Olivier (6 page)

“Private Lives”, when it did open in August 1930, proved to be very much as Coward had predicted – an immense success for the author and the principal players with scant attention paid to the supporting roles. “Gertrude Lawrence is amazing,” T. E. Shaw – Lawrence of Arabia – told Coward. “She acts nearly as well as yourself. I was sorry for the other two. They were out of it.” His was a “stooge role”, Olivier thought. But he made something of it. “In this comedy, in which every other line was a belly laugh, I had two half-laughs. By the time we finished, I got myself another two.” People who knew saw that the part was a difficult one and admired his handling of it. Most importantly, Coward himself approved. When John Mills saw the play Coward asked him what he had thought of Olivier’s performance. “Well,” said Mills, “I couldn’t believe that anyone as good-looking as that could be such a rivetingly good actor.” “I’ll tell you something,” replied Coward. “In my much-sought-after opinion that young man, unless something goes radically wrong, will, before long, be acknowledged as our greatest actor.”
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Successful or not, Olivier did not enjoy the play. Coward told Robert Stephens that, some years later, Olivier had admitted to him that he had been “eaten with jealousy” every time he witnessed the triumph of the leading players. “The thing about Larry was that he was jealous of everyone, whatever they did, if he felt they did whatever they did better than he could.” Or that they enjoyed an opportunity he had been denied. Or played a part he felt to be his own. Usually he kept such feelings under control, sometimes they burst out. His jealousy made his life a lot less tranquil and caused him much unhappiness.
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After his London triumph Coward took “Private Lives” to New York.
Adrianne Allen, the actress who had played opposite Olivier in the London production, was not free to make the trip so Jill Esmond was recruited to fill the gap. In spite of the fact that he was doomed to play second fiddle to the stars, there was a great deal about the season for Olivier to enjoy. Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence were invited everywhere and their junior partners usually travelled in their wake. They made many friends, among them Douglas Fairbanks Jr, who remained a close friend of Olivier all his life. Together Olivier and Fairbanks went to the Russian Club, where they watched a man whose act consisted of swallowing almonds, sewing needles and goldfish and regurgitating them in the order demanded by the audience. To add to this esoteric entertainment he offered them cocaine. Nervously, they accepted. Fairbanks survived more or less unscathed. Olivier, Fairbanks remembered, “never very robust, got sick to his stomach and asked us to leave early so as to throw up”. Such mishaps apart, he enjoyed his forays into New York high society. But the tour was not a total success. For one thing Jill Esmond not only disliked her role but thought she was miscast: “I was very bad in the part.” For another, irrespective of the merits of her performance, more attention was paid to her in New York than to her husband. She was already to some extent an established figure and the gossip columns covered her doings more often than those of Olivier. “Many of the local bigwigs dismissed him as a nice but stiff young Englishman,” remarked Fairbanks. “They said Jill was the one to watch and that Larry’s future was limited.” Olivier professed not to mind this in the least, but in fact was put out: it did not make the already slightly shaky marriage progress more smoothly. Halfway through the run Gertrude Lawrence fell ill and the Oliviers took advantage of the gap to spend a few days beachcombing in Nassau. Perhaps some time alone together would have helped them sort things out; Coward, however, decided to join them. “We didn’t really want to be joined,” said Jill Esmond wistfully. “We were quite happy by ourselves.”
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The run over, Jill Esmond was anxious to move on to Hollywood, where she knew profitable work awaited her. Olivier was doubtful:
apart from his professed conviction that the cinema was an inferior art form he was conscious of the fact that he had not fully mastered the art of acting to camera and was reluctant to expose himself to the risk of failure. In the end, he decided that he should give it a go. Coward was disdainful when he was told of their plan: “You’ve got no artistic integrity, that’s your trouble … Hahlleewood!” The reality was even worse than Olivier had envisaged. “He has no chance,” said a studio executive. “He tries to look like Ronnie Colman but his face is too strong and his looks are too rugged. When it comes to rugged actors we don’t need Englishmen.” Worse still, the director Victor Schertzinger said that Olivier had no idea how to perform before the camera: “He acted the way he did on the stage – all broad gestures and a face forever busy with expressions.” David Selznick, one of Hollywood’s most powerful producers, was more favourable, deeming Olivier an “excellent possibility”, but even he admitted that most people thought Jill Esmond “more desirable for stock”. In any case, he considered their salaries “way out of line for beginners, especially as we have no parts in line for either”.
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Though underemployed, and fobbed off with indifferent parts when he
was
employed, Olivier never lost his confidence in his powers. Fabia Drake, one of his oldest friends, was acting with a company putting on a repertoire of classical plays in Los Angeles. Night after night Olivier came to the theatre. How could he bear to spend his time watching other people act? she asked. “Well, you see, I’m going to do them all one day,” he replied. But he was not going to do them on the West Coast of America. After three years, with only three second-rate films to his credit but a reasonable cache of dollars in the bank, he decided it was time to return to London.
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To Jill, things looked rather different. It seems that she was likely to land the most important role in Clemence Dane’s “A Bill of Divorcement”. “Whoever played that, unless they were an appalling actress, could not help being a success,” remembered Jill sadly. “It was a wonderful part.” To secure it, though, she would have to sign a seven-year contract. What happened then is obscure. Olivier claimed to have seen
papers on Selznick’s desk that made it clear that the young Katharine Hepburn had already been signed up at a high salary and that Jill was merely being strung along. David Selznick claimed that this could not be the truth. The contract with Hepburn was not signed until after the Oliviers had left Hollywood so Olivier could not have seen it. He was determined that his wife should not be a bigger star than he was: “Larry is the most selfish man I have ever met.” If Olivier did invent the story of Hepburn’s contract it would have been not so much to sabotage his wife’s career as to ensure that she returned to London with him. It does not seem, anyway, that it played an important part in her final decision. “Larry,” she said, “wanted very much to go back to England … Naturally a part of me wanted to stay on but I wasn’t unhappy having made the decision.”
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Back in London, they decided that they must live in a style more appropriate to international stars. For the first year of their marriage they had rented a tiny flat in Roland Gardens with a bed, a dining-room table and chairs and almost nothing else. A Mrs Johns cooked for them when they had company. Her style was as unpolished as the surroundings. Once they plucked up their courage and asked Noël Coward to dinner. Some culinary disaster occurred and the three of them laughed heartily. “It’s all very well to laugh,” said Mrs Johns, “but suppose someone important had been here!” Things were going to be very different in future. They moved into a house on Chelsea Embankment, boasting a huge room which had been Whistler’s studio. In it they installed an imposing stone fireplace, a tapestry and a grand piano and prepared to entertain the cream of Bohemian London. Bohemian London duly rallied to the call. Their first large party was a flop. “We were too grand,” admitted Jill Esmond. “We invited too many grand people and, if you have too many grand people everyone wants to talk.” They learned by their mistake; in future parties the more voluble celebrities were interspersed with people prepared to listen. But the dollars were running out and though Olivier was offered one or two interesting parts and got excellent
reviews, the plays were not sufficiently successful nor the financial rewards high enough to support the life style to which he had become accustomed in America. Like it or not, he had to return to films.
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It is curious how long it took Olivier, a most perceptive actor and one who would repeatedly show himself as an innovator, to realise that the cinema made demands on the performer quite different to those posed by the stage. In part this was because he continued to despise the medium. “There’s something rather terrible and cold-blooded about acting in a film studio,” he told his sister Sybille. “Films can help you to buy your mother a smart car or your wife a house in the country, but I still don’t believe they can help you to act.” When Alexander Korda, the man who got nearer than anyone else to creating an English Hollywood, gave Olivier opportunities to play important parts, he only accepted them disdainfully: “I felt unhappy in the medium, and was using most of my energy trying to build strong performances on the stage in the evenings.
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Korda played an important part in Olivier’s life. He needed Olivier, because in the early 1930s there was still only a small pool of actors who operated exclusively in the cinema and producers looked to the stage to find their casts. Olivier needed Korda, because the cinema was where the money was. Olivier respected and, up to a point, trusted Korda; Korda admired Olivier. Yet they were in opposite camps, the relationship between them was always cautious. “There were times when I was frightened of him,” Olivier admitted, “when he seemed to have a sort of power thing.” Korda was determined that Olivier should play opposite Marlene Dietrich. Olivier refused “because Jill was rather ill, and I thought that if I was in a picture with Dietrich it would worry her”. When he tried to explain this to Korda, he met with ridicule. “I hated him at that moment,” Olivier remembered. J. B. Priestley tried to convert him to the potentialities of cinema. “I’d like to do a film with you sometime,” he wrote. “I think a bit better of them than you do – as long as one hasn’t some half-witted producer sitting on one.” Olivier was not convinced.
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Half-witted producers were only part of Olivier’s quarrel with the cinema; the whole film world seemed alien to him. He was convinced that the dislike was mutual. “God help any man, woman or child who tries to get into the films through me,” he protested to George Devine, “as I am very unpopular with them.” Even when he had made his breakthrough and come to terms with the medium, even when he had become a major film star, he never seemed altogether at home on the screen. Orson Welles remarked that Olivier was the master of technique and that, if screen acting depended only on technique, he would have been supreme master of the medium. “And yet, fine as he’s been in films, he’s never been more than a shadow of that electric presence which commands the stage. Why does the cinema seem to diminish him? And enlarge Gary Cooper – who knew nothing of technique at all?” He might equally have cited Marilyn Monroe; a woman who barely knew what acting was yet who, twenty years later, was to outshine Olivier in every scene.
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His view of the world of cinema was by no means enhanced by his expedition to Hollywood to star opposite Greta Garbo. In July 1933 he went back to Los Angeles to play the Spanish lover of Garbo’s Queen Christina. Garbo at this time was the best-known film star in the world. To co-star with her would have been an important step forward in Olivier’s film career; it would also have been a risky one, since Garbo’s screen presence was so overwhelmingly powerful that any man opposite her was likely to be eclipsed. This was a risk Olivier was more than ready to take; he haggled over terms, but he was never in any real doubt that he must accept the invitation. He had reckoned without his costar’s idiosyncratic tastes. She seemed not so much to dislike him as to be unaware that he was there. With increasing desperation he tried to get through to her; launching a blitzkrieg of charm, wit and wistfulness in an effort to break down her Nordic indifference. She allowed him to rattle on with detached unconcern; then shrugged and sidled away
with an enigmatic: “Oh vell, live’sh a pain, anyway.” The following day the producer told him that, while M.G.M. still had total faith in Olivier and were eager to keep him under contract, in this particular part, perhaps … In fact, it may not have been so exclusively Garbo’s decision as Olivier imagined; the casting director concluded that “he didn’t have enough maturity, skill and acting weight … he was too young and inexperienced for Don Antonio”. At the time it seemed, indeed was, a humiliating rebuff; in the interests of his long-term career it was perhaps a good thing. If Olivier had acted opposite Garbo and achieved even moderate success the pressure to remain in Hollywood and make a fortune would have been hard to resist. We might never have seen his Henry V, his Richard III, his James Tyrone; the history of the National Theatre might have been very different.
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So it was back to the stage and parts that became steadily more important and more testing. If one had to pick out three or four plays that defined the development of Olivier’s career, the first would certainly be “The Green Bay Tree”. William Wyler, the great American film-maker, saw it on its opening in New York and found it “a dark and puzzling drama about a homosexual relationship”. It “shocked and astonished” its audiences. It shocked and astonished Olivier, too, who disliked the part though recognising the great opportunity which it gave him. It was memorable for him because it was directed by Jed Harris. He had known Harris before, and found him charming, but as a director he was transformed into “a dreadful man”, a “cruel little bastard”; “I’ve never been so grateful to leave anything in my life.” He claimed to have in part modelled his Richard III on memories of Harris. But for all his defects, Olivier had to admit that he had “a theatrical brain of rare excellence” and that his ideas about the play were “sound and illuminating”. Harris had no doubts about the importance of his contribution. “The reason Olivier was halfway good in ‘The Green Bay Tree’ was because I made him good,” he wrote dismissively. “I took none of his childish shit about ‘forming’ his character and his ‘choices’ in reading lines. I just
told him to read his lines my way, and if he didn’t like it to get the hell out of the play.” Harris left an enduring mark: “he gave Larry a sense of discipline and seriousness about the theatre that he’s not had before,” said the director and critic, Harold Clurman. The very fact that Olivier felt ill at ease in the part, playing a weak and devious homosexual, forced him to introduce new depths into his acting to a degree that he had not so far achieved. “He was sensational,” remembered Noël Coward, “it was a marvellous, an extraordinary performance.” Olivier agreed. It was his first personal success in New York: “They thought I was wonderful and I
was
very good.”
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