Olivier (54 page)

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Olivier had seen Anthony Shaffer’s play “Sleuth” when it was on its provincial tour at Brighton. He caused some offence to the author. Anthony Quayle, who was playing the part of the mystery writer Andrew Wyke, asked him what he thought of the play. “The first Act is a bit of fun,” said Olivier, “but it’s piss, isn’t it?” This had been forgotten, by Olivier if not by Shaffer, when the play, which had proved enormously successful, was turned into a film and Olivier was invited to take over Quayle’s part. He would be playing opposite Michael Caine, already an established star but, as Olivier ruefully noted, “young enough to be my son”.
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Their relationship got off to an edgy start. Olivier remarked that Caine reminded him of Leslie Howard. The resemblance was only skin deep, Caine replied; adding rather enviously that, though Howard looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, he had notoriously slept with all his leading ladies. “Not, I believe, in ‘Gone With the Wind’,” said Olivier sweetly. Horrified by his gaffe, Caine stammered that, of course, Vivien Leigh had been an exception. Olivier was amused rather than annoyed. After that all went well. Caine was initially intimidated by Olivier’s grandeur, Olivier by Caine’s youth. Each thought the other was carrying the day: “He overwhelmed me,” remembered Caine. “It was frightening the way he bore down on me – and just kept coming.” Olivier thought that he lacked the authority to establish Wyke as the dominant figure in the first half of the film: “I had developed a habit of being an audience to Michael, a foil for him.” Both resolved to correct the imbalance, both found that in fact there was no imbalance and that once they had got used to each other they acted in complete harmony.
Characteristically, Olivier solved his problem by sticking on a Ronald Colman-style moustache: “I’ve discovered something,” he told Caine. “I can’t act with my own face. I have to be disguised.” It was hardly a new discovery – indeed, Olivier had recently shown signs of abandoning a lifetime’s addiction to disguise and rejoicing in his own unvarnished appearance – but in moments of stress he still found it reassuring to take refuge behind a false moustache, a wig, a plastic nose.
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And in “Sleuth” he found that there were many moments of stress. It was a two-actor film and Wyke’s speeches were numerous and elaborate. He was in the middle of “a great mountain-load of work,” he told Ralph Richardson, “it’s a v. long part indeed and v. hard to learn.” How did Richardson write out his parts, he wondered: all of it at once or only the bits he was going to need immediately? (Richardson replied that he typed the whole thing, but in different colours, cues in red and text in black.) It was, indeed, a singularly testing role but Olivier would not have made nearly such heavy weather of it a decade before. Joe Mankiewicz, the director, was disconcerted to find that this great actor, famed for his ability to master long parts at short notice, was subject to “mortifying lapses, he repeatedly stopped takes with an ‘Oh, shit!’ or ‘Sorry, Joe’, when he knew he had erred or dried up”. There was more to this than the ravages of age. Olivier had been combating the stress he was under at the National Theatre by taking what were for him unusually large doses of tranquillisers. A side-effect of this seems to have been that his memory was affected. It did not last. Olivier never regained the prodigious powers of his youth, but, once the pills were abandoned, his capacity to master a script came back to him. Within a couple of years of making “Sleuth” he would be tackling a long and taxing stage role, with difficulty, but with notable aplomb.
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Caine never ceased to hold Olivier in a certain awe, but he also felt solicitous about the older man’s patent frailty. Olivier for his part, though under pressure, by no means resigned himself to letting Caine carry the film. He “had no hesitation in placing himself centre stage in every scene,” Caine remembered, “and whenever I had a line that cut
across a move he wanted to do, he rather grandly ordered Joe to cut it.” The two men still got on well. “It was obviously a marvellous relief when we each discovered that it could be perfectly easy to act together,” wrote Caine in his memoirs. “He was marvellous in it. He’s a lovely fellow.” On screen their partnership worked to perfection. It is not a great film, but it is a fine example of how two important and ambitious actors can mesh together in total symmetry. Nobody watching the film could detect a trace of the pressure under which Olivier was working; something which reflects great credit on his supreme professionalism, but also on his co-star and his director.
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If Harold Pinter had had his way Olivier would have switched directly from Andrew Wyke to Proust’s Baron Charlus in Pinter’s screenplay of
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu
. Olivier did not take to the idea. He confessed that he could see nothing in Charlus beyond “a plain dilettante” or a “
filthy
old snob”. He went on pay tribute to the quality of the script, and to the glories of the original novel: “Quite simply, can you see and hear a shirt rustling with the same evocative reaction as when Proust describes it?” This was, Joan Plowright surmises, a characteristic piece of bluff. Olivier had never read a line of Proust and had probably no more than glanced through Pinter’s script. Reading of any kind, except for the study of possible scripts, hardly entered his life; the exquisite longueurs and subtleties of Proust were alien to his temperament. The film was never made.
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The new building of the National Theatre was topped out on 2 May, 1973. There was still much to be done – the probable date for opening had by now slipped to 1975 and was expected to go later still – but at least the topping-out ceremony seemed to add a certain inevitability to the process. But would Olivier be part of the organisation when the move was made? The arguments for a quick departure grew stronger by the day. He in no way lost interest in the future of the institution. He still expressed his views on every problem that arose. When it was proposed that the move to the new building should coincide with a change of
name to “Royal National Theatre” he argued that this would be too “suggestive of pomp and circumstance”. To call it “The National Theatre of
Great
Britain” might offend the Welsh and Scots. “The National Theatre of Britain” would be “both vague and unambitious”. “The National Theatre of England” sounded too isolated. Let it just be “The National Theatre”. Whether or not one accepts his reasoning, the reality of his concern was obvious. Yet it was a detached concern. He asked Roger Furse whether he thought he should stay on to see in the new theatre. “It seems to me you’ve done the real job in preparing and building up the company,” Furse replied. “You have built a great reputation, almost a tradition, which has had its downs, as anything of that kind must, but has had far more ups. Anyway, what could be more important than your children, particularly now at their present ages?” Little by little Olivier became convinced that Furse was right.
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Hall joined the National early in 1973. On the whole his first months went smoothly. There were moments of friction, but on most issues Olivier and Hall were more or less in accord. Both, for instance, agreed that Barbra Streisand’s proposal that she should play a Shakespearean role at the National should be politely but firmly rejected. “I admire the lady greatly,” wrote Hall, “but I would prefer to watch her do Shakespeare somewhere else.” Their views on plays usually coincided. Olivier told Hall that left to himself he would have rejected a play by the American dramatist Michael Weller, which Tynan had recommended. He found it “frankly disgusting”, which he suspected was the main reason for Tynan liking it. He felt, however, that in the circumstances, Hall should make the final decision. Hall found it “very perceptive and original”, but agreed it was not one for the National Theatre.
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Hall’s original title when he joined the National had been Director Designate. It was Olivier who proposed that, from April 1973, they should appear with equal billing as Co-Directors. At the end of October, he went on, Hall should become Director and Olivier Associated Director, with or without the honorific title of President: “This would create a good impression of continuity, of friendliness and co-operation.” After
March 1974 he would like to take six months’ sabbatical, after which he would return “to take such part as might be required of me for the opening of the new theatre”. Rayne was relieved by this proposal. He had foreseen ugly squabbles between Olivier and Hall, now all seemed set fair. Olivier’s proposals, he said, were “eminently reasonable and immensely helpful”.
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But even when he put forward these obliging propositions Olivier had doubts about whether he was going to adhere to them. Several months earlier Joan Plowright had told Dexter that her husband was changing his mind from day to day. At one time he would conclude that he should withdraw immediately, “and let P.H. sort it all out”; twenty-four hours later he would say that he must see it through. “Even so,” she went on, “he’s not sure he’s going to stay on in the capacity they (including Peter) all hope for.” More and more he sought to withdraw from the everyday running of the theatre. Early in 1973 he asked Tynan and Dexter to dinner in his flat in Roebuck House and told them that he was going to resign in October: he was bored by the administrative chores, felt no artistic excitement in the job and wanted to escape as soon as possible. They urged him not to retire prematurely and he found that, when it came to the point, it was painful as well as difficult to disengage.
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If 1973 was an uncomfortable year for Olivier, he made sure that it was almost equally awkward for his successor. Overtly he seemed to be anxious to work closely with Hall. “He tries to talk to me most days now,” wrote Hall in his diary: “I can’t quite make out what is going on … If I could be with him at lunch and dinner and sit up drinking with him all night he would be happy. But I can’t do that.” Olivier was at least as confused as Hall. He wished to give the impression that he was doing all he could to help his successor, part of him genuinely wanted to be co-operative, but he still found Hall’s presence a constant irritant, a reminder that this was no longer his personal empire, would, indeed, soon not be his empire at all. He knew that it would be damaging to his reputation if he seemed uncooperative and
yet he could not resist flickers of resentment. In March, with some ostentation, he announced that he proposed to vacate his office so as to make room for the Director Designate. Olivier could do what he liked, Hall retorted, but
he
wasn’t moving in to the Director’s office until he took over in November.
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In fact, Hall was more than happy to take over the management of the National. He would have preferred his predecessor to linger on in some titular role so as to emphasise the “continuity, friendliness and co-operation” which Olivier had extolled a few months before, but provided there was no overt falling out he could accept Olivier’s resignation without too many qualms. What mattered most to him was that Olivier should continue to act in the Old Vic and, in due course, in the new theatre as well. He was anxious not to be cast as the man who had driven Laurence Olivier from the stage of the National, if only because any production which included Olivier in the cast list was likely to attract 10–15 per cent more ticket sales than plays which featured any other actor. When Olivier at the last minute had to drop out of a performance of Trevor Griffiths’s “The Party”, Hall recorded, “the disappointment of people coming into the theatre … was almost unbearable. Many of them looked and behaved like heartbreakingly deprived children.” When it came to committing himself to regular appearances, however, Olivier proved disquietingly evasive.
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What Hall wanted above all was to ensure that Olivier would play Lear: preferably in the forthcoming season in the Old Vic. Olivier prevaricated, seemed to say that he would, then hesitated. Once he told Hall that he had tried to telephone to confirm his readiness to play but had failed to get through and had now changed his mind. Undiscomfited, Hall battled on. At least if Olivier was not ready now, let him promise to make his Lear the first production in the new theatre. “You know I want you to do this more than anything in the world.” Of course he would be honoured to direct the play himself, but “I think you should do it in any way you want and with whoever you want, but please don’t direct it yourself unaided. It is too much.” Olivier’s first
reaction seems to have been to accept, but soon doubts crept in. In a letter starting “My very dear Peter”, undated and probably never sent but providing the basis for a conversation, Olivier explained that “there does seem to exist very strongly in my mind and my being a feeling of unhappiness at committing myself to this extent … Something tells me that we both of us – more particularly you than me – may be glad not to cope with my re-entry when it is at present planned.” He asked Hall to avoid making any announcement which included “plans which involve us in commitments which we both may well and truly wish we had not undertaken”.
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For Hall, who was not merely prepared but anxious to commit himself in this way, this must have been a disquieting message. He fared no better when he tried to persuade Olivier to undertake “The Tempest”. In the past Olivier had dismissed Prospero as an unrewarding part; now he seemed interested and at once began to talk about his costume and make-up – “I love the fact that actors always go straight to their appearance,” remarked Hall. But wasn’t the old sorcerer abjuring his magic and breaking his staff almost too obvious a theme for what was likely to be Olivier’s Shakespearean swansong? Joan Plowright thought so. “I don’t think Larry
will
play Prospero,” Hall concluded. “I believe he will open the National with ‘King Lear’ directed by Michael Blakemore. I shall let him do exactly what he wants.”
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What he did want was unexpected. Trevor Griffiths was a politically conscious left-wing dramatist who was compared with Shaw for his combination of wit with reasoned argument. His new play, “The Party”, featured Tagg, a disillusioned Communist who bemoaned the fate that had overcome his beloved Party. Olivier told Tynan that he had never understood Marxism before he read “The Party”. It does not seem, though, that it was the political content which drew him to the play. Mainly he was impelled by a wish to disconcert those of his admirers who took it for granted that he would bow out with something obvious like Lear or Prospero. As well as this, he was attracted by what he must also have found most daunting. “The Party” opened with a monologue
lasting twenty minutes and consisting of a dense and dialectic exercise in political analysis. To retain an audience’s attention through this overture would be a testing challenge, and Olivier in 1974 was no more ready to resist a challenge than he had been forty years before. Finally, and most curiously, he disconcerted the author by telling him that he was anxious to play the part because he had never played a Scotsman before (presumably Macbeth, being royal, did not count). To master a new accent was another, and still more beguiling challenge.
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