At one point in her one-woman show about the life of
Vivien Leigh, the actress Marcy Lafferty tells us there are five stages to
an actor’s career: “Who is Vivien Leigh? Get me Vivien Leigh. Get me a
Vivien Leigh. Get me a young Vivien Leigh. Who is Vivien Leigh?”
Lafferty’s show is set just as her subject slithers from the fourth to the
fifth stage: When we meet Miss Leigh, she has already suffered the
indignity of one cub reporter asking her what part she played in Gone With
The Wind.
And so, Vivien Leigh: The Last Press Conference is as
much about the fickle nature of fame as it is about the actress’s life –
how long will it be before someone asks: “Who are Posh and Becks?”
The show, written and performed by Marcy Lafferty and
forged largely from Leigh’s own words, takes the form of an audience with
the press at which the ailing star is prepared to speak candidly – so
providing a pretext for a revealing canter through her life. Since her
life was eventful, this makes for an entertaining 90 minutes.
The young Vivien, we learn, developed her lethal
combination of determination and charm at a very tender age – by age six,
she had worked out that a successful bit of acting would get her
invitations to the best Christmas teas. No surprise then that this
precocious tot would go on to, famously, set her cap at Olivier (though
both she and he were married when she first spied him) and Scarlett – and
get them both.
We hear of her triumphs, but also enjoyably, of the
extraordinary backbiting, bitchiness, and paranoia that constitutes life
in Hollywood. Spicy details make this play: the fact that Clark Gable’s
people wouldn’t permit him to emphasize the word “damn”, so threatening
the end of the film; that Olivier had to be given a part on Broadway to
spirit him out of the way, lest their liaison get out to the press; that
she developed a phrase – “fiddle-de-fuck” – for when she wanted to blow a
take. And then there are the colorful leading men she landed. She quotes
Brando, from the set of A Streetcar Named Desire, revealing his personal
hygiene routine: “I never bathe: I just throw a gob of spit in the air and
run under it.” A useful skill, no doubt, in times of drought.
But running through the piece are also the darker and
the more serious strands of her life. There is her passionate relationship
with Olivier: despite the fact that their marriage became a sham, she
never really loved anyone else, according to Lafferty. And there is her
struggle with ill-health, her miscarriages, her tuberculosis and the manic
depression that made her increasingly impossible to be with. She could
always tell, she says, when a manic phase was coming on because her hair
would frize. In later years, her frizzing hair would send her scurrying
for a dose of electric shock treatment – horrendous, but better than the
alternative.
It is a touching piece then, if florid in places, and
sustained delightfully by Marcy Lafferty. Lafferty, directed by John Edw.
Blankenchip, does look like Leigh, turned out carefully in her chiffon
blouse, her face powdered perfectly, her hair clipped back in an outdated
1940’s style no longer flattering to her drawn face. And with her breathy,
rather arch delivery, she suggests at once how sparkly, charming and
captivating her subject could be – and how petulant, self absorbed and
destructive.
