William Gaskill, who had been one of the most uncertain about Olivier’s suitability for the Royal Court, was the first to admit how misjudged his doubts had been. “It would have been very easy for the work of the Court to have been a fringe activity performed by a group of left-wing cranks,” he told Olivier. “The moment you decided to play Archie Rice it became a movement of importance to the theatre.” Olivier knew that whatever he had given to the production was more than balanced by what he had gained from it. Before the first night he sent an effusive letter to Osborne. “Thank you for the thrilling and lovely play …” he wrote. “Thank you for the most deeply engaging part, perhaps barring only Macbeth and Lear, that I can remember – certainly the most enjoyable … Hope I don’t fuck it up for you tonight.” He did not fuck it up; on the contrary he produced a performance of such startling versatility that the critics were left struggling for new superlatives: “You will not see more magnificent acting than this anywhere in the world,” wrote Harold Hobson. In a sense Osborne’s fears were borne out; the play was distorted by Olivier’s presence. “Olivier is fabulous in the part of Archie Rice and wonderful to act with,” Joan Plowright, who took over from Dorothy Tutin as Rice’s daughter, told her parents, “but the rest of the play’s characters don’t really mean very much.” Yet Osborne had no complaints. His compliments to Olivier were quite as fulsome as Olivier’s to him: “Whatever might become of me in the future, nothing could deprive me of the memory of your tremendous, overwhelming performance, nor the experience of working with such greatness.”26
But though each man knew how much they owed the other, they never got on well. When the play went to New York Osborne put a paragraph in the programme denouncing the American theatre critics. Olivier felt that this could only harm its prospects. “It was the action of a cunt,” Olivier observed, “but then he was a cunt.” While Olivier’s performance was lavishly praised, the play itself got a poor press. “Darling heart, they’re not good, not good at all,” Olivier told Osborne after reading the reviews. “Well, not good for you, anyway. I shouldn’t read them.” He said it without a trace of irony, Osborne remembered, “only concern”. It would be surprising if the concern was not tinged with a touch of Schadenfreude. Olivier himself was disappointed because the Tony award which he felt he ought to have been given was instead awarded to Ralph Bellamy, who was playing Franklin Roosevelt elsewhere on Broadway: “As a performance, well, to put it mildly, I didn’t think it outshone mine.” The excuse was that he had just been given a special prize for his performances of Shakespeare. “I do congratulate you on the invention of this wonderful prize,” he said sourly in his acceptance speech, “and the effective removal of my candidature for the Tony …”27
Some people were shocked by what they saw as Olivier’s indecorous descent from the pedestal of classical theatre. “I appeal to you,” wrote the Rev. David Parton, “to put the wretched, vulgar thing behind you.” But for every one who deplored the vulgarity, a hundred wondered at the exceptional versatility and, indeed, courage of an actor who, at the age of fifty, was prepared to thrust forward into unknown territory and risk his reputation in the quest for a new horizon.28
*
One hazard during rehearsals was the frequent attendance of Vivien Leigh. She would slip in unobtrusively, sit in the dress circle and make no attempt to advertise her presence; but the fact that she was there was disturbing; as distracting, as Osborne rather bizarrely put it, “as an underwear advertisement at a Lesbians for Peace meeting”. No doubt she paid particular attention to Dorothy Tutin: Olivier’s daughter on the stage and, as she no doubt knew, his mistress off it. But such minor escapades cost her no real anxiety. She would have much more cause for worry a few months later. Tutin withdrew, to be replaced by the rising star of the Royal Court, Joan Plowright. Olivier had first seen her in “The Country Wife”, had been immensely impressed by her acting and enchanted by her appearance and personality. He would have taken steps to ensure that she took over from Tutin, but fortunately found that the management had reached the same conclusion with no help from him. She for her part had worshipped Olivier in the film of “Henry V” and then, under the influence of the Royal Court, come to see him as a fustian figure, more a celebrity than a serious actor, even perhaps a bit of a ham. When Olivier came backstage after “The Country Wife” she was partly awestruck, partly derisory. Once she was enlisted to play in “The Entertainer” and began the rehearsals that all changed. “He got down on the floor with us,” she said. “Larry won us over with sheer talent, and when you have that it pulls everyone up on their toes. There was no side about him – no nonsense at all. His sleeves were rolled up and his braces were showing. He was one of us.”29
By the time “The Entertainer” opened in New York they were most evidently in love. Joan Plowright viewed the relationship with some caution. She knew Olivier’s reputation for casual liaisons which ended after a few months; she was resolved that she would not be just one more name on that dissatisfying list. Vivien Leigh too was still on the scene: Plowright knew that Olivier felt that his marriage must be near its end but she knew too of Leigh’s terrifying instability and Olivier’s feeling that he should not do anything which would precipitate a crisis. Things were to move slowly and uncertainly. Nearly two years after the run of “The Entertainer” in New York came to an end Olivier stayed with Noël Coward at his house in France. “He was absolutely sweet and at his most beguiling best,” Coward wrote in his diary. “I really am becoming more and more convinced that he won’t go back to Vivien. He’s happier than I’ve seen him for years. I hope he won’t get a divorce and marry Joan Plowright, but I have grave fears that he will.”30
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Marking Time
Between the last performance of “The Entertainer” in May 1958 and the start of rehearsals for the Chichester Festival in March 1962, Olivier’s working life was relatively uneventful. To describe as “uneventful” a period which included four plays, four films for the cinema and two for television may sound a misnomer, but even though one of the plays and two of the films were of some importance they were, in Olivier’s mind, secondary to a longer-term development with which he was resolved to be associated: the opening of the National Theatre.
There had been talk of a National Theatre since the mid-nineteenth century; foundation stones had been laid, dug up and re-laid; the foundation and development of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon had clouded the issue – was this perhaps what had been intended all along? In 1948 the scheme had taken on a new life when the London County Council made available a site on the South Bank and, in the following year, while Olivier was in Australia, the Government pledged financial support. Still there was quibbling, haggling, one step taken backwards for every two forward. Without the resolute pressure of a group of devotees, notably Oliver Lyttelton, who in 1954 became Lord Chandos, the process would have stalled indefinitely. As it was it remained falteringly alive. By 1956 Chandos and Lord Esher were joint Trustees. They felt they needed someone from the theatrical profession to lend some practical expertise to their deliberations. The obvious choice was Tyrone Guthrie, but he proved reluctant. “There are plenty of old duffers around who would jump at the chance … It needs new blood,” he ruled. There was no guarantee that whoever was appointed a trustee would be the first Director of the National Theatre, but he would plainly be well placed to challenge for the job. The Director would have, in Guthrie’s view, to be “someone of an almost heroic stature: infinitely patient (to deal with committees), of an unassailable theatrical reputation (to attract the support of the political establishment) but also sufficiently flexible to absorb the ideas and style of the new generation”. Esher and Chandos did not have this job description to hand when they turned to Olivier, but they must have had in mind the possibility, even probability that whoever they asked to join them would end up in charge of whatever National Theatre finally opened on the South Bank. Olivier put it more modest
ly. “We don’t believe you’ll be much use,” he alleged Esher had told him, “but what we need is a glamour-puss, and you’re it.”1
Olivier later claimed to have had some doubts about the desirability of an institutionalised National Theatre. If he did, he kept them to himself. When Kenneth Rae, the Secretary of the Board, wrote in June 1958 to announce that Olivier had been elected as a Trustee to serve on “what is really the only important Committee, the Joint Council of the National Theatre and the Old Vic”, he accepted with alacrity. It might be many months before there was a meeting, Rae warned him. In fact the pace quickened, there were more meetings than Olivier could conveniently attend and by early 1960 the fact that he would be the first Director had been agreed if not yet crystallised in a legal contract. Long before then it had been the pole star of his ambitions. Anything that he undertook in these uneasy years was of secondary importance: the main challenge lay ahead.2
One man who, in his own mind at least, was a plausible rival for the role of directing a National Theatre was Donald Wolfit. Wolfit had far more experience than Olivier at running a theatre company and was one of the few other actors of his generation who was capable of greatness.
Olivier disliked him heartily and would have been appalled if Wolfit had been preferred to him for the National, yet there was still some solidarity between them, evidence that, however much actors might vie with each other, they do make common cause when assailed by those outside the profession. Early in 1957 Kenneth Tynan reviewed Wolfit’s performance in Henry de Montherlant’s “Malatesta”. Wolfit, he concluded, was not up to the part; Olivier would have been the better choice. For some reason not immediately obvious to the layman Wolfit considered this line of criticism impermissible. “Can nothing be done about this man Tynan?” he asked Olivier. “What a generation of critics for bitter venom!” Olivier claimed to be outraged. “I don’t read Mister T. myself,” he told Wolfit (a statement that was not entirely accurate), “but what he had said was shown me by friends.” He had intended anyway to write to Tynan “to point out the error of his ways. It was the first letter I have ever written to a dramatic critic [another questionable assertion], so you may judge that I felt strongly moved. I did not make it a public letter as it is against my principles to cross swords with the bastards.” He was as good as his word. Comparisons between actors, he complained to Tynan, though sometimes inevitable were invariably odious. This one was gratuitous, as well. Anyway “I must beg you to remind yourself that Donald Wolfit is an actor of considerable qualities who has given some very greatly admired performances and, as a courageous Actor-Manager, has rendered in his own way substantial services to the cause of the theatre.” The words “in his own way” gave a certain ambiguity to this testimonial, but it satisfied Wolfit, who wrote a grateful letter. “We don’t really know each other,” he concluded, “and I wish we did. Lunch at the Beefsteak?” It would be pleasant to record that this overture was well received and many happy lunches followed. The row with Tynan was still rumbling on, however, when Olivier in Zagreb got the news that Wolfit had been knighted. He had already been awarded the C.B.E., Olivier told Maxine Audley, “‘And that gives him precedence over me!’ He was furious.”3
*
One of the more interesting films Olivier made in this period was an adaptation of Bernard Shaw’s “The Devil’s Disciple”. He co-starred with the American duo, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas. He said in his memoirs that he was tired, depressed and far from at his best; also, that he found it impossible to remember which of his co-actors was which – he habitually addressed Burt Lancaster as “Kirk”. Privately he admitted that Lancaster, who was co-producer but not director, infuriated him by forever making suggestions as to how he should play his part, the British soldier General Burgoyne. In the end he took Lancaster aside and said apologetically: “I wonder if you could help me. I’m sure I’m being stupid but I’m finding it a little difficult to apprehend what it is you’re trying to say to me. Do me a favour, let’s go somewhere quiet and you read to me the scene as it ought to be done.” Flattered, Lancaster obliged and launched into his rendering, then became self-conscious under Olivier’s quizzical gaze, and came to a stammering halt.4
The following year Olivier was reunited with Kirk Douglas in the film “Spartacus”, a no-expenses-spared epic in which Olivier played a Roman general and Douglas a heroic Thracian slave. This time it was Douglas who took on the role of mentor; again Olivier became irritated, again he invited his co-star to give his rendering of the part, again the American broke down in the face of Olivier’s rapt attention. “It was all very shocking and very childish,” Olivier admitted, “but I didn’t care to be taught acting by those two.” He had read Howard Fast’s novel on which the film was based and thought that it had tremendous potential, but when the script arrived he decided it was “pretty awful. The more money they pour into a film, the more ordinary and conventional they make it.” Fortunately a fair amount of the money came his way – $250,000, to be precise – and since the part made small demands on his skills and he had old friends like Peter Ustinov and Jean Simmons in the cast, it was a relatively painless way of earning his living. Kirk Douglas, he told Tarquin, was a good actor, but “he does not feel heroic enough unless he is being fearfully physical all the time, consequently the thing is gummed up with callisthenics and flagellation”.5
Charlton Heston was another American super-star with whom Olivier found himself dealing. Heston had already played four major roles on Broadway when, early in 1960, he appeared in Benn Levy’s “The Tumbler”, with Olivier as director. He might therefore have resented Olivier’s somewhat dictatorial style. Unlike Lancaster and Douglas, however, he viewed Olivier with some awe. “Today I lunched with Larry, which I’ve not yet been able to call him, of course,” he wrote at the end of 1959, when rehearsals were just getting under way. He was convinced that Olivier somehow had access to the elixir which would transform him into a major actor: “If I’m ever to reach any special creativity, it surely must happen with this part, this director.” It never happened though: “Everything Olivier says adds a touch, and he’s unfailingly good humored and light about it, but the sad fact is I’m not measuring up to my standards, thus can hardly be reaching his.” He appealed for help to his director: “Star acting is really a question of hypnosis,” Olivier told him, “of yourself and your audience.” Heston’s hypnotic powers proved faltering: “This plane’s like an overloaded bomber straining down the runway,” he moaned, “I can’t lift it.” The bomber crashed, the reviews were disastrous, at the first-night party at Sardi’s “the knowledge of failure seeped like ink through the happy drinkers”. “I don’t know if ‘The Tumbler’ could have been made to work,” Heston mused. “Certainly Olivier made an enormous effort with it. He was heavily burdened at the time with the disintegrating fragments of his marriage with Vivien Leigh.” The only profit Heston derived from the production, he wrote, was “what I learned from Larry”. He was to win an Oscar for “Ben Hur” and global renown for his performance in “Planet of the Apes”, but his failure in “The Tumbler” haunted him all his life.6
The oddest play in which Olivier acted at this time was Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros”. This masterpiece of the Theatre of the Absurd was set in a French provincial town in which all the inhabitants except for Bérenger, the part played by Olivier, one by one turn into rhinoceroses. Either one found this funny and curiously disturbing or concluded that it had no point at all. Noël Coward was in the second camp. “The beginning was brilliant and Larry, as usual, superb, but then it began to drag,” he wrote in his diary. He burst into the dressing room after the final curtain with a small man in tow. “What a perfectly bloody play,” he exclaimed, then introduced his companion as Eugène Ionesco. “He doesn’t speak a word of English,” he added. Olivier seems to have been inclined to agree with Coward. One evening a tumult broke out in the dressing rooms after the performance and Olivier was heard to shout: “I’ve shat better plays than this.
” If this was his considered view it is hard to see why he took it on: presumably the main reason was that he wanted to go back to the Royal Court and Ionesco’s play had a good part in it for Joan Plowright.7
Another reason may have been that it was directed by Orson Welles. According to Welles, he was told that Olivier would not play the part unless he, Welles, was directing it; meanwhile Olivier was told that Welles refused to direct unless he, Olivier was acting in it. The fact that Welles was directing would have been an attraction for Olivier. The two were old friends. A few years before, Olivier had written Welles a letter which even by his own standards was strikingly gushing: “Darling boy, I have wanted to pick you up and hug you and swing you round and dance you up and down on my knee and even go birds-nesting with you to show you in some tiny measure how adorably sweet and generous was your dear thought …” The image conjured up by these raptures is bizarre and mildly disturbing; the more so because the “dear thought” which had provoked this outburst was the loan of a refrigerator. The enthusiasm endured, however. Olivier looked forward to acting under Welles’s direction. He had implicit faith in Welles, he said; he might sometimes be arrogant and difficult but “fuck all that, he’s a genius”.8 Genius or not, Welles’s recollections of trying to direct Olivier, as related by the actor, Peter Sallis, do not suggest that he was given an easy ride. It was Gielgud and “Twelfth Night” over again. Olivier decided that Welles’s direction was muddled and confusing. “I don’t know if they had a row,” Sallis recalled, “one day Orson simply didn’t turn up and Larry said: ‘I’ve sent him away. I’ve told him this is extremely difficult stuff. We’ve got to rehearse a set piece; we can’t change it on a day-to-day basis.’” Welles’s banishment only lasted a week – he was back before the first night – but he seems to have accepted Olivier’s diktat as meekly as Gielgud had five years before. Welles never forgave the affront: “He told me to stay home, and I did! I was so humiliated and sick about it that you can’t imagine … He had to destroy me in some way … He doesn’t want anybody else up there. He’s like Chaplin, you know. He’s a real fighting star.” (The comparison with Chaplin is interesting. The young Peter Hall once found himself at lunch with Olivier and Chaplin. He gazed at them in awe and admiration. “They then proceeded to out-boast each other about their possessions, lifestyles, houses, coming projects and conquests. They were like a couple of competitive schoolboys.”)9
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