I’m here to announce a new CONTEST for the summer! This contest is open to everyone and you will have 2 chances to enter. See details below.

Scarlett & Me was recently published by the Marietta Gone with the Wind Museum for their most recent Gone with the Wind event. The book is 55 pages long and describes what really happened with Anne Edwards’ sequel to Gone with the Wind. Yes, she wrote the first sequel, but it was never published! The back of the book reveals more : ” Scarlett & Me is the personal and dramatic story of how Anne Edwards’ life and work became enmeshed with that of Scarlett O’Hara, Margaret Mitchell, and a sequel to Gone with the Wind. It reveals for the first time the back story of how it came to be and includes details of what that sequel might have been had it not been caught up in a long, complex, legal battle among the Mitchell estate, the studios, and the producers who had contracted Edwards to write it.” I have read the book and I found it fascinating! It is a must have for Vivien Leigh and GWTW fans! I picked up an extra copy at the June event and had Ms. Edwards sign it for one lucky person.

People often think Vivien Leigh was Scarlett O’Hara. There definitely is a strong case here. Scarlett is the heroine we love to hate; she is attractive, forward thinking, and manipulative. And she often gets what she wants… except Rhett. Vivien Leigh was beautiful (bordering on goddess gorgeousness), forward thinking, and manipulative. She too often got what she wanted… except Laurence Olivier? Vivien shrugged at the comparison and once said: “I hope I’ve one thing that Scarlett never had. A sense of humor. I want some joy out of life. And she had one thing I hope I never have. Selfish egotism.”

In fact, people also compare Vivien to other roles she played… what about Vivien’s first film performance after her divorce from Laurence Olivier, Roman Spring of Mrs Stone? Karen Stone is a fading actress who agonizes over being alone and growing old. She’s hopeless. Or what about Vivien as Mary Treadwell in Ship of Fools? Mary Treadwell, a divorced woman who enjoys her alcohol to numb herself, tells a fellow passenger about her ex-husband, “Oh we put up a wonderful front in public. We were everybody’s favorite couple.” And later she continues explaining, “He was the most promising. The most handsome. He had the most glorious facade. A facade was all there was. He made me the best known wife of the best known skirt chaser in the community. I made life hell for him. It ended in divorce courts.” Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Why did she play these roles? Did these roles hit too close to home? Or was it all just a coincidence? Maybe Vivien was not like any of these roles at all. I found an article asking this very question. “Deadly is the Female,” by Jeri Jerome, says that Hollywood remembered the ruthlessness of Scarlett and expected Vivien Leigh to be like her. But was she? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

It was the first day of production on “Streetcar Named Desire.” Over at Warner Brothers, the entire lot was keyed with expectancy, for a great picture was about to roll. Director Elia Kazan was set to go. The publicity department was geared for action. Even the gaffers and grips shared in the excitement of the first day.

The entire supporting cast of the New York production to the West Coast. There was Marlon Brando, sensation of “The Men,” Kim Hunter, Karl Malden, and –the start of the picture—Vivien Leigh.

Everyone watched her as she came on the set. They noticed her friendliness, her slight British accent, her laughter. They noted her resemblance to Hedy Lamarr, even with the blonde wig she was wearing for the part of Blanche. There was no doubt Vivien’s appearance caused more than the usual excitement due a star. Her husband, Laurence Olivier, busy at Paramount on “Carrie,” had filled her dressing room with flowers. It was like opening night at a theater. This doesn’t often happen in Hollywood where pictures begin and end with steady monotony. But this was more than a first night; it was the triumphed return of Scarlett O’Hara after an absence of ten years.

The memory of Scarlett lingered, like an uneasy ghost, over the Warner lot. Scarlett had been ruthless. She had been deadly—and deadly is the female. Was Vivien deadly, too? Would she be difficult to work with? Weren’t there stories, went the whispers, that she had been “hard to handle” ten years ago, “difficult” with the press, “temperamental”?

As walked on the set, oblique glances went her way. She was tinier than most people thought she would be, ethereal and dainty. She looked like a flower, poetic as that sounds. Her face had been made to look older. Lines had been drawn in. A deep shadow of rouge gave her face an unnatural thinness. She was no longer the tempestuous Scarlett; she was the defeated and pathetic Blanche of “Streetcar.”

The tension on the set began to ease. People looked at each other and grinned. Vivien Leigh wasn’t Scarlett after all. She was an actress.

All this was behind her the day I had lunch with her in her dressing room at Warner Brothers. It was her first magazine interview in this country. Neither of us had met before.

She came into the room with an excitement that belied the pathetic makeup of Blanche. She was gay and friendly, with laughter on her lips. She was totally unexpected.

The blonde wig throws you at first, of course, and the carefully applied lines and wrinkles. But her eyes are the same green-blue you remembered from Technicolor, and her teeth as miraculously pearly white. I asked her what color her hair was naturally, and she pushed back her wig instantly and said, “This color!” It was a rich rust-brown.

Then I asked her what changes she noticed in Hollywood since she had been here before. “The weather!” she said ruefully. “over in England I have been thinking all this time that every day was beautifully balmy and sunny in California. But this is the first pleasant day we’ve had since we got here. I expected many changes, but not that the weather would change!”

We sat down to lunch, and Vivien told me that, as a rule, she rested on her lunch hour, bringing sandwiches from home. The part of Blanche is an exhausting one, running the gamut of emotion, a strenuous, demanding characterization. Vivien had played it for none months in the theater in London. It had been even more strenuous then because there was no pauses between scenes. There was a mad rush into costume changes. But the camera, she at least had brief respite now and then.

But not much, because director Elia Kazan was not wasting a precious minute of his production time. When the crew was setting up another scene or another angle, Kazan took the cast to rehearsal hall in a remote section of the sound stage and rehearsed the next scene. The cast works throughout the day, either in rehearsal or before the camera. At night, Vivien is exhausted. At first, she had Laurence accepted the invitations of their many friends without regard for this stiff schedule. They went out every night, renewing friendships and making up for ten years they’d been away from Hollywood. Gradually, they ruefully had to cut down their social engagements—accepting dates only for Saturday nights. The set was closed to interviews. Vivien had to conserve strength and energy.

Immediately the word went out that Vivien wasn’t well. That’s Hollywood for you—building facts of rumors. It’s a town that should know better, a hip place for people who should be the first to realize that you can’t leave a dramatic, emotional, heart-tearing scene and have some flip reporter ask, “What’s new?”, and then go back into the scene.

I felt this as we talked. It was sort of a constraint, a feeling of walking into the middle of something. I had been told that Vivien Leigh did not have the usual British reserve, but it was there, nevertheless, even while she was answering questions charmingly, even while she laughed spontaneously and indulged in social chitchat. There is something about Vivien Leigh that makes you refrain from digging too deeply under the surface.

What had happened in the ten years she had been away from America? There was, of course, the war. Larry was a flyer. “Although I don’t think he was a very good flyer, really,” smiles Vivien. “I think they were really quite pleased to release him to go on with the theater and to make “Henry the Fifth.’”

Vivien played “Doctor’s Dilemma” for nineteen months, thirteen in London and six on the road. She toured South Africa for three months entertaining the troops.

“It was a new experience for me,” she explains. “All the other who went on the tour were revue artists. They did the things they were used to doing. I didn’t have a similar repertoire, so I did a skit from ‘Gone with the Wind. I sang a song—not too well, I’m afraid. I did a soliloquy from ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ At the end, the whole cast did a mad kind of concert thing which I think we enjoyed more than the audiences. It was thrilling playing to the troops, very moving. Sometimes we played four shows a day.”

All during the war, the theater went on. It was difficult because of the blackout and the lack of transportation and the bombing, but there was a certain pride in keeping the theater intact during those war years. Vivien remember many times when the buzz bombs were being dropped. You could hear a long bzzzz, then a silence before it hit. When she heard the bzzzz, she felt like stopping in the middle of a line, and it took real will power to go on with apparent unconcern. She recalls all this today with a gay humor that must have been typical of the gallantry of all Britain at the time. Deadly is the female, and staunch in time of stress.

Vivien, Larry, and sixteen-year-old Suzanne are only a small part of the Olivier family. The rest consists of a collection of cats which number, at various times, from two to fifteen! There’s picture of one of them, a Siamese named Boy, on Vivien’s dresser. “He’s one of the things I miss most, being away from home,” Vivien confessed to me.

There are two kinds of female deadliness—the kind which, like Scarlett’s, is born of ruthlessness, and that like Vivien’s—a deadly determination to do good and thoughtful things; and to devote herself to her work and her family. The two are as difference as night is from day.

Goodbye, Scarlett. Hello, Vivien.

Examiner.com Actress Olivia de Havilland (“Gone With the Wind”, “Robin Hood”) Turns 95

Vivien

• Edwards said that Vivien had a “royal eye.” She described it as the way Vivien looked at you. Vivien isolated you when you were in a conversation with her.
• Edwards met Vivien and concluded that there was “a mystery there.” Someone needed to answer it, and Edwards decided it should be her. Her publisher, on the other hand, disagreed and wanted Edwards to write about Joan Crawford. Edwards prevailed.
• Vivien had a “raunchy sense of humor.”
• “She was a wonderful dancer.”
• “Her eyes were most expressive.”
• “Vivien was very intelligent.” Edwards said Vivien was also very political and toward the left.
• Vivien told Edwards “You can be naughty too Anne.”
• “She’s a very resilient woman. She was a very brave woman.”

Jack Merivale

• One of the first things she did was approach Dinah Sheridan who was married to Jack Merivale. Jack, as you know, was romantic linked to Vivien Leigh during the last years of her life. So Edwards was invited over to their home and she asked Dinah if Jack wanted to talk about Vivien. Jack was ill and on dialysis at this time. As Edwards tells the story, Jack came downstairs and went to a desk in the lanai. He opened a drawer, took out a stack of letters, and “threw them at her.” He then left the room. Dinah asked if Edwards wanted to go for a drive and Edwards agreed. On this drive, Dinah pulled the car over on the shoulder of the road and broke down in tears. She turned to Anne Edwards and said “thank you. You have just taken the ghost out of my house.”
• After the biography was published, Dinah wrote Edwards, “Jack is not able to open the book.”
• Jack Merivale felt Larry and Vivien were destructive.
• Jack “took very good care of her” and had a very “great feeling” for Vivien.

Suzanne

• Edwards believes Suzanne was not resentful of Vivien because she had a very loving father. “Last I spoke to her, she is a very happy lady.”

Laurence Olivier

• Larry was worried and concerned Edwards would reveal things about his private life in the biography. He wrote Edwards pleading her not to. Later in the interview, Edwards accidentally revealed one of those “things.” She asked us not to repeat it, so I won’t! But it definitely raised my eyebrow. Anyway, after the book was published, Edwards received a letter from Larry saying “Thank you dear Anne, thank you.”
• Edwards spoke about Laurence Olivier during the interview. It’s her belief that Larry “belittled” Vivien in the theatre, “I don’t think they worked well together in the theatre.” But Vivien “adored him.”

Due in Australia by air from San Francisco within a few days are the big three of the Old Vic Company, which begins its Australian tour in Melbourne on July 12. They are actress Vivien Leigh, who will be in Australia for about twelve months, Canadian actor John Merivale, who these days is Vivien’s constant companion, and Robert Helpmann, the tour director.

In Australia the Old Vic will present three plays: “The Lady of the Camellias,” adapted by Andrew Allan from the Dumas classic; Christopher Fry’s adaptation of “Duel of Angels,” by Giraudoux; and Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.” Leading the company, Vivien will play Marguerite in “The Lady of the Camellias,” the tempestuous Paola in “Duel,” and Viola in “Twelfth Night.”

For “The Lady of the Camellias,” dresses and decor have been done by Carl Toms, who decorated the Kensington Palace for Princess Margaret and Mr. Antony Armstrong-Jones.

Betty Best, of our London staff, reports that if the weeks of rehearsals in London were anything to judge by, the Old Vic season in Melbourne will be a merry one. She attended rehearsals in the Finsbury Park Empire–shell of a once-famous variety theatre in the north of London.

“It was fascinating to watch the plays grow under the expert Helpmann guidance,” Betty said. “A stickler for detail, he acted most of the parts himself in showing the cast exactly what he wanted to convey, and his quick humor whipped the company into gales of laughter when the long hours of rehearsal became wearying.”