Vivien Leigh

by Anne Edwards

  Spring came suddenly and prematurely in the beginning of March. For a fortnight, summer heat force-bloomed the few flowers growing wildly amid potato patches, the trees became alive with budding green. It was almost too good to believe, but with the sun and the blossoms and the green came good news. On March 5, U.S. troops entered Cologne, and they crossed the Rhine at Remagen on March 8. British troops crossed the Rhine at Wesel on March 23. On April 14 the Russians captured Vienna. Seven days later they reached Berlin. On April 28 Benito Mussolini was assassinated, and on April 30 Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide.

  On V-E Day, May 8, Vivien was in Blackpool trying out The Skin of Our Teeth before bringing it into the West End. Jack Merivale was stationed at a nearby R.A.F. station at the time. Their last meeting many years before at Sneden’s Landing had been most unpleasant. The play had been ill-received in the North Country, but Jack attended the V-E Day matinee and adored it. The theatre was packed. People had burned up a month’s ration of petrol to see Scarlett O’Hara in the flesh. During the interval they vented their fury at what they had just seen, had not understood, and hated.

  Merivale overheard one man say in a North Country voice, “ ’Ere, I wish I hadn’t paid my money for this muck!”

  After the performance Merivale decided to chance another confrontation with Vivien and ventured somewhat nervously backstage to her dressing room. She could not have been more openly pleased to see him. No mention was made of their last meeting. She asked him about his own plans now that the war was over and he would soon be out of uniform. “Oh, I’ll return to the theatre if it will have me,” he said. She offered to help any way she could. They exchanged a few personal remarks (he told her he had been married to and divorced from actress Jan Sterling since their last meeting, that his stepmother, Gladys Cooper, was fine, and that his stepsister had married actor Robert Morley). He was as charmed and dazzled by her as he had always been, and they parted at the stage door of the theatre. The next day the company moved on to London.

  Flags hung from balconies, but V-E Day had not brought any spontaneous joy of deliverance. In fact there seemed to be a numbness of relief, as though everyone was simply too exhausted to express strong emotion. The night before, there had been very few wild celebrations. Instead there were sighs of gratitude that there would be no more fear of air raids and that the children could at last come home.

  But for Tarquin Olivier, not quite nine years old, returning from the States was more like coming to a strange land. He had left England at three and a half, and his memories of it were vague, merely impressionistic; and he had almost no recall of his father, whom he had seen, after all, only a few times in his life. His mother had made a point of having him know and respect the fact that his father was a great actor. She had even introduced him to the profession at seven, when he took a small role in a film for Universal—Eagle Squadron— in which she also appeared. And he had been told that his new stepmother was “the most beautiful woman in the world” (perhaps this, by Jill, to explain Olivier’s desertion). But the boy was not happy to return. He had been living in Los Angeles, where he had attended the Brentwood Town and Country School in an upper-middle-class section of the city with well-manicured lawns and wild and beautiful flora and sun shining most of the time. London appeared drab and pokey, and the people were not really as cheerful as they made out to be. The food was dreadful, their rooms cold, and worse, he did not seem to look like anyone else. He was brown and healthy, and they were pale and worn. His legs were much improved, although his coordination was not yet perfect. But he was used to back yards and sunny parks to run about in, and postwar London was a difficult adjustment and somewhat of a shock to a sensitive child like Tarquin.

  Arrangements were made to bring him to the Phoenix Theatre to meet his father. Arriving somewhat early, he found that rehearsals were in progress. The theatre was dark except for the stage. The go-between said, “There he is,” and pushed the child forward.

  A man was sitting in the back row of the stalls, hardly visible in the gloom. The boy slowly, awkwardly made his way to him, coming, to a halt a few steps away.

  “Tarquin?” Olivier asked in a hushed voice. The child nervously nodded his head, and Olivier reached out, drew him close, and kissed him. Tarquin was conscious of the soft mouth, the murky surroundings, but the man was a stranger to him.

  “Sit down and watch,” Olivier whispered. “That’s Bibs [a pet name for Vivien] acting.”

  Tarquin sat self-consciously and stared at the woman on the stage. She wore grotesque makeup and a short dress and she was moving furniture about the stage as she spoke loudly in an ugly, rasping American voice. She was terribly thin and had big eyes, and the man who was his father was totally absorbed in what she was doing. Tarquin sat nervously, afraid he might make the seat creak. When the actress had finished she looked out into the audience, straining to see, and then stepped nimbly off the stage and hurried up the aisle to where they sat.

  “This is Bibs. You remember her,” Olivier said, prompting him, nudging him to stand.

  Vivien did not wait for the child to reply. She leaned down and put her arms around him and hugged and kissed him fondly. “It doesn’t matter, darling Tarquin,” she said, her voice now soft and gentle. “I remember you.”

  Vivien then took him by the hand and led him to her dressing room, where she chattered happily to him. As she removed her makeup she spoke about what they could all do together, asked him about all his interests, turned and listened to him attentively; and she made Tarquin feel that he was the most precious creature to her. And as he stared at Vivien, who he was now absolutely sure was the most beautiful woman in the world, his only desire was to be loved by her. Tarquin was awed and terrified by his father, but he immediately adored his stepmother.

  The play opened on May 16. “Lovely performance by Vivien Leigh as Sabina, the hired girl, half dabchick and half dragon fly,” wrote James Agate. On opening night Agate had arrived ten minutes late, and Olivier had been so furious (the first scene was important for a thorough comprehension of the play) that he actually punched Agate in the jaw directly following the curtain. Therefore they did not expect the fair review they received, which lauded not only Vivien’s performance but Olivier’s direction and the supporting cast. Not once did Agate in his column mention his fistfight with Olivier.

  Vivien considered the play a major step toward creating the image of herself that she wanted the world and Olivier to see. What she could not and would not question were the curious spells that she seemed to be having more frequently, and the alternating bouts of exhaustion and exhilaration that had overtaken her since rehearsals had begun. She had also developed a terrible cough in Liverpool before they had come into London, and since then she had lost an alarming amount of weight. She refused to see a doctor and made light of it to Olivier.

  Believing that Vivien only had another of the frequent colds she had always had a tendency toward, and with his work complete on The Skin of Our Teeth, Olivier went off with the Old Vic Company to entertain the troops on the Continent.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Shortly after the completion of Henry V and just before rehearsals began on The Skin of Our Teeth, Olivier fell in love with a thirteenth-century house that had been endowed by Henry V, and he decided they should buy it. But when Vivien saw it for the first time she was adamant in her opposition to such a move. They drove the forty-eight miles from London to Long Grendon, Buckinghamshire, where the house, Notley Abbey, was situated, on a grim February day, using a month’s petrol ration stamps to do so. Notley Abbey stood gray and forbidding in the chill winter cold; and as they approached the front entrance along the wide avenue drive through pasture fields, they could see over the gently sloping high grass to the bank of the dark and murky winter waters of the River Thame. Nothing eased Vivien’s depression at the sight of the massive, sprawling old stone abbey with its tangled overgrown rose gardens and its great drafty rooms.

 
; To say that the towered twenty-two-room stone house was overwhelming would be an understatement. The grounds consisted of sixty-nine acres, with a bailiffs bungalow, a refectory barn, a six-car garage, and farm buildings (including a cowhouse for five, a chicken house for four hundred, a pig unit with twenty-four concrete sties, and four greenhouses). Vivien could admire the mullioned windows, the red tiled roofs, the ancient brick chimneys, and the central tower that had been added in the sixteenth century; but the prospect of making it habitable and home seemed quite unthinkable to her. Olivier had different emotions.

  Notley Abbey’s history endeared it to him to the point of obsession. Not only had Henry V endowed it, but it had been founded during the reign of Henry II for the Augustinian canons, and Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey had stayed there on several occasions.

  Vivien could not deflect his enthusiasm even by pointing out the burst pipes, the lack of heat, the sheer immensity and number of rooms to be decorated, the total absence of modern kitchen and bathroom facilities, and the difficulties it would involve to obtain licenses, not to mention the expense of all the decoration and restoration. He insisted they could do it slowly, one room at a time, and that it did not matter how many years it took, for Notley Abbey would be their home, their refuge, for the remainder of their days.

  It was senseless to argue. Larry was possessed with the idea of being Lord of the Abbey. Vivien reluctantly agreed and within a few weeks Notley was theirs at the cost of most of their savings. With the aid of Lady Colefax, who loved historic restoration, she set about the task of making the ancient house a home, while at the same time she plunged into rehearsals on The Skin of Our Teeth. After the show opened and Olivier went to the Continent, the burden of her situation began to overcome her. Her weight loss had continued, she was painfully overtired, and the cough that she had developed in Liverpool had grown worse. The members of the cast were alarmed by her feverish appearance. There were times she looked frighteningly peculiar to them. One night her voice, her expression, her gestures seemed strange. The woman who was her dresser prevailed upon her to see a doctor.

  The doctor recognized the symptoms straightaway, and the X rays that he immediately ordered showed that she had a serious tubercular patch on her lung. He wanted to hospitalize her for the moment and then decide whether she should go to a sanitarium in Scotland or one in Switzerland. In any event he strongly believed Olivier should be summoned back and that she had better reconcile herself to the fact that her career would have to be shelved for a long time. He also assured Vivien that her “delirious behavior” (which she herself knew came upon her but seemed unable to stop or recall much about afterwards) was not unique in such cases. But Vivien refused to go to the hospital or to tell Olivier about her illness or the doctor’s diagnosis. She returned to the theatre that night and managed to get through the performance, and she consulted a second specialist the next morning, who confirmed his colleague’s diagnosis but felt she was in no immediate danger. She persuaded him to allow her to finish out the month of July with the play (a matter of a little more than a fortnight) before going to a hospital. Reluctantly he agreed, giving her strict orders for her personal care—absolutely no alcohol, no smoking, and rest almost the entire time she was not performing.

  Still she did not write to Olivier of her condition. He was in Hamburg and about to leave for Paris when he ran into Anthony Bartley, a young pilot who was a friend to both of them. Bartley had just seen Vivien and was enigmatic and a bit disturbing in answering Olivier’s question on how Vivien had looked. On his arrival in Paris Olivier contacted Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, who had just come from London and were appearing in Love in Idleness for the American troops. They had indeed seen Vivien only a day or so before, and she had told them she had tuberculosis (it was the first the shocked Olivier had heard of the diagnosis), but, they continued, there was no serious reason for alarm obviously, as the specialist was allowing her to complete the month before checking into University College Hospital for observation. Olivier reasoned that no doctor (and the Lunts assured him this specialist had an impeccable reputation) would allow her to perform if her condition was alarming. He wrote Vivien he would be back before the play closed and by her side when she entered the hospital.

  True to his word, he took her directly from the closing night at the theatre to the hospital, where after six weeks of treatment the patch on her lung seemed to arrest itself. The doctor then insisted that she be transferred to a sanitarium for six months to a year to see if a complete cure could be effected. Vivien adamantly refused, and there was nothing even Olivier could do with her. Finally she agreed to take a year’s absence from the theatre and to go to Notley with a nurse and staff. There she would occupy only the few habitable rooms, remaining quiet and in bed, with few guests. The doctor was not happy about her decision, but he was forced to agree.

  The idea of a lengthy stay in a sanitarium terrified Vivien. First and foremost she wanted to be where Olivier would be able to see her frequently, and she was aware that at Notley Abbey he would be occupied and their time together would have a sense of normalcy even if she was bed-ridden. But for a long time she had been more alarmed about her nervous condition than her physical health and had delayed seeing a doctor and entering a hospital out of fear that it might be discovered that she had some kind of dreaded mental illness. She equated a sanitarium with a mental institution, and the thought of having to spend time there threw her into a panic. Neither Olivier nor the doctor guessed her true motives in refusing the facilities of a sanitarium geared especially to her illness, but they were fully conscious of the strength of her refusal to accept what would seem to be a natural course; and feeling that her condition could deteriorate under the emotional pressure, they allowed her to have her way.

  Olivier helped settle Vivien at Notley and then, leaving her in the care of the nurse and a qualified staff, began the intense rehearsals required for the October 1945 Old Vic season in alternating roles at the New Theatre in Oedipus (Sophocles, translated by W. B. Yeats) and as Mr. Puff in The Critic (Sheridan).

  The Oliviers’ bills were mounting with staggering velocity. Vivien would not be working for at least a year, and her care was oppressively expensive. Then there was Notley, its restoration and upkeep, his own living expenses, and, of course, his responsibility to Tarquin and Jill. His salary with the Old Vic was a hundred pounds a week, hardly enough to cover. He was not only working hard but was under constant tension with Vivien’s condition, and he motored back and forth from London to Buckinghamshire almost daily. Then he barely escaped a serious accident in his role as Mr. Puff.

  At the end of The Critic, Mr. Puff exits in a startling acrobatic climax as he straddles a painted cloud and is hauled off stage out of view of the audience by a rope, to reappear moments later clutching the curtain as it swings down to end the play. At one performance Larry missed the rope. As he began to fall, he desperately grasped some wires that were attached to the cloud, and after clinging to them over a drop of thirty feet, he was finally rescued by stagehands. He began having nightmares that he would have a fatal accident, that he would fall from the flies or crash in a plane.

  It was a harsh and difficult winter. For four months Vivien was unable to rise from her bed. Her life revolved around the one room she had selected for her bedroom. It was an L-shaped room on the first floor with an attractive fireplace and windows looking south and across the gardens. By the spring of 1946 she was able to see the chestnut trees bloom with white flowers and watch the gardeners from her windows as they pruned and replanted trees and vines and flowers. She read constantly, worked on plans for the house, and refused to let the gardeners plant a single seed without her approval. By the time the flowers bloomed, Notley Abbey had become her home and she loved it perhaps more than Olivier did now.

  She was permitted to get up for short periods in the day and to have a few visitors, Tarquin among them. He, too, was swept into a great feeling of emotion for the Abbey. He saw
it for the first time that spring.

  Memory of it [Notley Abbey] moves me deeply. In a great valley it lay—the heart of leafy Buckinghamshire, the River Thame meandering in weedy shallows through the elm woods, the willowed fields. This place where Henry V once stayed, breathed heraldry. In the attic were priceless frescoes of the emblem of Notley embracing the hazel nut and the lovers’ knot. There was an exhausted sexuality about the place, regretful black rooks high out of reach, umbrella poplar trees silvering against the sky in unlaboring cascades, a cruelty unearthed in the corpses of monks once buried under The High Alban before the dissolution of monasteries by Henry VIII.

  It was a great house for the imagination and sensitivity of a child like Tarquin. It seemed in fact to answer all its occupants’ needs. Olivier fed his sense of history, Vivien her great love of beauty. The house began to take shape as she furnished it with valuable pieces—an admirable mixture of brocade and comfort. There were antique and scholarly manuscripts and a modest wealth of fine paintings; tinseled illuminations of plays and players decorated the library walls.

  Tarquin recalls:

  One could lie in a bath on Sunday mornings, look through the casement windows under the original stone masonry arches, see the ancient pear trees in their white orgasm of spring when the daffodils had died, and hear the church bells of Chearsley, Haddenham and Thame in their medieval peal.

  It was a house that possessed its occupants, a demanding place, which seemed to insist that one don a gown before descending the staircase for dinner. Vivien did not leave its refuge for nine months from the date she had arrived there from the hospital. She had regained fifteen pounds and did not tire as easily.