The Story of a Turbulent Romance

Remember Gone With the Wind?

Many Boomers and Gen Xers might recall watching Gone With the Wind. Clark Gable as Rhett Butler exuded a slick charm that epitomized the dark, handsome and ever-elusive Mills and Boons heroes as few others have. Vivien Leigh playing Scarlett O’Hara flashed a kind of womanhood that riveted us because she was so flawed: spoiled, ambitious, obstinate, determined. A woman who wasn’t necessarily likeable, but who drew our admiration nonetheless with her sheer tenacity. Here was someone who had that never-say-die quality to a degree that turned other lives into rubble.

Then there was Laurence Olivier, whose portrayal of the rugged Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights sealed his reputation as an actor likely to blaze across stages and screens. All along, Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier were already in love, or rather in the throes of passion. Moreover, it was the kind of passion “that engulfs, overwhelms, and sometimes destroys,” says Stephen Galloway, the author of a biography of “Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and The Romance of the Century.”

For other reasons, the movie, Gone With the Wind, may not have aged well in contemporary times. For instance, in its portrayal of slavery. As the author remarks, the producer David O Selznick “failed to ignore the book’s most vexing problem: its romanticized view of slavery…Gone With the Wind set a false image in stone.” But interest in the world’s first celebrity power couple still endures, long after their deaths.

Little Vivien Leigh

Vivien Leigh, the actress, shared at least a few of Scarlett O’Hara’s traits: the bursts of temper, the mood swings, the obduracy and passion. Since this was the first time I was delving into Leigh’s life, I was surprised to learn that she was born in Darjeeling, India in 1913. Her father was a British broker, while her mother might have been a homemaker of mixed ancestry – Irish, Anglo Indian and Armenian. Young Vivien grew up like many colonial kids in privilege, in households filled with Indian servants and horse carriages et al.

However, at the age of six, little Vivien was torn from her parents and deposited in a British boarding school. Though this was a common practice among the British upper-classes, it was traumatic for the child, who was suddenly dropped into the rigid environment of the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton. At the school, the discipline was intense: “Good Catholics were urged to dwell ‘constantly in the spiritual presence of death.’”

After her traumatic separation, she encountered her parents only 16 months later. As it happened, this stern faraway schooling carried on for eight years. Though Vivien evolved into a friendly and popular girl at the school, she always harbored an unfulfilled longing for parental love.

Olivier’s Childhood

Laurence Olivier was born in 1907, in Dorking, England to a poor curate. Unlike Vivien, whose early years were possibly lavish, Laurence confronted intense poverty and the neglect and rage of his father. Though his mother Agnes adored him intensely, there was too much financial hardship at home, which resulted in angry, bitter exchanges between the parents.

Unfortunately, for Laurence, his mother died when he was 12, of a cerebral tumor. Later, he was to write of how that death scarred him forever: “My heaven, my hope, my entire world, my own worshipped Mummy died when I was twelve.” So, like Vivien, he too was an adult with a void.

A Tumultuous and “Scandalous” Romance

Later, Leigh enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and played a “glamorous prostitute in a play titled The Mask of Virtue”. Laurence Olivier spotted her for the first time on that stage. By then, both Vivien and Laurence were already married and had a child each with their respective partners. That did not stop them from embarking on a fiery affair, the fervor heightened when they were cast together in a play titled Fire Over England as romantic leads. They then eloped, leaving behind spouses and kids to fend for themselves.

From England, they headed to Hollywood, where Vivien bagged the iconic role in Gone With the Wind. Around the same time, Olivier was cast in Wuthering Heights. During the Oscars at the end of that year, Vivien bagged the Best Actress trophy while Laurence was to remain bereft of any similar accolade. Indicative of how tempestuous their relationship was, Olivier reported later: “It was all I could do to restrain myself from hitting her with it. I was insane with jealousy.”

Contending With Leigh’s Mental Health

Vivien, according to contemporary psychologists, also suffered from bipolar disorder. But because she lived at a time when mental health was poorly diagnosed and poorly treated, she was considered a woman given over to fits of rage, or violent mood swings. Even as the couple went on to get married, they had vicious fights – with Vivien often descending into behaviors that were indicative of her condition. Like wandering naked in a garden, or barging into guest bedrooms.

As the writer Noel Coward later put it: “Their life together is really hideous and here they are trapped by public acclaim…they are eminent, successful, envied, and adored, and most wretchedly unhappy.”

Their Turbulent Passion

Still, as Galloway concludes, their passion might have also elevated their performances, as only the most blistering emotions often can. Though they were to eventually separate and divorce, the author observes: “Passion sears, it scalds, it convulses, it disrupts. It creates and destroys in equal measure…And yet without it, would either Vivien or Larry have soared to such heights?”

References

Stephen Galloway, Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the Romance of the Century, Grand Central Publishing, 2022.