Olivier (9 page)

Five major roles at the Old Vic and none of them totally successful: he had done more to establish himself as a Shakespearean actor than his own self-criticism would suggest but it had still not been a triumphant progress. There remained Coriolanus. Lewis Casson was the director and his wife, Sybil Thorndike, refused to play Coriolanus’s mother, Volumnia, unless Olivier promised to do what her husband told him. “His orders were that Larry was to get rid of all his experimental ideas and tricks, and act Coriolanus in a natural, straightforward way.” Olivier accepted the ruling meekly. He allowed himself one extravagance. “Coriolanus” was a “jolly ripping entertainment”, he told Basil Rathbone. “Whatever happens, you must do a magnificent fall at the end. I did a peach, I remember, a perfect peach.” It was to be still more of a peach when he repeated the part in 1959, but it was already spectacular enough. Otherwise he followed Casson’s bidding. “It was a great delight to watch you,” wrote Esmé Percy, who one suspects might have been briefed by Casson on what to say, “in a production which left you free to give your whole strength to the Play, without ‘stunts’ or eccentricities. How fine I thought you were, I cannot tell you, and how passionate and sincere your reading was. One may say you have been trying out all this year parts not yet quite within your compass. But that is what I feel has been so splendid for you … Now these memories are in your bones. They have given you range and depth and force.” Olivier had been growing in experience and stature ever since he had joined the Old Vic. With “Coriolanus” he came of age.
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His success was the more remarkable because of the strains put on him by his tempestuous private life. Early in 1936 it became evident that Jill
Esmond was pregnant. So far as Olivier was concerned this seems to have been unintended, for Esmond it was a despairing effort to save a sinking ship. As the filming of “Fire Over England” went on it became ever more evident that Olivier’s infatuation for Vivien Leigh was not a passing fancy. Jill Esmond knew well what was going on but, preoccupied by pregnancy, she preferred to think of it as little as possible. “All that, from my point of view, was pretty nasty,” she remembered. Perhaps she hoped that, when their child was born, her husband’s love would be miraculously rekindled. When he came, they called him Tarquin: “It came to me in a mad moment,” Olivier admitted. “It has such dramatic overtones.” But Tarquin brought no great improvement to his parents’ marriage. Olivier took a proper interest in his son but withdrew still further from any real engagement with his wife.
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Formally the marriage survived. Vivien Leigh went to inspect the baby a few days after it was born. “It is really
very
attractive,” she told her husband. “Larry says it is like Edward G. Robinson; which is a little cruel. He has already started reciting Shakespeare to it.” To the outside world she was still no more than a friend of the family and it was to remain that way for the best part of another year. But the veneer on the marriage was wearing thin. When filming “Fire Over England” finished the Oliviers took off for Capri. Vivien Leigh was soon in pursuit, presumably with Olivier’s consent. She was escorted by an elderly friend, Oswald Frewen, who viewed with dismay the development of a relationship which sooner or later, he felt sure, was bound to end in disaster. He pleaded with Leigh not to break up her marriage: she agreed that the advice was excellent, but she did not take it. Olivier, for his part, seems to have made occasional efforts to escape the thrall. Raymond Massey claimed that, when the filming of “Fire Over England” was almost completed, Olivier told him that: “He was consumed by guilt. He was putting an end to it, he said. He loved Jill and he’d been a fool. With Vivien, well, it was just a wild infatuation, but it was to Jill he owed his loyalty. He had talked to Vivien about it. She had agreed to a cooling-off period.” Massey can hardly have invented the exchange,
but Olivier’s words do not ring true, especially so far as Leigh’s role is concerned. Even if he said something along those lines he cannot have done so with much conviction. Jill Esmond, anyway, seems to have had few illusions. “After all, she was one of the most beautiful women there have ever been,” she accepted with resignation, “and he fell desperately in love with her in a way he’d never been in love with me.”
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Things came to a head when the Old Vic company set sail for Denmark, to put on “Hamlet” at Elsinore. It was in many ways a memorable visit. The plan was to perform in the open air at the castle of Kronborg but the first night was made impossible because of heavy and continuous rain. It was a gala performance with royalty present, so Guthrie was determined not to cancel it altogether. Instead it was switched to the ballroom of a nearby hotel. For a frantic few hours the cast, with Olivier very much in the lead, laboured to reorganise the production so that it could be acted with chairs banked all around the stage. The cast rose to the challenge, the audience appreciated the effort and were determined to enjoy it. The evening was deemed a complete success. More significantly, it convinced Guthrie that Shakespeare not merely could but should be played on a proscenium stage with the audience on both sides of as well as in front of the players, not merely viewing them in a box cut out of a wall as in the more traditional theatres. Olivier reached the same conclusion. The shape of the National Theatre, first at the Old Vic, then in its present building, owes much to the success of this one performance on a rainy night in Denmark.
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The visit was also important for the effect it had on Olivier’s marriage. According to his own account, he was taken aback when Guthrie suggested that, for the Danish tour, the part of Ophelia should be taken by Vivien Leigh: “Of course, I tried to mask my feelings, and said ‘Oh, yes’.” A more convincing account maintains that it was Olivier who pressed for the change. Guthrie at first refused. Vivien then made an hysterical scene and Olivier threatened to withdraw from the excursion if he did not get his way. Probably the truth was somewhere
between the two. In any case, to the annoyance of the woman who had played Ophelia in London, Olivier won the day. For reasons that are obscure, Jill Esmond decided, or was persuaded, that she should come too. “I shouldn’t have done. It was a mistake,” she admitted later. The result was open humiliation. Olivier and Vivien Leigh were unable to conceal their love for each other; indeed made very little effort to do so. Alec Guinness was delegated to look after Esmond when Olivier was acting or rehearsing: to stop her being bored, he was told; to leave the field open for the lovers to display their emotion freely, Guinness assumed. By the time they returned to London all attempts at secrecy had been abandoned. “I decided that it was time to pack up and go away,” is Esmond’s account of what came next; “Jill told,” was the terse entry in Olivier’s diary for 11 June, 1937. Whichever side took the initiative, the result was the same: the marriage was over.
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Olivier wanted to postpone a public breach for as long as possible. He had already received offensive letters denouncing his behaviour; he was convinced that a storm of abuse would follow as soon as it was known that he had left his wife for another woman, especially a woman who was married and as celebrated a star as Vivien Leigh. For another year he remained formally committed to Esmond while cohabiting more or less openly with Leigh and taking her for long, self-indulgent trips across France. It satisfied nobody; it was a “furtive life, lying life. Sneaky,” Olivier wrote in his memoirs. In July, 1937 he wrote a will. It left the house in Cheyne Walk and the fruits of all his insurance policies to Esmond. The rest, including Durham Cottage, the charming semi-rural retreat a powerful stone’s throw from the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, in which he had made a home for Leigh, he left to her. He concluded: “It is my most earnest wish that my wife and Mrs Holman [Vivien Leigh] shall live in friendliness and harmony of spirit, both forgiving and forgetting any possible bitterness that may perhaps lie between them. My dearest love, in the proportions that they know they own it, be with them and my family, my son and my good friends for ever.” The concept of Esmond and Leigh meeting in radiant harmony, presumably
to discuss the merits of the deceased Olivier, is both bizarre and distasteful. Olivier does not emerge with credit from the break-up of his marriage: in his defence it can be said that he was besottedly in love. At least he made no attempt to justify his behaviour. He was from time to time to complain about Esmond’s deficiencies as a wife, but he never denied that he had been at fault and she misused. He accepted his responsibilities as a former husband and as a father and was as generous in the financial provisions that he made for her as he had been sparing in his love.
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Things were moving towards a resolution. William Wyler, probably the most distinguished and certainly among the most prominent of American film directors at the time, was pressing him to go to Hollywood to star in what would be his most important film to date. Early in November 1938 he sailed from Southampton on the French liner, the
Normandie
. A new chapter began.

T
he film in which Wyler wanted to involve Olivier was “Wuthering Heights”; Olivier, of course, being destined to play the tempestuous and vengeful Heathcliff. He was not the first choice for the part. He had been told that Colman had been preferred to him but was not available: “That makes me the poor man’s Ronald Colman,” he observed. He would have been still more disconcerted if he had known that Wyler had then transferred his favours to Robert Newton. “Newton magnificent Heathcliff. He has strength and power which Olivier lacks,” he told the producer, Sam Goldwyn. Ben Hecht, who wrote the script, argued for Olivier. He was “one of the most magnificent actors I have ever seen,” he told Goldwyn. “He could recite Heathcliff sitting on a barrel of herring and break your heart.” Goldwyn thought Newton too ugly; Douglas Fairbanks, who was also in the running, would be too weak for the part. Olivier was the safest bet.
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But Olivier himself had doubts. He thought of making it a condition that Vivien Leigh should take the leading female role of Cathy. Goldwyn would only promise vaguely that she would be offered an important part. Then Ben Hecht’s script arrived and Olivier realised what a splendid role it would be for him. When it became clear that Vivien was to be fobbed off with the secondary part of Isabella he protested, but not to the point of turning down the offer. He did not believe that the woman whom Goldwyn had chosen to play Cathy, Merle Oberon, could be of Vivien’s calibre, but he had heard good things of her and concluded that it was worth accepting the second best. When Vivien decided that
Isabella offered too little to make the part worth accepting, she and Olivier realised that they must temporarily separate. To confirm that he had made the right decision Olivier once again turned to Ralph Richardson for advice. “Yes. Bit of fame. Good,” said Richardson, and Olivier was on his way.
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He had worked in Hollywood before, but never for a director with the skills of Wyler, nor in a production which had the potential to be important, perhaps even great. His first reactions were favourable. Things were better run than in England, he wrote to Sybille. “I am horrified to have to tell you that the American workman beats the English workman hollow in efficiency, acceptance and above all in enthusiasm … which make working conditions very much more pleasant.” As for Wyler: he was “an Alsatian of great artistic integrity and photogenic brilliance … one has the comforting knowledge that his artistic conscience will not permit anything to ‘go by’ that is not good or better than good.” But the two were destined to clash. Olivier still felt that film was an inferior medium, that real acting had to be done on a stage. “I was frightfully pompous, frightfully pleased with myself, overwhelmingly opinionated,” he recollected. When Wyler made it clear that he found his star’s performance extravagant Olivier retorted: “I suppose this anaemic little medium can’t stand anything great in size like that.” For Olivier the problem was that Wyler was quick to complain about what his Heath-cliff was doing wrong but reticent when it came to suggesting how it might be done better. Even Wyler admitted that there was “a lack of communication and articulation on my part”. Olivier would produce what seemed to him a splendid rendering of some lines, Wyler would tell him to do it again. One scene was shot seventy-two times without a single constructive comment from the director. “How do you want it?” demanded an exasperated Olivier. “I’ve done it calm, I’ve shouted, I’ve done it angry, I’ve done it sad, standing up, sitting down, fast, slow – how do you want me to do it?” “Better,” was the only answer. In retrospect, Olivier concluded that Wyler was waging a war of attrition, trying to reduce him to a point where he would see for himself that cinema
demanded a radically different approach to acting on a stage. In the end it worked: Olivier was never wholly to repress an urge to overact but by the time “Wuthering Heights” had been completed he had come to terms with the medium and, perhaps even more important, accepted that it was a medium with which it was worth coming to terms.
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The lesson was reinforced, though in a very different way, by David Niven, who was playing the relatively minor role of Edgar. Niven already knew Olivier and was to become one of his closest friends. He had no pretensions to be a great tragic actor and did his modest bit with studied casualness. Olivier watched him play and thought: “He isn’t even trying to act and here I am working my bloody guts out. He is going to look bad on screen.” But he didn’t; nobody could have transformed Edgar into a memorable role, but Niven made him convincing, as if there was no other way he could have been. Olivier acknowledged as much, and admitted too that Niven’s performance had taught him a great deal. “I thought when we first started working on the picture that I knew much more about acting than he did. And I did, when it came to acting on a stage, but he had a natural gift for screen acting, which I had to work at.”
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