by Anne Edwards
Rattigan’s fairy tale about a rather unpleasant Balkan prince who is lured by an American showgirl into a romantic affair on the eve of his coronation was rescheduled for a November 1953 opening, which meant that it would not be on the boards at the same time as the coronation. This somewhat eased the pressures on Olivier. Back in London in time for the gala event, they watched the majestic procession from the large windows in Olivier’s private office. It rained throughout. The spectators huddled under umbrellas in the street stands, but guards and statesmen rode unprotected on horseback and in open carriages. Winston Churchill, without the usual stout cigar, waved, and the people shouted and cheered him.
On a small table in the office sat a television set, the sound turned up high so that they could hear the running commentary. When the procession was over they gathered about the set. The young Queen Elizabeth looked glowing in her splendid costumes and magnificent royal jewels. There was about her a sense of humility as she sat with her hands crossed and resting on her robes. Vivien watched with tears in her eyes. “How sad it must be for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor not to have been invited,” she commented. She cried when the crown was placed on the new Queen’s head.
Later thousands stood outside Buckingham Palace. A thunderous roar came from the crowd as the new royal couple (looking like tiny waving specks on the small TV set) stepped onto the balcony. Vivien sighed so deeply that one of the secretaries took a step forward, thinking she might be feeling ill.
They previewed The Sleeping Prince in Manchester, and Vivien’s dressing room was filled with huge baskets of flowers. They were warmly received and she was given a standing ovation. She appeared to withstand the rigors of the performance and took several curtains smiling radiantly. The same empathy and enthusiasm marked the London opening at the Phoenix Theatre, on Thursday, November 5, 1953, Vivien’s fortieth birthday. She never looked more beautiful than she did in the costumes for her role as Mary Morgan, the showgirl, but it was Martita Hunt who was the great success of the evening, making a gorgeous thing of the comic Grand Duchess. Vivien, though she made a gallant try, was truly miscast as a Brooklyn chorus girl. Rattigan had feared this was the case all during rehearsals, but Olivier had felt confident he was wrong.
There was one moment when the audience always broke up with laughter. Olivier, as the aging Prince, and with little time to lose in which to seduce the chorus girl, glances impatiently at the clock and delivers the line “Ah yes, my child, here I am, having reached the age of forty . . .” There was a split second freeze of alarm, the most imperceptible of pauses, and then the continuation of the speech: “I have never found true love,” spoken on a slightly hysterical note and telegraphing to the audience the truth that the Prince was about to reveal his true age—forty-five—and then stopped. The line appeared to disturb Vivien in each performance. She was forty and there was little she could do to forget it.
The Oliviers still brought magic to the theatre, but the play did not seem to have the effervescence it should have, and though Larry—made up with a pasty complexion, a thin, rather humorless mouth, his hair parted grotesquely in the middle and brought unattractively downward over his ears, and wearing a pompous monocle on his right eye—had caught Rattigan’s Prince Uncharming perfectly, he had also taken his role too seriously, imparting a certain weightiness to an evening that should have been served up much lighter. The coronation had brought flocks of Americans to England, and tourists were everywhere. The theatre was packed at each performance with audiences eager to see the glamorous Oliviers on stage together. One American visitor was heard to describe the play as “a breath of old caviar.” By the time it closed, however, the pressures it had placed on Vivien had taken their toll. She was exhausted, and the spells of depression came and went alarmingly close together.
In 1954, Olivier was preparing to film Richard III, and he cast the young Claire Bloom in the role Vivien had played on the Australian tour six years earlier.
During those days there was little they dared talk about. A silence was growing between them that terrified Vivien. She tried to reach him with the right word, but Larry no longer seemed to hear her. She began to guess that behind his dark, intense stare, his silence, his constant preoccupation with his own needs, something she had no part in was developing. Her Larry had embarked upon a private and locked-away life of his own. They both now invited their own friends to Notley, and many of their good companions were drawn into separate camps. Vivien became flirtatious with other men, especially with Peter Finch. No other marriage could have sustained what theirs did, but the fact was they were held together by the same strong passion and need for each other that they had had from the very beginning. Neither was willing to give up the past, which they clung to as reality, for the present, which they refused to see as anything other than a bad dream from which both would one day soon awaken.
Tarquin had graduated from Eton and was in national service in the Coldstream Guards. He was commissioned in early 1955, carried the colors, changed guard at Buckingham Palace, and marched through the streets of the City to guard the Bank of England. Father and son seemed to be losing ground in their struggle for a working relationship. Olivier by then had suffered several years of Vivien’s illness. There was no doubting his pride in Tarquin and his growing fondness and admiration for the young man. Expressing it seemed too difficult, however. At Eton, for his last piano concert, Tarquin had hammered away at Chopin’s “Revolutionary Study,” hoping that his father would come to hear it at the school concert. Olivier did not attend and it had been a crushing blow to his son. Tarquin therefore steeled himself upon receiving his commission, certain his father would take no note of the occasion.
That night the sergeant on guard burst into the barracks room chuckling, a buff-colored envelope between his five thumbs. He knew Tarquin was the son of Sir Laurence and he was a great fan of the theatre. “ ’Ere, sir”—he grinned—“some ruddy message for you!”
In the envelope was a poem dictated via telephone from Notley by Olivier to the sergeant. Tarquin took out the Army message forms from inside the envelope and read the following written in the sergeant’s somewhat clumsy hand:
Hail resplendent Ensign, you young blade.
But why dost tempt to put thy father in the shade
With plume, mirrored leather and gold braid?
Coulds’t not remain a private economical?
Must Dad now find thee wardrobes astronomical?
Must Dad now curb his splendid voyage into wrong
To keep his son in wine, in women, and in song
While St. James from the theatre to the Palace throng
Fashion insists true feelings be denied
And this poem must try fathers doting pride.
For most of 1954 and 1955 Vivien remained at Notley under the care of doctors, fighting desperately against what she feared might become the permanent loss of sanity. There were few friends who were not aware of her battle or of the enormous courage she employed to overcome her illness. She was beginning to recognize the signs of an approaching attack and would send for Gertrude when they occurred. During her well periods she was the same grand and gracious hostess, the same thoughtful friend, the same sensitive and caring companion. For Larry and Gertrude it was like living with two different women.
To all those close it seemed that even though work exerted pressures on her it created a discipline in her life that stabilized her condition. Except for the horror of filming Elephant Walk, she appeared able to control her emotions when performing. She would, as did happen while doing The Sleeping Prince, stand brooding and mumbling incoherently in the wings. But as soon as she was on stage there was no evidence of her problem. Some of this could be explained by the fact that Vivien was an exceptionally ordered, controlled performer. Her performance was always set by the end of rehearsals and she relied on an exact assured technique. Nothing, not even a hand gesture, would vary once a show had opened. What she did on the stage, therefore
, was very much rote, allowing her to park her own psyche in the wings to be collected after the last curtain. Film was different, however, for one had to create a sense of immediacy for the camera, and it took a good director to “get at” a performer incisively enough to elicit the actor’s best response.
Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea had been a fair success on the stage starring the great Peggy Ashcroft. Alexander Korda had plans to film it in 1955 and had signed Anatole Litvak to direct and Rattigan to write his own screenplay. Vivien, always secure in Korda’s hands, agreed to make the film. Rattigan described his play as the story of “an affinity between a man and a woman who are mutually destructive to each other.” The woman, Hester Collyer, is married but obsessed with another man who is of inferior clay.
Both film script and play suffered from a basic dishonesty. Hester’s feminine gender seemed a cloak to appease theatregoers and censors, for an underlying story of a homosexual triangle came through in almost all the strong confrontation scenes. Vivien was therefore handicapped from the start because film glaringly magnified this sham. Her performance also suffered because of the lack of sexual chemistry between her and Kenneth More, who played her lover. Vivien appeared to have checked all immediate emotion the other side of the camera, just as she left it in the wings when she was on stage. Perhaps because she was able to do this she was also able to get through the film.
This ability heartened Olivier. So much so that he decided she should appear with him in a season at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, beginning that April of 1955 with a production of Twelfth Night. In June they would present Macbeth, in August Titus Andronicus. He wanted desperately to negate her illness, to prove that it had all been a bad dream. He did not want to make a lot of money, and in truth Vivien liked being Lady Olivier more than he enjoyed being Sir Laurence. First and foremost he was obsessed with acting the great stage roles, becoming the English-speaking world’s greatest classical actor. No lesser ambitions befogged that desire.
Vivien knew he remained very much in love with her but that his ambitions came first. She wanted the world to acknowledge his greatness as much as he wanted it for himself. A king ideally should have a queen, however, and Lady Olivier had always been to the royal manner born. Vivien, therefore, struggled to rise to the challenge he presented her. So, enthusiastically and gratefully, she tore into the difficult and diverse roles of Viola, Lady Macbeth, and Lavinia. She wanted to share Larry’s work, to be given another chance to prove her worthiness, and she wanted to be loved.
For Vivien to want to play opposite Olivier was one thing, but for him to expect her to master and to perform the roles of Lady Macbeth and Lavinia, both seething with horror and madness, seems, considering her recent medical history, to have been a dangerous step. He could not have been unaware of the fact that these three roles would have been an almost impossible challenge to her even before her collapse.
Titus Andronicus is above all else a horror story that takes place in a nightmare world. It is filled with violations and madness. It is an anthology of atrocities. The play had never before been presented at Stratford, perhaps because it was so horrific. But also it had been a matter of debate for generations whether or not, in fact, Shakespeare had actually written this gargoyle tragedy of bloody revenge. The old Roman general, Titus Andronicus, disaster raining down thunderbolts on his wiry gray head, was a role Olivier could act on the grand scale. Titus severs heads with abandon and his own hand in a vain effort to save his two sons. He kills Queen Tamora’s sons and serves their heads to her in a pie, and he finally stabs his daughter, Lavinia, to death before he himself is killed.
In Act I, Lavinia is a spirited character, but by the end of Act II she is led back on stage after having been ravished, her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out—a pathetic mute creature who after three more profoundly moving acts is murdered by her father in the last scene of the play. “Die, die Lavinia,” cries Titus. “And thy shame with thee ...”
Horror, death, and madness were also themes of Macbeth, which Olivier had first played in 1937. He saw it differently now, more as a domestic tragedy really. He felt that an intriguing aspect of the play was the fact that Macbeth had imagination, Lady Macbeth none, and that Macbeth saw what was going to happen and she did not. “That’s what gives her the enormous courage to plot the whole thing,” Olivier explained. “She persuades him, cajoles him, bullies him and he allows himself gradually, bit by bit, to be teased into it. But he knows the result and she doesn’t and it’s sort of—it’s the passage of two people doing that. One going up and one going down.”
As they moved into rehearsal for the season at Stratford, it became obvious that in both Titus and Macbeth Olivier was reaching for a deeper psychological penetrativeness. Certainly with Macbeth he was the psychiatrist probing his own and his lady’s diseased mind. Each of the three plays was to have a different director: John Gielgud for Twelfth Night, Glen Byam Shaw for Macbeth, and Peter Brook for Titus Andronicus. But Olivier came to each production with his own interpretation, and for a director to countermand this would have been like flying directly into the eye of a hurricane. Olivier had always sought the psychological motivations of his characters along with an identification that he could, with the greatest concentration, feel within himself. The summer was therefore spent with madness and its examination.
The initial play of the season was Twelfth Night, which opened in April, and Vivien’s role, Viola, a happy, romantic one. She adored Gielgud, but as director and actress they were not on the same wavelength. Rehearsals became successively more chaotic, with Gielgud changing his mind about interpretations every other day. Olivier was playing his role, Malvolio, in an unusual and realistic manner, as if he were appearing in a psychological drama. Vivien acted her part as romantic comedy. The play seemed shapeless.
Olivier’s lust for acting greatness had finally taken precedence over his love for Vivien. Perhaps this was not a conscious move on his part—the actor had usurped the man. He could rationalize this by noting that Vivien was also being given the chance at three marvelous roles. But somewhere there had to be an awareness that her finest performances were those that allowed her to be charming and beautiful or a fading beauty, as with Scarlett, Emma Hamilton, Juliet, Cleopatra, and Blanche. Viola could have been a successful role for her, but it was impossible to be charming and romantic as Viola when Olivier played Malvolio as a plain, unlikable man, turning away from any familiar interpretation. Much of the laughter that usually sprang from Malvolio’s dialogue was gone, and so her own frivolous reactions as Viola seemed painfully shallow. It was like combining a Wagner opera with a Strauss waltz. Yet Olivier hushed the entire audience in the moment when Malvolio cries out, “I’ll be avenged on the whole pack of you,” with a poignantly accusing and exquisitely studied cry.
The critics spent most of their words lauding Olivier’s performance, where only a few lines were given to Vivien. “Lovely to look at,” said The Times critic, “. . . like some happy hunting boy,” adding, “She is in her romantic way a little too ‘knowing’ to convey the natural and transparent honesty which is designed for those who are dupes of their own sentimentalism.”
There were weekends at Notley between performances. Olivier never was happier than when he was in Notley’s stately library in his smoking jacket, looking every inch the lord of the manor. He would stand at the window with a guest gazing out at the lovely grounds that were his and confide how he would like to have children to play on those lawns. He spoke quite often about children being a man’s only true bid for immortality. Tarquin had received his honors degree (M.A.) in philosophy, politics and economics at Christ Church, Oxford, and he was a frequent visitor at Notley. One weekend he met Quentin Keynes, the explorer, and a tremendous interest in the underdeveloped countries was kindled in the young man, who seemed gripped at the time by a desperate need to feel morally committed to a cause that he could embrace emotionally.
Vivien
was the same marvelous, generous hostess she had always been as she filled the house with friends and cast members. It never ceased to amaze new acquaintances and co-workers how knowledgeable she was on all subjects. In one weekend she would startle guests with her depth of understanding of art, architecture, antiques, music, animals, trees, and flowers. It seemed that whatever came up in discussion Vivien was well acquainted with the subject. She always rotated the groups of cast members so no one would feel slighted. Some, of course, she was closer to than others.
She was quite friendly with Maxine Audley, whom she had asked Gielgud to cast as Olivia in Twelfth Night. (That season Miss Audley also played Lady Macduff in Macbeth, and Tamora, the fiendlike Queen, in Titus Adronicus.) Miss Audley had recently become a mother, but children were a subject Vivien did not care to discuss. “Well, I do long to have another baby,” she confided when pressed. “But I would have to stop work if I became pregnant and do precious little for nine months and I don’t think that would suit my nature.”
If she meant her restlessness, it was much in evidence as they began rehearsals for Macbeth. From the start things seemed to be going badly between Larry and Vivien, and it was noticeable to all the cast. Curiously, everyone thought it indirectly helped their individual performances. Then Peter Finch began turning up more and more frequently at Notley and at Stratford. He and Vivien could be seen hand in hand together all the time. Olivier reacted with a rather shoulder-shrugging attitude. Nonetheless, one could see he was far from happy. It was a great source of gossip among the company and a solemn concern for all, for both were very much loved, and as Macbeth came together on stage so did their anger and hostility. The deeper they got in the production, the more distraught Vivien became. Finch was tremendously supportive, and certainly after his experience with Vivien in Ceylon he knew what he might be faced with at any time.