Olivier (30 page)

Olivier professed himself, and probably was, delighted by the prospect of becoming a father again at the age of fifty. He told the
Daily Sketch
that he thought he would prefer a girl; if it were one she would be called Katherine. He hoped that a child would cement his marriage and give Vivien Leigh a measure of stability. “Thought it might help her,” he told Tarquin. “I was worried I was sterile. Tests showed I’m as fertile as Hercules.” Perhaps the baby would have helped; Leigh had shown immense pleasure at the thought of being a mother and a nursery was
already planned for Notley. In the fourth month of her pregnancy, however, she miscarried. Though neither of them knew it at the time, the last hope for their marriage was extinguished.
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One person who had not looked forward to the birth was the putative Katherine’s half-brother, Tarquin. He had been very reasonably affronted when he read of his stepmother’s pregnancy in the newspapers rather than hearing of it from his father, and he made his resentment clear. Olivier grovelled. He had suspected that Tarquin would be upset by the news, he wrote: “Believe me, I do understand your feelings. When my father threatened me with the same possibility, I felt sick.” As a result he had put off passing on the news until it had leaked to the press and then it was too late. He urged his son to look on the bright side: “I beg of you to try and feel happy about it, it is a thing that pleads for joyful feelings.” Now the joyful feelings were in abeyance: Vivien Leigh seemed to be more settled but Finch was still in the background and the possibility of another breakdown had obviously not disappeared.
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Even when she was calm the pace of her social life remained hectic. Notley was not a place where Olivier could hope to relax, every weekend the house was filled with guests and loud with parties. In London they had abandoned Durham Cottage as being too small and spent a few months squatting in the Waltons’ house in Lowndes Square. They tried to buy a house in Lord North Street, but were pipped at the post by Harold Macmillan and finally settled for “a beautiful new flat” in Eaton Square. He and Vivien both loved it, Olivier told William Walton. “She is exceedingly bonny and better than she has been for ages, and all is merry song in the birdcage.” That was late in 1957. Walton was one of Olivier’s closest friends and he would not have sought to mislead him. He must have suspected, though, that the merry song was not going to last for long. The pace of her social life grew ever more frantic; even in a period of remission her mood swings were unpredictable; it could be no more than a lull.
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A
t the end of the Stratford season Olivier made a speech on the stage, without notes, in the course of which he thanked ninety-seven people by name; including the box-office staff. At the end he apologised in case he had forgotten anybody – “I never was any good at names.” “It was a show-off,” he cheerfully admitted. It was also one more illustration of a memory which was at the worst excellent, at the best prodigious. Roger Furse paid tribute to his “stubborn memory”, his alarming capacity to conjure up pieces of information which had been given him many years before and which the original informant had long forgotten. He had told Churchill that once he had stopped playing a part it vanished quickly from his mind. He belittled his capacities. The part had in fact not been forgotten, merely filed in a waiting tray from which it could quickly be recovered. At the age of forty-eight the sharpness of mind which had enabled him to learn a part in half the time needed by Ralph Richardson had perhaps been blunted, but he had perfected techniques which helped him retain otherwise evasive material. One of them he called “the Green Umbrella”. He was playing a part which was proving particularly intractable. Then, in a shop window, he saw a green umbrella and knew at once that it was the sort of thing the character would have owned and cherished. He bought it, carried it at every performance and never forgot another line. Not all talismans proved so miraculously effective, but in one form or another green umbrellas became a valuable weapon against the terrors of a failing memory.
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It was partly because it was not necessary to keep a long part in one’s head that he had felt the cinema to be a lesser calling than the stage. By 1956, however, that feeling had evaporated: he was immensely proud of his Shakespearean films, particularly “Henry V”. He was above all anxious to add “Macbeth” to the list and devoted almost as much time and effort to trying to set up a production as he had done to making any of its predecessors. He had been playing with the idea for several years; a screenplay and detailed production notes show how much thought he had given to the project. The problem, of course, was the cost. “Macbeth” was not a film that could be made on the cheap. The appearance of Scone, he considered, should be “a little more effective than its present-day aspect would seem to suggest that it was”. Any other thousand-year-old castle would look a thousand years old, which would clearly be unsatisfactory. It would therefore be necessary to build a castle. The early battlefield scenes could be on a small scale, but Birnam Wood could not come to Dunsinane without some significant display: at least eight hundred extras would be needed. “Henry V” had made a profit of £100,000, Olivier pleaded, “Hamlet” more than £300,000, “Richard III” £400,000, “which I think shows that the public were being educated to these Shakespearean epics”. He did not mention how long it had taken for each of them to reach these happy conclusions, nor were the figures immune to challenge; most accountants, for instance, would have said that “Richard III” was still in the red. Economically, the timing was unfortunate. “The production of ‘Macbeth’ under present conditions is, of course a highly speculative proposition,” warned John Davis of Rank.
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Mike Todd had seemed the most likely backer, but his death had ended that hope. Korda at one moment seemed interested, but he deferred a final decision until he too was dead. Filippo del Giudice claimed he could raise the money, but he inspired little confidence. William Walton thought he had found an American millionaire, but he too proved a will-o’-the-wisp. Sam Spiegel appeared to be more promising and the National Film Finance Corporation promised a loan of
£65,000. Lord Wemyss agreed to let the film be shot on his estate at Gosford in East Lothian.
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Olivier got as far as commissioning Walton to compose the music. At one point confidence was so high that a bottle of champagne was opened and a toast drunk to the new enterprise. And then came closure. “Macbeth” had been “indefinitely postponed”, Olivier told Walton. “We went on and on until things got to a point at which … the building would have had to have started in Scotland on the following Monday, and we could no longer continue without the money.” It was one of the most bitter disappointments of his life. “Don’t worry, I’m not too discouraged,” he told Tarquin. There was still a faint hope, but “even if it does come off, the recent peddling has tired my spirits and dulled my enthusiasm”. More than most people, Roger Furse knew how much Olivier had invested in the enterprise; financially but, more, emotionally. It must have been a terrible strain on his nerves and a grievous disappointment at the end: “But you’re a great boy at taking it and the reward for your courage and patience will be great.” If he meant that the film might still one day be made, he deluded himself. Olivier’s film of “Macbeth” was lost for ever. Not merely was posterity robbed of a permanent record of one of his finest performances, but another question had never been resolved. Was Gielgud right when he speculated that Vivien Leigh’s Lady Macbeth would have been stronger and a better complement to her husband if she had played it on the screen? If so, the film would have been memorable indeed.
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L.O.P. was not short of other projects. “There have been some changes in the set-up of my Company, for financial reasons, and I am not quite the little autocrat that I was,” Olivier told Michel Saint-Denis, when regretting he could not offer to bring the French company to London. It was a convenient excuse, but in fact the members of the Board – Bushell, Furse and Korda – were either not closely enough involved or too much in awe of Olivier to prevent him doing anything on which he had set his heart. This did not mean, though, that his liberty was unrestricted. He wrote to T. S. Eliot, asking if he had a new play
coming up which might be suitable for him. He was “gratified and flattered”, Eliot replied. Unfortunately, he was committed to Henry Sherek as producer, but if Olivier wanted to play “a leading part (
the
leading part) I should like nothing better”. He was finding it hard to finish the play he was working on (presumably “The Elder Statesman”) and it would be a year or more before it was likely to be ready. By then Olivier was engaged elsewhere. He did not miss much: Lord Claverton was a bleak part and when the play reached London it quickly closed. Another aborted project was a film of Graham Greene’s
The Quiet American
. Olivier admired the book, but he was nervous of it “because I would never wish to be thought anti-American”. Joe Mankiewicz, the director, assured him that he had no intention of putting “a Coca-Cola swilling, crew-cut, Mom-loving, dollar-waving Yankee on the screen”. In fact, his script did the opposite and ended up with a bland hero-cum-villain who, Greene thought, betrayed the message of the book. Olivier was still doubtful, however; if he did make the film, he insisted, there must be no changes made to the agreed script: “I’m not a difficult person, you understand, but a teensy bit too old to have my pants removed with becomingly boyish submission.” In the end he read Mankiewicz’s outline, disliked it and turned it down.
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Another project which at once attracted and repelled Olivier was a film of Nabokov’s brilliantly written story of the girl-child Lolita and her seduction by, or perhaps of, the middle-aged Humbert Humbert. In the end Olivier recoiled. “Having scrutinised the book curiously and intensely during the last week,” he told Stanley Kubrick, “I do not find my mind grasping a film conception of the subject … The chief merit of the book lies in the author’s brilliant, original and witty descriptive powers, and I can’t see how this particular virtue is photographable. I fear that, told in terms of dialogue, the subject would be reduced to the level of pornography.” It was a shrewd judgment and was proved right by the final film which, though not a disaster, was far from a success. A part of Olivier, though, still hankered after the challenge. Some years later, he was filming in Paris with Sarah Miles, his mistress at the time,
when he heard that James Mason was to play Humbert Humbert. Miles noticed that he seemed disappointed and asked whether he wished he were doing it himself. “I suppose so,” Olivier confessed. “But I’d sooner live it,” he added as an afterthought. “He gave me a sleepy look. ‘I never ever dreamt that I’d be tempted by anyone so young.’”
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One venture that did come off was the filming for television of Ibsen’s “John Gabriel Borkman”. Until then Olivier had dismissed television with lofty scorn. He didn’t want to appear “in a medium where squiggly lines appeared across the screen every time a car went past”. Television, he pronounced, was “intellectually unrespectable as well as technically primitive”. But recently, both intellectually and technically, things had got better. Olivier was still not ready to accept the new medium as being the equal of theatre or cinema, but provided the money and the producer were right he would give it a go. His agreement to play in “John Gabriel Borkman”, wrote Michael Meyer, “was a great turning point for television in Britain. At a stroke it made it respectable.” He was far from satisfied with his own performance, though; believing, in particular, that he had made a mess of the great final scene on the mountain. So strongly did he feel about it that he refused to allow the recording to be shown in America: “which was bad luck for the rest of us,” Meyer wistfully observed.
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Olivier guarded his reputation the more jealously because he felt – and was justified in feeling – that his status was unique and that anything he did or endorsed was thereby invested with an importance out of proportion to its true significance. Harold Nicolson attended a grand dinner given by Kenneth Clark for the departing French Ambassador, René Massigli. The heads of all the professions were there, he noted: “Tom Eliot for literature, the Oliviers for the theatre, Margot Fonteyn for the ballet, William Walton for music, Graham Sutherland for art.” Olivier, rightly or wrongly, was deemed by the world to be at the head of his profession: he knew it, he loved it, and yet he felt the role carried with it duties and responsibilities as well as prestige.
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His grandeur was not confined to the United Kingdom. He went to
the first night of the film of “Richard III” in Washington. He had been invited to lunch at the White House that day and had been told that it was possible but unlikely that President Eisenhower would attend. He prepared two speeches: one in case Ike was there, one in case he was not. At the last moment he was told that Eisenhower was coming. “A great lump of pride came into my throat,” he told Tarquin. “It was the first time he had ever done such a thing and it was for a British picture and all that, and I was moved beyond anything to think that our little picture had got the Queen in London and the President in Washington.” “Our little picture” was a fine example of the unconvincing self-deprecation in which he habitually indulged. He revelled in such marks of distinction. The fact that he would be an honoured guest at even the grandest houses in Britain and the United States gave him especial pleasure. During the provincial tour of “The Sleeping Prince” he and Vivien Leigh drove from one venue to another. He boasted to Tarquin that on the way they stayed with “some very sweet and rather swell friends that your pals at Eton wouldn’t be ashamed of – the Buccleuchs at Drumlanrig and the Northumberlands at Hotspur’s old haunt at Alnwick.” He would never have allowed hobnobbing with Presidents and dukes to interfere with the serious business of acting, but it was a very enjoyable bonus all the same.
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