Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (66 page)

During the time of Vivien’s greatest emotional distress, she played Blanche night after night for eight grueling months, enduring attacks from critics who asked, “What is Scarlett O’Hara doing in this garbage?” Tennessee’s play was also dismissed as “not fit for human consumption.”

After the curtain came down on Blanche every night, Vivien’s alcohol consumption reached new highs.

After 326 exhausting performances of
Streetcar
on the London stage, Vivien joined the producer, Alexander Korda, aboard his yacht for a sail along the Mediterranean.

It was during this trip that a rumor was spread the Vivien had gotten involved with a “sensitive” seventeen-year-old beach boy she’d met on the sands at Cannes. Korda privately told friends, “I think Vivien was just reenacting a scene from
Streetcar
in which Blanche flirts with such a young boy.”

Three years after the 1947 release of
Streetcar’s
opening on Broadway, and about a year after its 1949 opening in London, because of commitments in London to his Laurence Olivier Productions, Olivier remained behind as Vivien flew west, ultimately heading for Los Angeles. There, for $100,000, she had signed to appear as Blanche in the screen version of
A Streetcar Named Desire
, a film eventually released in 1951.

She was greeted with a Hollywood headline, “
SCARLETT O’HARA’S BACK IN TOWN
” as Vivien, after an absence of more than a decade, returned to the scene of her former glory. When facing overly deferential reporters, calling her Lady Olivier, she shocked journalists with the statement, “Her Ladyship is fucking bored with such formality and prefers to be known as Miss Vivien Leigh.”

Charles Feldman had arranged for the Oliviers to inhabit the same Cold-water Canyon house, with its egg-shaped pool, where they’d stayed when they had filmed
That Hamilton Woman (aka Lady Hamilton)
during the autumn of 1940. Vivien set about making it more intimate and homelike for Olivier’s return to Hollywood.

On the Warners’ lot, she was given the former dressing room of Bette Davis, who had departed after the disastrous box office returns of
Beyond the Forest
. There was a certain irony here. Had William Wyler directed
Streetcar
as originally planned, he’d have preferred Davis as the actress to play Blanche. Consequently, Davis ended up losing both of the roles that brought Vivien Oscars, beginning with Scarlett O’Hara.

Tennessee arranged a reunion with Vivien in Hollywood, where he com plained of censorship from the Breen office, which refused to allow the word “homosexual” to be even mentioned in relation to Blanche’s dead husband or her promiscuity with military men. The Breen office also wanted to eliminate the suggestion that Blanche, prior to her arrival on the doorstep of Stanley and Stella in New Orleans, had been sexually involved with a seventeen-year-old boy.

A key reference within the Broadway stage version was the line, “I came into a room and found my young husband with an older man who had been his friend for years.”

Broadway audiences clearly understood within that line the implication of homosexuality. But for the film version, the line was rewritten. Movie audiences heard, “He wasn’t like other people.”

Vivien’s dear friend, Robert Helpmann, was also in Los Angeles at the time, and Tennessee sometimes joined them on their forays to the clubs of Hollywood. During this, the pre-Stonewall era, gay bars didn’t exist as such, but there were many taverns where those seeking same-sex intimacies with a stranger could achieve that aim.

“We were looking for tricks,” Tennessee said, “and Robert knew how to maneuver. If Vivien and I couldn’t pick up something on our own, he could. Many of the men in this bar were bisexuals, and it wasn’t difficult finding a handsome young man who’d want to fuck Scarlett O’Hara. The homosexual men in these bars loved Vivien and crowded around her. Larry might not desire her, but she soon learned that dozens of handsome young men wanted to be with her. Unlike her, Robert and I often had to pay.”

“California has the most delicious men on the planet,” Robert claimed. “These hunks come here to break into the movies, and the pick-ups are easy to come by.”

Helpmann told Tennessee, “Vivien is certainly getting into her character of Blanche. She’s picking up young guys like her character, a sort of Method acting approach.”

Although she had strangers in her bed, Los Angeles itself was a stranger to her. The city had changed, and in her opinion, for the worse. A horrible yellow blanket of smog lay over Greater Los Angeles, stinging her eyes and intensifying her coughing spasms.

Warner Brothers finally met Brando’s demand of $75,000 to appear in the film version of
A Streetcar Named Desire
. Elia Kazan, who would direct the film, held out for the original Broadway cast. Consequently, Karl Malden and Kim Hunter were given the supporting roles that had made them famous on Broadway.

Jack Warner had preferred Burt Lancaster to Brando, but acquiesced to Kazan’s vision. Warner, however, definitely didn’t want Jessica Tandy. “She’s known on Broadway, but except for a few rotten movies, no one knows who she is,” the studio chief said. “Olivia de Havilland should do it, but the bitch is demanding $175,000. I’ve got Vivien Leigh for $100,000. Her husband is making a movie in Hollywood, and the nympho wants to be with the cocksucker.” Warner was referring, of course, to Laurence Olivier and his well-known homosexual proclivities.

“I can’t stand the limey cunt!” Brando shouted at Elia Kazan after the first three days of shooting
A Streetcar Named Desire
. “Miss Vivien Leigh. Miss Scarlett O’Hara. Now Lady Olivier. ‘Good morning, Mr. Brando.’” He imitated her accent perfectly. “‘Good afternoon, Mr. Brando.’ She’ll suffocate me with her politeness. I can’t wait for the rape scene!”

“If the censors will allow it,” Kazan cautioned.

The first time Brando sat down to talk to Vivien, he found a vulnerable character, not the “prissy English bitch” he’d envisioned. She reached out and gently touched his hand, as she spoke of the first time she’d read
A Streetcar Named Desire
in 1948. “I was touched by the haunting quality of Blanche,” she said. “The play seemed to speak to a woman inside myself that lives within my own heart. Blanche DuBois is the
animus
of my own being. Talk about Method acting!”

That remark seemed to win Brando to her side. After that, and until the end of the eight-week shoot, he became almost inseparable from her.

He was full of questions about how she’d fared in the London stage production of
Streetcar
, which had been directed by her husband, Laurence Olivier. He was also anxious to learn of the feuds Olivier had catalyzed with Irene Selznick and Tennessee over cuts Olivier had made before the play opened in the West End of London.

One Saturday morning he drove her into the desert so she could breathe the fresh air. She’d had a struggle with tuberculosis and was having a hard time breathing in Los Angeles. “It’s been ten years since Larry and I were here. Now there’s this bloody smog. You’re used to it. I’m not. It’s like a yellow blanket that hangs over everything and doesn’t go away. It stings my eyes and fills my lungs with poison.”

He told her he knew of an inn thirty miles away that was outside the smog’s radius. She could rest there for the weekend.

“When I first came to Los Angeles to play Scarlett,” she said, “I remember oranges everywhere. Now those orange trees have vanished like my virginity.”

“From what I was told, you and Larry had to live as secret lovers the last time you were in Hollywood,” he said. “Now you are the married Sir Laurence and Lady Olivier. The King and Queen of the London theater.”

“It’s a respectability I don’t deserve, and a social responsibility from the throne I don’t want. As you’ll get to know me, and I hope you will, there is nothing respectable about me. In London I pick up taxi drivers and fuck them.”

Startled, he looked at her. Had he heard right? Did she actually say that?

“Don’t be surprised,” she said. “I’m just as whorish as Blanche DuBois was, taking on all those soldiers at that army base.”

She paused, lighting her own cigarette, as if remembering something he’d just said. “Forgive me, but you said Larry. Do you know my husband, Sir Laurence?”

“I met him a few years ago in New York when he came to see me in a play,” he said. “I was very honored.”

“I won’t bother to ask you how well you knew Sir Laurence,” she said, sucking the smoke deeply into her tainted lungs.

“It’s just as well, because I won’t tell you.”

“Growing up in the theater, I am used to such things. I never quiz Larry about his private life. His first wife was a lesbian, you know. When he’s with Richard Burton, Danny Kaye, Noël Coward, I ask no questions. Larry asks no questions of me either. I don’t love him. We are only Sir Laurence and Lady Olivier in front of the press. When our pictures aren’t being taken, we lead completely separate lives.”