Olivier Read online

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  This to some extent consoled Korda for what seemed to him Olivier’s rank treachery. “Am amazed at information you have contracted to play ‘Rebecca’ for Selznick,” he cabled. “You are, of course, aware your exclusive contract with us is still subsisting and was only suspended to permit you to play New York. Please cable immediately that information received is unfounded.” Olivier replied blandly: “Am amazed at your resentment … Am under definite impression no contract with you exists. However, am willing to discuss new one with you upon my return end of the year, also most happy to see you.” Perhaps Korda was not sure of his ground, perhaps the conciliatory note of the last few words convinced him that, in the long run, it would be better not to quarrel with his inconstant star. He was to get his reward some years later when it was Selznick who cabled indignantly to complain about Olivier doing work for Korda while still under contract to the American producer.17

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  In August 1939 Selznick had another preoccupation. What would happen if war broke out and Olivier, George Sanders and the other British members of the cast were ordered to report for duty in England? “We would be in a fine pickle – not so much of a pickle as Poland, I grant you, but still a pickle.” The question does not seem to have caused Olivier serious worry. International affairs meant little to him; he rarely studied a newspaper except to read reviews of the new plays and films. The Munich crisis had not passed unnoticed, but he had many other things on his mind that seemed more pressing. On 3 September, 1939 he was on Douglas Fairbanks’s yacht off the Californian coast. Everyone had been drinking heavily and when Neville Chamberlain broadcast his baleful pronouncement that Britain was now at war it seemed only sensible to drink some more. Olivier, said Fairbanks, “was the only one who got really and truly drunk”. With some difficulty he lowered himself into a dinghy and began to row round the fleet of expensive yachts which infested those waters. “You’re all finished!” he shouted as he passed the boats. “You’re done! Drink up. You’ve had it! This is the end!” The occupants of the yachts, who did not share Olivier’s view that they were done or that this was the end, complained to the authorities that a mad Englishman was rowing around, abusing them. Unfortunately, they identified the miscreant as Ronald Colman, whose yacht was also in the area. Colman was accused of insulting behaviour and had some difficulty proving his innocence. Meanwhile, Olivier rowed back to the Fairbanks’ yacht and went to sleep. He woke next morning with a hangover and considerable uncertainty as to what he should do next.18

  CHAPTER SIX

  War

  Drunken extravagance was all very well, but was no solution to the problem of what Olivier should do now that his country was at war. He told Oswald Frewen that he didn’t know whether to stay where he was, to enlist or to be a conscientious objector. “Truly the ‘to be or not to be’ spirit has entered into him,” Frewen commented. The conscientious objector possibility cannot have been advanced very seriously. Olivier was by nature belligerent and any fashionable anti-war sentiments he might have held a few years before had long vanished. This, he believed, was a just and necessary war and he wished to play his part in it. But what part should that be? His first instinct was to hurry back to England to be of whatever use he could. Yet what use could he be? At his age he knew that there was no possibility of his being able to join up for several months at least, perhaps longer. It was likely that most of the London theatres would be closed: there was no filming in the offing: there seemed little point in rushing back to London only to hang around doing nothing.1

  And yet he felt this was what he ought to do. He disapproved of, indeed disliked, most of those English in Hollywood who decided to stay there. They held endless meetings to discuss how they could do this without giving an impression of cowardice or irresponsibility. “They had plans for getting publicity, having cricket matches for charity. I don’t know what bloody nonsense they didn’t get up to.” Angrily he told them that he would have nothing do with it all; he was going home. At least he preferred the honesty of George Sanders, who had acted with him in “Rebecca”. When Olivier told him he was determined to return to London, Sanders replied: “Of course, I admire your courage and all that, but I’m not going back because I’m a shit and I don’t give a fuck who knows it!” Olivier was not a shit and he was very anxious that nobody should think he was. If only to preserve his good name he felt that he must leave.2

  It was David Niven who first shook his resolve. The British Embassy had told Niven that he could serve his country best by staying in the United States and making propaganda for the Allied cause. He had been a regular army officer however; he had a regiment to join; he felt he must go back. “Why don’t you ask Larry Olivier, though? He’s dying to do something for the war effort and it’ll be a while before he gets home.” Olivier was a friend of Duff Cooper, who he knew was close to Churchill. He approached him for advice. “Stay in New York,” came the reply. Alexander Korda was going there and had projects in mind in which Olivier could play a useful part.3

  It has been suggested that there was more to it than that. A recent biography puts forward the theory that Olivier had been recruited by S.O.E., the Special Operations Executive, to work for a propaganda organisation. This made him a target for German undercover agents and put him at risk of assassination. He never said anything himself to support this theory, but he was quite happy to let a touch of mystery colour his activities in the United States. When asked why he was not more communicative he replied coyly: “My ego is too great to reveal my secrets. It serves my ego to keep things to myself.” In fact it seems unlikely that he had any secrets of consequence to reveal. He would have been useless to any intelligence organisation and one can imagine no reason why any such body should have sought to enlist him. Where he could serve his country was by making patriotic films which might speed America’s entry into the war or at least promote the British cause. If he had asked the Embassy for advice he would have received no more than generalised encouragement to strike a patriotic line.4

  Though he was rarely picked out by name, Olivier found himself, or at least felt himself included in the condemnation of those actors who had opted to stay in America. In the Sunday Dispatch Michael Balcon denounced “deserters” and insisted that “for the isolationists the curtain should be run down”. “We’ve got a good word in Lancashire to describe the people who have run away,” declared the ukulele-playing George Formby, “and it’s a bit stronger than desertion!” Such charges hurt, the more so for being unfair, but it was to be several months before Olivier was engaged in any activity which was intended to serve the war effort. In the meantime he prepared himself by taking flying lessons. He had begun these as long ago as 1935 but had let them lapse; now he engaged in an intensive course. “Larry is learning to fly every day, so that means he will be good,” Lynn Fontanne told Noël Coward. “He says he is going to be an ace.” He was never going to be an ace, but nor was he conspicuously unsuccessful. The legend grew – fostered largely by his delight in making a good story out of very little – that he had merely to step into a plane for some disaster to ensue. Olivia de Havilland wrote how he had repeatedly written off both his own and other people’s planes: “There were at least ten incidents and it was really hilarious. Larry was undaunted, fearless, oblivious.” Undaunted and fearless he was, but there was no long chapter of accidents of which he needed to remain oblivious. The notes of his hypercritical instructor suggest that he was no worse than most of his fellow students and better than some of them. He completed his two hundred hours of solo flying – “which is a great deal,” commented Jill Esmond – and was issued his certificate of competence.5

  His first contribution to the war effort was to be the making of a patriotic film with Alexander Korda but there was another commitment to be undertaken first. Though M.G.M.’s version of “Pride and Prejudice” took what any self-respecting Janeite must consider outrageous liberties with the plot, it was in fact a quite creditable effort to
put Miss Austen’s best-known if not best novel on the screen. Olivier, of course, was Darcy: a part which he was quite as capable of walking through as he had been when playing Max de Winter. He considered that his Elizabeth should be Vivien Leigh and this time he seems not to have had any of the private reservations he had admitted to in the case of “Rebecca”. Instead, Greer Garson was imposed on him. Where he had disliked Joan Fontaine, he thought well of Garson, but this did not reconcile him to the casting: “I hated it, and I thought it was disgraceful, and I was awful, and I thought darling Greer was as wrong as could be.” Instead of being sharp and level-headed as the plot demanded, she was, he claimed, “the most silly and affected of the sisters”. It seems almost as if he saw some other version of the film to that enjoyed by the rest of the world. He was not “awful”. Darcy was hardly a testing role but he acted it with all the necessary arrogance and panache – while Greer Garson was neither silly nor affected but something very close to the high-spirited and opinionated heroine Jane Austen had created.6

  Now the war effort could begin. This time, though, Vivien Leigh was included. “Larry and I are to do a picture about Nelson and Lady Hamilton,” she told the man who was still her husband. “I am extremely dubious about it. But now one does not plan a career much, as it seems futile, and we are certainly only doing this for financial purposes.” She did not do herself or Olivier justice. Money mattered, since their children were coming over from embattled Britain and would need support, but they could have earned far more if they had not chosen to put themselves at Korda’s disposal. Olivier was initially as doubtful as Leigh about the project. Had he heard of Lady Hamilton? Korda asked him. “She was the tart who fucked Nelson, wasn’t she?” replied Olivier. Korda agreed that this more or less summed it up, but he stressed that what was planned was a patriotic extravaganza, tailored to the needs of the day, with Nelson/Churchill mouthing slogans about the “unconquerable valour of the British nation”. Olivier was allowed a large input into the production – “We did a lot to make it sound more natural and that sort of the thing” – and the result was a slightly absurd but exciting adventure story. Olivier read energetically around his subject – “In those days I did quite a deal of research” – and tried to make his part realistic as well as romantic. His research omitted one detail. Shooting was about to begin when he asked which arm it had been that Nelson lost at Santa Cruz. None of the available portraits elucidated the point, naval historians were scarce in Hollywood. Then someone remembered that an elderly Hungarian opera singer living nearby had once played Nelson in an operetta in Vienna. He was sent for and Korda interrogated him. For a few minutes he pleaded forgetfulness, then admitted that he had got so bored playing the role that he had alternated, sacrificing his left arm on one night, his right on the other.7

  Olivier, always the perfectionist, was outraged by what he saw as Korda’s slapdash practices. The most important scene was the one in which he said goodbye to Lady Hamilton before leaving on what was to be his final voyage. For some reason he made a fearful hash of it. Twice he dried up, once he caught his scabbard in his cloak. To his dismay, Korda then called for the next shot. “Alex,” said Olivier. “You must be mad. It’s the worst acting I’ve ever done in my life. I must have another go at it.” “Larry, my dear boy,” Korda replied, “you know nothing about making pictures. Sometimes there must be bad acting. Next shot.”8

  “It was a damned good film,” Olivier concluded. “It stands up.” He did not find it an easy part to play, though. It was “quite fraught with traps and dangers”. It is probably true to say that, if the traps and dangers had not been there, he would have invented them. “I can’t remember if I ever found a part simple,” he once said. “Each one has always been a delicious problem, there’s been something always to fight a way through.” Each play or film for Olivier was an enemy, to be confronted, outwitted, battered into submission. The stiffer the resistance, the more Olivier loved it. That is why he believed “Hamlet” to be the greatest play ever written; because however many times he thought he had defeated it, it would reveal some unexpected and inexplicable subtlety, would escape from him again. “Lady Hamilton” possessed no comparable delights but it was good enough to be getting on with. It won him a powerful admirer. Churchill thought it the best film about war ever made and watched it seven times, though it was probably the battle scene which appealed as much as Olivier’s performance. He even sent a copy to Stalin who had notched up three viewings by the time he discussed the film with Churchill at a dinner during the Tehran Conference in 1943. The critics were not quite so enthusiastic, though they were generous enough: James Agate had little good to say about Vivien Leigh’s performance but thought Olivier made “a brave, unaffected and successful Nelson”.9

  This was not the only patriotic rodomontade in which Olivier became involved. The Ministry of Information asked Michael Powell to make a film that might help persuade the Americans to join in the war. He came up with the story of a group of survivors from a U-boat which had been sunk in Hudson’s Bay, who decided to make their way across Canada to the United States. “Goebbels considered himself an expert on propaganda but I thought I’d show him a thing or two,” remarked the screen writer, Emeric Pressburger, and the Germans were portrayed as a bunch of murderous thugs. Olivier, who charged only half his ordinary fee as a contribution to the war effort, played a French-Canadian trapper who was one of the Germans’ victims as they savaged their way southwards. His part was a small one but made memorable by his singularly bloody death. His sister Sybille asked him how this had been contrived. “I’m a marvellous actor, my dear,” he answered. “I can cough up a haemorrhage whenever I want to.” Pressed for further details he confessed that two tablespoonfuls of liquid chocolate – the film, “The 49th Parallel”, being shot in black and while – had provided the basis for his spectacular demise.10

  Their films, though not vast money-makers, had helped Leigh and Olivier to build up a comfortable reserve which would suffice to support their respective children when they arrived as evacuees. They managed to lose most of it in an ill-fated venture in the theatre. It was George Cukor who suggested that if they wanted to make a lot of money quickly and at the same time burnish their theatrical reputations they could not do better than act together in a production of “Romeo and Juliet”. How could it go wrong? “Never has there been a happier and more colourful combination of principals and production,” wrote one interviewer. “Two internationally famed lovers of fact projecting themselves into the two most famed lovers of fiction.” Olivier flung himself into the enterprise: selecting the cast, fussing over the costumes, planning the provincial tour that would precede the New York opening, even providing the music. “Larry has suddenly started composing music and nothing will stir him from the piano,” Vivien Leigh told her mother. He had completed his own entrance music and was now doing the same for Juliet – “unless I can do it myself,” Leigh concluded.11

  One result of this was that Olivier wore himself out. He was never fully able to accept that there was a limit to what he could achieve and in 1940 he had not even begun to learn the lesson. By the time the play opened in San Francisco he was mentally and physically at his limit. The result was a debacle. For the end of the balcony scene Olivier had devised a dramatic exit from the Capulet garden which involved him bounding lithely over the wall and disappearing into the night. Unfortunately he was so much weakened by his efforts that he missed his footing and was left floundering, clinging to the top of the wall but quite unable to surmount it.

  After this unpropitious start, things improved. “By dint of strenuous rehearsals it is getting better and better,” Vivien reported, “and by the time we open in N.Y. it should be alright.” What they did not take into account was that, while the reviews were reasonably friendly, the newspaper coverage which they received, particularly while in Chicago, was having the worst possible effect in New York. “See real lovers make love in public,” had been the tenor of the repo
rting. A squalid romance was being vulgarly exploited, was the response of the more austere New Yorkers. Besides, Olivier and Leigh were known in New York as film stars; “Gone With the Wind” and “Wuthering Heights” were playing to packed cinemas. It was deemed significant that the venue where “Romeo and Juliet” was to appear, the 51st Street Theatre, had been known till recently as the Hollywood Theatre. The case was proven. Something very remarkable would have had to have happened between Chicago and New York for the critics to treat the production with even a degree of charity.12

  Up to a point their complaints were justified. Olivier, by his own admission, was not at his best. Edmund O’Brien, who played Mercutio, agreed that it was a lifeless performance. Not for the first time, Olivier was accused of muting his performance so as to enhance the showing of Vivien Leigh. “He thought the whole thing should be Viv’s show,” O’Brien said. “Olivier believed the pure power of his stage presence would carry him through, and that American audiences wouldn’t know the difference between a great portrayal of Romeo and a lacklustre one.” If Olivier really thought this he was swiftly disillusioned. The critics denounced his performance: “Sheer, savage, merciless cruelty,” he described their judgment. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, most influential of all American theatre critics, was one of the more temperate. “Mr Olivier in particular keeps throwing his part away,” he complained. “The superficiality of his acting is difficult to understand. He is mannered and affected, avoiding directness in even simple episodes. As his own director,” Atkinson concluded, “Mr Olivier has never heard himself in the performance. This is just as well; he would be astonished if he did.” In the course of his career Olivier was often to direct plays in which he played a leading role. It was always a risky business, but his astonishing energy and ability to keep an almost impossible number of balls simultaneously in the air usually carried him through. In 1940, inexperienced and perhaps distracted by the need to sustain a faltering Vivien Leigh, he met with disaster.13