It was not the lack of distinction to which Weidenfeld’s editors objected but the wordiness, the convoluted sentences, the vapid rhetorical flourishes. The final version, published in the autumn of 1982, was a good deal better than what had first been submitted, but it could have been much improved by further editing. It was, however, in its way a remarkable book. Olivier kept his word about being harder on himself than on any other character. He was quite as ready to describe what had gone wrong in his career as to extol his triumphs: “One thing that does come out is the essential modesty of the man,” wrote Michael Billington. “There is steel and iron in this man, yet there is an extraordinary humility as well.” He wrote about his personal relationships with sometimes startling frankness: it was “a most courageous book”, Ronald Pickup told him. “For those of us who know how truly you protect and value your privacy, I think the courageousness is particularly telling.” It also caused considerable offence to those who felt that Olivier, in his determination to expose himself, had not hesitated to expose other people at the same time. His elder son, Tarquin, felt that there was much in it that was untrue. In particular his picture of his first marriage was distorted. Olivier suggested that he had never loved Jill Esmond nor she him, something that Tarquin believed to be wholly misleading, at least so far as his mother was concerned. John Gielgud was offended by what he felt to be the coarse and over-candid revelations about Olivier’s life with Vivien Leigh. This was not the woman he had known, he complained. Max Rayne was so shocked by what he thought to be Olivier’s misrepresentation of his last years at the National Theatre that he wrote to the Sunday Telegraph to protest. Everything, he said, had been done in a way considerate of Olivier’s susceptibilities and to suit his convenience: anything else would have been incompatible with “our relationship, not to mention the enormous respect and admiration I have always had for that great man”.24
Several critics commented on the curious artificiality of Olivier’s descriptive writing. He “acts writing”, wrote Craig Raine, “an uneasy mixture of the chatty and the belle-lettrist flourish”. John Carey made the same point: “His abject penitential routine belongs, you feel, to a stage voice – another acting role for the great impersonator to lose himself in.” But it was Olivier’s style that most offended Carey: “His sentences ramble and flounder, and he has a fondness for deeply thought platitudes which come thudding out like stuffed bison.” As for the jokes: “They stud the pages like wet washing.” He didn’t blame Olivier for having no sense of humour, he wrote, “but if you’re without one it’s best to avoid jocularity”.25
What Olivier lacked was not so much a sense of humour as the ability to project it on paper. A host of witnesses pay tribute to his wit and gaiety. Roger Furse spoke of “his wonderful sense of humour, fun and nonsense which have so often broken up tense or unhappy situations”. “I’ve never laughed with a man so much. I miss him. I miss the laughs,” remembered John Mills. “He had a wonderful sense of the ludicrous, a touch of Monty Python or the Goons,” said Anthony Havelock-Allan. His humour was the richer for being understated. “One has to be careful with Larry,” wrote Richard Burton. “He is a great deadpan leg-puller and one is never quite sure whether he is probing very subtly for weak spots or majestically sending one up.” To be a good raconteur and to laugh much and loudly is not necessarily proof of a sense of humour, but Olivier had a fine feeling for the ridiculous and was more likely to mock himself than anyone else. In a letter to Ralph Richardson in 1945 he described his performance in “Henry IV, Part One” one evening when he knew John Mills was in the audience. It was, he wrote, “one of the most self-conscious performances of Hotspur on record – either in such good taste and underacting it can’t be heard, or else ‘Look at my red hair and flashing eyes – aren’t I different!’ ‘No’ keeps coming back from the blackness … The man sitting next to Johnnie said, as the curtains parted on that most carefully arranged careless posture, white tights, garter just-so, light through window hitting one at just that angle, and all things that go to make up my startling and awe-inspiring second appearance, ‘Oh, here’s old Ginger again!’ Christ!” The humour is, perhaps, not of the most sophisticated, but it was written by a man who was prepared to find himself absurd and to expose himself to others for being so. His memoirs would have been vastly improved if he had banished his inhibitions and let such irreverent fantasies run loose.26
What were almost but not quite his last words could also never have come from a man devoid of humour. The young male nurse, trying to give Olivier some liquid refreshment in the middle of the night, cut an orange in half, put it in a gauze and tried to squeeze some juice into his mouth. Olivier moved uneasily, the juice splashed onto his cheek and a dribble ran down into his ear. Memories stirred of a royal Dane sleeping in his garden and a murderous brother leaning over him. “It’s not fucking ‘Hamlet’, you know,” said Olivier.27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Death
The months and years leading up to those almost-final words were singularly unpleasant. There are no absolutes about old age. Some people in their late seventies or early eighties are fortunate enough still to be energetic: walking vigorously, gardening, finishing the crossword puzzle, even writing biographies. Others withdraw from life, cease to take an interest in other people, switch off the light or let it burn very dim. Physical health plays a part in this: it is harder to engage fully with life if one feels perpetually debilitated. Olivier had had more than his fair share of illness: his spirit was undaunted, but his body and, in some ways, his mind were sadly handicapped. Something vital had been extinguished. “I hated the last few years, because it wasn’t Larry,” said John Mills. “It didn’t look like Larry.” It didn’t sound like Larry, either. Almost, one could say, it wasn’t Larry.1
He made valiant efforts to convince others, indeed to convince himself, that business was as usual. John Gielgud wrote to congratulate Cecil Beaton on rising above his miseries: “Larry and Michael Redgrave are both equally to be admired for their courage and determination. There must be something about the theatre … which manages to drive one, against all reason, to continue to be lively and interested and to refuse to lie down.” Olivier did refuse to lie down, but the opportunities for standing up became ever more infrequent and more erratic. His last and most bizarre performance in a theatre was in 1986 when he appeared in hologram as a disembodied head emerging from an extraterrestrial egg above the stage of the Dominion Theatre at the start of a new Cliff Richard musical. “I am Akash,” the head proclaimed. “All your questions will be answered.” “Unfortunately they are not,” commented Sheridan Morley. “My questions would include, how does the greatest actor of our century come to be entering his eightieth year involved, even if only in facsimile, with what may well prove to be one of the worst musicals of this century?” Olivier’s reply would have been that he needed the money. He may have believed that this was the case but it was not the most important motive; he took on such ignoble tasks because he needed to convince himself that he was still relevant, still in demand, still capable of commanding an audience. Each time he showed more clearly that it was in fact beyond his powers. The last commission in which he was engaged when his final illness forced him to withdraw, was to read poetry on television. Kenneth Williams watched aghast as Patrick Garland handed sheets of paper “to the ancient lord for him to read aloud. It was a dreadful exhibition of senility. He quavered his way through bits and pieces like some poor old sod being made to audition.”2
Emboldened by the friendly reception which his autobiography had received, Olivier decided to write another book. On Acting was to be the repository of a lifetime’s experience, the wisdom and understanding which he had gleaned and which he was uniquely qualified to pass on to the world. For many hours he talked to Gawn Grainger, a young actor who had become Olivier’s confidant and close friend, and who was expected to do most of the work of putting Olivier’s thoughts on paper. There was to be no repetition of the mo
ment when Olivier thrust Mark Amory aside and took on the business of writing his autobiography himself. He knew that the task was beyond him. On Acting was interesting and modestly instructive, it was better written than it would have been if its originator had undertaken the task himself, but Olivier did not put one word of the main text on paper. He wrote in his preface that, when he finished Confessions of an Actor, he thought that he had done with writing for ever, but now, here he was, “sitting with my nose buried into the blank page again”, suffering all the agonies of authorship. “I typed the bit about the writing of his book with my teeth clenched,” Olivier’s secretary told Gawn Grainger. “However, you and I know, don’t we? As long as there’s two of you it doesn’t make it quite so bad.” At least, in his will, Olivier left the royalties for On Acting to “Gawn Grainger, who wrote the book with me”.3
David Niven wrote to tell Olivier that he had been diagnosed with motor neuron disease. The end result could be quite horrid, he said: inability to move one’s limbs or to talk but with the brain still clear. “I’m afraid, dearest friend,” he went on, “that I have discovered that I am made of different stuff from you. Your shining example of blazing courage in the face of one vicious piece of bad luck after another should have inspired me; but alas! I know myself for what I have always suspected – I am a gibbering coward!” Olivier’s courage still blazed but with every month that passed it seemed that there was less and less for it to feed on. Olivier was bored. He lacked the intellectual hinterland which would have provided a profitable resource: he had lost the habit of listening to music; he read few books; he found abstract discussion tedious if not impossible – he knew how to act and to direct other people in their acting, that was all. At home, at the Malt House, he would fitfully revive when old friends came who would gossip with him about the theatre; then he would sink back into a stupor, not actively unhappy but getting little joy from life. Much of the time he was alone. Joan Plowright’s career meant that frequently she was in London. His children had full lives of their own. When people did come he sometimes tended to be contentious and bad-tempered. Matthew Burton stayed with the family as a teenager. He remembered how Olivier enjoyed outraging his wife and daughters. “Women are no bloody use in a film set when they’ve got the Curse,” he would complain; then, not yet satisfied that he had been sufficiently annoying, would continue: “They are incapable of work one week every four!” “Being cantankerous was both sport and revenge for him,” said Burton. “He was regimented, medicated, exercised and mollycoddled and, although he needed help, he hated being thought incapable.”4
It was the powerlessness which most distressed him. For years his son Richard had been taking over responsibility for his affairs and estate, proceeding more and more without reference to Olivier himself. He remembered “the flashes of bitter resentment” that would cross his father’s face when he saw his wife and son busily making plans for him and admitted to deriving some sadistic pleasure from speaking softly so that Olivier was excluded: “I revelled in the opportunity to punish him, for being away, for being ill, for taking mother away to work, whatever it was.” At first Olivier would revolt, protest indignantly, storm out of the room in injured dignity; gradually he became apathetic, accepted his exclusion with sullen resentment. His memory got worse and worse. The Daily Mirror reported that he was using a teleprompter for his television roles; Olivier was offended but he knew that it was true. When at home, he found that he was constantly uncertain what he was supposed to be doing next. Was he going to London that afternoon? Or tomorrow morning? “I daren’t keep asking because I know I’ve asked at least three times … I daren’t ask Joan; Dickie gets impatient; Oh God, it’s so awful!”5
His memory, though faltering, was not yet defunct. When Tom Stoppard arrived at one of the parties given to celebrate Olivier’s eightieth birthday, he was greeted with: “I remember you. You’re the one with big teeth.” The birthday was at least a landmark in his ever less eventful life, even if it reminded him of something he would far rather not have known. They had laid on a spectacular jamboree in his honour in the Olivier Theatre: John Mortimer devised the entertainment; Geraldine McEwan, Peggy Ashcroft and Albert Finney took part; Peter Hall appeared as Shakespeare. When Olivier arrived, wrote Hall’s successor as Director, Richard Eyre, “there was a wail from the crowd of almost Iranian intensity, and out of the car stepped Olivier, smaller, almost unrecognisably so, a very, very frail man supported by Joan Plowright”. At the climax of the evening a large white birthday cake was carried in, out of which erupted his daughter, Julie-Kate, to wish her father a happy birthday and to start the singing. The audience turned to Olivier and launched into a standing ovation that seemed as if it would never end: “He smiled, an enchanting childlike smile of pure pleasure. He was a man for whom applause was almost better than life itself.” And then it was back to seclusion at the Malt House and wondering what, if anything, was going to happen next.6
Richard Olivier, worried about his father’s deepening depression, persuaded him to see a Jungian analyst, Desmond Biddulph. Olivier welcomed his visits, clearly viewing him as an audience for his anecdotes rather than a physician. Biddulph found that he was always impeccably dressed and very much in control of himself. His short-term memory had almost gone, however, and he lived very much in the past. He reverted constantly to his life with Vivien Leigh and reproached himself for not having played a more active role at the time of her first serious breakdown. He took modest pride in the achievements of his children, but seemed to view them, as indeed everything else, with uneasy detachment. His closest relationship, Biddulph judged, was with his ginger cat.7
His relationship with Joan Plowright was tenuous. They had been living largely separate lives for the last ten years. He was convinced that he was being excluded from the inner family. Once, when Plowright was talking to Derek Granger at one end of the dining table, Olivier asked what they were discussing, then got angrily to his feet, demanded “Does anyone know where an unwanted old man can go to find a home?” and stalked from the room. He allowed himself to be coaxed back by one of his daughters, but made no attempt to conceal his resentment. Plowright accepted her responsibility for his welfare and preserved the proprieties. To an outsider it seemed a united ménage. “I was so moved by your spirit and tenderness to him,” wrote a friend after his death. “What a sadness to lose him, and what patience and love you showed during his time of illness.” Patience certainly; love, perhaps less. “I still loved him,” Plowright insists. “The love was a bit squashed and battered, but it was still there.” But there is a limit to the amount of squashing and battering that even the strongest love can survive. For years before he entered the final phase, he must have been difficult to live with. He became obsessed with the idea of suicide. He did not go to Joan Plowright’s first night in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” but instead interrupted the dinner party after the performance with a telephone call. How should he kill himself? he asked. Gas? Stones in the pocket and a plunge into the river? He reverted to the question at dinner at home and insisted on conducting a discussion on the subject. Plowright once told him that she could not endure this sort of life much longer. He launched into a bitter analysis of his own shortcomings: “The fact is that I don’t know who I am … I’ve played all these parts and I don’t know who I am. I’m a hollow man.” The worst thing was that to a great extent she agreed with him. In the last few years of Olivier’s life Plowright was increasingly asking herself whether she was sharing her life with a real human being.8
It seemed for a moment as if religion might provide part at least of his needs. At the end of 1983, when Olivier was in hospital recovering from the removal of kidney, Alec Guinness called on him, armed with a handsome jar of caviar. He had intended just to leave the caviar with a suitable message, but to his surprise – “After all, I was not an intimate chum” – Olivier insisted on seeing him. He was most affectionate in his greeting. “Thank God you’ve come! I’ve been think
ing of you so much. Help me! Help me! I want to become a Catholic.” Guinness havered, but eventually suggested that Olivier should see Father Nugent from Farm Street or some other sophisticated priest. “I have an idea he thinks it was all just a question of acknowledging the Pope’s supremacy. He said a couple of times: ‘I believe in transubstantiation, you know’. He was very sweet and I felt easier with him than I have in forty-eight years.” A few days later he wrote to suggest another man whom Olivier might like to consult. “I’m a pretty lousy Catholic,” he admitted, “though I love the Church (in spite of some of its ghastly supermarket modern ways) but if you want me to call on you for half an hour or so when you are out of hospital, I’d be only too happy to visit you and chat.”9
Olivier does not seem to have taken up the invitation. Nor was there much further evidence of his new-found quest for faith. He had told Denys Blakelock as long ago as 1931 that he felt he could “no longer throw in his lot with any organised religion” and from that time he had done little more than conform to the social shibboleths of the Church of England. At some point during the war Vivien Leigh told Cyril Cusack that “Larry was going through a religious phase”. “But I’ll soon get him out of that,” she added. She seems to have succeeded. Max Adrian, for one, noted that he was certain Olivier had “found great solace in religion when he has been troubled emotionally”. But it does not seem that this amounted to much. The prevailing picture is of one who was not prepared categorically to deny the existence of a deity but who gave the matter little thought. The Revd John Hencher had once been an actor, then had joined the Church, but in 1963 wanted to revert to the stage. Olivier advised him to think twice and then think again. “I am deeply sympathetic to your problem, but I feel that, if one is called to the Church, one can assume it has been from the right quarter, whereas this is by no means certain with the stage.” It was hardly a clarion call to rally to the faith, but nor was it the counsel of a confirmed disbeliever. Richard Olivier for one felt that his father, to the end, sat on the religious fence. There is no reason to believe that he was consciously insincere when he spoke to Guinness or Adrian but always he sought to adapt his personality to suit the person with whom he happened to be talking. Guinness and Adrian wanted to find him spiritually aware; then spiritually aware he would be.10
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