Olivier (22 page)

Olivier suspected that he was knighted in the Birthday Honours of 1947 so that the Australians would not feel short-changed by having a mere “Mr and Mrs Olivier” in their midst. Whatever the explanation, it meant that he had caught up with Richardson. Less to his taste was the fact that he had got ahead of Coward and Gielgud who had not been
given knighthoods, it was assumed, for sexual rather than professional reasons. He wrote to them both to apologise and duly received their assurances that they bore him no grudge. Gielgud told his mother that he had had an “enchanting letter” from Olivier. Richardson had also written. “They are both touchingly sincere and generous in saying that they feel embarrassment in being recognised over me.” How Gielgud was able to measure Olivier’s sincerity is difficult to say, but, having got in first, there is no doubt that Olivier was genuinely pleased when Gielgud was finally recognised.
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The journey out set the pattern for the whole expedition. Olivier and Vivien Leigh were exhausted by the time the
Corinthic
sailed. The cast had expected them to spend most of the journey in their suite, emerging only for rehearsals and occasional communal meals. For a day or two that was the case, but long before the liner reached Cape Town Elsie Beyer, who was largely responsible for looking after the welfare and programme of the Oliviers, was reporting that they were “very, very happy and wonderfully fit … You just can’t keep them out of the public rooms, the dining saloon, the games deck, sundry cabins, etc., etc.! They are adored by everybody … and voted the best mixers ever.”
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It was Vivien Leigh who took the lead. When she was there and on form, Olivier was happy to leave public relations in her hands. “She was enormously popular in the company,” Alec McCowen said of her on one of the American tours. “She was really much more of a company lady than he was.” But Olivier was always ready to intervene when necessary. Peter Cushing had been reluctant to join the party because he did not want to be parted for so long from his new wife. “I’ll have none of that,” said Olivier. “There was too much of it forced upon most of us during the war. You bring Helen with you.” The Oliviers worked energetically as a team. Every member of the party received a poem urging them to report if they had a birthday coming up:

When the occasion arose the birthday celebrant was given a party, loaded with presents, made to feel a cherished part of the family. “I have to thank you for your ever-gentle guidance,” wrote Cushing, “your untiring efforts with my Speech and many imperfections and all the dear, friendly, sympathetic interest you have so generously given me to benefit my present and future life.” Effusions of this kind can mean very little, but there are enough such tributes paid by members of the party to convince any doubter that this ship was indeed a happy one. The Oliviers were equally happy with their companions. “The Co. are absolute angels,” Vivien Leigh told Ralph Richardson’s wife Meriel – “Mu” – “and we’re all very happy together in that direction.”
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But it was also “incredibly strenuous”, she went on. Once they were in Australia they constantly found themselves on their feet “saying a few words”. It terrified her but “Larry is getting wonderful at it”. They were not merely running a theatre company and acting most of the principal roles, they were also making a royal progress with all that that involved in the way of gracious speeches, grandiose dinners and receptions and endless visits to institutions in which their interest was something less than passionate. “I was substitute royalty,” Olivier observed of one A.N.Z.A.C. day celebration. “I didn’t actually say ‘The Queen and I’ but it was not far off.” Once was quite amusing; endlessly repeated it became a stressful chore. Required while at Melbourne to make two speeches within three hours, Olivier thought he would relieve the monotony by dropping into Australian slang, referring to his audience as “beauts” and saying that the company was having “a bonzer time”. At once he was accused of being patronising and of disparaging Australia’s cultural achievements. More often he played safe and struck a patriotic note. The British, he told a Melbourne audience, were truly grateful
for the food parcels despatched from down under, but if they thought they were provoked “by that feeling of pity which is akin to contempt” they would far rather do without. “Britain is not finished.” So far as the Australians were concerned, even better than hearing the Oliviers in the theatre was meeting them in the flesh. Everyone who was anyone thought he had the right to at least five minutes of their time. Mrs Donnell, acting as their secretary, had to call in additional help at each stopping place to deal with the fan mail and sort out the would-be callers.
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On the whole the reviews in the Australian press wavered between the enthusiastic and the ecstatic and most of the coverage given to the party was extremely friendly. Olivier for some reason however – perhaps because he was so exhausted – decided that he was being victimised. “The most unpleasant press I’ve found in the entire world,” he remembered many years later. “I’ve never known myself feel so under attack.” It is true that the press were ready to take offence if they felt their visitors were being off-hand or supercilious, but such occasions arose only rarely. “Never, and I mean NEVER,” wrote the correspondent of the Melbourne
Argus
, “have I seen the men and women of the press fall so heavily … for the charm of a couple they were all keyed up to resent.” Melbourne felt itself to be the most sophisticated of Australian cities and so was likely to be the quickest to object to any real or imagined slight. In fact the reviews of “The School for Scandal”, “Richard III” and “The Skin of Our Teeth” (with Olivier taking over the part of Mr Antrobus) were excellent. What Olivier remembered, however, was the casual comment in one newspaper: “We have better Richard IIIs here in Melbourne.” Eager to engage such significant new talent for the Old Vic, wrote Olivier, he sent out his talent scouts to track down the putative King Richard; they returned with the news that there was no professional theatre in Melbourne.
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The opening in Perth showed them some of the perils ahead. “The School for Scandal” was put on in a monster hall which had not been used for live theatre for more than ten years. “It was quite a task,” Olivier
commented, “to bash over Sheridan’s gossamer trifles in a way that would be appreciated by 2,280 people.” When he first saw the auditorium he observed gloomily: “We’d better dress up as Christians and throw ourselves to the lions.” In the event, the audience were respectful, but loath to laugh. It turned out that few of them could hear. Reluctantly Olivier agreed that people from the University could instal amplifiers; it offended his sense of theatrical propriety, but at least it meant that the subsequent audiences could take in what was going on. For the last night at Perth Vivien Leigh decreed that at the end the cast should sing “Waltzing Matilda”. “Nobody knows the words,” she was told. “It doesn’t matter,” she insisted. “The audience will join in and you can pretend to sing.” The audience did not oblige. The first verse was more or less alright but by the end “all you could hear was Vivien’s little voice singing solo”. The experiment was not repeated.
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In the mind of Olivier the various stops along the way were marked as much by the pressure of social events as by the quality of the performances. In Hobart, where the company spent three full days, only “The School for Scandal” was mounted. This might suggest an opportunity to rest. Instead Olivier found himself calling on the Governor, attending a party given by the Tasmanian Arts Council (speech required), visiting the repertory company (speech), attending the Lord Mayor’s party (speech), inspecting the local hospital and the University, spending an hour at the Governor’s tea party and giving an Old Vic party for local residents who had been helpful. After all that, asking as many members of the cast as possible to lunch, tea, dinner or beach picnics must have seemed a rest cure.
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The pressure was almost beyond endurance. By April, when the party had reached Canberra, Elsie Beyer was reporting that the Oliviers were “terribly exhausted … I had been feeling uneasy about them for the past couple of weeks because they just did not seem to be able to get on top of their feelings of exhaustion.” Then, early in July, in Sydney, on a day on which he was playing Richard III both in the afternoon and in the evening, Olivier tore a cartilage in his right knee. The pain was
acute, but he carried on with the aid of crutches: “which he used to splendid effect in ‘Richard’, culminating in breaking one over the unfortunate Brackenbury’s head, in one performance,” wrote Vivien Leigh. By the time he reached New Zealand lumbago added to his problems. He had to have injections before he could play. “Poor chap, he is going through it,” Michael Redington, a junior member of the party, wrote to his family. “I don’t know if he is going to have an operation when we get back to London.” In fact he decided to have it in New Zealand and to convalesce on the journey home, but he put the operation off to the last minute and continued to act until a few days before the time of sailing. The tour of New Zealand was overwhelmingly successful. “You may not know it,” Olivier told a reporter in Dunedin, “but you are talking to two walking corpses.” The dead can rarely have appeared more quick. The tour took them to Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin and Wellington: every house was packed, every audience appreciative. The Governor, Bernard Freyberg, sent Olivier a case of whisky. “My congratulations on your conquest of New Zealand,” he wrote, “and my thanks for all you have done. I know it has been hard work but it has been so very well worthwhile.”
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Olivier, fresh from hospital where he had had his operation, boarded the ship on a stretcher. He was carried aloft by a crane and which lowered him triumphantly on the deck: it was an exit as theatrical as any he could have contrived for himself.

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The tour of Australia had been greatly eased by the labours of a young Englishman working for the British Council, Peter Hiley. Hiley won the hearts of both Oliviers and in return adored both of them and the life they represented. By the time the party sailed for England he had become part of the family. He was to remain a vital part of Olivier’s life for the next forty years.

All his ministrations had been needed. The tour of Australia and New Zealand was marked for Olivier by two crises which seemed at the time at least as pressing as anything that was happening on the stage.
The first was resolved relatively easily. Before he left England he had encouraged, or at any rate authorised, his sister Sybille to write his biography – more because it would give her a chance of earning a little badly needed money than because he thought she would do it well or that there was much point in writing about a life that was far from complete. She went to work and by July had finished a first draft. The publisher was keen to have it in the bookshops by October. Olivier took fright. He was worried, he told his agent and confidant, Cecil Tennant, about the biography appearing without his knowing what it said. “Really think it should be inspected by one of us,” he cabled. Tennant had no intention of accepting sole responsibility. The text was sent to Olivier in Australia. “You MUST react very quickly,” Tennant urged him, as otherwise the publisher would have begun to set the text and it would be too late to alter it.
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Editing a manuscript of some 70,000 words on top of all his other responsibilities can hardly have been a welcome challenge, but he undertook it with characteristic thoroughness. He made a lot of changes, some factual, many more of emphasis or phrasing, then suddenly repented of the whole exercise. “I must implore you not to publish biography as it is now,” he cabled his sister. Too much of it, “involving people’s feelings”, was inaccurate, and the balance of the book required a lot of thought. If it went ahead as it was he would feel bound to dissociate himself from it “in ways that would only hurt and discredit you”. The disgruntled publisher had to be bought off and Sybille compensated for her wasted work, but in the end Olivier had his way: the draft was abandoned and now rests, with Olivier’s amendments, with the rest of his archive in the British Library.
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Reread today, it is hard to see why he took so strongly against it. It was not a great work of literature but it was quite as well written as Olivier’s own later efforts. It was affectionate throughout and the occasional blemishes which it revealed in its hero’s behaviour and character were far less acerbic in tone than the self-criticism to which Olivier from time to time subjected himself. Sybille would have been happy to
accept any changes that her brother wished to make. The most probable explanation is that, when it came to the point, Olivier could not bear that his sister should write his life. Many years later, when Mark Amory seemed set to ghost the autobiography, Olivier decided that he would instead do it himself. As with the plays or films that he produced, directed and starred in, he had to be in charge. If some outsider had been undertaking his biography he could have affected indifference; when his sister was involved it came close to home, he could not avoid a measure of responsibility. But for Olivier a measure of responsibility was an intolerable concept. Too late Sybille discovered what she should have known from the beginning; her brother was generous, loyal and affectionate but where his own territory was involved he would tolerate no trespassing. The responsibility must be his and his alone.

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The second crisis had consequences far more profound. On 15 July, 1948, Olivier received a letter from the Chairman of the Old Vic, Lord Esher, thanking him for all he had done to build up the company but saying that the Board felt that in future it should not be run by actors but by some full-time administrator who would devote himself exclusively to the work. The contracts of Olivier, Richardson and John Burrell would not be renewed after the end of the 1948–9 season. Rumours that something untoward was in the offing had reached Olivier a few weeks before. “Private and confidential communication from Old Vic makes many changes in future outlook,” he had cabled Cecil Tennant in mid-June. “Would you contact Burrell immediately and seek confidential information?” Burrell does not seem to have had much idea as to what was going on; at all events nothing had prepared Olivier for the terse dismissal which he had now received.
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