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Olivia de Havilland Interview (page: 4 / 9)Legendary Leading Lady
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Weren't you taking a great risk, by taking Warner Brothers to court? You were risking that all the studios would blacklist you. How did you come to that decision?
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Olivia de Havilland: There really wasn't any doubt about the right decision for me to take, and one of the nice things I thought was, "If I do win, other actors feeling frustration such as I feel will not have to endure that. They will take the suspension, going without pay of course, but knowing they will not have to serve that time again." And indeed, I didn't realize how much that could mean to other artists in the profession until actually, about two or three years ago. I was at a luncheon in Hollywood, and I sat next to a very charming and very able man, very highly regarded man, Roger Mayer, a lawyer. Now, he was not related to Louis B. Mayer, but he was apparently with Metro [MGM studios] for a certain length of time, and he said, "What that meant to writers, you can't imagine." Writers like Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner was one. He didn't mention those particular names, but indeed, the names he meant were of equal stature. He said, "Those men would be put under contract, and then assigned something, a scene to write in a film for which they had no natural inclination and no knowledge." I mean, say a western, a writer whose great specialty was the Deep South. He said, "Those men couldn't bear to do a poor piece of work, and they knew that they would, and that they would risk their great international reputations in going ahead and trying to meet the requirement of the studio. Now, when you won your case, they were thrilled, because of course, they were perfectly willing to go without pay until they were assigned some kind of work for which they had a feel and knew that they could do a distinguished piece of work by it."
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[ Key to Success ] Integrity |
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The "De Havilland decision" really had a profound and long-lasting impact, not just on your career, but on the industry as a whole, didn't it?
Olivia de Havilland: Oh yes. Another wonderful thing is this:
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You know, our fellows, our actors, they were extraordinary in World War II. They all went. Jimmy Stewart, he was a bomber pilot, 21 raids over Germany; Clark Gable, tail gunner. The others in the Navy, Marine Corps, they were extraordinary. Now when they came back, you see, all the time they were at war, they were on suspension. When they came back, they would have to serve that time all over again and at the salary which was by this time outmoded, because when they were lending people right and left, the producers were paying the actor the normal salary, which was the contracted salary, but they would collect from the producer they were lending the services of the actor to. They would collect a lot of money and keep it. It wouldn't go to the actor. So certain actors really had quite high prices. They didn't get the money, but the price for their services had risen during the war through this system. Now that meant that these actors would come back and have to serve. Their services would be infinitely more valuable, but they would still get the same salary that they had been receiving five years before. Jimmy Stewart came back and all those others -- Tyrone Power, the lot -- and he wanted, of course, to take advantage of my case, and it was suggested that he better not risk anything. He'd better ask for declaratory relief, and it didn't apply to an actor who had gone off to war. Of course, it did, and that was settled straight away, because it was a question not of work, but of calendar years. Therefore, all of those chaps, those brave, splendid young men, were able to negotiate new contracts.
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Thanks to your decision.
Olivia de Havilland: Isn't that nice?
Tell us about your own work during World War II. You visited some very tough situations, psychiatric wards and so forth.
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Olivia de Havilland: Every cloud does have a silver lining, because when I was put on suspension by Jack Warner in '43, August -- or rather when I went to court and therefore was enjoined from working, I wanted to do something to contribute to the war effort. I wanted to find something, and under contract, I couldn't, but now that I was enjoined from working, I was free, and the USO -- I had done caravans and that sort of thing, but the USO asked me. They said, "You can't sing, and you can't dance. Could you, would you consider visiting our military patients in military hospitals in the Christmas season of 1943?" and I said, "Oh yes, I certainly would."
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I had a beau. He was in Italy, risking his life making documentary films for the Signal Corps, and I thought, well, I want my December to be constructive in some way, so I said yes. They started me off at a very large military hospital in Chicago with a program that would take me through the Christmas season, mainly in Oklahoma, with a couple of stops in Texas afterwards. I started in Chicago, and in between wards...
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A man presented himself in uniform, a Major, and he introduced himself. He said, "I'm Major Richardson, and I am in charge of the psychiatric ward here. I was in charge at Bellevue, previous to my Army service, in New York City. I have a theory. It's an experiment I would like you to agree to, that if you visited my patients, your visit would do some good. Would you agree?" And I said, "Well, of course, I would." He said, "I have to have the post surgeon, the head of the hospital's, approval first, and I will come back and meet you between wards to let you know if I have received it." Well, he met me between wards, and he said, "I've got the permission. So, at the end of your day -- I've read your orders, I know exactly what time and at what ward you will finish. I will come and get you," or "I'll send for you. You have nothing to worry about. I will have two very sturdy orderlies to protect you." Well, I hadn't worried before then, but I certainly began at that moment to worry. To protect?
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[ Key to Success ] Courage |
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Anyway, he met me, with the two sturdy orderlies, we got into a lift, and we rose to his floor. There was a padlock on the door, and one of the orderlies unlocked it, and we entered his ward.
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I was very, very anxious to be a success for Major Richardson, and there was a boy sitting right there, a big, kind of husky boy, not tall, but muscular, and blue eyes and brown hair and maroon corduroy dressing gown and his gray pajamas, and so I went up to him and I said, "Well, hello there." No reaction. He didn't even look at me. I said, "Well, it's nice to see you today." No reaction. "What's your name?" No reaction. "Well, what state do you come from?" No reaction. I asked five questions. Failed, failed miserably with each question, and I thought, "I am a total catastrophe. I have failed Major Richardson and this experiment." Well, they were all watching me, these doctors, and so I passed to the next patient, and I had much better luck with him, and things began to look brighter, and from then on, they were really very bright. Major Richardson explained to me. He said, "You know, that first boy that you encountered was in a catatonic state, and of course, he wouldn't respond. He was in a totally unresponsive state, but when he comes out of it, he will remember every single detail of what happened in much greater precision and detail than any of us." So, when we finished, he said, "I think it's been a success. Now I want you to do something for me. You have many hospitals on your schedule, at each hospital, I ask you to go first to the post surgeon, and tell him that you would like to visit a psychiatric ward -- and there will be one in every hospital you visit -- and then ask him to ask the doctor -- the psychiatrist in charge of the psychiatric ward -- if he would like you to make that visit. I beg you to do that." So, I said I would do it, and I kept my promise.
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[ Key to Success ] Integrity |
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I asked him about that boy who was in the catatonic state. I said, "Is he a battle case?" and he said, "Oh no. He's a healthy farm boy. Just being ripped out of his lovely life and thrust into the rigorous impersonality of camp discipline and training, it was simply too much for him." He said, "None of our cases here are battle cases. This is environmental shock these boys are going through." I thought that very extraordinary. Up in Alaska, it was the same thing. In the Aleutians I did meet some soldiers who had been in the invasion of Attu, and they were battle cases. When I got to Fiji, I visited, of course, their hospital at Nandi. It was a barrack hospital with just one story, two wings, and in the middle, there were three little cubicles with one window, and the fourth wall was just a sheet. Luckily, when I got pneumonia, I was put into one of those little cubicles, but before that happened to me, I had visited the hospital. This one boy suffered from pleurisy, and they said, "Would you like to watch us drain his lungs?" So I watched, little knowing that I was going to come down with pneumonia in two days time. There was one patient in the physical ward, and I think there were 25 in the psychiatric ward.
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I came back from this experience, and I thought -- because there was a great stigma to mental illness at that time, it was not understood, and families that had a case would never speak of it to anybody else, it was a true skeleton in the closet -- I thought, "These boys, their families, how are they going to react? They need education. They need hope, and the boys must be treated with some kind of understanding." And then, of course, The Snake Pit came along. That was wonderful. That was just after the end of the war, and here was my opportunity to do something about that. And it was a marvelous story, an autobiography written by this young woman who had become really seriously mentally ill, was institutionalized and remarkably was cured in a day when they had no drugs at all for treatment, but the therapy that they used then actually worked in her case, and so I thought this will educate families. People will understand. Patients will understand, and it's a hopeful story because it ends in a cure. That film, in New York, when it was released, ran one year in one theater. People flooded to it.
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[ Key to Success ] Vision |
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Olivia de Havilland Interview, Page:
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This page last revised on May 05, 2008 13:50 EDT
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