Olivier (53 page)

His powers of concentration, once so unwavering, were diminished. He fell asleep at inappropriate moments. When Tynan wanted him to take on Tom Stoppard’s “Jumpers” it happened that no clean script was available. Stoppard was told to read it aloud to a select group, including Olivier. Long before he had finished it was embarrassingly clear that the Director, eyes gazing up towards the ceiling, was unaware of what was going on. When Stoppard finished, Olivier stirred uneasily. “Ken,” he asked. “Where
did
we get those lights?”
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Decrepitude is relative. Olivier at sixty-five still enjoyed the memory, the energy, the versatility of many actors half his age. Though he might somewhat curb his physical activities, he had no intention of giving in. Derek Granger remembers being with a drunk Olivier who was making a bad job of backing his car into a restricted space. Give it up, urged Granger, there was man at the garage door who would be happy to put the car away. “You don’t understand, baby,” said Olivier, “that some of us have got to do things like this and conquer them.” His powers might be fading, but he still intended to confront each challenge as it arose and to overcome it. Yet there was a difference, and he knew it. “Most actors,” Beverley Baxter had written in 1949 of Olivier’s performance in “The School for Scandal”, “are like electric bulbs. The speaking of a line switches them on and the ending of a line switches them off. Not so Olivier. With him the light dims or rises but is never extinguished.” Even now it was never put out, if only because the weight of public expectation Olivier’s mere presence on a stage inspired was still a potent source of energy, but compared with what it had once been the light was burning low.
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It is hard to imagine why Olivier was so surprised when Rayne put forward the name of Peter Hall as the next Director. To most people Hall seemed the obvious candidate, a man who had proved himself
by running with conspicuous success the only theatrical organisation that, in its stature and its complexity, could be compared to the National Theatre. It was not as if the idea was new to him. John Dexter had warned Joan Plowright that he had heard Hall was being mooted as Olivier’s successor. Plowright passed on the warning; Olivier smiled knowingly and said: “You mustn’t believe every rumour.” Now the rumour had become reality; what was more, it was clear that Rayne was not trying out a new idea on Olivier but that matters were far advanced: the Board was behind the choice, Hall had been consulted and had given his provisional agreement. The provision was, of course, that Olivier should pronounce himself happy with Hall’s succession. “We do not wish to go ahead with the idea unless you are wholeheartedly in favour of it,” Rayne told Olivier. Hall had been emphatic that he would not think of taking on the job except with Olivier’s blessing. In theory it was in Olivier’s power to block the appointment. In practice it would have been almost impossible. All his other suggestions had been discussed and turned down; he could not argue that Hall did not have the proper qualifications; to veto the Board’s decision would be to reject somebody whom everybody else thought suitable on no grounds except those of personal distaste and a vague feeling that Hall was not right for the job. Olivier accepted the inevitable, made polite noises about Hall’s outstanding qualities and retired to brood over the way in which he had been misused.
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He
had
been misused. It was months since Rayne had first asked Hall whether, in principle, he would be willing to become Director. Hall had replied that he would, but only if Olivier wanted to retire and approved of his proposed successor. He felt that Olivier should at once have been brought into the discussions. Rayne disagreed. He said that it was not fair to trouble Olivier over such an issue while he was playing so gruelling a role as James Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey”. This cannot be the whole explanation. It seems more likely that Rayne feared Olivier would object to the proposal and wanted to present him with something close to a fait accompli. Hall was told that he was not
to say anything to Olivier about the matter; when he went to see “Long Day’s Journey” he felt that he could not go backstage after the performance in case the matter of the succession came up and he was forced to lie or at least to equivocate intolerably. The secret was well kept, few people seem to have known what was in the wind, but by the time Olivier was told, Hall had discussed the proposal with a variety of friends including Peggy Ashcroft, Peter Brook and Trevor Nunn.
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Olivier was the more aggrieved because, when his own suggestions had been dismissed, he had put forward the idea of establishing a Consultative Committee which would consider the various possibilities and make recommendations to the Board. Rayne had never approved this idea, but nor had he rejected it. Olivier thought it would be the way forward. In fact it might have been difficult to find suitable members for such a Board who did not consider that they were eligible for the job themselves, but it was a workable proposition and would have given Olivier a chance to revisit and perhaps promote candidates whom he had considered in the past but who had been rejected. Rayne, no doubt, viewed such a prospect with some dread and decided to take a short cut, even at the price of Olivier’s feelings. Olivier considered that he had been, at the best, sidelined, at the worst, misled. He had been manoeuvred into an impossible position. “It is, I think,” he told Max Rayne, “pretty good humbug for anybody to say that if I had had any reservations on the choice I should have voiced them, since I could not possibly have done so without creating an appalling scandal.” He had no aversion to Peter Hall – “apart from my admiration for him he does also happen to be my friend” – but he did feel that he had been given no chance to argue his case. Rayne disagreed. He claimed that there would have been no scandal if Olivier had vetoed Hall; “The only embarrassment the Board would have had … would have been finding another candidate as good.” The Board might not have been embarrassed, but Olivier would; his grievance was real and justified. It rankled, and poisoned the atmosphere during what would anyway have been a difficult and painful period.
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The pity is that, if the matter had been presented to him in a more civil manner, he would probably have come round to the Board’s view without too much hesitation. “When we talked to each other about it,” wrote Joan Plowright, “we had to admit that Peter was the only properly qualified candidate at the time.” Tynan reproached her for not having put up a stouter fight against Hall’s selection. She replied that, if she had done so, she would not have known “what I would be fighting FOR. Hence the rather fatalistic acceptance on my part and, I suspect, many others.” She had no great faith in any of Olivier’s suggestions – nor, if he was being honest with himself, did Olivier himself feel committed to them. Hall might be
faute de mieux
; but if there was really no rival candidate as good or better, then
faute de mieux
became a conclusive argument.
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Olivier rather curiously made the central plank of his grievance the fact that, from the start of his time at the National Theatre, he had believed it to be part of his duties to seek out and to groom his eventual successor. To that end he had imported a series of outside directors in the hope that one of them would establish himself as a potential Director. This was done, he maintained, at great personal sacrifice to himself. “I could easily have directed three times as many plays,” he claimed. “I could have directed thirty-seven instead of seven and made myself into a sort of Stanislavsky, which was my ambition … So when finally it turned out that they’d known perfectly well they were going have Peter Hall all the time, I realised the sacrifice I’d made was for
nothing
… That’s what made me sick; that’s the only thing that really did turn me badly in remorsefulness about my own history at the National.”
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This is, of course, absurd. The Board had not “known perfectly well they were going to have Peter Hall all the time”; they had scarcely given a thought to the succession until a few months before Olivier’s contract was due to run out. Nor could Olivier have added the direction of another thirty plays to his monstrous workload; he could already be criticised for putting too much on himself, to have done still more would have been disastrous both for himself and for the National
Theatre. Olivier had good grounds for feeling aggrieved without dragging in this extravagant red herring. He convinced himself that it was true, however, and never abandoned the belief that he had been cheated out of his birthright.

*

Olivier’s first act on leaving Rayne was to send Peter Hall a generous message of welcome and congratulation. The two men met a few days later and talked for several hours. Hall found Olivier in a confused and volatile frame of mind. Part of him wanted to retire as Director and get shot of the place as soon as possible, part of him did not want to retire at all. One part was pleased that Hall was to be his successor, another hated the idea: “I am Royal Shakespeare, not National,” Hall reflected. “I have not been Larry’s man, ever.” The conversation covered many subjects. Olivier still had his heroic energy, judged Hall, “but he strays from the subject, forgets names, muddles up attitudes”. On the whole the talk went well and Hall was relieved, “although I don’t kid myself that life will be simple … The interregnum period will be very difficult, and even thereafter, Larry will never be an easy man to have around.”
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Just how difficult it was going to be was illustrated when Olivier addressed a meeting of the Company to break the news of his impending departure. Hall was in New York but was telephoned by a friend who told him that Olivier had become emotional and had given his colleagues the impression that he had not been consulted about the succession and that he intended to “fight on” so as to ensure that he was still in charge when the move came to the new building. “Who is he fighting?” Hall asked himself. Nobody, was the answer. Even when at his most indignant, Olivier had no intention of trying to reverse Hall’s appointment or even to make his accession to power more difficult. But in the excitement of a public meeting, urged on by the sympathy and support he felt around him, he went further than he had intended in expressing his feeling that he had been betrayed. “You must have known that the company were too tongue-tied to say what was in all
their hearts,” Maureen Lipman told him. “Just – they are (and me) so sorry you are going and so glad you will still be here.”
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But how long would he still be there and how would the interregnum be handled? If Tynan had had his way, Olivier would have fought to retain his position and to make life as difficult as possible for his replacement. In the same way as Hall had been prevented from telling Olivier what was planned, so, for several weeks, Olivier felt unable to warn Tynan, Blakemore and the others of his forthcoming departure and the identity of his successor. Tynan knew that Hall disliked and distrusted him and that he would not survive under the new regime. The fact that Olivier had kept him in the dark added an edge of fury to his outrage. By failing to nominate a successor from among his colleagues, Olivier, Tynan felt, had “passed a vote of no confidence in us all … He had hired us, stolen our kudos, and now shows no compunction about discarding us!” Tynan made it his business to envenom and, so far as it was possible, protract the period of the handover. He told Hall that feelings were now so inflamed at the National Theatre – “by him, no doubt,” Hall added in his diary – that a cooling-off period in which no decisions were taken was the safest course. “I made no comment,” wrote Hall. Two days later Hall recorded apprehensively that the “scandal’ was growing so large that “Tynan may achieve what I guess is his objective and either get a mass resignation from the company, or one from Olivier, or both’. According to Tynan, Blakemore and Dexter were equally indignant; Blakemore, he wrote in his diary, was “outraged at the lack of consultation and feels betrayed by L.O.”. So far did Tynan go in suggesting that the staff of the National Theatre was against change that Dexter felt bound to dissociate himself from his turbulent colleague. He thought the manner of the announcement had been unfortunate, he told the Board, but he agreed that Hall “by his previous work and reputation” was the best man to take over as Director.
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In essence this was also the position of Olivier, but occasional fits of pique reminded the world how badly he thought he had been treated. On 13 April Hall attended his first Board meeting. It was most important
that Olivier should be present too and he had indicated that he would be coming. Instead, with no warning or explanation, he went home to Brighton. Rayne wrote to remonstrate. “The discussion continued in a most interesting and agreeable way until well after 8.00 p.m.,” he told Olivier. The next meeting would take place in four days. “Clearly it is most essential that you should be present at that meeting and, as with last evening’s meeting, the time is being arranged to suit your convenience.” This time Olivier turned up and the text of the formal press release was agreed. On 18 April, 1972 the world learned that Olivier would be retiring as Director of the National Theatre and that Peter Hall would be replacing him. “Apart from weeding out Larry’s purple prose (why is it that actors are addicted to over-writing?),” noted Hall in his diary, the announcement was intended to be as unspecific as possible. Hall would be joining the National Theatre in the next few months; he would take over as Director some time after that when the Company had moved into the new building: all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
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Not everyone swallowed this bland presentation of what had been and was still proving a fractious process. At a meeting of the Arts and Recreation Committee of the Greater London Council (one of the National Theatre’s main financial sponsors) Illtyd Harrington accused the Board of being “ham-fisted, heavy-handed and blundering” and said that Olivier had been treated “very shabbily indeed”. T. C. Worsley, the critic, told Olivier that he had not believed “that things were being done in so unmannerly, so hugger-mugger a fashion” but was now convinced that the Board had indeed ensured “as ungracious an exit as they could contrive”. Tynan was far from being alone in his efforts to persuade Olivier that he had been misused. From the point of view of the National Theatre and of Olivier’s own reputation, it was fortunate that he was not left with much time on his hands in which to brood on his misfortunes. One of his regrets while at the National had been that he was left with little time in which to make films. “Full-length films are practically impossible for me these days,” he had written a year or so
before. “My job at the National Theatre really is a full-time one and my escapes are few and far between.” From time to time, however, he was able, for two or three months at least, to divest himself of most of his duties as Director and get back to the cinema. Within a few days of his learning that Hall was to succeed him, one of those precious breaks began.
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