Vivien Leigh

by Anne Edwards

  Vivien did not accept the situation with grace, and she came to the theatre a great deal during rehearsals. Olivier had chosen a young actress, Joan Plowright, to portray his daughter in the play. Vivien did not think she was right and Osborne did not like her, but Olivier insisted, feeling that she represented the new school of acting. Vivien’s presence at rehearsals made Olivier terribly nervous—a new effect she was having on him. She also made her influence felt, criticizing Larry, Joan Plowright, and director Tony Richardson. Finally she had a furious quarrel with George Devine, and directly after the first dress rehearsal she was asked not to come to the theatre.

  Archie Rice was perhaps one of the most outstanding and impressive performances Olivier had ever given. Indeed, many critics now felt he was not only the greatest classic actor in the English theatre but the greatest comedic actor as well. For Vivien, however, that entire spring was fraught with disappointment. Olivier had tried to get a film production of Macbeth off the ground (she was to play Lady Macbeth) but failed. Then Hecht-Lancaster Productions in Hollywood offered them the starring roles in their film version of Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables, but they could not reach an agreement on the script.

  By summer’s approach Vivien appeared to be heading into the depressive phase of her illness. Olivier, perhaps feeling otherwise helpless, set plans for a summer tour with the original cast of Titus Andronicus to Paris, Venice, Belgrade, Zagreb, Vienna, Warsaw, and then back to the Stoll Theatre in London.

  Olivier decided that Vivien, he, and the entire company would travel by train rather than fly, taking into consideration first Vivien’s fear of flying and second the chance the company would have to relax between engagements. However, it was May when they started out, the weather had grown unseasonably hot, the trains were jammed with tourists, and the distances between cities were quite tiresome.

  They opened in Paris on May 16. Ten days later, at a ceremony on the stage of the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre, Vivien was decorated with the Knight’s Cross of the Legion d’Honneur. Olivier was already an officer of the Legion d’Honneur. Vivien’s decoration was conferred by M. Seydoux, the Director of Cultural Relations at the Quai d’Orsay, “for services rendered to the cultural relations and friendship between France and Great Britain.” Titus Andronicus had been a huge success in Paris, and Vivien met with better treatment by the French critics than she had by the English.

  From Paris they rode by train to Venice. The weather had become boiling hot and Vivien was showing signs of strain. The company was, in fact, noticing a sharp difference in her behavior patterns, and being in such close quarters they were conscious that she was roller-coasting into a manic condition much like the one they had seen at the end of the Stratford run. By the time they reached Belgrade she was smoking and drinking excessively and was in a terribly agitated state.

  For Olivier, Yugoslavia and Warsaw were a new experience. The people did not know him, but crowds would follow them wherever they went and scream, “Scarlett! Scarlett!” Scarlett O’Hara was known all over, and they packed the theatres to see her, waiting impatiently, shouting for her outside the dressing rooms, hotel rooms, and train cars, practically trampling her, and pushing him to one side in an effort to get “Scarlett’s” autograph. This hysteria did much to accelerate her own.

  On the twenty-two-hour train journey from Vienna to Warsaw, the heat soared to over ninety degrees. The train was full, no food was served, and the company had to carry their own lunches and bottled water. Vivien paced the corridor nervously, her voice taking on a hard edge. Everyone was alerted, but no one knew what to do. Then suddenly she turned against Olivier and began to run up and down the corridor shouting. He tried to restrain her, but she broke away, picked up someone’s makeup case, and hurled it, smashing a train window. Somehow members of the cast subdued her, and Olivier went into another car.

  Her wrath then turned on Maxine Audley. Maxine had the rather choice role of the fiendish Queen Tamora, and Vivien berated her, also seemingly angry that Maxine had had a better dressing room than she in one of the theatres on tour. Maxine rose from her seat and moved away. Vivien followed, verbally attacking her. In an effort to escape the tirade, Maxine locked herself in the train toilet. Vivien banged heavily on the door. “Come out! Come out!” she shouted. Finally, Maxine heaved a deep sigh and stepped out into the corridor. Vivien bombarded her with pieces of bread as she made her way back to her seat. She was totally irrational and out of control. Finally, after sixteen hours, Vivien collapsed into an exhausted sleep. Most naturally the company was relieved, but the interesting and moving thing was that they felt even more protective toward her. No one took any offense at her hysterical outbursts and insults. They all recognized the severity of her illness and knew from past experience that when the attack was over she would once again be their darling, loving, kind, giving Vivien.

  Once in Warsaw, a doctor was called. His visit and treatment was followed by hours of uncontrollable sobbing, but by the time of their first curtain in Warsaw she was back to a fairly normal state.

  They returned to London in July, just in time to hear the news that the House of Lords was debating the issue of tearing down the 122-year-old St. James’s Theatre, where Olivier had presented his first plays as actor-manager and where Charles Dickens had his first plays produced. The news set Vivien off. On July 20 she marched down the Strand ringing a handbell in protest. Two days later she swept imperiously into the visitors’ gallery of the House of Lords and listened impatiently to the debate on the floor. Baron Blackford in argument for the tearing down of the St. James’s declared the theatre was “simply an obsolete, Victorian, inconvenient, uncomfortable playhouse with no architectural or historic value.” Vivien leaped furiously to her feet and shouted down over the gallery rail, “My Lords! I want to protest against St. James’s Theatre being demolished!”

  It was a terrible breach of protocol. Their lordships sat in stunned silence and Sir Brian Harrocks, the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, gravely put a restraining hand on Vivien’s arm. “Now you will have to go, Lady Olivier,” he said. Vivien tried to shrug him off. None of the lords moved a muscle as Sir Brian had to forcibly eject Vivien. And though her protest of the demolition of the St. James’s Theatre coincided with one of her manic phases, it did look by the end of the week as though Scarlett O’Hara had saved Tara almost singlehandedly from the carpetbaggers. Churchill grumbled, “As a parliamentarian I cannot approve your disorderly method, but I shall pledge five hundred pounds to save the St. James’s from being replaced by an office building.” And American millionaire Huntington Hartford also contributed to a fund Vivien was sponsoring to save the St. James’s. Within a week the House of Lords had gallantly voted a stay of demolition to the “cramped, outmoded, bomb-battered and much loved theatre.” A cartoon appeared in The Times. In it Maxine Audley stood in the visitors’ gallery of the House of Lords. “I protest against the demolition of Miss Vivien Leigh,” the caption read.

  It looked as if the St. James’s would be saved, but the emotion spent in the protest exhausted Vivien and sent her into another deep depression. Olivier felt helpless. It seemed to him there was little more he could do, and in effect, he gave up at about that time. He was not unlike a man faced with an oncoming tidal wave. “What’s the use of running?’ his attitude implied. ”Let whatever is to happen happen.”

  But Gertrude was not ready to give up the battle. She thought it possible Leigh could help because his presence always had a calming effect on Vivien. Leigh often visited them at Notley; and Olivier agreed that perhaps, since Vivien reacted so badly to him, she should take a three-week holiday and rest cure with Leigh and Suzanne. As soon as Vivien, Leigh, and Suzanne left for the Continent the press speculated that the Oliviers were about to divorce.

  “There is absolutely no question of divorce,” Vivien told reporters on the telephone from the Continent. “My first husband and I are still good friends and there is no earthly reason why I should not see hi
m. Larry and I are very much in love.”

  To which Olivier, who was vacationing with Tarquin in Scotland, added, “I have no comment on something that does not exist.”

  Pictures appeared of Vivien resting in the sun at San Virgilio on the shores of Italy’s Lake Gardo. Parliament immediately rose in its own protest against Vivien.

  Mrs. Jenny Mann, a fiery Labourite Scotswoman and mother of five, declared angrily, “There is a woman who took the House of Lords by storm and she has gone on holiday with her first husband. Her second husband is on holiday elsewhere. I do not know of any protest about it. It would seem you can pack your first husband up—that is what our young people will be telling us—and you can go on holiday with him now and again. You might even be able to spend weekends with the first and the middle of the week with the second. It is a terrible example for people who occupy high places in life to place before young children. Where is the flood of indignation?”

  Leigh was the only one to show any indignation. He cabled The Times: CRITICISM ILL-CONSIDERED AND UNMANNERLY, PRESENCE OUR DAUGHTER GIVES EXPLANATION HOLIDAY TO ANY REASONABLE PERSON.

  The holiday with Leigh did seem to help, and Vivien returned to London looking more relaxed and beautiful than she had in a long while. No sooner had they returned than Suzanne’s engagement to Robin Farrington, a twenty-nine-year-old insurance broker, was announced. They were married on December 6. Olivier and Vivien arrived at the church together, but he quickly stepped aside to let her be with Suzanne and Leigh. There was immediate buzzing in the pews. The rumors grew when, after the wedding, Vivien left with Leigh in a car and Olivier stood on the steps of the church with the other guests waving goodbye.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Being manic-depressive was not like having a cold. Vivien could not simply suffer through and get over it. She had—at least until medicine became more advanced in the area—an incurable disease, and she knew it. Desperation seized her. Larry looked at her now with cool dark eyes locking away his private anguish. As matters stood, she was secretly fearful that the wounds inflicted on him by her attacks would drive him into the arms of another woman, and there were rumors that he was having an affair with Joan Plowright. Vivien did not blame him if it was true. In fact she found Larry blameless of all the somber, frightening things that had pervaded her life these past years. A dark, impenetrable fog seemed to be closing around her, and out in it stood something black and hooded, the shape of disaster. But it wasn’t Larry, nor did she think he could save her from whatever or whoever it might be.

  Larry was keeping her at a distance. There was no laughter between them anymore, no comfort in their bed. She was frightened and lonely. Telling him how much she loved him didn’t help. They had always been meant for each other. It had been obvious from the very beginning, as had her consuming love for him. She had to dissipate his fears. He was weaker than she, not nearly as able to cope with anguish and adversity.

  She read in a column that Joan Plowright might be leaving her husband for Olivier, but she refused to believe it. There was no way she could have discussed Joan with Larry. No newspaper gossipmon-ger had to hint that she was losing him. His detached concern confirmed it. How to hold him was uppermost in her thoughts. Joan was not yet thirty and could easily give him a family, a novice actress with great ambitions Larry could mold, and part of a new kind of theatre that excited him. But though Vivien no longer had youth, she had beauty, glitter, and taste—all things Larry greatly revered. They had found a flat in Eaton Square, which meant she would be in London when he was, and she set about making it a home that he would admire. Suzanne was pregnant, and Vivien had mixed emotions about being a grandmother. She could hardly be blamed, she told herself, for not giving Larry the children he wanted. Before her breakdown, children had not seemed to matter to him. And since, she had tried and miscarried. It was, then, God’s will.

  When they returned from the tour, The Entertainer was first transferred to the Palace Theatre, and then in 1958 the company moved to the Royale Theatre in New York. Larry and Joan were sharing day-to-day experiences; and Vivien was alone, an outsider. It seemed at the time that if she lost Larry nothing else in life would matter. What she feared most was the pity he sometimes revealed, the benevolent, somehow dispassionate sense of kindness.

  In February 1958 she was offered the role of Paola in Jean Girau-doux’s play Duel of Angels, which was to be presented at the Apollo in an elegant translation by Christopher Fry. She loved the play and the role; and it seemed to her the best way to prove to Larry that she could take responsibility and be a healthy, whole person, so she accepted the part. “When I come into the theatre at night I get a sense of security,” she once said. “I love an audience. I love people, and I act because I like trying to give pleasure to people.”

  The theatre offered her the loving response she was not getting at home. Every night she would go in an hour and a half before curtain time and go through the entire performance aloud by herself. As soon as the makeup was on she felt like another woman. When the wig came off she was once again herself.

  Duel of Angels was filled with talk of separation and a house divided, and the play took on an intimate personal meaning. “Sometimes,” Vivien said at the time, “I dread the truth of the lines I say. But the dread must never show. I love the theatre for that discipline.”

  The play was well received. Vivien portrayed the pagan Paola, who is as hot in temper as in sex, with authority and conviction, making Claire Bloom’s Lucile appear quite pallid in contrast. The Christian Dior period costumes in vivid scarlets and jeweled brocades were spectacular, and Vivien was breathlessly beautiful in them. But by summer the strain of Olivier’s absence became too difficult. Manic signs again appeared, and she took a leave from the play to join Gertrude for a rest on the Continent. Olivier returned from New York and flew down to spend some time with her before filming The Devil’s Disciple with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas.

  It was what she wanted more than anything else in the world, and yet it was impossible from the moment he arrived for her to control her behavior. She was delirious with happiness and felt young and wildly in love when she first greeted him. But by nightfall she began turning on him—just in small ways, but the signs were there. He left on the fourth day.

  “Puss” was one of her favorite nicknames, one that Olivier called her in moments of fond affection, and cats had always been a passion of hers. Now she became obsessive about them. While holidaying with Gertrude she had two with her constantly, fondling them, watching them with deliberate attention for extremely long periods. Gertrude noted that during her attacks Vivien became quite catlike, her fingers arching, her eyes flashing strangely, a terrifying hissing sound coming from her when she was furious, and not wanting anyone to approach.

  By November 5, her forty-fifth birthday, she had returned to the cast of Duel of Angels. Lauren Bacall was in London and remained at the theatre with her while she played two performances. Olivier presented her with a £7,000 Rolls-Royce that she had seen and liked at the motor show. Three nights later they threw a star-studded party for Lauren and 150 guests at the Milroy nightclub in Hamilton Place. Olivier smiled graciously at her side and Vivien looked incredibly beautiful in elegant turquoise brocade. The idea was to stanch the rumors that had been flowing freely in the press. They remained the perfect hosts, always making each arriving guest feel the night would not be complete without his or her presence. As each man entered he was given a red carnation by Vivien; each woman received a miniature red rose from Olivier.

  Vivien was gleaming and happy flanked by so many good old friends—Douglas Fairbanks and his wife, Beatrice Lillie, the Jack Hawkinses, Emlyn Williams, Alec Guinness, Tarquin, Gertrude, Bernard Braden and Barbara Kelly, Richard Burton and Sybil, Kenneth More and his wife, Duncan Sandys, Herbert Wilcox and Anna Neagle. It was a glittering evening and Vivien was her enchanting effervescent old self, except in those rare moments when the famous Cheshire smile would fade and sh
e could be caught wistfully watching Larry from a few feet away.

  From the time of the party, Olivier seemed to make a point of keeping the Atlantic Ocean between them. On December 5, Suzanne gave birth to a son, Neville Leigh Farrington. The following morning the newspaper headlines declared: SCARLETT O’HARA NOW GRANDMA. “It’s divine,” Vivien told reporters. Then she added, “I’ve been a godmother loads of times, but being a grandmother is better than anything.” She brushed away a tear, presumed to be caused by happiness, and raised a gin toast, which she drank slowly. That day she had lunch with Leigh. The fears of growing old filled her conversation. There was talk of her doing a play about Eva Perón of Argentina. “A lucky thing she was,” Vivien said. “She died at thirty-two. I’m already forty-five.”

  Self-pity was not her nature, however. She refused to allow her ebullient spirit to be quelled. Olivier was in America for most of 1959, and Vivien surrounded herself with close friends and dazzling newcomers in her set and threw herself with headlong pleasure into London theatre life. She glowed beneath the extravagant compliments given her by the men she met casually or already knew. There was something reckless about her behavior. She was living utterly in the present. Clothes became a passion, gift-giving an expensive pastime. Lengthy letters crossed the Atlantic. She would always love Larry. No man could mean what he did to her, and so she was able to discount any discretions she might indulge in and ignore the cruelty of his new restraint. Calls went back and forth via overseas cable. His manner would be cool and detached, hers silky and affectionate.

  In May she started rehearsals for the starring role in Noël Coward’s new play, Look After Lulu, an adaptation of a Feydeau farce. It contained the kind of dialogue that had made Coward “the Master”—the gracefully impudent retort, the glorification of the normally unspeakable obvious. The play was written with elegance and ease, and Vivien accepted without hesitation.