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  If they had had any doubts about the scale of their failure these would have been dispelled the night after their opening when they went to a “War Relief” Ball that Noël Coward had organised. Coward greeted them with a sympathetic but embarrassed smile. “My darlings,” he murmured, “how brave of you to come.” Goldwyn put it more brutally. After the first night Vivien Leigh told him that she would not be able to make another film for him as they would be leaving for London once the run was over. “So soon?” replied Goldwyn. The public read the reviews and flocked to the theatre to cancel their bookings and get their money back. “Let them all have it,” Olivier instructed. In her draft biography his sister suggested that he did this because gangsterism was rife in New York and, if he had offended too many people, he risked having the theatre burned over his head. “No, no, no,” Olivier protested in mock American. “It was only for the first two weeks of the run we handed the money back … but after two weeks I stopped it, as pride was becoming too expensive. It wasn’t that we were sceered, it was that we was proud.”14

  “Romeo and Juliet” struggled on for several weeks. Vivien Leigh was horrified by the reviews and in no way comforted by the fact that, on the whole, she had got better notices than Olivier. Whenever she was not on stage she hid in her dressing room, leaving it to Olivier to do what he could to sustain morale. “He continued to behave as if everything was fine,” said Joan Shepard, a member of the cast, “inspecting everyone’s make-up and costumes each night and treating everyone with the utmost courtesy.” It was a gallant effort on his part, to cover what had been a most painful shock. It was one of the few times in his life that he had been guilty of over-confidence. “We still feel that at any moment the laughter will stop and the tomatoes will begin,” he wrote many years later when describing life on the stage. “I don’t think that there has ever been any true actor who has not felt this. To this day I still feel it.” On the whole he escaped with a small proportion of tomatoes against a mountain of adulation; the failure of “Romeo and Juliet” was the most unpleasant and the most unexpected exception.15

  It was also among the most costly. “Larry has just lost $40,000 on ‘Romeo and Juliet’,” Jill Esmond told her mother, with what one suspects might have been mild Schadenfreude. “Vivien did not put one penny of her money into it. She has more sense.” Olivier found himself short of money. Any satisfaction Jill felt at this must have been diminished by the fact that she and Tarquin had by now crossed the Atlantic and so would be dependent on Olivier for financial support. She met him in Toronto in July 1940. “He is quite the film star now and suffering from a persecution complex,” she reported. “He is terrified of being recognised and distrusts everybody … He got on very well with Bumpin [Tarquin] but didn’t seem really very interested, in fact he seemed lacking in interest in almost all things except himself and his point of view.” Things were little better when she called on him in New York. Vivien Leigh came in while she was there: “Her eyes were hard and cruel. We were so charming to each other and so insincere. She left me quite cold – I might have been talking to a fish.” Jill had no idea why Olivier had wanted to organise the meeting; it had been a waste of time and “I gained nothing from it except the fact that he meant nothing to me and I don’t want to see him again”. She had to admit, though, that he was being as generous as he could be on the financial front and that he appeared genuinely concerned about the well-being of herself and their son.16

  By the time they met again, on Christmas Day, the divorces had come through and he and Vivien Leigh had been married. The fact that the situation had thus been regularised seems to have removed some of the restraint that had soured his relationship with his former wife. He was “charming, quite his old self”, Esmond told her mother. “I still think he’s a nice person. I don’t think I would have loved him if he hadn’t been really nice – he was just very weak, and still is.” Even though her sexual tastes developed in different directions and she grew further and further apart from her former husband, she never ceased to love and miss him. She wrote to her mother comparing the love which she had had for Olivier with her mother’s feeling towards her former husband. “Both our lovers had their faults and gave us great pain in various ways but at least we had a hell of a good time while it lasted and we both had a completeness of both body and soul that comes to very few … We have been very lucky that we have known the best that life has to offer.”17

  Olivier and Leigh had been married at the end of August 1940. “I hope he finds happiness, but I very much doubt it,” wrote Esmond grimly. The relationship had for the first time come under strain some months before when Leigh won an Oscar for her Scarlett O’Hara while Olivier was passed over for Heathcliff. Olivier stoically survived the banquet and preserved an expression of feigned delight when Vivien was receiving her award, but his suffering was dreadful. On their way home together, he told Tarquin many years later, he took her Oscar from her: “It was all I could do to restrain myself from hitting her with it. I was insane with jealousy.” He no doubt exaggerated his resentment, but the pain was very real. By the time of their marriage the offence had been forgiven if not forgotten, but his new wife can have had no doubt that, earnestly though he might seek to advance her career, there were limits to the level of competition he could endure.18

  For their marriage they slipped away to Santa Barbara where they could escape the attention of the press. They were so far successful that by the time they had joined Ronald Colman on his yacht at San Pedro an hour or two away not a word had been heard in public about the wedding. Olivier congratulated himself on his cunning and professed to hope that the silence would continue. A news bulletin made no mention of the marriage: “Excellent,” said Olivier, in mild dismay. An hour later there was still silence. The Oliviers were patently disconcerted. “We certainly pulled it off, didn’t we?” Colman said. “We certainly did,” agreed Olivier gloomily. At last, at ten o’clock, the story broke. “Too bad!’ said Olivier, with evident relief. “Too good to last,” sighed Vivien with an incandescent smile. “After that we had a very happy evening.”19

  The delay had proved worthwhile. People in Great Britain in September 1940 had things on their mind rather more urgent than the matrimonial vicissitudes of even their most celebrated actors and actresses. Olivier received a handful of letters, written more in sorrow than in anger, reproaching him with breaking sacred ties, but there was nothing like the torrent of abuse he had anticipated. They had no reason to expect any violent reaction when they returned to Britain. Six weeks earlier, Lynn Fontanne had told Noël Coward that the British Government had ordered Olivier home: “He doesn’t know when, as there are a hundred thousand young men of military age in America and they must wait until the facilities for getting them over are completed.” In fact there was no question of an order: the British Government would have been content if he had chosen to remain in the United States; might, indeed, have preferred it. The facilities were a problem, though. It was the very end of 1940 before the Oliviers got berths on the American ship Excambion destined for Lisbon. It was an uncomfortable voyage, not least because the captain was a German and most of the other passengers seemed to be German or German sympathisers. Olivier feared lest the ship be intercepted by a U-boat and the British passengers taken off into captivity. All passed off peacefully, though, and after a few days in Lisbon they managed to board a plane for England. This stage of the journey was no less hazardous: Vivien Leigh’s co-star in “Gone With the Wind”, Leslie Howard, was to be shot down and killed on the same flight the following year. But without mishaps, they arrived in Bristol on 10 January, 1941. An air raid was in progress and the anti-aircraft guns were firing. They spent the night in a bomb-damaged hotel without heating and with the outside wall of the building replaced by a flimsy tarpaulin. They had come home.20

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Naval Officer

  Olivier’s intention was to follow the example of Ralph Richardson and join the Fleet Air Arm – it
had always seemed to him that the Royal Navy was the most estimable of the armed services and the Fleet Air Arm would give him a chance to exhibit his prowess as a pilot. Not everybody thought that this would be the most sensible use of his abilities. Sidney Bernstein, then working in the Ministry of Information, asked for his ideas on the best way to influence American opinion and added his thanks for “promising to make films for the Crown Film Unit”. Olivier had made no such promise or, at least, had made it clear that his military service must come first. He at once applied to the Admiralty, attended a medical examination and, to his dismay, was failed for some defect in his hearing. He could now, with honour, have taken up Bernstein’s offer and reverted to what he did best – acting. Instead he reapplied, a few discreet strings were no doubt pulled, and on 18 February, 1941, he passed his medical and was accepted for the Fleet Air Arm. If he could get through his flying test he would immediately be commissioned. A day or two later he chanced to meet his old school friend, Douglas Bader. Bader was by now a hero, having already shot down more than twenty enemy aircraft and been awarded the D.S.O. and bar and the D.F.C. and bar. “I want to congratulate you,” he said to Olivier. “I think it’s a thoroughly good show your coming back to join up like this. I want to say ‘Bravo’!” Olivier cast a respectful eye on the glories attached to Bader’s breast. “I want to say more than ‘Bravo’,” he replied.1

  After a brief stay at the Royal Naval Air Station at Lee-on-Solent Olivier moved on to his first serious posting at Worthy Down, four miles north of Winchester. His unexciting though useful role was to fly trainee air gunners around the skies while they honed their skills in preparation for more serious operations. It was typical of Olivier that he not merely carried out his duties with competence but looked absolutely right in the part. “I always thought my performance as a naval officer was the best bit of character acting I ever did,” he once remarked. Ralph Richardson paid a half-mocking tribute to his transmogrification. “He looked fine,” he remarked. “The uniform was perfect: it looked as if it had been worn long on arduous service, but had kept its cut. The gold wings on his sleeve had no distasteful glitter; only the shoes shone… . His manner was naval, it was quiet, alert, business-like, with the air of there being a joke somewhere around.” Richardson found his friend’s performance mildly comical, but he was impressed by the contented atmosphere of the unit and the relationship between Olivier and the people who served under him. He knew all the Wrens and seamen, remembered their names and details and was liked and trusted. “Larry did that very well indeed,” thought Richardson as he left the base. “Then a thought crossed my mind: ‘I wonder if he rehearsed it?’ ” Olivier probably had rehearsed it – he left as little as possible to chance – but the leadership qualities which were so evident at Worthy Down were in time to figure to still greater effect in the National Theatre.2

  Though nobody would have detected it from his demeanour, Olivier did not feel at home in the Fleet Air Arm. “I’m always filled with the most affectionate admiration for the ‘lads’,” he told Jill Esmond, “tho’ many officers I don’t think much of.” Olivier found nobody in the Officers’ Mess to whom he could relate. He could impersonate an Air Force officer and even relish his performance, but he could not enjoy the company of his fellows. They knew nothing of the theatre and had no wish to learn about it; he for his part could only pretend to share their preoccupations. A somewhat narrow approach to life was one of his more noticeable characteristics. He was always reluctant to venture far outside his designated territory. A friend once asked him to dinner. He accepted with pleasure. “I’ve got some banker friends coming,” his friend continued. “I can’t do it,” Olivier protested. “Writers, directors, actors O.K. Otherwise, I can’t do it.” He could have done it and would, no doubt, have provided a most convincing performance as a banker, but he would not have enjoyed it. He coasted through his life in the Fleet Air Arm without engaging thoroughly with it. “I occasionally hear from somebody who says ‘Do you remember me at Worthy Down?’ and I probably don’t, but I say ‘Of course I do’,” Olivier recalled forty years later. “There were very few people with whom I had anything in common.”3

  Any chance that he would fit more easily into life in the Officers’ Mess was lost when he got permission to move into a bungalow he rented two or three miles from the aerodrome. “Larry not very happy,” Noël Coward noted. “Think it a great mistake for him not to live in Mess.” Possibly he would have been less happy if he had been living in Mess. At least, Vivien Leigh, who was enjoying a long run in “The Doctor’s Dilemma”, was able to join him in the bungalow on Sundays. It was embellished with Indian rugs, an Aubusson carpet, paintings by Sickert and Boudin. Other friends visited him from time to time. For him it was an oasis of civilisation in a barren world.4

  One reason for his discontent may have been that, by the high standards which he set himself, he was not a particularly good pilot. The legend of his unique incompetence, which Olivia de Havilland had rejoiced in while he was training in the United States, still clung to him. There was as little reason now as there had been then. He had one accident before he even took to the air and damaged two aircraft as a result, but this seems to have been only in part his fault. “I think I may describe myself as a decent pilot,” he wrote; and the description was not over-flattering. But he was no more than that, though he would have liked to have been acknowledged as a master. Instead he was mocked for his inadequacy. Cyril Cusack was travelling back to London by train in the same compartment as Vivien Leigh. She dropped off to sleep. Two Air Force cadets came into the compartment. “Isn’t that Vivien Leigh?” one of them asked Cusack. He said it wasn’t. “Just as well. That husband of hers is our training officer and he couldn’t fly his way out of a paper bag.”5

  Another cause for gloom arose when Ralph Richardson was given a half-stripe and thus gained seniority over his friend. Richardson had joined up several months before, so his promotion was justified, but Olivier admitted that this extra stripe “almost killed our relationship. I didn’t want one particularly; I wouldn’t have cared at all if it hadn’t been for Ralphie having one.” It made him very pompous, Olivier complained: “There was no talking to him, he became a different person.” It was not the first or the last time that Olivier resented his friends being awarded distinctions that he would never otherwise have coveted for himself.6

  Whatever their judgment of his merits as a pilot it became ever more obvious that the authorities felt he could be more usefully employed making propaganda and encouraging the public to contribute to various aspects of the war effort. His activities ranged from a tour of the countryside around Winchester, appealing to the local inhabitants to contribute unwanted books to a Salvage Drive, to performances in a packed Albert Hall ending with a spirited rendition of “Once more unto the breach”. The change in emphasis in his activities can be traced from the entries in his pocket diary. At the beginning of every month he would enter the various training courses and flights to which he was committed. More and more often these were crossed out and some propaganda duty substituted: a lecture on Ship Recognition, for instance, became an appearance at the Lyceum in Sheffield. Tyrone Guthrie, who had moved the Old Vic to Burnley and believed that it was vital that the theatre should be kept alive, argued that even this was not enough. The country did not need Richardson as a staff officer or Olivier as a second-line pilot, trolling air gunners about the skies. Nor was the occasional flag-waving foray a proper use of their talents. They had better and more important things to do. Regretfully, Olivier accepted that this was true. He was no more than an airborne taxi driver. He should move on.7

  He made a final effort to play a more active role. The Walrus was an amphibious aircraft designed to be catapulted from the decks of battleships or heavy cruisers. If he could qualify to fly them he would at last be able to undertake some real operational flying. He was frustrated once more. By the time he had completed the course the Walrus, already recognised in some qua
rters as a cumbersome antique, was withdrawn from active service. It would be back to the taxi work again. The blandishments of those who felt he would be better employed making films became more and more difficult to resist. Even before he had finished the course he had agreed to undertake a full-length film. It would be some time yet before he was discharged but effectively his life in the Fleet Air Arm was behind him.

  His first film after his liberation was “Demi-Paradise”, a propaganda exercise intended to make average Britons feel more warmly towards their Russian allies. As Olivier pointed out, Russia was at that time high in public favour; the exercise seemed superfluous. So great was his relief, though, at finding himself once more doing the work he loved, that he rated the film more highly than it deserved. It was, in fact, slight and rather silly, but it gave Olivier a chance to try out his Russian accent and was enjoyed by most of those who saw it. Anthony “Puffin” Asquith, who directed the film, had no illusions about its importance but felt that Olivier had produced “a truly creative performance”. Ivan, the Russian hero of the film, played by Olivier, was “so thoroughly imagined and so consummately realised that he contrives to exist quite apart from the film”. Asquith was not the only person to believe that the film represented a step forward in Olivier’s career: Dilys Powell, already one of the most respected of cinema critics, claimed that this performance put him for the first time in the top flight of British film actors.8