After his London triumph Coward took “Private Lives” to New York. Adrianne Allen, the actress who had played opposite Olivier in the London production, was not free to make the trip so Jill Esmond was recruited to fill the gap. In spite of the fact that he was doomed to play second fiddle to the stars, there was a great deal about the season for Olivier to enjoy. Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence were invited everywhere and their junior partners usually travelled in their wake. They made many friends, among them Douglas Fairbanks Jr, who remained a close friend of Olivier all his life. Together Olivier and Fairbanks went to the Russian Club, where they watched a man whose act consisted of swallowing almonds, sewing needles and goldfish and regurgitating them in the order demanded by the audience. To add to this esoteric entertainment he offered them cocaine. Nervously, they accepted. Fairbanks survived more or less unscathed. Olivier, Fairbanks remembered, “never very robust, got sick to his stomach and asked us to leave early so as to throw up”. Such mishaps apart, he enjoyed his forays into New York high society. But the tour was not a total success. For one thing Jill Esmond not only disliked her role but thought she was miscast: “I was very bad in the part.” For another, irrespective of the merits of her performance, more attention was paid to her in New York than to her husband. She was already to some extent an established figure and the gossip columns covered her doings more often than those of Olivier. “Many of the local bigwigs dismissed him as a nice but stiff young Englishman,” remarked Fairbanks. “They said Jill was the one to watch and that Larry’s future was limited.” Olivier professed not to mind this in the least, but in fact was put out: it did not make the already slightly shaky marriage progress more smoothly. Halfway through the run Gertrude Lawrence fell ill and the Oliviers took advantage of the gap to spend a few days beachcombing in Nassau. Perhaps some time alone together would have helped them sort things out; Coward, however, decided to join them. “We didn’t really want to be joined,” said Jill Esmond wistfully. “We were quite happy by ourselves.”6
The run over, Jill Esmond was anxious to move on to Hollywood, where she knew profitable work awaited her. Olivier was doubtful: apart from his professed conviction that the cinema was an inferior art form he was conscious of the fact that he had not fully mastered the art of acting to camera and was reluctant to expose himself to the risk of failure. In the end, he decided that he should give it a go. Coward was disdainful when he was told of their plan: “You’ve got no artistic integrity, that’s your trouble … Hahlleewood!” The reality was even worse than Olivier had envisaged. “He has no chance,” said a studio executive. “He tries to look like Ronnie Colman but his face is too strong and his looks are too rugged. When it comes to rugged actors we don’t need Englishmen.” Worse still, the director Victor Schertzinger said that Olivier had no idea how to perform before the camera: “He acted the way he did on the stage – all broad gestures and a face forever busy with expressions.” David Selznick, one of Hollywood’s most powerful producers, was more favourable, deeming Olivier an “excellent possibility”, but even he admitted that most people thought Jill Esmond “more desirable for stock”. In any case, he considered their salaries “way out of line for beginners, especially as we have no parts in line for either”.7
Though underemployed, and fobbed off with indifferent parts when he was employed, Olivier never lost his confidence in his powers. Fabia Drake, one of his oldest friends, was acting with a company putting on a repertoire of classical plays in Los Angeles. Night after night Olivier came to the theatre. How could he bear to spend his time watching other people act? she asked. “Well, you see, I’m going to do them all one day,” he replied. But he was not going to do them on the West Coast of America. After three years, with only three second-rate films to his credit but a reasonable cache of dollars in the bank, he decided it was time to return to London.8
To Jill, things looked rather different. It seems that she was likely to land the most important role in Clemence Dane’s “A Bill of Divorcement”. “Whoever played that, unless they were an appalling actress, could not help being a success,” remembered Jill sadly. “It was a wonderful part.” To secure it, though, she would have to sign a seven-year contract. What happened then is obscure. Olivier claimed to have seen papers on Selznick’s desk that made it clear that the young Katharine Hepburn had already been signed up at a high salary and that Jill was merely being strung along. David Selznick claimed that this could not be the truth. The contract with Hepburn was not signed until after the Oliviers had left Hollywood so Olivier could not have seen it. He was determined that his wife should not be a bigger star than he was: “Larry is the most selfish man I have ever met.” If Olivier did invent the story of Hepburn’s contract it would have been not so much to sabotage his wife’s career as to ensure that she returned to London with him. It does not seem, anyway, that it played an important part in her final decision. “Larry,” she said, “wanted very much to go back to England … Naturally a part of me wanted to stay on but I wasn’t unhappy having made the decision.”9
*
Back in London, they decided that they must live in a style more appropriate to international stars. For the first year of their marriage they had rented a tiny flat in Roland Gardens with a bed, a dining-room table and chairs and almost nothing else. A Mrs Johns cooked for them when they had company. Her style was as unpolished as the surroundings. Once they plucked up their courage and asked Noël Coward to dinner. Some culinary disaster occurred and the three of them laughed heartily. “It’s all very well to laugh,” said Mrs Johns, “but suppose someone important had been here!” Things were going to be very different in future. They moved into a house on Chelsea Embankment, boasting a huge room which had been Whistler’s studio. In it they installed an imposing stone fireplace, a tapestry and a grand piano and prepared to entertain the cream of Bohemian London. Bohemian London duly rallied to the call. Their first large party was a flop. “We were too grand,” admitted Jill Esmond. “We invited too many grand people and, if you have too many grand people everyone wants to talk.” They learned by their mistake; in future parties the more voluble celebrities were interspersed with people prepared to listen. But the dollars were running out and though Olivier was offered one or two interesting parts and got excellent reviews, the plays were not sufficiently successful nor the financial rewards high enough to support the life style to which he had become accustomed in America. Like it or not, he had to return to films.10
It is curious how long it took Olivier, a most perceptive actor and one who would repeatedly show himself as an innovator, to realise that the cinema made demands on the performer quite different to those posed by the stage. In part this was because he continued to despise the medium. “There’s something rather terrible and cold-blooded about acting in a film studio,” he told his sister Sybille. “Films can help you to buy your mother a smart car or your wife a house in the country, but I still don’t believe they can help you to act.” When Alexander Korda, the man who got nearer than anyone else to creating an English Hollywood, gave Olivier opportunities to play important parts, he only accepted them disdainfully: “I felt unhappy in the medium, and was using most of my energy trying to build strong performances on the stage in the evenings.11
Korda played an important part in Olivier’s life. He needed Olivier, because in the early 1930s there was still only a small pool of actors who operated exclusively in the cinema and producers looked to the stage to find their casts. Olivier needed Korda, because the cinema was where the money was. Olivier respected and, up to a point, trusted Korda; Korda admired Olivier. Yet they were in opposite camps, the relationship between them was always cautious. “There were times when I was frightened of him,” Olivier admitted, “when he seemed to have a sort of power thing.” Korda was determined that Olivier should play opposite Marlene Dietrich. Olivier refused “because Jill was rather ill, and I thought that if I was in a picture with Dietrich it would worry her”. When he tried to explain thi
s to Korda, he met with ridicule. “I hated him at that moment,” Olivier remembered. J. B. Priestley tried to convert him to the potentialities of cinema. “I’d like to do a film with you sometime,” he wrote. “I think a bit better of them than you do – as long as one hasn’t some half-witted producer sitting on one.” Olivier was not convinced.12
Half-witted producers were only part of Olivier’s quarrel with the cinema; the whole film world seemed alien to him. He was convinced that the dislike was mutual. “God help any man, woman or child who tries to get into the films through me,” he protested to George Devine, “as I am very unpopular with them.” Even when he had made his breakthrough and come to terms with the medium, even when he had become a major film star, he never seemed altogether at home on the screen. Orson Welles remarked that Olivier was the master of technique and that, if screen acting depended only on technique, he would have been supreme master of the medium. “And yet, fine as he’s been in films, he’s never been more than a shadow of that electric presence which commands the stage. Why does the cinema seem to diminish him? And enlarge Gary Cooper – who knew nothing of technique at all?” He might equally have cited Marilyn Monroe; a woman who barely knew what acting was yet who, twenty years later, was to outshine Olivier in every scene.13
His view of the world of cinema was by no means enhanced by his expedition to Hollywood to star opposite Greta Garbo. In July 1933 he went back to Los Angeles to play the Spanish lover of Garbo’s Queen Christina. Garbo at this time was the best-known film star in the world. To co-star with her would have been an important step forward in Olivier’s film career; it would also have been a risky one, since Garbo’s screen presence was so overwhelmingly powerful that any man opposite her was likely to be eclipsed. This was a risk Olivier was more than ready to take; he haggled over terms, but he was never in any real doubt that he must accept the invitation. He had reckoned without his costar’s idiosyncratic tastes. She seemed not so much to dislike him as to be unaware that he was there. With increasing desperation he tried to get through to her; launching a blitzkrieg of charm, wit and wistfulness in an effort to break down her Nordic indifference. She allowed him to rattle on with detached unconcern; then shrugged and sidled away with an enigmatic: “Oh vell, live’sh a pain, anyway.” The following day the producer told him that, while M.G.M. still had total faith in Olivier and were eager to keep him under contract, in this particular part, perhaps … In fact, it may not have been so exclusively Garbo’s decision as Olivier imagined; the casting director concluded that “he didn’t have enough maturity, skill and acting weight … he was too young and inexperienced for Don Antonio”. At the time it seemed, indeed was, a humiliating rebuff; in the interests of his long-term career it was perhaps a good thing. If Olivier had acted opposite Garbo and achieved even moderate success the pressure to remain in Hollywood and make a fortune would have been hard to resist. We might never have seen his Henry V, his Richard III, his James Tyrone; the history of the National Theatre might have been very different.14
*
So it was back to the stage and parts that became steadily more important and more testing. If one had to pick out three or four plays that defined the development of Olivier’s career, the first would certainly be “The Green Bay Tree”. William Wyler, the great American film-maker, saw it on its opening in New York and found it “a dark and puzzling drama about a homosexual relationship”. It “shocked and astonished” its audiences. It shocked and astonished Olivier, too, who disliked the part though recognising the great opportunity which it gave him. It was memorable for him because it was directed by Jed Harris. He had known Harris before, and found him charming, but as a director he was transformed into “a dreadful man”, a “cruel little bastard”; “I’ve never been so grateful to leave anything in my life.” He claimed to have in part modelled his Richard III on memories of Harris. But for all his defects, Olivier had to admit that he had “a theatrical brain of rare excellence” and that his ideas about the play were “sound and illuminating”. Harris had no doubts about the importance of his contribution. “The reason Olivier was halfway good in ‘The Green Bay Tree’ was because I made him good,” he wrote dismissively. “I took none of his childish shit about ‘forming’ his character and his ‘choices’ in reading lines. I just told him to read his lines my way, and if he didn’t like it to get the hell out of the play.” Harris left an enduring mark: “he gave Larry a sense of discipline and seriousness about the theatre that he’s not had before,” said the director and critic, Harold Clurman. The very fact that Olivier felt ill at ease in the part, playing a weak and devious homosexual, forced him to introduce new depths into his acting to a degree that he had not so far achieved. “He was sensational,” remembered Noël Coward, “it was a marvellous, an extraordinary performance.” Olivier agreed. It was his first personal success in New York: “They thought I was wonderful and I was very good.”15
He came back to a far more congenial role in London, though he had not expected to get it. Gielgud was directing Ralph Richardson as Both-well in Josephine Tey’s “Queen of Scots”. Eight days before the opening night Richardson threw up the part. He disliked the play, was not enjoying acting opposite Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies and, above all, hated being directed by Gielgud. “Johnnie was an awfully inconsiderate director,” said Olivier. “He didn’t give a damn what he said to anybody. I think probably he’d done that with Ralph and Ralph bloody well walked off the stage.” At twenty-four hours’ notice, Olivier walked on. “I shall always remember the gallant way you took over the part, the way you worked at it those last crowded days and the peace and reassurance your coming brought,” wrote the grateful author. Within a week he had memorised the role while rehearsing fourteen hours a day. All did not go smoothly. In rehearsals Gielgud was very rude to him, “but I took it because it was my habit. I decided I would always take, and think, and listen, and not act proud and stalk off.” He overstated his readiness to accept hostile criticism. Increasingly, he grew to resent instructions from those he felt less experienced than himself and on at least one occasion he stormed off in protest against an over-assertive director. But on the whole he took direction calmly and, even if he considered that his judgment as an actor was more sound, would contrive to compromise or to get his own way without direct confrontation. Richardson regretted his own impetuous departure, especially when the play ran for several months and was then only closed because a heatwave emptied the theatres. He felt vaguely aggrieved, however, at the alacrity with which Olivier had taken over his part: there was no outright quarrel between the two, but for a time the relationship was cool.16
It was Olivier’s next play, though, which won him his first popular following. Once again he got it by chance. He was engaged by Coward to play the swashbuckling hero of “Theatre Royal” during its provincial tour, after which the part was to be taken over by Brian Aherne. He was so good, however, that Aherne volunteered, or was persuaded, to opt out. It was the sort of dashing young hero role which Olivier could have played with little effort; he elected, though, to fling himself into it with reckless zest. His first entry involved a spectacular leap onto the stage from the top of a steep staircase. There was no need to make so energetic an appearance, but Olivier was determined to impose himself on his audience from the outset. It was not the only physical excess in which he indulged. Michael Meyer, the biographer and translator, was only a boy when he saw the play. Fifty years later he told Olivier what an impression the leap had made on him. “Ah, yes, but do you remember how I slid down the banisters?” Olivier replied. He seemed hurt when Meyer admitted that he did not. “Theatre Royal” ended in predictable disaster. Olivier broke an ankle in his leap and, though he only missed a handful of performances, his athleticism was sadly curbed towards the end of the run. His career was to be punctuated by such mishaps. “I am a moral and physical coward,” he maintained. Moral cowardice is hard to pin down; Olivier seems to have suffered from it less that most. Physically he was one of
the bravest of men. Time and again he subjected himself to extravagant and sometimes quite unnecessary risks. Usually he got away with it; the fact that sometimes he met with disaster never in the least deterred him. Nor did he hesitate to involve others in his adventures. Once, without stopping for oncoming traffic, he drove Ralph Richardson at fifty miles an hour over the junction of the Croydon bypass and the Purley road. “I shall never forgive you for that,” said a shaken Richardson. “Old man, what are you fussing about?’ enquired Olivier. “It is a well-known thing that when you get to a point of danger, you must get over it as quickly as you can.”17
John Gielgud was one of the many who admired “Theatre Royal”. “It made me envious of Larry’s marvellous use of physical technique,” he remembered, “and his mastery of timing was breathtaking … I had a sense that Larry was suddenly my rival. He was younger than I and I had the disagreeable notion that he was now in a position to surpass me.” Olivier was similarly ready to acknowledge the greatness of Gielgud. He went with Roland Culver to see “Richard II”: “He was transfixed by Johnny’s performance – by the grace of it, by the insight that flowed from its understated eloquence.” He found Gielgud’s first, and greatest Hamlet equally memorable: “fabulous,” he called it. “He made it intensely real, very well felt and very well modulated.” But the consciousness of rivalry was always there; only a few days after Olivier had seen Gielgud’s Hamlet he surprised Jack Hawkins, who was playing Horatio, by saying that “he’d like to give old Hamlet a try, to see if he couldn’t do it better than Gielgud”. The relationship between Gielgud and Olivier was correct but edgy. Told that Olivier had failed to contribute to a collection of tributes which Ronald Harwood was assembling, Gielgud remarked drily: “Larry was always jealous of me.” For his part Olivier saw things differently: “He always says awful things about me,” he complained. Even in the 1980s, he maintained, Gielgud would harp back to flaws in Olivier’s performances as a young man. “That’s forty-five years ago, you know. You don’t have to harbour nasty things about people for forty-five years.”18
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