Olivier (33 page)

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One of the more interesting films Olivier made in this period was an adaptation of Bernard Shaw’s “The Devil’s Disciple”. He co-starred with the American duo, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas. He said in his memoirs that he was tired, depressed and far from at his best; also, that he found it impossible to remember which of his co-actors was which – he habitually addressed Burt Lancaster as “Kirk”. Privately he admitted that Lancaster, who was co-producer but not director, infuriated him by forever making suggestions as to how he should play his part, the British soldier General Burgoyne. In the end he took Lancaster aside and said apologetically: “I wonder if you could help me. I’m sure I’m being stupid but I’m finding it a little difficult to apprehend what it is you’re trying to say to me. Do me a favour, let’s go somewhere quiet and you read to me the scene as it ought to be done.” Flattered, Lancaster obliged and launched into his rendering, then became self-conscious under Olivier’s quizzical gaze, and came to a stammering halt.
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The following year Olivier was reunited with Kirk Douglas in the film “Spartacus”, a no-expenses-spared epic in which Olivier played a Roman general and Douglas a heroic Thracian slave. This time it was Douglas who took on the role of mentor; again Olivier became irritated, again he invited his co-star to give his rendering of the part, again the American broke down in the face of Olivier’s rapt attention. “It was all very shocking and very childish,” Olivier admitted, “but I didn’t care to be taught acting by those two.” He had read Howard Fast’s novel on which the film was based and thought that it had tremendous potential, but when the script arrived he decided it was “pretty awful. The more money they pour into a film, the more ordinary and conventional they make it.” Fortunately a fair amount of the money came his way – $250,000, to be precise – and since the part made small demands on his skills and he had old friends like Peter Ustinov and Jean Simmons in the cast, it was a relatively painless way of earning his living. Kirk Douglas, he told Tarquin, was a good actor, but “he does not feel heroic enough unless he is being fearfully physical all the time, consequently the thing is gummed up with callisthenics and flagellation”.
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Charlton Heston was another American super-star with whom Olivier found himself dealing. Heston had already played four major roles on Broadway when, early in 1960, he appeared in Benn Levy’s “The Tumbler”, with Olivier as director. He might therefore have resented Olivier’s somewhat dictatorial style. Unlike Lancaster and Douglas, however, he viewed Olivier with some awe. “Today I lunched with Larry, which I’ve not yet been able to call him, of course,” he wrote at the end of 1959, when rehearsals were just getting under way. He was convinced that Olivier somehow had access to the elixir which would transform him into a major actor: “If I’m ever to reach any special creativity, it surely must happen with
this
part,
this
director.” It never happened though: “Everything Olivier says adds a touch, and he’s unfailingly good humored and light about it, but the sad fact is I’m not measuring up to my standards, thus can hardly be reaching his.” He appealed for help to his director: “Star acting is really a question of hypnosis,” Olivier told him, “of yourself and your audience.” Heston’s hypnotic powers proved faltering: “This plane’s like an overloaded bomber straining down the runway,” he moaned, “I can’t lift it.” The bomber crashed, the reviews were disastrous, at the first-night party at Sardi’s “the knowledge of failure seeped like ink through the happy drinkers”. “I don’t know if ‘The Tumbler’ could have been made to work,” Heston mused. “Certainly Olivier made an enormous effort with it. He was heavily burdened at the time with the disintegrating fragments of his marriage with Vivien Leigh.” The only profit Heston derived from the production, he wrote, was “what I learned from Larry”. He was to win an Oscar for “Ben Hur” and global renown for his performance in “Planet of the Apes”, but his failure in “The Tumbler” haunted him all his life.
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The oddest play in which Olivier acted at this time was Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros”. This masterpiece of the Theatre of the Absurd was set in a French provincial town in which all the inhabitants except for Bérenger, the part played by Olivier, one by one turn into rhinoceroses. Either one found this funny and curiously disturbing or concluded that it had no point at all. Noël Coward was in the second camp. “The beginning was
brilliant and Larry, as usual, superb, but then it began to drag,” he wrote in his diary. He burst into the dressing room after the final curtain with a small man in tow. “What a perfectly bloody play,” he exclaimed, then introduced his companion as Eugène Ionesco. “He doesn’t speak a word of English,” he added. Olivier seems to have been inclined to agree with Coward. One evening a tumult broke out in the dressing rooms after the performance and Olivier was heard to shout: “I’ve shat better plays than this.” If this was his considered view it is hard to see why he took it on: presumably the main reason was that he wanted to go back to the Royal Court and Ionesco’s play had a good part in it for Joan Plowright.
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Another reason may have been that it was directed by Orson Welles. According to Welles, he was told that Olivier would not play the part unless he, Welles, was directing it; meanwhile Olivier was told that Welles refused to direct unless he, Olivier was acting in it. The fact that Welles was directing would have been an attraction for Olivier. The two were old friends. A few years before, Olivier had written Welles a letter which even by his own standards was strikingly gushing: “Darling boy, I have wanted to pick you up and hug you and swing you round and dance you up and down on my knee and even go birds-nesting with you to show you in some tiny measure how adorably sweet and generous was your dear thought …” The image conjured up by these raptures is bizarre and mildly disturbing; the more so because the “dear thought” which had provoked this outburst was the loan of a refrigerator. The enthusiasm endured, however. Olivier looked forward to acting under Welles’s direction. He had implicit faith in Welles, he said; he might sometimes be arrogant and difficult but “fuck all that, he’s a genius”.
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Genius or not, Welles’s recollections of trying to direct Olivier, as related by the actor, Peter Sallis, do not suggest that he was given an easy ride. It was Gielgud and “Twelfth Night” over again. Olivier decided that Welles’s direction was muddled and confusing. “I don’t know if they had a row,” Sallis recalled, “one day Orson simply didn’t turn up and Larry said: ‘I’ve sent him away. I’ve told him this is extremely difficult stuff. We’ve got to rehearse a set piece; we can’t change it on a
day-to-day basis.’” Welles’s banishment only lasted a week – he was back before the first night – but he seems to have accepted Olivier’s
diktat
as meekly as Gielgud had five years before. Welles never forgave the affront: “He told me to stay home, and I
did
! I was so humiliated and sick about it that you can’t imagine … He
had
to destroy me in some way … He doesn’t want anybody else up there. He’s like Chaplin, you know. He’s a real fighting star.” (The comparison with Chaplin is interesting. The young Peter Hall once found himself at lunch with Olivier and Chaplin. He gazed at them in awe and admiration. “They then proceeded to out-boast each other about their possessions, lifestyles, houses, coming projects and conquests. They were like a couple of competitive schoolboys.”)
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It was during the run of “Rhinoceros” that the uneasy manoeuvring between Olivier, Vivien Leigh and Joan Plowright escalated into crisis. Over the previous two years Leigh had become convinced that she wanted to preserve her marriage. Some eighteen months before, she had told Noël Coward that her husband had asked her for a legal separation. The shock had been tremendous. “She had always assumed that, whatever might go wrong between them, they would stay together. She knew there was love and respect there … She could never love anyone else as she had loved Larry.” But Olivier was as convinced that he could never love anyone else as he loved Joan Plowright. “The glow that emanated from him was blinding,” wrote Lauren Bacall. “He dropped twenty years … He could have a life, he had something to look forward to.” “I am in touch with the real beauty of happiness at last,” Olivier told Tarquin. His friends urged him to give his marriage another try. “Can you really be happy, Larry, knowing that you’re making someone you love absolutely miserable?” asked Stewart Granger. Rachel Kempson, too, argued that Olivier could never be really happy if that happiness was bought at the price of somebody else’s misery. Vivien Leigh had changed, she said. She realised how much she had made Olivier suffer and had learned her lesson – “Viv would accept any terms at all.” Put off
any final rupture, they pleaded: keep up the façade of marriage and one day the reality might be restored. “What sort of a life do they think I can live?” demanded Olivier. “I could never act off the stage anyway.”
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Olivier was indeed disturbed by the thought of the pain he would be inflicting on his wife, but as well as his wish to be with Joan Plowright he was convinced that his marriage could only get worse and that it would eventually destroy both the parties to it. When Michael Blakemore asked him why he had decided to leave Vivien Leigh, Olivier replied, bluntly and honestly, “Because there was no room on the raft.” His life had become intolerable, he told Lauren Bacall. “He couldn’t think, he couldn’t sleep.” He could never return to his wife.
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But though he was clear in his own mind that his marriage was at an end he had no fixed idea as to how to bring that end about. He shrank from the squalor and sordid publicity of a contested divorce and yet saw no way in which it could be avoided. Then, on 22 May, 1960, Vivien Leigh, inexplicably and without warning, announced to the world that her husband had asked her for a divorce in order that he might marry Joan Plowright and that she proposed to accede to his wishes. This abrupt declaration was, of course, welcome to Olivier, but it also posed some serious problems. Leigh’s statement that she would fall in with her husband’s wishes could be interpreted as collusion and, in the state of the law at the time, this might make divorce impossible. It seems unlikely that any consideration of this kind was in her mind – she claimed herself that she had no recollection of even issuing the declaration and, given her mental condition, this seems entirely possible – but the danger could not be ignored. The immediate consequence was a hurricane of gossip; journalists and the idly curious besieged Joan Plowright’s home and, even more, Olivier’s flat in Eaton Square. Plowright pulled out of her part in
Rhinoceros
, to be replaced by the rising star, Maggie Smith. Some people thought that Olivier would do the same and the understudy had been brushing up his lines, but when the evening arrived Olivier appeared at the usual time and carried on as if nothing had happened to ruffle his serenity. “I watched him very
carefully and you would not have thought that anything was wrong at all,” Peter Sallis recalled. “He didn’t, from a theatrical point of view, bat an eyelid.” The crowds outside the stage door were denser and more turbulent than usual, but even when they were at their most importunate he remained unshaken. “I think it says volumes for him,” wrote Virginia Fairweather, who handled his publicity, “that never once did he lose his temper or alter his courteous attitude towards the scandal-seekers.”
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Mrs Fairweather had her work cut out over this period. She asked Olivier how she should deal with the divorce. “Darling, if anyone is going to come out looking like a shit, let it be me,” Olivier replied. “Do your best not to let them persecute Joannie or Viv.” He accepted that he was the guilty party when the divorce proceedings began; in fact, Vivien Leigh had been at least as guilty as he was but an unopposed action would avoid relentless mud-slinging and publicity. “Viv must have had a horrid time going through the divorce,” he wrote to Tarquin, “but she did nobly and bravely and managed alright.” He and Joan Plowright had had a horrid time too, but they knew that at the end of it there was stability and happiness. He had been passionately in love with Vivien Leigh, he still cared greatly for her, but he had no flicker of doubt that he had made the right, the only possible decision. “If only I can stop being agonised for V.’s suffering,” he told Jill Esmond, “I am in for the hell of a marvellous bloody time. This girl is so good, and so good for me… She makes me feel I am in a sort of idiot heaven.” Richard Burton had been married to the relatively sedate Sybil Williams before moving on to the glamorous Elizabeth Taylor. “You have got it in the wrong order,” Olivier told him. “I have gone about things the right way.” Michael Denison said much the same thing. “Larry took whatever Vivien in her
extremis
threw at him with the most fantastic forbearance,” Denison told Hugo Vickers, “and it was only when she had really gone that he turned to the total contrast – I mean from champagne to Guinness, from mink to macintosh – and to youth, of course, as well.” Olivier had had a lifetime’s worth of champagne and mink; it was time to give Guinness and macintosh a chance.
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His beloved Notley had been an incidental casualty of the break-up. He could not afford to keep it: “It is the first time we can feel thoroughly in line with the general run of English aristocracy,” he told Garson Kanin. Parting with it was a wrench, but at least he was moving on to something different and more welcoming. For Vivien Leigh it was far more painful. “Notley is sold,” she told Tarquin. “I can hardly even write the words. I walk from precious place to precious place and gaze at each beloved view with tears pouring down my face.” She would never forget “the hundreds of times my beloved Larry and I have wandered here in wonder and grateful amazement at the beauty all around us”. With her appearance and her fame Vivien Leigh was never going to be short of admirers. She had found a sort of solace in the company of Jack Merivale, a competent if undistinguished actor and a thoroughly nice man, who asked for nothing more than to be allowed to squire her around through life. But though she was fond of him and thankful for his existence it was Olivier she still loved. “Take care of your precious dearest self,” she ended a letter to him when divorce proceedings were already under way. “My love, dear dear heart.”
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