him to think twice and then think again. “I am deeply sympathetic to your problem, but I feel that, if one is called to the Church, one can assume it has been from the right quarter, whereas this is by no means certain with the stage.” It was hardly a clarion call to rally to the faith, but nor was it the counsel of a confirmed disbeliever. Richard Olivier for one felt that his father, to the end, sat on the religious fence. There is no reason to believe that he was consciously insincere when he spoke to Guinness or Adrian but always he sought to adapt his personality to suit the person with whom he happened to be talking. Guinness and Adrian wanted to find him spiritually aware; then spiritually aware he would be.
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During his closing years Olivier was preoccupied by approaching death. “I wish my body to be cremated,” he wrote, then changed his mind and substituted the word “buried”. From time to time he tinkered with his will; in the final version his eldest son, Tarquin, was to get 10 per cent of his estate, or £25,000, whichever was the smaller, the Malt House was to be Joan Plowright’s for life; as to the residue, 40 per cent was for Plowright, 60 per cent divided among their three children. One portrait
of him was left to the Garrick Club, another to the National Theatre. A few friends – Peggy Ashcroft, John Mills, Mu Richardson, Rachel Kempson and other intimates – were invited to choose from a collection of “smaller objects” which were specified in his will. John Gielgud was left “my early edition of the play ‘Hamlet’”. He lived with the thought of his death. Alan Webb called on him by appointment and was kept waiting. Eventually a rather dishevelled Olivier appeared. He apologised and said that he had been lying down imagining he was lying in state in Westminster Abbey.
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But he did not go gentle into that good night. Diana Quick said that when, in “The Dance of Death”, Olivier got to the line “I don’t want to die”, his voice always faltered. The world was a stage, the stage was a place where he had always gloried, the thought of an empty stage, a world without him, was intolerable. Gawn Grainger once asked him what it was like to know that he would end up in the Abbey. “After a long, thoughtful pause he said: ‘Westminster Abbey will be just as cold as the village graveyard. I don’t want to die.’” While the body weakened, the will to live remained as strong as ever. Gielgud saw him only a few days before he died. Traditionally, Gielgud was credited with disastrous tactlessness. This occasion proved to be no exception. “My God, Larry, I thought you were dead,” he exclaimed. “I mean, dying. I mean, getting better.” Like everyone in his circle Olivier relished Gielgud’s gaffes; this example may not have been so welcome.
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The family organised an eighty-second birthday party, knowing that it would be his last, not even certain whether he would survive to enjoy it or would be able to recognise the few old friends who were invited. Richard Olivier described the final stages in the days that followed: “that grey face, rasping away for three days when lesser mortals would have given up the ghost”. He was intermittently conscious, muttering when he was very near the end: “I don’t want this.” Did he mean he did not want painful life or impending death? his son wondered. Probably the latter. The last words Edna O’Brien heard him say were: “Oh sun, oh bloody sun, shine on me.” Were they a semi-conscious echo of Oswald
Alving’s last awful appeal at the end of Ibsen’s “Ghosts”: “Mother, give me the sun”? In any case, they do not suggest the mood of someone who sees the darkness approaching and who accepts it gladly.
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