Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (27 page)

The influence runs in both directions, though Olivier is inspired by Churchill in a less predictable way. On holiday in the South of France in 1949, he and his wife Vivien Leigh take up painting, having just read Churchill’s book
Painting as a Pastime
.

In 1951, the Oliviers are starring in
Caesar and Cleopatra
. During one performance, Olivier is informed that Churchill is in the audience. In the interval, Olivier is hovering about in his dressing room, wondering how his performance is going down with ‘the great man’, when the door swings open, and there he is. Olivier is too taken aback to say anything.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ says Churchill. ‘I was looking for a corner.’

Olivier escorts Churchill back, and points him in the right direction. At the same time, he makes sure there will be someone waiting to take him back to his seats in the auditorium.
¹¹⁴

Churchill goes about his business, returning in time for the second half. As he sits down, he jokes to Mary, ‘I was looking for Loo-Loo, and who do you think I ran into? Ju-Lu!’

A few weeks later, the actor and the world statesman are introduced in more formal circumstances, when the Duchess of Buccleuch takes Churchill to see
Antony and Cleopatra
. Olivier is entranced. ‘Adoring him as of course we already did, we found his sweetly polite, unforced kindness, and the courteous generosity of his conversation an unforgettable example,’ he records in his convoluted prose. In his encounters with other politicians, Olivier, who prides himself on reading faces, has always found them furtive, with ‘a certain guardedness, obviously caused by a fear of being caught out ... only detectable in the slightly hooded look around the eyes’. But not Churchill.

Over dinner, Olivier reminds Churchill of the time he joined in with
Richard III
, adding, ‘I can’t tell you how envious I am of such a wonderful memory.’

‘Oh, but you – so many myriads of words packed into your brain,’ replies Churchill. ‘It must be a great burden.’

Olivier confesses that, three weeks after he has finished playing a part, he is unable to quote a single word from it.

‘Aaah,’ replies Churchill. ‘That must be a great mercy to you.’

To celebrate Olivier’s birthday, Churchill invites the Oliviers to Sunday lunch at Chartwell. Churchill is smitten by Vivien Leigh, and presses one of his paintings onto her; later, they are told that this is the only painting Churchill has ever given away. (He has an eye for a pretty face: at a later dinner, when the women have left the room, Churchill turns to Olivier and says, ‘By Jove, she’s a clinker!’)

After lunch, Churchill stays indoors while Churchill’s son-in-law, Christopher Soames, shows the visitors around the farm. On their way round, they hear a bull issuing ‘a groan of agonised pain and grief; his head was pressed tightly against the wall and his wild eyes rolling’. Soames explains that the bull has already killed a man, and the only way to get him out of his stall to clean it is to entice him into another stall with a cow in season.

When they return to the house, Olivier tells Churchill that he is worried about his bull. ‘Oh, he’s all right,’ says Churchill. ‘And even if he does lead
a life of unparalleled dreariness, it is punctuated ...’ – he pauses for dramatic effect – ‘by moments of intense excitement.’

Years later, on January 30th 1965, Olivier speaks the commentary for the ITV broadcast of the funeral of Winston Churchill. It is, he believes, ‘more than a day of national mourning’. Rather, it is ‘a celebration of a nation’s overwhelming gratitude for the life of their “Valiant Man,” to whom they owed so incalculably much’. In his memoirs, he boasts that he was ‘proudly informed’ that of the broadcasts on BBC and ITV his own ‘gained the greater viewing audience of the two’.

But the story of the two men does not end there. In 1968, Olivier, by now Director of the National Theatre, is enveloped in a debate over whether a play called
Soldiers
by Rolf Hochhuth should be staged there. The play is highly critical of Churchill’s saturation bombing of German cities, and accuses him of complicity in the assassination of the Polish leader Władysław Sikorski.

Kenneth Tynan is determined to stage it; the Chairman of the National Theatre, Lord Chandos, a member of Churchill’s war cabinet, is equally determined to prevent it being staged. Olivier, confessing himself ‘deeply distressed and torn about’, flounders around in the middle. He is torn, he explains to the board, between his prejudices as an Englishman and his wishes for the National Theatre. His position is further complicated by the fact that Tynan is keen for him to play the part of Churchill.

Tynan detects much in common between the actor and the statesman. ‘My god how like you the old bastard is!’ he writes to Olivier. ‘The passionate maddening love of detail; the concentration that can wither people by simply ignoring their presence; the sudden changes of subject; the sudden focusing on apparent irrelevancies; the love of anecdote and quotation ... the brutally realistic assessment of human motives; the impatience; and the patience.’

BRINGS OUT THE PHONY IN

4 Christchurch Street, London SW3

May 21st 1951

In the same season, Laurence Olivier performs before the up-and-coming American novelist J.D. Salinger.

On May 8th 1951, Salinger sets sail for Britain on the
Queen Elizabeth
, hoping to avoid the hoo-ha surrounding the American publication of
The Catcher in the Rye
. There have already been requests for a rewrite and a change to the title,
¹¹⁵
along with a succession of misunderstandings involving publicity.
¹¹⁶
The
New Yorker
has refused to serialise the novel, complaining that the characters lack credibility, but his British publisher, Hamish Hamilton, has proved far more sympathetic. On Salinger’s arrival, Hamilton presents him with the British edition; as requested, it has a subdued cover, no author photograph and no biographical details.

Salinger’s entertainment in London is orchestrated by Hamish Hamilton, who Salinger calls ‘a professional get-together boy’. Hamilton treats his author to a series of nights out involving what Salinger describes as ‘tearing around to theater, supper parties’.

Among the plays they attend are two on the theme of Cleopatra –
Antony and Cleopatra
by Shakespeare, and
Caesar and Cleopatra
by George Bernard Shaw – both starring Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. ‘Very good, very pure,’ Salinger observes appreciatively, adding
that, ‘The audiences here are just as stupid as they are in New York, but the productions are much, much better.’ Afterwards, Hamish Hamilton is particularly buoyed up to have secured an invitation for himself and his author to dinner with the Oliviers at their house in Chelsea.

It all goes well; Salinger enthuses to a friend
¹¹⁷
about ‘a marvelous little house, very posh evening – formal clothes and all that’. Olivier, he says, is a ‘very nice guy, very bright. He’s knocked out about his wife, which was nice to see. She’s a charmer. Naturally, while we were having drinks in the living room, some gin went up my nose. I damn near left by the window.’

On the other hand, Salinger can’t help feeling a bit of a phony. When Hamilton arranged the invitation, he had apparently overlooked a passage in
Catcher in the Rye
in which the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, rants against the phoniness of actors in general, and one actor in particular:

I don’t like shows very much, if you want to know the truth. They’re not as bad as movies, but they’re certainly nothing to rave about. In the first place, I hate actors. They never act like people. They just think they do. Some of the good ones do, in a very slight way, but not in a way that’s fun to watch. And if any actor’s really good, you can always tell he knows he’s good, and that spoils it. You take Sir Laurence Olivier, for example. I saw him in
Hamlet.
D.B. took Phoebe and I to see it last year ... But I didn’t enjoy it much. I just don’t see what’s so marvelous about Sir Laurence Olivier, that’s all. He has a terrific voice, and he’s a helluva handsome guy, and he’s very nice to watch when he’s walking or dueling or something, but he wasn’t at all the way D.B. said Hamlet was. He was too much like a goddam general, instead of a sad, screwed-up type guy ... The only thing old Phoebe liked was when Hamlet patted this dog on the head. She thought that was funny and nice, and it was. What I’ll have to do is, I’ll have to read that play. The trouble with me is, I always have to read that stuff by myself. If an actor acts it out, I hardly listen. I keep worrying about whether he’s going to do something phony every minute.

However, none of these qualms is evident during his dinner with Olivier. In fact, Salinger gives every appearance of having countermanded the suspicions of Caulfield, exchanging lively conversation with the actor his creation considers to be teetering on the phony.

A few days later, Salinger sets off around England in a Hillman car he has bought, driving to Stratford-upon-Avon, where he rows a young lady on the river instead of going to the theatre, to Oxford, where he attends Evensong at Christchurch, and to Yorkshire, where he thinks he may have spotted the Brontë sisters running across the moors. He then travels to Ireland and then on to Scotland, where he thinks of settling. From London, he goes back to New York, taking his new Hillman with him.

It is only on his return to New York
¹¹⁸
that Salinger entertains second thoughts about whether he was entirely genuine with the Oliviers. Had they read Caulfield’s views on Olivier? Salinger’s worries are possibly exacerbated by the news that the Oliviers are planning a trip to New York, and have asked to see him again. He writes Hamilton a panicky letter, explaining that Caulfield’s opinion of Olivier’s acting is not necessarily his own, and asks him to explain all this to Olivier, and to apologise for any hurt caused.

Hamilton does so, and in turn Olivier sends Salinger a sympathetic letter. On September 1st, Salinger writes back: ‘At risk of sounding terribly oracular, not to say presumptuous as hell, I’d like – in fact I’d love – to tell you what I personally think of your acting ... I think you’re the only actor in the world who plays in a Shakespeare play with a special, tender familiarity – as if you were keeping it in the family. Almost as if you were appearing in a play written by an older brother whom you understand completely and love to distraction. It’s an almost insuperably beautiful
thing to watch, and I certainly think you’re the only actor who can bring it off.’

Nevertheless, two years later when Olivier asks, through Hamilton, for his permission to adapt ‘For Esmé – with Love and Squalor’ into a radio drama, Salinger refuses. As time goes by, his doubts about Olivier increase. In 1983, thirty-two years after his ‘very posh evening’ in Chelsea, Salinger writes a letter to a friend unfavourably comparing Olivier’s acting with John Wayne’s performance in
The Shootist
.

SEEKS OUT

The Ritz Hotel, 15 place Vendôme, Paris

Late August 1944

The twenty-five-year-old Jerry Salinger is experiencing a terrible war. Of the 3,080 men of the 12th US Infantry who disembarked with him at Normandy on D-Day, only a third are still alive.

His regiment is the first to enter Paris. They are mobbed by happy crowds. Salinger’s job as an officer in the Counter-Intelligence Corps entails weeding out and interrogating Nazi collaborators. As they go through Paris, he and a fellow officer arrest a collaborator, but a crowd wrests their prisoner away and beats him to death.

Salinger has heard that Ernest Hemingway is in town. A writer himself, with a growing reputation for his short stories, he is determined to seek out America’s most famous living novelist. He feels sure he will find him at the Ritz, so he drives the jeep there. Sure enough, Hemingway is installed in the small bar,
¹¹⁹
already bragging that he alone liberated Paris in general and the Ritz in particular.

To this latter claim, there is a slight smidgin of truth. ‘It was all he could talk about,’ remembers a fellow member of the press corps. ‘It was more than just being the first American in Paris. He said, “I will be the first American at the Ritz. And I will liberate the Ritz.”’ In fact, by the time he arrives, the Germans have already abandoned the hotel, and the manager has come out to welcome him, boasting, ‘We saved the Cheval Blanc!’

‘Well, go get it,’ snaps Hemingway, who then begins slugging it down.

Hemingway proceeds to make the Ritz his home. From then on, he can’t be bothered to cover the liberation of Paris, though he lends his typewriter to someone who can. Instead, he spends most of his time drinking Perrier-Jouet in the bar.

Over brandy after lunch on liberation day, a female guest says she wants to go and watch the victory parade.

‘What for?’ says Hemingway. ‘Daughter, sit still and drink this good brandy. You can always see a parade, but you’ll never again lunch at the Ritz the day after Paris was liberated.’

As the days go by, he continues to hold court in the Ritz, boasting how many Germans he has killed, though no one with him can remember him killing a single one.
¹²⁰

Upon Salinger’s arrival, Hemingway greets him like an old friend, saying that he recognises him from his photograph in
Esquire
and has read all his short stories. Does he have any new work with him?
¹²¹
Salinger produces a recent copy of the
Saturday Evening Post
containing one of his stories. Hemingway reads it and congratulates him. The two writers sit and talk for hours. Salinger (who secretly prefers Fitzgerald’s writing) is pleasantly surprised by the difference between Hemingway’s public and private personas; he finds him ‘a really good guy’.