*
His growing detachment from the day-to-day running of the National left him with more time than he had previously enjoyed to indulge in public life, at any rate so far as it impinged upon the theatre. Almost always he exercised his influence in the interests of traditional and right-wing values. When it seemed that Vanessa Redgrave and other elements of the extreme left were on the point of capturing the actors’ trade union, Equity, Olivier rallied to its defence. “Obviously the freedoms which you and I and those like us require are going to cost us something,” he told a friend, “and I am awfully sorry but that means the effort of turning up and raising a hand at the right moment. It is a perfectly frightful sacrifice to give up a Sunday … but it does need sensible people to make a few sacrifices.” He wrote an article in The Times, or at least put his name to an article in The Times, warning of the dangers facing the acting profession if Equity fell into the hands of the militants. His reward was to be pilloried in The Stage and Television Today as an antiquated grotesque “redolent of the Garrick Club and astrakhan collars rather than the jeans and T-shirts that are the garb of the contemporary actor”. Viewed from the perspective of the far left the charge was justified. Olivier was an authoritarian figure with little sympathy for the vagaries of youth or any kind of libertarian excess. When Keith Joseph, in 1974, was under fierce attack for a speech suggesting that Britain’s breeding stock was threatened by the number of working-class mothers unfitted to bring up children, Olivier sent him a congratulatory telegram. Viewed from nearer the middle of the road he seemed a man of liberal instinct and a generous disposition, not interested in politics as such, but conservative with a small “c” and sturdily patriotic. He liked and was attracted by Edna O’Brien, a close friend of his wife, but when Joan Plowright first suggested inviting her for the weekend he replied that he wasn’t having anybody in the house who supported the I.R.A.5
When the Russian dancers Valery and Galina Panov fell foul of the Communist regime, being refused permission to visit Israel and expelled from the Kirov ballet company, Olivier demonstrated outside the Russian Embassy, sent Panov a personal telegram and took part in an N.B.C. documentary on the subject. With Harold Pinter and Peggy Ashcroft he took the lead in organising a boycott of a visit by the Kirov to London in protest against the Panovs’ victimisation. Part of him relished the attention that his activities gained him: the limelight was where he belonged and he felt uneasy if exiled from it. His sympathy for the Panovs was sincerely felt, however. Nor did he wish to be given more credit than was his due. He was genuinely put out when the newspapers made too much of his contribution and said nothing of Rosemary Winckley and others who had devoted far more time and effort to the cause. “I do so want you and whoever else may be hurt or upset by this sort of inference to understand that I never consciously let this be thought,” he wrote to Miss Winckley. “They always want you to be boastful and that is the way they will have it.” “You ask us to forgive, but for what?” Winckley replied. “We are indebted to you for always … It is a wonderful thing to know that someone you’ve profoundly admired for years is as great a human.”6
That he had energy to spare for such diversions is the more remarkable because in 1974 and 1975 his health suffered a series of destructive and, finally, almost fatal blows. As if cancer, thrombosis and appendicitis were not enough, in the autumn of 1974 Olivier developed a rare and ruinous disease called dermatopolymyositis which attacked the muscles, leaving him almost speechless, unable to keep his eyelids open, dependent for survival on heavy doses of steroids which in turn fostered wild delusions or all-consuming lethargy. “I shall be quite a few weeks in this place,” he told Peter Hall from hospital in November 1974. At least it meant that he would be spared having to play Father Christmas; always one of his least successful roles. “I know you. You’re not Daddy Christmas, you’re just Daddy,” was a reception he had grown used to over the years. This was not much compensation, however, for several weeks of extreme pain in which he was in imminent danger of death, and several months of slow and painful convalescence. Only a man of singular strength, both physical and psychological, could have survived. “It shrinks, it eats one up, it’s one of those things when the body is at war with itself,” he remembered with horror. “I had enormous quantities of steroids until I went a bit mad. Poor Joan got really frightened. I said: ‘It’s all round here, Joan. I can feel it going round and round; this madness is going round and round in my ears.’ It was incredible.” It destroyed his looks: an unkind trick of fate for a man whose professional life depended in large part on his appearance. Worse still, it attacked his voice. Peggy Ashcroft visited him at Brighton when he had just emerged from hospital. She was dismayed by his appearance but still more by the difficulty he found in speaking: it was dreadful, wrote Peter Hall, that “a man who has spent all his life getting the last note out of his voice should now find that his vocal chords are affected”.7
Inch by inch he fought his way back. He had to teach himself to walk, to teach himself to write, to strengthen his muscles by remorseless training in the gym, to strengthen his voice by endless hours of practice. He never altogether recovered. John Gielgud saw him at a lunch for Lauren Bacall early in 1979 and was dismayed to find him “so changed and withered, but he talked gallantly, made a speech – a bit rambling – and even said he might be tempted to try and act in the theatre again”. It was not Peter Hall’s fault that he did not do so. From the moment that Olivier had recovered to the point where his appearance on a stage did not seem inconceivable, Hall had been bombarding him with invitations to direct or play whatever took his fancy. Would he like to direct “Romeo and Juliet”? Or “The Wild Duck”? Or a Chekhov? Or act in a new play by Howard Brenton – “It has an amazing part!”? Or give a master class on Shakespeare? “I am letting the ideas tumble out in an attempt to show you the strength of my feelings and our need to have you here.” If Olivier had replied that he wanted above all to play Dick Whittington, or even his Cat, the idea would have been greeted with delight. As it was, he replied discouragingly: “I just cannot think of anything I particularly want to do.” He had just visited the new theatre which at last was somewhere near completion. A “marvellous place”, he found it, though “I cannot honestly swear … that the impression given by the O[livier] Theatre is overridingly one of intimacy. The Lyttelton is also a perfect gem.” But fine though the new theatres might be, he held out little hope that he would ever act in them.8
One reason why he fought shy of too conspicuous a relationship with the National Theatre was that he had residual doubts about what he suspected might become a takeover of the National by Stratford. One of his objections to Peter Hall as Director had been that he was too closely associated with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. He complained to Hall that actors, when they came to see the Director, would not know whether they were seeking a job at the National or at Stratford. Hall retorted that he had resigned as a director at Stratford some time before. “He was delighted,” Hall recorded. Delighted, perhaps, but not convinced. When tentative plans were revived for what would in effect have been a merger between the National and Stratford, Olivier at first professed himself enthusiastic but soon recanted. He sabotaged the negotiations by imposing what Hall and the Director at Stratford, Trevor Nunn, felt to be unreasonable restrictions on the time that the Stratford company would be allowed to perform on the South Bank. Since nobody takes his “contortions very seriously, not much harm done”, wrote Hall. “It’s very difficult to know what motivates Larry’s vacillations. Certainly in some cases – and this is one of them – a Machiavellian love of intrigue.” A delight in thwarting Hall would have been more accurate: that, and a genuine belief that the last decade had shown that Stratford and the National could co-exist in amicable competition and that the theatre in Britain would be the stronger for their continued independence. Hall was deluding himself if he really believed that nobody took Olivier’s attitude “very seriously” and that he could be ignore
d. Lord Goodman, that master power broker, knew better. He told Hall that opinion was turning against the merger. Olivier was the only person who could reverse the trend, “and that he was not about to do”.9
The new building opened at last in October 1976. “I really thought it was his National Theatre and it was his building,” Hall recalled. He urged Olivier to take the centre of the stage at the opening: “You have to open your building.” Olivier prevaricated. He was frightened of being at the centre of anything, he said. “I think I can possibly undertake to get away with not more than a few ill-chosen words to start the thing going.” His qualms were not entirely fictitious – he was far from restored in health – but he must also have been getting some satisfaction from keeping Hall in doubt. His pleasure was the greater because Tynan, eager as ever to make mischief, had gleefully reported that an exhibition mounted to mark the opening of the National Theatre contained fifty-seven items relating to Barry Jackson’s Birmingham Rep., only five relating to Olivier’s time at the National and “room after room devoted to Hall’s Stratford”. “We didn’t really understand Peter Hall,” Olivier said, or is quoted by Tynan as saying. “I’ve never known a man more dedicated to self-glorification.” Hall sensed and deplored Olivier’s hostility. “It was one of the nastiest periods of my life,” he told Richard Eyre. “The friendship went because I was the next generation – I was the future. And I understood it all, none of us likes giving up. And Larry wasn’t just the king, he was the emperor.”10
In fact Olivier can never have doubted that he was going to speak at the first night in the new theatre, in the presence of the Queen and with everyone who was anyone in the audience. Peter Hall heard that he had been sneaking into the theatre at 8.00 a.m. and practising his speech behind locked doors. “I have to admire his professionalism,” he remarked. Olivier returned the compliment, though somewhat grudgingly. He rejected Joan Plowright’s advice and learned his speech by heart. “I knew that slimy bastard wouldn’t be using notes,” he told Tynan, “and I was damned if I was going to let him outdo me.” The effort was worthwhile. The play that Hall had selected for the first night proved to be a disaster. “The one undoubted success of the entire opening ceremony,” Hall generously admitted, “was Larry who … made an elegant, though over-written speech. The audience gave him a standing ovation. So they should have done. But it was difficult for a play to follow that.” It is hard to be sure whether Olivier would have derived more satisfaction from the success of his speech or the failure of Hall’s opening play.11
“For a year after I retired I was Associate Director,” Olivier told Mark Amory, “to look like a good sport and not let people think I was sulking.” In fact it was more like four years between the time that Hall took over as Director and Olivier’s final resignation as Consultant Director. His role, however, became more and more nominal over the years. He told Rayne in June 1977 that he was fed up with being asked what was going on at the National when he had virtually nothing to do with it. When he had made similar noises in 1975 Hall had begged him to stay on and to accept the Life Presidency. When in the end he left it seemed no more than the public affirmation of what was already an accomplished fact. The Board had proposed that they should commission a portrait by David Hockney to commemorate the occasion; Olivier rather ungraciously replied that he disliked having his portrait painted and that, while he did not know Hockney’s portraits, he found his landscapes hard to understand. He countered with the proposal that the Board should commission a group picture of his children by “some artist of a more formal type”. The Board did not feel that this would quite meet the needs of the occasion. In one of his last letters to Peter Hall Olivier said: “If there is anything for which I am really required advice-wise or any such thing as that, you have only to call; but I shan’t be even the tiniest bit surprised if you never do.” They never did.12
*
There was little point in taking the story beyond 1975, Olivier told George Weidenfeld when considering the shape of his autobiography, “because, since then, the only remarkable thing I can boast of doing is to recover from a frightening illness. The jobs I have done have been some half-dozen pictures and a year’s work producing a T.V. series for Granada – none of it really worthy of any cock-crowing.” There were indeed no supreme achievements yet to come, but by the standards of most mortals he did much that was memorable. In particular, he came to terms with television. The film that did most to reconcile Olivier to the medium was “Love Among the Ruins”, a dated but enjoyable romantic comedy, directed by George Cukor and co-starring Katharine Hepburn. Olivier said in his memoirs that he was devoted to both of them. The three had often idly discussed the possibility of doing something together; now it had happened. “It was an unforgettable six weeks,” wrote Olivier. “It passed like a lovely pink shooting star, so memorable but quickly gone.” The film was not as memorable as the filming; with such a director and such stars, however, it could hardly fail to succeed. The producer, Allan Davis, remembered it with affection. He found Olivier “most co-operative”, ready to work on a Sunday and, by so doing, inspiring Hepburn to do the same. She was acting in a play by Enid Bagnold at the time. Olivier took Davis backstage to meet her. His lead-up to the meeting was not quite so affectionate as his memoirs might lead one to expect. “Don’t get too excited, boysie,” he told Davis. “She can be the most awful fucking bitch in the world and she might be like that tonight.”13
The T.V. series which he had told George Weidenfeld he was making for Granada was a much more onerous affair. When Olivier emerged from hospital after his bout of myositis he was emaciated, exhausted and cautious about taking on any new commitment. His brother-in-law David Plowright, who was controller of programmes for Granada Television, decided that the best cure would be immediate and demanding work. He signed up Olivier to select and produce a series of six plays, each of which had first appeared in the last seventy-five years and each of which was deemed “the best play” for its particular year. “This series saved my life,” Olivier remarked. “I was dying. I know I was. I didn’t want to live any longer. I had nothing to live for and I felt that it was cruel of me to put Joannie through agony any longer … and then my dear brother-in-law gave me my life back.” “I had nothing to live for” is a curious declaration coming from a man who had a wife and three children under the age of fifteen. Probably Olivier would have rephrased it if he had been challenged. It contained an essential truth, however. Olivier loved his family and would have been distraught if ill had come upon them, but work was his life-blood. Nothing could replace it. He accepted the new challenge with gluttonous zest. In his memoirs Olivier said that he “reluctantly” played in five out of the six films. There was no reluctance about it, said Derek Granger, who co-produced the series; he would have been outraged if anyone had tried to stop him. “As you know,” Granger told Tynan, “he is fanatically and obsessively interested in all processes and mechanical gadgets, so that the whole technical business of television was fascinating for him. In all this, he masterminded every detail. He designed his own titles, he worked out the billings … he worked with the composers on the incidental music. He virtually did the adaptations himself.”14
David Plowright was right; the scent of battle rekindled Olivier’s appetite for work, and therefore for life. Peter Sallis and Alan Bridges joined him for dinner while the six plays were being filmed. Bridges remarked that he was just about to embark on a feature film. Olivier immediately wanted to know if there were parts for him and his wife. It was “the energy of the man” that amazed Sallis. “There he was, finding out what else he could cram into his life. There was a restless urge to keep working.” But could the urge be gratified? However willing the spirit, the body was frail, and it was the body that concerned the producers who stood to lose large sums of money if a star had to abandon work when a film was still unfinished. It was the custom to insure against such a risk. In the case of the Granada series it proved impossible to get cover except
for a premium which was ruinously expensive. The money at stake in a television series of this kind could be kept within limits; Granada took the risk and got away with it. The problem was far more intractable when a full-length feature film was involved.15
In the autumn of 1975 John Schlesinger conceived the idea of casting Olivier as Dr Christian Szell, a Nazi arch-villain, in a splendidly black and over-the-top thriller called “Marathon Man”. The Marathon Man himself was to be played by Dustin Hoffman, the cost of the film would be enormous, the stakes were very high. Olivier went to lunch with Schlesinger to discuss the possibility. At first he was unenthusiastic and Schlesinger in his mind wrote him off as a potential Szell: “His voice was terribly high, his muscles had weakened, he said he did not want any lunch.” Schlesinger began to expound the plot. “This is when you run after him,” he explained. “Can’t run, dear boy, can’t run,” observed Olivier. “I can walk fast, though,” he added helpfully. Schlesinger became more and more convinced that this would not do. Then Olivier became enthused by the plot, particularly a lurid scene in which Szell tortures the unfortunate Hoffman by drilling holes in his teeth. As the afternoon wore on Olivier recovered his strength and seemed to shed years off his age. “I would so love to play this, such a monstrous part,” he said; adding cautiously, “if Paramount will pay my exorbitant fee”.16
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