Dark journey of a star

John Kobal

VIVIEN LEIGH by Hugo Vickers

Hamish Hamilton, £14.95, pp.411 mma', says her husband Lord Hamilton, arriving to join the Nelson family in the rooms overlooking the hero's triumphal parade into London in the com- pany of Lady Hamilton, 'swallows ovations like a heron swallows fish.' The same could be said about Vivien Leigh, who swallows triumphs and washes them down with her biographers. Little wonder that Leigh gave one of her finest displays of self and had one of her greatest triumphs playing the woman for whom Nelson left his wife, tarnished his reputation, and who after his death herself died in squalid poverty. Churchill and Stalin both loved that film. Supposedly Hitler did too. And of course the millions of people who flocked to see this story to get away for a moment from what those men were doing to them. The film's appeal, then as now, was Vivien Leigh's Emma; she was 28 and never more ravishing; her acting, like her beauty, was as natural and effortless as breathing. Even now I'd trade a Japanese classic for the sight of her on the balcony in the moon- light. But then, as a lady friend reminded me, most men are suckers for beauty. Audiences can afford this luxury. Writers can't.

But Leigh was more than a great beauty, as if that weren't enough. She had the power to make an audience feel as Emma made her Nelson feel, alive; and a world of greater performances by actresses not blessed with her looks, ambitions and fine-strung temperament pales by compari-

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son. So, perhaps, as a writer friend who loves the movies said, Vivien Leigh is a first-rate beauty and a second-rate actress, whereas Bette Davis is a third-rate beauty and a first-rate actress, but at those rates I'd rather be in the audience than have to be Paris.

For people to be able still to stimulate so much interest so long after their deaths makes writing about stars like Vivien Leigh a profitable business and explains why, when one gets bogged down reading all those sad and sorry details of much of her private life, one returns to her on film to be refreshed, renewed, excited all over again. And one is. Vivien Leigh is a gift for biographers. She has done it all for them. The triumphs, the tragedies, the sordid- ness, the unhappiness, so compellingly portrayed on the screen, were echoed in her private life as well. They need only follow the trail of cuttings she left behind her.

Biographers of film stars, perhaps be- cause the vital part of their work is done for them by the camera, tend not to tackle the difficult task of making their subjects come alive but concentrate instead on a kind of balance-sheet of their lives in terms of gains and losses. For these accountants, losses are more interesting than profits. Instead of figures we get memories. Profits are creative failures, manic depressions, bad marriages, bitter childhoods, alcohol and drug abuse. Losses are happy child-

hoods, holy wedlock, success, whether on stage or screen, and conversions in time for the final curtain. Oscars and titles, awards and ceremonies fit into both columns. Inevitably, stage stars sell less well than film stars, and the popular idol of one country is rarely bought for publication by another country. Film stars who made it in Hollywood sell best. Celebrities whose lives were also tragic sell best of all. So Vivien Leigh, like Marilyn Monroe, is a gift, and people whose skill has been in putting together scrapbooks have made a nice career for themselves as authors. But these authors, too often 'accountants' rather than writers, tend to justify their credentials as serious biographers by mix- ing gush with gutter. Reading them I have grown to demand no more than I do from my own accountant, namely, that they get their facts right.

Hugo Vickers begins this latest biogra- phy of Vivien Leigh by telling us how he was driven to write about her because all the previous books had got it wrong. Glancing over the hundreds of names he has spoken to and almost 100 pages of notes, one certainly feels that he has done his research. Enough to interest any Vivien Leigh devotee. But, in pointing out that his predecessors' greatest mistakes lay in their emphasis on her film career, in the alarums and tantrums that went into film-making, and in the obsessive details about her contracts with the studios (things, Mr Vickers informs us, that never interested Vivien Leigh herself), it soon becomes apparent that her indifference is his excuse to get almost every fact to do with films, hers and those of others, wrong. Inevit- ably, his assertions, asides, plot summaries and such are silly and riddled with that peculiarly English form of snobbery when it comes to films in general. To illustrate how badly the dialogue from one of her old films dates, he cites a contemporary audi- ence falling about when it was sent up by a comedy team! This attitude towards films was especially prevalent in the Thirties, and one that Leigh, who loved the theatre, pretended to share. But it is one thing for the biographer to get beneath the skin of his subject, and quite another to wear it for his own. These errors and snide asides may seem trivial at first but soon become infuriating. He is wrong about Vivien's convent-school friend Maureen O'Sulli- van's first film, and about Laurence Oli- vier's start in Hollywood, and about a lot of other things along the way.

In Fire Over England, the first film to team the young lovers, Vickers states that Flora Robson as Elizabeth I 'had to appear hostile to the youthful lovers' and for her role 'was dressed in an ornate costume with a false nose and red wig.' Since the film

was in black and white pass on the colour of the wig, but what did he expect her to be wearing? And as for the Robson nose, it was a feature that that talented but plain actress was very conscious of and

tried to change whenever she could. The reader who doesn't know will not mind that he is being steered in a direction that puts down the medium without which we probably wouldn't remember Vivien Leigh sufficiently for Vickers et al to find it profitable to write about her.

Both Vivien's and Olivier's pre-1939 Hollywood work is dismissed as 'a trail of undistinguished films.' So much for Alex- ander Korda. Vickers refers to another of Leigh's 'undistinguished' British films, Dark Journey, as being 'memorable as an early film in which action at last contains some credibility,' which is just plain silly, and then claims that Korda's attempt to, bill Vivien above Conrad Veidt, the most popular male star in British films, led to Veidt never talking to his producer again. Veidt made several more films for Korda, and they can be seen in stills talking together on the set of at least one of them.

Vickers also indulges in the worn-out device of commending Vivien by denigrat- ing others. We are told that Vivien was 'praised for her composure and compe- tence, and above all her wit, not then [1937] a notable attribute of many of the screen's leading ladies.' Based on what? Compared to whom? Bette Davis, Hep- burn, Colbert, Bankhead and Lombard were some pretty witty broads.

Films apart, Hugo Vickers, in this parti- san, devotedly assembled court circular of Vivien's life from crib to grave, does supply us with some new ingredients, the most fascinating being the revelation that her mother was half Indian. This saffron trace in her blood goes some way towards explaining the scent of mystery that clings to all of her best performances, a reason for that provocative unpredictability be- neath her calm English-rose exterior. Like Merle Oberon, another Alexander Korda discovery, whom one knew to be half- caste, and Margaret Lockwood, who was also born in India, Leigh brought a mystery to her roles in a way that no other English actress did. In all the best of these she

played characters who were forever hiding something — whether Scarlett her hands or Blanche her past. Unfortunately Vickers makes so little of her early formative background in explaining, at least in part, a behaviour as she grew older so at odds with her 'ladylike' British image as to give friends and enemies reasons to wonder about her mental state. Yet surely her Indian antecedents, with hindsight, pro- vided an evident component of her success as Cleopatra. What other actress of her generation could have taken the news of the killing of a rival with her chilling

insouciance? It was this sudden flash of the

behaviour of an Eastern potentate with absolute power over life and death which Leigh had, a natural instinct that infused

her roles, making them all, Blanche, Mrs Stone, Scarlett, the doomed ballerina in Waterloo Bridge, as real and unpredictable as life, and with which she left an audience

dizzied and breathless, for these flashes came and went like summer lightning and were instantly replaced by a charm every bit as seductive. It is what made her perfect casting for Scarlett and irreplaceable.

The camera, unlike journalists and biog- raphers, saw no need to denigrate or justify her behaviour in private, especially in the last years of her life, to make her worthy of our interest and affection. It left all that to her. It was because of her nature as much as her beauty that audiences were drawn to her. It was her character that fascinated the public in the way other beauties failed to, and the continuous repetition of this fact by everyone quoted in the book becomes boring since one has only to look at her photograph for that to be self-evident. It is what went on between her ears that kept one coming back for more. Unlike her ravishing contemporary Hedy Lamarr, Leigh's looks were only the icing on a many-tiered cake.

Vivien's neglected but forgiving daugh- ter Suzanne provides excerpts from family diaries, letters and introductions to pre- viously silent friends. Enriched by such details, Vivien's private life makes reward- ing reading. She wrote a beautiful letter. One can almost hear her read it. Through- out her life, from about the age of 16, the time she left the confines of nuns and convent, before and during her first mar- riage, after and during her next marriage, and on after Olivier, Vivien indulged an enormous sexual appetite that some have credited to nymphomania but which Vick- ers lays at the door of her incipient problems with tuberculosis, an illness that apparently increases one's sexual needs. More fortunate than some with such a problem, Vivien seemed to have had no trouble in satisfying them. While Vickers handles sensitive areas with beautiful phrases and sometimes a curious reticence, I await the day when a subject's sex-life is left alone. Certainly Olivier knew about and put up with it long enough for the reader to suspect finally that he was either party to it, used it as an excuse to carry on his own affairs or that his lack of interest only drove her further.

Of course there are many good things in this book. About Vivien Leigh, how could it be otherwise? Perhaps one of her future biographers will assess her life in relation to the impact she had on the public of her time, and on the memory, on how she was able to achieve this, and what it was we still find in her that we don't find in another, so that being a 'film star' can be regarded in the same light as any other creative art, and lives like hers will be treated for what they achieved, the gift to illuminate and throw into relief other people's lives.

John Kobal has edited several books on the cinema. His life of Marilyn Monroe was published by Hamlyn in 1974 and his most recent book, People Will Talk by Aurum in 1986.