Vivien Leigh & Laurence Olivier' Stories

I adore him!

Her; not so much.

I do hope these stories will be vaguely factual.

According to Eve Phillips, then a young actress and fashion model who was assigned a job as a stand-in for Vivien in her first few Korda movies, "She was bored and itchy. Her husband was furious at all the attention she was receiving and withdrew from her in a huff. I know it's the accepted wisdom that Viv went straight from her husband to Olivier, but that wasn't the case at all. She was mad about Olvier. But she didn't even know him and she carried on her infatuation from a distance. I know she went to see him in Romeo and Juliet on a number of occasions, and she talked about him incessantly. But what could she do? He was married. Not even Viv was that daring.

"She was daring enough, though. She met a great many theatre and movie people that year, and she was so beautiful that the chaps were falling over themselves trying to seduce her. Her love life with her husband was practically nonexistent, she told me. I think her feelings about Olivier aroused some deep animal feelings in her that she'd not been aware of before. Anyway, I know for a fact that she had two secret affairs during the time she was waiting for Cyrano to get off the ground. The reason I know is because she used my flat. I knew one of the chaps —he was an actor, married. The other—I only knew who he was, 1 didn't know him at the time. Alexander Korda."

...........After the Oliviers departed, according to Buckmaster, "Viv suddenly went quiet, then became testy. Larry had shaved his moustache for Romeo and Juliet, and I recall remarking that he looked much better with it than without. Viv got furious with me, as if she were defending some wayward relative. She hardly talked to me the rest of the night. That's when I realized how she felt about him. And Larry, the poor bloke, hadn't the slightest notion."

Olivier would not remain in the dark for long. Not more than a week after their first meeting, Vivien was backstage at the New Theatre late one afternoon to audition for a role in a future Gielgud production of Shakespeare's Richard II. Her timing was good—she "happened" to run into Olivier as he came into the theatre for that evening's performance of Romeo and Juliet. He expressed surprise at her interest in Shakespeare and invited her to his dressing room for a talk.

No one knows what occurred behind the closed door, but afterward Vivien was more ecstatic than ever about Olivier

As January progressed into February, though, there were more backstage visits after Gielgud, at Olivier's urging, gave Vivien the role of the Queen in his limited-run production of Richard II. Rehearsals for Richard II were held in the afternoons at the New Theatre during the last weeks of the run of Romeo and Juliet. According to an observer, "Larry took to coming in early almost every day and coaching Vivien Leigh in her lines. His dressing room became her private acting school. Who knows what else?"

In February, Olivier and Jill Esmond took a country house near the Thames Valley town of Maidenhead so that Jill would be able to spend most of her pregnancy outside the city. "It was Larry's idea after he met Viv," says the observer. "I don't think they'd started an affair yet, but I'm sure Larry got the idea from Viv that she was open to one. And I'm sure that, after some soul-searching, he felt ready. But if there was going to be an affair, it was going to have to be top secret as far as Larry was concerned. The first thing he had to do was get Jill out of town. Her pregnancy provided the perfect excuse."

"Viv was still dying to get romantically involved with Larry/' says a woman who, with her husband, got to know both of them well at the time. "But Larry, except for flirting, was all caution. He was aware of how Vivien felt, and he was awfully tempted to plunge in. But he kept holding off. Later he told my husband that the reason was Vivien's husband, Mr. Holman. Larry hadn't met him, he'd only heard about him from Vivien. Nevertheless, he felt awful about the idea of cuckolding another man. He fought it for a long time. Larry was, after all, a very honorable man, and he wasn't used to sexual intrigue. Vivien, on the other hand, although she was only twenty-two, was. In fact she delighted in it."

'I never saw such a transformation in a man as the one Larry Olivier went through after he became involved with Vivien Leigh," said an actor friend.

"His entire personality changed. He went from a rather somber, pessimistic chap to an upbeat, gay bon vivant and raconteur. Oh, with his close friends—fellows like Ralph Richardson and Jack Hawkins—I suppose he had been always like that. But with people he didn't know well, he was usually aloof and humorless. Suddenly he was gregarious with everyone, not exactly backslapping, but expressive and talkative and full of quips. No one knew, of course, that he was so deeply caught up with Vivien, so we all wondered what had happened. We assumed that Larry had simply decided to become an actor in real life as well as on the stage. We laughed at him a bit, I'm afraid—I mean, it all seemed such artifice at first. . . . There was a bit of Korda in his sudden flashiness, a bit of Gielgud in his voice, a bit of Ivor Novello in his swagger, a bit of Noel in his feyness. We figured that Larry must have decided to do an overhaul of his personality and present a new Olivier to the world, consisting of all the characteristics he admired in others. For such a good actor he seemed to be doing rather a bit of a hammy job of it. But then, later, we realized it was Vivien's influence"

"Vivien overflowed with girlish enthusiasm and good cheer, and Larry was very affected by it. Jill was a no-nonsense girl, sharp as a pin mentally, direct and explicit in her approach to people, always in charge of everything, the type of woman who wouldn't say anything unless she had something to say. Vivien, on the other hand, would talk about anything, and she'd do it with great style and charm, but without any naivete. Her most singular asset, I suppose, was her ability to focus all her attention on whomever she happened to be with. This was an immensely endearing trait and was what made her so popular with everyone. And it was very sexual where men were concerned—this great beauty running her hand up your arm, laughing at your jokes, seeming to be immersed entirely in you—all so natural and without any sort of guile.

"Well—she got Larry under her spell, obviously, and he responded with this huge personality change."

^ I'm guessing that 'Cyrano' refers to another unfortunately aborted production for Alexander Korda.

Charles Laughton would have been a wonderful Cyrano and Vivien a decorative Roxane.

....Fire Over England took more than two months to film. Olivier's swashbuckling role as an Elizabethan seafarer, for which he insisted on doing most of his own stunts, exhausted him to the point that he, as one observer has said, "seemed barely aware of it" when on August 21, 1936, Jill Esmond gave birth to their child.

Olivier had earlier insisted that if Jill had a boy, he should be called Tarquin—a name that showed up in the ancient Olivier family ancestry and was also prominent in Shakespearean literature.

Although the impact of the birth of his son took a while to register on Olivier, when it did it had a sobering effect. During the first few weeks of filming Fire Over England at Denham, he and Vivien Leigh conducted their affair in passionate bits and snatches, and it was made all the more feverish by the secrecy it entailed. Soon, however, it was no secret, at least at the studio.

"Everyone involved with the picture knew about them," said an actor who played a role in the epic. "One morning Larry and I shared a car out to the studio. I tried to hint in a subtle way that what he was doing mightn't be such a good idea, considering he'd just had a child. He looked at me and said, 'So you know.' I said, 'Larry, old boy, everyone knows. They're all talking about it.' He cursed and said, 'So much for secrecy. Well, I've got to do something, haven't I?

"Then we got to talking about his work in the picture. He was doing some terribly demanding stunts and looked beaten up and exhausted. I said, 'Jesus, why don't you use a double? You'll be all done in before you're finished.' And he answered, 'I'm done in already. But it's not the stunts. It's Vivien. It's every day, two, three times. She's bloody wearing me out.' "

Olivier's friend wasn't the only one worried about the affair. Korda grew concerned too. According to his former assistant, "Alex heard the talk. He began to worry about a scandal. The film was an expensive project, and he knew the only way he'd get his money back would be through its acceptance in America. He thought American audiences would reject the picture if it ever got out that its two stars—both married, both with children—were having an affair.

'Finally he called them in and pleaded with them to put an end to it, at least until production was finished. By that time Olivier and Leigh knew that it was no longer a secret, that everyone at Denham knew about it. They too became concerned. So they stopped. At least they stayed pretty well apart during their spare time for the rest of the picture. The accommodations Alex had arranged for them—they were hardly used anymore."

Raymond Massey had a small role in the movie. He later said, "I knew what was going on. I felt sad for Jill, because I knew her and I knew she was ignorant of the whole business. In a way I was happy for Larry, for I could see that Vivien was making a new man out of him. On balance, though, I had a feeling of foreboding for all of them, a dread that everything would end in a mess. But then I talked with Larry. It was about a month after his son was born. He was consumed with guilt. He was putting an end to it, he said. He loved Jill and he'd been a fool. With Vivien—well, it was just a wild infatuation, but it was to Jill he owed his loyalty, and the child. He had talked to Vivien about it. She had agreed to a cooling-off period. And that, I thought, would be the end of it."

As, perhaps, did Olivier. But not Vivien Leigh. As Eve Phillips later recalled, "Viv said that Larry Olivier was in love with her, that he had told her so over and over again during Fire Over England. She couldn't understand his sudden withdrawal. But she was not going to let him get away.

James Wong Howe, the cameraman on Fire Over England, said: "Toward the end of the picture Olivier was in a melancholy state of mind. Earlier, his love scenes with Vivien had come across with tremendous vitality because of the way he felt about her. But later he seemed less intense. I asked him: 'Has something happened with you and Vivien, Larry?' And he said: 'I've got to give her up, Jimmy. I don't want to, God knows. But I must. And I can't.' "

when he completed work on Fire Over England, he took Jill on a three-week holiday to Capri. "It was a reconciliatory move on Larry's part," said a friend. "He didn't confess his affair to her, but he did concede that he'd drifted from her. The purpose of the trip was to revitalize their marriage, and he tried to put Viv out of his mind. Later he said it didn't work. All he could think about was Viv."

And all Vivien Leigh could think about was Olivier, according to Oswald Frewen. He has said that when she learned Olivier and Jill would be staying at the Hotel Quisisana in Capri, she quickly arranged her own trip to the Mediterranean—with a two-day stopover at the Quisisana. Since she didn't want her husband with her, she asked Frewen along as her "chaperon."

Frewen claimed not to have known that Vivien had planned the trip in order to encounter Olivier in Capri. But when, on their arrival at the Quisisana, they ran immediately into Olivier and his wife, he began to put two and two together. That it was no coincidence was soon confirmed when Vivien told him that she was hopelessly in love with Olivier and couldn't bear his three-week absence from London. The fifty-year-old Frewen was shocked, for now he was a collaborator in Vivien's deception of his friend Holman.

He was not the only one to be shocked. Vivien was unable to maintain the simulated indifference to Olivier with which she had masked herself the previous spring when she and her husband had visited the Oliviers. Now she cast openly adoring glances at Olivier, repeatedly touched him in familiar, almost intimate ways, and visibly shivered at his casual touch—all in open view of Jill. At first Jill excused the behavior as a hangover from the love scenes they had done together for Fire Over England. But soon she grew annoyed by Vivien's actions, and more so by Olivier's responses.

The moment Vivien and Oswald Frewen left for Rome, Jill complained about Vivien's behavior. During Vivien's visit, Olivier had struggled silently but furiously with himself over his feelings. He had contrasted Jill's familiar reserve to Vivien's free-spirited vivacity. He had measured the difference between Vivien's youthful, almost ethereal beauty and Jill's more mature, somber attractiveness. But most of all he had succumbed once again to Vivien's outgoing sensuality, against which Jill's reserved demeanor suffered in comparison. His desire for Vivian was reignited, and was made all the more painful by his inability to give expression to it because of Jill's presence.

When Jill complained about Vivien, Olivier could no longer suppress his frustration. He defended her, in the process demeaning Jill for her "Victorian" attitude. A violent argument followed, bringing their holiday to an abrupt end. Jill and Olivier left for Naples in bitter silence on the first leg of their journey back to London. While waiting for the train in Naples, Olivier phoned Vivien in Rome.

"He told Viv he was finished with Jill," Frewen later recalled. "He was all set to send Jill back to London on her own, and he wanted Viv to go back to Capri with him."

Frewen felt constrained to intervene. Vivien was willing to do anything Olivier wanted. But Frewen cautioned her urgently against it, then got on the phone and repeated his warnings to Olivier. Wait, he urged both of them. Vivien had a child, and there was no telling what Leigh Holman would do if he discovered that they were alone together. And Olivier had just become a father—what would it do to his career if the public learned that he had left his wife just a few months after she had given birth?

The two heeded Frewen. Olivier and Jill went back to London together. Vivien arrived quietly with Frewen a few days later....

The affair resumed. In the days that followed, the two lovers abandoned their secrecy, meeting for lunch at prominent restaurants around town and then disappearing together in the afternoons.

Word soon reached Jill Esmond. What she had suspected was now confirmed. When she challenged her husband, he confessed his love for Vivien. What was perhaps even crueler news was Olivier's announcement that he wanted Vivien to play Ophelia in Denmark the following month. Just a few days before, Tyrone Guthrie had privately invited Jill to take the role. She had agreed, provided Olivier approved.

Guthrie had a temporary falling out with Olivier over the matter. Although he didn't think Jill was the best type to play Ophelia, it was only for a week, she was both competent and available,......When Olivier went to him in late April and demanded that Vivien Leigh be given the part, he was outraged. Vivien was suitable from the point of view of her looks, Guthrie thought, but her voice—she had no voice for Ophelia, her voice was too thin, too diaphanous

"Not to worry," said Olivier, "I'll work with her. Her voice will be all right."

"But I've already asked Jill."

"I don't care. Look, Vivien plays it or I don't go. It's no skin off my nose. I have a movie to make for Korda. You can find yourself another Hamlet."

Guthrie was tempted. But the only actor available who knew the part was Alec Guinness, Olivier's understudy in the original production. And Guinness was not the actor the Danes expected to see. To find another star and rehearse him in the few weeks left would be an impossible task. So Guthrie gave in.

"But you must do it correctly," Olivier said. "I don't want Viv to know I'm behind it. You must contact her separately and invite her to do the part."

"But what if she declines?" Guthrie said.

"Oh, she won't decline, old boy. She wants it more than I do."

Just before their departure, Jill Esmond paid an unannounced visit to Vivien Leigh at her house in Shepherd Market. She told Vivien that she knew what was going on; she asked her to give up Olivier and not o go to Denmark with him. She got nowhere. Rather than the penitent Vivien Leigh she had hoped to find, she encountered a twenty-four-year-old who seemed without a care or concern in the world.

"Do you mean to marry Larry?" Jill asked at one point.

"I do. And he intends to marry me. Perhaps not immediately. We know the difficulties. But one day, when all the hatred and resentment is finished and we are forgiven our mistakes—at least in the eyes of the law—we will marry."^

According to several friends of Jill Esmond, she came away from her encounter with Vivien Leigh more fascinated than angry. Said one, "Jill was astonished by Vivien's directness, particularly when Vivien started asking her intimate questions about Larry. I mean, questions like how did he like his eggs cooked, how did he like his shirts ironed—that sort of thing. Jill felt as though Vivien was some kind of housemaid who was taking over from her. She was fascinated by Vivien's gall. It was Vivien's matter-of-fact way of letting her know that she, Vivien, was succeeding to the throne. Jill found it amazing, even amusing, while at the same time resenting it. It was almost impossible for her to be angry with Vivien."

Said another, "Jill was astonished, of course. But she still had Tarquin and that fact softened her anger. She wasn't ready to give Larry up, certainly, but she knew if eventually she had to, she would always have Tarquin"

"She did worry about what would happen when Leigh Holman found out about it, though. What if he instituted adultery proceedings against Vivien and named Larry as corespondent? That would put her in the midst of a scandal. What's more, what would it do to Tarquin, later on, to learn that his father had left him and his mother for another woman? Jill's first impulse, despite her anger, was to protect Tarquin. So, after her pride had a chance to recover, she gave Larry implicit permission to carry on in the hope that the affair would run its course and he'd return."

Jill did not have to wait long to learn what Leigh Holman would do when he found out about his wife and her husband. While in Denmark, Olivier and Vivien resolved to leave their respective homes and begin living together on their return to London. Vivien wrote to Holman from Denmark and informed him, confessing her love for Olivier and rationalizing her inability to return to Shepherd Market. Holman, once over his initial shock, reacted resignedly to the news, according to Oswald Frewen. He too would wait.

.....Somewhere in there, about midway through the engagement, Larry and Vivien had an enormous scrap. It was about her drinking and smoking so much, if I remember correctly."

It wasn't about drinking and smoking. Vivien had become a heavy smoker the year before as well as a regular drinker—according to friends, because of her anxiety over her personal life. These habits did not particularly bother Olivier, since he was also fond of smoking and drinking. What did bother him was something in Vivien that he had never seen before..

Toward the end of their stay at Elsinore, however, Vivien, evidently worn down by a combination of flu and tension, went through a brief—and to Olivier, disturbing—metamorphosis. "It was some sort of spell," recalls the cast member. "At first no one paid it much mind, not even Larry—we all thought it was something to do with Viv's fragile constitution, a bit of female hysteria brought about by the monthlies.

She sort of disappeared inside herself, at first wouldn't talk to anyone, then wouldn't stop talking—yelling, really. It was all very strange, and Larry hustled her off to their rooms in the hotel. Then we didn't see Larry for a while. When he reappeared that night before the performance, he was chalk-white. Said something about Viv having gone bonkers, having attacked him, having had a fit of some kind. He didn't think she'd be able to go on

"Just then Viv appeared. Not a word to anyone, just staring blankly into space. She got her makeup on, got into her costiune and did the performance. Then she disappeared back into their rooms without a word. At first Larry was afraid to follow her. But he did, after arming himself with a lot of aquavit. He was totally at a loss to explain what was bothering Viv. You see, that's what we all thought—something was bothering her. Had Larry done or said something? A lover's spat? No, he said, he had no idea what it was all about, but Viv definitely wasn't right. But next morning Viv and Larry appeared and all was right with the world again. Viv was her familiar old charming self, there was no mention of the day before, no apologies to those she'd screamed at, just as if it hadn't happened. As for Larry, well, he was still puzzled. But he was greatly relieved."

Olivier had no way of knowing it, but he had witnessed for the first time an aspect of Vivien Leigh's personality over which she had no control. The incident was a harbinger of things to come.

YOU see it so often," said actress Margaret Leighton, once a close friend of Vivien Leigh's. "A woman gets her man and then quickly settles into smug contentment, as though the battle is over and the time has come to enjoy the spoils of victory. This, I think, is what makes men become bored with their women so quickly. The women lose their air of seductresses and turn into ordinary people.

"This is just the opposite of what happened with Viv. Probably it had to do with the fact that they could not get married right away. She had taken a great gamble in leaving her husband and child to be with Larry. . . . Although she gave the appearance of being gloriously elated about her new life with Larry, deep down there was a terrible anxiety that it wouldn't last, that there was nothing that bound Larry to her except for the attraction he had for her. So she never let up for a minute. I mean, she never became matter-of-fact about him or for a moment allowed him to think she took him for granted.

"That had been Larry's problem with Jill—jill had ceased to adore Larry and had turned into a normal wife given to challenging and contradicting him. Viv perceived this early on and resolved never to fall into that trap. So she was constantly adoring of Larry, constantly deferring to him, constantly flattering him and making him feel like the greatest, most attractive and brilliant man under the sun. She always made herself look perfect to him, she worked hard to make their surroundings perfect—there was no end to what she did to try to create a perfect fantasy life for them.

. . . There was a joke that went round—that even when they made love Viv would have every hair and eyelash in place, and would never sweat. ... Of course, that wasn't true. Everyone knew that Viv was a sexual dervish, especially with Larry, and she probably put all the rest of us to shame in the bedroom."

"But that was Viv. Once she had Larry, she was always 'up' for him. When he wasn't around she was forever talking about him. When he was around she showered him with attention and affection. Of course, Larry basked in it at first—Viv was such a change from Jill. But after a while it began to irk him. . . . Viv invested everything she had in Larry emotionally, and she became tremendously dependent on him for her own sense of self-worth—both as an actress and as a woman.

Larry began to feel put upon by Viv's dependence. Outwardly she was a very free-spirited lusty young woman. But inside she had a terrible anxiety going on all the time about keeping Larry attracted to her the way he was attracted in the beginning. The harder she tried as the years went by, the less attractive Larry found her and the more troublesome she became to him."

On their return from Denmark, Olivier and Vivien Leigh settled immediately into the elegant Durham Cottage in Chelsea. Their intention was to obtain divorces and marry as soon as they could, despite the fact that, under English law, divorces would mean putting their adulterous affair on the public record....

More! More!

A friend said, "I think Larry was relieved that Leigh Holman and Jill had decided to withhold divorces. Frankly, he was not as keen to marry Viv as she was to marry him. This stemmed from Alex Korda's telling them that the divorces necessary to enable them to marry might force them to leave England and pursue their careers in California. Viv had never been to the States. Larry was repulsed by the idea of having to go back to Hollywood—not just to work, but to live! To him, staying unmarried in London and keeping their romance quiet was much the better alternative."

Korda finally prevailed with Vivien by giving her a copy of America's most recent book phenomenon, the dizzyingly successful novel by Margaret Mitchell called Gone With the Wind. Hollywood producer David Selznick had acquired the screen rights to the book and had just launched a "worldwide search" to find an actress to play the heroine, Scarlett O'Hara

"They're looking for a newcomer," Korda told Vivien. "Whoever gets the part will become an instant international star, believe me. I think it can be you."

"But Alex," Vivien laughed, "this Scarlett O'Hara, she's American, from the South. I couldn't possibly play a Southern belle. The accent!"

"Forget the accent," said Korda. "They teach accent. Anybody can learn accent. What they're looking for is a face. And you have the face. And Larry. They're also looking for someone to play Rhett Butler. Larry could do it. You two—it would be fantastic."

"But we're British. Americans wouldn't accept British actors in these parts—even if we got the accents right. Alex, you're mad!"

"Darling," said Korda, "don't sell me short. I know Hollywood. I know how these idiots think. Selznick's in trouble with this picture. He's short of money. He needs terrific actors, but he's got to get them cheap. That's where you come in. And Larry."

"Larry would never do it. He hates Hollywood."

"Maybe not. But you—would you pass up the chance?"

On the basis of Korda's argument, Vivien agreed to take the part. Then she went back to Durham Cottage and read Gone With the Wind. When she finished, she was even more convinced than Korda that the role of Scarlett was made for her.

Said Eve Phillips, "From the moment Viv read it, she never stopped pestering Korda about what he was doing to get her the part. Her entire characterization in A Yank at Oxford was worked out as a kind of screen test for Scarlett O'Hara. Larry helped her some, but it was Korda who really coached her. Her part was that of an Englishwoman, yes, but really an atypical Englishwoman. She played her as saucy and sexual, like an imperious modern-day Cleopatra. It was out of character for the film, and it brought a lot of arguments on the set between her and the director. It even caused her old friend Maureen O'Sullivan to get mad at her. But Viv wouldn't budge. She had this vision that she had to do an English version of Scarlett O'Hara.

Olivier and Vivien Leigh were by then genuine stars throughout England. Fire Over England, released earlier in 1937, had established them as the country's top romantic screen team. The press's interest in them became much more intense than it had been when they were known merely as stage performers.

One frequent visitor later said, "Larry found an entirely new dimension in himself once he took up with Vivien. She was absolutely infectious in her charm. She made everyone feel good, but particularly Larry. Having been exposed to the rather coarse chaps at Denham for a year or so, she had learned to utter the most vile obscenities. She delighted in startling her friends with profanity, yet coming from her lips it was like music. She was always gay and companionable and full of stories. She delighted in gossip, but never in the malicious sense. Underlying it all one sensed a tremendous nervous energy—almost an hysteria. I often wondered what she was like when she was alone. I imagined this enormous sense of deflation, of panic at being alone.

"Anyway, Larry absorbed much of Vivien's style. He became a raconteur, a great story-teller, a performer in private as well as public. He and Ralph Richardson would do the most humorously bizarre turns at parties. Everything was intensely gay, intensely high-pitched, intensely outgoing whenever one was around Larry and Vivien. Great style, great sophistication. Yet underneath it all, one felt a great sadness on Larry's part. As though, somehow, he was not being true to himself, as though he was living outside himself. For all their apparent happiness, he and Vivien struck me as two exquisite pieces of china teetering on the edge of a shelf. I was fascinated to watch them, yet frightened lest they slip off the edge and shatter into pieces."

Olivier brought Vivien Leigh back with him to the Old Vic. She was featured with Ralph Richardson in the company's second production, A Midsummer Night's Dream, in December of 1937, while Olivier continued in Macbeth, which had been moved to the New Theatre in the West End. "Viv went into the Vic under a bit of a cloud," says a friend today.

"She was somewhat embarrassed about it because previously the critics had made her feel insecure about her ability to do Shakespeare. She expected resentment on the part of other members of the company on the theory of favoritism—that she was Larry Olivier's mistress, or whatever one chose to call it. But Viv had a backbone made of steel, and she pressed on gamely. She knew, though, that she'd have to be good, that she'd have to make her own mark as a Shakespearean actress to be accepted. And she was. She got lots of coaching from Larry for her part in A Midsummer Night's Dream and she played it well, although she was never happy with herself in Shakespeare. It was Larry who wanted her to do as much Shakespeare as possible because he had become so immersed in it.

He was trying to invent a new way to play Shakespeare, different from the traditional style He was going for earthiness and a certain kind of romantic, lyrical naturalism, but he was having a devil of a time getting it across. He became obsessed with Shakespeare. And of course his obsession became Vivien's, since she was so mad about him."

....Most of the party-goers were suitably impressed and many instantly volunteered for other parts in the dramas. But one, an actress, was not so impressed. "It was to be the Laurence Olivier-Vivien Leigh Repertory Theatre," she said.

"It was a cockeyed idea. No one doubted for a minute that the real motive behind it was Larry's desire to turn Viv into an important Shakespearean actress in her own right, which she very dearly wanted to become. Well, I wasn't about to get involved in a proving ground for Vivien Leigh—as much as I adored her. Nor was I going to help Larry publicly enshrine his love for Viv. You see, although Larry was devoted to Viv, one never got the feeling that he was comfortable with his devotion. He was always trying to improve her.

One couldn't help but feel that he'd never be comfortable with her until she measured up to his expectations. She was very affectionate and loving in a little-girl way, but he soon grew bored with that. She had to be more to him than a doting young lovebird; she had to be an actress of stature and accomplishment. He was then very much engaged by the idea of their becoming a team like Lunt-Fontanne. The reason it hadn't worked with Jill Esmond was because in many ways Jill was the dominant mind in that relationship. But now Larry was dominant—just as Alfred Lunt dominated Lynn—and he wanted it to happen ... his way."

"Viv wasn't all that interested in the idea. In the first place, she felt she could never measure up, and in failing to do so would lose Larry's devotion to her. Second, she didn't cotton to having to work so bloody hard. She was really more interested in movie work, which was less wearing and where the financial rewards were greater. She wanted still to go to Hollywood. And that was a bone of contention between the two of them, because Larry's last thought was of Hollywood. He was very happy to do an occasional picture for Korda for a lot of money by English standards. But he intended to devote most of his energy to the stage."

....In the meantime, the efforts of Alexander Korda to sell Olivier once again to Hollywood unexpectedly bore fruit. Korda had already arranged to loan Merle Oberon to the Goldwyn Studio and United Artists for the female starring role in Goldwyn's projected movie version of Emily Bronte's famous nineteenth-century English novel Wuthering Heights, to be filmed in California.

When Korda learned that Goldwyn was having difficulty casting the part of the leading male character, Heathcliff, he urged him to consider Olivier and sent him a print of The Divorce of Lady X, which Olivier and Oberon had done for Korda the year before. That picture was hardly a good sample of either performer's screen-acting ability, but William Wyler, who was to be the director of Wuthering Heights, didn't care. Wyler, an autocratic perfectionist as a director, had seen Olivier act on stage and discounted his awkwardness in The Divorce of Lady X.

As far as he was concerned, Olivier was the perfect type for the fiery, sensuous Heathcliff. That was his primary interest in screen actors: type. He believed that under his method of directing, he could draw a brilliant performance from any actor so long as he fit the part physically and vocally

....Then there were his problems with Merle Oberon. Oberon was in Hollywood without her mentor and the man who wanted to marry her, Alexander Korda. OUvier had long suspected that she had no real feelings for Korda and had been using him solely to advance her career.

Ordinarily he would not have thought this worth his concern, since there was an amusing irony in it. Korda was in many ways a con man —an elegant, sophisticated con man, but a con man nevertheless. It was a necessary facet of any movie mogul's nature to be a con man

Notwithstanding that, Olivier remained fond of Korda and felt keenly protective of his interests. He was considerably less fond of the ambitious Oberon. He saw her as a young woman engaged in conning a con man. For her part, Oberon resented Olivier's presence in Wuthering Heights. She believed that Korda had arranged it so that he would have a faithful retainer in Hollywood to report on her activities.

Jerry Dale was a young press agent working at United Artists in the late 1930s. He was assigned the task of handling Olivier's relations with the Hollywood press during the actor's stay at the Goldwyn studio, and Olivier quickly befriended him. In becoming his friend, the unobtrusive Dale also became Olivier's confidant.

"The thing was," Dale says today, "that Merle Oberon wanted to have a romance with Larry and he refused. It stemmed back from several years before, Larry told me, when they first met through Alexander Korda. Korda was in love with Merle. She was his protegee and he wanted to marry her. She kept putting him off, saying that she couldn't think of marrying him until she became the star he'd promised to make her.

R16 I adore Margaret Leighton also.

Larry invited her to join his acting company in the mid-40s. She wasn't as pretty and petite as Vivien (whom theatre critics described as 'exquisitely lovely and lifeless as a piece of Delft Blue China'). But Margaret knew how to act.

"Evidently at some point back in England, Merle had let Larry know that she was available to him if he wanted her. It was just before Larry began his relationship with Vivien Leigh. Larry disliked Merle from the start for having suggested that he double-cross Korda. Then he opted for Vivien, and that made Merle mad. She was jealous of Vivien too, for there was Vivien with the handsome Larry Olivier while Merle was stuck with this rich but aging, not very good-looking Hungarian—Korda.

"Anyway, Merle and Larry came to Hollywood—each of them alone—for Wuthering Heights. Merle decided to make another try for Larry. At some point during the preproduction on Heights, she made a pass at him. She used the excuse that since they were both alone in L.A. and were both close to Korda, it would be all right, that Korda wouldn't mind if he found out, that she knew Korda had been to bed with Vivien —all that sort of thing.

"Any other man might have been sorely tempted, because Merle was a beauty. But not Larry. He gave her a dressing down, I think. In any event, they ended up as enemies on Wuthering Heights. And they never really became friends, not even after Merle married Korda. I understand that Larry tried to talk Korda out of marrying her, but he wouldn't listen."

.........Olivier, in the meantime, was going through similar struggles on Wuthering Heights. "Toward the end of the picture," says Jerry Dale, "Larry lost all interest. He was so fed up with Wyler that he just did whatever he was asked and spent the rest of his time joking around with the cast—all except Merle Oberon, of course. He became especially pals with David Niven, and the two of them concocted elaborate jokes to play on the set. I remember once Merle had to leave the set in the middle of a scene—she had been caught unprepared by her period.

Everything stopped until she could get herself together. Larry and David got their hands on several boxes of Tampaxes, and while they were waiting for Merle they constructed a kind of daisy chain of Tampaxes which they wrapped around their necks like Hawaiian leis. When Merle finally came back to finish the take, she saw these adornments. Not recognizing what they were, she said to Willie Wyler, 'Have you made a change in their costumes?' And before Willie could answer, Larry piped up: 'No, Merle, darhng, these are just to mop up the blood the next time.' Not those exact words, but something funnier. The crew collapsed with laughter. Had it been Vivien playing the part, she would have enjoyed the joke. But Merle was horrified, and she stalked off the set in tears."

Late June brought an end to Vivien Leigh's toil in Gone With the Wind and she joined Olivier in New York for her first visit to the city. Their secret reunion was not a happy one, though, for Vivien arrived angry fter having learned that David Selznick had second thoughts about starring her with Olivier in Rebecca.

In order to get the role of Scarlett O'Hara, she had had to sign a seven-year contract with Selznick that gave him the right to use her in the future as he saw fit, whereas Olivier was under contract only for Rebecca. The possibility now existed that Olivier would have to do the picture without Vivien.

The news distressed Olivier, but he was disturbed even more by another matter concerning Selznick. As Vivien was preparing to leave Hollywood for New York, the producer had written to Olivier to warn him that the release of Gone With the Wind was still at least six months away and that, for the sake of the picture, he and Leigh must maintain the secrecy of their relationship. Olivier concluded that Selznick's second thoughts about using Vivien in Rebecca had more to do with his concern over their relationship than with Vivien's suitability for the leading female role.

When Olivier voiced his suspicion to Vivien, she said, "We've got to do something. Puss [their term of endearment for each other]."

"But what?" said Olivier.

She suggested they return immediately to England for another try at persuading their respective mates to divorce them. If they could go back to Hollywood with divorces in hand, Selznick would have no excuse for keeping her out of Rebecca

Leigh Holman was one of the few in London who took the war preparations seriously. Despite his realization by then that his marriage was beyond saving, he had little interest in discussing divorce. "When I get around to it," was as much as he would promise Vivien.

Olivier had no better luck with Jill Esmond. Wuthering Heights had just been released in London and had given every indication that Olivier was on his way to becoming a movie star of vast future wealth. Jill intended to have a generous portion of that wealth for herself and Tarquin

"That's what really held things up for so long," an Olivier friend said. "Larry had always been on the parsimonious side by nature. He was perfectly willing to support Tarquin, but he did not relish the idea of paying huge sums of alimony to Jill—particularly because the life he and Vivien were leading was so expensive. He saw alimony as punitive, and he didn't care for being penalized financially for his mistake in marrying Jill.

"It's my understanding that he kept this from Vivien. She thought it was Jill's vindictiveness toward her rather than Larry's stubbornness over money that was preventing their divorce. When she finally learned that Jill had come round to the idea of divorce but that Larry was throwing up the obstacle by not wanting to pay her what she was asking for, Vivien got terribly exercised with Larry. They had quite a few arguments over it. Vivien used to say, 'For Christ's sake, Larry, pay her what she wants. I'll be making enough money for both of us.' But the idea of being supported by Vivien did not appeal to Larry'

Olivier and Leigh sailed back to the United States in mid-August, their marital situations unchanged. With them came Gertrude Hartley, Vivien's mother, whom Vivien had decided to treat to a stay in California during the filming of Rebecca. Midway across the Atlantic, on the He de France, Vivien received a cable from Selznick in Hollywood announcing that she was out of Rebecca. Joan Fontaine had been cast in her stead

December brought the release of Gone With the Wind, which was given its premiere in Atlanta during a gala publicity festival arranged by David Selznick. Olivier accompanied Vivien to the opening but was forced to remain discreetly in the background as she and Clark Gable became the focus of everyone's attention.

Olivia de Havilland, who played the featured role of Melanie Wilkes in the movie, said that "Vivien was having problems. I was fairly close to her but I didn't know what they were, although they seemed definitely problems having to do with her nervous system. She was worried about what was going on in England, she was fighting with the Selznick brothers about doing a picture with Larry, she had any number of things making her unhappy. As a result she was very unpredictable —up one day, down the next. Larry sort of hovered over her, watching her every minute as though looking for some sign that she was about to fall apart or break. Of course, I didn't know that she had a history of these ... episodes. I thought she was just your normal neurotic actress at first. But then, as I got to know her, I saw that there was more to it than that. She was always living on an emotional edge."

According to Jerry Dale, Vivien evidently had one of her "episodes" shortly before going to Atlanta. He tells of encountering her one day at M-G-M, where she had gone apparently to discuss the starring role in a film for which she was being loaned to that studio by Selznick. The movie was Waterloo Bridge She had been angling with M-G-M's L. B. Mayer to get Olivier cast in the male co-starring role, but to no avail. Mayer had chosen Robert Taylor, then almost as big a box-office draw as Clark Gable

Dale says that Vivien "was in some kind of state." He had never seen her "behave so strangely," and when he went up to her to greet her, "she looked right through me as though she had never seen me before." Dale later learned that throughout this time in Los Angeles, Vivien went through two or three episodes of what "for a better term I'd call manic-depressiveness." He adds that Olivier was probably the only person to have fully witnessed them. "Larry was certainly confused and mystified, but he was very protective and would keep her incommunicado whenever they occurred. He thought it was just plain old depression over the fact that they still couldn't get married, and nobody knew any more than he did."

After its Atlanta premiere. Gone With the Wind was released nationally in a torrent of further publicity, and Vivien Leigh, as anticipated, immediately became a full-fledged star. Simultaneously, as the year 1940 began, word came from Gertrude Hartley in London that Leigh Holman and Jill Esmond had finally agreed to proceed with divorce actions.

"That was it," said Gladys Cooper, who was then filming Rebecca with Olivier. "Vivien had never stopped talking about how the studio bosses were cheating her and Larry out of playing together. But now, she figured, they no longer had any excuses."

On to a successful formula, M-G-M was planning to film another classic nineteenth-century novel. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. ........so L. B. Mayer offered the part to Olivier. He accepted on the condition that Vivien be taken off Waterloo Bridge and be given the co-starring role of Elizabeth Bennett. Mayer, not a man given to being on the receiving end of conditions, said he'd consider it. On that basis, Olivier agreed to play Darcy.

"Larry knew, though," says Dale, "that the likelihood of L. B. keeping his word was remote. With Clark Gable out as Darcy, L. B. lost all interest in Vivien for the Elizabeth part. He now claimed that Vivien was too powerful and earthy in Gone With the Wind to convincingly play the refined, delicate Elizabeth Bennett. But the real reason he dropped her was because he had been convinced by David Selznick, who was his son-in-law, that putting Larry and Vivien in the same movie was still too risky commercially, given the chance of their affair coming to light.

"Larry knew all this, and although he made a show of wanting Vivien in the picture, it was mostly for her benefit. Actually, Mayer had decided to use Greer Garson for Pride and Prejudice and keep Vivien in Waterloo Bridge, and this suited Larry fine. Garson had just been signed by M-G-M, and it was to be her big debut picture. The reason it suited Larry was, I understood, because he and Garson had had some kind of relationship a few years before in London, before Larry met Vivien."

According to others, the entire roundelay of casting on the two movies turned Vivien Leigh into a different person. "She was bitterly disappointed not to be with Larry in Pride and Prejudice, " says one, "and she became insanely jealous of Greer Garson, whom she began to imagine stealing Larry away from her. Larry unwittingly fed her jealousy by expressing his fondness for Greer in public. I don't think anything in the way of a romance went on between them, but they were very affectionate with each other and this drove Vivien up the wall.

She became alternatingly more loving toward Larry and more catty with him. One never knew how one would find her with him, adoring or frosty. She became agonizingly insecure. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that after becoming a top star with Gone With the Wind, she expected to get her way in anything she chose to do in Hollywood. She just couldn't understand why the studio bosses kept her from acting with Larry."

Vivien's mystification intensified in January and February when, in London, Leigh Holman and Jill Esmond filed for and were granted divorces on grounds of the adultery of their respective spouses. The divorces were given back-page treatment in the American press and raised barely a ripple of interest. "Whether Selznick, Mayer and the others influenced the general press to downplay the divorces I don't know," says Jerry Dale. "But I do know they got the trade papers here in L.A. to go easy."

Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were now free to marry after the obligatory six-month waiting period required by English law. And no longer needing to hide their relationship for the sake of Selznick, they moved together into a rented house on San Ysidro Drive, just off Benediet Canyon above the Beverly Hills Hotel. The house had been recommended to them by Danny Kaye and his wife Sylvia, who lived next door

Soon after moving in, Olivier and Leigh began work at M-G-M, on Pride and Prejudice and Waterloo Bridge, respectively. Vivien set about immediately to use their new status as a tool to force David Selznick and other studio heads to find a movie that she and Olivier could star in together. But now she encountered new objections. As Myron Selznick said, "Before, it was no picture together because they were having a love affair while they were still married to others. After their divorces, when they said they were going to get married, it became: no picture together because the public would be bored watching a married couple romancing on the screen. You figure it."

"It was true," says Jerry Dale. "But then Larry had an idea. It was more to calm Vivien down than anything else, but he thought it might also force Hollywood to take notice of the fact that they would be a terrific box-office draw together."

Olivier's idea was for him and Vivien to co-star in a play and take it on a tour of the United States. The play Olivier had in mind was Romeo and Juliet, produced and directed by himself so that he would have complete control over it. To finance it, he and Vivien would pool their cash resources, which amounted to about fifty thousand dollars.

Dale recalls, "Larry started working on it while still shooting Pride and Prejudice. He consulted me a couple of times at the beginning on the publicity angle. Vivien was in seventh heaven once preparations got underway. They would rehearse and discuss the play every night up on San Ysidro Drive and would have friends over to hear a scene or two once in a while. The whole preparation seemed to unite them. She became her enthusiastic self again, and he was all attention to her. She used to say, 'My God, I'm so thrilled and scared all at once. Larry's teaching me so much about acting, and yet I'm afraid I'll never be a proper Juliet to his Romeo.'

"The whole idea had tremendous publicity potential. They were going to play a week in San Francisco, then two weeks in Chicago, then on to New York for the really big test. Larry and Vivien playing Romeo and Juliet—it was a publicity man's dream. But Larry immediately put the kibosh on any big publicity push. He wanted the whole thing to be presented in a dignified way. That's when I began to worry for him."

Olivier and Vivien made their first public appearance together following their divorces at the 1940 Academy Awards ceremonies at the end of February. Gone With the Wind swept most of the important awards and Vivien won an Oscar as the best actress of 1939. "I tried to convince Larry," says Dale, "that Vivien's best-actress award was a tremendous publicity bonanza for Romeo and Juliet, and that he should use it for all it was worth on the tour. But he wouldn't hear of it. His initial impulse in doing the play was to promote himself and Vivien as a box-office acting team for the movies.

But once he got into it, some instinctive devotion he had to the dignified tradition of the theatre took over. He got so wrapped up in every phase of the production that he forgot all about Hollywood. In fact, I think getting back into a theatrical experience turned him against everything he'd been doing in Hollywood. He realized how much he missed the theatre."

As for emphasizing the publicity value of Vivien's Oscar, Olivier was right, the production didn't need it—at least at the beginning. Opening in San Francisco in April, Romeo and Juliet was a nightly sellout and its two stars were followed everywhere by adoring fans. Little noticed were the reviews, most of which adjudged Vivien excellent as Juliet but criticized Olivier's Romeo as lacking credibility

Vivien's reception in Chicago was even more glowing, while mystification over Olivier's portrayal deepened. He seemed to be tossing off his lines with indifference, and one critic suggested that he deliberately gave a dull performance so as not to steal the spotlight from his co-star; or conversely, to ensure that she would steal it from him.

There was truth to this, as actor Edmond O'Brien, who played Mercutio, would later attest. "I was mystified myself. It was the thrill of my life to get the part. I thought, Jesus, playing with Olivier, I'm going to learn so much. But Larry really did give a lifeless performance. There was none of the electricity I expected. Part of it, I suppose, was because he'd done the thing before in England. Part of it was that he was weighed down by so many other things—everything from getting the sets mounted to box-office details, as well as directing.

But most of it was—well, I think he thought the whole thing should be Viv's show. It was a major exposure for her, playing Juliet, whereas for him it was like brushing his teeth every morning. He wanted to make sure she wasn't disappointed. He believed the pure power of his stage presence would carry him through, and that American audiences wouldn't know the difference between a great portrayal of Romeo and a lackluster one. There was a lot of that familiar English arrogance and superiority in his attitude, and he eventually paid for it."

Cornel Wilde, who played Tybalt, had this to say many years later: "Something happened in Chicago and it was a mystery to all of us. Larry and Vivien had been lovey-dovey all through rehearsals in Los Angeles and during our stay in San Francisco. But when we got to Chicago things changed. Larry was clearly upset by his reviews and was trying to do something to improve his playing. Vivien kept saying, 'No, no, you're perfect, pay no attention to the critics, what do they know, they wouldn't recognize dog shit if they stepped in it, so how can you expect them to recognize brilliance?' I vividly recall her using that phrase 'dog shit,' trying to cheer Larry up. But he wouldn't be cheered up.

He got gloomier and gloomier. Then Vivien got gloomy. She was a fish out of water without Larry. She was really dependent on him, and once he began to panic, she did too. She went through a sudden change over a period of a day or so that was almost like catatonia. She froze up or something. She thought Larry had lost confidence in her, that maybe he was blaming her for the fact that she'd gotten good notices and he'd gotten lousy ones. Anyway, she went through this strange thing, a series of irrational tantrums, and we had to cancel one or two performances. Vivien refused to go on, and we had no understudy for her."

The situation grew worse when the troupe moved to New York. The production was soundly spanked by most of the Broadway critics when it opened at the Fifty-first Street Theatre early in May, with Vivien faring only a little better than Olivier in the unanimously negative reviews

Also in the cast as a supporting player was the twenty-three-year-old actor Jack Merivale,... When Vivien discovered in the early spring of 1940 that Merivale was in Hollywood, she persuaded Olivier to hire him for the Romeo and Juliet tour

Merivale had made no secret since then of his awe for Olivier or his adoration of Vivien Leigh. "Indeed," said Dame May Whitty, also in the cast of Romeo and Juliet, "Vivien rather adopted Jack as a kind of surrogate brother, or son, during the tour. He was a gorgeous boy, but timid. He was a few years younger than Vivien, but he was madly in love with her from the start. Of course he had to keep his love to himself, but everyone knew it just from watching him with her. He didn't quite know how to deal with it, especially when Vivien was affectionate with him. One could see him just melt in confusion and embarrassment."^^

Merivale has often told the story of an incident among himself, Vivien Leigh and Olivier during the New York run of Romeo and Juliet. After the play's opening in New York, Olivier and Vivien took up residence at Katharine Cornell's comfortable country house in Snedens Landing, about thirty miles up river from Manhattan. Vivien invited Merivale to the house for a weekend. After a Sunday night dinner, he and Vivien became involved in a card game while Olivier perused the Sunday newspapers, catching up on events in Europe.

Merivale noticed that Vivien had grown increasingly edgy during the previous few days. He had blamed it on her concern over the financial losses she and Olivier were bound to suffer as a result of the play's poor reception and dwindling audiences in New York.

After winning a hand and preparing to deal another, Merivale was stunned to hear Vivien angrily accuse him of cheating. Was this a joke on Vivien's part? At first he thought it must be. But Vivien repeated her charge, this time throwing in some obscenities that left him with no doubt that her anger was real But it was also irrational—Merivale hadn't cheated. He tried to defend himself, but that only heightened Vivien's hysteria. Merivale appealed to Olivier, who just shrugged helplessly. "Had a bit too much to drink, she has," he said, himself a bit drunk.

Merivale's turning to Olivier for help brought another round of invective from Vivien. She accused him of wanting to steal her away from Olivier. Although it was something Merivale might have wanted, he would not have known how to go about trying. He was at the same time astonished that she knew how he felt about her, and embarrassed that she should reveal it in front of Olivier.

Merivale started to sputter a denial but was cut short by Vivien, who ordered him to leave first thing in the morning. The next morning he was gone before she was up. Yet when he saw her that night at the theatre, it was as if the whole contretemps had not happened. Vivien treated him as she always had. When he asked Olivier about it later, all he would say was, "When she's had too much to drink, she occasionally behaves like that. Not to worry, old chap, she doesn't even remember it."

"After a Sunday night dinner, he and Vivien became involved in a card game"

Nope. It was Chinese Checkers, which Vivien referred to as "Chinker Checks."

Now I'm wondering what else this author got wrong.

As the audiences for Romeo and Juliet grew sparser throughout the rest of May, Olivier decided that he had no choice but to close the production.

.........Olivier and Vivien's six-month waiting period was about to come to an end. They announced to Vivien's mother and Jill that they intended to marry once they got back to Hollywood. Their marriage took place on August 31, 1940, a few days after their return to Los Angeles.

...........According to several friends, Vivien Leigh felt she had lost touch with Olivier during his year of intensive work on Henry V. "Viv did a couple of small stage things in London and then went out on an expedition to entertain the troops in North Africa in 1943," recalled an actress friend. "When she got back, she discovered that she couldn't be in Henry V. The main reason she'd agreed to go to North Africa was to get some sun so that she'd be rested up and healthy for the film. Then Larry got so deeply involved in it that she felt totally left out of his life. So she decided—'Well, I'll use this time to have a baby.' She had been dying to have a child by Larry.

"Viv finally got pregnant—oh, in the spring of 1944, after some months of trying. She was thrilled. In the meantime she had agreed to do a film of Caesar and Cleopatra, and then she got into this awful legal wrangle again with David Selznick over her right to do it. It all became a terrible source of anxiety and depression, and she suffered a miscarriage. The grief! She felt she'd let Larry down—he was keen on having another child—and she blamed it all on Selznick and the horrid troubles he was making for her. She went along and made the film anyway [most of her salary had to be paid to Selznick—au.], but it marked an awful change in her. That's when I first noticed that she was beginning to have mental problems. Also, she wanted to have another try at having a child, immediately. The thing began to feed on itself. Vivien went through increasing depressions because of her failure to become pregnant"

"Actually, had Larry and Vivien gone back to Hollywood, I think it all would have turned out differently for her. She might have become so preoccupied with her own career that she wouldn't have had the time to dwell on her fears and anxieties. But after the war Larry so overwhelmed her with his talents and achievements that she lost her sense of her own worth, and that in my opinion is what led her into madness."

......Cecil Beaton, who was to become a close friend of Vivien Leigh's, once said. "When Larry started the business of falling in love with his characters, he began to fall out of love with Viv. We often heard him talk about it, and it always struck me, though I said nothing to her, that he used it as a substitute for his flagging love for her. Of course, she never recognized it. Indeed, she was just as enthusiastic about the concept as Larry was, and kept telling everyone how brilliant an acting insight it was."

According to others, if Olivier was falling out of love with Vivien at that time, it had more to do with her behavior than with his acting insights. "The truth is," says a friend, "that during that first Old Vic season, Viv was becoming more and more of a concern to Larry, a burden. She had lost their baby and was in a terrible state about it for the longest time. Then these dreadful fits of melancholy or depression or amnesia she was given to began to increase. And last longer. Larry simply didn't know what to make of them or how to handle them. He tried to get Viv to see a doctor, but when she was in the middle of an attack she was impossible to reason with. And when they were over, she had no recollection of them and of course wouldn't entertain any suggestion that something was wrong with her.

Larry tried to keep her hidden whenever they occurred, but I saw one or two of them and I can tell you—he was up against it. She went from the perfectly normal Viv to this unrecognizable, ugly ogre. It put Larry in a quandary at first. Then, out of frustration, his anger began to build. I'm convinced that much of his brilliance in Richard III was due to his need to release all of his pent-up frustration and anger."

Says another, "Yes, no doubt there was a connection between Larry's frustration over Vivien and his performances with the Old Vic at war's end. The performances he really excelled at were in the bravura parts that demanded great energy and breadth. Larry was overflowing with repressed emotion in his personal life, and he used these roles as escape valves. Perhaps too, finding it increasingly difficult to love Vivien in the way that he had, he diverted his passions to his characters and then called it falling in love. He was saying that he had to be in love with someone. If it couldn't be Vivien, it would then be Richard, Hotspur, Oedipus—all these characters he played to such stunning effect."

in the spring of 1945, Olivier directed Vivien as Sabina in the first London production of Thornton Wilder's American hit, The Skin of Our Teeth. Then, with the war over, he and Richardson took the Old Vic on a summer tour of British army bases in Occupied Germany, performing Richard III and the other plays of the previous season. Olivier had to make an emergency journey back to London in July when he learned that Vivien was diagnosed as suffering from a long-standing case of tuberculosis.

His alarm was mixed with relief, for he assumed that the tuberculosis had been responsible for her mystifying mental dysfunction. Vivien was put into a hospital for six weeks and Olivier returned to the continent to finish out the tour. He was confident that her recovery from the TB would put an end to her mental episodes—confident because her doctors had assured him, when he told them about her periodic attacks, that such behavior was common among TB victims.

Vivien was ready to leave the hospital at the end of August, and her doctors wanted to send her to a TB sanitorium in Switzerland for at least six months—her disease was far from cured. She refused, persuading them to allow her to go through her long recuperation at Notley Abbey, attended by a nurse. She took up residence under orders to remain out of the theatre for a year. The only activity she was permitted was the planning of the furnishing and decoration of Notley Abbey. Olivier, in the meantime, began to prepare for his second season at the Old Vic.

DON'T THINK I've ever seen a woman more desperately in love v^ith her husband," says one of Vivien Leigh's old friends, "even after five, six years of marriage. We know now, of course, what we didn't know then—that there must have been a link between Vivvy's mental condition and her crazy need for Larry. It was abnormal; we all thought so. Vivvy was a woman who had everything going for her—beauty, talent, endless charm. It made no sense that she was so dependent on this one man, no matter how much of a giant he was."

No one was more confused by Vivien's increasingly neurotic devotion to Olivier than Olivier himself. And no one was more disappointed when, after several months of quiet confinement at Notley Abbey in the fall of 1945, Vivien's mental blackouts resumed.

According to another friend, "Larry even adjusted himself to this..The doctors had made Viv give up drinking and smoking, so he could no longer blame her problems on that. Then they said her TB was clearing up nicely, and he was without that to use as an excuse. For a while he said—well, maybe it was the giving up smoking, it made her edgy and nervous. But when she started smoking and drinking again, they continued. The tragic thing was that Larry would think he'd adjusted to Viv's having these bouts and get to the point where he could deal with them, only to have them get worse—they would become more intense and last longer. So he could never really adjust. He began to treat her more as a patient than as a wife and lover. What else could he do?

And Viv of course caught on to it and went out of her way to reestablish herself as wife and lover, which only served to increase her neuroticism. They were still terrific together in public, but Larry had to be very careful, always on guard against a sudden change in her."

The saving grace, if it could be called that, was that the onset of Vivien's mental lapses began to take on an identifiable pattern while she was recuperating at Notley Abbey. No longer did she spring her bizarre personality changes on Olivier; rather, she built up to them over several days of increasing edginess and moodiness, lapsing finally into a state of alternating amnesial depression and hysteria—almost mania—that was most frightening in the depths of its irrationality. After a day or two in the snakepit of her sickness, Vivien would emerge thoroughly sane but exhausted.

If Vivien Leigh was the primary source of his discontent, anxiety about money and his son Tarquin also vexed him. Tarquin had returned to England with Jill Esmond soon after the end of the war and now was nine. Having given up on the idea of having a child with Vivien, Olivier had made what he thought were sincere and hearty efforts to express his love for his son. The boy, who strongly resembled his father but felt him an intimidating stranger, was unable to respond with anything but juvenile withdrawal. Olivier mistook this for calculated indifference: each time he viewed himself as having been rebuffed by Tarquin, he grew more unsettled.

Vivien complicated matters by making a concentrated effort to draw Tarquin into their orbit. When the boy began to respond to her in ways that he could not respond to his father, Olivier grew angry at both. Vivien's method of bringing Tarquin out of his remoteness, as Olivier saw it, was to spoil him with effusive, undeserved praise and gifts. He did not approve.

As for his anxiety over money, Olivier's share in the profits oi Henry V were, up to then, minimal; they helped little, added to the modest salary he was getting from the Old Vic, to cover the costs of keeping two houses going, of Vivien's medical care and of his payments to Jill Esmond.

Vivien had not worked since the summer before and was forbidden from doing so for another year. They had each achieved a measure of wealth before the war in Hollywood only to squander it on their elaborate, ill-conceived production of Romeo and Juliet. Now, in the early months of 1946, Olivier wondered if he shouldn't go back to Hollywood to make a movie or two in order to solve his money worries for a while. He could do it during the summer, between seasons at the Old Vic, and collect a comfortable nest egg to see them through the next few years.

"Larry was in a fury when he heard that Hollywood was reluctant to use him because he had allegedly double-crossed David Selznick," says Jerry Dale, who was with Olivier in Boston and New York at the time, helping to promote Henry V. "He was never one to share his problems, but he even said to me, 'God, Jerry, who are these people you work for in Hollywood? Myron says they're out to ruin me. I can't let them do it. I need a picture, I need the money.' I think he went to see a lawyer in New York about it, Arnold Weissberger or Louis Nizer, one of those big entertainment lawyers.

... He wasn't innagining it, that I'm sure of. I mean, I don't know exactly what Myron Selznick told him— maybe he made it all up, because basically he hated his brother and enjoyed embarrassing David. But 1 later heard the story around Hollywood and I'm sure it was true—there was a kind of informal boycott against Larry. The strangest thing of all was that Henry V was a fabulous movie success. Larry produced, directed and starred in it. Why, anyone else with that kind of movie success would have had Hollywood knocking down his doors to sign him up to a multipicture deal. But they stayed away from Larry for the longest time, even after he and the picture won several Oscars the following year.

"The biggest irony of it all was that when Larry was finally allowed to do another Hollywood movie, it was David Selznick who was largely responsible for getting him the part."

Vivien depression-free state lasted through the summer as she and Olivier relaxed at Notley Abbey, preparing for the coming theatre season. Olivier, given the choice of selecting the Old Vic's opening production that fall, had chosen King Lear, with himself as Lear. So that he would not have to overtax himself, Vivien agreed to Olivier's plan to revive the production of The Skin of Our Teeth that had been forced to close when she went into the hospital the year before. She would resume her starring role as Sabina and rehearsals would be minimal.

"It was a marvelous summer for both of them," says a friend who visited Notley Abbey on more than one occasion. "They had made the house habitable—indeed comfortable—and they entertained their pals all summer. Just about everyone who was anyone in the West End went down to spend weekends with Larry and Viv. Once the house was fixed up, Larry got very involved in putting the landscape in order, and for two months he was out every day for hours on end planting and pruning and mowing and having a wonderful time as an ersatz farmer.

So far as I know Viv had bounced back completely from all her previous problems. There was no sign all summer that 1 could tell of any further emotional illness, and she was really looking forward to going back to the West End. They were like the Viv and Larry of old. I never saw Larry more pleased or relaxed. He even had his son down for a while and was learning to get on with him."

If Olivier was the most popular figure in England, Vivien Leigh was a close runner-up. Her revival of The Skin of Our Teeth, of which Olivier was still billed as director, drew full houses throughout the fall—largely because of Vivien's marriage to him. Said George Devine, who played the role of Mr. Antrobus to her Sabina, "In itself the play wasn't all that popular. Half the people who came to see it did so only because they'd seen Lear and then had to see Vivien, or else because they couldn't get tickets to see Lear and settled on watching Viv as the next best thing to watching Larry."

Olivier could not have been more pleased with his life at that juncture. Vivien had recovered completely from her TB and had not shown a sign of mental malfunction in half a year—he attributed this to the fact that she was once again working and happy.

.....just before Christmas, and Vivien was forced to drop out of The Skin of Our Teeth. Some of her friends suggest that it was fueled by the fact that her daughter, Suzanne, then thirteen and back in England in Leigh Holman's custody, refused to visit Notley Abbey during the Christmas holidays. Others insist that it was insensitivity on Olivier's part that sparked it.

"Larry started working on Hamlet right away," recalls a friend of Vivien Leigh's. "Viv had been destroyed by the news that Cyrano wasn't going to come to pass—it was the second time in her career, I remember her saying, that she'd missed out on the movie. The fact that this time she would have been acting with Larry somehow made it worse. Anyway, when Larry shifted straightway from Cyrano to doing his film of Hamlet, Viv quite naturally expected him to include her as Ophelia. They had already done it together on stage, and for some reason she had the impression from Larry—or maybe she just assumed—that she would be playing Ophelia. I do believe that Larry's original intention was to use her. But he ran into a problem from the Rank people."

The problem was that Olivier was about to turn forty. Vivien Leigh was almost thirty-four. The Hamlet of Shakespeare was in his twenties, while Ophelia was in her late teens. By dyeing his hair blond and using makeup, Olivier might still pass on screen for a younger man. But no amount of makeup could turn Vivien—now a mature woman—into a teenager. Afraid that an older woman playing Ophelia would hinder the film's success, the Rank organization insisted on a much younger actress for the part or else they wouldn't finance the film. After some argument, Olivier himself, fearful of losing the ten thousand dollars he had been offered in advance, acceded

"When Larry broke the news to her she pretended to understand," says Vivien's friend. "But deep down she felt rejected and betrayed. And that started a new pattern of out-of-control emotional and mental fits. In fact I'd say it sent Viv over the edge once and for all. She'd seemed to have recovered from all that business, and then boom—it all started again and it was much worse than before. Where before she used to take her irrationality out on other people, friends or strangers, now she began taking it out on Larry. Larry was to blame in a way, although he had no idea that his very pragmatic decision to exclude her would have the effect it did. He was to blame but he wasn't to blame. Of course, when he realized what it was all about, he felt very guilty and went out of his way to make it up to Viv."

One way he tried to make it up was to persuade Alexander Korda to cast Vivien in the lead role of a lavish film the producer was about to make of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. And he persuaded Korda to give the important part of Count Karenin to Ralph Richardson so that Richardson, who was familiar with Vivien's problem, could monitor her behavior and save her from embarrassment during the picture's long, complex shooting schedule. Although neither Vivien nor Richardson was well suited to the roles, Korda allowed his affection for his friends to prevail over his hard business sense.

One of the few bright moments for Olivier during the difficult Hamlet filming came in June, when it was announced that he had been nominated for a knighthood in recognition of his service to England.

.....At that dinner was, among others, Cecil Beaton, who had designed the costumes for Korda's Anna Karenina. "Everyone had a rip-roaring good time except Vivien. I should say, everyone tried to have a rip-roaring good time. But Vivien was strangely quiet and broody throughout, and her mood put a damper on the festivities. I had been with her when the news of Larry's knighthood was announced. She'd reacted with utter indifference, although it meant that now she would be 'Lady Olivier.' And later, in the time leading up to the ceremony at the palace, she seemed to resent it more than anything else. She didn't even want to go to the ceremony. She only did so when Alex Korda closed production on Karenina for the day. But she wasn't enjoying any of it. She acted as though she was holding a grudge against Larry."

....One of the reasons the filming of Hamletdragged on for so long was the shapely Jean Simmons, the eighteen-year-old actress Olivier had chosen to play Ophelia in Vivien's stead. Although she had made some films, she was entirely innocent of any experience in acting Shakespeare and had to be coached intensively by Olivier. Some say that Olivier became enamored of Miss Simmons and fell into a brief affair with her. Others say that, yes, he was beguiled by her ripe sensuality but that her youthful innocence and sexual naivete acted as a bar to seduction. Still others insist that his attachment to her, intense as it was over the several months of filming, was purely professional.

Whatever the case, Vivien Leigh suspected the worst, which only added to the high-pressure anxieties that were apparently behind her mental dysfunction. " 'Goddamn Larry is fucking his Ophelia,' Vivien said to me once when 1 dropped by to see her at Shepperton," recalls a close friend of both Oliviers. "I said, 'Viv, don't be silly, he's doing no such thing, it's all your imagination.' And she said, 'No, I'm sure of it, I'm losing him to a bloody child. Well, I shouldn't be surprised. I was barely out of my teens when Larry started fucking me.' I kept saying it couldn't be.

Jean Simmons, after all, was going with another actor at the time—Stewart Granger, 1 think. I kept telling Viv she was imagining things. After I said it three or four times, she lashed out at me in a fury and accused me of calling her insane. She wouldn't speak to me for months afterward."

According to others who knew her, Vivien Leigh finally became aware, at about the time she was making Anna Karenina, that something was profoundly wrong with her. "Yet she refused to acknowledge it, and any suggestion of it from others usually elicited a fearsome diatribe," says one. "I think her whole resistance to it was caused by her great fear that Larry would find out that she had a flaw, or that she'd be taken away from Larry. Of course, that was another symptom of her irrationality. She believed that Larry didn't know and that the most important thing was to keep it from him."

When Anna Karenina was released early in 1948, the critics remarked on a strangely lifeless, almost indifferent performance by Vivien Leigh and disliked the film as a whole. Such was not the case when Olivier's Hamlet reached the movie theatres a few months later....Olivier, unfortunately, was not around to enjoy Hamlet's enthusiastic reception. When the film first opened in London in May of 1948 he was in Australia, leading a six-month Old Vic tour of that vast British Commonwealth nation.

The tour itself was a financial and cultural success. To Australians, both Olivier and Vivien Leigh were living legends—Vivien especially because of her fame as Scarlett O'Hara—and the citizens of each city the troupe visited crowded the theatres to see their performances. The tour apparently had a salubrious effect on Vivien, as well. In a journal he kept of their six months in Australia, Olivier made repeated references to his wife's condition and spirits. The references indicated that she was once again free of her problem

Vivien began again to suffer mental lapses in the spring of 1949 as she alternated at the Old Vic among Lady Anne in Richard III, Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal and Antigone. A two-month summer rest with Olivier at Notley Abbey after the season ended did nothing to improve her mental stress—according to several other friends it was the worst they had ever seen her, and Olivier was in a new state of depression over the development

Matters went from bad to worse in September as he and Vivien began to rehearse the first West End production of Tennessee Williams's phenomenally successful American drama A Streetcar Named Desire. The Williams play had opened in New York almost two years earlier and had been acquired for the West End by producer Hugh Beaumont.

After seeing Vivien in her opening night at the Old Vic in February 1949, though, he decided to proceed. And when he sent her a script, she was as eager to play Blanche as Beaumont was to have her. Her only condition was that Olivier direct the London version. Olivier agreed, although he was not entirely comfortable with the play and had misgivings about Vivien portraying a woman teetering on the edge of insanity. He took the assignment nevertheless because the play, after all, was a long-running hit in America and a handy vehicle by which to reintroduce himself as a director to the West End

By the time Streetcar opened on October 11, Vivien Leigh was Blanche du Bois in more ways than just as an actress. During rehearsals she had taken on many of Blanche's delusionary colorations as her own, and soon the distinction between the stage character and the real-life woman began to blur. Vivien was generally praised for her performance, but her friends began to worry that the longer she played the part, the more it would damage her already shaky emotional equilibrium.

Olivier, on the other hand, had given up worrying. He now accepted the inevitability of his wife's condition and despaired of ever learning what, in particular, triggered her bouts of hysteria and depression .And the reason he had given up worrying about the outbreaks themselves was because he was now confronted by a greater worry.

One night after a performance as Blanche, she had failed to come home, but had gone out on a whim for a late supper with members of the cast of another play. Apparently in the grip of one of her amnesial depressions, she had sent everyone else on their way and remained alone with a young actor from the cast with whom she'd spent the evening flirting. She suddenly went beyond flirting and became very amorous with the actor, finally demanding that he take her home with him for a night of lovemaking.

The young man had no hesitation in complying with her wish, since she seemed perfectly normal to him and gave him no impression that her motive was anything else but a compelling attraction to him. He walked her to his flat in Soho, but as he began to take the initiative she suddenly and just as unaccountably became resistant, talking unintelligibly. Thinking she had merely had too much to drink, he forced himself on her, stripping Vivien of her clothes and then having sexual intercourse with her while she lay in a stupor. When he was finished, she dressed and disappeared.

She walked aimlessly through the empty streets of cold, predawn London until a patrolling police car came across her trailing her expensive fur coat through the stagnant puddles of a street near Covent Garden. Finally able to determine who she was, the policemen delivered her to Durham Cottage as dawn began to light up the sky over Chelsea. Olivier thanked the officers politely and got Vivien into bed

Whether Olivier noticed the physical signs of Vivien's hour in Soho is unknown. But the young actor was not hesitant in spreading the word among his theatre friends that he had spent a night with the fabled Vivien Leigh, and Olivier soon picked up the rumors. When he questioned Vivien about it a few days later, she claimed no memory of the event. Indeed, she grew wrathful at his suggestion that it had occurred

"Larry was stoical about it," recalls an old friend. "No, I don't think he believed the story that was going round, at least in the beginning. People were furious with the boy who started it—in fact, he was canned from his show a few weeks later and he didn't work for a long time. Nobody believed it! We all thought it was the fantasy ravings of this actor. But then, later, when Vivien began doing it with other people, running off on these one-night stands—well, maybe it was true. That didn't excuse the actor for babbling about it, though. He deserved what he got. Vivien was sick."

Why did Vivien's mental instability suddenly take a sexual turn? Most of her friends today agree that there was a dual reason. First, she had been harboring a deep resentment and desire for revenge stemming from her suspicions about Olivier and Jean Simmons during the making oi. Hamlet. "There was no question about that," says one. "Viv had never forgotten that. Even though there may have been nothing to Larry and Jean's relationship, Viv remained convinced there had been. She was not consciously capable of revenge, but her mental breakdowns became a form of revenge in themselves. And the conscious remembrance of her suspicions about Larry having been unfaithful became grafted onto her —I suppose you would call it her subconscious. So gradually, as she continued to go through her mental breakdowns, she associated her own sexual infidelity as the best way to hurt Larry."

"And then there was the fact that she was playing Blanche du Bois at the time. Blanche was a character wrapped in a complex, distorted sexuality, and she gets raped by her contemptuous brother-in-law. I remember that when we discussed Viv's performance, she always insisted that Blanche enjoyed being raped by Kowalski. I believe that her sudden promiscuousness when she was under the influence of her mental blackouts had a lot to do with her ideas about Blanche, with the idea of wanting to be raped. I know that sounds terribly cheap-psychoanalysis, but just the same I believe it's very close to the truth."

During her eight months in A Streetcar Named Desire, Vivien had several such encounters. The one that infuriated her friends most when they learned about it was with the up-and-coming actor Peter Finch..

The thirty-three-year-old Finch, London-born, grew up in Australia and had been working as an actor in Sydney when Olivier, during his Old Vic tour the year before, saw him in a low-budget production of Moliere's Le Malade Imaginaire. Impressed by his ability and by the fact that Finch had formed his own acting company to bring theatre to Australia's outlying districts, Olivier offered him a place with the Old Vic if and when he decided to return to London. Finch took up the offer...

"Larry was getting into a period of his life," says a friend, "where he believed he had a responsibility to help younger talent find opportunities. A large part of that came from the criticisms he had received at the Vic about having ignored younger talent in favor of Vivien. No doubt Peter Finch would have labored in obscurity in Australia all his life had it not been for Larry suddenly being stung by the criticism. Peter was only eight or nine years younger than Larry, but I suppose because he was unknown he seemed even younger. Anyway, he became Larry's personal project. Larry felt that by helping Peter obtain some prominence, he would show his Old Vic critics that they were wrong."

A member of the Streetcar cast relates, "Pete had become a great pal of Larry's. One of the reasons Larry liked him so was because Pete didn't play the sycophant. I mean, Pete knew that Larry was responsible for his sudden success, but he didn't go around licking Larry's feet in gratitude In a way he was much more independent and brash than Larry, and Larry admired that in him. And what Pete admired about Larry was his style and authority. Anyway, Pete became part of Larry's inner circle. He was almost like a younger brother—Larry trusted him because he was always so direct in his dealings with everyone.

"Well, Vivien became jealous of their relationship, and she got it into her head that she had to destroy it. How was she going to do this? She decided to work her sexual charms on Pete and then let Larry know that his friend had betrayed him. Pete had become quite a blade around London. Larry knew that he was in and out of a dozen beds, and that he had no scruples about who he slept with. So she was sure Larry would believe her rather than Pete."

A friend of Vivien's claims, "It was much more complicated than that. Viv may have been jealous of the camaraderie between Larry and Finch, but she didn't set out consciously to destroy their friendship— Viv simply didn't have that kind of malice in her. What happened was that when she went into one of her mental states, she was no longer able to distinguish between Larry and Peter Finch. Because Finch was around so much in those days, because he and Larry were so devoted to each other, in her disarranged mind Finch became like a surrogate Larry. And she tried to seduce him, just as she might have Larry if he had been around. And the horrible thing was that Finch allowed her to go on with it, instead of telling Larry what was happening. For that he cannot be forgiven.

I suppose he thought it was some special charm on his part, not Viv's sickness, that enabled him to 'conquer' her, if you will. He assumed that Viv was mad about him and would keep the facts from Larry, and so he went on blithely being pals with Larry and boasting to his close drinking pals of how he and Vivien were having an affair"

"Poor Larry, in the meantime, remained in the dark about the whole thing. Even if Viv had wanted deliberately to hurt Larry by having him find out from her, she couldn't. For the three or four times she was with Finch—she never remembered them afterward. Or if she did have some hazy memory, she was too ashamed to say anything."

In July of 1950, Vivien Leigh went to Hollywood to make the movie version oi A Streetcar Named Desire with Marlon Brando. Afraid to leave her on her own for the three months it would take director Elia Kazan to film the production, Olivier accepted an offer to play the male lead in the Hollywood film version of Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie. The offer had come thanks to David O. Selznick, who had just married actress Jennifer Jones.

Hollywood was unaware of the troubles of Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier. Except for a few friends such as David Niven and Danny Kaye, so far as anyone knew the Oliviers' storybook romance of the late thirties was still in full flower. To keep the myth alive, Kaye and his wife threw a huge but exclusive welcoming party for them at the Beverly Hills Hotel shortly after Olivier arrived in August to start on Sister Carrie. The fact that he was "Sir Laurence" and she "Lady Olivier" impressed the party-goers considerably more than that he had won two Oscars and Vivien one.

Although she would win a second Academy Award for her performance in the movie of Streetcar, the filming of the picture did nothing to improve Vivien's state of mind. Nor did Carrie excite Olivier, and when the two were finished with their respective tasks in late November they sailed together by slow freighter back to England

"It was Larry's idea," said Spencer Tracy, with whom Olivier had become good friends. Tracy, married but long separated and having a affair with Katharine Hepburn, was an alcoholic who sympathized with Vivien Leigh's problems. "It's the drinking," he told Olivier when he learned about Vivien. "It often happens to me too. I go off on these benders and can't remember a thing afterward. There's nothing wrong with her mind, it's just the booze. Get her off the booze and you'll see a tremendous change."

Was Vivien an alcoholic? Yes, say most of those who knew her. Not a Spencer Tracy-type of alcoholic who would drink himself into oblivion. But a woman dependent on alcohol nevertheless. "A day did not go by when Viv didn't have five or six drinks, usually starting with lunch," says a close friend. "It was either champagne or gin martinis, and they were part of her regular daily diet—much more important to her than food. She didn't drink herself into stupors though, just to get high and stay high. She needed to be high because it gave her courage. She said it enabled her to work better.

"Of course, Larry was no teetotaler. He was always good for three or four whiskeys, some wine, what have you. I wouldn't say he was an alcoholic but he was a robust social drinker. I don't know if he drank because Vivien drank or she drank because he did. The point is that he could handle it and she couldn't."

Caesar and Cleopatra opened at the St. James's on May l0, 1951...

.An American actor who had been hired to play a supernumerary in the Shakespeare Cleopatra at the Ziegfeld recalls, "There was a lot of coolness backstage between Olivier and Vivien Leigh toward the end of the run. There was an English actor in the production, Edmond Purdom, and it was clear to just about everyone in the cast that something was going on between him and Vivien. Vivien was the one who pursued it, not Purdom—in fact I'd say he was embarrassed by it. Olivier seemed aware of what was going on and was very nice about it to Purdom, but he was cool and abrupt with Vivien."

Vivien just kept getting worse, Says an Olivier friend, in stages. Finally he realized that there would be no end to the troubles she caused him. He felt trapped, and he fought a violent struggle within himself between his instinct to be free and his innate decency and sense of responsibility to Vivien. His work became a way of escaping from his problems. Which is why it lost that incandescent quality. It wasn't his age, primarily, it was his depression. He lost pride in himself because he no longer knew what to do about Vivien. Oh, he kept up a good actor's front, but he was bottomlessly disappointed in himself, in Vivien, in life. One was reminded of his old prescription about loving the characters he played just as he loved himself. Well, he had trouble loving himself at that time. It was no wonder that he could have no love for his characters. And it showed, not only in those performances he did but in the characters he chose to perform."

The first character Olivier chose to portray after playing Caesar and Antony was MacHeath in a movie version of John Gay's eighteenth-century musical play The Beggar's Opera. ...

Will somebody tell me which posts are about the homosex. I couldn't get through the tedium of most of this.

With Olivier, Kaye and Tracy there should be plenty. And God knows what might have gone on between Olivier and Finch.

Dear OP, I'm loving that you have presented all this. I will relax and enjoy it on the weekend.

While Olivier was filming The Beggar's Opera during the summer of 1952, Vivien was once again confined to Notley Abbey, this time under semipsychiatric care. A lung infection shortly after her return from New-York necessitated treatment with drugs. In June, the drugs had combined with her alcohol intake to unleash a prolonged episode of hysteria and near-catatonia. Olivier and her doctor finally summoned a psychiatrist.

After Vivien recovered, the psychiatrist talked with her for several days without revealing the nature of his medical specialty. By then Vivien was well aware that something was radically wrong with her, but she refused to acknowledge it still. When she learned by chance that the doctor was a psychiatrist, she went into a panic and ordered him away.

But by then Olivier was adamant. The physician had diagnosed her as suffering from acute manic-depressive disease—the first time Olivier had heard a medical name applied to Vivien's condition. The doctor also assured him that several months' rest, without drinking, should restore her personality to normal. The disease itself would probably not disappear, but if Vivien could adjust to living without alcohol, it might remain largely dormant.

Olivier was grateful at least to discover that Vivien's problem was a known disease and that there were ways of controlling it. Over the next few months he convinced her to accept the reality of it and to work on restoring herself to normalcy. She appeared to cooperate, passing her days at Notley Abbey entertaining friends and puttering in the gardens. But her cooperation was not all it seemed to be.

"Whenever Larry was around, Viv didn't drink," a man who saw much of her at the time said. "But during the day, when he wasn't there, she took a nip now and then. She was deathly afraid of Larry finding out, so she took to drinking vodka, which left no breath odor. She didn't drink much, just enough to keep herself with a slight buzz on, and her condition actually improved."

LARRY was beginning to wonder if it wasn't he who was driving Vivien insane," Angela Baddeley once said. "He talked about it once, and he blamed himself. Viv had a negative reaction to everything he thought he was doing right for her, and then when he tried to do the opposite, thinking that might be what was right, she reacted negatively to that too. He was in a terrible bind about what to do and what not to do. He was no longer in love with her, he said. He still had great affection for her, and he still felt thoroughly loyal, but how could he go on loving this woman who had turned his life, their life together, into a third-rate drama? And yet he blamed himself. He tortured himself with guilt. He never showed it to anyone, but one night down at Stratford he got drunk and showed it to me. He was in tears."

By the New Year of 1953, Vivien's condition had stabilized and she seemed well enough to go back to work. When she was offered the starring role in a Warner Brothers movie called Elephant Walk, she was anxious to do it despite the fact that it called for two months of location shooting in the tropical heat of Ceylon and then two more months in a studio in Hollywood. A friend said, "She was eager to get away from Larry for a while to show him that she was no longer dependent on him. Yet once she got away, she blamed him for letting her go. She even accused him of forcing her to go, which was not the case at all. Larry had great misgivings about her doing the film."

Olivier's misgivings were so great that he persuaded the movie's producer, Irving Asher, to put Peter Finch into the co-starring role opposite Vivien. He wanted someone he trusted to be on the scene to look after her. Finch, delighted that his first movie was to be a co-starring role in a big-budget Hollywood production, solemnly promised Olivier that he would act as his surrogate in Ceylon. Olivier still had no idea that his friend had already played the role.

Vivien left for Ceylon late in January 1953, accompanied by Finch. He would later say to me, in defending himself against accusations that he had betrayed his benefactor Olivier, "Listen, Larry should never have let Viv go in the first place. He did it because he needed the money and Viv was getting a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Is it my fault Viv picked on me to cling to? I was just trying to act in Larry's best interests. I told him that. Would he rather have her fall into the clutches of some grip or assistant cameraman? I did what I did to save Larry from embarrassment. Viv too."

At the end of February, Olivier received an urgent call from producer Asher in Ceylon: Vivien had cracked up, what should he do? Olivier caught the first available plane and arrived in Ceylon to find Vivien perfectly normal: the crisis had passed. Although troubled to leam that she had been sharing her hotel suite with Finch, he accepted Finch's explanation that he had merely moved in to protect Vivien from hurting herself, and that nothing amorous had gone on between them. "Shit," Finch said to Olivier, "she calls me 'Larry' half the time."

Leigh sounds exhausting. And I've only been reading about her for 30 min or so.

There is nothing about her daughter? Did she completely give her up to be with Olivier?

R66 Yes

Olivier returned to London after five days in Ceylon. A week later the Elephant Walk company flew to Los Angeles to continue production at the Warner Brothers studio.

In April, while Olivier was on a working holiday in Ischia, planning a new stage production as part of the coming summer's coronation celebrations,* he received an emergency call. from his friend Danny Kaye in Los Angeles. Vivien had suffered a violent breakdown, Kaye told him. She had been put to bed, heavily sedated, on a psychiatrist's orders. The doctor wanted to put her into a psychiatric hospital, but he needed Olivier's permission since Vivien was totally irrational. Olivier refused permission. He asked Kaye to "hold the fort" until he could get there.

It took him three days to travel to Los Angeles. When he arrived, accompanied by his friend and agent Cecil Tennant, he was stunned to find Vivien drugged and barely conscious. Rather than allow her to go into a hospital in Los Angeles, he decided to get her back to England where doctors with whom she was familiar could look after her. Danny Kaye and David Niven made the travel arrangements, Kaye flying to New York in advance to arrange a place to keep Vivien on the stopover between flights.

With Vivien still heavily sedated and lying on a nurse-attended rolling stretcher, Niven saw the Olivier party off from Burbank Airport. Kaye met them at New York with a nurse and limousine and took them to the Long Island home of a friend, where they stayed overnight. The next afternoon he delivered them to Idlewild Airport to board their flight to London.

By then much of Vivien's sedation had worn off and she fought furiously, irrationally, for twenty minutes before the nurse could inject her again and maneuver her onto the plane. Exhausted by her exertions and aided by the drugs, she slept for the entire ten hours it took the plane to cross the Atlantic while Olivier brooded to Cecil Tennant on the whims of fate.

Upon their arrival in London, Olivier and Tennant whisked Vivien to a psychiatric hospital in Surrey, where she was placed in isolation with no visitors allowed. By then the newspapers had gotten wind of the affair, and when Olivier finally got back to Notley Abbey he found a throng of reporters and photographers waiting for him. Assured that he would not be able to see Vivien for at least two weeks, he ordered Cecil Tennant to turn the car around and head for the London airport. That night, in a state of utter exhaustion and despair, he was on a plane back to Ischia.

Not a small ingredient of his anguish was his knowledge, learned from Irving Asher in Los Angeles, that Peter Finch may have been behind Vivien's breakdown. Finch, Olivier had been told, had been living with Vivien in more ways than one.

The most boring pile of impotent and lunatic twaddle that has appeared here in a long time.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzz............

Vivien's recovery was remarkably rapid, considering the violent depths to which she had apparently plunged. But then perhaps it wasn't so remarkable.

By summer's end of 1953, Vivien was back at Notley and itching to return to work. But not to Elephant Walk —she had been replaced by Elizabeth Taylor. Her April breakdown was fobbed off to the skeptical press as a combination of an infection she had contracted in Ceylon and exhaustion. When Vivien began to appear in public again in London looking healthy and happy, if somewhat bloated, no further questions were asked

With himself directing the play and starring as the Prince opposite Vivien as Mary Morgan, the showgirl. The Sleeping Prince had its West End premiere on November 5, 1953. The date was Vivien's fortieth birthday, a fact that she was depressingly reminded of the next day when several reviewers criticized her as being too old to play the sexy young American.

Vivien's manic-depressive episodes had started again after she learned that Olivier intended not to use her as Lady Anne in Richard III. He got her doctors to explain that after the rigors of appearing nightly in The Sleeping Prince she needed a long rest. But as Angela Baddeley later said, "Vivien was convinced it was because Larry thought she was too old. This put her on a new rampage, and she lit into him about his own age. 'You're forty-seven!' she would scream at him. 'What makes you think you can play Richard at forty-seven? Please, Larry, don't do it, you'll be the laughingstock.' Once she was sure Larry wouldn't use her, she tried to get him not to do the picture. She needed him to herself for the summer, she complained. Larry was betraying her by putting his career first. The fact that Larry was being paid a good deal of money by Korda didn't occur to her."

.....And then there was Vivien. Fuming and growing once more delusionary at Notley Abbey, she made his life a hell of vindictive phone calls and irrational accusing letters while he worked full-time at Shepperton. Olivier finally went to Korda and begged him to give Vivien a starring role in another movie the Hungarian was planning to make, hoping that work would divert her attention from him.

The film was The Deep Blue Sea by Terence Rattigan, and Korda was skeptical both about Vivien's suitability for the lead part of Hester Collyer and about her ability to handle a tough shooting schedule without causing problems.

"Alex was fully aware of Vivien's mental problems," says a man who was a friend of both. "Vivien had been down to the south of France the summer before for a stay on Alex's yacht, and he had been saddened to see her floating in and out of reality. He gave her the part in Deep Blue Sea, but with great reluctance and only because he wanted to make Larry's life easier."

Yes usually I enjoy these book excerpts but this is one of those no shred of truth or at least heavily sanitized bios that used to come out by the truckload in the 60s.

Next was Macbeth, which opened at Stratford on June 7, 1955, and starred Olivier in the title role and Vivien as Lady Macbeth. Trader Faulkner, an Australian actor who played the key role of Malcolm, was quoted as saying that he thought "Larry had agreed to do Macbeth only to give Vivien a chance at Lady Macbeth. Larry seemed rather bored throughout, and that made Vivien highly nervous because she had gotten poor notices for her Viola and felt totally out of her element as Lady Macbeth. There was a great tension between them."

Another member of the cast suggested the reason. "Peter Finch began coming around during Macbeth. Evidently he and Larry had reached some understanding and Larry tolerated his presence. Actually, I think he thought of it as a kind of godsend. Vivien started spending more and more time with Finch, and that seemed to take the pressure off Larry. There were times he even seemed happy to have Finch there. He would leave Vivien with him and go off drinking."

And, said a friend, "Larry very quickly realized that Peter Finch represented something important to Viv. She was much more relaxed when Finch was around her than when he wasn't. Finch was like a second Larry for her, but a Larry she felt she didn't have to measure up to. In fact she could treat Finch with a slight condescension, which made her feel superior to him and gave her a sense of power and authority she never had with Larry. Finch took it all because he was in love with her. He accepted the position he was in—a kind of pawn between Viv and Larry.

Larry was no longer friendly with him, nor did he play the outraged cuckold. He apparently accepted and then simply ignored the whole thing. He knew he had to live with Vivien. So evidently he said, if that's what she needs to keep her calm, I'll go along with it. Of course, Viv was still not beyond using Finch to taunt Larry. She wasn't in love with Finch; she just loved the idea of him always being there when she wanted him."

In April, Vivien opened in the West End in Noel Coward's latest play. South Sea Bubble. A few weeks later she informed Olivier that she was pregnant. A great shroud of mystery has lain over this event ever since. Even close friends were never sure whether Vivien was actually pregnant. Nevertheless, it was announced that Vivien had suffered a miscarriage in August, while Olivier was in the midst of filming The Sleeping Prince. With the reputed miscarriage came a further descent into madness.

The Sleeping Prince, later retitled The Prince and the Showgirl to underline Marilyn Monroe's presence in the movie, took four frustrating months for Olivier to film. Not even he could control Monroe's quixotic personality. "For the first time since practically the beginning of his career," says a man who worked on the production, "Larry was up against a woman who had absolutely no awe of him, and he found this more disconcerting than anything else. I mean, he was a man used to actresses who would always try to please him, who would always defer to his opinions and suggestions, whether he was directing them or just acting with them under someone else's direction. But Marilyn Monroe gave not a shit about him—who he was or what he represented.

She was just too dumb and uncultured and obsessed with herself. She took advice from only one person, and that was Paula Strasberg, her so-called acting coach, who was always about the set. Larry tried to be polite to Monroe at first—friendly, encouraging and supportive. But that didn't work— Monroe was going to do things her way no matter what. Then he tried to be stern and authoritative. Same result. So finally he said, 'Shit, let's just get on with it and get it over.' He was fed up with neurotic women."

"It was Marilyn Monroe, strangely enough, who enabled Larry to resolve in his own mind what he should do about Vivien. Larry once told me that for the three or four years prior to his working on The Prince and the Showgirl he was in a miserable quandary about Vivien. Each time she'd have a breakdown he'd say, 'Aha, that's it, this time I'm leaving.' But then she'd bounce back and he'd say, 'Wait a minute, perhaps I was too hasty.' And it went on and on like that, with each passing year producing a greater emotional paralysis in Larry, and a greater inability to act upon his own needs. He wanted to get out, but he knew that if he did he'd be consumed by guilt for abandoning this helpless creature.

"But then he met Monroe. More to the point, he met Arthur Miller. Now here was America's most celebrated playwright, a serious man of great theatrical achievement, married to America's most famous actress. Larry became—well, not chums with Miller, but they got on. The thing was, Larry identified with Miller, if you will. He saw the troubles Miller was going through in his marriage to Monroe, who was not far from being a madwoman with all her psychoneurotic idiosyncracies—whereas Miller was a stable, sober character much like Larry. And here was Larry, married to the equivalent of Monroe in fame and even more unstable than her. It was like seeing a mirror image of himself. And when he saw the damaging effect Marilyn was having on Miller, he suddenly saw something of himself in Miller.

"He and Miller talked about it—about the trials of being married to huge stars who, in one way or another, were round the bend. Miller was very defensive, he went on and on trying to justify his sufferance of Marilyn. But Larry soon came to realize that it was just rationalizing. He could see Miller being consumed by the relationship with Marilyn. Miller himself was confused, paralyzed, and he couldn't work, he couldn't do the things he needed to do, he couldn't concentrate.

"Larry pitied Miller in a way. But then he realized that he was in the same boat. Miller was justifying and rationalizing much as Larry had done five years before. Now it was five years later and Larry was still doing it. He thought: 'My God, do other people pity me the way I pity Arthur?' And that did it. He resolved once and for all to get hold of his life and change it. He realized, he said, that he was about to be fifty, and that he didn't want to live the rest of his life in that personal purgatory he found himself in."

I hope you're not going to tell us that the fastidious Vivien succumbed on the commode.

.......Vivien, recently diagnosed by one psychiatrist as suffering from nascent schizophrenia, was undergoing electroshock treatments, Olivier had little enthusiasm for appearing in another movie with her, no matter how attractive the money.

When he received a copy of John Osborne's Entertainer script, Archie Rice was a marvelous part. He was every cheap, hapless, whisky-soaked vaudevillian Olivier had seen during his early days of touring the seaside resorts of England, possibly even the kind of pathetic self-delusive performer Olivier might have turned out to be had he had no talent. He phoned Devine immediately and said, "I'll do it. Pay me whatever you want. When do we start?"

Devine and Osborne were enthralled. With Olivier as Archie Rice, a long-running hit was all but guaranteed. But they had a further idea: why not Vivien Leigh as Phoebe, Archie Rice's frumpy shrill-voiced wife? Olivier vetoed the suggestion, but not before Devine had talked to Vivien separately about it. Already exhibiting the puffy-faced signs of her alcohol addiction, Vivien agreed to play the role "if it was all right with Larry," according to Devine.

When Vivien discovered that Olivier didn't want her, she went off on another binge of madness at Notley, smashing lamps, china and valuable porcelain figurines into bits and shards. "That's the way Vivien was becoming," said Angela Baddeley. "She was extraordinarily fond of all the fine furnishings and decorations she and Larry had surrounded themselves with at Notley, and very meticulous about their preservation. Yet in the depths of one of her spells, she wouldn't think twice of destroying some treasured object."

Olivier's growing estrangement from Vivien brought about a curious change in his relationship with Tarquin, by then almost twenty-one but still ill at ease with his father. During the previous ten years, Vivien had evinced much more affection for Tarquin than she had for her own child, Suzanne. Tarquin felt closer to Vivien than to his father. Now Olivier made an effort to correct the situation.......

.....Olivier finally broke the ice by inviting Joan Plowright to join him for a meal between a matinee and evening performance after The Entertainer reopened. Said the cast member, "Joanie of course had heard all about Larry and Vivien Leigh—all the romantic business of years before and all the ugly rumors that were going on about then. Evidently she asked him about them and Larry burst forth with a great, impassioned tale of woe and anguish about Vivien, about his loneliness and feelings of futility and so on. Joanie came back dumbstruck with pity for Larry and told a few of us what agony he was going through. She spoke with such compassion that it was easy to discern that she was in love with him."

Her feelings remained unexpressed, mainly because Olivier refrained from expressing his own emotions about her. He had reason to remain quiet. In the first place, he wasn't sure of the nature of his feelings: was he attracted to Joan Plowright because she was so consoling of him, or because she herself seemed to need consohng? Second, she was married—although, he had learned, not happily so. Third, he was almost twice her age—old enough, really, to be her father

....The Entertainer ran through the spring of 1958. It was Joan's first visit to the city, and she was shown around in proper style by Olivier. They were far away from the prying British press and from their respective domestic troubles in London. They needed to take only minimal precautions to keep their affair hidden from the New York newspapers. By the time they returned to England in the summer, they had made a pact to marry as soon as they could obtain divorces.

Joan wondered how her husband would react. "Not to worry," Olivier said. "I will go and see him, talk to him. I have experience at this sort of thing, you know."

Olivier did not go to see Joan Plowright's husband upon his return to London. There he found Vivien performing in a hit play, Duel of Angels, and seeming much better. He was confronted again by a crisis of loyalty.

He explained his dilemma to Joan. Because she was still not altogether ready to face her husband, she urged Olivier to move back in with Vivien at the flat in Eaton Square. The last thing she wanted to do was wreck any chance Olivier might have of reviving his marriage. Despite the love he had professed for her, she knew that he still clung to a residual hope that Vivien would someday magically recover and once again be the woman he thought he had married. "See what happens," Joan said. She was content to exist for a while on the memory of their affair in New York.

Olivier moved back to Eaton Square. But he remained only long enough to learn once and for all that it was his presence in Vivien's life, more than anything else, that seemed to provoke her mental storms.

All the accounts he had received from friends indicated that she had gone through the three months of his absence without a single untoward episode, lamenting their separation to friends but not once suffering a breakdown. Even her doctors were encouraged, and Olivier thought that now, maybe now, it's finally over.

But while Olivier was making The Devil's Disciple, Vivien suffered a violent relapse. Some say it was because she had learned about Olivier's relationship with Joan Plowright. (Vivien had been to see The Entertainer during its second run at the Royal Court and had been heard to say about Plowright: "Who's the ugly girl?")

Others claim it was due to the fact that someone connected with the Hecht-Hill-Lancaster organization had told Vivien that Olivier had turned down Separate Tables because he hadn't wanted to appear with her in the film. Still others insist that it was caused by nothing more than Vivien's psychic inability to tolerate the things in her life that were most important to her: "This demonic need to destroy her most precious possessions kept growing and growing," says one. "And Larry was the most precious."

Whatever the reason, Vivien's outburst was the end of any hope

In describing it not long ago to The New York Times, he said, "I was afraid of killing her. . . . She was slapping me across the face with wet flannels, striking me, until I went into my room and closed the door. She kept beating on the door, beating and beating until I couldn't take it anymore. I came out and grabbed her and threw her across the room. She hit her head on the edge of the bed and it cut her just one inch below the temple. One inch higher and that would have done it. ... I knew then it had ended. If I went on, sooner or later it would go too far. I knew I had to get out."

Get out he did, and it was not long before he resumed his affair with Joan Plowright.......With his gradual estrangement from Vivien, Olivier had lost interest in the Abbey. Now, with his brother gone and no one to keep the grounds in order, he decided to put it up for sale.

It was then that Olivier proposed that they proceed with their plans to marry. He wrote to Vivien, who was in New York repeating her starring role in Duel of Angels, requesting a divorce. Then he went to see Roger Gage and, with great apologies, asked him to file for divorce against Joan.

In New York, Vivien was already deep in an affair with Jack Mer-rivale, the actor whom Olivier had employed for their 1940 American tour of Romeo and Juliet and who was appearing with her in Duel of Angels. Undergoing shock treatments once again, she wrote back to Olivier agreeing to his request and promising to file for divorce as soon as she returned to England. In the meantime, Olivier moved into Joan Plowright's flat in Kensington after she refused to inhabit the Oliviers' place in Eaton Square.

On December 2, i960, Vivien Leigh Olivier—Lady Olivier—was granted a divorce from her husband on the grounds of his adultery with Joan Plowright. In order to satisfy a legal technicality, she conceded that she too had committed adultery with unnamed men in previous years and months—in Ceylon, in London, in New York, elsewhere. But Olivier's affair with Joan Plowright was the cause of the divorce action, and since the two lovers had signed legal papers admitting to their sexual relationship, the court granted the divorce to Vivien. An hour before, it had approved Roger Gage's petition for divorce from Joan, also on the grounds of adultery. The judge decreed that the twin divorces would become final three months later.

Three months and a few days later, Joan Plowright became the new Lady Olivier in Wilton, Connecticut. It was St. Patrick's Day of 1961. Richard Burton—then appearing in New York in Camelot —and his wife, Sybil, drove up to Wilton for the ceremony before a local justice of the peace.

LARRY'S marriage to Joan Plowright brought about a radical change in his life," a close friend of both said. "Joanie was an earth creature as compared to Vivien, the goddess of fire and air. It was probably a kind of organic shock for Larry to be living with such a woman of stability and good sense after almost twenty years with the unpredictable Vivien.

....In July 1967, while Olivier was undergoing radiation therapy in a London hospital, Vivien Leigh died at her home outside London..... Olivier checked himself out of the hospital against doctors' orders to help with preparations for Vivien's funeral.

Thank you, OP for this wonderful contribution!

I add my thanks, OP. Please the usual snide remarks.

This whole bunch is exhausting. All of them.

When did the Leigh/Finch" failed "elopement" take place. Used as the plot for the Taylor/Burton segment of "The VIPs"?

I think Katharine Hepburn was a witness at their wedding? Was Tracy there too? I think Hepburn was amused that Olivier and Leigh were worried about the press and apparently no one cared.

Here's the obituary of Leigh's daughter with biographical information and pictures:

[quote] It took him three days to travel to Los Angeles. When he arrived, accompanied by his friend and agent Cecil Tennant, he was stunned to find Vivien drugged and barely conscious.

Cecil Tennant - father of actress Victoria Tennant. Olivier was her godfather.

Thanks OP

Scarlett seems like Mother Theresa compared to Vivien.

Apparently they used some of Vivien's footage for "Elephant Walk" even after she was replaced by Elizabeth Taylor.

Supposedly it is Leigh in some of the long shots.

^ There's a short Youtube video showing Vivien Leigh in the long shots. You can recognise her (she's very short and bottom-heavy in jodhpurs)

r86 Normal, beautiful life, happy marriage. Obviously, she was nothing like her mother.

R92 LOL at Vivien complaining "I have produced such a small size infant that I shall have to feed it for months. The thought is too depressing.” Especially as how Vivien had such tiny dugs.

Suzanne was nothing like her mother, and she doesn't seem to have had a facial resemblance to her father either. But she did get a million pounds when she sold Vivien's archive to the V and A.

That archive included those precious nude shots of Larry in the golden days when they were young, beautiful, adored by millions and blissfully happy together.

Any mention of me....any where?

From the link at R86

[quote] During these years she was hardly ever alone with her mother, who, though she would remember the birthday of every member of the cast of a play she was in, was capable of forgetting that of her own daughter. From her Switzerland finishing school, Suzanne wrote to Vivien that she was “simply aching” to see her again, “also for a chat”. Vivien merely sent the letters to Leigh Holman, commenting: “They’re so sweet & funny.”

Suzanne and her grandmother, Gertrude Hartley, early 1970s

I heard once from an elderly theatre impresario who frequented the same circles as those frequented by Larry and Viv during the 1950’s, he told me this little story :

“I met her [Viv] a few times – one in her dressing room at Stratford, when she was playing Viola in Twelfth Night to Larry’s Malvolio – I went to a party at their house the same night, but Vivien was not in evidence, as she was upstairs bonking with Peter Finch, while her guests (and Larry) who all knew, pretended everything was normal downstairs. I remember sitting on the floor chatting with Renée Asherson, while Kay Kendall was being extrvagant on the sofa.”

r97 Vivien was trash.

Great story R97!

R9

Yep. Still have a very unfavorable opinion of her. What a selfish pain in the ass.

Omg I love her. I’ve read a biography about her, years ago, and it was more forgiving. Life can be surprisingly hard when you’re beautiful.

I have no doubt Olivier was bonking Finch as well at some point.

Actors will bonk a nailed down 2x4.

No mention of the fact that Olivier’s first wife was gay or that Larry was bi? How old is the book that’s being quoted from here?

R103, it is my understanding that Olivier came to dislike Peter Finch and regarded him as a malign presence in his life, possibly due to associating Finch with Vivien’s mental illness at its nadir which caused Olivier a lot more heartache and stress than her infidelity. Olivier commented late in life that he was glad Finch was dead.

Are you an actor R103? Or a wannabe?

R96 I can see Vivien in her mother's face but nother daughter's.

R102 You say 'Life can be surprisingly hard when you’re beautiful'. I say 'Life can be unsurprisingly hard when you’re rich and/or beautiful'.

Helen Mirren said she was immensely grateful after her Oscar win. But she also said that, despite her wealth and four homes, she wasn't particularly happy.

r105 " but nother daughter's."

Are you an English teacher?

R106 Not Vivien's daughter nor Gertrude's granddaughter, Mr Wannabe-Actor

When Vivien was brazenly carrying on with Peter Finch at Notley she was more or less non compos mentis. This is not to excuse her behavior, but one must also look at the degree to which Olivier was enabling it as he was looking for something, anything, to manage Vivien whenever she was in the grip of her bipolar affective disorder, an illness that had no effective form of treatment at that time. Lithium carbonate and other mood stabilizers were not available yet, and bipolar patients were subjected to prolonged sedation and other treatments which posed many dangers and did little to relieve their terrible suffering. It’s not surprising that Vivien availed herself liberally of booze, although of course that leads to its own separate set of problems.

Had her daughter been a beauty she would have presented her as a trophy.

R105 because Mirren has Russian bone structure. The other kind..a lump of clay. She's got be the cattiest envious most miserable old bitch around because she was never a beauty. In England no less. Think about it.

Regular ole looking people were put away in large mental institutions and forgotten about in those days.

R98 She was mentally ill. Her sexual excesses were a symptom of her mental illness. I remember reading about how she would go out and find random men and have sex with them in public parks. She was not in control of her behavior and I think back then they had yet to develop any of the medicines they have now to control schizophrenia and bipolar illness.

Forget the medicines. They hadn't even developed understanding of the illnesses themselves.

R112 Yeah and so what's gay men's excuse?

^ How shocking at OO.27. Is this true?