lifejustgotawkward:

victoriastation:

lifejustgotawkward:

victoriastation:

lifejustgotawkward:

victoriastation:

myreveries:

victoriastation:

lifejustgotawkward:

so today in film class my professor wandered from the topic of Macbeth to a discussion of Laurence Olivier’s sexuality and his relationship with Danny Kaye. I’d already heard what he told us, but I hadn’t seen this particular photo. (Sid Field is on the right.)

for the record, I’ve always thought Danny Kaye was good-looking. The wackiness takes precedence in most people’s minds, but he was cute back in the day.

The relationship that it’s been revealed probably never happened and has been used by biographers such as Donald Spoto to try and justify Vivien Leigh’s erratic behavior since he didn’t believe she was actually mentally ill? Oh.

This is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard. I do know quite a few things about Danny and… no! He had quite a few affairs with women but I’ve never heard anything else about affairs with men. Simply because it never happened! And should this photo prove that they had an affair? That’s even more silly. I’ve seen photos like this of other men (for example Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra) (and women also for that matter!) who’s never been under suspicion of having an affair with each other. Ridiculous.

It’s been published in many Olivier biographies (starting with Spoto’s in the early 1990s), but no one I’ve talked to in my research has ever been able to back it up. I’m pretty sure it started with Michael Korda, who seems convinced it happened. But he also admitted in Spoto’s interview tapes that he didn’t know Larry very well, and that he is convinced that Vivien wasn’t actually manic-depressive, therefore his affair with kaye would definitely explain things (in Spoto’s book, he writes that this affair lasted for 10 years and that instead of rushing to Vivien in Hollywood while she was having a breakdown, he decided to shack up with Kaye in NY first, which is false). For me, his comments (and Spoto printing them) totally undermine Larry’s character in a  time of extreme trauma with Vivien. They also show how ignorant people are about Vivien Leigh and about mental illness awareness,

I’d like to point out that what my professor told us - which is apparently a well-known story, the one where Kaye met Olivier at the airport - was something Sylvia Fine Kaye told him in a conversation they had circa 1990 (I think?), at the time she financed the renovation of the Kaye Playhouse. I’m not inclined to think either of them a liar, so if my professor heard it from Fine herself, I would think the stories are true.

What exactly did your professor tell you? It’s true that Kaye met Olivier at the airport in New York when Olivier was en route to Hollywood (because Kaye and Sylvia lived there and as direct flights from London to LA were non-existent in 1953), but it is extremely unlikely anything sexual happened at this point in time. Olivier recorded this event point by point in the unpublished first draft of his autobiography. People seem to forget that Olivier wasn’t alone on this trip—Cecil Tennant was with him—and that it wasn’t a holiday but an extremely stressful and worrying situation. The Kayes had the same role as David Niven and Stewart Granger had in Hollywood: to give Olivier updates on the situation with Vivien and to help with her transport back to London. Somehow I highly doubt Olivier was more concerned with his dick than with Vivien at this point in time

he simply told the outline of the story, that Kaye was all dressed up when he met Olivier, and that it was a nice surprise after a long and tiring flight.

I don’t presume to know what Olivier was most concerned with in his personal life. I’d just like to think that if my professor was repeating a story he supposedly got from a private conversation with Sylvia Fine herself over twenty years ago, that whatever he heard came from someone who might actually know.

Yes, he very well could have been dressed up to meet them at the airport, and it probably was a nice surprise after a long and tiring flight but that doesn’t delineate an affair. Niven and Granger (who were with Vivien for a few days in Hollywood while Olivier was on his way) had been passing information to the Kayes so Olivier could keep up to date. The purpose of his trip to LA via NY was to bring Vivien Leigh back to London so she could be committed to a mental hospital because she was suffering a major nervous breakdown. He and Tenant were set up in a NY hotel by the Kayes, and they left on the next flight to LA (which was the day after they arrived). On the way back to England, Vivien, Olivier, Tennant, the Kayes and a doctor-appointed nurse were, according to Olivier, put up at the Vanderbilt’s in Long Island so people wouldn’t talk and the press wouldn’t invade their privacy. During this time, Olivier was consulting with a group of psychiatrists who had treated Vivien, and he and Kaye had to forcibly hold Vivien down so she could be sedated for the plane journey overseas. Imo, saying saying Olivier and Kaye were busy getting it on while Vivien was in danger of possibly killing herself and hurting other people, makes them both look like giant assholes more than anything else. And knowing how worried Olivier was about Vivien and how stressful the entire event was, it just seems really unlikely.

The point isn’t whether he and Kaye ever slept together. The point is that a lot of people use what is definitely a rumor and not a proven fact to somehow justify or make sense of a situation/event that they  don’t understand

from the writing I’ve seen on your tumblr and also in various links, you evidently know way, way more than I do about the Olivier marriage history, so I’ll amiably bow out while I can.

Sorry for going off on a tangent there. This specific incident is something I’ve been doing a lot of in-depth research into lately. I didn’t mean to discredit you or your professor (or Sylvia Kaye), it’s just that there are a lot of misconceptions surrounding this period in Vivien Leigh’s (and subsequently Laurence Olivier’s) life