The principal victim of the play was Vivien Leigh herself. Olivier believed that he had done a masterly job of direction. “If it hadn’t been for me Vivien would have been no good in ‘Streetcar’,” he claimed. “This sounds like a terrible lack of humility; I’m sorry … You sometimes need a guy who knows what the fuck he’s talking about and can tell you how to get it, and whatever else I am, I know the hell of a lot about the business. I’m very, very good at giving people the right advice.” But in claiming responsibility for her remarkable performance he also accepted responsibility for the damage it did her. Instead of shedding the burdens of the role at the same time as she took off her make-up, Leigh seemed somehow to have become locked into Blanche Dubois and was permanently scarred by the experience. “I think it was the beginning of the illness, the seeds of the illness,” wrote Olivier. It was neither the beginning nor the seeds of the illness, and on other occasions Olivier accepted that his wife’s condition could be traced back for many years, but the strain of playing the part marked a notable step in her disintegration.8
“Streetcar” was an immense success with the critics and, still more, with the public. More than ten thousand people applied for tickets on the first night; people were queuing for seats in the gallery three days before. Olivier came in for some criticism for sponsoring so shocking a play. In a speech J. B. Priestley remarked that the world of show business encompassed everything from the bearded lady or elephants playing hockey to Vivien Leigh in “A Streetcar Named Desire”. Olivier complained bitterly about this juxtaposition. It encouraged the sort of audience, he said, who normally went only to the Windmill (a Soho theatre celebrated for the display of naked women) and who “sat squirming, giggling, coughing, hoping for the worst to happen. This had made Vivien’s task, already cruelly arduous, almost impossible to bear.” It seems, in fact, unlikely that many habitués of the Windmill found their way to Vivien Leigh’s performance but criticism of this kind from so august a figure as Priestley increased her unease and made her still more vulnerable to the self-doubts that consumed her.9
The final curtain fell on “Streetcar” in June 1950. “I think I’m almost more grateful about it than she is,” wrote Olivier. “It’s been a most ghastly strain for her, poor darling.” The strain was not yet over for there was still the film to be made, but it was in the nature of acting for the cinema that the emotional pressure of the stage performance was relieved if not removed. It was also made more acceptable for Vivien Leigh by the fact that she was playing opposite Marlon Brando. It proved a memorable experience. Though far less experienced and versatile, Brando was one of the few actors who could match, even surpass Olivier for sheer explosive power. He also had a reputation for always sleeping with any actress who played opposite him. But not Vivien Leigh, it seems: he is quoted as having said, “I was so anxious to bed my co-star that my teeth ached,” but Olivier was also in Hollywood at the time and “I liked him too much to invade his chicken coop.” Brando, with Danny Kaye, Henry Ainley and others, is among the men with whom it is alleged that Olivier had a homosexual fling. Olivier to some extent brought this on his own head by his cryptic reference in his autobiography to his “nearly passionate involvement” with another man. He went on to say, however, that he had never had any sort of homosexual relationship. In his memoirs and elsewhere he frequently accused himself of far more serious offences; there is no reason to believe that he lied in this respect. He would hardly have bothered to deny the charge if it had been true: he saw nothing reprehensible about going to bed with another man, it was merely that the idea did not appeal to him. A high proportion of his theatrical friends and acquaintances were homosexual: not admitting publicly to it and thereby risking prosecution, but taking little trouble to conceal their leanings. Olivier was intrigued – he took a somewhat salacious interest in other people’s love lives and offended Alec Guinness by cross-examining him on whether Gielgud had or had not tried to seduce him – but he felt none the worse of them if their tastes lay in that direction.10
Gielgud himself was no less curious. He was fascinated to read in Donald Spoto’s biography that Olivier was supposed to have had an affair with Danny Kaye. “Quite unexpected news,” he wrote, but then he remembered that Kaye had plied him with drink at his home in Hollywood. “Perhaps he conceived making a pass at me and thought better of it when he actually saw me … You never know, and I never shall.” Others among Olivier’s friends who were quite as well qualified to speak on such matters, thought they did know. Noël Coward, having established that his godson, Tarquin Olivier, was not on offer, confessed that Tarquin’s father had proved equally obdurate. Terence Rattigan tried to persuade Olivier to play Diaghilev: “Yes, I know … you’re frightfully normal and couldn’t bring yourself to love a mere boy … but there’s noone else who could play it or should play it.” Cecil Beaton, in his diary, said that he had seldom come across “someone who has so successfully mastered the conundrums of his life … He’s 100 per cent male and sure of the basic things in his life.” The evidence most often cited by those who claim Olivier was bisexual is a remark by Vivien Leigh to the effect that Robert Helpmann had shared a bed with her and her husband, but this, even if true, is no proof of homosexuality. Helpmann himself claims Olivier once said: “I’m sorry to say this in front of you, Cocky, but I don’t think there is any place in the theatre for queers” – a curious observation given the sexual predilections of many of those at the Old Vic but one which Helpmann claimed to understand.11
Olivier’s appetite for women, on the other hand, was rapacious and enduring. He could hardly wait to get every new acquaintance into bed. It has been said that, when he got them there, his performance was not particularly distinguished, but that does not seem to have stopped them coming back for more. “I don’t know anybody who had more sex appeal,” said Rosemary Harris – Elena to Olivier’s Astrov in “Uncle Vanya” in the celebrated Chichester programme: “Everybody, whatever sex you were, whether you were a cat, a dog or a mouse, you were in love with him.” “You were and are the DISHIEST man who ever lived,” announced Claire Bloom, who had a brief affair with him. To those unacquainted with theatrical mannerisms he gave some grounds for doubting his virility. He could be extremely camp; he was by instinct tactile, quick to lay an affectionate arm on the shoulder of another man or woman; his epistolary style, even by luvvie standards, was extravagant – “Darling boy,” he began a letter to David Niven, ending “All my love dearest friend in the world, your devoted Larry”. Nobody who knew him well, however, can have doubted that he loved women, lusted after women and would have considered a sexual relationship with another man a pitiful substitute for the real thing.12
*
As a father Olivier knew he had been inadequate. Since his divorce from Jill Esmond he had barely seen his son. He dutifully sent foreign postage stamps to him when he was aboard, he was conscientious about birthday presents, but meetings between the two were rare. “Some years ago,” he told Tarquin in 1951, “I arranged my life so that I could never be a father to you in the accepted sense of the word.” Now he felt he should be making up for lost time. Vivien Leigh helped in the process; indeed, she was much better than he was at establishing a relationship with Tarquin. Olivier found it difficult to have any sensible conversation with a schoolboy. Jill Esmond urged him to make greater efforts: “He very much wants to get closer to you … He said that if in the next two years or so you and he still remain strangers, after that it would be too late … He has reached an age when Mum ought, for the time being at least, to take a back seat – his problems are male and should be discussed with a male.” Olivier was left with a feeling of guilt, but still had neither the time nor the will to do much about it. Nor did the business of dayto-day communication get easier. “I do hope you don’t mind my being untalkative,” he wrote apologetically. “I am rather prone to long silences, I know, which makes me jolly dull company at times.” Tarquin, of course, was left suspecting that it was he who was the
dull company; an additional cause for unease in their faltering relationship.13
But Olivier was still concerned about his son’s future. Shortly after he was ejected from the Old Vic, he told Jill Esmond that he was determined to own a theatre before he died, “with the vague idea that Tarkie might like to inherit it”. He never achieved this ambition but he at least made a start in that direction when, in 1949, he took a four-year lease on the St James’s Theatre. It was a decisive step forward for the limited company which he had set up in 1946, Laurence Olivier Productions, usually referred to as L.O.P. In origin L.O.P. was little more than a tax avoidance scheme whereby the Oliviers could channel all their earnings into a company and make that company responsible for most of their expenses. At its first meeting Anthony Bushell, one of his closest friends, was appointed business manager. Cecil Tennant, the managing director, announced at the second meeting that £2,000 had been borrowed from Laurence Olivier, interest being paid at the commercial rate, and that the first substantial undertaking had been the purchase of a Rolls Royce. It was all very cosy, certainly legal, and, from a tax point of view, beneficial. At first the only directors were the Oliviers; as the activities of the company became more ambitious, Roger Furse and Alexander Korda were added to the Board. Now, in occupation of the St James’s Theatre, L.O.P. was taking a new initiative. Leslie Banks wrote to say how thrilled he was that “an Actor has managed to PRISE his way back into real Actor Management again. It is the reward for all the imagination, the vitality, the team-work, the loyalty to a craft, the family feeling in a curious way, of us English actors.”14
The pity is that imagination, vitality and teamwork were not enough. The St James’s Theatre, though superficially attractive, had bad acoustics and sight lines so deplorable that only once, when the Oliviers were playing “Caesar and Cleopatra” eight feet up centre stage on the paws of the Sphinx, were both leading players visible to the whole of the audience. Financially speaking, Olivier was not a good manager. He would never accept second-best, whether in terms of cast, scenery or costumes, and the cost of his productions was so great that, even with a full house, the margin of profit was only £60 a week. Perhaps most of all the age of the actor-manager was over, not because there was no-one fit to wear the mantle of Booth or Irving but because, as Tyrone Guthrie put it, “the garment has become unwearable. A general devolution of tasks has taken place. The production of a play is now undertaken by a corps of specialists.” Even with a powerful machine behind him Olivier was to find it overwhelmingly difficult to act, direct and at the same time run the National Theatre. At the St James’s Theatre he was working more or less single-handed.15
To make matters worse, his choice of plays, though not always unsuccessful, failed to generate any great popular success. The first, James Bridie’s new play “Daphne Laureola”, was in fact put on before he had acquired the St James’s Theatre and was still at the Old Vic. Wyndham’s, where it first played, was back-to-back with the New Theatre where the Old Vic was still based. It starred Edith Evans and there was a part for Olivier’s Australian protégé, Peter Finch. Harold Hobson was awestruck by the audacity of this enterprise. “It is doubtful,” he wrote, “if in the 350-year history of the London theatre, there exists any really comparable case: when a world-famous actor, appearing himself in one theatre, presented a world-famous actress in a rival attraction at a theatre only a few yards away … Sir Laurence unites in himself an influence in the cinema and the theatre never before concentrated in the hands of one man.” The play itself was less remarkable than the circumstances of its production but it did well enough to encourage Olivier to move into his own theatre.16
For his first play at the St James’s he turned to the most fashionable dramatist of the day, Christopher Fry. Viewed in hindsight, it is hard to understand how this sophisticated, frothy and basically frivolous versifier was once ranked with T. S. Eliot as the inaugurator of a new age of poetic drama. His words sounded very nice, though – even if he did not have much to say – and “Venus Observed” gave the public what it wanted and had come to expect. Olivier’s extravagance was liberally displayed. He himself headed a powerful cast, a six-piece orchestra was employed, the women’s dresses were all changed after the first night, Roger Furse let himself go with the sets. The author was expelled from rehearsals after the first read-through: “Since I’m both acting and directing,” Olivier told him, “I should only show off if you were here.” Accepting this somewhat dubious premise, Fry withdrew and the next thing he heard was that the dress rehearsal was scheduled for the following day. He rang up to find the time. “Well, you’re a nice author, I must say,” said Olivier. “Never coming near us!” “Larry, I’ve been waiting for you to ask me to come,” Fry protested. “Well, it’s too late now.” It was too late: the production was not at all what Fry had been expecting, but though the two men talked until four in the morning, not much could be done about it. Olivier had other, to him more pressing matters on his mind. On the one occasion outside the theatre when Fry thought a serious discussion was beginning, Olivier’s only question was: “What sort of nose do you think … ?” “It’s a wonderful success,” Olivier told Garson Kanin, “and I am so very happy in what I like to kid myself is my own theatre.” The play ran for seven months, which was success enough, but by the end of its run it had not generated enough profit to justify the enterprise on commercial grounds. For the cast, though, it had been a rewarding experience. “The last six months have been for me the most exciting, inspiring, and indeed the happiest that I can remember,” wrote Denholm Elliott. “Thank you for teaching me so much, so patiently, and for pretending not to notice my nervousness at the beginning of the run.”17
Rex Harrison took over Olivier’s role when the play opened in the United States. “Larry and I got on splendidly,” Harrison wrote. “I’d never worked with him before, and now I found him a marvellous director.” In fact, according to Patrick Garland, the two men, “so similar in many ways, egocentric, supremely gifted, insecure, envious, deeply attractive to women”, disliked each other. When Harrison asked whether some role could be found for him at the National Theatre, Olivier rebuffed him: “For the sake of the amour propre of the company I do not want to practise more than I can help a constant settling on top of them of visiting stars.” The philosophy was sound enough but it would have been more convincing if Olivier had not already engaged Peter O’Toole, every inch a visiting star, for his first production. Harrison, anyway, was not pleased. When some years later he was invited to play opposite Olivier in “The Dance of Death” his reply is said to have been: “Dance of Death? Only on your grave, dear boy.”18
In the first years of L.O.P. at the St James’s that was as good as it got. One aborted disaster was “The Damascus Blade” – a play by a new writer called Bridget Boland. Noël Coward dismissed it as “badly constructed, fairly tedious” and the public concurred. John Mills had been persuaded to play the principal role and, like others before him, said that he had never before encountered a director “who had so meticulously worked out every single move and every single piece of business”. On the whole he thought the system was successful but, personally he would have preferred “more freedom at the early rehearsals”. Whether because of or in spite of Olivier’s directing – probably the latter – the play limped painfully around the provinces. By the time it reached Edinburgh it was clear a London opening would be calamitous. What followed illustrates Olivier’s striking propensity to rewrite history to suit his view of what should have happened. In his memoirs he says that John Mills got cold feet and begged him not to bring it to London; Olivier was reluctant to let down the author but “valued Johnnie’s friendship too much to refuse”. In the interviews on which his memoirs were to be based his recollections were still more stark. It had the makings of an excellent play, but Mills “hadn’t the courage to go on with it … I hated giving way… He was unfortunately a great friend; if he’d not been I’d have said: ‘You fucking get in there and
earn your money!!’” In fact he wrote to Mills: “Listen, Johnnie, you are my dearest friend. The last thing I want to do is to bring you into town and have you find yourself with a flop on your hands. Would you be very upset if we accepted defeat and called it off?” To Leslie Banks he explained that the play “didn’t add up, if you know what I mean”, and was not “a worthy enough thing for dear Johnnie’s return to London”.19
Increasingly Olivier seemed to be casting around in search of something that would fill his theatre. He asked Evelyn Waugh if he could have an option on The Loved One, his novel about American funeral practices. Olivier “thinks it will make a film”, Waugh told his agent incredulously. “He must be insane.” (In fact it was made into a film – not very successfully in 1965 with John Gielgud in the cast.) Waugh thought Olivier’s idea so eccentric that he asked Anthony Bushell whether there had been a muddle and the offer should have referred to Brideshead Revisited: “If so I should be most excited, as I believe there is a really good film in it and an excellent part for Lady Olivier, tho’ I am less sure about Sir Laurence.” Olivier had probably not even read The Loved One. Certainly he did not mean Brideshead; it was to be more than thirty years before he played the tiny but imposing role of the aged Lord Marchmain in the television series.20
Don’t come back to Britain, Olivier urged a female acquaintance who had written to him, presumably hoping that he would offer her a job. “Life is not at all easy. There are restrictions, there is austerity amounting to what would certainly seem like hardship to people not used to it. We have taken rather a toss with our last two plays, and so are having to be careful in any case.” L.O.P. was not on the rocks, but it was close to them. Something special would be needed for 1951, the year of the Festival of Britain.21
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