Olivier (31 page)

He knew, though, that however brightly he might shine in the theatrical firmament there were people in show business who, regardless of their skills and abilities, were always going to be more widely known than he was. One such was Marilyn Monroe. Monroe conceived – or had the idea sold to her – of buying the film rights to “The Sleeping Prince”, playing Vivien Leigh’s part herself and persuading Olivier to direct and act opposite her. Rattigan, Olivier and Cecil Tennant hastened over to New York to discuss the matter: she kept them waiting for an hour, but thereafter all went swimmingly. “I am going to fall most shatteringly in love with Marilyn,” Olivier decided. “She was so adorable, so witty, such incredible fun and more physically attractive than anyone I could have imagined.”
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There were soon hints that all would not run to plan. Even before filming started the script caused problems. Rattigan had assumed that, once Olivier had fed in a few ideas, the serious work would be left to him. Olivier, however, insisted on “complete collaboration” and at one point the two men fell out so thoroughly that it seemed the enterprise might founder. Reason prevailed, a modus vivendi was established and they retreated to Gleneagles to complete the job in comparative amity. But Rattigan cabled his New York agent: “Have feeling Larry really prefers his authors dead.”
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Once filming got under way what was left of the euphoria was rapidly dissipated. Monroe arrived with her recently acquired playwright husband, Arthur Miller, so all thoughts of dalliance had to be put aside. To make matters worse, Olivier did not take to Miller. “A self-satisfied, argumentative pseudo-intellectual,” he described him. “He talks a great deal better than he listens,” Olivier told Noël Coward, “but I never found his talk very entertaining.”
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Miller was at least a professional who could be relied upon not to interfere. Far more dangerous was Monroe’s adviser and confidante, Paula Strasberg. Strasberg was the wife of the most enthusiastic proponent of “The Method” and herself the repository of innumerable half-baked, half-understood and passionately held notions which she preached with idiotic fervour. She came with excellent credentials from Garson Kanin – “a sensitive creature; sound and discreet. Her considerable talents, used to the full, can benefit you and the film enormously” – but what those talents might be Olivier was at a loss to guess. She saw her main function as being to boost Monroe’s morale, which she did by assuring her that she was the greatest actress since Sarah Bernhardt and that she must never allow herself to be pushed into any course of action which did not seem right for her. If she did not feel in the mood to act then she must not do so – too bad if other people were inconvenienced. She was putting up the money for the production so she had every right to indulge her whims. Mrs Strasberg was tiresome enough; Olivier tolerated her existence so as to avoid a bust-up with Monroe. His
never very notable patience snapped, however, when he heard that her husband Lee had arrived in London and was proposing to take over his wife’s responsibilities. “I’m the fucking director of this fucking film,” he shouted. “I’m the fucking producer too. I won’t allow Lee Strasberg on set. Call the studio police and have him stopped. Fuck him!”
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Lee Strasberg, by one means or another, was stopped; but it made no difference to Monroe’s behaviour. Olivier, professional through and through, punctual and well-ordered, was outraged by her unpunctuality, horrified by what seemed to him her wilful inability to follow his direction, offended by her discourtesy – she failed even to acknowledge gifts of flowers and lavish presents that the Oliviers had given her. She had “the brains of a possum”, he exclaimed; teaching her how to act was “like teaching Urdu to a marmoset”, she was incapable of learning five lines by heart.
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It was still more irritating when Sybil Thorndike – an immensely distinguished old lady who was kept waiting hour after hour by this Hollywood addle-pate – praised Monroe’s warmth and charm. “She has a ravishing smile – no airs and graces at all – simple and quite fun. I like her awfully.” When Monroe forgot her lines for the umpteenth time and Olivier berated her, Thorndike sprang to her defence. “Don’t you realise what a strain this poor girl is under? She hasn’t had your years of experience. She is far from home in a strange country … Are you helping or bullying?” Olivier, indeed, was unsuited to the task of directing Monroe. He shot one scene twenty-nine times, achieving nothing but the misery of his leading lady. “I really think,” wrote Colin Clark, a young assistant director and an amused yet horrified witness of all that was going on, that Olivier “wanted to break all records as proof … of how difficult it was to work with her.” Arthur Miller, who had a pretty clear perception of his wife’s strengths and weaknesses, was critical of Olivier’s methods as director yet supported him – to little purpose – against the appalling Mrs Strasberg. “As for Olivier,” he wrote in his memoirs, “with all his limitations in directing Marilyn – an arch tongue too quick with the cutting joke, an irritating mechanical exactitude in positioning her
and imposing his preconceived notions upon her – he could still have helped her far more than Paula with her puddings of acting philosophy.”
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In some ways the most irritating thing for Olivier – though it was also a consolation – was that Sybil Thorndike proved to have been right when she had predicted that it would only be Marilyn Monroe whom the public looked at: “She’s really giving everyone else lessons in acting for the cinema.” “The Prince and the Showgirl”, as it was eventually titled, was not a great film but it was enjoyable and the enjoyment lay principally not in Olivier’s adequate performance but in Monroe’s warm and wayward charm. She exercised a miraculous rapport with the camera which transcended her inexperience and limitations of technique. Olivier was generous in accepting that this was so. Many years later he admitted that by the time the film had been made “my hatred for her was one of the strongest emotions I had ever felt”. But only a few days earlier a friend had insisted on his watching it: “I was
amazed
what a good film it was,” commented Olivier, “and flabbergasted how wonderful Marilyn was.”
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As if this experience had not been gruelling enough, within a few months the Oliviers embarked on a European tour of “Titus Andronicus”. Olivier told Noël Coward that, after the claustrophobic horror of internment in a studio with Marilyn Monroe, he found the prospect of “darting like hysterical bumblebees” from Paris to Warsaw by way of Venice, Belgrade, Zagreb and Vienna decidedly pleasing. The rehearsals were characteristically thorough. Michael Blakemore, who had just joined the company and so was a new boy to “Titus”, was amazed by the attention paid to even the most minor parts. He felt that Olivier was always watching him – “His eyes kept swinging over the newcomers, assessing us perhaps or just practising which name went with which face.” Blakemore only had a single speech and one day felt that he had delivered it badly. Olivier turned to him and said: “You’ve got a very good voice, a fine voice, but if I might just suggest, try pitching it further
forward. Up here” – he tapped his frontal sinuses – “Just for a day or two to see how it goes.” It was excellent advice, Blakemore thought, but even more “what bucked me up was the fact that I had been noticed and, however briefly, thought about. Those few considered words warmed my entire afternoon.” Blakemore believed that Olivier was not merely concerned to have a better production but was anxious to help a young actor at the start of his career. When the actor became established it was a different matter. “Now he had a competitor, and he assessed him according to his weaknesses, not his strengths, and often with a marked lack of generosity.”
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In the theatre the tour was a triumph: in Paris the applause was so loud and so prolonged that it seemed Olivier would never be allowed to leave the stage. Offstage it was another matter. “I had all sorts of intensely and agonisingly personal complications in my life,” he recalled. “It was a very tough one for me indeed.” The main, indeed the only complication was his wife. In public, the Oliviers still kept up a united front. As in Australia nearly ten years before they struggled to keep up the spirits of the company and to foster a sense of unity. In Belgrade the Oliviers and one or two of the other, more senior members were invited to dinner at the Embassy. Olivier replied that he had made everyone bring clothes suitable for grand receptions and, if the Ambassador wanted him, he would have to invite the company as well. A buffet supper was substituted for the
intime
dinner which had been planned. It was bad luck on the Ambassador, who had looked forward to lionising the Oliviers, but from the point of view of the morale of the company it was an excellent affair.
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Vivien Leigh would have supported him in this enterprise and been on her best behaviour at the Embassy but her hold on the proprieties of everyday civility grew ever more tenuous. “It was impossible not to admire her pluck,” wrote Blakemore, “though by this time we had grasped that it had an edge of craziness. She was like some Italian
principessa
, absolute in her whim, reigning over a small state in Renaissance Italy. The company was her principality, and she could be as charming or as
deadly as the mood took her.” Olivier, of course, bore the brunt of it: he fussed over her “very like a lady’s maid” and tried to ensure that she was in the right place at the right time. But as the tour wore on her behaviour became ever more unruly, her drinking was unbridled, she roamed the streets at night, got into a fight with an Italian policeman, refused to board the train with the rest of the party. “Unprovoked. Bad scrap,” is a scribbled note in Olivier’s diary written in Belgrade, which gives some hint as to what was going on in the seclusion of their hotel suite. “When I woke her up in the morning, very, very gently, she was absolutely sweet for about five minutes and then when I went to have my shower, she got up in a rage and smashed the mirror against the wall.”
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In 1954, in a late night show for charity, Olivier had found himself paired with Jack Buchanan. I “would find nothing in the world more exciting than to dance with you,” he told Buchanan. “I’ve always had a great leaning that way.” After twenty hours of intensive coaching they ended up with a two-minute dance routine which was judged by the – no doubt indulgent – audience to have been a riotous success. “I was really happily swollen-headed about my dancing,” Olivier recalled. The word spread of his new accomplishment. “
J’ai lu même que vous apprenez la danse
,” wrote Jean-Louis Barrault. “
Quand allez-vous vous livrer à la pantomime?
” This fleeting experience was not responsible for Olivier taking on “The Entertainer”, but it disposed him to look kindly on a project which he might otherwise have felt to be outside his range.
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He was anyway in a mood to seek adventure. He felt that his life had settled into a predictable rhythm: a classical or semi-classical film, a play or two at Stratford, a nine-month run in the West End. “I was going mad, desperately searching for something fresh and thrillingly exacting. I really felt that death might be quite exciting compared with the amorphous, purgatorial
Nothing
that was my existence.” As was not unusual, he grossly overstated his case. By the standards of most people his life was crowded with incident and variety; even by his own standards most days brought a new and interesting challenge. Nor was
he as discontented as he suggests; he was restless and ambitious but unless things were going badly he was on the whole a happy man. But he did have an uneasy feeling that he had got into a rut and ought to be looking for some new experience. He sought it in the Royal Court Theatre off Sloane Square in London.
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The establishment of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court in April 1956, followed by the visit of the Berliner Ensemble to London only a few weeks after the death of its founder, Bertolt Brecht, profoundly affected the development of British theatre over the next decades. The Court, under the direction of that ardent Brechtian, William Gaskill, became not merely renowned for the spare, vigorous, exquisitely integrated ensemble acting that was the Brechtian trademark, but also as a centre of rebellion and challenge to the established order. Outrage at the Anglo-French adventure at Suez, a crusading campaign for the abolition of nuclear weapons: these were not necessarily causes overtly espoused by the Royal Court, but they were part of the atmosphere in which it existed. Nothing was sacred; everything was open to challenge. Olivier, if he had considered the issues at all, would probably have favoured intervention at Suez and the retention of a nuclear deterrent. But he wanted a change; he recognised the quality of the Royal Court’s productions; he might deplore some of the methods and the causes it espoused, but the basic thrust, the energy, the passion, stimulated his jaded palate. He was ready, almost determined, to be converted.
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John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger”, with its ferocious yet brilliantly entertaining assault on patriotism, paternalism and all the values of the middle classes, was the most celebrated or notorious example of this new rebellion. Olivier at first disliked the play. “It’s just a travesty of England,” he told Arthur Miller, “a lot of bitter rattling on about conditions.” Although, he added, “some people think it’s fairly good satire”. Miller was intrigued and decided to go. Olivier went with him and was convinced by Miller’s enthusiasm that, even if the sentiments were not to his taste, Osborne’s was a powerful talent and his work heralded a tsunami of new drama on the crest of which it would be possible to ride
into a challenging and exhilarating world. A few weeks later Olivier came again to the Royal Court to see Osborne act in Nigel Dennis’s “Cards of Identity”. He went behind afterwards to congratulate the cast. “You’re my kind of actor,” Olivier told Osborne. “You like hiding behind make-up.” He was evidently Olivier’s kind of dramatist as well; to Osborne’s amazement Olivier went on to ask him whether he would consider writing a play with a part suitable for him.
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