Less controversially, it was Tynan who advocated the visit to Russia which the National Theatre made in 1965. Olivier proposed that the Company should tour with three productions: Miller’s “The Crucible”, “Othello” and Congreve’s “Love for Love”. “The Crucible” had already played in Moscow and had been a flop: would not two productions be enough? asked Humphrey Trevelyan, the Ambassador. If they confined themselves to “Othello” and “Love for Love”, he would be involved in every performance, replied Olivier, and would be exhausted before the tour was over. “Hobson’s Choice” was substituted for “The Crucible”: whether the Muscovites were likely to make much of this peculiarly homespun comedy was an open question, but at least it would be a novelty. “Love for Love” was played by the company for the first time in Moscow. It was “a smasharoo”, Olivier told Tarquin. It did not escape some adverse comment, however. One leading critic complained about the salacious content of the plot. “They are terribly easily shocked, the Russians,” observed Olivier. “It’s a lovely comedy, delicious, it’s not yoff-yoff laughing, it just purrs over your ears.”35
But it was “Othello” that made the greatest mark. It was the first production of the tour; the Russians were known to revere it above all other plays by Shakespeare; Madame Furtseva, the powerful Minister of Culture, was in the audience; there was all to play for. The effort of getting the company to Moscow and onto the stage had been stressful; Olivier had had no time to go to the gym; he had had to cut to a few minutes the leisurely and ritualistic build-up which usually preceded every performance. Out of his exhaustion he conjured what was perhaps the greatest performance of his life. He was staggering, Billie Whitelaw said. “He was able to show what in my view had always been missing: Othello’s vulnerability.” The Russians were ecstatic. When he opened his curtain speech with the word “Tovarishchi”, “Comrades”, it seemed that their applause would never stop. Olivier drank too much in the celebrations that followed, was put to bed by Joan Plowright and was so hungover the following morning that he missed a pompous luncheon given in honour of the National Theatre. It did not diminish his triumph: half a century later people in Moscow still speak of Olivier’s Othello with bated breath.36
*
The National Theatre goes very well, Olivier told Tarquin, at the beginning of 1966, “but the brain-teasing miasma of permutations never seems to lessen or grow simpler.” The National had indeed got off to a sensationally successful start; it remained to be seen whether the burden on Olivier would grow any lighter now that it was established.37
As Lear, in a production he also directed, with Alec Guinness as the Fool. “Frankly, Lear is an easy part . . .” Olivier proclaimed boldly. It isn’t.
Olivier and Leigh as Caesar and Cleopatra in 1951. Already there were signs that their relationship was under strain.
Swashbuckling in “The Beggar’s Opera”. “I hope and pray,” Olivier wrote, “that my personal flop will be the worst that I will ever disenjoy.”
Vivien Leigh and her soon-to-be lover, Peter Finch, flying off to Ceylon to film “Elephant Walk” in 1953. She was eventually replaced by Elizabeth Taylor, although she still appears in many long shots and with her back to the camera.
Malvolio to Vivien Leigh’s Viola in the 1955 “Twelfth Night” at Stratford.
Olivier, Gielgud considered, was “the finest Macbeth I have ever seen”. Leigh’s performance was “almost the best thing I ever saw her do – but on a small scale”.
With Claire Bloom as Lady Anne in “Richard III”. She was not merely seduced by Richard III on stage but by Olivier off it.
Dressed as Richard III and being painted by Salvador Dalí. The portrait is now in the Dalí Museum in Barcelona.
The Oliviers with Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe in 1956.
With Marilyn Monroe on the set of “The Sleeping Prince”. Olivier had expected to have an affair with Monroe but ended up hating her with consuming ferocity.
With Maggie Smith in Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros”. “What a perfectly bloody play,” protested Noël Coward, but others thought it a masterpiece of the theatre of the absurd.
With Joan Plowright in the film of “The Entertainer”. By this time Olivier’s marriage with Vivien Leigh was all but over.
Peter O’Toole played Hamlet in the first production at the National Theatre. Olivier directed – an experience not greatly relished by either party.
Olivier’s Othello was one of his greatest roles. His interaction with Maggie Smith produced an unforgettable theatrical experience and much discomfort to both parties.
Olivier took three and a half hours to make up as Othello: blackening every part of his body, whether visible to the audience or not.
With the architect, Denys Lasdun, in 1967, inspecting a model of the new National Theatre.
As James Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey into Night” – “a pretty well perfect play”, Olivier judged it.
With Lord Cottesloe, smoothing out the cement during the topping-out ceremony for the new National Theatre in May 1973.
With Peter Hall in May 1973: the past and the future of the National Theatre.
As John Tagg in “The Party”: Olivier’s last stage role and one of his most successful.
With Michael Caine in “Sleuth” – “He’s young enough to be my son,” said Olivier ruefully.
Opposite Sarah Miles’ marvellously seductive schoolgirl in “Term of Trial” in 1962.
Operating on Dustin Hoffman. “I am awfully pleased about the ‘Marathon Man’,” Olivier wrote, “horrific as the story is.”
Reunited with Gielgud and Richardson in 1983 in a mini-series for television about Wagner.
As Lord Marchmain in “Brideshead Revisited” (1981) with Diana Quick as Julia Flyte.
Olivier with Joan Plowright.
The family at the time of Olivier’s eighteieth birhday. Tamsin, in the patterned dress on the left, Richard in the centre and Julie Kate on the right.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Problems
Tarquin Olivier had dinner with his father and Joan Plowright in the summer of 1962. “They were still happy and in love with their young family,” he wrote. Their relationship may have lacked some of the hungry passion that had fired Olivier’s relationship with Vivien Leigh, but it was more mature, more equable, more likely to endure. Many people remarked on the conspicuous success of their marriage, the pleasure they took in each other’s company. Rosemary Harris was impressed when Olivier, having smashed a particularly precious Dresden china cake stand three tiers high, was stricken with guilt. “Oh well, dear, never mind,” said Plowright. “Get on with your supper while I fetch a dustpan and brush.”1
But they were also two ambitious and professional actors who were conscious always of the demands of their individual careers. Plowright was quoted as saying that, of course, she loved her family, “but the theatre is my life”. If the words had been attributed to Olivier they would have been no more than the truth; coming from Plowright they must either have been misquoted or taken out of context. During the years that she was bearing children and seeing them through their infancy her theatrical life unequivocally took second place to her responsibilities as a mother. It was fortunate both for her and for Olivier that those years coincided with the early days of the National Theatre at the Old Vic. Olivier longed to promote the interests of his wife and knew that she was qualified to undertake most of the leading female roles; equally, as Director of the National Theatre, he had to consider the needs of the Company as a whole and to keep all his leading ladies happy. Maggie Smith and Geraldine McEwan, to mention only the two most prominent, would have been quick to protest if they had thought that Plowright was getting preferential treatment. As he told Tammy Grimes when she asked him to find her a part, he was already having “hell’s own job keeping these girls happy”; to add another prominent figure would make the task impossible. Plowright was given some splendid parts, but she might have been offered more if she had not been
the wife of the Director. In other circumstances she might have resented this; coming when it did she felt only relief. When Billie Whitelaw was brought in to replace her in “Hobson’s Choice” because she “had gone to have Olivier’s baby”, Plowright may have felt a pang of regret, but she had no doubt that she had chosen the better course.2
This was their third child. Richard, the first, had been born at the end of 1961. Having been scarcely aware of Tarquin as a baby, Olivier was startled by the exultation which his new son’s birth caused him. Fabia Drake came to inspect Richard when he was only a few days old. “Oh, Fabby,” said Olivier. “I am so happy!’ More temperately he told Tarquin that the baby looked like the squashed lemon in the advertisements for the soft drink Idris, but he was improving: “You never saw anyone as happy as Joannie (or me for that matter).”3
Richard proved a restless child. Once Olivier volunteered to sleep next door to his bedroom when the nanny had a night off. When Plowright joined them for breakfast next morning there was cereal and apple sauce all over the carpet and down the front of her husband’s silk dressing gown. “I’d rather play Othello eight times a week than do this again,” Olivier grumbled. Richard was convinced a man-eating crocodile lived at the end of the corridor in which he had his room and, on the evenings that the nanny was out, would call upon his parents for reassurance. Nanny insisted that the proper thing to do was to let him cry himself out and then go back to sleep. With some reluctance the Oliviers agreed to give this tactic a try. Sure enough, Richard ran out of breath, said feebly “How can I keep on crying if no-one is going to care?” and made his way back to bed. The crocodile, similarly discomfited, never reappeared. It was a triumph for stern parenting, but not one that was often repeated. Olivier was an indulgent if distrait father and was even less likely to treat his daughters severely than he was his son.4
Their two daughters, Tamsin and Julie-Kate, followed in 1965 and 1966. Julie-Kate almost finished off her mother. Joan Plowright had suffered a debilitating miscarriage at the end of 1964 and was still undergoing surgery. The doctors claimed there was no possibility of her conceiving but were proved wrong. Julie-Kate was born by Caesarean and, according to her father, would undoubtedly have been dead if there had been even a few hours’ delay. He was present at the birth. Plowright wanted him to be there, Olivier remembered; he was able to “hold her hand and stroke her head and bring comfort to her while they were attending to things down below”. No doubt she did want him there, but he would have taken some keeping away. Even if he was himself the victim, Olivier was always anxious to know what was going on and, if possible, to watch it. This operation was almost too much for him, however: “My God, there was a lot of blood. The floor was inches thick in it. That really began to make me feel a tiny bit queasy.” He gave Tarquin a gory account of the occasion. “I don’t know if surgical detail interests you,” he wrote. “I’m afraid it always fascinates me.”5
The three children never doubted that their father loved them and wished them well; they also knew that, by the standards of most of their friends, he was a remote and evasive figure. In retrospect it seemed to them almost as if he were pretending to be a father, acting the part conscientiously and with skill but shedding it when he left the stage. He thanked Ralph Richardson for agreeing to reshuffle the order of appearance in a charity performance so that he could catch the last train home to Brighton – “taking my little ones to school is almost my only chance of seeing them these days, and has a special place in the day for me” – but often even this limited duty proved unfeasible. His visits to Brighton, he told the journalist David Lewin, were “bounded at one end by flinging myself into bed to an exhausted and sound sleep, and at the other by a lunatic scramble for the train”. The children literally lived next door, in the neighbouring house in the Royal Crescent which had now been integrated with their parents’ rather smarter house. “I know exactly how you must feel about not having enough time with your babies,” wrote his sister Sybille: “But truly the more important time for them to be with you will be when they are a little older.” Olivier may have drawn consolation from this advice, but he was deluding himself if he imagined that in five or ten years he would manage to spend very much more time with his children. Even when they were together they were apart. Richard remembers staying with his father at Franco Zeffirelli’s house in Italy. In theory it was a family holiday; in practice his father was learning a twenty-minute monologue for a forthcoming play: “He was constantly at it and could not be approached while it was on.”6
He was still less effective when it came to maintaining a relationship with his elder son, Tarquin. “How wrong you have got me, or more probably we have got each other,” he wrote. He was dismayed to find that Tarquin felt he had been putting on “a stern father act”; on the contrary he had been trying to do the very opposite, to “take you as I found you”. The trouble was, he hardly ever found him, at all events not often enough to form any clear impression of what he was really like. Tarquin got married at the beginning of 1965. Olivier announced that his duties were so demanding that he could not afford to do more than attend the ceremony. His new daughter-in-law’s parents tried to organise a meeting; he refused their invitations and did not even offer them tickets for the National. On the way from the church to the reception the bride’s mother berated him for his bad manners. Placatingly, he expressed the hope that they would meet again. “That won’t be necessary,” she answered.7
The ghost of Vivien Leigh could not altogether be exorcised. It had taken her separation from Olivier to convince her how desperately she loved and needed him; when she was acting his photograph was always on her dressing table. He, for his part, felt a residual loyalty towards her. In 1963 he heard that Marlon Brando was to play Macbeth in New York. He wrote to Binkie Beaumont asking if there was “some subtle and tactful way” by which it could be suggested to Brando that Vivien Leigh would be the perfect Lady Macbeth for him. “Of course, the last thing in the world I would want is for it ever to be known by anybody that the suggestion came from me, as it would be completely misunderstood.” The idea came to nothing – it is unlikely, anyway, that Leigh’s health would have allowed her to undertake such a role. A few months later she was convalescing at her country home from yet another breakdown. Olivier arrived to visit her. You must go down to meet him, said her nurse. “She said, ‘Oh, no, I can’t!’ … and then this voice came up the stairs: ‘Vivien, are you coming down or am I coming up?’ She just took off like a little schoolgirl, you know, meeting her boyfriend – oh, it was beautiful, and they walked by the lake together.”8
It seems that this is the last time they met, at any rate for more than a casual exchange. At intervals Leigh tried to arrange a meeting, the last time being at the end of 1966. Her doctor advised Olivier not to accept the invitation. If he once acceded to her request she would be importunate in her demands and would never take no for an answer. “I am quite sure that emotional contacts of this kind would in the long run not be good for Vivien as it would be likely to push the state of elation and all its other aspects into a more disturbing state of mind.” Six months later Olivier was himself in hospital. Douglas Fairbanks was visiting him when the news came that Leigh had died. “There was a long, sad moment and then he said, ‘Poor, dear, little Vivien.’ It seemed to me that their life together was running like a film through his mind.” Olivier insisted on leaving hospital to visit the flat in Eaton Square where her body was still lying. He stood in silence by her bedside and, he said, “prayed for forgiveness for all the evils that had sprung up between us”. He did not have much with which to reproach himself. He might have been a little more sympathetic, a little more understanding, but on the whole he had showed exemplary patience and had tried to the best of his ability to grapple with problems which were not only beyond his comprehension but beyond the grasp of any of the psychologists of the day. By chance, as he was leaving the memorial service, he found himself standing next to Jill Esmond. “I put
my hand on his as he left the pew, and he put his other hand on top of mine and gave it three little squeezes. I thought he looked grey right through.”9
By singular ill-fortune, Cecil Tennant, Olivier’s agent and most trusted friend, was killed in a car crash while driving back from Vivien Leigh’s funeral. “He wasn’t supposed to die, you know,” Olivier told Lord Chandos. “He was supposed to live for ever and look after me.” This reaction might seem a little solipsistic, but can perhaps be excused on the grounds that Olivier had many reasons to feel self-pity in 1967 and 1968. It was unsurprising that Jill Esmond described him as looking “grey right through” since, against the urging of his doctor, he had emerged from hospital to attend the service. Some weeks before, while directing rehearsals of “The Three Sisters”, he had experienced sharp pains and was overcome by exhaustion so complete that he could hardly breathe, let alone give instructions. As he prepared to leave the theatre he remarked to Joan Plowright how terrified the other members of the cast had seemed. “They thought you were about to die,” she retorted. “So did I. Go to hospital, or you’ll be dead in the morning.” Prostate cancer was diagnosed – “the best kind of cancer,” he noted, “so I was lucky in that.” This did not make the treatment any more agreeable: it involved being interred in an opaque coffin, reduced almost to freezing point and then bombarded with radium-soaked cobalt. He endured this with striking fortitude; the only indication of the strain that was imposed on him was his reluctance to be left alone until the very last moment before the treatment. Noël Coward visited him in hospital and found him “writhing on his bed” but rejoicing in the fact that the cancer was reported to be responding to treatment. “I hope to God this is true.”10
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