Olivier (25 page)

But Olivier was still concerned about his son’s future. Shortly after he was ejected from the Old Vic, he told Jill Esmond that he was determined to own a theatre before he died, “with the vague idea that Tarkie might like to inherit it”. He never achieved this ambition but he at least made a start in that direction when, in 1949, he took a four-year lease on
the St James’s Theatre. It was a decisive step forward for the limited company which he had set up in 1946, Laurence Olivier Productions, usually referred to as L.O.P. In origin L.O.P. was little more than a tax avoidance scheme whereby the Oliviers could channel all their earnings into a company and make that company responsible for most of their expenses. At its first meeting Anthony Bushell, one of his closest friends, was appointed business manager. Cecil Tennant, the managing director, announced at the second meeting that £2,000 had been borrowed from Laurence Olivier, interest being paid at the commercial rate, and that the first substantial undertaking had been the purchase of a Rolls Royce. It was all very cosy, certainly legal, and, from a tax point of view, beneficial. At first the only directors were the Oliviers; as the activities of the company became more ambitious, Roger Furse and Alexander Korda were added to the Board. Now, in occupation of the St James’s Theatre, L.O.P. was taking a new initiative. Leslie Banks wrote to say how thrilled he was that “an Actor has managed to PRISE his way back into real Actor Management again. It is the reward for all the imagination, the vitality, the team-work, the loyalty to a craft, the family feeling in a curious way, of us English actors.”
¹⁴

The pity is that imagination, vitality and teamwork were not enough. The St James’s Theatre, though superficially attractive, had bad acoustics and sight lines so deplorable that only once, when the Oliviers were playing “Caesar and Cleopatra” eight feet up centre stage on the paws of the Sphinx, were both leading players visible to the whole of the audience. Financially speaking, Olivier was not a good manager. He would never accept second-best, whether in terms of cast, scenery or costumes, and the cost of his productions was so great that, even with a full house, the margin of profit was only £60 a week. Perhaps most of all the age of the actor-manager was over, not because there was no-one fit to wear the mantle of Booth or Irving but because, as Tyrone Guthrie put it, “the garment has become unwearable. A general devolution of tasks has taken place. The production of a play is now undertaken by a corps of specialists.” Even with a powerful machine behind him Olivier was
to find it overwhelmingly difficult to act, direct and at the same time run the National Theatre. At the St James’s Theatre he was working more or less single-handed.
¹⁵

To make matters worse, his choice of plays, though not always unsuccessful, failed to generate any great popular success. The first, James Bridie’s new play “Daphne Laureola”, was in fact put on before he had acquired the St James’s Theatre and was still at the Old Vic. Wyndham’s, where it first played, was back-to-back with the New Theatre where the Old Vic was still based. It starred Edith Evans and there was a part for Olivier’s Australian protégé, Peter Finch. Harold Hobson was awestruck by the audacity of this enterprise. “It is doubtful,” he wrote, “if in the 350-year history of the London theatre, there exists any really comparable case: when a world-famous actor, appearing himself in one theatre, presented a world-famous actress in a rival attraction at a theatre only a few yards away … Sir Laurence unites in himself an influence in the cinema and the theatre never before concentrated in the hands of one man.” The play itself was less remarkable than the circumstances of its production but it did well enough to encourage Olivier to move into his own theatre.
¹⁶

For his first play at the St James’s he turned to the most fashionable dramatist of the day, Christopher Fry. Viewed in hindsight, it is hard to understand how this sophisticated, frothy and basically frivolous versifier was once ranked with T. S. Eliot as the inaugurator of a new age of poetic drama. His words sounded very nice, though – even if he did not have much to say – and “Venus Observed” gave the public what it wanted and had come to expect. Olivier’s extravagance was liberally displayed. He himself headed a powerful cast, a six-piece orchestra was employed, the women’s dresses were all changed after the first night, Roger Furse let himself go with the sets. The author was expelled from rehearsals after the first read-through: “Since I’m both acting and directing,” Olivier told him, “I should only show off if you were here.” Accepting this somewhat dubious premise, Fry withdrew and the next thing he heard was that the dress rehearsal was scheduled for the
following day. He rang up to find the time. “Well, you’re a nice author, I must say,” said Olivier. “Never coming near us!” “Larry, I’ve been waiting for you to ask me to come,” Fry protested. “Well, it’s too late now.” It was too late: the production was not at all what Fry had been expecting, but though the two men talked until four in the morning, not much could be done about it. Olivier had other, to him more pressing matters on his mind. On the one occasion outside the theatre when Fry thought a serious discussion was beginning, Olivier’s only question was: “What sort of nose do you think … ?” “It’s a wonderful success,” Olivier told Garson Kanin, “and I am so very happy in what I like to kid myself is my own theatre.” The play ran for seven months, which was success enough, but by the end of its run it had not generated enough profit to justify the enterprise on commercial grounds. For the cast, though, it had been a rewarding experience. “The last six months have been for me the most exciting, inspiring, and indeed the happiest that I can remember,” wrote Denholm Elliott. “Thank you for teaching me so much, so patiently, and for pretending not to notice my nervousness at the beginning of the run.”
¹⁷

Rex Harrison took over Olivier’s role when the play opened in the United States. “Larry and I got on splendidly,” Harrison wrote. “I’d never worked with him before, and now I found him a marvellous director.” In fact, according to Patrick Garland, the two men, “so similar in many ways, egocentric, supremely gifted, insecure, envious, deeply attractive to women”, disliked each other. When Harrison asked whether some role could be found for him at the National Theatre, Olivier rebuffed him: “For the sake of the
amour propre
of the company I do not want to practise more than I can help a constant settling on top of them of visiting stars.” The philosophy was sound enough but it would have been more convincing if Olivier had not already engaged Peter O’Toole, every inch a visiting star, for his first production. Harrison, anyway, was not pleased. When some years later he was invited to play opposite Olivier in “The Dance of Death” his reply is said to have been: “Dance of Death? Only on your grave, dear boy.”
¹⁸

In the first years of L.O.P. at the St James’s that was as good as it got. One aborted disaster was “The Damascus Blade” – a play by a new writer called Bridget Boland. Noël Coward dismissed it as “badly constructed, fairly tedious” and the public concurred. John Mills had been persuaded to play the principal role and, like others before him, said that he had never before encountered a director “who had so meticulously worked out every single move and every single piece of business”. On the whole he thought the system was successful but, personally he would have preferred “more freedom at the early rehearsals”. Whether because of or in spite of Olivier’s directing – probably the latter – the play limped painfully around the provinces. By the time it reached Edinburgh it was clear a London opening would be calamitous. What followed illustrates Olivier’s striking propensity to rewrite history to suit his view of what should have happened. In his memoirs he says that John Mills got cold feet and begged him not to bring it to London; Olivier was reluctant to let down the author but “valued Johnnie’s friendship too much to refuse”. In the interviews on which his memoirs were to be based his recollections were still more stark. It had the makings of an excellent play, but Mills “hadn’t the courage to go on with it … I hated giving way… He was unfortunately a great friend; if he’d not been I’d have said: ‘You fucking get in there and earn your money!!’” In fact he wrote to Mills: “Listen, Johnnie, you are my dearest friend. The last thing I want to do is to bring you into town and have you find yourself with a flop on your hands. Would you be very upset if we accepted defeat and called it off?” To Leslie Banks he explained that the play “didn’t add up, if you know what I mean”, and was not “a worthy enough thing for dear Johnnie’s return to London”.
¹⁹

Increasingly Olivier seemed to be casting around in search of something that would fill his theatre. He asked Evelyn Waugh if he could have an option on
The Loved One
, his novel about American funeral practices. Olivier “thinks it will make a film”, Waugh told his agent incredulously. “He must be insane.” (In fact it was made into a film – not very successfully in 1965 with John Gielgud in the cast.) Waugh thought Olivier’s
idea so eccentric that he asked Anthony Bushell whether there had been a muddle and the offer should have referred to
Brideshead Revisited
: “If so I should be most excited, as I believe there is a really good film in it and an excellent part for Lady Olivier, tho’ I am less sure about Sir Laurence.” Olivier had probably not even read
The Loved One
. Certainly he did not mean
Brideshead
; it was to be more than thirty years before he played the tiny but imposing role of the aged Lord Marchmain in the television series.
²⁰

Don’t come back to Britain, Olivier urged a female acquaintance who had written to him, presumably hoping that he would offer her a job. “Life is not at all easy. There are restrictions, there is austerity amounting to what would certainly seem like hardship to people not used to it. We have taken rather a toss with our last two plays, and so are having to be careful in any case.” L.O.P. was not on the rocks, but it was close to them. Something special would be needed for 1951, the year of the Festival of Britain.
²¹

M
eanwhile, the Oliviers’ marriage wore inexorably more thin. The trouble was that they were both too self-centred, too preoccupied by their own lives, to address themselves fully to the problems of the other. Olivier genuinely cared about Vivien Leigh’s career and worked actively to forward it, but in the last resort his own concerns took first place. Leigh admitted and admired her husband’s greatness, but was quick to resent it if she felt that her own preoccupations were taking second place in his mind. In the first fury of their passion they had been prepared to make serious sacrifices for each other; when the relationship subsided into something nearer the humdrum they grew to resent the demands that their marriage imposed on them. To the outsider their life together seemed idyllic, but this was more a reflection of the fact that they were both professional actors than that all was well between them. She became slightly bored with him, he grew irritated by what he saw as her affectations and pretensions. They were falling out of love.

In London their home was still Durham Cottage. Vivien Leigh, who had admirable taste and an indefatigable appetite for forays into the more expensive zones of shopping, furnished it lavishly: “It was tiny and sweet and bijou,” remembered a friend of the Olivier’s, Anne Norwich. “I had an awful feeling of Larry being like an unfortunate bull in a china shop … I could hardly move for objects; it was an almost claustrophobic prettiness that Vivien surrounded herself with.” It was unequivocally
her
house and except in his crowded and defiantly untidy study, Olivier always seemed slightly out of place. Leigh was not good at being alone and loved to surround herself with a band of decorative and chattering friends, not necessarily theatrical but almost always smart. Olivier, on the other hand, disliked parties and was happiest when
à deux
with an attractive woman or gossiping over a glass of whisky with one or two old cronies. Athene Seyler remembered a wonderful party at Durham Cottage but also recalled that “Larry, who had been filming all day and was very tired and rather dirty, suddenly came in and saw his cottage filled with people all drinking and shouting and talking, and she really paid no attention to him at all … He went off to bed. She wasn’t always very considerate.”
¹

Durham Cottage was not their only house. Towards the end of the war Olivier had bought for a bargain price Notley Abbey, a semi-stately home near Thame in Oxfordshire. Ralph Richardson had left his mark at Durham Cottage when he arrived there for a party armed with fireworks which he set off in the garden. A rocket went astray, zoomed through the window of the recently decorated drawing room and did much damage. When in due course he was invited to Notley, the memory of this mishap disturbed him. “I won’t put my foot in it this time,” he promised. Olivier took him up into the attic to see the frescoes on the ceiling of what had been the great hall. He had made a narrow walkway from which visitors could admire the artwork. Richardson expressed rapturous enthusiasm, stepped back to get a better view, put his foot in it and brought down the ceiling in the bedroom below.
²

Much of Notley, including the ruins of the Abbey itself and the Abbot’s Lodging in which the Oliviers lived, dated from the Middle Ages. Cardinal Wolsey is supposed to have lived there while Christ Church, Oxford, was being built. According to the somewhat starry-eyed estate agent, it had a ghost, a dining room that would comfortably seat twelve, ten bed- and dressing rooms, a wine cellar, a potato room, fifty-six acres of land, eleven rooms for grooms, menservants etc. – in fact all the appurtenances desirable in the residence of a distinguished
actor who wished to establish himself as a country gentleman. “I never had anything in my life I loved like that house,” Olivier remembers. “It was absolutely idolatry … I’ve always been over-romantic about antiquity.” Vivien Leigh, after some initial doubts, took to the concept and decorated wholeheartedly: too much so, in the minds of some. Kenneth Clark, the art historian, admitted that he had preferred it before it had been embellished: “The drawing room, when it was finished, was too big for me and made me feel I was staying in Petworth.”
³