In “Truly, Madly,” Stephen Galloway writes about one of the 20th century’s most glamorous couples, training an eye on Leigh’s mental health struggles.TRULY, MADLYVivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and the Romance of the CenturyBy Stephen Galloway406 pages. Grand Central Publishing. $30.God help anyone who flew the friendly skies with Vivien Leigh, her second husband, Laurence Olivier, or both.1936: A struggling seaplane on which Leigh was a passenger went “thudding like a skimmed stone over the waves” en route to Capri, writes Stephen Galloway in “Truly, Madly,” a new book about the couple’s relationship, causing Leigh, a Catholic, to repeatedly invoke Saint Thérèse.1940: The newlyweds were en route from Lisbon to Bristol. The cockpit of their plane burst into flames, eerily echoing a dream of Olivier’s.World War II: The debonair Olivier, enlisted in the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy but a pilot “of notorious incompetence,” according to the writer and editor Michael Korda, crashed his own plane twice and was demoted to target-towing, parachute-packing and recruitment demonstrations.1946: On a trans-Atlantic flight from New York, the lovebirds glanced out the window and saw an engine on fire. The Pan Am Clipper turned back and hit the ground with a long, hard bounce in Connecticut.1948: Leigh got breathless at 11,000 feet over the Tasman Sea; the plane had to descend several thousand feet, and the actress was given an oxygen mask. Traveling by air in the ensuing years, she suffered flashbacks that required her to be restrained and sedated.Best remembered for her role as Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind” (1939), Leigh had bipolar disorder, known in her lifetime as manic depression (she later contracted tuberculosis as well). She was brittle, winsome and sociable: “The only person in the world who could be charming while she was throwing up,” Korda’s uncle, the director and producer Alexander Korda, told him. But then she would toggle rapidly, and at first confoundingly, to fits of temper and nervous breakdowns. The medications and therapies that might have stabilized her weren’t common at the time.And thus her three-decade entanglement with Olivier, considered one of the greatest talents of his generation, was its own sort of doomed flight: It soared sharply into the heavens, then was rocked with turbulence before its inevitable tumble down to earth and straight through to hell.There have been many, many previous biographies of Leigh and several of Olivier (including one by his oldest son, Tarquin, from a first marriage to Jill Esmond); a memoir by Olivier, “Confessions of an Actor”; and a memoir by his third wife, Dame Joan Plowright. There has even been at least one book, “Love Scene” (1978), devoted specifically to the Olivier-Leigh romance.But Galloway, the former executive editor of The Hollywood Reporter, is perhaps the first author to interpolate this oft-told story with commentary from contemporary mental-health experts, like Kay Redfield Jamison, the psychologist who herself suffers from bipolar disorder and wrote “An Unquiet Mind.” He accomplishes this smoothly, in a contribution to the LarViv literature that is — if not strictly essential — coherent, well-rounded and entertaining. To the couple’s tale of passion he adds compassion, along with the requisite lashings of gossip.Stephen Galloway, the author of “Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the Romance of the Century.”Austin HargraveSome couples “meet cute.” Olivier espied Leigh playing a prostitute in “The Mask of Virtue” and was left “drunk with desire.” (They went on to get drunk on many other substances as well.) Unfortunately, they had both already married other people.The startlingly beautiful Leigh was born Vivian Hartley, an only child raised first in India and then shipped off to convent school in England. She took her stage surname from the middle name of her first husband, Herbert Holman. They had a daughter, Suzanne, but Leigh found the marriage “just another role in an interminable play,” Galloway writes, and “motherhood a repeat performance without the benefit of good writing.” The youngest of three siblings, Olivier lost his beloved mother when he was 12, and though less attached to his father — a clergyman of some oratorical gifts who “meted out affection in tranches, just like the Sunday roast he would cut into wafer-thin slices” — he was influenced by him to settle down early with Esmond. “That’s a noble idea,” Esmond responded when Olivier proposed for the second time. Trying to spice up their home life, he bought her a lemur from Harrods. The Brits are different.Leigh, Olivier and their spouses all became friends at garden parties, lunches and holidays. Reading how it all went down, quite civilized and drawing-room (Leigh asked Esmond how Larry liked his eggs cooked) but with plenty of jealousy, despair and child neglect, I was reminded of John Updike’s lesser-known infidelity novel, “Marry Me,” and Harold Pinter’s play “Betrayal.” (Leigh, who excelled onstage as Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire” before bringing her to the silver screen, and Olivier, a Shakespearean virtuoso, both preferred the theater to mercenary moviedom.)That the scandal of their relationship had to be initially covered up for the morality clauses of Hollywood just as they were having their big breakthroughs there — Leigh in “Gone With the Wind”; Olivier as Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights” — surely only added to the excitement.Galloway clearly spent significant time in the archives (though frustratingly, a chunk of Leigh’s side of her correspondence with Olivier remains on the loose). Galloway splices this material seamlessly with old interviews and enough new ones with those Of That Era, such as Korda and Hayley Mills, to inject some pep and freshness. Re-encountering Leigh and Olivier’s highly literate fans, like Noël Coward and J.D. Salinger, and their foils, like the flamboyant critic Kenneth Tynan, is a treat. As are the old-fashioned words — like “martinet,” “popinjay” and “annealed” — that Galloway sprinkles through the text, the way Leigh strewed the beloved posies from her various country estates.This celebrated pair, whose doomed, disease-troubled love lends them a sheen denied to steadier partnerships, won between them half a dozen Oscars. It’s an enjoyable, disorienting sensation — as the Oscars now hemorrhage viewers and relevance — to find a time capsule from when movies and their stars didn’t just stream into our living rooms along with all the other space junk, but seemed the very center of the universe. More
