Olivier (46 page)

But they were also two ambitious and professional actors who were conscious always of the demands of their individual careers. Plowright was quoted as saying that, of course, she loved her family, “but the theatre is my life”. If the words had been attributed to Olivier they would have been no more than the truth; coming from Plowright they must either have been misquoted or taken out of context. During the years that she was bearing children and seeing them through their infancy her theatrical life unequivocally took second place to her responsibilities as a mother. It was fortunate both for her and for Olivier that those years coincided with the early days of the National Theatre at the Old Vic. Olivier longed to promote the interests of his wife and knew that she was qualified to undertake most of the leading female roles; equally, as
Director of the National Theatre, he had to consider the needs of the Company as a whole and to keep all his leading ladies happy. Maggie Smith and Geraldine McEwan, to mention only the two most prominent, would have been quick to protest if they had thought that Plowright was getting preferential treatment. As he told Tammy Grimes when she asked him to find her a part, he was already having “hell’s own job keeping these girls happy”; to add another prominent figure would make the task impossible. Plowright was given some splendid parts, but she might have been offered more if she had not been the wife of the Director. In other circumstances she might have resented this; coming when it did she felt only relief. When Billie Whitelaw was brought in to replace her in “Hobson’s Choice” because she “had gone to have Olivier’s baby”, Plowright may have felt a pang of regret, but she had no doubt that she had chosen the better course.
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This was their third child. Richard, the first, had been born at the end of 1961. Having been scarcely aware of Tarquin as a baby, Olivier was startled by the exultation which his new son’s birth caused him. Fabia Drake came to inspect Richard when he was only a few days old. “Oh, Fabby,” said Olivier. “I am
so
happy!’ More temperately he told Tarquin that the baby looked like the squashed lemon in the advertisements for the soft drink Idris, but he was improving: “You never saw anyone as happy as Joannie (or me for that matter).”
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Richard proved a restless child. Once Olivier volunteered to sleep next door to his bedroom when the nanny had a night off. When Plowright joined them for breakfast next morning there was cereal and apple sauce all over the carpet and down the front of her husband’s silk dressing gown. “I’d rather play Othello eight times a week than do this again,” Olivier grumbled. Richard was convinced a man-eating crocodile lived at the end of the corridor in which he had his room and, on the evenings that the nanny was out, would call upon his parents for reassurance. Nanny insisted that the proper thing to do was to let him cry himself out and then go back to sleep. With some reluctance the Oliviers agreed to give this tactic a try. Sure enough, Richard ran out of
breath, said feebly “How can I keep on crying if no-one is going to care?” and made his way back to bed. The crocodile, similarly discomfited, never reappeared. It was a triumph for stern parenting, but not one that was often repeated. Olivier was an indulgent if distrait father and was even less likely to treat his daughters severely than he was his son.
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Their two daughters, Tamsin and Julie-Kate, followed in 1965 and 1966. Julie-Kate almost finished off her mother. Joan Plowright had suffered a debilitating miscarriage at the end of 1964 and was still undergoing surgery. The doctors claimed there was no possibility of her conceiving but were proved wrong. Julie-Kate was born by Caesarean and, according to her father, would undoubtedly have been dead if there had been even a few hours’ delay. He was present at the birth. Plowright wanted him to be there, Olivier remembered; he was able to “hold her hand and stroke her head and bring comfort to her while they were attending to things down below”. No doubt she did want him there, but he would have taken some keeping away. Even if he was himself the victim, Olivier was always anxious to know what was going on and, if possible, to watch it. This operation was almost too much for him, however: “My God, there was a lot of blood. The floor was inches thick in it. That really began to make me feel a tiny bit queasy.” He gave Tarquin a gory account of the occasion. “I don’t know if surgical detail interests you,” he wrote. “I’m afraid it always fascinates me.”
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The three children never doubted that their father loved them and wished them well; they also knew that, by the standards of most of their friends, he was a remote and evasive figure. In retrospect it seemed to them almost as if he were pretending to be a father, acting the part conscientiously and with skill but shedding it when he left the stage. He thanked Ralph Richardson for agreeing to reshuffle the order of appearance in a charity performance so that he could catch the last train home to Brighton – “taking my little ones to school is almost my only chance of seeing them these days, and has a special place in the day for me” – but often even this limited duty proved unfeasible. His visits to Brighton, he told the journalist David Lewin, were “bounded at one end by flinging
myself into bed to an exhausted and sound sleep, and at the other by a lunatic scramble for the train”. The children literally lived next door, in the neighbouring house in the Royal Crescent which had now been integrated with their parents’ rather smarter house. “I know exactly how you must feel about not having enough time with your babies,” wrote his sister Sybille: “But truly the more important time for them to be with you will be when they are a little older.” Olivier may have drawn consolation from this advice, but he was deluding himself if he imagined that in five or ten years he would manage to spend very much more time with his children. Even when they were together they were apart. Richard remembers staying with his father at Franco Zeffirelli’s house in Italy. In theory it was a family holiday; in practice his father was learning a twenty-minute monologue for a forthcoming play: “He was constantly at it and could not be approached while it was on.”
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He was still less effective when it came to maintaining a relationship with his elder son, Tarquin. “How wrong you have got me, or more probably we have got each other,” he wrote. He was dismayed to find that Tarquin felt he had been putting on “a stern father act”; on the contrary he had been trying to do the very opposite, to “take you as I found you”. The trouble was, he hardly ever found him, at all events not often enough to form any clear impression of what he was really like. Tarquin got married at the beginning of 1965. Olivier announced that his duties were so demanding that he could not afford to do more than attend the ceremony. His new daughter-in-law’s parents tried to organise a meeting; he refused their invitations and did not even offer them tickets for the National. On the way from the church to the reception the bride’s mother berated him for his bad manners. Placatingly, he expressed the hope that they would meet again. “
That
won’t be necessary,” she answered.
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The ghost of Vivien Leigh could not altogether be exorcised. It had taken her separation from Olivier to convince her how desperately she loved and needed him; when she was acting his photograph was always on her dressing table. He, for his part, felt a residual loyalty towards
her. In 1963 he heard that Marlon Brando was to play Macbeth in New York. He wrote to Binkie Beaumont asking if there was “some subtle and tactful way” by which it could be suggested to Brando that Vivien Leigh would be the perfect Lady Macbeth for him. “Of course, the last thing in the world I would want is for it ever to be known by anybody that the suggestion came from me, as it would be completely misunderstood.” The idea came to nothing – it is unlikely, anyway, that Leigh’s health would have allowed her to undertake such a role. A few months later she was convalescing at her country home from yet another breakdown. Olivier arrived to visit her. You must go down to meet him, said her nurse. “She said, ‘Oh, no, I can’t!’ … and then this voice came up the stairs: ‘Vivien, are you coming down or am I coming up?’ She just took off like a little schoolgirl, you know, meeting her boyfriend – oh, it was beautiful, and they walked by the lake together.”
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It seems that this is the last time they met, at any rate for more than a casual exchange. At intervals Leigh tried to arrange a meeting, the last time being at the end of 1966. Her doctor advised Olivier not to accept the invitation. If he once acceded to her request she would be importunate in her demands and would never take no for an answer. “I am quite sure that emotional contacts of this kind would in the long run not be good for Vivien as it would be likely to push the state of elation and all its other aspects into a more disturbing state of mind.” Six months later Olivier was himself in hospital. Douglas Fairbanks was visiting him when the news came that Leigh had died. “There was a long, sad moment and then he said, ‘Poor, dear, little Vivien.’ It seemed to me that their life together was running like a film through his mind.” Olivier insisted on leaving hospital to visit the flat in Eaton Square where her body was still lying. He stood in silence by her bedside and, he said, “prayed for forgiveness for all the evils that had sprung up between us”. He did not have much with which to reproach himself. He might have been a little more sympathetic, a little more understanding, but on the whole he had showed exemplary patience and had tried to the best of his ability to grapple with problems which were not only beyond his
comprehension but beyond the grasp of any of the psychologists of the day. By chance, as he was leaving the memorial service, he found himself standing next to Jill Esmond. “I put my hand on his as he left the pew, and he put his other hand on top of mine and gave it three little squeezes. I thought he looked grey right through.”
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By singular ill-fortune, Cecil Tennant, Olivier’s agent and most trusted friend, was killed in a car crash while driving back from Vivien Leigh’s funeral. “He wasn’t supposed to die, you know,” Olivier told Lord Chandos. “He was supposed to live for ever and look after me.” This reaction might seem a little solipsistic, but can perhaps be excused on the grounds that Olivier had many reasons to feel self-pity in 1967 and 1968. It was unsurprising that Jill Esmond described him as looking “grey right through” since, against the urging of his doctor, he had emerged from hospital to attend the service. Some weeks before, while directing rehearsals of “The Three Sisters”, he had experienced sharp pains and was overcome by exhaustion so complete that he could hardly breathe, let alone give instructions. As he prepared to leave the theatre he remarked to Joan Plowright how terrified the other members of the cast had seemed. “They thought you were about to die,” she retorted. “So did I. Go to hospital, or you’ll be dead in the morning.” Prostate cancer was diagnosed – “the best kind of cancer,” he noted, “so I was lucky in that.” This did not make the treatment any more agreeable: it involved being interred in an opaque coffin, reduced almost to freezing point and then bombarded with radium-soaked cobalt. He endured this with striking fortitude; the only indication of the strain that was imposed on him was his reluctance to be left alone until the very last moment before the treatment. Noël Coward visited him in hospital and found him “writhing on his bed” but rejoicing in the fact that the cancer was reported to be responding to treatment. “I hope to God this is true.”
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It
was
true, but it was far from being the end of the story. Olivier emerged from hospital and almost immediately contracted pneumonia: it was back to hospital again, from which he emerged, against the advice of his doctors, to attend Vivien Leigh’s memorial service and then to
read a lesson at Cecil Tennant’s – “That’s the kind of man he was,” said Tennant’s widow Irina. His plight got much attention in the press and he was bombarded by well-meaning but generally fatuous suggestions as to how he might restore himself. Most of them recommended a vegetable diet, but he was also urged to visit various gurus all over Europe and the United States, as well as Agra, Benares and Calcutta. All such letters got a reply; a large number of them signed by Olivier himself.
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“My disease is at its worst just now,” he told Chandos after Cecil Tennant’s death. “They told me the convalescent period was the worst, and ‘they’ are bloody well right. But I shall get over all that and get a whole chapter written on ‘the things I’ve done for England’, by getting to Canada and (what is more) coming back.” The National Theatre was due to visit Canada in October and November 1967. Nobody would have reproached him if he had opted out, but he knew how much the success of the tour depended on his presence and was determined to be there if it were physically possible. The only concession he made was that “Othello” should be removed from the repertoire because of the strain involved: even so he was going to play a part in all the forty-two performances that the company gave in Montreal and Toronto. And then, early in 1967, while playing “The Dance of Death” in Edinburgh, he developed agonising stomach pains. Appendicitis was diagnosed, he was rushed back to London and operated on the following day. “Just in time,” said the surgeon. “The appendix was about to explode.” Once again pneumonia followed. It must have seemed to Olivier as if his problems would never end. In fact, in the short term, the worst was over, but he was never really a fit man again. He lived every day in the knowledge that he was vulnerable and in the fear, if not the expectation, that something would go wrong.
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His mood cannot have been lightened by the publication early in 1969 of Virginia Fairweather’s biography of him,
Cry God for Larry
. Fairweather had been for a long time in charge of publicity at the National Theatre and before that at Chichester, but she was abruptly dismissed
for reasons which are obscure but are rumoured to have involved some flagrant misbehaviour. When her book was about to appear she appealed to Olivier to attend a Foyle’s literary lunch which was to be given in its honour. Reluctantly Olivier agreed. In a letter to Fairweather’s husband, undated and perhaps never sent, he said that he had not yet read the whole book. He had been shown some excerpts to which he might object but “as the whole enterprise is clearly meant to be generous, and at times generous beyond all justice in my direction, I can’t very well take exception to details”. Then came serialisation in the
Sunday Times
. As so often, newspaper serialisation featured all the more salacious and sensational elements and gave a false impression of the book as a whole. Olivier reacted violently. He wrote to the
Sunday Times
denouncing “this distressful tissue of overstatements and other digressions under the terms of gossip” and complained of Fairweather’s “lifelong addiction to the overdramatic” which was apparent throughout the excerpts. He in particular disliked a passage which described a quarrel he had had with Leslie Evershed-Martin and gave the impression that it was this which had led to his departure from Chichester. There had been one such exchange, he told the editor of the local paper, the
Chichester Observer
, “for which, she is correct in saying, I was entirely and regrettably to blame”, but it had been another three years before pressure of work at the National Theatre forced him to give up the Festival. Fairweather’s words, he complained, had been neither kind nor helpful.
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