Vivien Leigh Read online

  BOOKS BY ANNE EDWARDS

  NOVELS

  The Survivors

  Miklos Alexandrovitch Is Missing

  Shadow of a Lion

  Haunted Summer

  The Hesitant Heart

  Child of Night

  BIOGRAPHY

  Judy Garland: A Biography

  Vivien Leigh: A Biography

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  The Inn and Us (with Stephen Citron)

  CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  A Child’s Bible

  The Great Houdini

  P. T. Barnum

  Vivien

  Leigh

  Vivien

  Leigh

  A BIOGRAPHY

  Anne Edwards

  TAYLOR TRADE PUBLISHING

  Lanham • New York • Boulder • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

  Published by Taylor Trade Publishing

  An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

  www.rowman.com

  10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom

  Distributed by National Book Network

  Copyright © 1977 by Anne Edwards

  First Taylor Trade edition 2013

  The author wishes to thank the following sources for permission to quote material in this book:

  W. H. Allen & Co., Ltd. for material from Alexander Korda by Karol Kulick, copyright ©1975 by Karol Kulick.

  Chappell Music Company for lyrics from “I Went to a Marvelous Party” by Nöel Coward, copyright ©1939 by Chappell & Co., Inc. copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

  Hamish Hamilton, Ltd. For material from Vivien Leigh—A Bouquet by Alan Dent, copyright © 1969 by Alan Dent.

  McGraw-Hill Book Company, for material from Memoirs of the 40’s by Cecil Beaton, copyright © 1972 by Cecil Beaton.

  New Directions Publishing Corporation, for material from The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. 1, copyright © 1947 by Tennessee Williams.

  Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., for material from “Dancing in the Dark” by Howard Dietz, copyright © 1974 by Howard Dietz.

  The Viking Press, Inc., for material from Memo from David O. Selznick edited by Rudy Behlmer, copyright © 1972 by Selznick Properties, Ltd.

  A. P. Watt & son, for material from The Oliviers by Felix Barker, copyright ©1953 by Felix Barker.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Edwards, Anne, date.

  Vivien Leigh.

  Includes index.

  1. Leigh, Vivien, 1913-1967. 2. Actors—Great Britain—Biography.

  PN2598.L46E3

  791’.092’4 [B] 76-58432

  ISBN: 978-1-58979-785-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-58979-786-4 (electronic)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Steve

  who shared this writing experience with me

  and never failed

  in his loving encouragement

  Act One

  This way the king will come;

  this is the way.

  —Queen

  in Shakespeare’s

  Richard II

  Chapter One

  The search for an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara had cost David O. Selznick $50,000 and lasted two and one half years. Yet, work would begin on Gone With the Wind this clear, cold December evening in 1938 with the role uncast, and the city of Atlanta would burn on the back lot of his studio with seven Technicolor cameras standing ready to roll. Doubles for Scarlett and Rhett waited on the sidelines for their cues to hop aboard the buckboard that would take them through the fiery streets of Atlanta, streets that had been created by giving false fronts and new profiles to the old sets of King Kong and Little Lord Fauntleroy in order to simulate buildings of the American Civil War period. Selznick knew he was about to take a tremendous gamble. Over the past two and one half years he had, after all, sent out to every hamlet in the South the best talent scouts in the country, dispatched director George Cukor and a whole crew to follow, and had personally seen hundreds of young women who were untrained actresses and an equal number who were trained and who read and tested for the part. In fact, he had done everything conceivable, and yet there was still no Scarlett. There was the possibility that Margaret Mitchell’s world-famous heroine with her seventeen-inch waist—the smallest in three Georgia counties—would never be found.

  But Selznick was a gambler by nature and he knew his financial backers would not wait. Either he was to begin work or abandon the project. Never had he felt so excited at the start of a film. Like Sherman himself he paced back and forth on the high-railed observation platform from which he was to watch the spectacle of Atlanta burning. But still he would not give the signal for the crew to turn on the gas jets to start the blaze for the cameras to photograph. The crew waited impatiently. The three pairs of Scarlett and Rhett doubles, the three identical buckboards—each with a Melanie, her newborn baby, and the servant Prissy hidden in the back—stood by. But Selznick was waiting for his brother, Myron, and refused to begin without him.

  David Selznick was a bear of a man, big and robust and well over six feet tall, and he seemed a positive giant to the crew watching him from below for some sign. Shortsighted, he leaned forward scanning the night for a speck that he might recognize as his brother. Finally, furious at Myron, he gave the go-ahead. As the gas jets were turned on, fire leapt up, devouring the dry wood, and the first set of Scarlett and Rhett doubles jumped on their buckboard and raced alongside the flames. The scene was shot and reshot eight times before Selznick was satisfied. Sweat poured down his face and he had to remove his glasses to wipe them clean. He was exhausted and yet at the same time exhilarated beyond anything in his past experience. The shooting of Gone With the Wind had finally begun.

  Replacing his glasses, he stood for a moment watching the flames consuming what remained of the set. Every available fire company in the area stood by and the back lot was a maze of men and equipment. Then he spotted his brother, Myron, elbowing his way through, a man and a woman following close at his heels. Myron had mentioned that he was dining with a client, the renowned English actor Laurence Olivier, and as the three came closer he was able to identify Olivier. But who was the woman? Selznick fixed his gaze on her as Myron took her hand and helped her up the precarious steps of the platform. Dressed starkly in black, she held tightly to a wide-brimmed black hat that framed her face as it shadowed it. It was windy at the top of the platform and she turned her head to the side as she approached him, so he could not see her.

  “Here, genius,” Myron said in greeting to his furious sibling, “meet your Scarlett O’Hara.”

  The woman tilted her head back and swiftly removed the halo hat so that her dark chestnut hair blew wildly behind her. The reflection of the flames lighted her face and made her green cat-eyes dance. She smiled, her almost childlike mouth turned up at the corners, as she extended her hand.

  Selznick stared with stunned disbelief at the young woman who was grasping his hand. Vivien Leigh was indeed Scarlett O’Hara as Margaret Mitchell had described her—“the green eyes in the carefully sweet face turbulent, lust
y for life, distinctly at variance with her decorous manner.” It was exactly this duality of personality that he had been looking for in every girl he had interviewed for the role: an elusive quality that he now suspected was the chief factor that had caused him to be so slow in reaching a final decision. He had found his star and the world was about to see one of the most famous fictional heroines of all time come alive.

  Vivien, like Scarlett, was from her childhood an extraordinary and powerful personality and a desperate and unconquerable survivor. There was about her a wildness that flashed in her eyes, and yet few women had more outward composure, elegance, or style. Even at twenty-five she was a complex, exciting woman who created a world of her own. Hers was a mythical kingdom born of the gleaming palaces of her Indian childhood, the gilded fantasies of her youth, and the glowing pageantry in the pages of Shakespeare that she had devoured throughout her life.

  Olivier, young and handsome—England’s heir apparent to the crown of the English theatre—stood behind her as she faced Selznick, her back to the charred devastation that had moments before been Atlanta burning. For her he had left his wife and son, and she had deserted her husband and daughter for him. Theirs was a great, an historic love affair, and now she would have a great and historic role. With incredible odds that even a veteran gambler like Selznick would have called impossible, she had traveled halfway around the world to win both.

  For the twenty-five years that had led up to that moment high on that windblown platform, Vivien had molded her days from dream and fantasy which never contained defeat, and she had lived in the future where almost anything could happen. Now she was face to face with the role of her life.

  In 1905, the time of the British raj, a time when England’s young men flocked to India in search of adventure, Ernest Richard Hartley arrived in Calcutta as a clerk in the brokerage offices of Piggott Chapman and Company, not yet twenty and barely able to grow a stubble on his chin. He was the son of a family of moderate good breeding with no fortune to squander, land to inherit, or Court connections to assure his future. He, therefore, considered himself damned lucky to have secured his position. Marriage and children were far from his thoughts.

  He had brought to India with him picturesque fantasies founded on Kipling’s tales of a life of turbaned sepoys, tiger hunts, and “manly pursuits.” It was a great shock to him when he discovered he had come to a city that was virtually a human sewer packed with beggars and lepers, stinking from an overflow of garbage, urine, and excrement, and miles from the exotic life he had imagined. Against his liberal nature but as a means of survival he quickly learned how to live in India as a white Englishman. There were the cricket matches on the spacious lawns of Calcutta’s Bengal Club and races and polo games organized by the Calcutta Turf Club. But even more to his liking was the high quality of Calcutta’s English-speaking Royal Theatre, for which he was instantly recruited as a performer.

  There was no theatrical’ history in Hartley’s background, and no way to explain his extraordinary talent as an amateur actor. Appearances of visiting companies were rare, so the English residents of Calcutta were forced to provide their own entertainments. Several of these amateur productions were presented each year and within a very short time Hartley had progressed to a leading supporting player and collected a respectable box of favorable press clippings. Apparently it caused no conflict of interests, as Piggott Chapman and Company soon made him a junior partner. Hartley, though, had grown into what might be called a “bon vivant.” His distant French ancestry had endowed him with a certain irresistible charm toward women. Unfortunately the majority of attractive young Englishwomen in Calcutta were married, and therefore dangerous playmates for a junior partner.

  When he returned for a visit to his home in Bridlington, Yorkshire, in 1911, Hartley—who had left six years before as a rather artless lad—was now considered a part of India’s romantic legend. The young women of Bridlington were entranced with his “worldly” charm, and their parents were impressed with his patina of success. Certainly he stood apart from other Bridlington bachelors. The intense Indian sun had tanned and weathered his skin; and his theatre training had squared his shoulders, taught him a gallant air, and helped him refine his country speech. It did not take him long to recognize that he could win the charms of even the most beautiful girl in Bridlington. The combination of French-Irish ancestry had endowed Gertrude Robinson Yackje with the fragile look of Sèvres porcelain and the merry nature of a pixie. Hartley fell madly in love, proposed, and with a promise of a life filled with drama and romance won her heart.

  They were married in the fall of 1911; and as though he had staged the rising curtain of their life together, his lovely young bride arrived in India on the same date—December 2, 1911—as their imperial majesties George V and Queen Mary. Fireworks exploded over the Bay of Bombay as the city celebrated the monarch’s arrival. Gertrude was overwhelmed at the masses of shouting, shoving, unwashed humans. Hartley, sensing her distress, hurried her through the redbrick Neo-Gothic arches of Bombay’s Victoria Station and into the first-class carriage of the shiny green and red car with its brown upholstered luxury that would take them to Calcutta and the home he had found in its fashionable suburb of Alipore.

  Though their life in those early years was lived a good deal more luxuriously than either had been accustomed to—a staff of several servants and a chauffeured car were at their disposal—neither felt comfortable. Gertrude was a good Catholic and longed for the rituals of her religion; and Hartley could not shut his eyes to the poverty, dirt, and small regard for human life that surrounded him daily. Still, they made the most and the best of it. Ernest continued with his interest in the theatre, helping to raise funds for a larger, more modern building than the one that then housed the Royal Theatre Company. He became quite a good polo player and developed a considerable knowledge of horseflesh. Gertrude remained whenever she could behind the solid white stucco walls and shuttered windows of their palatial home, showing a talent for gardening as she transformed the courtyard into an English garden. She was not unhappy, for she truly loved Ernest and was proud of his achievements. But after two years the monsoon rains and the scorching heat began to test her good nature. To add to these trials she was three months pregnant and by the end of April—only a fortnight away—Alipore would be deserted and only native servants would remain to guard the houses in the unbearable heat of the hot season. She and Ernest planned to follow most of their friends to the cool of the lower mountain regions of the Himalayas, but a house—rather than a hotel room—had to be found, as Gertrude was to remain until the child’s birth in November.

  By the last week in April, Ernest had located just the right house. He stepped out of his office at 5 Royal Exchange Road and into the unrelenting sun the morning before their departure, not seeming for once to mind the pungent odors. He hurried down the steps and dodged quickly into the rear of his chauffeur-driven limousine. The car swept past the Georgian mansions and offices of trading and brokerage houses, turning off and moving through cluttered lanes and in and out of dark clouds of buzzing flies. He looked down at some papers in his lap, a habit he had acquired to avert the possibility of his eyes meeting a beggar’s stare through the car’s windows. It was only a short ride until they had passed the figure of the Bengal tiger that surmounted the central gateway of Belvedere, the official residence of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. That meant he was only moments from his home.

  They packed that night and by morning were on a train that wound its way north to the breezy mountain resort town of Darjeeling. The house, which belonged to a colleague of Hartley’s, more than met their expectations. A two-storied building with the exceptional luxury of two bathrooms and a large bathtub, it stood surrounded by its own thick woods on the side of a hill overlooking the town. Hartley remained there with Gertrude for several weeks before returning to his desk at Piggott Chapman. The summer was almost as hot as it was lonely, but he was kept busy with his work, the bu
ilding plans for the theatre, and the conversation of his friends at the Turf Club, where he was. now involved in breeding racehorses.

  In late October he went back to Darjeeling to join Gertrude; and on the evening of November 5,1913, just as the sun went down over the snowcapped peaks of Kanchenjunga and Everest, and the lights of Darjeeling were turned on, the English doctor came downstairs to inform him that he was the father of a fine and exceptionally beautiful baby girl. It was a fitting and dramatic entrance for Vivian Mary Hartley, who would one day become the fabled Vivien Leigh. Gertrude was not surprised that her daughter was beautiful, for she had faced Kanchenjunga just before the child’s birth, which the Indian amah had assured her would guarantee her child’s perfection of face. Gertrude was happier than she had been since coming to India. Ernest enjoyed being a father, they were both proud of Vivian, and they settled into a most civilized way of life. Then, nine months later, the world was at war.

  Hartley was ready to return to England but was persuaded instead to become an officer in the Indian cavalry, for whom his hobby of breeding racehorses now made his services most desirable. Gertrude and little Vivian followed him to Mussoorie, a small hill town near Darjeeling where he trained remounts for Mesopotamia. After two years he was transferred to the military station in Bangalore and his family moved to the suburb of Ootacamund. Vivian thought her father looked especially handsome in shiny boots and uniform. She was ecstatic when she was taken to the racetrack in Bangalore, and though she saw less of Ernest than she wished, she had learned a sure way to capture his attention and admiration.

  Ootacamund had an amateur theatre group and the English Army wives took it upon themselves to present children’s plays and pantomimes. Gertrude agreed that Vivian should sing Little Bo Peep at one of these performances and costumed the three-year-old as a Dresden shepherdess, replete with sheep crook, flowered bonnet, and rosettes on her shoes and skirt. Standing center stage and with amazing presence, Vivian announced that she would recite, not sing Bo Peep.