Olivier (2 page)

He had other traits which gave his father reason to disapprove of if not dislike him, as he admitted in his autobiography. As a child, he was a compulsive liar. To conceal the truth was almost an automatic reflex. Once he touched the scorchingly hot handle of the bread-making machine, causing the dough to sink and burning himself severely. He must have known that, if he had explained what had happened, he would have received sympathy for the pain he was suffering rather than a scolding; nevertheless he clung to his story that he had never
touched the machine and tried to conceal his burn. He never hesitated to lie if he thought it would bring him some advantage and showed considerable skill in practising his mendacity. He found it easy to convince his nursery schoolmistress that his presence was needed at home and that therefore he must leave early.
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The habit of lying he shed quickly, though throughout his life he allowed himself to embroider the truth with picturesque but invented detail. The temper which had earned him his nickname, however, stayed with him all his life. His roar, “reminiscent of a Bull of Bashan”, which his sister remembered from his infancy, was to reverberate for seventy years or more. His explosions were all the more terrifying for being unpredictable. Once, dining with the actor Laurence Harvey, he had been notably dulcet throughout the evening. Then Harvey ridiculed in turn Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud and Paul Scofield. Olivier erupted, “How dare you! Call yourself an actor? You’re not even a
bad
actor. You can’t act at all, you fucking, stupid, hopeless, snivelling little cunt-faced arsehole!” He then stormed out: it was as true to his character that next day he repented and sent Harvey a bouquet of twenty-four red roses.
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There were other, more estimable traits that were evident in his infancy. If he started on some enterprise he would not stop, he would plug away at a childish puzzle until he had resolved it – even though it was in theory intended for someone of twice his age. Nothing would deter him. It was said that Edmund Kean, opening in the first night of “The Merchant of Venice” in the early nineteenth century, found himself the wrong side of the Thames without the money for the toll and swam the river so as to get to the theatre in time. “Even if he didn’t do it I’m sure, if it had been necessary, he would have done,” wrote Olivier approvingly. “As, indeed, I would. Determination.” “He was the most disciplined man I’ve ever met,” said the director Franco Zeffirelli. “His discipline is the first secret of his success … Steel discipline, and merciless with himself and others – no excuses, no weakness.” Translate this to life in the nursery, allow for a few childish tantrums, and the
picture emerges of an alarmingly resolute child, one who might take some time to decide upon his course of action but who, once committed, could only with the greatest difficulty be diverted. Looked at another way, of course, tenacity became obstinacy. He could be infuriating, his sister remembered: “he had a habit of saying ‘No’ slowly and loudly and, however much one might coax or threaten, he remained unshakeable.” The Olivier “No”, final and unchallengeable, would break the nerve of many an actor or director before his career was done.
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His mother, who seems to have been in charge of his early education, was determined that he should go to the choir school of All Saints, Margaret Street. All Saints was an Anglican church so high as to seem to its more austere neighbours dangerously tainted with the odour of Rome. It had one of the best, if not
the
best choir in London and this, coupled with the excellent reputation of the schooling, meant that there was stiff competition for places. Olivier’s brother was already there, and for two years Mrs Olivier battled to secure a place for her younger son. In the meantime the boy was subjected to a series of indifferent preparatory schools – an experience which he much disliked. The first was a boarding school in Blackheath, predominantly for girls, to which Olivier was despatched at the age of six. He was so miserable that a kindly aunt who lived nearby had to be persuaded by the school to take him in “in case my perpetual crying should do me an injury”. The tears were certainly genuine: no doubt, too, they were enhanced by that instinct towards the histrionic which so often led Olivier to turn into a performance something which otherwise might have been un-excitingly run of the mill.
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Finally, in 1916, at the age of nine, he was admitted to the All Saints choir school. It was soon evident that he was not going to shine as a scholar: “Handwriting poor. Spelling careless. Composition slovenly. Arithmetic disgraceful,” was the harsh judgment at the end of one of his earlier terms. Things improved, but not to any great extent; the fact was that the work did not interest him and he was therefore not disposed
to take much trouble over it. The same was not true of games, where he longed to excel but lacked the talent. He was “totally inept”, wrote his brother with some brutality: “Even at the tender age of twelve I had protective qualms about him coming to the school. Not only qualms on his behalf, but on my own, since I didn’t fancy being embarrassed by a younger brother who didn’t fit in.”
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Where he did fit in was in the choir. Not everyone agreed. “Larry hath an ugly voice,” lisped the organist. “Enormouth, yeth, my goodness yeth. But Dickie ith the really muthical one.” Others were less censorious. “He has a fine voice and much ability,” was the more usual verdict, and though he rarely featured as a soloist he was one of the elite who were regularly considered for the role. He had become used to ceremony in his father’s church and relished the smells, bells and rich flummery at All Saints. At home, he and his brother had used to drape eiderdowns around themselves and indulge in orgies of bowing and intoning; he would have liked to do the same things at All Saints but made do with watching others perform the rituals. The music, too, he found fulfilling. The musical education was as ambitious and as rigorous as any in the country and Olivier acquired a knowledge of religious music which enriched his life. The aura of sanctity hung over All Saints. If Olivier, at this point of his life, had been asked what he proposed to do when his education was behind him he would almost certainly have replied that he intended to become a priest. He would have taken it for granted that his father held the same view. If anything this would have been a disincentive, but Olivier was not so perverse that he would have gone against his own strong inclinations just for the satisfaction of frustrating his father.
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But the choir school made a still more significant contribution to Olivier’s future. The vicar of All Saints, Father Henry Mackay, was an energetic theatregoer and he had recruited as a master Father Geoffrey Heald. Heald was an amateur actor of distinction, both he and Mackay had friends in the theatre world, and the result was that All Saints enjoyed a reputation for its acting far beyond that of most comparable
schools. Heald identified Olivier as being a boy with both potential as an actor and an eagerness to perform, and Olivier responded to his encouragement with rapturous enthusiasm. “I had complete faith in this man,” Olivier said many years later. “I was devoted to him, and I think he was very fond of me.” Too fond, in the opinion of one of Olivier’s biographers, Michael Munn, who suggested that Heald had physically molested his young pupil and left a permanent psychological scar. There is no evidence to support this and Olivier’s words suggest the contrary. Far from pursuing small boys it seems that Heald’s tastes were robustly heterosexual. He made something of a fool of himself a few years later when he fell in love with the actress Edna Best, star of the successful “The Constant Nymph”, and pursued her with conspicuous but unrequited zest.
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Heald gave Olivier his first chance to shine on the stage when he produced “Julius Caesar” at the end of 1917. Olivier, who was only in his second year, was originally assigned the humble part of First Citizen but, in a general shuffle, was recast in the more important role of Brutus. Few twelve-year-old boys can have been more acclaimed on their debut. As usual, the school had drawn a distinguished audience. The Duke of Newcastle, a prominent benefactor of All Saints, presented Olivier with a copy of “Julius Caesar” taken from his own library and inscribed “As a souvenir of the splendid performance”. Johnston Forbes-Robertson, renowned actor-manager and the foremost Hamlet of his generation, wrote to Heald praising Olivier’s “pathetic air of fatalism which was poignantly suggestive – remarkable in one so young”. Most striking of all, Ellen Terry – in most people’s view the leading actress of the age – noted in her diary that the boy who had played Brutus was “already a great actor”. A year later she was still remembering his “wonderful” performance.
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More successful still was Olivier’s last appearance at All Saints, as Katherina in “The Taming of the Shrew”. The role of the heroine in this detestable play is one of the most difficult in the Shakespearean repertoire. Olivier handled it with astonishing aplomb. Ellen Terry was there
again and wrote that she had “never seen the part played as well by any woman”, while the enormously influential Russian director Theodore Komisarjevsky – surely a most improbable spectator at a schoolboy performance in London? – praised “the sincerity, the seriousness and the simplicity of the acting” and in particular acclaimed the “especially impressive Katherina”. He was “wonderful – a bad-tempered little bitch,” remembered Sybil Thorndike, who was then in the early stages of her resplendent theatrical career, “and he looked just like his mother in the part – gypsy-like”. Sybille too remarked how closely he modelled Katherina on their mother – not in personality, because there had been nothing shrewish about Agnes Olivier, but in her manner of speech and her movements. Their father came to one of the performances, “and he had to get up and leave, so shaken was he to see Larry re-creating Mother down to the last detail”.
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It was re-creation because, after a brief illness, Agnes Olivier had died in 1920. For any twelve-year-old boy the death of a mother must be a fearful blow; for Olivier, frightened and remote from his father and, as a result, cherished with particular determination by the warm-hearted and affectionate Agnes, it seemed that his world had been obliterated. He was given the news by Father Heald, wept briefly, then remained dry-eyed. Throughout his life he was given to extravagant displays of grief or joy; this was one of the few occasions in which he did not externalise his emotions. “I’ve been looking for her ever since,” he remembered many years later. “I can’t think I’ve ever loved anybody quite as much … My mother was my life really, she was my entire world.” Olivier believed that, dreadful though it was, the experience fortified him for the future; others might feel that it extinguished in him the capacity for unequivocal love, the lack of which impoverished his emotional existence. The biographer is well advised to avoid glib psychological pronouncements, but it is difficult not to feel that the loss of his mother when he was at his most vulnerable did do him lasting damage. His personal loss may, of course, have been the world’s gain. The deprivation which he endured may in itself have been an important
factor in shaping the personality of that most complete of actors.
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He was sustained by the support of his brother and sister. Fifty years later he was to reproach his own children for their perpetual bickering. “It’s so hard for me to understand you three,” he said. “My family was the happiest family ever in the world. We all absolutely adored and worshipped each other.” Things can hardly have been as rapturous as that, but Sybille and Dickie stood by their younger brother and restored to him some of the sense of intimacy and belonging of which his mother’s death had deprived him. Sybille in particular assumed many of the responsibilities of a mother. Agnes Olivier’s last words had been “Be kind to Larry”. Her husband paid them scant attention; Sybille took them to heart and did her best to obey them.
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By now Olivier’s time at All Saints was almost finished. “His work has improved and he is taking more pains,” the report for the Lent term 1921 noted approvingly. He had been made a monitor, “which will, I hope, help to develop a stronger sense of responsibility”. Evidently it did. “A most satisfactory term,” recorded his final report. “He has proved quite efficient as a monitor and has developed considerably. He is a very nice boy and we shall miss him greatly.” The boys were not all as enthusiastic. “He was not altogether a nice boy …” one contemporary remembered, “a bit of a bully.” “No-one could trust him to be constant,” another complained. “He would be your great pal one day, and then turn round and try to humiliate you the next.” Physically, he had a long way to go. “He was thin and bony with knobbly matchsticks for legs,” remembered one boy of his generation. His hair grew low out of his forehead which, combined with his thick eyebrows, “gave him a decidedly mole-like appearance”. Such photographs of him as survive are less unflattering: he seems an obviously good-looking child. But he was naturally ungainly: when he played games he was “as awkward as a cow trying to balance on a wire”, the future actor Laurence Naismith remembered. Olivier himself was dissatisfied by his appearance and uneasy about his standing with the other boys. He was inclined to slink
furtively around the edge of groups, reluctant to draw attention to himself yet wishing to be close to the heart of things.
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On the whole, though, he had enjoyed his time at All Saints. His elder brother had moved on to Rugby and it had been his mother’s hope that Larry would follow him. Perhaps, if she had lived, he would have done so – her small private income made a substantial contribution to the family’s financial situation – but left to himself the Revd Gerard concluded that he could not afford it. Instead he settled for St Edward’s, Oxford, a school which admitted clergymen’s sons at a preferential rate of £60 a year and, as a result, boasted a disproportionate number of clerical offspring among its 230 pupils. The high moral tone which one might have hoped this would produce was sadly lacking: all minor public schools have their ups and downs and St Edward’s in 1921 was badly down. Kenneth Grahame, author of
The Wind in the Willows
, was one of the few old boys of distinction. No dispassionate observer surveying the school at that period would have been likely to predict that many of the current vintage would join him in the halls of fame. In fact, as well as Olivier, the school boasted the future fighter-pilot hero Douglas Bader. Bader, who was two years younger, was imprudent enough to push Olivier under the water in the school swimming pool. Olivier complained to the President of his form room that Bader had been “intolerably saucy”. Bader was beaten and Olivier was allowed to administer two of the strokes. “I simply loathed myself,” he remembered. “I didn’t hurt him at all, of course; he just got up, grinned and left.” Bader bore no grudge but soon afterwards got his own back by bowling Olivier for a duck in a match where four runs were needed for victory and the last man was in. It was an incident typical of an undistinguished athletic career. Olivier longed to be good at cricket, but never rose above the Fifth XI. In his last year he took to rowing, but had left it too late to make any real mark. “I wish to God that I’d been a wet bob. I adored it,” he maintained, but though his eldest son was one day to be successful as an oarsman it does not seem likely that Olivier’s own failure to take it up deprived British rowing of any significant talent.
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