So Who's Your Mother

by Tarquin Olivier

  The only other females were Welsh maids, and the scripture teacher Miss Joly whom I described in a letter home as a ‘stern Christian’. One day when I was being maddening she hit me in the face with a Bible which gave me a nose-bleed. She said she was sincerely very sorry, told me to go to nurse and then lie down. Nurse asked what happened and I said I had had a fall. Miss Joly wrote an abject letter of apology to my mother and said my not having sneaked on her made her and the staff like me. The Welsh maids spoke little English, all sing song. They could not begin to pronounce my French name Olivier so they called me ‘toe face’. It didn’t stick.

  Cottesmore School introduced me to chapel: daily morning service with lessons, psalms and hymns; two on Sunday, with all the boys singing, and hearing the masters’ bass voices. It made me feel how we were unified in the presence of the Lord, a new concept for me.

  Michael Rogerson made the inspired purchase of Buchan Hill Estate, near Crawley in Sussex. It was a Victorian gothic mansion with the heaviest stone roof in the county, immense grounds, a large lake and rhododendrons up the drive, and a long tunnel of rhododendrons to one of the boundaries. It had been built by a man who had made his fortune from ostrich feathers. From that moment Cottesmore went from strength to strength. I sent my son there and he has sent his, and his daughter. The new headmaster is the third generation of Rogersons.

  My mother’s court case was held for her to win back her residence in the house she had leased, a large St John’s Wood property. It had been rented to some Czech refugees who refused to move. She won and they had to leave. Months were then devoted to cleaning the place, redeco-rating, taking the furniture from storage and bringing life back to the garden: her favourite pastime. It became one of the best herbaceous gardens in London, delphiniums comparable to the Chelsea Flower Show.

  We went to Henley Royal Regatta, not far from Apple Porch. The old actors Beau Hannen and Athene Seyler invited us to Leander Club, the Mecca for oarsmen, he in his blazer, white flannels, pink cap and socks. Athene was plain as ever and my mother was nicely dressed but nervous among the rowing gentry indulging in afternoon tea. She still felt guilty at having been out of England during the war, like a rene-gade, despite having been told to leave for the sake of my health. When the teapot needed more hot water she tried to be helpful, picked up the wrong jug and out poured milk. Her awkwardness was so sad. We were rescued by a pretty waitress who changed the pot. As she walked dain-tily away Athene leant confidingly towards me and said, ‘My Beau has fallen in deeply love, with that delicious young waitress’s bottom.’

  I looked at it twinkling away under the black silk skirt and saw what Athene meant.

  ‘Luckily,’ she added, ‘he never sees mine.’

  There remained the small matter my parents had yet to agree upon. With the dislocations of war, divorce, evacuation and Larry’s work being so demanding they had not put me down for a public school. Larry grandly consulted the Labour government’s Minister of Education who felt bound to recommend a state school. Failing that he should send me to Eton. My mother shamed him into sending me to Eton, where his cousin had been and mine was going – both Oliviers. Through a friend’s contacts I was squeezed in to the house of Mr E. P. Hedley, a devotee of the theatre who fancied himself as an actor. So I took my Common Entrance a year earlier than normal and passed, to become the youngest boy in the school and the shortest bar one.

  Deadly Hedley, a humourless and self-righteous man, was sensitive enough to realise that both my parents had taken against him from the start. He had been a classics scholar at Eton, then King’s College, Cambridge, then back to Eton as a teacher of classics. His poor sight had prevented him from being called up. His deep set eyes were magnified by powerful horn-rimmed spectacles. His presence induced guilt. He gained satisfaction from reducing a roomful of thirteen-year-old boys to abject tears of unworthiness. He took one class through As You Like It and they hated it. Despite his education being the best that money could buy he was not an educated man. He did not read, had no appreciation of music and seemed not to see as far as any horizon. His wife, on the other hand, was attractive, easy to talk to on a wide range of books, and many varied subjects. She would have been a far better housemaster than he.

  On the football field my shrunken Achilles tendons still made me run on tiptoe, but eventually the boys stopped saying ‘Ha ha, look at Olivier running’. For summer I decided against cricket and took up a sit down sport: rowing. I became a stylish sculler and won quite a few races, but never the final. The Thames, overlooked by Windsor Castle, was an escape into nature, with the swans and ducks and all aspects of life on the riverbank. That was where I was happiest. Also I had luck with my piano teacher. My grandmother Eva had suggested I learn Debussy’s ‘La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin’. The Precentor, Dr Sydney Watson, asked me to play something so I played the Debussy. He was most surprised. He stammered that I should play something else, so it was ‘Solfeggietto’. Both pieces so out of the ordinary for young boys that he decided to teach me himself. My first term I learnt Debussy’s ‘Deux Arabesques’.

  During the summer holidays Larry and Vivien took me and her daughter, my stepsister Suzanne who was three years older than I, to the South of France. There we joined Vivien’s first husband Leigh, a lawyer with a dry sense of humour. We stayed with his sister who had married a wealthy Frenchman. Their classic Midi mansion was called l’Oulivette, surrounded by its own parklands, on a hill overlooking Cannes, the Mediterranean and the Iles de Lérins. It had high rooms, and patios for the master bedrooms. A hundred yards away there was a cottage beneath umbrella pines which I shared with Susie, now one of my closest friends.

  Every morning Leigh, Larry and Viv went to market to buy a picnic lunch while Susie and I sat testily in the back of Leigh’s car. They found a small wooden fishing boat, skippered by a local fisherman called Edmond, and we would go out to the islands for lunch. Larry had bought me a bikini. It had shocked me in the shop, trying it on, incred-ibly brief, but so were everyone else’s on the boat. I spent much time trying out my French with Edmond.

  My mother and I went to Apple Porch for Christmas with Eva. Every night at six we would sit in Eva’s morning room and listen to the BBC news. As the tones sounded six times she would say: ‘You’re late, Jill,’ and my mother would give her a whisky. As we listened, Eva would comment: ‘The world’s in a terrible state.’ She was a grand old lady who had lived a great life creatively, from the time she fled her middle-class home to go on the stage and be disowned by her parents. When-ever a public holiday approached she used to say, as if she were Queen Mary: ‘Oh I do hope the weather is fine. For the people.’

  After Christmas my mother and I went skiing in Grindelwald, starting a sport which became my favourite. We teamed up with an avuncu-lar old friend called Teddy Clarke who was looking after two Gibson brothers, both at Eton, Clement in the same class as me. He and I became best friends.

  Music was becoming more and more important, not only the piano where I was learning more passionate pieces, but also as a chorister in the Lower Chapel choir. With love in my heart and nowhere to put it, music became a refuge. For schoolboys any show of emotion was taboo, but in Chapel it was accepted. However, as choirboys we were not angels. Sex was in our minds. I invented a game to help us while away the sermons and readings from the Bible. If we were using a psalter all you had to do was signal over to the boys opposite the number of the psalm and the verse. During a more than protracted sermon I came across a gem. I caught the eyes of the others, signalled the text and feverishly they looked it up. It read; ‘For the Lord hath proved me and seen all my works.’ I pointed between my legs. They almost burst with laughter.

  A term later I was Keeper of the Lower Chapel Choir, carried the Cross at the head of the procession and had to become more serious. I composed the music for the canticles: the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis. During the chapel’s weekly practice under Dr Watson all the boys had to learn the new tunes. Daddy Watson, a
s we referred to him, said that it had long been the case in College Chapel for the canticles’ tunes to be composed by boys, but this was the first time for Lower Chapel. I managed to look calm and no one guessed it was me. Hearing them sing my tunes so lustily was exciting.

  By the summer of 1952 I was in College Chapel with the senior boys, and tall enough to wear Eton tails rather than the idiotic short Eton jackets we called bum freezers. For the holidays my mother and I were invited to Denmark by our old wartime friends from Los Angeles, the de Kauffmans, to stay at their log cabin compound near Gilleleje, north-west Rutland. Their daughter Inge was now aged just sixteen, still with her platinum blond hair, exceedingly curvaceous but with the unfortunate addition of a tall blond boyfriend. However he did not stay long. After a family dinner she and I put to sea in a canoe. The Aurora Borealis was at its most brilliant, pulsating across half the night sky. When we paddled there were bursts of phosphorescence at every stroke. I was learning to smoke. She leant back to hand me a cigarette. I leaned forward to take it and we suddenly turned turtle, straight into the water. I surfaced to hear her laughter. It was glorious, even pushing the canoe to shore. We took off our wet clothes and shoes and strode back to the house in our underwear: innocence and desire.

  Then we went to Normandy, this time with Eve Brierly, who had come to live in our top floor flat. She was an elderly, etiolated French lesbian, which I never suspected at the time; such is nature’s protection of the young, for my mother had become bisexual: anything for company. Larry had ruined her for serious relationships with men. We stayed near Cabourg in a village called Le Hom. There was plenty of French speaking which I began to enjoy. The beach was wide and windswept. I built a sandcastle with tunnels and runnels for red golf balls to run down. I was joined by a granddaughter of the Rodier fash-ion house, called Jacqueline. We got to know her family who had a cottage overlooking the beach.

  That winter in London I had dancing lessons and went to the Hyde Park Hotel for my first ball, given by Adrienne Allen (she had played in Private Lives in London before it went to New York with my mother in her role) and her husband Bill Whitney. There were about sixty of us teenagers, all delivered by our parents, also in evening dress, who came to collect us much later. The girls were ravishing, shy in their new ball-room gowns, necklaces and earrings, and we danced. The hit musical in London was South Pacific and after the show its star Mary Martin came to sing to us, in cabaret.

  When my mother drove me home she was blushing with pleasure and I asked why. She looked slightly coy. She said she had been standing next to Mary Martin’s husband, a most attractive man and they had chatted. He had given her bottom a little pinch. I expressed alarm. She said she enjoyed it. It was a nice pinch. I wondered if she had been wearing a girdle.

  I wrote to Larry:

  I had the most wonderful Christmas at Apple Porch to which I invited Virginia, my English girlfriend. She is not as good-looking as Inge de Kauffman but that cannot be expected. She is very nice and a little younger than I am. At the moment she is a little taller too. We are very devoted and are keeping up a fulsome correspon-dence. I think the reason for this is that on Christmas night, when I was saying goodbye and nobody was looking I shared what mistletoe was for. I enjoyed this very much and look back on it with much pride as it took a lot of nerve as it was my first experience of anything in that line.

  I was fifteen and a half. The letter goes on to describe Jacqueline in France. My persistence in writing to Larry was starting to yield returns. His response was a classic.

  Just as a spur to my already smarting conscience there arrives today your second angelic letter. You are a dear chap to keep writing to me so sweetly. I am enjoying so much your descriptions of all …

  My dear boy! The international spirit you show in your choice of girlfriends is very laudable, though I fear it may be a severe tax on your diplomacy as time goes on. Such hazardous procedure may well endanger world peace, or are you training for the diplomatic corps? Otherwise I’m afraid such a very ubiquitous love life may well consign you to a naval career! French, English and Danish. I’ll try and pick one for you in New York shall I? And one from Jamaica – a nice black job if we go there to visit Noëlie [Coward] on our way home.

  Every now and then poor Vivien showed very publicly her symptoms of manic depression: nervous breakdowns at a time when it was an incur-able sickness and mental illness was ill understood. It led to rebounding and confounding mood changes, some very serious, to the enraptured attentions of the press. Again and again, page after page, photographs and exaggerated shock stories. The boys at school expressed their under-stated sympathy, but those newspapers, day after day … It was awful.

  After all our letters it was natural for Virginia to come and stay in the old-fashioned shabby calm of Apple Porch. Her family had known my mother’s for two generations. She was intelligent and fun. One day as we sat in the spring sunshine she placed my hand on her breast and life changed gear – but only that one gear. It kept us happy for hours.

  Apart from the piano and rowing, my last couple of years at school were transformed by my modern tutor, Oliver Van Oss. He was of Dutch extraction with strong cheekbones, rounded nose, deep dark eyes and black hair. He was a modern linguist of distinction. I felt at ease with him. I once asked whether, during the war, he had ever been a spy. His crow’s feet creased with humour: ‘No.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘I did try but they said I looked too like one.’ All the boys liked him. He was a tremendous worker and wonder-fully perceptive. My mother found him a bit daunting when she had her first chat with him, but she was enthralled by his assessment of me. His knowledge of all the arts was stimulating and we debated it all with him during our weekly sessions, about a dozen of us in his study. He did from time to time ask after Larry and Viv’s problems, when alone with me, while correcting something I had written. This helped. Hedley never did, and he couldn’t bear Van Oss. He dismissed him as a dilet-tante, which is the best quality to engage the interest of boys. He knew what was good and his horizons were wide.

  Notley had become amazing. Vivien organised the decorations with the help of Sybil Colefax of Colefax and Fowler and made it the loveli-est place I had ever seen. Every school holiday I had a weekend or two there, always arriving with a suitcase. Never a corner which was actu-ally mine, except for the Steinway. The place became known for Larry and Viv’s hospitality and entertainment. The newspapers got that right when they described it as ‘legendary’. There were surprisingly few actors among our usual guests; only those few who really were close friends. The theatre world was more burdened with envy than any other; acting was a profession where genuine friendships were rare. Their real friends were for the most part from other professions. Vivien always encouraged me to play the piano, especially to William Walton and Malcolm Sargent, an excellent way of learning how to handle nerves when performing.

  With guests on all sides Larry had little time for me except for our single afternoon walks together, and on the tennis court playing very mixed doubles and laughing till we ached. In the mornings I went to their room for breakfast on a tray while they had theirs in bed, avidly reading the Sundays. Not the news, just the critics: Harold Hobson in The Times and Kenneth Tynan in the Observer. Their reactions, even at that delicate hour, were stentorian, filled with vicious and uproarious sarcasm about the reviews, the plays and the actors themselves. Larry’s language knew of no restraint and he made me and Viv laugh painfully, in extremis. He was ridiculously, gloriously funny.

  Clement Gibson and I went to Grindelwald again with Teddy Clarke, who had made his money in Argentina, some of it through the beef of Fray Bentos where the Gibson family were prominent.

  Then there was a day unlike any other day. We were lunching in the restaurant of the Hotel Bahnhoff, not the most electrifying establish-ment. The best thing on the menu was Rösti potatoes, a Bernese gift to civilisation. Then, at the far end of the restaurant there arrived a vision of such purity and beauty that I knew in le
ss than a heartbeat, that my life had changed. I put my napkin down, rose to my feet, hurried out into the lobby and rushed upstairs to the room Clem and I were sharing, and brushed my teeth. I was smitten, bowled over, pole-axed, or whatever the unworthy words are to describe the emotion which I felt I had not only discovered but invented, and I thought it was marvellous.

  Her name was Jenny. That was a love which was to flourish for five years. We danced a bit, had a day’s skiing, hardly spoke a word and when she left I gave her a beautiful silk scarf. She placed in my hand a scrap of square ruled paper with her address. So started our letters, hers in English, mine in French. They became daily.

  This surge of desperately untried love combined powerfully with what was the spiritual height of my religious passion, and the only way I could express it was on the piano. There, things were rising to a higher level. I had won the junior and the senior piano competitions and became able to move the people who were listening to me. As I sat facing the keyboard with the audience on my right I could sense the direction the emotion came from, and then feel it expanding, growing and it became as if my hands no longer existed, awareness of the delin-eated notes beneath my fingers reached another plane, as if nothing existed between the actual sounds and the hearing of those who were listening. When I played at Notley after dinner, if things went well the feeling of emotion came from all of them; except Larry. He had unequalled power to move huge audiences. He did it for a living, matchlessly, night after night. He knew what I was experiencing and was like a star looking down affectionately upon me, his little piece of earth. He knew I could perform, but that was in my genes. I was not a natural musician. I couldn’t even sight-read a hymn. He knew that emotions could feel sacred, but they were not the be all and end all.