Vivien Leigh

by Anne Edwards

  It opened on July 29 at the Royal Court Theatre, scene of Olivier’s triumph in The Entertainer. “The evening is Miss Vivien Leigh’s,” wrote The Times critic. “Beautiful, delectably cool and matter of fact, she is mistress of every situation.”

  It was a great personal success for her and should have bolstered her flagging self-confidence, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. Larry came to see her sparkling performance, they walked arm in arm smiling from the theatre, but she went home alone and he returned to Stratford, where he was rehearsing Coriolanus.

  One cannot live nearly twenty-five years with a man and not know when things are wrong. He was and always would be her “beautiful, shining, brilliant darling Larry,” and she loved him better than she loved herself. Yet she had lost him as surely as she had lost her youth.

  There was no use looking back. It only brought pain, heartache, and desperation. What she wanted more than any other one thing in life was for Larry to love her as she now was. Her illness made her feel quite bewildered, curiously more childlike than she had ever been. It would have been all right even if he could have held her in his arms without passion but with gentleness, like a fond, loving friend. She would gladly have welcomed such an arrangement. There were things that only Larry, who had shared her memories and her youth, her love, and her ambitions, could understand.

  She returned alone to Notley that weekend and waited for a call from him that never came. When they next met it was to discuss the feasibility of selling Notley. She agreed. What else could she do? A Notley without Larry would be like a house without lights. But worse was yet to come. He needed time for himself, time to think things out. He suggested they spend the Christmas holidays apart. There seemed little left for her except to hold on to her dignity. As Larry had plans to go to the States for the holidays, Vivien accepted an invitation from Noel Coward to spend Christmas with him and other close friends at his home, Les Avants, in Switzerland.

  Then Ernest became gravely ill, underwent major surgery, and on December 18, died at the age of seventy-five.

  Vivien felt that everything was slipping away from her. Ernest’s death was like some terrifying omen. The past had slipped darkly around an unknown corner and was lost. Gertrude had gone into the beauty business and was doing quite well. She was, in fact, stronger than she had ever been during Ernest’s lifetime, and Vivien leaned heavily upon her.

  Look After Lulu closed shortly after Ernest’s death. Everyone close to Vivien feared that inactivity could be devastating to her, and they were relieved when a decision was made to revive Duel of Angels in New York with Mary Ure in the Claire Bloom role. In fact, except for Peter Wyngarde, the play was entirely recast, with Robert Helpmann taking over the direction. The one role that was not too easy to cast was that of Vivien’s husband in the play. The actor had to be a member of American Actors Equity and yet speak with an English inflection, and he had to be able to stand on his own and not be overwhelmed by Vivien.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Since their meeting backstage during The Skin of Our Teeth, Jack Merivale and Vivien had seen each other only a few times, and that had been in California in 1950, when Vivien was doing Streetcar and Olivier Carrie. At that time Jack had stayed with his stepmother, Gladys Cooper, and had attended two or three of the gala afternoon parties the Oliviers gave on Sundays. Once Gladys had “the most famous couple in the English theatre” to dinner. But in the intervening ten years the paths of Jack and Vivien had somehow not crossed. It was Cecil Tennant who suggested that Jack—as he was a member of American Actors Equity—take on the difficult role of Vivien’s husband in Duel of Angels.

  Tennant had always been Larry’s great good friend, guide, philosopher, benefactor—everything close. To Vivien he was “Uncle Cecil,” and she trusted him utterly. “Of course have Jack Merivale cast,” she agreed.

  There were, though, various delays before their departure for New York, and Merivale, feeling he knew her well enough to do so, rang Vivien up to ask, “Have you any news?” When the play was once again delayed he rang to find out if she knew why. It had something to do with the availability of a proper theatre, she replied. She was in one of her lows, a deep depression, and it came through in her voice. Merivale picked it up. He continued on, joking, trying to be as cheering as he knew how. On impulse he said in closing, “You ought to see the beard I’m growing for the part,” and then suggested that they meet.

  Her reaction to him when they met was extraordinary. For the first time in years she felt alive and female. She adored him almost immediately for saving her. Olivier’s rejection had robbed her of self-esteem. His affair with a young woman cut deeply. There was no way she knew to compete, having exhausted all possibilities open to her. But here was an attractive, talented, intelligent man who from the first moment of their reunion showed signs of being dazzled by her. She listened in deep gratitude to his strong, sure, even voice that seemed to suddenly make things all right. There was a new calm in her where anxiety and fear had been.

  It appeared to Jack that their romance had been fated. There were so many things in their past association only half noticed—shadow moments so fragmentary that one scarcely thought of their meaning—the curious familiarity of flesh when they had embraced fleetingly in greeting, the surprising flame of anger his words had struck in her, the faintest awareness of each other amid a group of people. Beautiful women held his utmost respect. There was something awe-inspiring in a woman so perfect in face, so exquisitely well bred as his stepmother Gladys, his ex-wife Jan Sterling, and Vivien. He was only a young boy when his father married Gladys, who was considered one of the world’s great beauties at the time. Perhaps there was some relevance to that, some envy. Perhaps it was merely a predestined pattern.

  “I ask only a chance for life” is what Vivien’s attitude conveyed to him. She was humble, grateful, responsive to his smallest kindness. He was heady from the reactive warmth of her touch, smile, and voice. There was little doubt in his mind after only a few meetings that he was in love with Vivien and that she felt more than friendship for him. But the Oliviers were a legend, an historic pair, so closely wedded in thought one did not think of one without the other: the Fitzgeralds, the Lunts, the Windsors, and the Oliviers. To step between would be like trying to divide Siamese twins when you did not know which organs they might share. Therefore he kept a certain distance. A polite, careful man, he was always conscious of the feelings of others, always respectful of their imperatives.

  One of his principles was to never interfere with anyone’s marriage, and he instinctively felt that Vivien’s allegiance was still with Olivier, for she spoke constantly about him. There was more than one picture of him in her dressing room and near her bed and in her purse. It was as though she was carrying around the ghost of a dead man.

  One day, directly after they arrived in New York, Jack turned up at rehearsal wearing a plaid suit. “I love that suit,” she said, her eyes misting, a faint smile on her lips. “Larry has got one like it,” she added softly.

  She took an apartment at Hampshire House in New York, and each evening after rehearsal Jack Merivale and Bobby Helpmann would go back to her flat for a drink. By the time the company was ready to move to New Haven for its out-of-town tryout, Vivien and Jack accepted their own emotions and brought their love out into the open. In New Haven they were together all the time. Vivien seemed as astonished at her own happiness as she was deeply moved by Jack’s. “This will be our town,” she confessed to him, and between performances he took her all over it—to the Yale campus, the galleries, the green parks, the waterfront. He was deeply and sincerely in love, and Vivien reacted to his tenderness like a rejected child might to an overwhelming show of affection.

  By the time they returned to New York he was aware of many of her characteristics. Her loyalty for one; no one could say a word against Larry in her presence. Her quite extraordinary generosity for another; he had to be careful not to admire anything or she would buy it for him. T
he afternoon of their opening at the Helen Hayes Theatre he insisted, “Now look, I don’t want anything from Cartier or Tiffany—nothing like that. I don’t want any jewelry. If you want to celebrate our opening give me a packet of soap. No nonsense.”

  She promised to do as he asked. But then Jack had a time thinking to himself what he might give her. Recalling that Cartier made an inexpensive little gold head of St. Genesius, the patron saint of actors and musicians, he bought one and gave it to her. The minute she saw the Cartier wrapping, she exclaimed, “I think I’ve been double-crossed!” Vivien simply could not stand to be outdone. Not long after she ordered a matching piece for him.

  The play opened on April 19, 1960. Vivien trembled on Jack’s arm as they made their entrance together. What outsiders never knew was that in her low periods almost anything and everything frightened her, and it required great courage for her to see people, attend parties, and especially to go out on stage. She stood at center stage trembling and speechless. Then the entire house rose, giving her a tremendous ovation. It went on and on, Jack stepped away and it was all hers. After the curtain the street was brimming with fans and police on horseback. Vivien stepped out from the stage door to cheering crowds. One would have thought her spirits would have raised enormously. She had been brilliant in a role and a play that she greatly respected, and had done so without Larry. To Jack’s stunned surprise she ended the evening in near hysteria.

  Like everyone else, he had read the headlines about her being flown out of Hollywood under sedation and back to London. He knew about Elephant Walk, but that was years before. There had even been rumors that got back to him before Duel of Angels; but they had been together nearly six solid weeks now and though he had felt a pervading sadness at times, and was surprised when only one or two drinks after theatre made her overwrought, he had not been alerted to the truth, partly because of the years of their friendship. She had always been restless, nervous, unable to sleep, uniquely exhilarated and exhilarating. It was a great portion of her tremendous personal sex appeal and her magnetism as a performer. He could remember nights in Chicago, San Francisco, and New York during Romeo and Juliet, the Chinese Checkers game at Sneden’s Landing, the way she sparkled at parties, smoked to excess, and ran, ran, ran. None of it had been normal behavior. But then she was no ordinary person.

  “Why can’t I have a decent, clean illness?” she cried. She hated illness of any sort, had absolutely no sympathy with it—not hers or Ernest’s or Larry’s or Gertrude’s or Jack’s—not really anybody’s. If you were ill you just got over it and you ignored it or you got it fixed quietly with dignity. Having something mentally wrong was shameful.

  It was out now. Jack knew she was suffering a mental illness. “Why should you feel ashamed?” Jack asked. “What an example you are to so many people who suffer from this, and to think you can lead this successful life, battling against this. It’s a most marvelous example to any and all, and you should be a figure of hope and encouragement to thousands of people.”

  She agreed diffidently, but it was obvious to Jack that she did not really accept his rationale. But somehow his constancy, his tenderness, and his unfailing patience quite won her heart; yet her hopes and her desires for the future still rested on Larry. His portrait remained by her bed and on her dressing table; and though she wrote him that Jack was in love with her and she deeply in love with him, she begged Olivier to give her some sign of his plans for the future and if they in any way revolved about or included her.

  Helpmann was now coming to Jack to enlist his help almost daily. “You’ve really got to calm her down,” he begged, for she had slipped into some of the same behavioral lapses that had been rampant during the Titus Andronicus tour. She had to rest, but she simply would not go to bed and she refused to stop drinking. The illness just drove her on and on. “Everything seems to go so fast,” she cried.

  Olivier was told of her condition, and he enlisted the help of Irene Selznick, who was in New York and whom Jack had never met. Suddenly, Jack received a phone call from Irene asking him to please come to see her alone at her apartment to discuss Vivien and he went. “You know you have got a life of your own,” she warned him. “She’s ill. Mental.” Jack did not seem in the least deterred. “Well, I’m going to invite her up to my country place on Sunday. Will you come and bring her? And after lunch I can have a long talk with her. She needs treatment.”

  Jack did accompany Vivien to Irene Selznick’s home, and Vivien agreed to go the following day for a series of shock treatments. Monday morning Irene went with them to a doctor who administered shock in his office. Vivien let out a cry from the treatment room, and Jack, waiting outside, heard it and rose to go in. Irene pulled him back. “No, don’t go,” she insisted.

  That night Vivien played with a racking headache and burn marks on her forehead (not too uncommon when shock treatment is employed). Not once did she falter in her lines. She had “the courage of a lion, really,” Jack recalls. The next day she returned for another treatment. The excruciating headaches were still plaguing her. “I never feel this way after Dr. Conachy’s treatment,” she kept repeating. She was agitated, jumpy, unable to sit. Jack was certain she would run out before the treatment, and the doctor had not arrived yet. “Let’s walk around the block,” he suggested.

  By the time they had returned to the front of the building she had made up her mind she was not going to have a treatment. Jack managed to get her into the office and the doctor came out. She was hostile and incoherent. Nothing the doctor said could get her to accompany him into the treatment room. Suddenly she lurched away. “No! What I’ll do is ring Dr. Conachy in London. I want to speak to Dr. Conachy!”

  She credited Conachy with bringing her back to life. He was the one who had said, “You are ill. I can help you.” He had been the first one who had helped her, and she trusted him. She was perfectly coherent when Dr. Conachy came on the line. Whatever he said seemed to calm her and she handed the telephone finally to the other doctor. This time the shock treatments were abandoned and medication was substituted, but the manic phase, therefore, took longer to pass than usual. Incredibly, she appeared every night, and no matter how distressed she would be in her dressing room, a transformation would begin in the wings and she would go out on stage and give a brilliant performance. The play was now reblocked, however, so that Jack was as close at hand as possible.

  She was becoming extremely dependent on him, and her love for him was growing each day. He was tall, lean, dark, and handsome, a no-nonsense type who managed at the same time to be warm, tender, and caring. He came from her world, and Vivien admired his lineage. His father had been the first Professor Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion in America, and his stepmother was one of England’s greatest and most beautiful actresses. He was a few years Vivien’s junior and yet easily seemed Larry’s contemporary. What he did not possess was Olivier’s mystique, the charismatic personality that not only dazzled but stirred and uprooted the most violent of emotions. She was overwhelmingly grateful to him. She wanted him to know how much his love meant to her, and so she showered him with gifts and letters expressing her own love.

  Saturday, May 19th, 1960

  [It was, in fact, the 14th]

  My Darling—why I have written May 19th on this little present I don’t know—but as I love you every day of the year—it matters not— I hope very much that you will like it—use it—and not lose it—it is to thank you for your kindness and goodness to me. It is to tell you that I love you—my beloved.

  Vivien.

  On May 19, the day she had wrongly dated her letter to Jack, she received a long and moving letter from Olivier. He and Joan Plowright were appearing opposite each other in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros at the Royal Court. They were very much in love. Joan was asking for a divorce from her husband, and Olivier, after much and great soul-searching, was asking Vivien to release them both from an obviously untenable relationship. Cindy Dietz was with her when she opened the letter. At first
Vivien could not believe the contents. Then, distressed greatly and not well to start with, she became somewhat hysterical. Finally, she quieted. “What are you going to do?” Cindy asked.

  “Whatever Larry wants me to do” was Vivien’s immediate reply.

  By the time of her evening performance she had issued a statement to the press: “Lady Olivier wishes to say that Sir Laurence has asked for a divorce in order to marry Miss Joan Plowright. She will naturally do whatever he wishes.”

  At nine-thirty the next morning reporters wakened Olivier with the news of Vivien’s announcement. He was appalled. His letter had, after all, been of a very private nature, and he had expected a return letter from Vivien, at which point they could have taken the next step. This way Joan had been publicly named as corespondent, which, since she was still married, created a somewhat embarrassing situation. In the same circumstances years before, Jill had acted with more discretion. Olivier had no immediate response to the press other than “I have no comment to make—literally none. I have to have time to think.”

  Joan, who was labeled by the British press as “the black-stockinged darling of the Vital theatre,’ ” drove away from her flat in Ovington Square, Kensington, moments later and was gone the entire day, presumably at her parents’ home in Scunthorpe. She and Olivier were due to appear that night at the Royal Court Theatre.

  Olivier left the flat on Eaton Square at iunchtime, still refusing to answer reporters’ questions. When he returned that evening and found the press corps still gathered at his door he gave them a bottle of whiskey. “Have a drink with me,” he offered charmingly, adding, “I’m sorry to have been so uncooperative.” He put his arm around the shoulders of one man, and the reporters followed him into the flat. When they came out they had no more information than they had previously.