Vivien Leigh Read online

  “I will play Cathy,” she said, smiling nervously.

  “Merle Oberon has already been cast,” he replied, “and she is under contract to Sam Goldwyn.”

  “I will play Cathy or nothing,” she insisted.

  “It’s impossible and I assure you that you will never get a better part than Isabella for an American debut,” Wyler urged.

  They parted with Wyler knowing Vivien would not accept a secondary role and doubting that Olivier would sign for Heathcliff in view of this fact. But with all his sensitivity, Wyler had not perceived the depth of Vivien’s understanding of the man she loved. Having met Wyler, Olivier now wanted to play Heathcliff desperately, and he had refused because he had not wanted to leave her behind. Fearing that self-sacrifice of this nature could destroy them more quickly than separation, she insisted he go to Hollywood to do the film, reasoning that she would be well occupied for the three months of the projected separation, as she had been offered the title role in Serena Blandish, to open shortly at the little Gate Theatre; and then, at Christmastime, she had a commitment to appear in the revival at the Old Vic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  Olivier was not convinced that she should be left behind to fend for herself in what he knew would be a difficult situation, and he put off making an immediate acceptance of Wyler’s now exceptionally generous offer. He was co-starring with Ralph Richardson in Q Planes (Clouds Over Europe in the U.S.A.) for Korda, and he discussed this dilemma with both men. Korda, now in love with Merle Oberon and facing a similar separation, felt the two lovers had to adapt their lives to the demands of their careers and not the other way around. And Richardson advised him to go to Hollywood to do the film because the fame attached would do him no harm.

  Q Planes was completed by the end of October, and on November 5, Vivien’s twenty-fifth birthday, she drove with him to Southampton to see him sail for America on the Normandie and then returned that evening for a performance of Serena Blandish, which had opened on September 13 and was closing that week after an unsuccessful run.

  Vivien was idle until Tyrone Guthrie summoned her to begin rehearsals on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Meantime, Olivier sent her a cable from New York: Goldwyn had called from Hollywood as soon as the Normandie had docked to ask if Vivien might still be available, as they were having problems with Merle Oberon. But no sooner had Vivien had her hopes raised than Larry cabled her back from Hollywood that Oberon was going on with the role as agreed.

  Daily letters began arriving at little Durham Cottage. Olivier was not getting on well with Merle Oberon, and open war had developed during a love scene because Oberon claimed he had spat on her as he spoke his lines. They replayed the scene. “You spat again!” Olivier’s leading lady accused. At which point Olivier let loose an abusive reply and Merle Oberon walked off the set.

  Then there was the problem of Olivier’s makeup. Used to the theatricality of the stage, he had insisted on heavy makeup. After viewing the first rushes, Goldwyn followed Wyler onto the set screaming in his famous accented voice, “This actor is the ugliest actor in pictures! This actor will ruin me!”

  Olivier’s going to Hollywood now seemed a terrible mistake; and to add to the difficulties of their separation, the production problems and his own insecurity in his performance, he had developed a terrible case of athlete’s foot and had to walk around on crutches which were removed only when the cameras were ready to roll.

  Vivien was lonely and despondent. What she could withstand with Olivier she found quite impossible alone. There were her parents, who felt this a good opportunity to discuss her situation with her, attempting to convince her to return to Leigh; and there was Leigh and little Suzanne and the motherless house on Little Stanhope Street. Her awesome, frightening restlessness returned. Her heartbeat accelerated wildly. She felt she might be drowning and had used up all the air in her lungs. She smoked incessantly and never seemed able to satisfy her hunger. The nights became terrifying, and she slept less than ever.

  Once again she picked up her dog-eared copy of Gone With the Wind and reread it and then called John Gliddon. “You know,” she said, “the passage where Scarlett voices her happiness that her mother is dead, so that she can’t see what a bad girl Scarlett has become? Well—that’s me.”

  Scarlett had still not been cast, and everyone knew a final decision had to be made soon or Selznick would never get the film before the cameras. As fate would have it, Olivier’s Hollywood agent, Myron Selznick, was David’s trusted brother.

  Vivien wrote Olivier asking him to speak to Myron, but no sooner had she posted the letter than she cabled she was sailing on the Queen Mary the next day and then would fly from New York to Los Angeles, where she could only spend five days before having to return to the Old Vic. It seemed a mad and reckless expenditure for a five-day visit with Larry, but Vivien was convinced she must do it.

  Act Two

  And all my fortunes at thy foot I’ll lay

  And follow thee my lord throughout the world.

  —Juliet

  in Shakespeare’s

  Romeo and Juliet

  Chapter Ten

  Dawn usually found Vivien a lonely figure on a deserted deck wrapped mummylike in woolens to protect her from the freezing December sea winds. Yet, with all the discomfort of an unseasonal and rough Atlantic crossing, she was exuberantly happy. Soon she would see Larry. There was little else she thought about, unless it was her intense wish to be cast as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. Olivier was to remain in Hollywood until the beginning of March. It seemed perfectly sensible to her that if she were to get the role they could remain together.

  She saw nothing of New York when they docked, rushing as soon as she was through customs to the airport for the next scheduled flight to Los Angeles. Having never flown before, she was not sure what her reaction to it would be. It was terror, and had she not been so desperate to see Larry, and if their time to be together was not so precious and short, she never would have boarded. She had a sleeping berth, as the trip took fifteen and a half hours and required three stops for refueling, but she was unable to close her eyes. To pass the time she worked on “Scarlett expressions” in her makeup mirror. In her description of Scarlett in the book, Margaret Mitchell kept comparing her to a cat. So Vivien practiced “a Cheshire cat smile,” “eyes of a hungry cat,” and “clawlike gestures of her hands.”

  Olivier met her at the airport, but it was a restrained meeting, for they were not alone. Hollywood morality, he explained to her later, was set on a double standard. Residents did not have private lives. They had public and secret lives, and he had been well warned by Myron Selznick, his agent, that careers had been ruined for less reason than a public affair being conducted by two people legally married to other mates. Vivien was driven to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where a room had been reserved for her by Larry. But Vivien’s great joy at being reunited with him overcame any quarrel she might have with this arrangement. She was giddy with happiness and bubbling over with ideas and schemes. Somehow she would have to meet and make an immediate impression on David Selznick. Somehow she would have to get an immediate test. Somehow things would work out so that she and Larry would not have to be parted.

  First, Myron Selznick had to be convinced that no one but she should be cast as Scarlett. On the morning of December 10, the third day of her stay, they met briefly. “My God, you are Scarlett!” he said. “And if I know my brother as well as I think I do, he is going to agree.” They planned to meet for dinner after Larry was through filming that night.

  It had been almost two and a half years since David Selznick had purchased the film rights to Gone With the Wind, a period fraught with script, casting, and financial problems. Many of the best writers in Hollywood had worked on the script, including John Van Druten, Jo Swerling, Oliver H. P. Garrett, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sidney Howard, who perhaps contributed the most to the final shooting script. (As scenes were written and rewritten during the entire producti
on, there was no actual final screenplay per se until the last day of shooting.)

  David Selznick’s original choice for Rhett Butler had been Gary Cooper, but that had been quickly set aside for Clark Gable. Leading contenders had also been Ronald Colman, Basil Rathbone, and Errol Flynn; but Selznick never wavered in his enthusiasm for Gable, who was the people’s choice in every public poll.

  Leslie Howard uniquely represented the brooding, poetic intellectual hero to film audiences (The Petrified Forest, Of Human Bondage), and Selznick had thought if he offered Howard the part that, at least with the role of Ashley Wilkes, there would be no casting problem. To his dismay, the actor was not keen to accept. Melvyn Douglas, Jeffrey Lynn, Ray Milland, and Shepperd Strudwick were then considered, none of whom Selznick thought right. Finally he succeeded in persuading Howard to accept the role, and then, seeing his first costume tests, he became duly alarmed. Howard looked his forty-five years, and Ashley in the opening sequences of the film was a man of twenty-five.

  Before Olivia de Havilland was cast as Melanie Hamilton Wilkes, Frances Dee, Andrea Leeds, and Anne Shirley had been tested. For a time Selznick considered Joan Fontaine, planning it for her major film debut. But Joan, holding out for the plum role of Scarlett, suggested her sister, Olivia, who was under contract to Warner Brothers.

  It was Scarlett, though, who was the major concern; and in the search for the actress to portray her, girls flocked to Hollywood hoping to secure a test, talent scouts combed the South for possibilities, and almost all of Hollywood’s glamorous leading ladies were considered and many of them tested. Yet the cameras were set to roll after two and a half years without a Scarlett. There were many candidates—among them Joan Fontaine, Paulette Goddard (who seemed in the lead), Susan Hayward, Norma Shearer, Lana Turner, Miriam Hopkins, Loretta Young, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Jean Arthur, Joan Bennett, Lucille Ball, Tallulah Bankhead, and unknowns Margaret Tallichet, Mary Anderson (who played Maybelle Merriweather in the film), Alicia Rhett (finally cast as India Wilkes), and Catherine Campbell (an Atlanta belle now Mrs. Randolph Hearst).

  Selznick was a man under fire. Shooting could not begin without Scarlett O’Hara, and his financial backers were snapping uncomfortably at his heels. Then William Cameron Menzies, the film’s production designer—who had a fine record of screen direction as well, including Korda’s Things to Come and portions of Conquest of the Air—came up with a stroke of genius.

  Construction of the interior sets—Tara, Twelve Oaks, and the Atlanta Bazaar—was already begun on Stage Sixteen but in order to build exteriors, space had to be cleared on the Selznick back lot, which was now piled high and wide with the sets and building facades of films dating back to the days of the silents. Clearing the back lot for a set the size required to re-create ante-bellum Atlanta would cost dearly, but to burn the old sets and then to film that fire as the burning of Atlanta would satisfy John Hay Whitney, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and all the money people who threatened to withdraw further support if more time was lost. With Menzies’ plan the film would be under way, and literally in a blaze of publicity and with a design beneficial to the budget.

  Originally conceiving Sherman’s sacking and burning of Atlanta as a final shooting sequence in the production, Selznick was quick to see the advantages of Menzies’ plan and gave the order to proceed immediately.

  Myron Selznick, astute showman that he was, had prolonged dinner with Vivien and Olivier at Chasen’s as late as he could so that her entrance would not go unnoticed in all the excitement of the blaze-setting. And Vivien delayed him with question after question about David, the search for Scarlett, and the casting of the other roles in the film. Her beautiful face was alive with feverish excitement by the time dinner ended. Carefully she put on her wide-brimmed black picture hat. Her eyes were lined with deep green shadow, making them seem more catlike than usual, and the dress she wore cinched her waist so that it appeared as small as Scarlett’s. Myron had been struck by Vivien’s rightness for the role of Scarlett from the moment they had met, but the dinner that night convinced him.

  When they pulled out of the restaurant’s parking lot and turned the corner looking south from Beverly Hills, the sky was glowing red over neighboring Culver City and the Selznick studio. David had set fire to Atlanta.

  Selznick later commented on that historic moment when Vivien faced him on the raised platform overlooking the devastation of Atlanta: “When he [Myron] introduced me to her, the flames were lighting up her face ... I took one look and knew she was right—at least right as far as . . . my conception of how Scarlett O’Hara looked. . . . I’ll never recover from that first look.”

  Though he had seen her in A Yank at Oxford and Fire Over England, at that startling moment Selznick had not made the connection. Vivien talked animatedly to him, her wide green eyes so intent on him that she seemed unaware of even Olivier standing at her shoulder. A remark of Selznick’s sent her into peals of merry laughter. When she glanced past him, staring at the dying flames, her eyes appeared wild with anger and her delicately molded chin was set, hard and determined. Selznick caught his breath as he stood watching her. Only moments later tears welled in her eyes, as though she was mourning the death of her own civilization.

  A screen test was set up for her almost immediately with George Cukor, who was to direct. Cukor had been in England that year, just before the British release of St. Martin’s Laney and when asked by interviewer Max Breen if he had seen Vivien Leigh, who Breen thought would be a marvelous Scarlett O’Hara, Cukor had replied, “I saw her in A Yank at Oxford, and she seems to be a little static, not quite sufficiently fiery for the role.” But he made no mention of this to Selznick and agreed to see her the next day, which was a Sunday. He was almost as taken with her as Selznick had been and arranged the test for the following week. Vivien cabled Tyrone Guthrie that her return would be delayed, adding that she hoped it would not make things difficult for him and the company.

  Monday morning David wrote his wife, Irene, who was in New York at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel:

  Darling:

  Saturday night I was greatly exhilarated by the Fire Sequence. It was one of the biggest thrills I have had out of making pictures—first, because of the scene itself, and second, because of the frightening but exciting knowledge that Gone With the Wind was finally in work. Myron rolled in just exactly too late, arriving about a minute and a half after the last building had fallen and burned and after the shots were completed. With him were Larry Olivier and Vivien Leigh. Shhhhh: she’s the Scarlett dark horse, and looks damned good. (Not for anybody’s ears but your own: it’s narrowed down to Paulette, Jean Arthur, Joan Bennett, and Vivien Leigh.)

  That same day he wrote his general manager, Henry Ginsberg:

  . . . Scarlett will definitely be decided upon as the result of this next group of tests, which I hope we will be able to see by Monday or Tuesday of next week. . . .

  The girls to be tested in these scenes are Miss Goddard, Joan Bennett, Jean Arthur, and Vivien Leigh.

  Myron gave her the script pages of the test scenes (the same as the other actresses were to perform) as soon as he could, and she went over them, with Olivier feeding her the lines. Cukor was to direct the tests himself. The plan was that each actress was to do three scenes which when viewed by Selznick would be intercut so that each of the four would appear consecutively in each of the scenes. Vivien’s test was to be the last shot on the following Wednesday, December 21.

  She cabled Guthrie again to say she now could not return in time to appear as Titania. He cabled that he had already replaced her, guessing as much. Then she wrote Leigh:

  Darling Leigh, I do hope that the sweaters arrived all right and that they fit. It’s a bit silly that they were made in Scotland, but I hope that that means you won’t have to pay duty on them.

  You will never guess what has happened—and no one is more surprised than me—you know how I only came out here for a week—well, just two days before I w
as supposed to leave, the people who are making Gone With the Wind saw me and said would I make a test—so what could I do?—and so now I am working frantically hard rehearsing, and studying a southern accent which I don’t find difficult anyway. These are the final tests they are making and there are just four of us—they seem to be very pleased with me—and I don’t know what I think or what I hope—I am so afraid it will mean my staying here (if I get it) for a long time and that I know I don’t want to do.

  The part has now become the biggest responsibility one can imagine—and yet it would be absurd not to do it, given the chance. I will not know definitely till the end of the week.

  I do hope you will have a nice time at Hyes, and that Suzanne is well. I hope all the right books arrive for her Xmas present . . . Darling Leigh I do hope you are well. I will write and let you know what is happening. With dearest love. Vivien.

  It was a completely truthful letter, except in the barest essentials, and if Leigh Holman hoped someday she might return to him, it was this curious kind of attitude in letters and conversations that kindled his hope. Remaining in the States meant she would not see Suzanne for many months, and she was fearful of both Leigh’s and her parents’ censure of such an apparent lack of maternal feelings.

  Cukor decided she should not worry about the Southern accent in the tests. The scene she played with Mammy lacing up her corsets was deliciously funny, loving, and yet showed Scarlett to be an arrogant young girl; while the confrontation with Ashley at Twelve Oaks was sensual, moving, and brilliant. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind as soon as the tests were completed that Vivien was Scarlett O’Hara. Vivien, however, found out she had the role in a rather casual manner.