Vivien Leigh

by Anne Edwards

  He was beginning to feel his new authority as head of the company and as Sir Laurence. His old friend Peter Cushing, who had appeared with him in Hamlet, was in the company, and Olivier confessed to him how lonely he felt in his position: “No one has the temerity to tell me how my performances are standing up to so much repetition. I wish they would, because we all need a sounding board and it’s of no help to be told that you were splendid tonight because you can’t be—always.”

  The last night in Perth the company as a curtain call joined together in rousing choruses of “Waltzing Matilda.” The audience went wild. More crowds waited en masse outside, and a police escort on motorcycles had to clear the road to the airport, where another crowd of several hundred waved and cheered and sang “Auld Lang Syne” as they boarded the plane for Adelaide.

  Olivier was playing Mr. Antrobus to Vivien’s Sabina in The Skin of Our Teeth, and the press conducted a small private war of pros and cons on his performance. But there was no doubt Vivien had captivated Adelaide. The press named her “Miss Vitamin B” because she was so full of smiling energy. And Olivier entered into his diary, “V is wonderful—better than ever.”

  They were again the world famous lovers. Neither could take his eyes from the other. They took private trips. Vivien was fascinated with the Daliesque terrain and wrote Hugh Beaumont:

  We drove . . . through the most wonderful country imaginable . . . great shallow blue lakes surrounded by glistening white sand, black and white branches of trees sticking up out of the water and birds of every kind and description everywhere. Then through great forests to Mount Gambier where we spent the night in a very strange hotel. The midnight clock struck eighteen and the fire alarm was sent off every two hours just to see if the poor old thing was all right (and that we knew it).

  They arrived in Melbourne on April 19, and again were met by swarms of people and cameras, as well as having to face a press conference. “V carried the wretched thing off with superlative charm,” Olivier wrote. Entering the conference room at the Menzies Hotel, Vivien, not able to bear the stiff formality of a prearranged row of chairs, pushed them all out of the way so that everyone had to stand and mill about, somewhat as though they were guests at a cocktail party.

  At Canberra it was more of the same, with an even more terrifying benefit appearance at the Capitol Cinema added to the schedule (Food for Britain), with “arc lights, two movie news cameras, four microphones, 2,000 people. Vivien looked wonderful in pale lime green and a blood red rose at her waist. Halfway through she hesitated, but went on finishing with Sonnet 116.”

  They had a two-month engagement in Melbourne alternating the three plays. Next came Sydney, then Brisbane. They had been away six months, and Vivien was beginning to feel homesick, a sentiment shared by the entire company. The crowds, the receptions, the speeches continued. They flew from Brisbane to Auckland and gave nine performances in eleven days. They closed on a Saturday night, and then flew 1500 miles on Sunday to Christchurch to open that next Monday evening. Olivier’s knee (injured in Sydney during the Richard III duel scene) began to give him trouble. Eight days and twelve performances later they flew to Dunedin and performed that same night of their arrival. By then Olivier’s knee was causing him extreme pain. After the first show in Dunedin, and as Vivien stood holding his arm, he told a reporter, “You may not know it, but you are talking to two walking corpses.”

  The next day his knee was operated on to remove some cartilage, and he remained in a nursing home while the company continued their engagements in New Zealand, with an understudy taking over Olivier’s roles. October came, and the rains with it. The Corinthia stood in dock at Glasgow Wharf in Wellington waiting to carry the victorious and exhausted Old Vic Company home. Vivien stood on the quayside in her wet mackintosh as Olivier was lifted out of an ambulance on a stretcher, then hoisted in a canvas sling by a crane.

  The trip home was as depressing as the trip over had been high-spirited. The ship rolled constantly and monotonously. There was almost no sun, and worst of all, Vivien received word that New, the Siamese cat, had been run over. But Olivier’s knee healed, they brought home about £42,000 for the British Council, and they were planning on opening at the New Theatre in January 1949, replacing The Skin of Our Teeth with Antigone, but retaining Richard III and The School for Scandal. Vivien had wanted to play the tragic role of Antigone for a long time and had tried to persuade Olivier to include it in the Australian tour. Now he was finally agreeing to put it on, and she was deliriously happy about it.

  Tragic heroines were, in fact, much on her mind. A Streetcar Named Desire had opened in New York on December 3, 1947, not long before the Australian tour. Cecil Beaton had rung Vivien on the telephone to tell her he had seen it and that it was an ideal role for her. She had secured a copy of the play just before the tour and had read it many times during their travels, dog-earing it as she had once done to Gone With the Wind.

  On a gray November day they drove from the dock to Durham Cottage. Olivier, to Vivien’s great delight, had arranged for a new little Siamese kitten to be waiting. Leaving the boxes and crates of boomerangs, paintings, aborigine knives, and stuffed koala bears that they had brought home with them, Vivien swept the little frightened creature into her arms and stroked it until it began purring contentedly. Then she carried it with her into the bedroom with the one new acquisition of the trip that seemed to have meaning to her—the play-script of the Tennessee Williams play.

  Except for Scarlett O’Hara, she had never wanted to play a role more than she did that of Blanche DuBois.

  Chapter Twenty

  Their oversized beds at both Durham Cottage (where cupids were painted on the headboard) and Notley were shrines. The satin covers were not allowed a crease, nor the polished wood frames a fleck of dust. By simply studying the objects on the nightstand on Vivien’s side of the bed one could tell whether she was in residence or not; for the picture of Larry, the boxes containing mementos from him that she deemed sacred, and the few notes he had written her that had special meaning were set down with the same exactness on her bedside table wherever she was. She had originally kept her Oscar for her performance in Gone With the Wind on the mantelpiece of the living room at Durham Cottage. Its presence had been a bone of contention between them for a number of years during which Larry was jealous of it and did not like to be reminded that he had not been awarded one. But since then he had won an Oscar for Hamlet and received a special award for Henry V, and now the three statuettes were kept on a bookcase in their Durham Cottage bedroom.

  They were once again the passionate lovers. Australia had been a great healer. The overwhelming ovations paid to them, the royal receptions, and the tributes had given her a renewed faith in herself and an even greater belief that Larry had now become King of Players. In a sense she thought of herself as his queen, but in actuality she played the role of dedicated handmaiden. And Olivier treated Vivien with a new professional respect, doubtless because of her emergence as a fine tragedian in the role of Antigone.

  It was Vivien who had fought to include Anouilh’s version of Sophocles’ Greek classic into the Old Vic repertory season of 1949. The play had been rewritten by Anouilh as a parable of wartime France and had been a great success in its opening season in Paris. When the curtain rose, Vivien, as Antigone, sat at the back of the stage, a white-faced, wild-eyed creature, arms clasped on crossed knees, while Olivier, as the one-man chorus, stood wearing modern evening dress as he described the tragic destiny that the gods had waiting for her. Her performance was one of great power, and Olivier was startled into a new assessment of her capabilities as a stage actress. Two months after her first appearance as Antigone, he enthusiastically agreed to produce and direct the London production of A Streetcar Named Desire with Vivien as Blanche DuBois.

  Vivien was always drawn to characters of queenly dimensions— Scarlett, Emma Hamilton, Cleopatra, Antigone, and now Blanche— all women whose passions gave stature to a play or film. Tenne
ssee Williams says of Blanche, “She was a demonic creature, the size of her feeling was too great for her to contain without the escape to madness.” Vivien became more and more obsessed with Blanche, seeming to understand her with even greater intensity than she had Scarlett. Blanche was different from anything she had ever done, and as far from Scarlett as another woman could be. Yet they were both true daughters of a romantic tradition that harbored nostalgic regret for the loss of the past. Like Vivien, Blanche was a creature living on frayed, snapping nerves, a woman constantly aware of madness, but who could still conjure up the white pillars and trimmed lawns of the past, while living in squalor.

  “Everyone,” Blanche tells her insensitive brother-in-law, Stanley, “has something he won’t let others touch because of their—intimate nature.”

  Vivien had not seen Jessica Tandy in the New York production, so the image she had of Blanche came from her own interpretation of Williams’ play. The New York production and the playscript differed strongly in one respect—Blanche’s costumes. Williams had indicated rather sleazy clothes for Blanche (“a worn-out Mardi Gras outfit . . . a dark red satin kimona”), but Lucinda Ballard, the play’s costume designer in New York, had seen Blanche as a delicate, uncertain woman and dressed her in mothy whites and faded flowered organdies. One of Olivier’s first important decisions was to adhere to the author’s costume descriptions. This of course altered the New York production’s concept of Blanche and might account in a great part for the critical attacks on the play when it opened at the Aldwych on October 11.

  The critics called Blanche a nymphomaniac and a prostitute and the play was snidely referred to as “low and repugnant” in the House of Commons and condemned by the Public Morality Council. The Times came to the conclusion that “the purpose of this play is to reveal a prostitute’s past in her present.” But Vivien had never once believed that Williams had written about a prostitute. To her, Blanche was a tragic woman whose past was too lonely and loveless to support her fading, aging beauty, a woman fighting for a last desperate chance of a life of gentility, one whose fantasies finally careen her into madness.

  There was only one allusion in the play to Blanche’s possible past immorality. Brother-in-law Stanley declares, “Sister Blanche is no lily!” and then elaborates with a bit of gossip garnered from the sup-ply-man at his plant, who supposedly traveled often to the town of Laurel, where Blanche lived. “This supply-man stops at a hotel called the Flamingo,” he goads his wife, Stella, who is Blanche’s younger sister. “A second-class hotel which has the advantage of not interfering in the private social life of the personalities there! The Flamingo is used to all kinds of goings on. But even the management of the Flamingo was impressed by Dame Blanche! In fact, they were so impressed by Dame Blanche that they requested her to turn in her room key—for permanently!” Then he adds that she got “mixed up with” a seventeen-year-old boy and “they kicked her out of that high school [where she had been teaching] before the spring term ended.”

  Olivier found the undertaking one of the most painful he had experienced. Irene Selznick, now divorced from David and a successful theatre producer on her own (she produced the New York production of Streetcar), arrived in London and crossed swords with Olivier almost immediately as she fought to prevent cuts he was making in the original script to create a faster moving play. Olivier had problems with the Board of Censors, which refused to allow them to have Blanche describe her young dead husband as a homosexual, a point that all concerned felt was basic to the understanding of the character. In the end, Vivien could only indicate that there was a problem, and then break down sobbing so that the problem could only be guessed at. Further conflicts arose with the presence of the play’s original director, Elia Kazan, in London to rehearse Death of a Salesman. Olivier had been sent Kazan’s prompt script with all his notations. He tried to ignore it but was constantly drawn back to refer to it and to incorporate some of Kazan’s bits of stage business in his own production. This weighed heavily on Olivier’s conscience, and finally he had a credit line inserted in the program following his own which read, “After the New York production.”

  “Miss Vivien Leigh drifts to ruin on a tide of words many thousands strong,” wrote the reviewer for The Times. “Her performance, considered merely as a feat of memory, is impressive. It is impressive also for its delicately insistent suggestion of a mind with a slowly loosening hold on reason. She is ridiculous, she is indomitable; she is lost. But the impressiveness of the performance grows as the violence of the action deepens.”

  But although the critics praised the production highly, many of the audience considered the action on the stage obscene and were quite vocal in their disappointment that Vivien should appear in such a “sooty” play. Vivien refused to be disturbed by this and was fond of telling a story she claimed one of the tea ladies had told her. At intermission when this lady passed among the audience to sell tea, a woman rose from her seat. “ ‘Ere,” she said at the top of her voice, “don’t give this place another penny!”

  The play had now been bought by Warner Brothers. Kazan and Irene Selznick both felt Vivien should portray Blanche on the screen. But if Olivier had not accepted the lead opposite Jennifer Jones (now Mrs. David O. Selznick) in William Wyler’s film version of Theodore Dreiser’s Carrie, it is doubtful that Vivien would have agreed to play Blanche in the film. This way they would be in Hollywood together.

  Shortly after Vivien signed for Streetcar, Lucinda Ballard flew to London to meet with and discuss her film costumes for the role. Kazan, who was to direct, felt this was a rather touchy matter (Olivier had, after all, adamantly rejected Lucinda’s costumes for the London stage production) and one that had to be settled before Vivien arrived in Hollywood.

  Lucinda and Vivien met for the first time at a party given by Ivor Novello. When Lucinda first saw Vivien, she was sharing a large crimson chair with Danny Kaye. They were laughing and whispering to each other, but the moment Ivor said, “This is my sweet Lucinda,” Vivien looked up and rose at once, “like a good little girl,” and Miss Ballard, who hails from the South and is a descendant of the Confederate President Jefferson Davis, was struck immediately by her impeccable manners and with her most unusual beauty. Vivien smiled in greeting, the corners of her mouth turned up naturally, and yet Lucinda had never seen this lovely curve of the lips on anyone else. It gave her a look of eagerness and a sweet sort of innocence which, combined with her startling beauty, made her absolutely unique.

  But it was more than Vivien’s beauty that attracted Lucinda. It was her joyous and ebullient nature, the spellbinding way in which she could tell a story. That night Robert Helpmann was also at the party, and Vivien had everyone in hysterics as she related and re-enacted a story about the time the two of them had appeared in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the Old Vic Company and the royal family with the two little princesses had been in the audience and Vivien and Helpmann had turned to bow to them. To their immense horror their elaborate headpieces locked and they could not draw apart. Vivien smiled inanely at the royal family and nestled in closer to Helpmann and the two of them backed off the stage with Vivien in a position that made her crowned head seem to grow out of her backside. Novello’s guests roared with laughter.

  Lucinda, who, with her copper curls and freckled fair complexion, possessed a childlike openness and enthusiasm, won Vivien over; and it was not long before the two women became good friends. Lucinda took her costume sketches to Notley Abbey. England was still crushed by rationing, but the food, the service, and the atmosphere at Notley were so exquisite that she felt she was removed in time to Edwardian England, for Vivien, with ingenuity and infinite pains, and without ever using black market foods, had been able to make her table and her house gracious and welcoming. Before Lucinda returned to the States, Vivien had agreed to all the costume sketches, and a special understanding had grown between them.

  Lucinda was struck by the distinctiveness of the Oliviers’ marriage, the sense
that they were still young lovers and all their friends were conspirators to an illicit affair. Vivien’s subjugation of her own status to Larry’s, the complete and genuine idolatry she had of him, and the fears that she would not please him, troubled and confused Lucinda. It seemed incredible to her that a woman who seemed even more beautiful at night, with her face creamed and without makeup, should be distraught because “Larry thinks my legs are too fat,” but such was the case.

  Money had been the major factor in Olivier’s agreement to do Carrie and Vivien’s to film Streetcar. He had recently formed Laurence Olivier Productions, realizing his lifelong ambition to head his own company as actor-manager. Vivien was made a director of the company along with Alexander Korda, Anthony Bushell, and the scenic designer Roger Furse. After much searching it was decided that they would take over the St. James’s Theatre, which was once a gem among London theatres but had lost its prestige over the years. Olivier had hopes of restoring the theatre to its former glory. To this end he spared no expense in refurbishing it. His first production, Venus Observed, Christopher Fry’s complex verse play, ran successfully (and concurrently with Streetcar) for seven months in 1950, with Olivier starring as the Duke of Altair. But production costs had been so high that it made no money. Disastrously, Laurence Olivier Productions’ second entry at the St. James’s—Fading Mansion, an Anouilh play which starred Siobhan McKenna—closed after a fortnight. There had seemed to be only one recourse if the company was going to continue. Hollywood would have to foot the bill, and as Larry confided to Vivien, “It will be a pleasure to snoot old monsters!”

  It had been nearly nine years since either of them had been there. Many dramatic changes had taken place. Vivien no longer considered herself a film star, nor did she believe she needed Hollywood to advance her career. And they were now Sir Laurence and Lady Olivier, which in a society based on fairy tales very much changed their social status. It was difficult not to reflect on the last time she had left England for Hollywood, a runaway lover determined to remain at Larry’s side in spite of all censure.