by Anne Edwards
She was still on close and fond terms with Leigh. It was a relationship that she had not yet come to fully understand, and she struggled inwardly with many emotionally disturbing thoughts. During the periods of depression that still plagued her she had sexual fantasies that distressed her, believing that if she were left alone at these times she might be moved to pick up a stranger on the street, bring him home, and seduce him. Occasionally she would feel a compulsion to ask a taxi driver in whose cab she had ridden to come back to the house with her. This same kind of desire would at times overwhelm her when she was alone with a deliveryman. Certain comparisons could be made to Blanche DuBois’ sexual behavior in Streetcar. But Vivien’s needs were considerably different from Williams’ character’s. Loneliness was not the motivation. Nor did she ever “misbehave” during periods when she was not ill. But within Vivien was a childhood guilt so deep-rooted that none of the psychiatrists who had treated her were able to dislodge it. The thought of having relations with a man who was “working class” appeared to lighten the guilt for short periods. Unfortunately, such fantasies left their mark upon her, so that one guilt seemed only to be traded for another.
There was no way she could bring herself to discuss these schisms of behavior with Larry. She was certain that madness waited around the corner for her. The thought terrified and consumed her. Leigh calmed her fears considerably. Not that she could reveal her private thoughts or sexual aberrations with him either. It was simply that they seemed to disappear in his presence. He made her feel free and clean, young, beautiful, untouched—still innocent. It would never occur to her to use indecent language before him or to dispute any arguments he might have. She hated variations of her name and yet she never complained when he called her Vivvy. At the same time she never felt sexually drawn to him either, and this was a great relief to her. It meant she could relate to Leigh as though he were a fond and loving parent.
Suzanne was now sixteen, and Vivien wanted very much to form a closer communion with her. The girl appeared to be leaning toward a career in the theatre and hoped to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In the beginning Vivien tended to dissuade her, reminding her that there were about 12,000 actors out of work in England at the time. It was a curious attitude for Vivien to take in view of her own experience, but she did not believe that Suzanne had the natural ability to make a success of it without a terrible and hard struggle. When she saw that Suzanne was serious, she backed her up. There was no apparent bitterness on the girl’s part for past indifference, and Vivien felt Leigh was responsible in the main for that. But try as she did, she could not relate to her daughter in a true maternal fashion.
With Tarquin it was another matter. Tarquin was more openly demonstrative and of a more sensitive and artistic nature. She encouraged his aspirations to play the piano and tried hard to make Larry take a keener interest. Strangely, she was not as close as she should have been to Suzanne, and yet she desperately wanted father and son to bridge their chasm.
Tarquin had entered Eton shortly before the production of Streetcar. Before that he had been at Cottesnore School, which was a boarding preparatory school in the wilds of Wales near Snowdon, where the boys were housed in a crazy historical mansion alleged to have secret passages, priest holes, and ghosts—a marvelous place for vigorous little boys—and he had been very happy. Eton was entirely another matter. As Olivier’s son and heir, a great deal was expected of him that he did not feel capable of delivering. Most painful, perhaps, was the fact that he was small for his age, which was a handicap in sports. He majored in Spanish and French, but was not doing at all well.
He had a good relationship with Jill, never hesitating to bring friends home when he had time from school, and he was pleased that she easily fit in as “one of the boys.” But it was his father’s approval that he needed most desperately, and no matter what he did he seemed unable to get it. He took up rowing with enthusiasm, and despite his size was a welcome addition to the Eton junior rowing team. He gave small concerts at school for friends and won the junior piano competitions, but Olivier did not attend.
Vivien’s relationship with her parents very much occupied her thoughts. She had a far greater understanding of Gertrude than she had had in her younger years. She was aware of her father’s infidelity, and her allegiance had turned to Gertrude. But now Ernest was ill and she found their meetings were charged with emotion that she could not disperse.
It was not an easy decision for Olivier to remain in London to complete his current engagement while Vivien left for a conference with Elia Kazan at his home in Newtown, Connecticut. He was well aware that her dependency on him was great and that their separation often threw her into one of her attacks of depression. She had “taken ill” during the last weeks of Streetcar, and it had closed without her. But she had rallied quite well, and lately there had been none of those little signs that indicated that she might turn on him—and ultimately upon herself. Feeling that her “spells” might be behind them, he saw her off on a flight to New York.
Vivien had “terrific admiration” for “Gadge” Kazan, who was going to direct the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. She had first seen him as an actor in the role of Eddie Fusili in a London production of Golden Boy in 1938, and had gone back several times to watch him perform. And she and Olivier had staged the London productions of The Skin of Our Teeth and A Streetcar Named Desire, which he had directed first in New York. Kazan planned to film virtually the entire playscript—including the speeches Olivier had cut from the London production—and he and Vivien went over it line by line. There had been ticklish problems raised by Hollywood’s censorship office (known then as the Breen office). Once again, as in England, the reference to homosexuality had to be removed, and Williams was working on that passage to get it past the censors while retaining what he could of the original concept.
Kazan and Vivien differed on the interpretation of Blanche’s motivations, and it looked as if there might be trouble ahead between them. After two days as a guest in his home (he found her “full of grace, and intelligence, and clever enough not to say all she thought”), she boarded a train for California, stopping in Wisconsin en route to visit with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Vivien had always felt able to confide in Lynn, to confess many of her anxieties. At this time she seemed most obsessed with the idea of Larry’s possible infidelity. Both women agreed that they would much prefer their husbands to have homosexual rather than heterosexual affairs, neither feeling able to cope with the threat to her ego that another woman would pose.
Tennessee Williams met her in Hollywood, where he was still working on the script. One troubling sequence was Scene Nine in the play, in which Blanche after having had her past exposed by Stanley, brings down the curtain by yelling, “Fire! Fire! Fire!” The Breen office banned this on the basis that it might send patrons out of the theatre in panic. Williams also had the problem of the scenes dealing with the homosexuality of Blanche’s dead husband, her supposed promiscuity with soldiers and sailors, and the accusations that she had been involved with a seventeen-year-old boy.
But by the second week in August 1950 the film was ready to go before the cameras, and Vivien, as Blanche, was unveiled to the press in Jack L. Warner’s private dining room at the studio that bore his and his brother’s name. She entered on Kazan’s arm wearing one of Lucinda’s costumes for the film—a dotted net negligee—a yellow straw-blond wig on her head. She was introduced to her co-star Marlon Brando for the first time. Brando was clad in brown slacks and a T-shirt, his naturally blond hair died dark for the film—as it had been for the play at Lucinda’s insistence. (His first Broadway appearance had been as a blond young Scandinavian boy in a production of I Remember Mama.)
Vivien talked to him about his performance with Katharine Cornell in Antigone (he had played the Messenger). She replied to the reporters’ queries in a straightforward manner and rejected their calling her Lady Olivier. “Her Ladyship is fucking bored with such form
ality/’ she told one reporter, “and prefers to be known as Miss Vivien Leigh!” The film’s producer, Charles K. Feldman, laughed nervously beside her.
She was asked questions like “What do you suppose happened to Scarlett O’Hara after Rhett Butler walked out?”
“I think she probably became a better woman, but I don’t think she ever got Rhett Butler back.”
Did she read her lines to Sir Laurence?
“No, I always know my lines.”
Did Sir Laurence read his lines to her?
“Yes, it’s perfectly wonderful because he puts me to sleep.”
Did they go out often?
“On Saturday nights and maybe one night during the week.”
Did she think the American public might resent her playing a Southerner again?
“A great many Americans saw me when I played the same role in London on the stage and I didn’t get any rude letters, so I must have sounded all right.”
In answer to other questions: “Streetcar is a most wonderful, wonderful play. . . . The role of Blanche is very exhausting—in the theatre anyway. ... I am extremely flattered Mr. Kazan chose me.”
“Lord, I’m famished,” Vivien finally announced after more than a half hour of being questioned. Brando nudged her from behind. “Go ahead and fuckin’ eat your meal,” he advised her and then slouched off to order his own.
Before A Streetcar Named Desire went before the cameras, Olivier had arrived from London accompanied by a wide-eyed, six-teen-year-old Suzanne, just finished with her secondary school studies and looking forward to a summer holiday and her entrance in the fall in the Royal Academy. Olivier began work on Carrie immediately, and they moved into a manorial house with a huge pool that no one except Suzanne ever had the time to use. The young woman would join her mother and Vivien’s secretary, Sunny Lash, in Vivien’s dressing room for lunch, but the role of motherhood seemed an added and most difficult pressure and the relationship was not good.
Kazan had seen Blanche in an unsympathetic manner, and Vivien did not share his view. They had come no closer to an agreement once in production. For two weeks they were at an impasse. Then their differences suddenly dissolved. Kazan claimed that Vivien came over to his side; Vivien said in interviews that he had come over to hers. What seemed to have eased the tensions between them was Vivien’s final agreement not to go home each evening and work out her next day’s scenes with Larry. Kazan blamed her stagy performance in those first weeks on Olivier’s “subversive” direction.
What Vivien found important in the character of Blanche was her beauty of spirit, imagination, and mind. She was trying through her interpretation to let people see what Blanche was like when she was seventeen and in love with her young husband. The key to her was Blanche’s sister Stella’s line “Nobody, nobody, was tender and trusting as she [Blanche] was.” The reading by Stella of that line created a tremendous schism between Vivien and Kazan. Vivien felt the words “tender” and “trusting” should be elongated because they evoked the young Blanche when she was tender and trusting, as opposed to what she had become—cynical, hard, mad.
During the three months it took to shoot the film, Vivien could hardly wait to get to the studio each day; and once again, as with Gone With the Wind, she was the last to leave in the evening. Williams’ final script was frozen, no further changes could be made, and cast and crew felt dedicated to bringing it to life to the last detail. The prop man would question Vivien: “What sort of things do you think Blanche would have on her table next to her bed?” She decided it would be a picture of Blanche when she was young, and objects that came from her past—a dance program, a gift from an admirer, a picture of her family home.
She adored Kim Hunter, who played Stella; but in the beginning there was tension between Brando and herself. She found him affected, and he thought she was stuffy and prim. “Why are you so fuckin’ polite? Why do you have to say a fuckin’ good morning to everyone?” he asked. It was difficult for him to understand how important good manners were to her, but after a while they became friends. Brando would sing folk songs in a pleasant voice to the cast and do imitations of Olivier as Henry V. Larry was difficult to mimic, but Brando was able to imitate him perfectly.
Olivier was concerned because she was sleeping very little. Blanche seemed constantly on her mind. There were moments when those close to her were startled by the thought that she had times when she fully believed she was Blanche. Olivier was under terrific pressure on Carrie, for though he admired Wyler he was beginning to feel that the film had been a mistake and his role too downbeat and not dramatic enough. There were also the coming theatre productions for the Festival of Britain in less than six months for which he was partially responsible. Every night the two of them would read Pirandello, Sheridan, and Shaw until they were red-eyed, searching for plays.
When Sylvia Fine and Danny Kaye decided to throw them a glamorous party at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Olivier was extremely pleased, since he thought it would relax Vivien’s increasing nervousness. The Kayes had decided that no producers would be invited and that the guest list would have to be limited to 150. Invitations to “a party in honor of Sir Laurence and Lady Olivier” immediately became the key to social status in Hollywood. Everyone surreptitiously inquired of everyone else if they had been invited, and those who had not, and knew Vivien, besieged her with requests to secure invitations for them. It soon became more than she could bear, and she would lock herself in her dressing room with Sunny and weep. She begged Larry to speak to the Kayes about canceling the affair, but he thought that would be a terrible breach of etiquette and she was forced to agree with him.
The party was held in the hotel’s grand ballroom, which glittered with crystal and gold. An orchestra augmented with additional strings played at the far end of the room, and there seemed to be as many uniformed waiters as guests. A tuxedoed Danny Kaye, his hair dyed a brilliant red for an appearance in a Technicolor film, strode exuberantly through the crowds of his guests to greet each newcomer. To Vivien it recalled her Court presentation, and though no one loved parties more than she, the pretentiousness of this one struck a wrong chord with her. Certainly it was the most elegant of parties. Men as well as women who considered themselves Hollywood royalty were strutting like peacocks, and each seemed to be wearing more jewels than belonged to the British crown. Vivien looked exquisite in a green gown that made her eyes look like two dark emeralds. She smiled, she laughed, she flirted, but she was not happy. It disturbed her that Larry was enjoying the party so much, that Danny Kaye seemed to completely ignore his wife, Sylvia, indeed that she and Larry were being used as an excuse for a party.
No guest who was unattached was allowed to come alone or with anyone who had not been invited, so Lucinda Ballard, who had recently fallen in love with Howard Dietz, was escorted by a rather dandified Otto Preminger. At the end of the party Lucinda announced to the Oliviers that she and Howard were going to marry. Vivien was genuinely happy for the first time that night. “Oh, how marvelous, Cindy darling.” She beamed and hugged Lucinda to her.
But Larry commented, “What? Not that publicity man?” (He remembered him from the Atlanta premiere of Gone With the Wind.)
“Howard Dietz is one of America’s finest lyricists!” Vivien retorted sharply, then turned and walked angrily out of the room. It was one of the few times the Oliviers were ever seen to argue in public.
At the conclusion of the principal photography on Streetcar, Vivien took a train trip to New Orleans with Kazan. Even so, they never became intimate. Their relationship revolved around their work. Kazan was aware that she experienced extreme ups and downs, but as she was happy when she worked, indeed thrived on it, he ignored them. Yet his first impression of her as a great beauty being devoured by something that she was trying unsuccessfully to control remained unchanged from the first day of the film until the last.
As soon as Larry had completed Carrie, the Oliviers made plans to leave, but Vivien was unable to co
pe with the idea of a long air flight. There were no ocean liners scheduled for departure out of San Francisco, so they booked passage on a French Line freighter, the Wyoming; and with five other passengers, 40,000 crates of apples, 10,000 cases of sardines, and 2000 bales of cotton they sailed a rough winter sea looking forward to Christmas at home.
Chapter Twenty-one
Rehearsals for the 1951 Festival of Britain productions had to begin immediately if they were to open as scheduled, but Larry and Vivien had not yet found a play that would give them roles of equal stature. Finally, all the board members of Laurence Olivier Productions Ltd. (Cecil Tennant, Anthony Bushell, Roger Furse, Alexander Korda, Olivier, and Vivien) met at their office in the St. James’s Theatre to reach a decision. The majority were in favor of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, but Vivien did not think the sixteen-year-old Cleopatra, which she had already portrayed on the screen, ambitious enough.
“Let’s do the two Cleopatras”—Roger Furse laughed nervously—“the Shaw and the Shakespeare, then Vivien could age over twenty years in one evening.” He meant it as a humorous remark and was immediately sorry he had said it, thinking Vivien might have been offended, but she leaned forward, eyes shining.
“It couldn’t be done in one night, of course,” she said excitedly, “but it could on successive nights.” She looked up at Larry, who was pacing the room.
“Too expensive and too massive a cast,” he muttered.
