Vivien Leigh

by Anne Edwards

  The discussion of the King and Mrs. Simpson at Capri shared equal time with Larry’s plans for the next season at the Old Vic. Hamlet was to be the first production, and Olivier had come to Capri with a suitcase crammed with books of criticism and commentaries. The director, Tyrone Guthrie, had decided on a new interpretation of the role; but after the critics’ cool views on his Romeo, Olivier was uncertain if Guthrie was right.

  Before rehearsals had begun, the two men, at Guthrie’s insistence, had been to see Ernest Jones, a Freudian analyst and the biographer of Freud, who had published some theories based on the interpretations of his master of the true motivations of Shakespearean heroes and villains. Guthrie followed Dr. Jones’s thesis. The Hamlet he directed and Olivier portrayed delayed the revenge of his father’s death because he was in love with his mother.

  Vivien went to see the play fourteen times. Her worship of Olivier’s theatre talent grew fourteenfold. She was in awe of his “greatness” and of the steely body and fiery mind he brought to the poetry and pathos of Shakespeare, and she harbored the deep feelings that until she had achieved some measure of that “greatness” on stage herself she was not worthy of his love, even though she was confident by this time that she did indeed possess it. But her intent was to do something concrete about it, which made the guilt tolerable.

  Inactivity was her nemesis, forcing her to think about things she did not want to recall, and so she was thankful when Gliddon secured a part for her in a play going immediately into rehearsals. Because We Must was a light effort by playwright Ingaret Giffard, and Vivien’s role was the only dimensional and theatrical one in the play. Need overbalanced judgment, for it is doubtful that she would have accepted the part in view of her lack of belief in the play’s merits if she thought there was another choice.

  Because of Olivier’s performance in Hamlet and the demands of his personal life, Vivien was spending a good deal of time alone when Leigh was at his chambers. Nights were more difficult than ever. They loved each other passionately, yet Larry went home after the theatre to Jill, and she lay sleepless beside Leigh. Eclectically, voraciously, she read Shaw and Shakespeare, biographies and art histories, Lawrence, Lewis, and Joyce until dawn.

  Although the American best seller Gone With the Wind had already been purchased by Selznick for films, the book had just been published in England. Vivien was enthralled by it. She had known little about American history and found the Civil War a heart-wrenching saga. Olivier was fascinated by human conflicts in war, and his taste leaned toward Shakespeare’s histories. She made notes on the North and South to discuss with him. But most of all she was immediately drawn to Margaret Mitchell’s heroine Scarlett O’Hara.

  On opening night of Because We Must she gave each member of the cast a copy of the book and told John Gliddon that she felt she was ideal to play Scarlett in Selznick’s planned film version. Gliddon, used to the enthusiasms of his acting clients, patiently tried to explain to her that the part was as American as Tom Sawyer. “Ridiculous,” Vivien replied. “Scarlett’s parentage was French-Irish, just like mine, and the South was still mostly first- or second-generation English in the mid-eighteen hundreds!” Gliddon then reminded her that since Selznick owned the rights and she was under contract to Korda, her interest would come to naught.

  Vivien became obsessed with Scarlett. She went back and reread the book cover to cover and dog-eared passage after passage that she particularly liked. Then she spoke to Gliddon again. It was impossible to say no to Vivien. “Dear John,” she cajoled, “I know I am right for Scarlett and that you can help me convince Mr. Selznick.” He noted that she smiled gently but that there was a note of intensity in her request that he had not been conscious of previously. Certain that he was only appeasing her, he sent some photographs and press clippings on her to Selznick’s New York office and promised them some film as soon as Fire Over England was ready for release.

  He received only a cursory thank you, but apparently someone in New York had been sufficiently impressed to show the material to Kay Brown, Selznick’s New York representative, who in turn sent him a telegram urging him to consider her, and Selznick wired her back:

  FEBRUARY 3, 1937

  TO: KATHARINE BROWN

  AND OSCAR SERLIN

  CORRECTING ON MATTER IN TELETYPE, I HAVE NO ENTHUSIASM FOR VIVIEN LEIGH. MAYBE I WILL HAVE, BUT AS YET HAVE NEVER EVEN SEEN PHOTOGRAPH OF HER. WILL BE SEEING “FIRE OVER ENGLAND” SHORTLY, AT WHICH TIME WILL OF COURSE SEE LEIGH.

  In May of 1936, one month before its American publication, Selznick had hesitated in paying $50,000 for Gone With the Wind, but his associate John Hay Whitney had wired him that if he didn’t buy it for Selznick International (Selznick’s film company, in which Whitney had a financial interest), he, Whitney, would purchase it and hold it for the company. Selznick capitulated and paid the asking price (the largest amount they ever paid for a book that was not yet an established success) and read it for the first time on board a boat to Hawaii.

  MGM, in exchange for a half interest in the film, had loaned Selznick $1,250,000 (the film cost $4,250,000) and Clark Gable’s services as Rhett, applying pressure for him to cast Joan Crawford as Scarlett, Maureen O’Sullivan as Melanie, and Melvyn Douglas as Ashley—all Metro performers. But Selznick felt that these good actors would be miscast and thereupon launched the most publicized talent search in the history of film.

  By the time Vivien had read the book and pressed Gliddon to enter her name in the sweepstakes, Bette Davis, Joan Fontaine, Tallulah Bankhead, and many other top actresses had been tested or considered. Vivien was virtually unknown to Hollywood and her chances seemed even less than slim. She did not drop the idea, however, and brought it up from time to time. There is no doubt that Scarlett held a fascination for her, but she was also astute enough to realize that the winning of the part would bring her international stardom, an accomplishment she felt could place her on a more equal footing with Olivier and enable her to obtain better stage roles.

  Because We Must closed within a month, and Korda exercised his option by casting her in the film Storm in a Teacup, a funny but inconsequential comedy adapted from the Bruno Frank play Storm im Wasserglas, which had had a fairly successful Broadway run as Storm Over Patsy. She co-starred with Rex Harrison and Scruffy the dog, and her role could not have given her much pride of accomplishment, though she gave a witty and warm performance.

  In early 1937, Sydney Carroll was putting a slim farce called Bats in the Belfry into rehearsal at the Ambassadors’ Theatre, where Vivien had so captivated London in The Mask of Virtue. She accepted a part he offered her in it, but it was a mistake. The play was indeed very light and slipped away almost unnoticed in a matter of weeks.

  Vivien’s career seemed to be slipping away from her as well. She knew Olivier did not think her a good actress yet, and the parts she had just played had done little to bolster her image. It had been two years since she had swept London by storm, and she had not appeared in one good play since. Nor since signing with Korda had a top film role come her way. She was quietly disturbed when Jill played opposite Larry in Twelfth Night, which followed Hamlet at the Old Vic.

  Yet Olivier believed that she had a unique quality and that she had to work hard at some of her inadequacies. He found her rather thin and high-pitched voice still her greatest failing as a stage performer and began to work with her to overcome this and other problems. More and more their relationship was moving out into the open.

  In March they were assigned co-starring roles by Korda in a film based on Galsworthy’s The First and the Last, which Graham Greene had scripted under the title Twenty-one Days. Basil Dean was the director, and Olivier’s work with him in the past on two plays had not been much happier than Vivien’s film experience in Look Up and Laugh. Korda stepped in himself to direct some sequences when he saw that his director and his stars were at such odds with each other. He also thought the film needed the Continental touch, and the scene he contributed—a court
scene—had a Brechtian quality.

  Korda’s decision to make the film had been stimulated by his belief in Vivien’s star potential, and in Twenty-one Days she had a chance to be sensual and a lady—exactly the combination of traits he thought would work for her. He was also a romantic, and a film co-starring two young lovers appealed to him (by now there were few in London’s theatre and film circles who did not know of the affair). He took Larry and Vivien’s side throughout the making of the film and had an active part in helping them finally to run off together, as, coincidentally, the two characters they portrayed in the film also did. Korda, whose first marriage to Maria Corda (a well-known silent screen star) dissolved in 1932, directed most of his attention to being the head of his male-dominated family (all three of the Korda brothers—Alex, Zoltan, and Vincent—had sons). He enjoyed men relating to him paternally, perhaps because of his problems with his own son, and he easily “adopted” younger men like Olivier. Becoming the benevolent father, he arranged the shooting schedules so that Larry and Vivien could take a week off to appear together in Hamlet in Elsinore (Denmark), Vivien to play Ophelia.

  Before the two lovers left, Jill, pent up with desperation, arranged a meeting with Vivien, intent on pleading with her not to go away with Larry. She arrived at Little Stanhope Street late in the afternoon when Vivien had just returned from the studio and while Leigh was still at the Middle Temple. Waiting nervously in the small sitting room surrounded by evidences of Vivien’s exquisite taste, she rehearsed what she planned to say. Vivien swept into the room impeccably dressed, showing no sign of anxiety at the rather dreadful audience ahead of her.

  “Hello, Jill darling.” She smiled, one hand grasping Jill’s hand warmly as with the other she pulled the cord for the maid.

  “Champagne,” she ordered when Aide appeared.

  And Jill was never able to speak what she had come to say. When she left the house she knew she had waited too long and that she had lost Olivier.

  The trip to Elsinore was a memorable one for Vivien. Her love for Olivier seemed boundless, her pride enormous. Never in her life had she wanted anything more than to be the object of his devotion. Once London was behind them the restrictions were off, decorum could be ignored. The cast and crew of Hamlet became their confidants. By the time they reached Denmark, the lovers knew they would never be able to turn back.

  From Elsinore, Vivien wrote Leigh that she begged his forgiveness but she had gone off with Larry and would not return to Little Stanhope Street. Oswald Frewen tried to intercede and get them to reconsider their decision, to which Olivier replied that it was to Vivien’s benefit to live with a man who shared her artistry and her life and not with Leigh, whose opinion on drama was by Olivier’s standards contemptible.

  Drama was the most important thing in young Olivier’s mind. Vivien understood this and worshiped at the same shrine. She also was aware that to share the experience of his portraying Hamlet, a role that had more meaning to him than any other, would bind them even closer together. John Gielgud had already been acclaimed as the Hamlet of their generation, and after Romeo and Juliet a distinct rivalry existed between him and Larry. Olivier did not think of himself as the same sort of actor as Gielgud. He felt they were different faces of the same coin, with Gielgud the top half—all spirituality, beauty, and abstract things—and himself all earth, blood, and perhaps the baser part of humanity. When he played Romeo he was fighting for his own conception of great theatre, trying to sell realism in Shakespeare. The part of Hamlet, because of its enormous length and depth, seemed ideal to make his point.

  They were to play Hamlet in the courtyard of the ancient Kronborg Castle in Elsinore with its pinnacled towers and the thick stone walls against which the sea crashed endlessly. It was a cold June week, wind and rain constant, and Vivien had to rehearse beneath an umbrella, but still she shivered and froze for two days and two nights while Larry fed her coffee and schnapps to keep her going.

  The day before the opening the sky was darker than usual, with thick, coiling black clouds and a tempest wind that made it impossible for lines to be heard. Guthrie made the decision to transfer the production to the nearby Merienlyst Hotel, where they were all staying. It was a disappointment to the entire company, except for Vivien, who felt more relaxed and confident of her voice in the smaller “theatre.”

  It is difficult to assess if the onstage or offstage drama being played was the more intense. Having made a decision to leave their mates and children and live together, they now had only a few days to arrange this most difficult crisis. Jill and Leigh had to be told before the press got wind. Her parents and several friends needed to be notified, and although Korda’s office would be helpful in writing a press release, there would still be reporters to face upon their return. It was a delicate situation. Tarquin was an infant; they had fallen in love while Jill was pregnant. Then there was Suzanne. Vivien was not sure what to do about the child in the future, but she knew the four-year-old would be better off until their plans were set to remain with her father and in her nursery at Little Stanhope Street in the care of Nanny Oake. The press might not react well to that either.

  In spite of all the problems, Vivien was happy in Elsinore in 1937. Sharing all of Larry’s private and public hours made her completely oblivious to the poor working conditions and the long hours. The Times sent a reviewer up to cover the opening, and the next morning she and Larry had the review read to them over the telephone. Olivier’s Hamlet was superlative, it said, and Vivien Leigh’s Ophelia showed real promise.

  The sun broke through the shifting black clouds, and that night they moved back to the courtyard of Kronborg. Darkness covered the town of Elsinore, the Swedish coast was lost, and only the lights of a cargo vessel flickered on the waters. Two thousand people sat silently waiting for Hamlet’s ghost to pass through the turreted courtyard. The production had triumphed twice. To Vivien and Olivier it seemed a good and special omen.

  Chapter Eight

  Aide, the maid at Little Stanhope Street, was pretty and young and proceeded to get married during the time Vivien was in Denmark. Leigh’s old friend Beryl Samson came to his rescue and sent Daisy Goguel over to take Aide’s place. Just after moving in with Olivier, Vivien returned to the house when Leigh was at the Middle Temple to collect her personal effects and was met at the door by an unknown maid. Before she was able to enter the house, two elderly neighbor ladies, visibly disturbed, came rushing up to announce that they had just seen Nanny Oake angrily smack Suzanne in the park.

  Shaking badly and on the verge of tears, Vivien went inside and waited for Nanny Oake and Suzanne to return. But as she gathered together the things she had come for, she could not help having mixed and anxious emotions. She was a stranger in the home that she herself had so lovingly put together. But, of course, that was not the most painful cross she must bear. If Nanny Oake was in fact mistreating Suzanne, what right had she to fire Nanny? After walking out on Leigh and, yes, her child for the man she loved, what rights did she have? And unless she was prepared to fight for Suzanne’s custody, did she have the right to intervene at all in the child’s care? It was a scene directly out of the just-released American film Stella Dallas.

  Nanny Oake and her charge finally returned. It seemed that Suzanne had tossed her bonnet for Nanny to retrieve one too many times for Nanny’s considerable patience. The explanation did not ease Vivien’s anxiety and she left the house in a state.

  Whatever wounds Leigh Holman suffered he bore with incredible good grace and with a politely indifferent facade. In the early months of the separation he was certain that Vivien would return home to him and treated the matter much in the way one might a child’s tantrum or a juvenile’s escapade. His law practice and the running of a motherless household kept him busy. He remained on good terms with Gertrude and Ernest, and he never spoke bitterly about Vivien or with self-pity about his own plight. He merely carried on with his life in a dignified, self-possessed fashion. There was no quest
ion of his love for Vivien; and he refused to accept the undeniable truth that Vivien and he were simply not well mated, that their needs and desires had been worlds apart even when they were together.

  Olivier had bought Durham Cottage at 4 Christchurch Street in Chelsea. It was a charming but modest seventeenth-century house with a lovely walled garden, near Burton Court and the Chelsea Hospital. Being small, its care would be minimal and decoration not too big an undertaking. Conscious of Vivien’s state of anxiety, Larry decided they should first have a brief vacation in Venice.

  They stayed at a comfortable hotel along the Grand Canal. It was July and the city glittered in the sun. The water shimmered, buildings shone, and there were so many marvelous impressions to seize and to hold. St. Mark’s Basilica with its eight hundred marble columns, the Campanile, and the interior of St. Mark’s, where at every turn there was a vision of marvels—such a profusion of gold and precious stones, such works of great and beautiful art.

  They fed the pigeons in the Piazza, held hands in the Chiesa della Salute, put on their sunglasses to gaze at the brilliant facade of the Ca’ d’Oro, and strolled in the clear moonlight along the Molo. Vivien was radiant. Life took on a new, deeper meaning for her. Olivier noted with relief the disappearance of her anxieties.

  No sooner had they returned to Durham Cottage than she was cast as the second lead in A Yank at Oxford, which was the first film Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was to make in England. Korda had loaned her out for the small but showy part—that of the adulterous young wife of an Oxford bookseller—certain that the American exposure would greatly enhance her career. Louis B. Mayer was not pleased at the idea of casting an “unknown,” but British producer Michael Balcon persuasively appealed to Mayer’s financial acumen. Vivien was in London, which meant no traveling expenses, and in addition her loan-out fee to Korda was far less than the salary of a known American actress. This knowledge of why she was finally cast as flirty Elsa Craddock was disturbing to Vivien, more so, perhaps, because Maureen O’Sullivan had been cast in the lead.