JackFavell wrote:Welcome, Ms. Bean! Thank you so much for coming to visit at the Oasis. We are so happy to have you here! And I want to thank you also for creating such a beautiful book. It's only once in a long time that such a lovely tribute comes to classic movie fans.
Can you tell me a bit about Maureen O'Sullivan and Vivien in school? Did they remain friends or lose touch with one another?
Thanks for the warm welcome, JackFavell (love your username, by the way)!
Maureen O'Sullivan was two years Vivien's senior, so I don't know that she and Vivien were
best friends while attending the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton as they'd have been in a different class. However, they seemed to hang around one another quite a bit amidst a bigger circle of friends. There's a funny story in this wonderful (and sadly out of print) book called
Vivien Leigh: A Bouquet by the journalist Alan Dent. One of Vivien's other school friends told Dent that she, Vivien, and Maureen were "such a nuisance at school games that we were relegated to the bottom of the garden with worn-out racquets and told to get on with it, which we did with relish!"
Vivien later said that Maureen was the one she told about wanting to be an actress when she grew up. Public interest in their friendship came about when they acted together in the 1938 film
A Yank at Oxford, but Maureen seemed to have fond memories of Vivien as a child, and her daughter Mia Farrow related similar stories in a previous Vivien Leigh documentary.
I have read widely differing versions of Vivien's relationship with Leslie Howard, some say the actor was one of her favorites, some say she quarreled with him on the set of GWTW. Can you elaborate a bit on what you found out about these two?
I didn't really dwell on Vivien's relationship with Leslie Howard in this book and didn't come across any revelations while doing research. Howard didn't read the source material and didn't want to be there. In my opinion, this shows in the film. He only accepted the part of Ashley - which he disliked - because Selznick agreed to let him produce the upcoming film
Intermezzo. Despite suffering through a long, disorganised, and exhausting shoot, Vivien took her job on this film very seriously. She fought hard to get the part of Scarlett and threw herself into it with everything she had, so while she liked Howard as an actor, I can imagine his indifference to the work at hand probably annoyed her. Her biggest contender on the set, however, was director Victor Fleming, with whom she clashed on a regular basis.
In the writing of your book, you had access to Vivien's letters and correspondence, plus you interviewed those who knew her. Did you find anything that truly surprised you?
I talked about this during an interview with Greg Farrera at TCM Movie Morlocks recently. The framework of Vivien's life and career had been pretty well laid out by previous biographers, so I knew going in to the archives that I wouldn't uncover any huge revelations about her as a person. What I did discover when going through this material were little details that really helped to clarify and flesh out certain situations and aspects of her life. A lot of it reaffirmed my opinions about things like the depth of her relationship with Olivier, how much she invested in her work, and that she was very much loved by her friends and fans. But there were certain things that did peak my curiosity. One of them was how worried Olivier always seemed to be about Vivien's well being, and how much he looked out for her. In fact, that was the most prevalent theme that emerged for me when going through his papers. He was always keeping tabs on her and quite often relayed his concern about her to other people. These days there's a lot of talk in the press about how horrible he always was to her, but that wasn't the impression I got at all.
