So Who's Your Mother

by Tarquin Olivier

  An orthodontist peeked into my mouth, measured the jaw and said there was a further deformity from meningitis. My lower jaw had not grown. Platinum rings were fitted tightly round top and bottom molars with little hooks on the outside. Every night they were joined with tight rubber bands to pull forward the lower jaw, while a permanent band all round the inside widened it. The orthodontist’s name was Dr McCoy and the rings were his invention, and named after him. This could have cost a fortune but he fell in love with my mother and never sent a bill. He was a fan of hers and that was enough.

  Judy Garland appeared in The Wizard of Ozand I fell rapturously in love with her. I wanted to become an actor so as to be close to her in MGM studios. My mother liked the idea. If I were in a movie that was shown in England, my father could see how I was shaping up. My first part in 1942 was in Eagle Squadron, an MGM propaganda movie to encourage America to join Britain in the war. This was before Roosevelt felt it possible to rescind the Neutrality Act. It showed the Battle of Britain, using Pathé’s actual news clips of the RAF dogfights against the Luftwaffe, an entire nation’s fate being decided by multiple combats between individuals. Several dozen American airmen joined up in the Battle of Britain, as indeed did many more Poles, whose country had been occupied by Germany. Robert Stack played the leader of the American airmen in Eagle Squadron. As a US officer on the South Downs of England he had to rescue me from the debris of falling fighter planes. When he picked me up I had to punch him in the face, tell him I hated him, and make the rudest possible noise with my tongue sticking out. There cannot have been many harder starts to a movie career. I liked him so much.

  My mother was in six films that year, all at Twentieth Century Fox. My heart was sidelined for a moment from fantasising about Judy Garland when I played Roddy in Two Tickets to London, a six-year-old son of Jeanne, a French beauty played by Michèle Morgan. One scene required a large number of retakes. I was tucked up in bed and she had to hug me and give me a big kiss. With her perfume, her soft fair hair, earrings and exquisite ears, I was overwhelmed. Over and over I forgot to say ‘Good night’.

  My mother helped me learn my lines every evening after supper, which I enjoyed. It was the only time I was really with her, rather than Joan who looked after me and had the genius of making every problem disappear. As for the acting itself, with the camera you must never look at, and the concentration of every man in sight, all in such sharp focus, everything filled me with a unique sense of vitality. On the other hand, the waits between takes were interminable. While the lights were re-jigged for different angles I had to be given lessons in English and arith-metic by a teacher I did not take to. When not actually in the lights I felt I was nothing.

  The British colony in Hollywood heard of my passion for Judy Garland. I had sent her a bouquet and she had sent me a signed photo-graph, all hand-delivered by MGM messengers. A reception was held, with her most generous and understanding permission, for ‘Miss Judy Garland to meet Master Tarquin Olivier’. It was arranged by Ben Webster, an old actor well known to my parents, and his formidable wife Dame May Whitty, whom they always referred to as Dame May Titty. She had acted with my mother and my grandmother.

  A suit was bought for me of beige linen, a new shirt, my first tie, which to my irritation Joan said made me look grown-up. We parked in a grand drive with trees high overhead. The house was above a hilly garden with flowerbeds and rhododendrons. I was introduced to Judy Garland. I held up my hand to hers. I felt her hand gently clasp mine. I saw her face and could not speak, my throat seized up. It was terrible, like being concussed. She led me away from the ogling grown-ups. We had a lovely stroll and my voice came back.

  She invited me to stay the weekend with her husband, a fair-haired and good-looking young composer called David Rose. They were the first young couple I had ever seen who were madly in love. Their eyes were not only for each other but embraced everyone around them, a quality she retained for the rest of her life, the more so when singing, dancing or acting, or all three at once. He had just made a recording of a piece he had composed called ‘Symphony for Strings’. They played it at full pitch on their gramophone, with its pizzicatovitality and sweeping violins at their most melodious. I think that with me she was wondering what it would be like to have a boy of their own.

  David had a model coal-burning steam engine, about two feet high, with tracks running all round the garden. It puffed. It was real, the only concession to comfort being a three-foot extension to the funnel to shunt the smoke above the driver and passengers. A tunnel went through a cliff and beyond there was the panorama, far below, of Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean, all the way to the horizon. One day as we sat on the sofa she looked into my face and saw an eyelash on my cheek. She stretched out her hand, with her scarlet fingernails, and retrieved it on her slim forefinger. ‘First you must make a wish,’ she said. ‘When you have decided what it is, and not before you’re quite quite sure, why, then you blow.’ I remembered the five-day rail journey all the way from New York, the steam train with the sound of its glorious trailing, exhausted whis-tle, and putting on two extra engines to help with the climb up the Rocky Mountains. I thought of David’s model engine, the view over to the distant coast, the Pacific Ocean. I wished I would travel the whole world. I blew and the eyelash disappeared from her fingertip. The wish came true.

  She introduced me to her niece Honeybunch, a pretty girl about my age who said she would like to take me to church with her family. I had never been to church. I asked about the service and what one was supposed to do and she gave a vivid account. The best of it was singing the hymns. She loved that. She said she always got the tunes okay, just like show business, but could never remember the lyrics. We moved to Pacific Palisades, the far side of Mandeville Canyon, beyond a polo field and riding school. The plateau was planted with lemon groves. The roads had Italian names. Our house, 1535 San Remo Drive, was two-storeyed red brick with a front and back garden. We rented it from the daughter of the German writer Thomas Mann, winner of the Nobel Prize, who lived in the large house opposite. Other houses were within walking distance and I went round to introduce myself to everybody, as was the American way with neighbours, and they called me ‘Sussex’ because of my accent. Every Saturday morning Thomas Mann came over to us, wearing his Homburg hat and carrying a cane. He had been an admirer of Jill and Larry’s. He would ring our doorbell, doff his hat to my mother and say: ‘Good morning, Mrs Olivier. Stamps for Tarquin.’ I still have a complete set of used Hindenburg stamps, a page of unused Hitler stamps and many others he gave me with engraved views from all over the world.

  When I was seven my governess Joan decided that her duty lay in England, for the war effort. My mother cried and cried. All her life she was incapable of living alone, so we were joined by her mother, Eva, who came all the way from England. This meant that I was no longer the centre of attention, giving rise to a jealousy I could not contain. I became unbearable, deliberately pasting rude notices round the house, leaving drawing pins on Eva’s dining chair, and being impossible to everyone. The schoolteachers became upset at my behaviour in class.

  With my mother having Eva for company rather than my governess, the conversation at mealtimes changed from mundane household talk to educated and knowledgeable exchanges, dramatic story-telling and wit. Eva scotch-taped maps of all the war zones across her bedroom walls. She and Jill discussed the campaigns in North Africa, the Philip-pines, and Burma where Jack Hawkins was still fighting the Japanese. I had a dream in which all the land and the soldiers were purple; so I knew we were in Burma. That was the colour of Eva’s map. There was discussion of concentration camps, and prisoners of war in Europe, a number of whom we knew. Every week we packaged up and posted our offerings to them; mainly tins and chocolate, while for friends in England we added nylons, loo paper and hairpins.

  I was making some progress in reading so my mother tried to get through to me by correspondence, sometimes in verse: tarquin

  In the morn
ing, if you wish to clown,

  Don’t forget to don your dressing gown.

  Your feet, so lily white and fair,

  Put into slippers, of which there is a pair.

  Don’t get cold, or sit upon the floor.

  Please use that bump which passes for your brain,

  And if it’s wet don’t rush out in the rain.

  Your cold is over, disappeared and gone,

  So do your best to keep quite well and strong!

  The school suggested that for six weeks of the summer holidays my behaviour might benefit, and my mother be relieved, if I went to the Golden Arrow Camp in the High Sierras. This topic came up when I was going for a walk with Thomas Mann.

  ‘Camp?’ he asked.

  ‘What sort of camp?’

  I replied nonchalantly: ‘Oh, you know, a concentration camp.’

  I thought they were places where you went in order to think very hard, a sort of seminary. He stopped in mid-stride, walking stick unplaced. ‘I don’t think you will be going to a concentration camp.’

  ‘It’s the only sort I’ve ever heard of.’

  ‘Even so.’

  We had many walks together. The reason I remember that one is because of the elements of disagreement. Other landmarks in the mind come from my being puzzled by something. One afternoon outside the drugstore in San Vicente Avenue I saw a pretty girl in jeans. Her back-side had been patched with red tartan. ‘Look at that,’ I said to a hobo passing by, ‘those patches. Very interesting.’

  He said it would be more interesting without them, which was of course beyond my comprehension. The memory is indelible.

  The Golden Arrow camp was at an altitude of 11,000 feet, mountains towering above and reflected in a big lake. We carpentered every day, which became a lifelong hobby, learnt archery, water-skiing, shooting with 2.2 rifles, and clambered around rock climbing. Our leader in Tent One, for the youngest, was a teenager. The first thing he made was a paddle to beat us with. He never used it. We slept in our bunks outside and gazed up at the largest constellations we had ever seen, crystalline, never a minute without a shooting star.

  At home my mother and Eva had a succession of live-in household servants. The one I liked best was Jean, chirpy, overweight, a terrible cook and she hated cleaning. She taught me ‘art’. She bought some fine long-handled paintbrushes, tubes of oil paint and a bottle of turpentine. She painted roses on bottles and showed me how. This kept me quiet. We ran out of bottles so I went in search of some. Beyond us, past Thomas Mann’s house, there was a long road lined with guava trees, lemon groves crowding behind them. High up there was a house on a hill and by the entrance there was a line of dustbins. I opened the first, like the cartoon Top Cat, and found priceless empty bottles of all shapes and sizes, clean and shiny. I stood them in line on the road, totally absorbed.

  ‘What are you doing?’ It was a pleasant lady’s voice.

  I straightened up. She was beautiful, fine ankles, high heels, a simple summer dress and perfect figure. I explained that I was an artist and wanted the bottles to paint on.

  ‘You sound English. What’s your name?’ ‘Tarquin Olivier.’

  ‘Good heavens. I knew your mother and father.’

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Barbara Hutton.’

  She led me up the drive. I told her my family news, and where my mother and I lived just down the road. She took me to the swimming pool and introduced me to her husband Cary Grant. As a Hollywood star he had known my parents. He said this called for a celebration. He flicked his fingers. A maid came over wearing a lace apron and a doily on her head.

  ‘A glass of rum for Mr Olivier.’

  My mother renewed her friendship with them. Barbara had a son called Lance by her previous husband, a Swede. He was a big boy, a year older than I. He was a great climber of trees and a bit of a bully. He had asthma. He was allowed to hit me but I wasn’t allowed to hit him. Disagreements were one-sided, led nowhere and quickly fizzled out, but that didn’t make me a pacifist, merely disgruntled.

  My mother wanted me to have some idea of what was going on in England during the war. There, unbelievably for me, children had hardly any toys. She had her friends in London send us poorly printed booklets, with coarse paper, showing how you could make your own toys from corks, matches and pipe cleaners. Barbara Hutton was fasci-nated. She sat at table with me, a row of corks and the rest, as she followed the instructions on how to put together a horse. She was fun to be with, possibly the richest woman in the world and heir to the for-tune of F. W. Woolworth, who had been behind the very first skyscraper in New York in the 1920s, as soon as elevators had been invented.

  Long after the war – years later in the 1960s – when my mother and I were holidaying in Venice, we met up with her, now often divorced. She said that her years with Cary Grant had been her happiest. With his huge film star earnings he was the only one who had had no need of her wealth. The only problem was his hours of work, starting at crack of dawn and coming home only just in time for dinner. She became bored and surrounded herself with continental European friends. He was still a cockney at heart and was put out by this. All remained well when they were together, until one of his terms of endearment struck her like a thunderbolt. He had kissed her fondly and asked: ‘How’s my little fat podge?’

  She went on a ‘coffee diet’, clung to her French friends, showed only French movies, and made him, Hollywood’s leading man, feel inferior and out of place in his own home. He tried to talk her out of this, but she was horrified, in her thirties that her waist was bigger than it had been when she was eighteen. She became obsessed with that nonsense. Eventually he left. His had been her only true love, she told us.

  In Pacific Palisades she and Cary invited my mother to a black tie dinner. That was a problem. She had only one evening dress and did not like it: a long olive green skirt and a leaf-designed top. She tried it on and asked what I thought. I said it looked common. She frowned, but agreed.

  ‘What’s the most common thing about it?’

  ‘The buttons.’

  She cut them off and Eva replaced them with pearl earrings. This made her feel much better. She told this story at the party and made them all laugh. There were some French people there and she was quite capable of chatting with them because she had had a French nanny.

  Our closest friend was the star actress, an exceptional cool fair-haired beauty, referred to in London as the ‘English Rose’: Gladys Cooper. She had kept her name and at the start of her career worked to lose her cockney accent, often with my parents’ help. Luckily she retained her wit and down to earth quality.

  Her third husband Philip Merivale had just died of a heart attack. He had had a son, Jack Merivale, by a previous marriage, equally good-looking who forty years later became Vivien Leigh’s end of life compan-ion. Gladys became my Granny Gladys. She had me to stay when my mother was filming, in her large wooden house, overlooking the golf course across the end of Mandeville Canyon. She had a red setter dog, a pet white duck called Romeo, and her daughter by a previous marriage called Sally Pearson, a teenager.

  I had the run of the place. There were twelve battery chickens, separated in wire cages, each with a sloping wire floor. Their eggs ran down to a runnel for collection. They were fed and watered automati-cally. It seemed to me unnatural and the sounds they made were piteous so I opened them up and lowered them to the gravel. They hated the feel of dirt and pebbles between their toes. They wailed, picked up each foot in turn and examined it in horror. It took Gladys ages to recapture them.

  It was a typically hot summer and I wandered around in bare feet. The volleyball I was playing with ran into the road so I chased after it. The melted tar squashed between my toes, hot but not hurting so I forgot about it; until Gladys saw me walking over her Persian carpet. That was quite a scene, but far worse was my throwing a stone over a hedge. It happened to hit Romeo on the head. He gave a terrible squawk. I rushed round and saw him scamper into th
e kitchen. I arrived just in time to see him showing his head to Gladys. It did have a speck of blood. It was an accident. The filthy looks at me of a fifty-year-old leading actress together with her injured duck were punishment enough.

  She had a large double bed which she let me share one night. I became a sort of doomsday machine. I pawed with my toes, scrunching them like a cat. When fast asleep my feet would seek out a target and lo and behold it was Gladys. There was no stopping them. She got out of bed, crept round it and secretly climbed in the other side, my side, now vacated; but not for long. The monstrous sleeping me went into reverse, groped over and went for her on the other side. Before she died at her house Barn Elms, near Henley, in 1971 I wrote her a long letter of reminiscences, about the chickens, the duck and the tar on my feet. She lived a little longer so I went down to see her. A number of young admirers were there. She produced a cigarette and three of them dived over with gold lighters to light it. My letter had touched her. However I had made one important omission. She said I had forgotten that I was the only male ever to kick herout of bed.

  I was in a few more films. Our favourite American friends were the actress Margaret Sullavan and her husband the top agent Leland Hayward, and their children Brooke, Bridget and Bill. There were many others but for conversation there was no comparison to Euro-peans, Jean Wright and her twin daughters, a number of others and the Danish de Kauffman family: Axel de Kauffman was a prince and had been privy to his government’s intelligence secrets. Denmark was occupied by the Nazis. The winter of 1940 had been exceptionally cold. He, his wife, three little daughters and a few friends, carrying as much documentation as they could, escaped on foot across the frozen sea one night, a dozen miles of uneven ice from Copenhagen to Malmö in neutral Sweden. They travelled on to London where he gave the files to the Foreign Office and continued with his family out to California.

  The years of my early boyhood in California were golden. I had a mare called Whinney who was so fat I could ride her bareback. After twenty minutes climbing the Santa Monica Mountains you were far away, beyond the yuccas, into the great wine-growing valleys, where the far end was marked by a huge water butt. At night we could hear the coyotes yelling which reminded us to bring the cat in. Everything was so ordered that we never bothered to lock the front door. Rationing [ 12 ] was scarcely an inconvenience. Petrol was limited per car. We wanted more petrol so we bought another car, a jalopy with a dicky-seat. One chore we had was the result of all the tinned food which was part of our diet. We had to hammer the empty tins flat and hand them in. We had no idea what the ‘war effort’ really was. At school we were all Democrats. During Roosevelt’s campaign for his fourth term of office we linked arms and galumphed round the school yard shouting: ‘Roosevelt, Roosevelt, booey to Dewey.’ Everything was so safe that I walked the three miles to school, blue jeans, T-shirt, and lunch box, with great care crossing the road over to the polo fields, past the riding stables and Whinney, and up to San Vicente.