Vivien Leigh

by Anne Edwards

  Her work on Things Are Looking Up had not been a great hardship on Leigh. To the contrary, she was home for dinner and had refused all party invitations, wanting to look her best in the morning. He was reconciled to this new interest of hers, though he did not take it seriously and assumed it would eventually pass.

  But Vivian spent long hours pressed close to her dressing-room mirror practicing eye expression and learning how to control her eyebrows. Her friend, actress Beryl Samson, recognized her new interest as the commitment it was and suggested she find an agent. That was not an easy task for a girl of twenty who professionally had spoken only one line in a film. Vivian was certain it would be impossible until she had accumulated a list of credits. Then fate intervened.

  Beryl was at a party when she overheard John Gliddon, the agent, telling another guest that Hollywood had the right idea in contracting many beautiful young unknowns and training them before the camera with the hopes that at least one might have the makings of a star. Alexander Korda, he was saying, was the only man in Great Britain clever enough to employ such a system. In a two-year span he had signed a number of hopefuls and used them in one film after the other—and look how successful it had been, with Wendy Barrie and Merle Oberon nearing star status in The Pivate Life of Henry VIII. Beryl turned to him and agreed, adding that she knew one girl who was bright, spectacularly beautiful, had attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and appeared in one film. She added, “If you are looking for star potential, Vivian Holman has it.” Gliddon was interested, and the next day Beryl and Vivian went to see him in his Regent Street office.

  Vivian wore a lovely wide-brimmed hat that framed her face. She looked up at Gliddon with eloquent eyes. “Beryl says you are the only man who knows how to make a girl a star.” She smiled, the perfect sycophant. Gliddon replied rather modestly that he could not work miracles but that he was convinced she had a good chance if she let him manage her for a year.

  “But your name—Vivian Holman—must go,” he insisted.

  “How about Vivian Hartley?” she asked.

  “No good either,” he replied. “You need something more memorable.” After concentrating for a time he suggested April Morn.

  On the ride back to Little Stanhope Street, Vivian was troubled. “Leigh would never accept my being called April Morn,” she said.

  Beryl said she would have to agree with Leigh if he thought it was a vulgar name.

  The two women rode in silence for a time, and as Vivian pulled the car up to her front door, Beryl said, “How about Vivian Leigh? He’s bound to approve that.”

  For several weeks thereafter the newly christened Vivian Leigh was escorted by Gliddon on a daily round of luncheon, tea, and cocktail dates at such posh places as the Ivy, the Ritz, and the Savoy Grill, where she was bound to be seen by the titans of Wardour Street— those men and women who controlled Britain’s film industry. With Vivian wearing a different outfit at each meeting, being seated so that her extraordinary beauty was shown to its best advantage, Gliddon was successful in his campaign. Korda’s office rang for an interview with Vivian, and Gliddon hastened to accept.

  The financial success and the international critical acclaim of The Private Life of Henry VIII had made Alexander Korda the undisputed king of Great Britain’s film industry. Adding to the luster of his crown was his kingly manner and his glamorous past. From the time he was a young man in Budapest, Sándor Korda (as he was originally named) had been devastatingly attractive to women. He had a leonine head, strong bones, and eyes that were at once hypnotic, slanting, and sensitive. His first film was made in his native Hungary in 1914, when he was twenty-one years old, and from the beginning he had lived with and dispensed luxury on a royal scale.

  One of the earliest and youngest of Hungary’s film elite, he soon built his own studio with a suite of his own impressive offices. Five years later his empire crumbled as the fearful purge known as the White Terror gripped the nation. The Communist regime that had held Korda in high esteem had fallen. Admiral Horthy, an enemy of Bolshevism and a German sympathizer, was now in control; a direct attack was made against intellectuals, Jews, and film makers, and Korda was all three. He moved his headquarters to Vienna, where he continued living the grand life and began to build a new empire.

  The building of that empire had taken eleven years and had transported him from Vienna to Berlin, Hollywood, Paris, and finally London, where he opened the grandiose offices of London Films on Grosvenor Street in Mayfair. The Private Life of Henry VIII had not only made Korda both internationally famous and rich, but had catapulted the British film industry into the world market for the first time. Without question Alexander Korda was the most important man in British films, and Vivian Leigh was not unaware of his power. Yet their meeting seemed somehow fated to her. She had known in her heart for over two years that Korda would one day single her out, as he had Maureen O’Sullivan. While making films in Hollywood in 1930, Korda had given Maureen (then only eighteen) her first starring role in The Princess and the Plumber opposite Charles Farrell. Vivian, on her return from the Continent, had seen it three times; and since she and Maureen had always looked alike and often for a giggle had exchanged places to fool a casual acquaintance, it was not difficult for Vivian to fantasize herself in her place.

  Korda’s offices were like one of his own lavish sets, and they were staffed with Continentals who spoke a polyglot of eight languages, which greatly added to the glamour. One journalist had called the offices “International House.”

  Vivian and Gliddon were greeted in the anteroom by a fräulein, ushered into a waiting room by a mademoiselle, escorted into Korda’s private office by a señorita, and greeted finally by an elegant, tall, slim, commanding man with a charming Hungarian accent. His appearance was most impressive. His manners were impeccable. He rose, came around his desk, took her hand in his, and through the glasses he had only just begun to wear, held her in a riveting glance. The interview that followed was not at all what she had expected. He asked her questions about her background, her family, and her ambitions; but he also wanted to know what books she liked to read and which plays and films she had liked. She commented on a painting he had hanging in the office, and he got up and went over to it to discuss its merits with her.

  Vivian was enthralled and certain the meeting had been a tremendous success. However, when Gliddon rang later, Korda said she was exquisite, yes, charming, yes, but that she did not fall into any type that would stamp her as unique. He explained that his current list of contract players consisted of Merle Oberon, who was exotic, Wendy Barrie, who was a pure English girl, and Diana Napier—a beetch. It was this one identifiable character projection that made a girl a candidate for stardom, he claimed, and at this point he did not think Vivian Leigh had it.

  Vivian was badly disappointed, but Gliddon did not allow her to languish in self-pity. He managed to get her a part in a quickie film to be made by British and Dominion called The Village Squire. She was the leading lady, and the film—for which her pay was five guineas a day—was made in six days. A month later she was cast as a typist in another quickie titled Gentleman s Agreement. Both films were dreadful and received poor reviews.

  But David Home, who had also appeared in them, rang to tell her that he had been cast as an elderly man in a play set in fifteenth-century Florence called The Green Sash. They were having difficulty casting the role of the flirtatious young wife. John Gliddon spoke to Matthew Forsyth, the producer, and with only a few weeks’ rehearsal time before the scheduled opening at the Q Theatre, Vivian was engaged to play the role of the wife, Giusta.

  The Green Sash opened on February 25, 1935, and was reviewed the next morning in The Times: “. . . The dramatists have given so vague a sketch of Giusta that Miss Vivian Leigh has little opportunity for portraiture, but her acting has a precision and lightness which should serve her well when her material is of more substance.”

  It was not a very auspicious stage debut, but Vivian was he
artened by the review and thrilled that she had now made a professional stage appearance. The play lasted for two weeks, and she reveled in every moment of its run. Leigh was not nearly so ecstatic, for their home life was considerably turned about. He hardly saw her, as she went to the theatre about the time he came home from chambers and was generally sleeping when he left in the morning, not having got to bed until dawn. He was not what one might call “good humored” about his wife’s new stage career and being a practical fellow could see no reason she should continue. And, considering the pale reviews of The Green Sash, the discouragement of her interview with Korda, and the lack of any notice of her appearance in the Cicely Court-neidge film, Things Are Looking Up, it was understandable that Leigh thought she should see the handwriting on the wall.

  The Green Sash closed on Saturday, March 9. The next morning, although it was freezing cold, she and Leigh motored down to Brede to visit Oswald Frewen. “Despite Arctic weather we were all happy and kept ourselves warm with risqué stories except old Leigh who assiduously dug the first trench of my new Kitchen Garden,” Frewen wrote in his diary.

  One night Vivian confessed to Patsy Quinn, “Oh, Pat, I feel so tied. I’m so young and I do so love the gay life, and Leigh—though I adore him—is not very social.” Attending theatre was her greatest pleasure, and so if Leigh was not available as an escort she would go with Patsy or Beryl or her parents. She yearned for something more than she had, but she was not sure what it was, except that somehow the theatre was a part of it. She was always weaving magical and glamorous stories in her head. At Roehampton she had been able to see dancers and a queen swan on the small lake; at Dinard she could sit on the sand and imagine glittering ships filled with partying passengers and a queen of the festivities. Always now her daydreams contained a masked king or prince, an elusive suitor who could not reveal his identity.

  Never in Vivian’s maturing years had she suffered the pain or the ecstasy of an unrequited crush. If she decided she must have a young man’s attention she had always received it. There was no more adoring husband than Leigh in their set. Still, Vivian flirted outrageously and had wild fantasies that she would confide to her closest friends, shocking them. (“If the Prince of Wales asked me, I would become his mistress.” Then she would elaborate on how she would behave in this role.) There were several young, handsome matinee idols of film and theatre at the time—Ivor Novello, Noël Coward, and the young Laurence Olivier. Of the three, Olivier held the greatest sexual charisma and an aura of assurance that gave him a commanding, a regal presence. He was far more than a fine performer. He was a star on the rise, a prince among players, and from the first moment Vivian had set eyes upon him he had been the romantic figure in all her fantasies—the man behind the mask.

  She had first seen Olivier the previous year as Richard Kurt in Biography, then as Bothwell in Queen of Scots, and as the dashing, eccentric Tony Cavendish in Theatre Royal. This last thrilling and theatrically superb performance had totally mesmerized her. There was the handsome young Olivier, his dark eyes flashing, his slim hips tightly trousered, a white shirt gashed open at the throat to reveal a portion of his manly chest, speaking the most outlandish and suggestive dialogue and leaping over a balcony in a virile Douglas Fairbanks fashion.

  Olivier’s stage presence affected Vivian on many levels. Certainly she had a great admiration for his talent, but he also aroused in her a sexuality that she had previously not known existed. Finally one night she was introduced to him in the Savoy Grill, where he was dining with his wife, the lovely and well-known actress Jill Esmond. Vivian had been escorted by a young man who was a friend of both Leigh and herself, and she had insisted they go to the Savoy Grill because she knew Olivier often dined there. Olivier greeted her casually, but she caught his unguarded reaction as she grasped his hand tightly and smiled that devastating smile that was so uniquely her own. Perhaps out of pique, her escort said some disparaging things about both Olivier’s appearance and his acting ability, and Vivian savagely defended him, to her companion’s dismay. Having now met Olivier, she was fully convinced she was in love with him and that he was as deeply in love with her.

  From that evening on, all she could think about was Olivier. Her feelings toward Leigh turned to a detached fondness. He was dear, he was sweet, but she had been too young, too inexperienced when they had married to know or desire a grand passion. It had been Leigh’s maturity and accomplishment and his life in London that had originally drawn her to him. They never truly had found much in common, and she could not speak to him of those things which seemed the most important at the time—her growing passions as an actress and as a woman. She was positive that a man like Olivier would not only understand but help her to fulfill herself.

  Gertrude was well aware of her daughter’s dilemma. She had always been disturbed with Vivian’s restlessness, and she was fearful her daughter might do something (she was not sure what) that would violate the laws of the Church. She tried to get Vivian to attend mass but did not succeed. As often as possible she reminded her that marriage was a sacred vow. Vivian assured her mother there was nothing and no one for her to worry about. But Gertrude now knew her daughter too well to be deceived.

  On the other hand, Laurence Olivier was not yet truly aware of Vivian’s existence.

  Chapter Five

  Laurence Olivier was born on May 22, 1907, in a small red-brick house on Wathen Road in the town of Dorking, where his father, the Reverend Gerard Kerr Olivier, was an assistant at St. Martin’s. In the sixteenth century the Oliviers or de Oliviers were Huguenots who lived at Nay in Gascony, a village south of Pau in the Basses-Pyrénées. The Reverend Jourdain Olivier emigrated to England in 1688 as chaplain to William of Orange. For generations the English branch of the Oliviers had followed church tradition and sired future Anglo-Catholic (High Episcopalian in the States) ministers. There were three children in Laurence’s family: his brother Richard, his sister Sybille, and himself. At a very early age he assumed he would follow family tradition and would someday become a clergyman.

  Laurence’s childhood had not been an easy one, with the Oliviers having to move constantly from one parish to another. His father was a stern, cold Victorian man; his mother the center of his world. She died when he was thirteen. “I spent most of my stupid youth being terrified of my father,” Olivier admits. “Then my mother died and I was nearly destroyed.”

  But he had survived, and his father had taken over the running of the family not truly knowing any of his children well at the time. But the Reverend Olivier had been more of a maverick than his younger son suspected, and in his youth had done a bit of acting with the Oxford University Dramatic Society when he was up at Merton. And there was no doubt that he was very dramatic in the pulpit, using wide gestures and a thunderous voice, with great yawning pauses.

  Laurence had not been a strong child. He himself says, “I was born a weakling. As a child I was a shrimp, as a youth I was a weed. I was a miserably thin creature and my arms hung like wires from my shoulders.” His mother had encouraged him to act in an effort to overcome his awkwardness, and he had appeared in school plays from the age of ten. He was also a choirboy at All Saints, Margaret Street, where the precentor, Geoffrey Heald, was a superb actor. But after his mother s death Laurence was sent to St. Edward’s, Oxford, where he did not do well and where he acted only once—as Puck.

  “I was a muddled kind of a boy,” Olivier confesses. “I liked acting. I adored the theatre, but part of me wanted to go into the mercantile marine, and I was very keen on the idea of being a farmer.”

  But when he was seventeen his older brother went to India to be a rubber planter, and Laurence’s life—to use a play on words—took a dramatic turn.

  “The night Dickie went,” Olivier recalls, “I was very miserable—my mother had been dead four years—and I went up to the bathroom. I always had my bath after my father had his and got into his bathwater to save water. My father came in and sat on the edge of the bat
h. He was missing Dickie as well. I said, ’When can I follow Dickie out to India?’ He said, ’Don’t be a fool, Kim’—that was my family nickname. ’You’re going on the stage.’ ”

  And that was exactly what he did. He began to study with the extraordinary Elsie Fogerty in 1924 and was her favorite pupil. But when he finally went to look for work he had no idea what kind of actor he wanted to be, though he did have a burning ambition. But, as he puts it, “I think possibly one of the most strongly contributing facts toward such an ambition was my upbringing. The atmosphere of genteel poverty is probably almost the most fertile ground for ambition that there can be, because you seem to say, ‘I want to get out. I’m going to get out. When I get out of this, I will show them!’ without having the faintest idea how or what you’re going to show them. I simply had this driving feeling—I’m going to be a smashing actor!”

  Yet even with Elsie Fogerty’s fine training and the fire of ambition, success did not come immediately. He played walk-ons in numerous productions and then minor parts with the Birmingham Repertory Company for two years. His last season with them was from January to May 1928 at the Royal Court Theatre, London, where he was the Young Man in Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, Malcolm in Macbeth, and the lead in Tennyson’s Harold.

  In his first play away from the Birmingham Repertory Company, Bird in Hand, which ran at the Royalty Theatre for seven months, he appeared with a beautiful, slender dark-haired girl named Jill Esmond Moore (she soon dropped the last name), who was the daughter of Eva Moore, the famous actress, and H. V. Esmond, the even more illustrious playwright and actor-manager. The two young hopefuls fell in love and on July 25, 1930, at All Saints, in Marylebone, were married. Olivier by this time had played in a long string of co-starring roles (Journey’s End, Beau Geste, The Circle of Chalk) and went almost directly after the ceremony into the cast of Private Lives with Noël Coward.