Olivier (13 page)

O
livier’s intention was to follow the example of Ralph Richardson and join the Fleet Air Arm – it had always seemed to him that the Royal Navy was the most estimable of the armed services and the Fleet Air Arm would give him a chance to exhibit his prowess as a pilot. Not everybody thought that this would be the most sensible use of his abilities. Sidney Bernstein, then working in the Ministry of Information, asked for his ideas on the best way to influence American opinion and added his thanks for “promising to make films for the Crown Film Unit”. Olivier had made no such promise or, at least, had made it clear that his military service must come first. He at once applied to the Admiralty, attended a medical examination and, to his dismay, was failed for some defect in his hearing. He could now, with honour, have taken up Bernstein’s offer and reverted to what he did best – acting. Instead he reapplied, a few discreet strings were no doubt pulled, and on 18 February, 1941, he passed his medical and was accepted for the Fleet Air Arm. If he could get through his flying test he would immediately be commissioned. A day or two later he chanced to meet his old school friend, Douglas Bader. Bader was by now a hero, having already shot down more than twenty enemy aircraft and been awarded the D.S.O. and bar and the D.F.C. and bar. “I want to congratulate you,” he said to Olivier. “I think it’s a thoroughly good show your coming back to join up like this. I want to say ‘Bravo’!” Olivier cast a respectful eye on the glories attached to Bader’s breast. “I want to say more than ‘Bravo’,” he replied.
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After a brief stay at the Royal Naval Air Station at Lee-on-Solent Olivier moved on to his first serious posting at Worthy Down, four miles north of Winchester. His unexciting though useful role was to fly trainee air gunners around the skies while they honed their skills in preparation for more serious operations. It was typical of Olivier that he not merely carried out his duties with competence but looked absolutely right in the part. “I always thought my performance as a naval officer was the best bit of character acting I ever did,” he once remarked. Ralph Richardson paid a half-mocking tribute to his transmogrification. “He looked fine,” he remarked. “The uniform was perfect: it looked as if it had been worn long on arduous service, but had kept its cut. The gold wings on his sleeve had no distasteful glitter; only the shoes shone… . His manner was naval, it was quiet, alert, business-like, with the air of there being a joke somewhere around.” Richardson found his friend’s performance mildly comical, but he was impressed by the contented atmosphere of the unit and the relationship between Olivier and the people who served under him. He knew all the Wrens and seamen, remembered their names and details and was liked and trusted. “Larry did that very well indeed,” thought Richardson as he left the base. “Then a thought crossed my mind: ‘I wonder if he rehearsed it?’ ” Olivier probably had rehearsed it – he left as little as possible to chance – but the leadership qualities which were so evident at Worthy Down were in time to figure to still greater effect in the National Theatre.
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Though nobody would have detected it from his demeanour, Olivier did not feel at home in the Fleet Air Arm. “I’m always filled with the most affectionate admiration for the ‘lads’,” he told Jill Esmond, “tho’ many officers I don’t think much of.” Olivier found nobody in the Officers’ Mess to whom he could relate. He could impersonate an Air Force officer and even relish his performance, but he could not enjoy the company of his fellows. They knew nothing of the theatre and had no wish to learn about it; he for his part could only pretend to share their preoccupations. A somewhat narrow approach to life was one of his more noticeable characteristics. He was always reluctant to venture
far outside his designated territory. A friend once asked him to dinner. He accepted with pleasure. “I’ve got some banker friends coming,” his friend continued. “I can’t do it,” Olivier protested. “Writers, directors, actors O.K. Otherwise, I can’t do it.” He
could
have done it and would, no doubt, have provided a most convincing performance as a banker, but he would not have enjoyed it. He coasted through his life in the Fleet Air Arm without engaging thoroughly with it. “I occasionally hear from somebody who says ‘Do you remember me at Worthy Down?’ and I probably don’t, but I say ‘Of course I do’,” Olivier recalled forty years later. “There were very few people with whom I had anything in common.”
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Any chance that he would fit more easily into life in the Officers’ Mess was lost when he got permission to move into a bungalow he rented two or three miles from the aerodrome. “Larry not very happy,” Noël Coward noted. “Think it a great mistake for him not to live in Mess.” Possibly he would have been less happy if he
had
been living in Mess. At least, Vivien Leigh, who was enjoying a long run in “The Doctor’s Dilemma”, was able to join him in the bungalow on Sundays. It was embellished with Indian rugs, an Aubusson carpet, paintings by Sickert and Boudin. Other friends visited him from time to time. For him it was an oasis of civilisation in a barren world.
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One reason for his discontent may have been that, by the high standards which he set himself, he was not a particularly good pilot. The legend of his unique incompetence, which Olivia de Havilland had rejoiced in while he was training in the United States, still clung to him. There was as little reason now as there had been then. He had one accident before he even took to the air and damaged two aircraft as a result, but this seems to have been only in part his fault. “I think I may describe myself as a decent pilot,” he wrote; and the description was not over-flattering. But he was no more than that, though he would have liked to have been acknowledged as a master. Instead he was mocked for his inadequacy. Cyril Cusack was travelling back to London by train in the same compartment as Vivien Leigh. She dropped off to sleep. Two Air
Force cadets came into the compartment. “Isn’t that Vivien Leigh?” one of them asked Cusack. He said it wasn’t. “Just as well. That husband of hers is our training officer and he couldn’t fly his way out of a paper bag.”
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Another cause for gloom arose when Ralph Richardson was given a half-stripe and thus gained seniority over his friend. Richardson had joined up several months before, so his promotion was justified, but Olivier admitted that this extra stripe “almost killed our relationship. I didn’t want one particularly; I wouldn’t have cared at all if it hadn’t been for Ralphie having one.” It made him very pompous, Olivier complained: “There was no talking to him, he became a different person.” It was not the first or the last time that Olivier resented his friends being awarded distinctions that he would never otherwise have coveted for himself.
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Whatever their judgment of his merits as a pilot it became ever more obvious that the authorities felt he could be more usefully employed making propaganda and encouraging the public to contribute to various aspects of the war effort. His activities ranged from a tour of the countryside around Winchester, appealing to the local inhabitants to contribute unwanted books to a Salvage Drive, to performances in a packed Albert Hall ending with a spirited rendition of “Once more unto the breach”. The change in emphasis in his activities can be traced from the entries in his pocket diary. At the beginning of every month he would enter the various training courses and flights to which he was committed. More and more often these were crossed out and some propaganda duty substituted: a lecture on Ship Recognition, for instance, became an appearance at the Lyceum in Sheffield. Tyrone Guthrie, who had moved the Old Vic to Burnley and believed that it was vital that the theatre should be kept alive, argued that even this was not enough. The country did not need Richardson as a staff officer or Olivier as a second-line pilot, trolling air gunners about the skies. Nor was the occasional flag-waving foray a proper use of their talents. They had better and more important things to do. Regretfully, Olivier accepted that this was true. He was no more than an airborne taxi driver. He should move on.
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He made a final effort to play a more active role. The Walrus was an amphibious aircraft designed to be catapulted from the decks of battleships or heavy cruisers. If he could qualify to fly them he would at last be able to undertake some real operational flying. He was frustrated once more. By the time he had completed the course the Walrus, already recognised in some quarters as a cumbersome antique, was withdrawn from active service. It would be back to the taxi work again. The blandishments of those who felt he would be better employed making films became more and more difficult to resist. Even before he had finished the course he had agreed to undertake a full-length film. It would be some time yet before he was discharged but effectively his life in the Fleet Air Arm was behind him.

His first film after his liberation was “Demi-Paradise”, a propaganda exercise intended to make average Britons feel more warmly towards their Russian allies. As Olivier pointed out, Russia was at that time high in public favour; the exercise seemed superfluous. So great was his relief, though, at finding himself once more doing the work he loved, that he rated the film more highly than it deserved. It was, in fact, slight and rather silly, but it gave Olivier a chance to try out his Russian accent and was enjoyed by most of those who saw it. Anthony “Puffin” Asquith, who directed the film, had no illusions about its importance but felt that Olivier had produced “a truly creative performance”. Ivan, the Russian hero of the film, played by Olivier, was “so thoroughly imagined and so consummately realised that he contrives to exist quite apart from the film”. Asquith was not the only person to believe that the film represented a step forward in Olivier’s career: Dilys Powell, already one of the most respected of cinema critics, claimed that this performance put him for the first time in the top flight of British film actors.
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Another tempting possibility was dangled before Olivier while “Demi-Paradise” was being filmed. Michael Powell had decided to make a film based upon David Low’s farcical cartoon character, Colonel Blimp. It was to be a satirical attack on all that was most hidebound and atrophied in the British establishment. Who better to play it than
Olivier, who had himself had the chance to study blimps at first hand during his service with the Fleet Air Arm? He put forward the idea. “Larry stooped like a hawk … Larry is, above all, an inventive actor who has to find the secret pass-key which makes a character work for him … What bitter, burning satire he could bring to bear from his own experience of a diehard Blimp.” Unfortunately, the Secretary of State for War, Sir James Grigg, who himself was not altogether free of blimpish traits, saw little merit in a film intended to mock the stuffier elements of the British military establishment. He rejected any suggestion that Olivier should be released from the services to make such a film.
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Meanwhile, Olivier was making desultory efforts to keep in touch with his son and former wife. He could fairly plead that he had a great deal else to do, but even so he could have tried harder. Jill Esmond wrote wistful letters reporting on their son’s progress. Tarquin loved gardening, like his father, but had inherited the impatience which led Olivier to dig up each plant a few days after it had been put in the ground so as to see how it was getting on. “I think it is awfully difficult to bring up a boy entirely without a man and I’m determined that he will never be a mother’s boy,” wrote Esmond. Could not Olivier make more effort? “I wish you would write him a letter; he can’t quite understand why you don’t, as other boys here have their Father.”
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The truth was that what energy Olivier had left over was devoted almost exclusively to Vivien Leigh. The successful production of “The Doctor’s Dilemma” had brought her to London – “Amazing, the appeal of the film star,” wrote Gielgud superciliously. “She is still madly in love with her husband – who adores her – and is convinced he is a much greater person than herself,” Cecil Beaton wrote in his diary. William Wyler, who saw them several times at this period, agreed that they were “still very much the newly-weds – and it’s very refreshing to see”. About her feelings for him there can be no doubt; Selznick’s London office assured him that the only reason she did not honour her contractual obligations and return to Hollywood was that Olivier forbade it: “She is
still terribly in love with him” and “refuses to listen to any criticism of Larry”. Olivier’s feelings are not quite so clear cut. “No-one has ever been made so happy as Vivien makes me,” he wrote in September 1942. “She’s my whole life.” But there are some suggestions that he was beginning to find her devotion a little oppressive and to be alarmed at the force of her emotions. The situation was complicated by her failing health. In 1944 she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She seemed to have recovered and was at work on a film of “Caesar and Cleopatra” when she found that she was pregnant. She should have given up the part but filming was by then far advanced and she struggled on. One scene, in which she had to beat an offending slave, proved too taxing for her. She collapsed, miscarried and suffered a fresh bout of tuberculosis. Grief for her lost baby and the protracted nature of her recovery did permanent damage to her psychological balance. She had always been subject to violent mood swings; after this trauma they became dramatically worse. The marriage between Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh would endure for many years yet, but it was under threat. It was not, to employ a trite but telling phrase, the beginning of the end, but it was the end of the beginning.
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Olivier himself had other and, if he was honest with himself, more important things on his mind. He was about to embark on the enterprise by which he is best remembered and which established him most firmly as a figure celebrated not only in his own country but across the world.