A star is torn

In a market crowded with full-length biographies of Vivien Leigh, Lyndsy Spence wisely refrains from adding another one. Instead she focuses on the years 1953–67, covering the period when Leigh was beginning to lose her grip on reality due to an escalation of bipolar illness. She had already won Oscars for the roles of Scarlett O’Hara and Blanche DuBois, and her high-profile marriage to Laurence Olivier was failing, damaged by his repeated infidelities and her fragile mental health. This complex relationship, and its effect on Leigh’s health and work, sits at the core of Spence’s original new book, which she hopes will emanate a “theatrical air” and tell the story of her subject’s mental health breakdown with “symbolism and subtext”.

Olivier believed that Leigh’s descent into madness began as early as 1937. Describing an incident that took place before a performance of Hamlet, Spence reveals that Leigh was stressed by Larry’s attendance with his wife, Jill Esmond, and feeling the additional pressure of performing a role originally destined for Esmond, who was widely considered to be a more suitable choice for Ophelia. Prior to the performance, Spence writes, “Vivien flew at Larry like a demon”.

By 1953, Leigh was undergoing archaic medical treatment at a time when bipolar illness was not well understood. Committed by Olivier to Netherne Asylum in Surrey (where his sister had previously been an in-patient), she was subjected to ice baths and cold packs, and given injections that left her in a coma state. She suffered burns and hair loss from repeated ECT treatment, which also affected her brain and memory. Seemingly unable fully to extricate herself from the roles of Scarlett and Blanche, she re-enacted scenes for her nurses and sometimes believed herself to be the fictional characters she had once played to such acclaim.

Where Madness Lies is the story not only of a mental health breakdown, but also of the painful unravelling of a marriage. Leigh and Olivier found it impossible entirely to sever their bond, even while in relationships with other people. Leigh continued to pursue Olivier with desperation. She did not like being the loser in any situation and was fired up by the challenge of trying to win him back from his new love, Joan Plowright. He reluctantly came to visit, seeming “unmoved” by her illness and misery, and “unable to tolerate her in any form”; she tried her best to remind him of how good they once were together. But things were never to be the same again. By this time Olivier had already asked for a divorce so that he could marry Joan. Their twenty-year union, Spence writes, was “dissolved in twenty-eight minutes”. Leigh was devastated, “weeping openly” as the divorce was granted.

The author proclaims her lifelong admiration for her subject in the introduction to this book, but it is hard at times to warm to the Leigh who is portrayed here. She collected men like artefacts and refused to let them go, preventing lovers and husbands from moving on with their own lives. She stole Olivier from underneath his first wife’s nose, angling for an introduction in a restaurant while Esmond could only look on in growing despair. Later she did the same with the actor Peter Finch, destroying his marriage to the ballerina Tamara Tchinarova. This behaviour was nothing new – she had developed and honed her modus operandi from the tender age of eighteen, when she married Leigh Holman after stealing him from his partner. Spence demonstrates how few men could resist her lethal combination of physical beauty, single-minded ambition and vulnerability, finding themselves drawn into her web as if by magic. When she wanted to impress a man, Spence tells us, she “absorbed the personality traits of those she loved or wanted to impress”. She was unsubtle when it came to seduction, drenching herself in “Joy”, a hugely expensive rose and jasmine scent, and moving in “a perfumed haze as heavy as a storm cloud”. She inspired a particular sort of devotion – her final, younger partner, Jack Merivale, seemed to live more like her butler than her lover. Yet he, along with her first husband, Holman, remained supportive until the end. Those who remained close to her could still glimpse the true woman beneath the illness, but as Spence states in her introduction, the “double life” of this book’s subtitle “was a reflection of her two selves: Vivien, whom everyone loved, and the mental illness which warped her perception of herself and how others saw her”.

It comes as something of a relief to read about Leigh’s admirable work ethic. Her early death at fifty-three marked the end of a life that, while affected and interrupted by bouts of mental illness, was nonetheless filled with international success and acclaim. She never allowed her beauty to override her ambition of becoming a great actress. She rejected the title “film star”, stating that this implied a false and limited life based mostly on publicity. At one point she was the highest-paid actress in Britain. But by the early 1960s Leigh’s life was on a downwards trajectory and her grip on reality had become tenuous, resulting in frightening changes of mood that affected all those around her. As a result she became famously difficult to work with, and people who didn’t know her well were “shocked by her explicit language and crude turn of phrase”. Her descent into madness was fast and all-encompassing, and echoed her period of incarceration ten years earlier. Spence describes her being “bound to a stretcher with a piece of fabric covering her face as her body was transported from the ambulance to the aeroplane”, where she had to be restrained by a nurse.

Soon afterwards the tuberculosis from which she had suffered in the late 1950s returned with a vengeance. Doctors told her to stop smoking, drinking and receiving visitors if she wanted to recover from the illness. True to form, she disobeyed them, filling her bedroom with guests and a smoky haze of drink-fuelled chatter. Her final days, spent in her flat at Eaton Square, tended to by the ever-patient Merivale, are described movingly in Spence’s book. Vivien Leigh, the glamorous star who had spent her life in the public eye, died alone after trying to get out of bed and haemorrhaging, Merivale having gone into the kitchen to heat up a can of soup. Olivier was one of the few allowed to spend time at her bedside the next day. He prayed over her body, asking forgiveness for all the “evil” that had blighted their relationship. These intimate yet unsettling details add much poignancy to Where Madness Lies.

Spence’s book is undoubtedly a fiery and powerful read, but focusing on one period of a life inevitably causes challenges for a biographer. Although there is a refreshing lack of those obligatory early chapters chronicling the lives of obscure Victorian ancestors, the downside is that the author has to insert chunks of backstory in order to provide some sort of context. This leads to much dipping back and forth into different decades, giving a fragmentary and sometimes confusing feel to the narrative. A fictional “afterword”, written from the author’s imagination, strikes an odd chord and seems a bewildering addition. Based on real events, it portrays Vivien, recently dead, coming through to her friend and psychic medium Sybil Leek. This section of the book adds little to what has already been written and even seems retrospectively to siphon off some of the integrity so evident in the rest of it.

Perhaps mindful of the “theatrical air” that she wanted her book to suggest, Lyndsy Spence tries hard to convince us that Leigh was fascinated and influenced by astrology and the supernatural. But, though she once participated in a tarot reading and had her palm read from time to time, there is no real evidence to show that she was ever truly immersed in the world of spiritualism or spent any time dabbling in the dark arts. Perhaps there was no need. Her soul seemed dark enough already.

Vanessa Curtis is the author of two biographies of Virginia Woolf and a number of award-winning novels for children

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