The lesson was reinforced, though in a very different way, by David Niven, who was playing the relatively minor role of Edgar. Niven already knew Olivier and was to become one of his closest friends. He had no pretensions to be a great tragic actor and did his modest bit with studied casualness. Olivier watched him play and thought: “He isn’t even trying to act and here I am working my bloody guts out. He is going to look bad on screen.” But he didn’t; nobody could have transformed Edgar into a memorable role, but Niven made him convincing, as if there was no other way he could have been. Olivier acknowledged as much, and admitted too that Niven’s performance had taught him a great deal. “I thought when we first started working on the picture that I knew much more about acting than he did. And I did, when it came to acting on a stage, but he had a natural gift for screen acting, which I had to work at.”4
Another problem for Olivier was his leading lady. He was prepared to forgive Merle Oberon for not being Vivien Leigh but not for what he saw as her pretensions and incompetence. She was indeed neither as vital nor as attractive as the ideal Cathy would have been. “Of course, we were at daggers drawn,” Olivier recalled. “We spat at each other. We hated each other.” The spitting was literally the case. Once Oberon protested when Olivier’s spittle landed on her face. Olivier called her “a silly little amateur bitch” and told her that it was bound to happen in scenes of this kind. Oberon stormed off the set and Wyler insisted that Olivier should apologise when she returned. “Over with your tantrum, dear?” was the best Olivier could do; an apology which neither Wyler nor Oberon felt met the needs of the situation.5
Sam Goldwyn proved to be another problem. Though he was responsible for Olivier getting the part, he had his doubts once filming got under way. “A sordid story, but artistic,” he deemed “Wuthering Heights”, and on at least one occasion it seemed to him that Olivier was exaggeratedly sordid and not nearly artistic enough. He chanced to come onto the set at a moment when Olivier was playing Heathcliff at his most disreputable and uncouth. Puce with fury, Goldwyn shouted: “Thees actor es the ogliest actor in pictures, thees actor will ruin me!” Wyler defended his star and Goldwyn grumbled off. Olivier subsequently surmised that the incident had been contrived so as to create a rapprochement between actor and director. This could be true but credits Goldwyn with greater subtlety than he was accustomed to display. Anyway, it did no harm, and provided Olivier with one of his favourite anecdotes with which he would entertain dinner parties for many years.6
In spite of these vicissitudes Wyler prevailed; Olivier produced a performance finer than anything he had done on screen before. His Heathcliff was passionately natural: extravagant, of course – nothing was going to turn Heathcliff into a normal member of society – but terrifyingly convincing, a magnificent study of humiliation breeding hatred and the hunger for revenge. Not everyone was satisfied: Graham Greene for one complained that this Heathcliff “would never have married for revenge. Mr Olivier’s nervous, breaking voice belongs to balconies and Verona and romantic love.” The vast majority of the critics, however, and still more the public, hailed a great achievement. Wyler for one had no doubts. Merle Oberon publicly made some disparaging remarks about Olivier’s performance. “The truth is, Merle,” Wyler wrote, “that his dynamic performance is the most important contribution to the artistic success of ‘Wuthering Heights’, far more than yours or mine.”7
*
Before the filming of “Wuthering Heights” had even begun Vivien Leigh had joined Olivier in Hollywood. She came because she missed him and could not bear to be parted from him any longer, but she had another reason too. For the last few months the papers had been full of speculation about who would play the role of Scarlett O’Hara in the film which David Selznick was making of Margaret Mitchell’s successful novel Gone With the Wind. It was conceived on a vast scale; enormously expensive; star-studded; the film, it was predicted, of the decade. All the great names of Hollywood had been canvassed: Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn. Paulette Goddard was the current favourite. Vivien Leigh had decided that the part must be hers. She knew that she was a complete outsider – an Englishwoman little known in Hollywood – but that did not weaken her determination. Olivier was sceptical about her chances but eager to help in any way he could. As his relationship with Jill Esmond had shown, he was not a man who liked to be outshone; he knew that if Vivien won the part of Scarlett she would be propelled into the ranks of super-stardom; the fact that he nevertheless supported her in her efforts was a measure of how intense his love had become.
His agent in Hollywood was Myron Selznick, brother of David. Olivier planted in Myron’s mind the idea that Vivien Leigh would make a perfect Scarlett. Myron took to the idea; to place one of his clients in such a role would enormously enhance his reputation. Together the three visited the set where “Gone With the Wind” was being filmed. The need to settle on a Scarlett was growing urgent; a decision had to be made within a few days, a fortnight at the most. They arrived on the evening that the spectacular burning of Atlanta was taking place. The flames were just beginning to die down as they approached the spot where David Selznick was standing. Vivien Leigh was silhouetted against the flames, spectacularly beautiful, her face glowing with the excitement of the moment. “Hello, David,” said Myron. “Meet Scarlett O’Hara.”8
Of course, it was not as easy as that. There were screen tests, anguished debate about her English accent, her relative obscurity, but in a remarkably short time the matter was settled. Vivien Leigh felt that the part of Rhett Butler, her putative lover, ought to be played by Olivier. Olivier agreed. With Leslie Howard playing Ashley Wilkes, however, that would have meant that English actors were playing the three most important parts in this great American epic – a palpable absurdity. Anyway, the part was already pledged to Clark Gable. Gable had the reputation of always sleeping with his leading ladies, but in an interview with the press he insisted that he and Vivien Leigh had “neither fought nor fucked”. Leigh affected to find this a little hurtful; she asked him whether he had thought she looked a bad lay. Not at all, replied Gable. It was all Olivier’s fault. “Never have I seen a girl more completely hooked on a guy than you. You couldn’t think or talk or dream of anything or anyone else on earth. I really began to think I was slipping.” There were, indeed, many witnesses to the fact that the couple were conspicuously in love. “They were more like teenage lovers than two adults who had been married before,” said Myron Selznick’s secretary, who had been deputed to look after Leigh while the filming was in progress; while Douglas Fairbanks noted that they “seemed to be constantly impatient to get the trivialities of everyday life over with so they could just rush madly back to bed. Or anywhere else handy and preferably private … Vivien was extremely libidinous.” Formally, they lived separate lives, but Olivier’s hotel room became celebrated as “the least slept-in bedroom in Hollywood”. David Selznick feared that there might be a scandal which would damage the prospects of his film, and so put a night porter outside Vivien Leigh’s house, with instructions that he was to keep Olivier out. Vivien protested, whereupon Selznick relented and changed the orders: the porter was to let Olivier in and keep out everybody else.9
Once the filming of “Wuthering Heights” was over, however, no amount of fornication would have kept Olivier in Hollywood. The constant efforts of the English set to draw him into their midst bored and irritated him. “We didn’t play cricket and always go about together,” he remembered, distancing himself from the Anglo-centric group which clustered around Sir Cedric Hardwicke. “Nobody liked the English because they were English, though the English seemed to think they did. It embarrassed us terribly.” More important than that, however, was the fact that no work of any real interest was offered him. “I was never the sort to let a romance interfere with my career, never,” he admitted or perhaps boasted, “so when I saw the way the land lay I said, ‘I’m sorry, darling. I’m going to get a job in New York.’ ” Vivien Leigh accepted
his defection with apparent equanimity; subsequent events suggest that it caused her a great deal more grief than Olivier realised, or chose to realise.10
The “job in New York” had, in fact, already been secured. Olivier was to play opposite Katharine Cornell in S. N. Behrman’s new play, “No Time for Comedy”. Cornell was one of the most, perhaps the most distinguished actress on the American stage. Unfortunately, however, she had relatively little experience of playing comedy and this, in spite of its title, was what Behrman’s play was. She was a great deal below her best. “Poor old Kit,” said some critic condescendingly. “Poor old Kit!” echoed Olivier derisively. “The most successful woman in the American theatre. The richest, the most beautiful, the most sought after, the most distinguished, the most loved. Poor old Kit indeed!” Privately he was rather less enthusiastic: “I’m afraid I came out a little bit ahead of her,” he claimed, “because I did know how to do it and she didn’t really. I don’t think she was terribly happy, poor darling. I’m afraid it was my success.” A success it was, a resounding one, but it was marred for Olivier by a sudden appeal from Selznick to rush to Hollywood to succour Vivien Leigh. Gruellingly hard work coupled with her separation from Olivier had proved too much for her; she was hysterical, close to a breakdown. It seemed that the vast investment which had been made in “Gone With the Wind” might be in jeopardy. Olivier could only be away for three days but in the short term it was enough. He successfully applied emotional first aid and Leigh was back at work by the time he left. For Olivier it was an alarming shock. He had always known that she was highly strung and suspected that she might prove unstable – “Vivien was barking fucking mad from the word go,” he once told Derek Granger – but this was the first time he had encountered any serious disorder. All seemed to be well, but he must have had apprehensions about the future.11
To add to his preoccupations, his father died just before the first night of “No Time for Comedy”. He had been ill for some months and was getting little pleasure out of life, but his death was sudden and unexpected. Even if he had wanted to, Olivier could not have got back in time for the funeral. “I can feel no sorrow whatever at Fahv’s dying,” his sister told him. “I’m thankful for his sake and everybody else’s.” Olivier did not feel differently, but, almost in spite of himself, he had warmed to his father in recent years. “I got fond of him because he got fond of me,” he confessed. But he was conscious of the fact that his father’s affection was related closely to his own success as an actor. “More and more, old Son, I congratulate you on your wonderful success,” he had written when Olivier’s Hamlet was first beginning to attract attention. “Everybody about here is raving about you.” Olivier could not help contrasting this adulation with the scorn, if not hostility, which his father now showed towards his elder son. Dickie’s job in India had come to an end, through no fault of his own, and he had returned to England more or less penniless and with dismal prospects of finding rewarding employment. His father seemed to delight in pointing out that he had been a failure. Once Olivier came to the house and Fahv offered him a whisky. Dickie asked if he could have one too. “Good God, no, what do you want a whisky for?” Fahv demanded. “It was brutal, shocking,” remembered Olivier. “I was afraid of him and never was able to give it to him straight. My weakness, my cowardice, was to blame more than anything else.” It was Olivier who gave Dickie the money he needed to stay afloat while searching for a job. He did it with good grace and without a trace of patronage, but it must still have been humiliating for Dickie to depend upon the charity of his younger brother. The Revd Gerard not merely did nothing to alleviate that humiliation, he seemed to rejoice in it. Any warmth that Olivier felt towards his father was weakened by the indignation he felt on behalf of Dickie.12
Jill Esmond came to her father-in-law’s funeral. Sybille told Olivier that she had never seen her look prettier or more contented. “I don’t think it was an act, either,” she wrote: “I think she really has gained a measure of stability and happiness that she’d never have achieved while staying with you.” Part of it was an act. Jill was lonely and distressed, but her feelings towards her husband had stopped well short of passion and she was doing a good job of making a new life for herself. She, too, wrote to Olivier after Fahv’s funeral, agreeing with Sybille that his death was the best thing that could have happened. She gave news of their son, Tarquin. “It’s impossible to describe him to you as it’s so long since you’ve seen him and you don’t know him at all … all I can say is, he really is heaven and makes me laugh a lot.” She had been to see “Wuthering Heights”: “I have never thought you a really first-class film actor before, but I do now … We wept buckets.” Only on page sixteen of a twenty-three page letter did she turn to “our jolly little divorce”. Did Olivier want to go through with it immediately, which would involve Vivien Leigh being cited as co-respondent and the risk of a lot of disagreeable publicity, or would he be content to wait another year and then be divorced for desertion – a process which, with luck, would attract less attention? She was in no particular hurry herself. “Without our being together or you loving me, I can’t feel I’m your wife,” but, “as yet I haven’t met anyone I want to marry … Of course, if I meet someone I want to marry I shall want a divorce at once.”13
It was a brave letter, and one which must have cloaked much unhappiness. Olivier had met someone he wanted to marry and he was in a hurry, but he saw the force of his wife’s argument. He dreaded the publicity, which would be all the worse now that Heathcliff and Scarlett O’Hara had given him and Vivien Leigh a prominence which normally they would have courted but which at that moment seemed undesirable. Besides, it was not just he who needed a divorce. Leigh was still married to Leigh Holman. Esmond was quite ready to get together with Holman so as to sort out the details of the divorce, but this had to be done with caution since any hint of collusion would have been enough to see the petition dismissed. Regretfully Olivier pencilled in the summer of 1940 as being the earliest moment he could hope to remarry. Till then their furtive relationship had to carry on. It was disagreeable for both of them. Selznick continued to do all he could to keep their entanglement out of the public eye. When Vivien Leigh said that she wanted her lover to come to the grand opening of “Gone With the Wind” Selznick vetoed the idea out of hand. In that case they would have to manage without her either, said Vivien Leigh. Selznick gave way and invited a few other celebrities in the hope that Olivier’s presence would thus be camouflaged. Olivier found himself in a carriage with Claudette Colbert and Carole Lombard. They were agreeable company but were not enough to make the occasion pleasurable for him. He hated playing second fiddle and real though his love was for Vivien Leigh he found it displeasing to figure only as one of her admiring retinue.14
Hollywood held better things. David Selznick was scheduled to make a film based on Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, a romantic novel that had come close to Gone With the Wind in its popular success. It was to be directed by Alfred Hitchcock, who had made his name triumphantly with “The Thirty-Nine Steps” and “The Lady Vanishes” and with whom Olivier was particularly anxious to work. It seemed that he was bound to have his wish: the role of the moody, slightly saturnine Maxim de Winter, though not a particularly testing part, was so obviously within his range as to make it likely that it would be his if he wanted it. “I was an absolutely natural choice for it,” he argued. “I was the obvious chap. I was the top English actor.” Selznick was not so sure. “Colman is the only perfect man,” he wrote, but once again Colman was unobtainable. William Powell was next choice, but he would have cost $100,000 too much. Olivier was, if not faute de mieux, at least considered a second or third best. Once he had the part Vivien Leigh decided that the role of the anonymous but omnipresent heroine should be hers. Selznick thought that to cast an actress so recently distinguished as the dashing, headstrong Scarlett as the hesitant, self-effacing second Mrs de Winter, would be to destroy the balance of the film. Olivier professed to disagr
ee with him. He maintained that Vivien had done an outstanding test and that it was only Selznick’s wish to show that he could create a new star which had led to her rejection. In fact Selznick, while thinking she would not be right for the part, had great respect for her ability and had by no means ruled her out. If Olivier had pressed strongly he might have got his way. But, as he later admitted, “I didn’t really want her to get the part. There was already so much strain in our personal lives, our divorces, leaving a wife and child and a husband and child in England … It was perhaps better for us to have a little vacation from constant togetherness. Vivien thought I didn’t try hard enough for her … Well, I didn’t. I hadn’t felt she was right for the part, if the truth be told.”15
Instead, he found himself playing opposite the little known Joan Fontaine. He disliked her from the start, finding her skinny and unattractive – “I didn’t really understand what Max de Winter could see in her.” The generosity which Roger Furse had remarked when Olivier had played opposite Curigwen Lewis was conspicuously lacking. He told Hitchcock that he thought she was no good in the part and Hitchcock passed it on. “You can imagine how that made me feel,” Fontaine said. “I was as friendly and co-operative as I could be. But after what I’d been told, if I convinced Olivier of my good feelings towards him then I really deserved an Oscar.” She won no Oscar – for that piece of acting at any rate. “I felt she didn’t like me …” was Olivier’s conclusion, “she never said anything hostile to me, but she scarcely spoke to me at all.” In spite of this unpromising preamble, the partnership worked pretty well. Fontaine, Olivier admitted, “gave an amazing performance”; as for himself: “I literally walked through the part – it had nothing to do with the real work of acting.” His was, indeed, an understated performance in an undemanding role, but it was what the film needed and what the public wanted. “Most people thought I was excellent … That, of course, was the bloody exasperating thing about film acting. The less acting one did the better one came across.” Another way of putting it would have been that Olivier had fully come to terms with the medium. “Rebecca” confirmed what “Wuthering Heights” had already suggested; that Olivier was now in the first rank of international film stars.16
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