Vivien Leigh Read online

  It was the first time the girls had met since their Roehampton days; and though it should have been a happy reunion, it was in fact a most difficult one for Vivien. In their childhood friendship Vivien had always been the leader. Now Maureen was the star. Yet Vivien was a true professional, quite used to repertory companies where actors and actresses considered the play first and their egos last. And actually, though a secondary role, Vivien’s was the most interesting. But there was a deeper and more painful reason for Vivien to be stand-offish with Maureen. It was quite impossible for her to explain to a contemporary who had shared her convent schooling how she could have left her husband and child to take up a life with a married man who was a recent father. (At this time Tarquin was only one year old.) The situation was made somewhat easier for Vivien because they had few scenes together. Most of her scenes were with Robert Taylor, Griffith Jones, and Lionel Barrymore.

  Jack Conway, who had previously directed Arsène Lupin, Red Headed Woman, Viva Villa! and A Tale of Two Cities, did an admirable job on a trite script. But even so, Vivien felt that his notions of English character were somewhat one-sided. She leaned heavily in her portrayal on Olivier’s home advice, and her independent interpretation did not ease tension on the set. She did, however, contribute strongly to the final credibility of the film; and though she was not aware of it, Maureen viewed her with even greater admiration, for she was always early on the set, always prepared, and never flagged in her energy. And in spite of the ghastly makeup and the frizzy hairdo chosen for her, Maureen thought Vivien more beautiful than ever.

  Her life at Durham Cottage could not have been more of a contrast to her life on Little Stanhope Street. Olivier was filming The Divorce of Lady X (a remake of the 1932 film Counsels Opinion) opposite Merle Oberon and with Ralph Richardson at the same time as Vivien was filming for Metro. Both were up early and off to the studio at the same time, returning home tired but happy and able to discuss their days. They read lines together and discussed interpretations. Vivien hated to see that time come to an end, for when it did Larry went back to the Old Vic as Macbeth while she waited for Korda to pick up (or perhaps drop) the option he held on her services.

  It had been almost six months since they had run off to Denmark. Larry decided it was time to ask Jill for a divorce, and Vivien in turn to ask Leigh for one, so that they could marry. Leigh replied that he would do nothing to release her unless forced to (meaning, it seemed, that he would refuse unless she became pregnant with Olivier’s child), and he confessed to Oswald Frewen that he still hoped to win her back. The second blow came when Jill refused to divorce Larry.

  It was a dismal situation, but Vivien would not accept the facts. She was convinced they would find a way to marry, and her love for Olivier grew each day. Friends were constantly remarking that it was almost impossible for her to keep her eyes off him when they were in public.

  On December 27, after spending a private, happy Christmas together—their first—Vivien appeared as Titania at the Old Vic under Tyrone Guthrie’s direction in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Robert Helpmann, Anthony Quayle, Ralph Richardson, and Alexander Knox. She was enchanting, as indeed was the entire production. The stage ceased altogether to be self-consciously theatrical, a spell descended upon it, and the illusion was complete.

  Vivien deeply believed Olivier was the greatest actor alive, and during this period she was his most devout and devoted pupil. His entire life revolved around his acting experience. They might be riding on top of a bus and he would single out a fellow passenger and begin to discuss him with Vivien, noting the man’s gestures and reactions. “Why do you think he did that?” he would ask. And then would proceed to analyze the man’s action with an imaginative explanation. Much later, in a performance, Vivien would note that he was using the man’s gesture as a bit of business and that it worked mainly because it seemed true and real. He also identified so greatly with each role he was playing that she could expect him to be some of that character off stage.

  His advice to her was always to anticipate what the audience expected—and then not to do it. Working on her phrasing with her, he reached back to Chaliapin’s teaching and warned her never to take a breath when the audience expected, thus they would not notice when a breath was taken and believe a whole phrase had been sung on one breath.

  “You have to feel it to do it,” he would explain about a part. “If you do it right you feel it. The suffering, the passion, the bitterness, you’ve got to feel them. And it takes something out of you and puts something in, as all emotional experiences do.”

  For the next few months she watched him do exactly what he preached as Iago in Othello, Vivaldi in King of Nowhere, and in the title role of Coriolanus. This last portrayal was considered his greatest performance in his thirteen years on the stage. His voice was deeper and stronger than ever, and the role required a patrician quality and a pride of nature that made the man too proud to accept praise. Olivier confessed that it was quite easy to get into the role. “Getting into” his role was, of course, the prime thing for him, and to do that with Iago (to Ralph Richardson’s Othello) he returned to the eminent psychoanalyst Ernest Jones. As in his analysis of Hamlet, the doctor insisted that homosexuality was Shakespeare’s theme. There followed several hours of discussion about the interpretation of each scene taken in this new light.

  Olivier portrayed Iago as a man possessed of a subconscious affection. Therefore, the great climax in Act III, when Iago and Othello kneel together planning the death of Cassio, virtually became a love scene, with Othello’s “Now art thou my lieutenant” and Iago’s reply “I am your own for ever” taking on a new significance. It might have worked if Richardson’s Othello had been played with an understanding of this new Iago. When Olivier and Tyrone Guthrie left Dr. Jones, Olivier confessed, “I don’t think we dare tell Ralphy.” Any overtones of sexual perversion, however unconscious, would immediately gain Richardson’s disapproval, so they never did come right out and confront him with what they were attempting to convey. Rehearsals therefore went forward with Richardson quite unaware of why Olivier was playing Iago in what he could not help but think was a curious manner. “Never mind your psychology!” he would exclaim whenever the subconscious was even mentioned. “The beauty of the play to me is the magnificence of its rhetoric. Leave me my ’monumental alabaster,’ ” he would insist. And they did sincerely believe that perhaps Othello would not have been aware of Iago’s perversion, in which case their character study might be the more powerful. But if Richardson had known, the critics might have reacted better than they did. As it was, they missed the point entirely.

  Vivien was at the theatre nearly every night learning, as she confessed, by just watching Olivier perform. Olivier might seem her Professor Henry Higgins, but Vivien was no Eliza Doolittle. On her own she was terribly funny, and very witty. And, not unlike their good friend Noël Coward, shrewd and intelligent. Olivier had never felt himself to be much of an intellectual. Noël, as he said, “made him use his silly little brain,” pointing out to him when he talked nonsense. Vivien was in her way just as taxing, just as thrilling to be with, and most of all she carried on what Coward had begun. She made him read. He had read very little early in his life except for scripts of plays and films in which he appeared or thought he might appear. However, he never kept pace with Vivien’s intellectual interests. The pursuit of anything other than acting always took second place, but he was stimulated and excited by this side of Vivien.

  In the meantime her love and appreciation of opera and music and art grew. She had learned a great deal about art and artists from Korda, and she loved museums and auctions, and bought art selectively and with great insight and sensitivity. Two years before she had, for instance, purchased an early Boudin for two hundred pounds that had already risen dramatically in value.

  During the spring of 1938, Korda loaned her to Charles Laughton’s newly formed independent Mayflower Productions for the lead inSt. Martin’s Lane (Sidewal
ks of London in the U.S.A.). This meant Vivien and Olivier (who was having one of his most stellar seasons at the Old Vic, where he gave a quartet of great performances) were on different schedules. She would come home from the studio at Denham, study her lines for the next day, meet Larry at the theatre, return home late, and rise at five A.M. after no more than three to four hours’ sleep for what was certainly her most strenuous role to date, involving not only a highly dramatic part but one demanding an ability to dance and sing. It was trying and exhausting, and it was made more difficult by her poor rapport with Laugh ton.

  The filming was fraught with hostility. Vivien and Laughton did not get along any better now than when he had refused to star opposite her in the abandoned Cyrano. He felt she was tremendously gifted and capable physically and emotionally of being a great film star, but she somehow unnerved him. Vivien, on her part, admired Laughton as an actor, but was terrified he would make a physical advance which she would be forced to reject. Therefore she kept to her dressing room as much as she could. Curiously, though sensitive to things of this nature, she was not aware of Laughton’s homosexuality.

  A rather interesting sidenote is that Vivien had recently added a few four-letter words to her vocabulary. Though still (and always) almost painfully polite, she would curse quite venomously at inanimate objects or at herself. Laughton could not bear to hear these profanities spoken by her, and it became a considerable issue between them.

  By summer 1938 four of Vivien’s films—Fire Over England, Storm in a Teacup, Dark Journey, and A Yank at Oxford—had opened in New York with an extremely good press. However, only A Yank at Oxford received a general release. Outside of New York and a few major cities, if Americans thought of her at all they thought of her as a frizzy-haired flighty young woman who almost got Robert Taylor kicked out of Oxford.

  Chapter Nine

  The summer of 1938 was to be the last season of peace England was to have for a long time. But Vivien and Larry did not know that then. Exhausted by the tense days of filming St. Martin’s Lane, Vivien was thrilled when Olivier decided they should take a holiday. Where to was not an easy question, as the threat of war hung over the Continent. Her beloved Austria was out. Only three months earlier truck-loads of young men wearing swastika armbands had paraded in the streets of Vienna defying the police as they hauled down the Austrian flag and raised the blood-red banner with the swastika. Austria had been swallowed up by Hitler. It horrified Vivien, as did the thought that Hitler might not stop at Austria. Surely there would be war then. But three months had passed since the Anschluss, and there had been no further threat from the Reich.

  They decided on the South of France because many of their friends were spending the summer there—dropping in and out of the villa that John Gielgud and Hugh Beaumont had rented in Vence— and because they were desperate for sun, London having been de-pressingly cold and dreary the entire spring. Vivien also liked the fact that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, now having married, were in Antibes, though she had had many heated discussions with Noel Coward (who saw the royal couple occasionally) on the trip they had just made to see Hitler, which she thought ill-advised, if not simply stupid. Still, royalty intrigued her as much as it always had, and privately she longed to be invited to one of the Windsors’ intimate parties.

  Vivien and Olivier drove down through France to the Riviera in her trusty but rather weary old Ford V-8 two-seater. The threat of Hitler, the terror of the bloody civil war so close in Spain, the rise of Fascism under Mussolini seemed unreal beneath the comforting warmth of the southern sun. First they stopped at St. Paul, a fortified town built in the twelfth century and set high up in terraces on a spur of rock. Vence, where Gielgud was staying, was only a fifteen-minute drive. Their hotel, La Colombe d’Or, was charming. In their early years Picasso, Dufy, Modigliani, Bracque, Matisse, and Chagall had often stayed there, trading paintings for food and lodging. These great works were hung in all the public areas of the hotel. Vivien adored eating lunch facing a Modigliani or a Dufy, and she walked happily along the old ramparts looking down at a view that could have been a scene from any of the Impressionists’ paintings. But both she and Larry missed the sea, so after a few days they drove down along the coast to the small village of Agay, which had a sheltered bay where they could swim and sun-splashed beaches for them to stretch out on. They stopped at the Calanque d’Or, a little hotel not nearly so grand as the hotel in St. Paul, but with an irresistible plus for Vivien: the patron had eighteen Siamese cats.

  Life was an idyllic day-to-day existence—swimming, sunning, sightseeing and occasionally visiting with Gielgud and Hugh Beaumont, or Peggy Ashcroft, or Glen Byam Shaw and his wife Angela Baddeley, who were also on the Riviera that summer. June melted with a curious unreality into July, when on the first Monday, Olivier received a cable from his London agent:

  ARE YOU INTERESTED GOLDWYN IDEA FOR SEPTEMBER FIRST FOR VIVIEN YOURSELF AND OBERON IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS STOP ANSWER AS SOON AS POSSIBLE STOP

  They discussed this for several hours before sending an ambiguous cable stating that they would discuss it on their return to London.

  In the past Hollywood had been an unhappy experience for Olivier. Once, after a flurry of just such cables, he had gone to do a film with Garbo, only to be replaced soon after he arrived by John Gilbert. Nor had he been happy there with Jill on a succeeding trip. He harbored, as well, a lack of respect for films, especially those made in Hollywood. In addition, Vivien was being offered the secondary and, in her opinion, rather dull role of Isabella. Wuthering Heights had always been a favorite of hers, and she felt a closer affinity to Cathy—a part it seemed Merle Oberon was to play.

  One week later the script arrived following several more cables begging them to read it before their return, as the director, William Wyler, was to be in London. The script was a literate and good rendering of the book. The role of Heathcliff had been adapted exceptionally well. Isabella, however, remained for Vivien uninteresting, and after her experience in A Yank At Oxford she did not feel she should accept a supporting role in an American film when she had, after all, starred in four recent English films. Since they did not want to be parted and Olivier was not that keen to do a Hollywood film, they sent back a cable stating that they were not interested.

  Toward the middle of July they drove back up through France, stopping as they had planned at Roanne on the Loire. A letter from Olivier’s agent waited for him there. He hoped, the agent wrote, that because of the importance of the film, and the standing of William Wyler (Counsellor at Law, Dodsworth, These Three, Dead End, and Jezebel), Olivier might be persuaded to change his mind. Olivier again read the script, this time liking the role sufficiently so that the first thing they did upon their return to London was to see Jezebel. The film, starring Bette Davis, had been made by Warner Brothers to beat out Selznick’s Gone With the Wind, which was still, after more than a year, uncast. Vivien was particularly impressed with the performance Wyler got from Bette Davis, and knowing in her heart that Larry now wanted to play Heathcliff, insisted they at least meet with Wyler.

  In Hollywood, Samuel Goldwyn, who was the producer of Wuthering Heights, and Wyler, had decided Olivier was the best choice for Heathcliff. Wyler, considering the role a “plum for any actor—particularly one relatively unknown in America,” was puzzled at Olivier’s original lack of enthusiasm and had assumed (somewhat rightly) that it was due to a previous unpleasant experience in Hollywood. But Wyler, a deeply perceptive man, knew the moment he entered the small walled garden of Durham Cottage to greet her as she stood by a late-blooming trellis of roses that Vivien was the real reason.

  He had tea with them in front of the open fire of the modest sitting room, a Siamese cat Vivien had brought back from Agay purring at his feet before it settled itself in the corner of Vivien’s chair. There were small bowls of flowers on either end of the mantel and on all available tables, as well as lovely porcelain figurines. Bookcases flanking the hearth were crammed with beaut
ifully bound book sets, and over the hearth was a good oil that Vivien had recently bought at auction. The room strongly bore Vivien’s signature. She talked animatedly and persistently, leaning most carefully forward so as not to disturb the cat as she poured tea from a fragile Limoges pot, setting it back again on a glass-topped white wrought-iron Victorian cocktail table. Olivier sat on a straight cane chair, his eyes following her every gesture.

  They discussed Wyler’s native Alsace, Bette Davis, and Gone With the Wind. Wyler had recently fallen in love with Margaret Talli-chet, a pretty twenty-one-year-old redhead who had come to Hollywood from Austin, Texas, with film aspirations and who was working as a secretary in Paramount’s publicity department to finance acting and singing lessons. A chance meeting with Carole Lombard brought her to the attention of Selznick’s publicity man Russell Birdwell. Through Birdwell’s efforts she was put under contract as a Scarlett possibility. Vivien was intrigued with all the machinations of Hollywood, Selznick, and the search for Scarlett and asked Wyler a million questions. Was Gable truly signed to play Rhett? Was Margaret Mitchell doing the screenplay? What sort of man was Selznick? Who was to direct?

  Toward the end of tea, Olivier mentioned that there was to be a showing of Vivien’s new film, St. Martin’s Lane, and that perhaps Wyler might like to join them. He accepted, knowing instinctively that the two hoped that after viewing the film he would be convinced Vivien should be signed as Cathy in Wuthering Heights. Wyler was impressed and moved by her performance and agreed that she was not only excellent but had a tremendous film presence and could very well play Cathy, but—and here it was—he could not offer her any role but that of Isabella.