The production, wrote Time magazine, was “not merely weak or spotty, but calamitous. Audiences in the unairconditioned auditorium dripped with sweat, just like the actors, and Olivier, wrapped in thick clothes and squeezed into a tight corset meant to contain an incipient paunch, was horrified when his putty nose began to melt. On opening night, Larry was so exhausted that when he attempted to vault up a wall to Juliet’s balcony, he fell short and was left clinging by his fingertips, provoking peals of laughter.įrom San Francisco, the company traveled to Chicago and then to New York’s Fifty-First Street Theatre, where any hope of success was killed by the sweltering heat. And yet he was determined to do it again. The last time he had tackled Shakespeare’s tragedy, in his joint production with John Gielgud, he had been slammed for mangling its language, for essaying a Romeo who was all fire and no finesse. Rather than choose something simple or even a manageable contemporary work, Larry selected the one play in which he had most conspicuously failed: Romeo and Juliet.
And so they made their biggest error to date with a nationwide tour. Around the country, hordes of people would surely flock to anything they did onstage. They were universally admired, even held on a pedestal, despite their illicit union. This was the right time, director George Cukor advised Vivien and Larry, to cash in. Now the lovers, still unmarried-and yet to be divorced from their previous spouses-had to decide what to do next. A year after Vivien Leigh had landed the role of Scarlett O’Hara in 1939’s Gone With the Wind - and only a little longer since Laurence Olivier had been cast as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights-the two were global superstars.
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