Olivier (29 page)

It should have been an easy start, for Vivien Leigh at least. Viola in “Twelfth Night” is an important but not particularly taxing role, and well within her powers. “She was enchanting,” wrote John Gielgud, who was supposed to be directing the play, “but she was torn between what I was trying to make her do and what Olivier thought she should do.” She survived relatively unscathed, which is more than can be said for Gielgud himself. He took against Olivier’s concept of Malvolio – “like a Jewish hairdresser, with lisp and an extraordinary accent”. When Olivier insisted on falling backwards off a bench in the garden scene – “though I begged him not to do it” – Gielgud roundly, and in front of the whole cast, accused him of vulgarity.
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Olivier was offended. “You’ve
no idea how damaging that is,” he protested (another version has him saying: “Johnny, you just winged me”). From that moment it was open war. Angela Baddeley, who was playing Maria, said: “The basic antagonism between Larry and Johnny came out during rehearsals. I think Larry was a bad boy about it. He was very waspish and overbearing and Johnny became intimidated by him. Almost everyone in the cast sided with Larry, laughing at his wisecracks about John’s direction. I felt very sorry for Johnny.” Gielgud himself admitted that he was “very restless as a director and very apt to change my mind”; under Olivier’s bombardment he became even more indecisive and the production seemed to be drifting towards disaster. “Darling John,” Olivier finally flung at him, “please go for a walk along the river and let us just get on with it.” Gielgud’s summary of the affair in a letter to his friend, Stark Young, is a perceptive and on the whole generous comment on his rival.

He was good for himself as well. “Larry was absolutely superb,” wrote Coward in his diary. “He’s a great actor, and that’s all there is to it.” Most of the critics and, to judge by the volume of applause, the vast majority of the paying public, agreed: his performance was extravagant,
even self-indulgent, but it delighted almost all who saw it. Gielgud continued to feel that Malvolio unbalanced the rest of the production, but, as he handsomely told Olivier: “The character is brilliantly conceived and consummately executed – and I know you will delight with it.” Vivien Leigh fared less well. In the early rehearsals she was anxious and uncertain. It could still work, Gielgud thought, if Olivier “would let me pull her little ladyship (who is brainier than he is but
not
a born actress) out of her timidity and safeness. He dares too confidently while she hardly dares at all and is terrified of overreaching her technique.” This is a little unfair – it is the combination of Olivier and Gielgud which seems to have disturbed her, rather than either one of them – but the result was that her performance, though competent, seemed lacklustre compared with the explosive vitality of her husband. Tynan described it as being one of “dazzling monotony”. “It was absolutely untrue,” said Olivier. “She rang every vocal change that anybody could do.” But it did little for her morale in the build-up to what was to be her stiffest test.
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Olivier had had doubts about “Macbeth”; not for his wife but for himself. “Glennie, I’ve played Macbeth. I’m no good as Macbeth,” he told Byam Shaw. He allowed himself to be persuaded without too much difficulty. Byam Shaw knew that Olivier was going through “a difficult and worrying time”, but, he wrote, “I believe that the greatest achievements are often accomplished through the most difficult circumstances, and so I feel that your Macbeth may well be your greatest of all triumphs.” As for Vivien Leigh as Lady Macbeth, Byam Shaw hoped that their partnership would help “bring about a perfection of subtle reality between those two great characters”: an observation which, if taken literally, seems to suggest a somewhat unenthusiastic judgment on the Oliviers’ marriage. What the partnership
did
bring depends on whose judgment prevails. Olivier himself maintains that his wife was up to the part – “she was good, she was marvellous in the sleep walk.” “Wonderful,” thought Godfrey Winn, “wonderful,” echoed Christopher Fry: both men adding that they preferred her performance to her
husband’s. But this was not the opinion of most of the critics who, with Tynan as ever at their head – “more niminy-piminy than thunderyblundery” was his verdict – dismissed her as a lightweight who wilted when exposed to the blazing fury of her husband. Probably Gielgud got it right. Olivier, he considered, was “the finest Macbeth I have ever seen”; Leigh’s performance was, “I think, almost the best thing I ever saw her do – but on a small scale. She would have been enormously effective if a film had been made.”
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Olivier continued to protest at any suggestion that he was lowering the level of his performance so as to accommodate his wife. “I was keeping my end up for all I knew how,” he protested. “I was acting opposite her as if I was acting opposite Sarah Bernhardt. I was doing my nut to act her off the stage. I couldn’t.” In fact this charge was levelled at him more often over “Twelfth Night” than “Macbeth”; the critical response to his Macbeth was adulatory, even awestruck. Harold Hobson, by now the doyen of British theatre critics, rarely missed a chance to praise Olivier and on this occasion outdid himself. “As distress and agony enter into him, Laurence Olivier multiplies in stature before our eyes until he dominates the play, Stratford-upon-Avon and, I would say, the whole English theatre. The performance is full of unforgettable things … I don’t believe there is an actor in the world who can come near him.” His physical presence on a stage, always daunting, became overwhelming. Harry Andrews, who played Macduff, was one of the few actors in Britain who would not have been eclipsed by him. They flung themselves into the fight in the last act with an abandon that left the rest of the cast aghast. “We both enjoyed it more than any other two people who fought on the stage, I swear it,” Olivier remembered. “We were wonderful together … two peacocks who weren’t afraid of hurting each other.” Or of being hurt. Other actors were less hardy and protested that their lives, or at the least limbs, were being put at risk. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Olivier exclaimed. “Have I hurt the dear boys? I’ll do better in future, but I do like to show there’s life in the old dog yet.”
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Rattigan told him that his was the definitive Macbeth. Olivier made
no bones about agreeing. “I just thought of it the right way,” he explained. “It was just the right mixture of style and down-to-earth bone reality. I found the right cocktail, the right ingredients and the right proportion. I’m very proud of it.”
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Third and last in this majestic season was “Titus Andronicus”, a horror-comic with some magnificent poetry but so macabre a plot that it is not often staged. Any play which accommodates thirteen deaths, two mutilations, a rape and a cannibal banquet at which a mother inadvertently eats a pie made out of her two sons, must teeter on the brink of absurdity. T. S. Eliot considered it “one of the stupidest and most uninspiring plays ever written”; more importantly for the purposes of this production, Olivier himself had doubts about it. “I don’t think I really admire ‘Titus Andronicus’,” he told Basil Rathbone, while to Colin Blakely he complained that he would rather play characters like Richard III or Macbeth than Titus, who was “one of the moaners. Those are the difficult ones, the ones that do nothing but suffer.” But he moaned majestically. Peter Brook was the director. It was the first time the two men had worked together since the ill-fated “Beggar’s Opera”. Brook arrived determined to impose his will from the outset to find that he was beating at an open door; Olivier was resolved “to show himself a model of acceptance and flexibility … Not only could I understand and admire his amazing talent, but the way he played the central role gave the whole production an intensity and reality that no other actor at the time could have brought.” Brook admitted that he never felt close to Olivier – “He was most polite and attentive, but behind the gesture there was always a sense of strain; even his laughter was acted, as though he never ceased remaking and polishing his mask” – but on this occasion at least their professional relationship could not be faulted. Olivier praised Brook as a “master interpreter”, who had “not only the genius for the job but also the generosity to make me a partner in his thinking”; Brook wrote Olivier gushing thanks for “being such an extraordinary, great, true, breathtaking actor on one hand and for being so endlessly sweet, understanding, helpful and encouraging on the other”.
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As so often, Tynan found the most compelling phrases to praise Olivier’s performance. “It was,” he wrote, “an unforgettable concerto of grief … One hears great cries which, like all of this actor’s best efforts, seem to have been dredged up from an ocean-bed of fatigue. One recognises, though one has never heard it before, the noise made in its last extremity by the cornered human soul.” But again – as so often – Tynan could not resist a dig at Vivien Leigh. She received, he wrote, “the news that she is about to be ravished on her husband’s corpse with little more than the mild annoyance of one who would have preferred foam rubber”. Such criticism from Tynan might have been expected, but Gielgud, usually ready to defend her, was equally condemnatory. She seems in a very bad way, he told a friend. “She is utterly ineffective on the stage – like paper, only not so thick, no substance or power.” Worst of all, Olivier himself agreed. “I was terribly disappointed,” he recorded. “She didn’t act the part at all, she was beyond it then, she couldn’t bloody well act. For the first time I felt ashamed of her.”
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It was during the run of “Titus Andronicus” that Vivien Leigh moved irrevocably closer to total breakdown. It was not just her lacklustre acting that signalled what was happening. Offstage, wrote Gielgud, she is “haunted, avid, malicious and insatiable, a bad look-out for the future and for poor Larry, who is saint-like with her”. Noël Coward visited Stratford and thought “Titus” “a very, very silly play with some good moments”. Afterwards: “Vivien was in a vile temper and perfectly idiotic. Larry was bowed down with grief and despair … Personally, I think that if Larry had turned sharply on her years ago and given her a clip in the chops, he would have been spared a mint of trouble.” The comment does not suggest that Coward had the remotest perception of what lay behind Vivien Leigh’s behaviour, but, coming from a man who up till then had tended to think of her as more sinned against than sinning, it illustrates vividly the pressures under which Olivier was now living.
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In spite of his own resounding success, Olivier did not enjoy the Stratford season. He was longing for an end to it: “I feel I cannot take any
more of that lowering Stratford atmosphere,” he told Mu Richardson. It was not so much Stratford as the state of his marriage which caused the atmosphere to lower. Peter Finch, whether there or not, seemed omnipresent. Olivier accepted the relationship yet resented it. He told Hamish Hamilton how much it pained him “to go into her dressing room and see the photograph of that god-damned Finch on her dressing table”. She made no effort to keep her feelings hidden and seemed almost to exult in the pain she caused her husband. She told Trader Faulkner, a close friend since the tour of Australasia, how “warm, sweet and thoughtful Peter was, like a wild, sensual Pan”, while “Larry could think of nothing but his career”. Peter was “an old soul, full of timeless wisdom”, Larry “a new soul with a plastic Karma”. At least Finch was only present at Stratford in photographic form; at Notley, where they went almost every weekend, he was a regular visitor. Leigh would bombard him with telephone calls and send her car to collect him; when he was there her devotion to him was obvious and, to Olivier’s friends at least, embarrassing. “The best you could say about them,” wrote Finch’s biographer, Elaine Dundy, “was probably the worst you could say about them; they did nothing behind Olivier’s back.” To the casual observer it seemed as if Olivier condoned or at least was indifferent to his wife’s behaviour; in fact he felt rejected and resentful. Once there were fire-works after dinner. “I had the distinct feeling,” wrote Susana Walton, “that Larry was pointing a rocket directly at Peter, but reluctantly changed his aim at the last minute.”
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Olivier’s pride told him that he should not make a scene or show how deeply he was being hurt; on the other hand, the situation could not drag on indefinitely. The trouble was that he still liked Finch and could not blame him for what was happening. Eventually, he decided that there must be a confrontation. The two men met in the library after dinner but, although Olivier was resolved to settle matters, somehow the encounter evolved into an enjoyable conversation. It was broken by Vivien Leigh putting her head round the door to ask which of the two men was going to bed with her. In the end it was the guilty couple who
brought things to a head, by escaping together to the South of France. Olivier pursued them and pleaded with Leigh not to make a public scandal which would damage his career and destroy hers. Possibly the flames of passion between her and Finch were burning lower, possibly discretion overcame her romantic urges; at any rate, she returned to the fold. For a time, in the public eye at least, the marriage was reestablished. “Larry and Vivien have decided to present a united front,” Noël Coward noted early in 1956. He wished them well; especially since she was on the point of appearing in his new play. He was less pleased when the rapprochement was followed by the news that Leigh was going to have a baby and so he would have to find another star. Yet more annoying, Binkie Beaumont heard about the pregnancy before he did, so injured pride was added to his irritation. In a letter to a friend Coward indulged in some disobliging reflections on the likely destiny of the unborn child. “To be born into such a turbulent
ménage
might possibly be far from easy, what with Daddy shrieking ‘Fuck!’ and bellowing ‘Macbeth’, and Mummy going briskly round and round different bends, and never less than twenty people to lunch, dinner and supper.” When Coward met Olivier in Dublin he made a violent scene, then realised he had gone too far and apologised for being so clumsy and self-indulgent. “The only possible excuse was that I had been miserably hurt by being shut away from your confidence,” he wrote. “This, considering that I have been so intimately concerned with your and Puss’s troubles for so long, made me very angry and hurt like hell. After all, you
are
both very dear to me.”
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