*
It was during the run of “Rhinoceros” that the uneasy manoeuvring between Olivier, Vivien Leigh and Joan Plowright escalated into crisis. Over the previous two years Leigh had become convinced that she wanted to preserve her marriage. Some eighteen months before, she had told Noël Coward that her husband had asked her for a legal separation. The shock had been tremendous. “She had always assumed that, whatever might go wrong between them, they would stay together. She knew there was love and respect there … She could never love anyone else as she had loved Larry.” But Olivier was as convinced that he could never love anyone else as he loved Joan Plowright. “The glow that emanated from him was blinding,” wrote Lauren Bacall. “He dropped twenty years … He could have a life, he had something to look forward to.” “I am in touch with the real beauty of happiness at last,” Olivier told Tarquin. His friends urged him to give his marriage another try. “Can you really be happy, Larry, knowing that you’re making someone you love absolutely miserable?” asked Stewart Granger. Rachel Kempson, too, argued that Olivier could never be really happy if that happiness was bought at the price of somebody else’s misery. Vivien Leigh had changed, she said. She realised how much she had made Olivier suffer and had learned her lesson – “Viv would accept any terms at all.” Put off any final rupture, they pleaded: keep up the façade of marriage and one day the reality might be restored. “What sort of a life do they think I can live?” demanded Olivier. “I could never act off the stage anyway.”10
Olivier was indeed disturbed by the thought of the pain he would be inflicting on his wife, but as well as his wish to be with Joan Plowright he was convinced that his marriage could only get worse and that it would eventually destroy both the parties to it. When Michael Blakemore asked him why he had decided to leave Vivien Leigh, Olivier replied, bluntly and honestly, “Because there was no room on the raft.” His life had become intolerable, he told Lauren Bacall. “He couldn’t think, he couldn’t sleep.” He could never return to his wife.11
But though he was clear in his own mind that his marriage was at an end he had no fixed idea as to how to bring that end about. He shrank from the squalor and sordid publicity of a contested divorce and yet saw no way in which it could be avoided. Then, on 22 May, 1960, Vivien Leigh, inexplicably and without warning, announced to the world that her husband had asked her for a divorce in order that he might marry Joan Plowright and that she proposed to accede to his wishes. This abrupt declaration was, of course, welcome to Olivier, but it also posed some serious problems. Leigh’s statement that she would fall in with her husband’s wishes could be interpreted as collusion and, in the state of the law at the time, this might make divorce impossible. It seems unlikely that any consideration of this kind was in her mind – she claimed herself that she had no recollection of even issuing the declaration and, given her mental condition, this seems entirely possible – but the danger could not be ignored. The immediate consequence was a hurricane of gossip; journalists and the idly curious besieged Joan Plowright’s home and, even more, Olivier’s flat in Eaton Square. Plowright pulled out of her part in Rhinoceros, to be replaced by the rising star, Maggie Smith. Some people thought that Olivier would do the same and the understudy had been brushing up his lines, but when the evening arrived Olivier appeared at the usual time and carried on as if nothing had happened to ruffle his serenity. “I watched him very carefully and you would not have thought that anything was wrong at all,” Peter Sallis recalled. “He didn’t, from a theatrical point of view, bat an eyelid.” The crowds outside the stage door were denser and more turbulent than usual, but even when they were at their most importunate he remained unshaken. “I think it says volumes for him,” wrote Virginia Fairweather, who handled his publicity, “that never once did he lose his temper or alter his courteous attitude towards the scandal-seekers.”12
Mrs Fairweather had her work cut out over this period. She asked Olivier how she should deal with the divorce. “Darling, if anyone is going to come out looking like a shit, let it be me,” Olivier replied. “Do your best not to let them persecute Joannie or Viv.” He accepted that he was the guilty party when the divorce proceedings began; in fact, Vivien Leigh had been at least as guilty as he was but an unopposed action would avoid relentless mud-slinging and publicity. “Viv must have had a horrid time going through the divorce,” he wrote to Tarquin, “but she did nobly and bravely and managed alright.” He and Joan Plowright had had a horrid time too, but they knew that at the end of it there was stability and happiness. He had been passionately in love with Vivien Leigh, he still cared greatly for her, but he had no flicker of doubt that he had made the right, the only possible decision. “If only I can stop being agonised for V.’s suffering,” he told Jill Esmond, “I am in for the hell of a marvellous bloody time. This girl is so good, and so good for me… She makes me feel I am in a sort of idiot heaven.” Richard Burton had been married to the relatively sedate Sybil Williams before moving on to the glamorous Elizabeth Taylor. “You have got it in the wrong order,” Olivier told him. “I have gone about things the right way.” Michael Denison said much the same thing. “Larry took whatever Vivien in her extremis threw at him with the most fantastic forbearance,” Denison told Hugo Vickers, “and it was only when she had really gone that he turned to the total contrast – I mean from champagne to Guinness, from mink to macintosh – and to youth, of course, as well.” Olivier had had a lifetime’s worth of champagne and mink; it was time to give Guinness and macintosh a chance.13
His beloved Notley had been an incidental casualty of the break-up. He could not afford to keep it: “It is the first time we can feel thoroughly in line with the general run of English aristocracy,” he told Garson Kanin. Parting with it was a wrench, but at least he was moving on to something different and more welcoming. For Vivien Leigh it was far more painful. “Notley is sold,” she told Tarquin. “I can hardly even write the words. I walk from precious place to precious place and gaze at each beloved view with tears pouring down my face.” She would never forget “the hundreds of times my beloved Larry and I have wandered here in wonder and grateful amazement at the beauty all around us”. With her appearance and her fame Vivien Leigh was never going to be short of admirers. She had found a sort of solace in the company of Jack Merivale, a competent if undistinguished actor and a thoroughly nice man, who asked for nothing more than to be allowed to squire her around through life. But though she was fond of him and thankful for his existence it was Olivier she still loved. “Take care of your precious dearest self,” she ended a letter to him when divorce proceedings were already under way. “My love, dear dear heart.”14
It was at Notley that Olivier had made the most conscientious efforts to establish a proper relationship with his son Tarquin. He always reproached himself with having opted out of the duties of a father almost from the moment of Tarquin’s birth, but his efforts to reinstate himself were erratic and not always successful. When his brother Dickie died in 1958 Olivier wrote to Tarquin to say how painful he was going to find the loss. “As time goes on you will no doubt fill that gap for me, as indeed you will many another one for me, and you will give me such gifts of ever-increasing pride, ever-closening devotion and joy in you and in your life.” That all sounded very fine, but as time went on Olivier made little effort to fit his son into that or any other gap. When he did take steps to assert his presence he sometimes hit the wrong note. He expressed doubts, for instance, about Tarquin’s plan not to settle down to a steady job but instead to embark on an ambitious and adventurous journey around the world. Jill Esmond rounded on him. “You have forgotten what it is like to be young,” she wrote. “Go on! Go home to the next play. That’s all you understand and care about.”15
Vivien Leigh and Tarquin got on well together and for as long as she was around the relationship between father and son improved, but as the marriage foundered so Tarquin found the atmosphere at Notley less congenial. When Tarquin began to write a book about his travels,
Olivier was at first unenthusiastic about the project, then critical because work was not progressing rapidly enough. Finally he was told that the book had been accepted by a publisher. “I have never asked to see the book,” Olivier told his son, “because something told me that my opinion would be qualified enough not to be anything but depressing to you … I don’t want to read the book now because I simply haven’t got time, that’s all. I go into rehearsal in four weeks and I don’t know how I’m going to get through all I have to. I’ve taken on too much, I know. I’m sorry, but I don’t see what I can do about it … I haven’t exactly encouraged you to come and stay or anything because I wouldn’t be able to give any proper time to you.” As a model of how not to write to an affectionate but neglected son, this letter could hardly be bettered. Noël Coward, as so often, got it right. “Tarquin is really a bright and sweet boy,” he wrote in his diary. “Jill … has been a wonderful mother to him and he quite genuinely adores her. Larry, as a father figure, has not come off quite so well.”16
*
Olivier and Joan Plowright were in the United States when the decree absolute ending the divorce proceedings came through on 3 March, 1961. A fortnight later they married. “If someone had told me, fifteen years ago, that I would one day be serving as best man for Larry Olivier, I’d have summoned him a bloody ambulance,” Richard Burton remarked on the Dick Cavett show. In fact he overstated his role; the ceremony, such as it was, took place in the strictest privacy in Wilton, Connecticut. The couple rushed back to New York, however, and Burton gave a party for them after their respective shows had finished. “Joan is a very natural and splendidly earthy young woman,” Olivier told Tarquin, “and if I am to make her happy and fulfilled she’s simply got to have [children], that’s all, she’s that type.” He addressed himself to his duties as a putative father with commendable alacrity.17
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Chichester
“I know nothing about Festivals or how they are run,” Olivier told an enquirer in 1952. “I have no signposts to show you, and know of no pitfalls of which to warn you.” A decade later his reply would have been very different. Between those dates a prosperous, energetic and stage-struck citizen of Chichester, Leslie Evershed-Martin, had conceived and brought almost to reality his dream of building a theatre in his home town and holding an annual Festival. Well did he call his book on the subject The Impossible Theatre; to persuade his fellow councillors that the project was worth pursuing was hard enough; to find a suitable site and raise the funds to buy and build upon it was an almost absurdly ambitious enterprise. Even then his troubles were only just beginning. He had to find someone to run it, who would be prepared to work enormously hard for little money and who would be able to attract to Chichester actors and actresses of the calibre necessary if the fledgling theatre was to be established.1
His first idea was Tyrone Guthrie, who had recently supervised a similar undertaking in Stratford, Ontario, a Canadian town very similar in size to Chichester. Guthrie was no more ready to take on a second festival than he had been to engage with the National Theatre. He was in favour of the project, however. He read with interest the list of possible candidates which Evershed-Martin had drawn up, then commented: “Leslie, you keep on about having only the best of everything at Chichester, so why don’t you go for the best? Ask Laurence Olivier.” Guthrie offered to approach Olivier himself and duly did so, stressing that nothing very extravagant was being contemplated: “Just an opener, so to speak – a Shakespeare and a Shaw for three or four weeks.” Olivier, who was in America, did not immediately respond and Evershed-Martin followed up Guthrie’s letter. Olivier was cautious: he had just seen two London theatres – the St James’s and the Stoll – pulled down in spite of his efforts to save them and, as he wryly noted, he was beginning to think “that my presence in a London theatre would only be enviable to a member of the I.R.A.”. He suggested that Evershed-Martin get in touch with his agent, Cecil Tennant. Would he have full artistic control? he asked. And how much would he be paid? Yes, and £5,000 a year, were the answers. Too much, said Olivier. He would accept only £3,000 – “he wanted to be all in all with us in the adventure”. By the time Olivier first met Evershed-Martin on 23 June, 1961 a deal had almost been done.2
Binkie Beaumont and the producer, Cecil Clarke, were amazed to hear Olivier was interested in so precarious a venture. “I’ve got it,” said Clarke. “He wants to prepare himself for the National Theatre.” He was not wholly wrong. Olivier did have in mind that to launch a new theatre in Chichester would strengthen his claim to take over the National when the moment came, give him useful experience in running a repertory company and enable him to launch productions and build up casts which would be available for the South Bank. But this was not the whole story. Olivier was in a mood to start his own company and Joan Plowright is convinced that he would have grasped at Chichester even though he had known that the National Theatre would never happen or that he would not be asked to take it on. Chichester provided an irresistible challenge; he never doubted that he could make it work and rejoiced in the opportunity to prove it.3
*
There was another reason why the idea of Chichester was appealing. If it had been Cheltenham or Salisbury he might have hesitated, but Chichester, as the crow flies, was less than thirty miles from Brighton and it was in Brighton that he and Joan Plowright had decided to make their home. In 1961 they bought a handsome four-storey Regency house with twelve rooms in Kemp Town’s celebrated Royal Crescent; believed by its inhabitants to be the best address in Brighton and certainly offering stiff competition to any rival. It had used to boast a statue of the Prince Regent, put up by the developer in an effort to ingratiate himself with the occupant of the Royal Pavilion. Unfortunately it was not made of durable material and the nose and fingers fell away. It seems that the developer must similarly have economised on the houses themselves. Olivier had not even moved in before it became apparent that the front of the house was on the point of collapse and that it would cost a fortune to restore it. To compound his troubles, he insisted on making certain structural alterations which involved substantial building works. The result was that he found himself committed to spend more on rebuilding than he had spent on the house itself and was confronted by a vista of apparently endless construction works. When the Oliviers spent their first night in the building on 16 December, 1961, it was in the knowledge that for months to come they would be sharing their house with a gang of labourers. Not content with this, as their family grew they concluded that they needed more room. Within a few years they had bought the house next door and the builders were back again turning the two houses into one.
But they were enormously happy. The Cassons had dinner with them shortly before the move into the Royal Crescent. Sybil Thorndike noticed a striking difference. “For the first time in years he is relaxed and like the dear old Larry that we’ve not seen for the last ten years,” she wrote. “Joan is a darling. You couldn’t have anyone more unlike poor Viv.” As a married couple they were entirely satisfied with each other: in that happy honeymoon phase when each one is discovering new and delightful things about the other and every difference seems a reason for congratulation rather than a presage of potential trouble. As actors, the relationship was rather more complicated. “Marry him if you must, but do not act with him if you can help it,” had been George Devine’s advice. He meant, Plowright thinks, that she must avoid being thrust into parts which Olivier thought would suit her or would complement parts he himself was playing but which in fact were wrong for her. Plowright could see the danger and anyway dreaded the “Actor-Manager and his Wife” syndrome, which would damage both their own reputations and the reputation of whatever institution they were working in. Olivier realised that he must tread carefully. Years later he insisted that his wife was “one of the finest actresses in the country. I didn’t give her much of a leg-up towards that,” he admitted. “I’ve been wrong so often about her, so often I’ve thought:
‘I’m not quite sure Joannie can handle that part.’ I’ve always been wrong. I didn’t really appreciate the darling thing. I don’t think it was anything to do with being married.”4
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