Larry's lamb
HILARY SPURLING
Virginia Fairweather has handled Laurence Oliviers relations with the press on and off for the past twenty years, in some of the trickiest, most intimate, often enough har- rowing experiences of his career. She was at his side throughout the divorce when he was miserably hounded by the press; she has been press representative for the National Theatre since its inception; she doled out statements two ■ears ago during the fracas over Soldiers; and she was dismissed her post last year in circumstances which, though evidently distressing, remain some- what obscure. For the past six years she has paced the corridors of theatrical power. Or rather the corridor of the National Theatre's administrative offices, which made a poor impression on Mrs Fairweather: a row of flimsy and dilapidated huts, perishing cold in winter, boiling hot in summer, painted 'a disgusting shade' and pervaded by the noise of 'wild cats fornicating underneath the creaking floorboards.'
Mrs FairWeatherti OffiCC was opposite Kenneth Tynan's where, in the first few years which by her account were far from carefree. Sir Laurence's young henchmen, William (jaskill and John Dexter, would regularly meet and gossip. Eavesdropping was not only easy but practically inevitable. Factions, jealousy and rivalries are implied. Plots were hatched. The atmosphere, when not 'spooky and unsettling', was 'thoroughly unhealthy.' For, as anyone who has ever penetrated backstage in even the dimmest amateur production will have gathered, the theatre generates tensions on which spite and rumour flourish. It would seem, there- fore, that Mrs Fairweather is admirably placed to spill quantities of highly coloured beans.
Readers will no doubt feel much relieved, even if a trifle bilked, to learn that she does nothing of the kind. 'When actors get to- gether their shop is probably the most
amusing and scandalous of any profession.' she says, and says no more of what
was plainly an exceedingly indiscreet
occasion. Similarly with Soldiers: though Mrs Fairweather was there. sitting atten- tively behind her 'paperthin' partition, we are given no more than an indication that nerves were in general strained, and a recap-
itulation of the official press release. Her 'intimate memoirs of Sir Laurence Olivier' are for the most part as scrupulously reti- cent as, say, Bram Stoker's Personal Remin- iscences of Sir Henry Irving. And, if two books could scarcely be more different in tone, both bear witness (though, in Mrs Fairweathe(s case, it sometimes takes strange forms) to the same deep, constant, even passionate devotion to their subjects.
But Bram Stoker was a close and trusted friend who got on famously with Irving's admirers, from Gladstone and Disraeli to Tennyson or Walt Whitman; and, when he had to deal with reporters, it was with an infinitely milder and more gentlemanly breed. Mrs Fairweather scarcely came across an admirer, indeed she seldom saw Sir Laurence—or if she did, she doesn't mention it—save in the most trying circum- stances. As a young actor making his first appearance in New York, Sir Laurence was once asked by a lady columnist if he didn't think Katherine Cornell the greatest actress in the world; he replied carefully that, though Miss Cornell was indeed extremely fine, there were others he could name in England, such as Edith Evans, Flora Rob- son, Peggy Ashcroft ... Banner headlines are said to have appeared next morning: 'Unknown British Actor Thinks Cornell Stinks.' Years later, after his marriage to Vivien Leigh, Sir Laurence answered the telephone to a reporter who informed him that Miss Leigh was going to have a baby. 'Reelly?' said Sir Laurence, in a disguised voice presumably not vastly different from the plummy tones he still employs as the butler in A Flea in Her Ear, 'That will be most gratifying to all of us below stairs.'
But the reminiscences in this book are not often funny. Frequently they are wretched: a chronicle, on the one hand, of gloom, agi- tation and well-justified mistrust; on the other, of press leaks, bad notices and vicious speculation. The theatre is a world much given to indiscretion and intrigue; Fleet Street is another; and the aims of the two are incompatible. Mrs Fairweather's job seems, therefore, to have consisted largely in breaking unpleasant news (`Feeling very sick, I told him ...') to her employer, in persuading him to see people he would sooner not see, to make speeches, pose for photographs, give interviews, all of which were his aversion. If her position was often awkward-1 was on the horns of a dilemma and every other damn cliché in the book'— Sir Laurence was as often flustered; on almost every page he is 'fraught', 'utterly miserable', 'utterly shattered', 'close to ex- haustion', 'wild with rage' or 'racked with worry.'
Impossible to deduce what their rela- tionship might have been in its happier moments. Impossible, for that matter, to glean from this remarkably uninformative portrait anything but the most superficial, and alarmingly lopsided, portrait of its sub- ject. Sir Laurence's decision to accept the post of director of the National Theatre is recorded with characteristic brusqueness: he 'remarked philosophically that ... he supposed he could make a balls-up as well as anyone else.' And it is above all impos- sible to guess that, during the period covered by this book, Sir Laurence has supervised a change as momentous as any in the history of the English stage, made the National Theatre from scratch into one of the finest companies in the world—seized, in short, and exploited with unfailing panache, an opportunity Irving would have envied him.
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