Stephen Galloway - Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and the Romance of the Century

A round midnight on June 16, 1937, an anxious young man, dark-eyed and good-looking, slipped out of his London home, stole away from his wife and child, and set out to meet the woman he loved.

Two years after Laurence Olivier had first glimpsed Vivien Leigh, a woman of such transcendent beauty and intoxicating allure that she had left him drunk with desire, he was under her spell. Day in and day out, they would sneak off the set of their new movie or sit lost amid a swirl of dreams, real-life versions of the lovers they would later play, Romeo and Juliet, whose lesson they would have done well to learn, violent delights have violent ends / And in their triumph die. Whether they thought they were fooling anybody, I dont know, said a crew member. But we all knew that here were two people hopelessly in love.

What drew them to each other with such fierce power, blinding them to all sense of duty and danger, even to right and wrong, and pushing them to the point where, this very night, they were about to run away? Was it simply lust, the devouring sexual greed that nobody who knew them could ignore? Or was it something else, an affinity of the heart, mind and soul? Long after their passion had faded, when their ecstasy had turned to agony and their turbulent romance had left them battered and scarred, Olivier searched for an explanation. It was a virus, he said, a disease, a compulsion as mighty as any in legend or myth. It sometimes felt almost like an illness, he wrote, but the remedy was unthinkable. Only an early Christian martyr could have faced it. Virtue seemed to work upside down: love was like an angel, guilt was a dark fiend. At its every surge Macbeth would haunt me: Then comes my fit again.

For cynics, this was self-aggrandizement; for others, mere indulgence. Only Larrys wife, Jill Esmond, collateral damage left in the wake of her husbands affair, understood what it was, even when it had turned into a fireball that incinerated her marriage. Real passionIve only seen it that once, she told their son. If you are ever hit by it, God help you. Theres nothing you can do.

And yet there was something Olivier could have done. Three weeks before he and Vivien fled, they had traveled to Denmark, planning to stage Hamlet in the place where it was set, with the thirty-year-old Larry as the prince and the twenty-three-year-old Vivien as Ophelia. Equipment, costumes and props had been loaded onto trucks; the trucks hauled across the North Sea; the cast and crew flown to the coastal town of Helsingor, where the actors were scheduled to perform for a week on the ramparts of Kronborg Castle. And then, hours before they were due to go on, all hell broke loose. A thunderstorm cracked open the sky; water flooded the battlements, along with thousands of makeshift seats; and any hope of salvaging the production as it had been conceived was doused by the storm. Moving indoors to a hotel ballroom, the troupe scrambled to reconfigure their work as theater in the round, with barely enough time to arrange their entrances and exits before an audience of royals and dignitaries began to filter in. The play seemed doomed. And yet somehow, despite the chaos, this Hamlet was a sensation, sealing Oliviers reputation as one of the most dazzling actors alive.

The next day, he was in the midst of rehearsals when an incident took place that shook him to the core. What happened is unclear, but after an explosive confrontation with Vivien, he reappeared before his colleagues, ashen, and said something about Viv having gone bonkers, having attacked him, having had a fit of some kind, according to an early report. When Vivien emerged, she was unrecognizable from her usual vivacious self and spoke not a word to anyone, just staring blankly into space.

This was more than a moment of pique, more than a terrified ingenues temper tantrum; it was as if a flare had been sent up from the recesses of her psyche, warning Olivier of trouble ahead. Why she had erupted, he did not know; whether she would do so again, he could not predict. And yet it was obvious this exquisite diamond was flawed. Once, outsiders might have said she was possessed; now, two hundred and fifty years after the last witch had been burned at the stake, and decades into the age of Freud and Jung, people still knew so little about mental health that nobody understood she was seriously ill.

Larry could have walked away, could have ended his affair then and there and returned to Jill (who had accompanied him on this voyage, only to be shunted off on sightseeing tours with the young Alec Guinness). But he didnt. Rather than extricate himself, he plunged deeper; rather than step back, he surged forward. Once home, he and Vivien vowed, they would leave their spouses for good. Reason was powerless to stop them. Passion conquered all.

This book is a study of passionnot the soft, sentimental kind of Hollywood movies and Victorian romance but the sort that engulfs, overwhelms and sometimes destroys: the sort for which the Oliviers became famous.