Where Madness Lies (eBook)

Chapter One

‘O, that way madness lies’

King Lear, William Shakespeare

1953

‘Oh, the bliss of not having to go mad, commit suicide, or contemplate murder,’1 Vivien Leigh told the waiting reporters as she stepped off the aeroplane and on to the airfield in Colombo, Ceylon. They came to interview her about Elephant Walk, her new picture for Paramount, to be shot on location there. She was exhausted after the long flight by way of London, Rome, Beirut, Bahrain and Bombay. Her leading man, Peter Finch, took her by the arm and escorted her through the sea of reporters and curious faces who hoped to catch a glimpse of the star. The humidity was suffocating and the heat swept over her like a furnace. She stopped to catch her breath, before adding, ‘My character is … a normal healthy girl.’2

On the journey to the bungalows – where the cast and crew were to live for a month – the scenery, familiar from her childhood in the east, filtered through the taxi window. The palm trees, colonial buildings and British cars filled the streets, but an air of unrest stirred beneath the surface during those final days of the empire. Perhaps she thought of her mother, Gertrude Hartley, unhappy in her marriage and heavily pregnant, gazing at the Kanchenjunga – the Five Treasures of the Great Snows – from her window at Shannon Lodge, praying to the saints for her child to be beautiful. Born in Darjeeling on Guy Fawkes Day in 1913, little Vivian – it was spelt with an ‘a’ and not an ‘e’ back then – always thought the fireworks were for her. In those days, her mother’s lies were harmless: ‘Remember, remember, the fifth of November’, Gertrude might have said, as a kaleidoscope of colours exploded above her.

In the back of the taxi, Vivien crossed herself and said a prayer to St Thérèse of Lisieux,3 the patron saint of missions. Although her fellow Catholics considered her a sinner – she left her first husband, Leigh Holman, to run away with Laurence Olivier – she liked the saints and was drawn to mystical things and religious iconography. A trio of crystals – carnelian, citrine and clear quartz – were kept on her dressing table and she carried a carnelian agate in her handbag. The combination of those crystals was, and is, generally believed to attract abundance. But an abundance of what? As for spirituality, she called herself a ‘Zen–Buddhist–Catholic’4 and favoured churches with beautiful architecture and stained-glass windows.5 Her first real experience of the theatre was attending Mass at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton in London, which was later bombed by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz.

‘All that Catholic mumbo jumbo,’6 Peter said of organised religion. His voice sounded exactly like her husband, Sir Laurence Olivier’s. Larry was his idol – he had been knighted in 1947 for his contributions to the stage and screen – and for Peter, there was no greater actor.

‘No problem, then. Opt out and be a good Protestant,’7 she said.

The Comet carrying them to Colombo would crash two flights later. So, to her mind, the prayer to St Thérèse had worked.

The seclusion of the set unnerved Vivien and everything felt static as she took in her surroundings: the flower-scented air, the sprawling tea fields and the hills in the distance, and the scrutinising glares from the locals, some of whom did not want the production there.

‘The Devil Dancers,’ Vivien’s stand-in, an Australian woman named Carrol Hayward said, as she crept up behind her. ‘The wild folk of Ceylon.’8

‘Sinhalese rituals,’ Peter corrected Hayward. As a boy, he had followed his mother to a theosophical community near Madras. Despite his drinking and womanising in adulthood, and the pain it caused others, he identified as a Buddhist. He detested Christianity and the symbol of the crucifix, saying, ‘I think a man dying on a cross is a ghastly symbol for a religion.’9

It had taken a mere few days for Vivien to lose interest in the picture and she had trouble memorising her lines. It belonged to the adventure genre but felt like a horror story when she analysed the undertones of the script. Her fictional home, a mansion in the jungle called Elephant Walk, was named after the trek of the elephants who marched past it and was haunted by the Governor, her character’s late father-in-law. She was cast as Ruth, the unhappy wife of a tea planter, John Wiley, an unsympathetic character who preferred to drink with his cronies than tend to her. Close-ups were shot of Vivien looming on the staircase, serpent-eyed and commanding him to come to bed. As the plot unfolds, she ends up falling for a fellow planter, Dick Carver – played by Dana Andrews, who was often drunk in real life, but was harmless – and contemplates eloping with him. After typhoid fever breaks out, she remains at the house, which is ransacked by elephants, thus concluding the story.

The truth was, Vivien knew the script was beneath her and not very good, despite being a Hollywood production with a big studio budget. Larry had declined the part of Wiley and dismissed the script as a pale imitation of Rebecca. A little dig, for she had wanted to appear with him in the film adaptation of Rebecca in 1940 but David O. Selznick, the producer, considered her too beautiful for the mousy Mrs de Winter and the part went to Joan Fontaine. In a way, Larry’s rejection of Elephant Walk was serendipitous, or so he thought at the time, and it allowed Peter an opportunity to star opposite Vivien. She had planned the entire thing.

Peter was the first to crack and, after a long day of filming, he hated to be alone at night. Vivien, an insomniac all her life, was glad of the company. They spent their nights in her bungalow, sitting at the sugarcane table, playing Canasta, chain-smoking and drinking too much gin. All Peter wanted to do was talk about Larry, and Vivien was tired of him fishing for compliments and looking to be reassured of his talent. At almost 40 and yet to have his big break, he said he was grateful for anything he could get.

‘But you don’t take what you can get. You let people persuade you as to what they think is best for you and throw dust in your eyes,’ she said, exasperated. ‘You’re a good enough actor to stand alone as someone quite different and still do what you really want as an actor, but you have no follow-through. You play at life, play with women, and you dissipate your God-given talents because you don’t believe in your own wonderful star.’10 There was sincerity in her words: she had believed in Peter’s talent from the first moment she saw him in The Imaginary Invalid at O’Brien’s Glass Factory in Sydney in 1948. Both she and Larry felt he was unstoppable.

As a child, Peter had been sent to Australia to live with his great-uncle, as his mother, Alicia Fisher, known as Betty, was incapable of looking after him. Betty was too busy with her love affairs, which had disastrous consequences for Peter, both in his childhood and adulthood. The man whom he thought was his father, George Finch, was not, and his mother’s second husband, Jock Campbell, an Indian Army officer, was, in fact, his biological father.

Vivien did not try to console him, they were both too intoxicated. She had abandoned her only child to run away with Larry, who, in turn, left his child, a boy named Tarquin. Vivien’s mother had abandoned her, too – sort of. She had been sent from India to Roehampton at the age of 6 and put into a convent school: she was pupil no. 90, Vivian Mary Hartley.

After Peter returned to his bungalow, Vivien stayed up drinking. She had the odd feeling of being fixated on something. On what? She could not decide; everything inside her brain was that of white noise, desperately searching for a connection and failing.

The following morning, she sent Larry several telegrams, begging him to come to Ceylon for a week. As her mental stability declined, her writing became worse and she dashed off erratic postcards to people.11 Only later would it become known as a symptom of her condition, manic depression, then undiagnosed. There was no answer and she suspected the crew were intercepting her mail in order to manipulate her into doing their bidding. Larry’s picture, The Beggar’s Opera, was in post-production and he went to Ischia to stay with friends. Those details escaped Vivien. In her diary, she wrote his name several times, underlining it each time, as though she were performing a ritual to summon him.

Outside in the fields, she imagined Larry was coming towards her, his shirt sleeves rolled up and his body bronzed from the sun. ‘Larry,’ she called to Peter, who tried to correct her. She ignored Peter as she walked into the water. His instincts told him to follow her. She swam out as far as she could go, weighed down by her flimsy dress, and floated on her back, staring at the blistering sun creating prisms. Or was it a dream? She heard bells, the way Blanche DuBois also heard bells at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire. The bells from the temple purified the air, reminiscent of the Sacred Heart’s daily toll for Mass: The precious blood of our Jesus Christ, wash away our sins.

Later that day, Vivien returned to her bungalow and opened her diary, scribbling, ‘Please come!!!’ under...