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Laurence Olivier: A Biography

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i've read this and every other biography about olivier. don't bother with this one, it's a waste of your time. read the terry coleman biography instead. more thorough, more accurate, with total access to olivier's personal papers and archive. follow it up with tarquin olivier's book and joan plowright's book to get the personal view and understanding. the greatest actor. a great man. extraordinary, fascinating and deserving of more than spoto.

In 1973, French film-maker Philippe de Broca scored one of his biggest triumphs with a delicious comedy called "Le Magnifique," in which the old joke of the story being interspersed with the story of the guy-who's-writing-the-story was used to perfection. Audiences were delighted each time the writer, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, got stuck in front of the typewriter and the action cut to his characters waiting impatiently, until one of them said to him that they didn't have all day to wait and would he please make up his mind. Belmondo had had the mixed blessing of creating a hero, a Bond-like secret agent, whose extremely improbable adventures sold by the millions, and made him a slave of his own creature, whom by now he hated but couldn't get rid of. He still owed his publisher a great number of books, which he had already been paid for and was pressed to write very fast. Whenever the story-within-the-story materialized on the screen, Belmondo himself became the hero and the publisher became his nemesis, the arch-villain who wanted to destroy him at any cost. The whole thing was very intelligent, very funny, and the film was a big hit.

In one of the confrontations with his arch-enemy, Belmondo is chained to a bed in a dungeon of sorts where the villain sadistically tells him that he will be left there to die. Any movement he makes while trying to escape will release a big, voracious rat that will come to devour him. Not only that, but even if he manages to get rid of the rat, he won't be able to keep the filthy creature from biting him. Now for the best part: the rat has cyanide in his fangs! At this point, the action cuts to the writer typing like a madman. Suddenly he stops, looks ahead with a bewildered face and says, "Cyanide? But then the rat would die!"

Indeed. There's no way the rat wouldn't die with cyanide inside his mouth. However, this absolutely unquestionable fact would probably go unnoticed by most readers had the writer not realized in time the magnitude of the stupidity he was about to perpetrate, the truth being that most readers digest whatever is served to them, be it cordon bleu stuff or junk food. Hence the tremendous responsibility of anyone who writes a book of any kind.

The big, big trouble whenever Donald Spoto comes up with still another biography is that the book is invariably infested with rats whose fangs couldn't be more completely loaded with cyanide. To complicate matters, Spoto is a very gifted writer. His prose is nothing short of magnificent, at once sober and poetic. The way he describes the final moments, the death, and the aftermath of his subjects is always very beautiful, never failing to bring up the exact dimension of the subject's greatness. It's not difficult to imagine what a fantastic author he would have been had he chosen to write fiction rather than biographies. Alas, he found his way to being among the most popular show business biographers of his time. Readers go about his books with great pleasure without realizing that each of them is a feast of cyanide-fanged rats. In the end, it becomes perfectly clear why being a gifted writer and a dishonest biographer makes for such a dangerous combination.

"Laurence Olivier: A Biography" is a good example. Olivier is an icon of the 20th century. A shining legend. Anything published about him will always find avid readers all over the world. He was the only actor in history who, after gaining respect while still very young in the highly demanding arena of the classic theater in England, moved successfully to big Hollywood stardom, relinquished the kind of fame and money that came with it, became a national hero by returning to Britain to film Shakespeare during the war, and turned into the most respected actor of his time due to a gallery of creations that place him beside the greatest myths of the English theater, like Burbage (for whom Shakespeare is supposed to have written "Othello"), Kean, Garrick, and Irving. Along the way, he was the protagonist of one of the century's most glittering love stories, in which the other part was Vivien Leigh, the woman who played Scarlett O'Hara, one of the most beautiful women of all time, their relationship alone making for one of the most sensational stories ever to have involved two actors. Deserting her for an exceptionally talented actress young enough to be his daughter, he became a family man, the somewhat older-than-most father of three children, a Lord, and the father figure of one of Britain's greatest cultural treasures: The National Theatre. From the biographer's perspective, Olivier's life is almost too good to be true, like a fiction character made real. Just like Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, or Judy Garland (with Michael Jackson to follow soon), it was inevitable for him to be the subject of an ongoing list of books telling his story with varying degrees of accuracy, meaning that, just like the others, he became an easy pray for cyanide-fanged rats.

As profusely documented by other authors, all plausible evidence points in the direction (kindly observe that the words in this paragraph are being chosen with great care) of Olivier being a straight man who in his youth experimented with homosexuality, an actor named Henry Ainley having probably been responsible for his first and possibly only sexual encounter with another man (kindly bear in mind that the adverb *possibly* indicates that something might be true, but no certainty can be attached to it) . Lots of things have to be considered here. Any (or would it be more prudent to add "As a rule" to the beginning of this particular sentence?) adult man knows perfectly well in what direction, or directions physical desire leads him. More often than even in the 21st century most people would be ready to admit, young men who later engage in a straight sex life, experiment with same sex encounters. Very few are willing to speak about it, the subject is hardly ever brought up by anyone, and there are practically no studies about it. To this day, it remains cloudy, restricted to speculation, and vastly misunderstood. Under these circumstances, if it is discovered, or strongly suspected that, being a public figure, in his youth a man had sex with another man, or men, even though his whole life points in the opposite direction, people will forever assume that he was gay, one more celebrity in the closet, using women to disguise his true nature, and biographers will start out to "investigate." Bad omen, this "investigation." It never fails to produce a stampede of cyanide-fanged rats.

Showbiz biographies sell one hell of a lot, we all know that. But then they sell even more if they are "spicy." Trouble is that in order to spice up the material, some biographers go too far, making readers balk and start looking for the way out. That's when a certain kind of biographer makes his triumphal entrance: the gifted writer whose extremely elegant style enthralls readers to the point where they don't realize that the stuff they've been wasting time with is essentially as trashy as the scurrilous books they try to avoid about their most beloved stars. This kind of biographer is perhaps best represented by Donald Spoto.

Personally, I could never understand the obsession with the sex life of actors, so much paper being consumed to make sure the world knows all the details about Cary Grant and Randolph Scott having been lovers, Garbo being bisexual, Chaplin's fetish being teenage girls, or Maureen O'Hara being legally charged with indulging in some kind of frolics with some kind of guy in the balcony of some kind of movie theater. Maybe the question to ask is not "Who cares?" but "Why should anybody care?" Well, somebody does, and biographers make one hell of a lot of money, especially if they master the ingenuous art of writing sensationalistic books under the guise of sophistication.

A treatise could be written about the menagerie of cyanide-fanged rats to be found in Spoto's biography of Olivier, most of them aimed at demonstrating that he was a gay man forever in the closet. Some of the rats are pretty daring. Look at this one: insisting as he does on Olivier having had an affair with Danny Keye (among so many others), he tells how in 1953 he had to travel in all haste from Italy to Hollywood, where Vivien Leigh had suffered her most serious nervous breakdown. Disguised as a customs officer, Danny Keye is supposed to have met Olivier at New York's Idlewild airport, submitted him to the indignities of a naked and intimate body search, removed the disguise and emerged as himself revealing it all to be a joke. Then the boys are supposed to have spent the night together in a hotel and only next morning Olivier is supposed to have given another thought about his rather dangerously ill wife (she very nearly died).

This particular rat might as well burst into a convulsive fit with so much cyanide in his mouth. One wonders if hashish had anything to do with Mr. Spoto having engendered such a delirious scene knowing, as he certainly does, how unlikely it would be, even for a star like Danny Keye, to obtain the complicity of the U.S. customs and immigration officers, especially at such deranged times as the McCarthy era, when authorities were not in the least inclined to be condescending with actors. Needless to say, the story contradicts all existing reports of that day. And for the record, the British producer Cecil Tennant was with Olivier when he disembarked at Idlewild. For all his undeniable ingenuity, Spoto forgot to give poor Uncle Cecil something to do while the boys were having fun. How lamentable. He could so easily have made Uncle Cecil go get some popcorn and a Coke to go with it, or see a fortune teller, or better still, have a walk around Times Square till he ran into a stouter-than-most drag queen named Rosita La Gorda who would talk him into producing a musical version of "Cleopatra" with her as the lead and Carmen Miranda as the Pythoness of Delphos, the show's big production number being a sensational rendition of "Mamãe Eu Quero," which the two of them would perform in front of the Sphinx to the sound of Xavier Cugat.

One thing seems to be very close to Spoto's heart: debunking what was published before. He always does that, in all the books. Trouble is that just like heavy drugs, if you're not careful with it, you may overdose. That's what happened to Spoto in Chapter Ten, while writing about Vivien Leigh's mental illness. Trying to prove that she was a manipulative woman up to anything in order to prevent the marriage from breaking up, he suddenly comes up with this absolutely startling statement: "There is simply no medical data from that time verifying Vivien Leigh's mental illness."

Two decades after her sadly untimely death, Lady Olivier, as she liked to be called, had the good fortune of being the subject of one of the most striking examples of what a biography should be, written by Hugo Vickers, who must be regarded as a perfect biographer. Vickers is far from being the only one to present an impressive (and very sad) array of data verifying that she was a tragic victim of manic depression, or bipolar disorder. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Rudolf Freudenberg, has since become something of an icon in his profession. Netherne Hospital, where he worked and had Leigh committed when she was brought back to London in 1953, was one of the most respected mental institutions in the world. Surely Spoto knew about these facts when he brought up the alleged lack of medical data. It has to be admitted that he has guts. Another writer wouldn't have the courage to load the rat's mouth with so much cyanide.

In the end, there isn't much use for Spoto's "Laurence Olivier: A Biography." It's so distant from reality that, just like this author's similar efforts, you don't know what to do with it. As an actor I was once engaged to play the lead in "The Long Goodbye," a one-acter by Tennessee Williams. Knowing how strongly auto-biographical the play was and being not in the least familiar with the author's life, I got hold of "The Kindness of Strangers," his biography by Spoto. I found the book very engaging, very well written and poetic. But all along there seemed to be something odd. Too many parts of it sounded like a reverie. I had never read a biography written in such a whimsical style. Somehow it didn't sound like the story of an actual character. A good ten years later, Williams' gigantic, extremely well researched biography by Lyle Leverich came out and I could see how unreliable Spoto's book had been.

One episode in particular astonished me: beautiful though it may be, Spoto's account of the circumstances (and the time!) in which Williams wrote "Something Cloudy, Something Clear," one of his best and less known plays, is totally disconnected from the truth. I was taken aback to see that there isn't one single element in it coinciding with the facts surrounding the play's composition. I became curious to know how Spoto concocted his absolutely delirious version, in which even Tallulah Bankhead, who never had anything to do with the play or the circumstances in which it was written, appears out of nowhere and becomes a key figure, if not a muse, without whom the play might not have been written. Spoto describes Bankhead as someone Williams had "loved and lost." All other sources sustain the actress was someone he loathed and did his best to keep at bay. And anyway, "Something Cloudy, Something Clear" was written in 1941 as a short play with a different title, and expanded into a full-length play with the definitive title in 1962, six years before Bankhead's death. Williams couldn't possibly have "loved and lost" her and then written the play as a kind of elegy for her. Being Tallulah Bankhead, she might have got hold of the manuscript and read it long before the play's belated première in 1981. Then her neighbors would probably jump out of bed in the middle of the night with her screaming after recognizing herself as a character: "What the f*** is that?!" It made me wonder if not getting anywhere with his research on that particular play, Spoto decided to make up the whole story as if he were writing fiction. Not much of a way to go, Mister.

If you want to have fun with Laurence Olivier made into a fiction character, the book for you is "Curtain," a biographical novel (or "roman à clef") by Michael Korda, in which even his name was changed to Robert Vane. But if you want to read about his life and why he became, as Cary Grant put it, "the actors' most admired actor," your best bet really is "Olivier" by Terry Coleman (2005), not only the definitive Olivier biography, but also one of the best actors biographies in print.

-- Leonardo Thierry (waitsfortherain@gmail.com)