Olivier (7 page)

He came back to a far more congenial role in London, though he had not expected to get it. Gielgud was directing Ralph Richardson as Both-well in Josephine Tey’s “Queen of Scots”. Eight days before the opening night Richardson threw up the part. He disliked the play, was not enjoying acting opposite Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies and, above all, hated being directed by Gielgud. “Johnnie was an awfully inconsiderate director,” said Olivier. “He didn’t give a damn what he said to anybody. I think probably he’d done that with Ralph and Ralph bloody well walked off the stage.” At twenty-four hours’ notice, Olivier walked on. “I shall always remember the gallant way you took over the part, the way you worked at it those last crowded days and the peace and reassurance your coming brought,” wrote the grateful author. Within a week he had memorised the role while rehearsing fourteen hours a day. All did not go smoothly. In rehearsals Gielgud was very rude to him, “but I took it because it was my habit. I decided I would always take, and think, and listen, and not act proud and stalk off.” He overstated his readiness to accept hostile criticism. Increasingly, he grew to resent instructions from those he felt less experienced than himself and on at least one occasion he stormed off in protest against an over-assertive director. But on the whole he took direction calmly and, even if he considered that his judgment as an actor was more sound, would contrive to compromise or to get his own way without direct confrontation. Richardson regretted his own impetuous departure, especially when the play ran for
several months and was then only closed because a heatwave emptied the theatres. He felt vaguely aggrieved, however, at the alacrity with which Olivier had taken over his part: there was no outright quarrel between the two, but for a time the relationship was cool.
¹⁶

It was Olivier’s next play, though, which won him his first popular following. Once again he got it by chance. He was engaged by Coward to play the swashbuckling hero of “Theatre Royal” during its provincial tour, after which the part was to be taken over by Brian Aherne. He was so good, however, that Aherne volunteered, or was persuaded, to opt out. It was the sort of dashing young hero role which Olivier could have played with little effort; he elected, though, to fling himself into it with reckless zest. His first entry involved a spectacular leap onto the stage from the top of a steep staircase. There was no need to make so energetic an appearance, but Olivier was determined to impose himself on his audience from the outset. It was not the only physical excess in which he indulged. Michael Meyer, the biographer and translator, was only a boy when he saw the play. Fifty years later he told Olivier what an impression the leap had made on him. “Ah, yes, but do you remember how I slid down the banisters?” Olivier replied. He seemed hurt when Meyer admitted that he did not. “Theatre Royal” ended in predictable disaster. Olivier broke an ankle in his leap and, though he only missed a handful of performances, his athleticism was sadly curbed towards the end of the run. His career was to be punctuated by such mishaps. “I am a moral and physical coward,” he maintained. Moral cowardice is hard to pin down; Olivier seems to have suffered from it less that most. Physically he was one of the bravest of men. Time and again he subjected himself to extravagant and sometimes quite unnecessary risks. Usually he got away with it; the fact that sometimes he met with disaster never in the least deterred him. Nor did he hesitate to involve others in his adventures. Once, without stopping for oncoming traffic, he drove Ralph Richardson at fifty miles an hour over the junction of the Croydon bypass and the Purley road. “I shall never forgive you for that,” said a shaken Richardson. “Old man, what are you fussing about?’ enquired
Olivier. “It is a well-known thing that when you get to a point of danger, you must get over it as quickly as you can.”
¹⁷

John Gielgud was one of the many who admired “Theatre Royal”. “It made me envious of Larry’s marvellous use of physical technique,” he remembered, “and his mastery of timing was breathtaking … I had a sense that Larry was suddenly my rival. He was younger than I and I had the disagreeable notion that he was now in a position to surpass me.” Olivier was similarly ready to acknowledge the greatness of Gielgud. He went with Roland Culver to see “Richard II”: “He was transfixed by Johnny’s performance – by the grace of it, by the insight that flowed from its understated eloquence.” He found Gielgud’s first, and greatest Hamlet equally memorable: “fabulous,” he called it. “He made it intensely real, very well felt and very well modulated.” But the consciousness of rivalry was always there; only a few days after Olivier had seen Gielgud’s Hamlet he surprised Jack Hawkins, who was playing Horatio, by saying that “he’d like to give old Hamlet a try, to see if he couldn’t do it better than Gielgud”. The relationship between Gielgud and Olivier was correct but edgy. Told that Olivier had failed to contribute to a collection of tributes which Ronald Harwood was assembling, Gielgud remarked drily: “Larry was always jealous of me.” For his part Olivier saw things differently: “He always says awful things about me,” he complained. Even in the 1980s, he maintained, Gielgud would harp back to flaws in Olivier’s performances as a young man. “That’s forty-five years ago, you know. You don’t have to harbour nasty things about people for forty-five years.”
¹⁸

The contrast between the two men was indeed striking. Olivier was power, passion, animal magnetism; Gielgud precise, exquisite, melodious. It was the difference between Nature and Art, Kenneth Tynan suggested; between burgundy and claret, Alan Dent more prosaically suggested. Gielgud, three years older, was better established on the London stage and was shortly to try his hand as an actor-manager; Olivier had stolen a march by venturing into film. Apart from Richardson there were not many other giants in their age group. Frederick Valk
and Ronald Colman belonged to an earlier generation, Emlyn Williams possessed a considerable talent, but he was somehow never in the mainstream, Alec Guinness was still barely visible. Donald Wolfit and perhaps Charles Laughton were the only figures considerable enough to challenge the big three. Wolfit could produce performances of real majesty – most notably as Lear – but surrounded himself with a team who were too often not even second rate. Olivier’s Othello was a
tour de force
, went Hermione Gingold’s unkindly quip, Wolfit’s a forced-to-tour. Olivier disliked him: “He had extraordinary guts,” he admitted, “and at the height of his career he had a tremendously gutsy voice,” but he was selfish, arrogant and bad mannered: “We all thought he was awful.” When Wolfit was put up for the Garrick Club during the war, Olivier stopped short of blackballing him, but he did his best to thwart his entry; “standards had slipped”, however, and Wolfit was elected.
¹⁹

Olivier himself became a member of the Garrick early in 1936. He was, he thought, the youngest member at the time and he was very conscious of the distinction: “I was thrilled to bits.” He deplored the prejudice of those members who blackballed Noël Coward – “stupid clots, hidebound, absolutely immovable anti-homosexuals” – but did not contemplate resignation in protest. To be a member of the Garrick was a necessary part of belonging to the theatrical establishment. Being a member of the establishment – theatrical or not – mattered to Olivier. He was not clubbable by nature, but at times he belonged also to The Players in New York, Boodle’s, Buck’s, the Beefsteak and the R.A.C. Membership was a visible sign of his eminence in his profession. He would have been inordinately grateful if he had known that James Agate, perhaps the leading critic of the day, when asked who were the contemporary equivalents of the Irvings and Ellen Terry, had answered that they were John Gielgud and Edith Evans, “with a reservation in favour of Laurence Olivier as the most promising young actor”.
²⁰

I
t was Gielgud who now propelled his rival into the next stage of his career. He conceived the idea of producing “Romeo and Juliet”, alternating the roles of Romeo and Mercutio between himself and some other actor. His first choice for a partner had been Robert Donat, who was unwilling or unavailable. He then tried Olivier, who at first said he planned to put on the play himself with Jill Esmond as Juliet but changed his mind when he heard that Gielgud had signed up Peggy Ashcroft for the part with Edith Evans as the Nurse. It was generous of Gielgud to offer this opportunity to someone he considered a dangerous rival; part at least of his calculations may have been that he would be taking on Olivier on what he felt to be his own ground, on which he was confident he could outshine the young pretender.

Up to a point he was proved right. Olivier was the first to play Romeo and he was savaged by many of the critics for what they saw as his inability to speak the poetry: “His blank verse is the blankest I ever heard,” wrote the reviewer for the
Evening Standard
, while James Agate in the
Sunday Times
accused him of an “inexpertness which approached virtuosity”. Olivier was appalled. His intention was, and always would be, to speak the verse “as if that is the way you speak naturally”. If that was unacceptable then he had better give up the part altogether. His offer to resign was refused. Not all the critics condemned his approach: St John Ervine in the
Observer
said he had “seen few sights so moving as the spectacle of Mr Olivier’s Romeo, stunned with Juliet’s beauty,
fumbling for words with which to say his love”. “Larry was the definitive Romeo,” thought Peggy Ashcroft, “a real, vigorous, impulsive youth.”
¹

When Gielgud took over as Romeo the contrasting approaches became more obvious. Gielgud was concerned most of all with the beauty of the words, Olivier with the reality of the action. “Larry had the advantage over me in his vitality, looks, humour and directness,” wrote Gielgud, “I had an advantage over him in my familiarity with the verse and in the fact that the production was of my own devising.” Alec Guinness, a relatively junior member of the cast, was less generous. “We all admired John greatly,” he said, “but we were not so keen on Larry. He seemed a bit cheap and vulgar, striving after effects and making nonsense of the verse.” But Olivier’s was the way of the future. Over the years he much improved his delivery of Shakespearean verse, but he never yielded in his belief that it was the sense that came first. Gielgud, he said, sang Shakespeare. “I’ve always despised Shakespeare sung. I don’t think it’s opera; I think it’s speech.” After his Romeo everything changed; ten years later the Gielgud school of declamation would have seemed almost absurdly old-fashioned. Gielgud himself was to modify his style. As to which was the better in 1935, Gielgud himself summed it up with concision. “I spoke the poetry much better,” he told Patrick Garland, “but Larry got the girl.”
²

When it came to Mercutio, the critics treated Olivier more kindly. He had appealed to Ralph Richardson for advice on how to play the part. Richardson denied that he could help: “You should be much better than me – don’t forget you could colour Bothwell which drove me right out of the stage door.” He did offer two useful tips: Olivier was not to take Mercutio’s great “Queen Mab” speech too fast, and on no account was he to get drunk during the one hour and twenty minutes in which he was offstage: “This takes years of skill and cannot be overestimated.” Oddly enough, Gielgud was more put out by Olivier’s rendering of Mercutio than he had been by his Romeo. He complained about the “loudness and extravagant tricks” of Olivier’s performance and speculated that the critics would treat it with even greater harshness. Possibly he feared a
too conspicuous Mercutio might distract the audience from his Romeo. The public did not seem to have seen any problem: “Romeo and Juliet” ran for six months and was still playing to full houses when the show had to close.
³

*

Any ill feeling between Olivier and Richardson had faded. They decided to produce and star in a play together, joining forces with the prolific and, usually, most successful dramatist, J. B. Priestley. Unfortunately, Priestley was having an off day; there was nothing much wrong with “Bees on the Boat Deck” but its sour tone lacked popular appeal and though ten years later the names of Olivier and Richardson would have been enough to carry an unappealing play, in 1936 more was needed. It soon closed. The failure did no damage to Olivier’s reputation, but it did to his bank balance. He lost some £700, say £30,000 at current values. By the standards of the day Olivier was paid well for his labours, and he had money left from his American film-making, but he never knew how to save. Money was there to spend: he lived well, was extravagantly generous and gave no thought for the morrow. Jill Esmond was little better. When Sofka Zinovieff came round seeking to get a job as secretary she suggested that she should be paid £16 a week. “Give her £25,” Jill called from the next room. Olivier was happy to oblige.
⁴

Something that in the end was to cost him far more, in money, time and emotional strain, was in the offing. In the middle of July 1936 filming started on Alexander Korda’s new patriotic epic, “Fire Over England”. In this Olivier played a heroic sailor who almost single-handed defeated a dastardly Spanish plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. “It was an excellent part,” he recalled. “I just wasn’t very good in it.” He exaggerated both the excellence of the part and the inadequacy of his acting. Michael Ingolby was the sort of energetic young hero whom Olivier could have played in his sleep. Possibly, indeed, he would have been more successful if he
had
played it in his sleep: if anything, he tried too hard. He could do “the hysterical type of young romantic with ease”, remarked Graham Greene with mild contempt. The reviews were not
ecstatic, but his performance brought him no discredit. It had, however, other, more lasting consequences. The hysteria which Greene noted was not induced just by the excesses of the plot. Opposite him, playing the object of his passionate devotion, was a young actress called Vivien Leigh.
⁵