Olivier (11 page)

Hollywood held better things. David Selznick was scheduled to make a film based on Daphne du Maurier’s
Rebecca
, a romantic novel that had come close to
Gone With the Wind
in its popular success. It was to be directed by Alfred Hitchcock, who had made his name triumphantly with “The Thirty-Nine Steps” and “The Lady Vanishes” and with whom Olivier was particularly anxious to work. It seemed that he was bound to have his wish: the role of the moody, slightly saturnine Maxim de Winter, though not a particularly testing part, was so obviously within his range as to make it likely that it would be his if he wanted it. “I was an absolutely natural choice for it,” he argued. “I was the obvious chap. I was the top English actor.” Selznick was not so sure. “Colman is the only perfect man,” he wrote, but once again Colman was unobtainable. William Powell was next choice, but he would have cost $100,000 too much. Olivier was, if not
faute de mieux
, at least considered a second or third best. Once he had the part Vivien Leigh decided that the role of the anonymous but omnipresent heroine should be hers. Selznick thought that to cast an actress so recently distinguished as the dashing, headstrong Scarlett as the hesitant, self-effacing second Mrs de Winter, would be to destroy the balance of the film. Olivier professed to disagree with him. He maintained that Vivien had done an outstanding test and that it was only Selznick’s wish to show that he could create a new star which had led to her rejection. In fact Selznick, while thinking
she would not be right for the part, had great respect for her ability and had by no means ruled her out. If Olivier had pressed strongly he might have got his way. But, as he later admitted, “I didn’t really want her to get the part. There was already so much strain in our personal lives, our divorces, leaving a wife and child and a husband and child in England … It was perhaps better for us to have a little vacation from constant togetherness. Vivien thought I didn’t try hard enough for her … Well, I didn’t. I hadn’t felt she was right for the part, if the truth be told.”
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Instead, he found himself playing opposite the little known Joan Fontaine. He disliked her from the start, finding her skinny and unattractive – “I didn’t really understand what Max de Winter could see in her.” The generosity which Roger Furse had remarked when Olivier had played opposite Curigwen Lewis was conspicuously lacking.
He told Hitchcock that he thought she was no good in the part and Hitchcock passed it on. “You can imagine how that made me feel,” Fontaine said. “I was as friendly and co-operative as I could be. But after what I’d been told, if I convinced Olivier of my good feelings towards him then I
really
deserved an Oscar.” She won no Oscar – for that piece of acting at any rate. “I felt she didn’t like me …” was Olivier’s conclusion, “she never said anything hostile to me, but she scarcely spoke to me at all.” In spite of this unpromising preamble, the partnership worked pretty well. Fontaine, Olivier admitted, “gave an amazing performance”; as for himself: “I literally walked through the part – it had nothing to do with the real work of acting.” His was, indeed, an understated performance in an undemanding role, but it was what the film needed and what the public wanted. “Most people thought I was excellent … That, of course, was the bloody exasperating thing about film acting. The less acting one did the better one came across.” Another way of putting it would have been that Olivier had fully come to terms with the medium. “Rebecca” confirmed what “Wuthering Heights” had already suggested; that Olivier was now in the first rank of international film stars.
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This to some extent consoled Korda for what seemed to him Olivier’s rank treachery. “Am amazed at information you have contracted to play ‘Rebecca’ for Selznick,” he cabled. “You are, of course, aware your exclusive contract with us is still subsisting and was only suspended to permit you to play New York. Please cable immediately that information received is unfounded.” Olivier replied blandly: “Am amazed at your resentment … Am under definite impression no contract with you exists. However, am willing to discuss new one with you upon my return end of the year, also most happy to see you.” Perhaps Korda was not sure of his ground, perhaps the conciliatory note of the last few words convinced him that, in the long run, it would be better not to quarrel with his inconstant star. He was to get his reward some years later when it was Selznick who cabled indignantly to complain about Olivier doing work for Korda while still under contract to the American producer.
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In August 1939 Selznick had another preoccupation. What would happen if war broke out and Olivier, George Sanders and the other British members of the cast were ordered to report for duty in England? “We would be in a fine pickle – not so much of a pickle as Poland, I grant you, but still a pickle.” The question does not seem to have caused Olivier serious worry. International affairs meant little to him; he rarely studied a newspaper except to read reviews of the new plays and films. The Munich crisis had not passed unnoticed, but he had many other things on his mind that seemed more pressing. On 3 September, 1939 he was on Douglas Fairbanks’s yacht off the Californian coast. Everyone had been drinking heavily and when Neville Chamberlain broadcast his baleful pronouncement that Britain was now at war it seemed only sensible to drink some more. Olivier, said Fairbanks, “was the only one who got really and truly drunk”. With some difficulty he lowered himself into a dinghy and began to row round the fleet of expensive yachts which infested those waters. “You’re all finished!” he shouted as he passed the boats. “You’re done! Drink up. You’ve had it! This is the end!” The occupants of the yachts, who did not share Olivier’s view that
they were done or that this was the end, complained to the authorities that a mad Englishman was rowing around, abusing them. Unfortunately, they identified the miscreant as Ronald Colman, whose yacht was also in the area. Colman was accused of insulting behaviour and had some difficulty proving his innocence. Meanwhile, Olivier rowed back to the Fairbanks’ yacht and went to sleep. He woke next morning with a hangover and considerable uncertainty as to what he should do next.
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D
runken extravagance was all very well, but was no solution to the problem of what Olivier should do now that his country was at war. He told Oswald Frewen that he didn’t know whether to stay where he was, to enlist or to be a conscientious objector. “Truly the ‘to be or not to be’ spirit has entered into him,” Frewen commented. The conscientious objector possibility cannot have been advanced very seriously. Olivier was by nature belligerent and any fashionable anti-war sentiments he might have held a few years before had long vanished. This, he believed, was a just and necessary war and he wished to play his part in it. But what part should that be? His first instinct was to hurry back to England to be of whatever use he could. Yet what use
could
he be? At his age he knew that there was no possibility of his being able to join up for several months at least, perhaps longer. It was likely that most of the London theatres would be closed: there was no filming in the offing: there seemed little point in rushing back to London only to hang around doing nothing.
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And yet he felt this was what he ought to do. He disapproved of, indeed disliked, most of those English in Hollywood who decided to stay there. They held endless meetings to discuss how they could do this without giving an impression of cowardice or irresponsibility. “They had plans for getting publicity, having cricket matches for charity. I don’t know what bloody nonsense they didn’t get up to.” Angrily he told them that he would have nothing do with it all; he was going home. At
least he preferred the honesty of George Sanders, who had acted with him in “Rebecca”. When Olivier told him he was determined to return to London, Sanders replied: “Of course, I admire your courage and all that, but
I’m
not going back because I’m a shit and I don’t give a fuck who knows it!” Olivier was not a shit and he was very anxious that nobody should think he was. If only to preserve his good name he felt that he must leave.
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It was David Niven who first shook his resolve. The British Embassy had told Niven that he could serve his country best by staying in the United States and making propaganda for the Allied cause. He had been a regular army officer however; he had a regiment to join; he felt he must go back. “Why don’t you ask Larry Olivier, though? He’s dying to do something for the war effort and it’ll be a while before he gets home.” Olivier was a friend of Duff Cooper, who he knew was close to Churchill. He approached him for advice. “Stay in New York,” came the reply. Alexander Korda was going there and had projects in mind in which Olivier could play a useful part.
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It has been suggested that there was more to it than that. A recent biography puts forward the theory that Olivier had been recruited by S.O.E., the Special Operations Executive, to work for a propaganda organisation. This made him a target for German undercover agents and put him at risk of assassination. He never said anything himself to support this theory, but he was quite happy to let a touch of mystery colour his activities in the United States. When asked why he was not more communicative he replied coyly: “My ego is too great to reveal my secrets. It serves my ego to keep things to myself.” In fact it seems unlikely that he had any secrets of consequence to reveal. He would have been useless to any intelligence organisation and one can imagine no reason why any such body should have sought to enlist him. Where he could serve his country was by making patriotic films which might speed America’s entry into the war or at least promote the British cause. If he had asked the Embassy for advice he would have received no more than generalised encouragement to strike a patriotic line.
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Though he was rarely picked out by name, Olivier found himself, or at least felt himself included in the condemnation of those actors who had opted to stay in America. In the
Sunday Dispatch
Michael Balcon denounced “deserters” and insisted that “for the isolationists the curtain should be run down”. “We’ve got a good word in Lancashire to describe the people who have run away,” declared the ukulele-playing George Formby, “and it’s a bit stronger than desertion!” Such charges hurt, the more so for being unfair, but it was to be several months before Olivier was engaged in any activity which was intended to serve the war effort. In the meantime he prepared himself by taking flying lessons. He had begun these as long ago as 1935 but had let them lapse; now he engaged in an intensive course. “Larry is learning to fly every day, so that means he will be good,” Lynn Fontanne told Noël Coward. “He says he is going to be an ace.” He was never going to be an ace, but nor was he conspicuously unsuccessful. The legend grew – fostered largely by his delight in making a good story out of very little – that he had merely to step into a plane for some disaster to ensue. Olivia de Havilland wrote how he had repeatedly written off both his own and other people’s planes: “There were at least ten incidents and it was really hilarious. Larry was undaunted, fearless, oblivious.” Undaunted and fearless he was, but there was no long chapter of accidents of which he needed to remain oblivious. The notes of his hypercritical instructor suggest that he was no worse than most of his fellow students and better than some of them. He completed his two hundred hours of solo flying – “which is a great deal,” commented Jill Esmond – and was issued his certificate of competence.
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His first contribution to the war effort was to be the making of a patriotic film with Alexander Korda but there was another commitment to be undertaken first. Though M.G.M.’s version of “Pride and Prejudice” took what any self-respecting Janeite must consider outrageous liberties with the plot, it was in fact a quite creditable effort to put Miss Austen’s best-known if not best novel on the screen. Olivier, of course, was Darcy: a part which he was quite as capable of walking through as
he had been when playing Max de Winter. He considered that his Elizabeth should be Vivien Leigh and this time he seems not to have had any of the private reservations he had admitted to in the case of “Rebecca”. Instead, Greer Garson was imposed on him. Where he had disliked Joan Fontaine, he thought well of Garson, but this did not reconcile him to the casting: “I hated it, and I thought it was disgraceful, and I was awful, and I thought darling Greer was as wrong as could be.” Instead of being sharp and level-headed as the plot demanded, she was, he claimed, “the most silly and affected of the sisters”. It seems almost as if he saw some other version of the film to that enjoyed by the rest of the world. He was not “awful”. Darcy was hardly a testing role but he acted it with all the necessary arrogance and panache – while Greer Garson was neither silly nor affected but something very close to the high-spirited and opinionated heroine Jane Austen had created.
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Now the war effort could begin. This time, though, Vivien Leigh was included. “Larry and I are to do a picture about Nelson and Lady Hamilton,” she told the man who was still her husband. “I am extremely dubious about it. But now one does not plan a career much, as it seems futile, and we are certainly only doing this for financial purposes.” She did not do herself or Olivier justice. Money mattered, since their children were coming over from embattled Britain and would need support, but they could have earned far more if they had not chosen to put themselves at Korda’s disposal. Olivier was initially as doubtful as Leigh about the project. Had he heard of Lady Hamilton? Korda asked him. “She was the tart who fucked Nelson, wasn’t she?” replied Olivier. Korda agreed that this more or less summed it up, but he stressed that what was planned was a patriotic extravaganza, tailored to the needs of the day, with Nelson/Churchill mouthing slogans about the “unconquerable valour of the British nation”. Olivier was allowed a large input into the production – “We did a lot to make it sound more natural and that sort of the thing” – and the result was a slightly absurd but exciting adventure story. Olivier read energetically around his subject – “In those days I did quite a deal of research” – and tried to make his part realistic as
well as romantic. His research omitted one detail. Shooting was about to begin when he asked which arm it had been that Nelson lost at Santa Cruz. None of the available portraits elucidated the point, naval historians were scarce in Hollywood. Then someone remembered that an elderly Hungarian opera singer living nearby had once played Nelson in an operetta in Vienna. He was sent for and Korda interrogated him. For a few minutes he pleaded forgetfulness, then admitted that he had got so bored playing the role that he had alternated, sacrificing his left arm on one night, his right on the other.
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