So Who's Your Mother

by Tarquin Olivier

  So Who’s Your Mother

  Tarquin Olivier

  © Tarquin Olivier 2012

  The right of Tarquin Olivier to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  First published in Great Britain 2012 by Michael Russell (Publishing) Ltd Wilby Hall, Wilby, Norwich NR16 2JP

  Published 2013 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Acknowledgements

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Extract from My Father Laurence Olivier, also by Tarquin Olivier

  Foreword

  To be the son of a King is always an awkward business, whether the monarch in question is orthodoxly royal, athletic, theatrical or what you will. Tarquin Olivier’s father, Laurence, was every inch a King, agreed by most to be the greatest actor of the twentieth century and, by his prodigious energy and enthusiasm, principal creator of the National Theatre. Add to that a mother who was herself a leading actress and to have Noël Coward, Ralph Richardson and Sybil Thorndike numbered among your godparents, and it will be obvious that Tarquin started life labouring under a considerable burden.

  He solved his problem by doing his own thing. He loved travel and indulged it prolifically: first during his national service in Germany, then with Quentin Keynes in an expedition following in the steps of Dr Livingstone This gave him a high level of dedication to Third World development. Then he went on an adventurous two years travelling by himself around South-East Asia, and finally into jobs that took him around the world. This is far more than a travelogue, of which he has written one already: it is an exploration of his personality and a rounded portrait of a remarkable life. His passion for travel permeates almost every page.

  To be a successful traveller – provided, that is, you wish to escape the comfortable but suffocating embrace of luxurious international hotels – it is necessary to be resourceful and a good linguist, to have an insatiable interest in the lives and thoughts of other people and to be good at making friends. The last is particularly desirable. Tarquin arrived in Caracas knowing nobody. His only introduction proved abortive. Within a day or two he had been invited to stay at the home of a professor from the university and was lent a white tie and tails to attend a ball at the Country Club. After ten days he was driven to the airport, ‘followed by several cars of well-wishers who wanted to see me off. That had been the most unexpected ten days I had ever had. A week earlier I had not even seen any of them.’ Except for the white tie and tails his experience would have been very similar and his pleasure equally great if he had been visiting some backwoods village in a remote corner of Indonesia. To feel at home wherever you are is a rare and enviable trait. Tarquin enjoyed it in spades. Another attribute desirable for a happy, or at least an interesting and eventful life is a healthy interest in the opposite sex. Tarquin got off to a good start when he fell in love with Judy Garland at the age of six – not the celluloid image most of us had to content ourselves with but the real thing. She plucked an eyelash from his cheek and told him that if he made a wish and then blew the eyelash away, his wish would come true. Tarquin has greatly enjoyed his life. Fortunately he knows how to communicate that pleasure. The reader will enjoy it too.

  Philip Ziegler

  Acknowledgements

  As a young man I had no idea what I wanted to do in life until 1958, when during a long vacation from Oxford University, aged twenty-two, I retraced Dr Livingstone’s second journey to the Zambezi. The expedi-tion was led by Quentin Keynes, so my first debt of adult gratitude goes to him. That experience awakened in me an ambition to contribute to Third World development. For that to be satisfied I had to undertake a prolonged search with a number of dead-end frustrations. During my final year at Oxford my father Larry and Vivien Leigh’s marriage was foundering. I was shattered by that even though it had been threatening for years because of her mental health problems. I felt I had to get away. I knew that never again would I be able to spend any real length of time being footloose and fancy-free, so I took a Messageries Maritimes boat from Marseilles to Manila. I spent nine-teen months wandering round South-East Asia and had a number of experiences which I thought illustrated the people’s ways of life and patterns of thought. I described these in the book Eye of the Day which was published after much rewriting in 1964. Fifteen years later I was based in Hong Kong looking after the Asia and Pacific regions’ business for the security and banknote printers The De La Rue Company Ltd. I revisited the places I had written about and sought out the people I had known. Such rediscovery has been a constant enhancement of my life. My second book, My Father Laurence Olivier, was published in 1992. Its aim was to set the record straight about him, my mother the actress Jill Esmond, and Vivien Leigh, my three main influences. Those two books were focused mainly on other people, with me as a participant. This new memoir overlaps them a few times for the sake of continuity; but a life of experience in eighty countries does provide a wide and bright enough spectrum to be worth recall. I would like to thank my father’s widow Joan Plowright for permis-sion to quote from his letters and indeed her own to me, and also to my stepsister Suzanne for letting me quote from her mother Vivien’s let-ters. She and I went through so much together with her mother’s manic depression and ever since she has been a wonderful and supportive friend.

  When assembling photographs there were no suitable ones of me and Larry, except from home movies. I much appreciate the assistance of the British Film Institute’s archive establishment in Hemel Hemp-stead for letting me use their equipment to isolate the relevant 16mm frames in those movies, and also to TKone Film and Video in Covent Garden for enlarging and sharpening the images from colour film to stills in black and white. I am extremely grateful to Philip Ziegler who is writing the most authoritative biography of my father. To assist him I gave him a copy of the first draft of this memoir and he responded with such enthusiasm that I asked him if he would like to write the Foreword, which he has been gracious enough to do. Above all of course is my publisher Michael Russell. As soon as I saw his publishing list, with so many names of those I knew or cared about, I longed for him to publish this book and will always recall the pleasure I felt when he agreed. Since then his detailed attention and wide variety of editorial points has concentrated my mind wonderfully, a lesson in itself. When my parents were alive I called them ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’. Here I refer to them as ‘my mother’ or ‘Larry’ which is what everyone always called him. On a more personal level, writing this memoir has been the most fulfilling vote of thanks to so many people I have known, yielding pleasure to me on many fronts and for that I am eternally indebted to Zelfa, my wife of twenty-two years, whose idea it was. At first I thought of calling it An End in Itself, which is what I think life should be, but I was told that as a title it was too indefinite. I was then prompted to use my own rather imperious first name. I tried By the Nine Gods, a quote taken from the opening of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome:

  Lars Porsena of Clusium

  By the nine gods he swore

  That the great house of Tarquin

  Should suffer wrong no more. After trying it out on friends
, we – especially Zelfa – felt it was too portentous. So I challenged her to think of something better, hence the question which I must have been asked more often than almost anybody. Even my children are asked ‘So who’s your grandmother?’. When Zelfa suggested So Who’s Your Mother?it seemed a natural choice, and one which might raise a smile.

  One

  In the beginning was Apple Porch, an old cottage four miles west of Maidenhead. My maternal grandmother was Eva Moore, a star of her era. She had acted in more than eighty plays, and as leading lady oppo-site Henry Irving, the first actor ever to be knighted. Her husband was Henry Vernon Esmond, an actor manager and playwright who had had thirty of his plays produced in the West End. He died when my mother was fifteen. Their friends included W. S. Gilbert, Herbert Tree, Anthony Hope, Clemence Dane, Rudyard Kipling, John Gielgud, Somerset Maugham, Ivor Novello (who lived two miles away in Burchetts Green), and those who became my godparents: George and Mercia Relph, Noël Coward, Ralph Richardson, and Sybil Thorndike. Eva received several fan letters from Queen Mary. She and Harry Esmond were theatrical royalty. Their town house was in Chelsea: 21 Whitehead’s Grove. After Saturday performances in West End theatres they took the train to Maidenhead, and went the four miles to Apple Porch by pony and trap. Later they bought a steam car which could just manage five miles before having to be refilled with water. The arrival of their first Daimler was a relief. They built on a servants’ wing to the cottage, four more bedrooms, two studies, and a long drawing room which led to a sun parlour. It was badly designed, a most awkward house. After we sold it in 1955 it became an old people’s home and has now been completely rebuilt. Outside were two acres of herbaceous garden and several apple orchards. The view still spreads down the fairways of Temple Golf Course and over the Thames Valley. On a clear day you can see Marlow. In 1925 my mother Jill Esmond was seventeen and played Sorel, the juvenile lead in Noël Coward’s play Hay Fever, her third West End appearance. I have a first edition of the play where the hand-written dedication reads ‘To Jill, from the great God Coward’, and five kisses. I saw the play with Edith Evans and later with Celia Johnson. Only when I read it did I realise that the part of the leading lady, Judith Bliss, was modelled on my grandmother Eva, a star actress, trying to become country gentry; and the excruciating house in the play was suggested by Apple Porch. The dialogue between Sorel and her brother goes:

  Sorel – Where’s Mother?

  Simon – In the garden, practising.

  Sorel – Practising?

  Simon – She’s learning the names of the flowers by heart.

  Later on their mother says she has been pruning the calceolarias.

  My mother was a fine actress, much sought after, had mature literary tastes, was a good tennis player and a party girl. She had a sense of humour and was fun. So was Larry. They met at the Royalty Theatre at rehearsals in John Drinkwater’s playBird in the Hand.Although he had neither her literary background nor her maturity, she knew hewas the man she wanted to marry. All her friends immediately took to him, especially Noël Coward. Larry was like a man drunk even when sober, a wonderful mimic, raconteur, with electrifying changes from gay and amusing to mock serious. An actor’s actor. Eva so took to him she couldn’t help calling him ‘Harry’, her late husband’s name, instead of ‘Larry’. And he called her ‘My darling Mum’. His own mother had died when he was twelve, which had traumatised him. Earliest memories are seldom as comforting as Laurie Lee’s, who wrote about them in his book Cider with Rosie.His were of getting into his mother’s bed in the morning. When she got up he rolled into the valley left by her warmth. To him that seemed the whole point of life.

  My own first recollections are of hell. In the frozen winter of 1940 I was smitten with meningitis, still dreaded as a potential killer disease, but then all too often fatal. Meningitis is a swelling around the brain. When it inflames it exerts pressure within the head and down the spinal column. It causes unbearable pain, and in my case an agonising paralysis which twisted and curved the spine inwards, for six tortuous weeks.

  This was horrific also for my mother, made doubly so because it coincided with her divorce from my father. He had been Vivien Leigh’s lover since their film together, Fire over England, in the summer of 1936 two months before I was born. The doctor advised my mother as sympathetically as he could that my chances of full recovery were poor. He had to reveal to her that it was quite possible that the aftermath would be insanity or deafness. Blindness. A lifetime of physical handi-cap of some kind. My actual survival amazed him. He said that with young children you can so often be wrong. When you think they’ll live they die, and when you think they’ll die, they live. The after-effects in my case were only physical. It took years for my sway-backed spine to straighten, helped in my teens by rowing. My legs were less satisfactory. The thighs were disproportionately short and remained so. From finger tip to finger tip I measure six feet, but my height is only five foot eight. The Achilles tendons were so shrunk that I walked on the balls of my feet. Steel-soled shoes were of some help; after a few years I managed to place heels first to the ground when walking, but when running I still can’t. On the tennis court I sprint around like a ballet dancer on tiptoe.

  It was only after my mother’s death in 1990 that I understood the disease had caused hera longer lasting hurt. All my life, subliminally, I had associated her hands with that almost deadly pain, so I never liked her touch. I avoided it, which must have been upsetting for her; but we were always each other’s best friends and her last words to me were:

  ‘Thank you for loving me as much as you do.’

  The doctor said that I should immediately be taken away from England and the Blitz because any explosive bang could destroy my mind. My mother took me and my governess, a strong healthy girl called Joan, to New York. She rented a tiny apartment at the Franconia Hotel on the West Side: the wrong side. She had twice been a great success on Broadway: in 1928 in Bird in the Hand, and in 1931 in Private Lives with Noël Coward, Larry and Gertrude Lawrence. That was then. Now she was nobody, with £10 allowance to take from England for herself and for Joan, and £5 for me. In the New York world of show business a friend in need was a friend to be avoided. Jessica Tandy, an equally hard up actress, moved in with her daughter Susan Hawkins, daughter of the actor Jack Hawkins who was a British officer serving in Burma. The two actresses shared the rent. Larry and Vivien paid us a visit in New York when they were on their way back to England, he to join the Fleet Air Arm. I had gazed at their photographs in newspapers and was excited. It seemed extraordinary to see them in our tiny place: we were unworthy of their fame. Joan had put me to bed so that they could not see my tortured walk. They sat next to my feet. Vivien was so beautiful I could hardly believe it.

  Once they were gone I expect that my mother, Jessica and Joan sat down and had a nice drink. Jessica had a humdrum job in the British Consulate. My mother ended her radio programme explaining what things were like in war-torn England, and took her chances by going to Hollywood, not overtly touting for work but pretending to have a holiday. As Jill Esmond, she had a fine reputation on screen and had been the lead in a number of successful films, including Skin Game directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

  The five-day journey by train across America was split between two hostile railroad companies with a stop in Chicago and a wait of several hours. We went for a bracing spring walk along Lake Michigan. I ran as best I could with my steel-soled shoes. I skipped and jumped and fell into the lake. The water felt like icicles. Joan leapt after me, grabbed me and scrambled to the roadside. She took off my trousers and under-pants and tried to squeeze them dry. She looked round and saw a parked Greyhound bus. We followed her over to it. She hung my clothes over the exhaust which was still warm. An ingenious solution, but so livid was I with the humiliation that I disowned her, and my mother, waddling off into the crowd, morally superior, disdainful, self-righteous and entirely ridiculous, but at least alone, my buttocks pink as peaches.

  In Los A
ngeles Joan Crawford, the film star at the height of her film career, rang to say there was a bungalow available next to her house in North Cliffwood Avenue, with a large garden. There, within a few days, we settled down. One night we were adopted by a marmalade cat. He came into my bedroom and lay on my chest. He purred, which was new to me, and had a calming influence. It actually made me want to go to bed, to have him with me.

  I went to Brentwood Town and Country School, off San Vicente Avenue, a wonderful co-educational school with about eighty children aged from four and a half years old to eight or nine; T-shirts and jeans for boys, cotton frocks for the girls. We all sat together in class and played in the sizeable grounds with swings and roundabouts, lots of brown grass and an old horse called Traveller we took turns to ride. The owners were the Dyes, whom we called Auntie Catherine, head teacher, and Uncle Ben, head of admin. When their son John was killed in the Korean War they renamed their school the ‘John Thomas Dye Foundation’.

  One of the girls was Gary Cooper’s daughter. Her name was Maria. She invited all of us in her class to her birthday party. There were as many governesses and matrons as children. Birthday parties abounded. Everyone came to my own fifth birthday and left a ton of presents, even a scooter. A special man came to give me physiotherapy, with various exercises and strange contraptions. He had me pick marbles up with my toes. Co-ordination was a problem. If anyone threw a ball for me to catch I would bring my hands together after it had passed me and hit the ground. Oddly, I was apparently good at boxing. My mother and Joan took me for long walks to help my Achilles tendons. I trudged in the heavy steel-soled shoes along trails in the Santa Monica Mountains. I had a recurring dream of their long shadows, ahead of my short one, and my never being able to catch up.