I’m not at all sure if you know that I’m alive . . .
1
I never will forget the day I went to see a movie which you know all about if you’ve been watching television lately: Anthony Adverse. I won’t mention the year I saw it, but it had just come out, and I was in it, and I was just nineteen. I went in the afternoon, to the very first matinee at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Because I’d been in films only a year and this was the fifth and best I’d so far made, I was very thrilled and excited, sitting in the dark waiting for the picture to begin. I was also enjoying the rest, because, as you’ve surmised, I was just a little overworked.
The grand moment came, and with treble voice, her hair hanging down her back, Angela, the character I played, made her first appearance. As she did so, I heard a lady behind me exclaim to another beside her, “That’s Olivia de Havilland!”
There followed a silence disturbed only by the muted flapping of my ears. Then the second woman queried, “I wonder how old she is?”
There was no silence this time as the first lady replied with promptness and with certitude, “Why, she’s thirty if she’s a day!”
This incident has marked me, and because of it I’m not at all sure if you know that I’m alive. I have the idea that anyone who has ever heard my name has the distinct impression that I was put under the sod years ago just before they buried Lillian Russell. And so, when I wonder if you know that I live in France, I’m sure you don’t, because I am certain that you think me peacefully interred, and in good old native American soil.
If that’s the case, you’re in for a surprise. By golly, I’m alive, all right, and I do live in France, and not under but on top of solid Parisian limestone. Furthermore, I speak First Class Foreign French, and if I’ve stunned you into immobility by all this startling information, you just keep seated and keep quiet, and I’ll tell you how it all came about.
About nine years ago I was living (yes, even then) a life both sober and sobered, although conducted in Hollywood. I had very regretfully come to realize that a divorce from my first husband was necessary, and in August of 1952 had filed for and been granted an interlocutory decree of divorce. In the early spring of 1953 a film I’d been in, My Cousin Rachel, had just come out, and I was staying very much at home reading scripts for another one and keeping my eye on the apple of my eye, my three-year-old son, Benjamin Briggs Goodrich. If that sounds like a feat, it was, as he is the most active apple I have ever encountered.
While I was thus engaged, Louella was unhappy, Hedda was unhappy, and the publicity department at Fox, where I’d made Rachel, was unhappy. They wanted me to fall in love. And you don’t do that if you stay at home with your nose in a script and your eye on its apple, because, among other things, you are just too contorted to do so. Louella, Hedda, my agent, and Fox just didn’t understand; they wagged their heads and remarked sadly, “There’s only one male she loves, and that’s Ben.”
About six thousand miles away, on the other side of the Atlantic, the French government was busying itself with its usual occupations and, in addition, preparing for the Cannes Film Festival. As the chestnut trees along the Champs Élysées were getting ready to bloom, the office of the Secrétaire Général put a lot of white envelopes in the mail; one of them was addressed to me.
When it arrived at my Hollywood apartment, I deflected my gaze from Benjamin for a moment and read the enclosed invitation. I’d never been to France and I’d never been to a Festival, and after a fifth of a second of solemn deliberation I decided to accept. Forthwith I sent a message to the French government, which had graciously agreed to provide my transportation to and from the Festival, that I’d be happy to come if it would send me two airplane tickets instead of one.
Do you know, that simple, frank little request absolutely rocked the French government? And it’s a government that’s had its ups and downs. The Secrétaire Général of the Festival went right over to see the Secrétaire Général of Paris Match, France’s most celebrated illustrated magazine, because the Secrétaire Général of Paris Match had actually been to Hollywood and had actually met some American actresses on home ground and could, no doubt, give some advice about my request. He could and he did. Seeing straight through my petition and seeing no reason why the French government should subsidize American romance, he said with clear, cogent brevity, “Non.”
So while Louella and Hedda were shocked because I was not in love, two French Secrétaire Générals were shocked because I was. When I wasn’t.
When the Secrétaire Général of the Festival finally learned that my proposed companion, though male, was exactly three and a half years old, his French family spirit came to an immediate and joyful boil, and without further ado and by fastest courier he dispatched to me two airplane tickets instead of one.
A month later, as the plane bringing Ben and me to France circled over Orly Field in the midmorning mid-April sunshine, I speculated as to what the very first Frenchman I would meet would be like. Unquestionably, he’d be dapper, with an Adolphe Menjou mustache. Naturally, he’d be gay, effervescent; he’d gesticulate. He’d be voluble in French, expressive in English. Of course he would kiss my hand. And that would be charming.
The plane landed and Ben and I emerged into the tonic, sun-filled air. We descended the ramp while the 580,000 photographers who hospitably greet each arriving Festival guest flashed every one of their 2,000,000 flash bulbs. Then we approached the air terminal door where my American, German-born, French-speaking agent was waiting for us. He was in Europe on business, and because I didn’t know a word of French, he had come to see me through my first hours on foreign soil. With him was a Frenchman. The very first Frenchman I met in France. Handsome but hangdog. Cleanshaven and solemn. Didn’t speak English, didn’t even speak French. And did not kiss my hand. He was the Secrétaire Général of Paris Match.
We met again forty-eight hours later at Cannes, in the revolving door of the Carlton Hotel. I was on my way to the opening night of the Festival and so was he. I wore a pink evening gown, long gloves and mink; he wore dinner clothes and his hangdog expression. More intense, though. Sort of hangdog and sheepish. He did not speak English, he did not speak French, and he did not kiss my hand.
My seat at the Palais du Festival throughout the festivities was always reserved, always the same—in the dress circle, one in from the aisle. Who was on the aisle? Every night, every performance, in his own reserved seat? The Secrétaire Général of Paris Match.
At the great supper parties after every film, at no matter whose table I sat, oddly enough, always beside me in his unreserved seat was the same singular Frenchman. Then at the Austrian Gala his expression changed. He smiled. Then he spoke. Fluently. In French, which I did not understand. Then in English, which I did. But he still did not kiss my hand—he held it in the taxi going home.
This opening skirmish swiftly developed into a major campaign, international in scale, range, and implication. As soon as the Festival was over I withdrew with my three-year-old aide-de-camp to England. We were overtaken. We retreated behind and beyond the national boundaries of the United States, even unto the heart of Texas.
Retrenched in Dallas, I went into rehearsal for The Dazzling Hour, a play which, by the way, was not to be presented in Dallas at all but in La Jolla, California. That’s hard to follow, I know, but it involves José Ferrer, the very mention of whose name will make clear any confusion. You know Joe—if there’s anything he hates to do it’s one thing at a time; in Dallas he was acting, singing, dancing and joking in Kiss Me, Kate, rehearsing The Dazzling Hour, and getting married. And in Dallas, even though the eyes of Texas were upon him, the one-man French Expeditionary Force made an airborne landing.
I fled, aide-de-camp and all, to La Jolla. Again we were routed. In Los Angeles my aide nearly reversed the field when, by the merest hazard, in the high spirits of healthy American youth, he struck the opposition an accidental blow on the top of the head with a potato masher. However, as August 26 came around my divorce became final, the adversary pursued his advantage undaunted, and by the end of the month, as one of the most intense and relentlessly fought operations in French military history came to a close, the tricolor rose triumphantly in the California sunshine over the Shoreham Apartments and I announced my engagement to Pierre Galante.
A few weeks later the victor set sail for his native shore in the barque the Liberté, and at the same time, by merest coincidence, Air France sent me an invitation to christen and be aboard their inaugural Chicago–Paris nonstop flight. Needless to say, enclosed with the invitation were two airplane tickets instead of one.
I planted my own standard on the Left Bank of the River Seine in late October of 1953, and though I have since transferred it to the Right Bank, it has been fluttering with considerable joy and gaiety from that first moment to this one. My aide-de-camp is now twelve years old, and because settling down in a foreign country requires quite a bit of staff work, Pierre and I have given him an assistant. She is now five years old, is named Gisèle, and has all the requisites for a happy life that any girl could ask for: a full set of teeth, pretty legs, and a mouth like a kiss. She thinks her brother is God, and he is leaving it that way.
We live in Paris in a little white house which is as tall and narrow as a chimney; behind it we have a little garden with our own chestnut tree and a small fountain for the pigeons and sparrows to bathe in. Just as you’ve supposed, we are living happily ever after. In other words, to put it in a manner much more à la mode, I have made, toward living in a foreign country, a “very good adjustment.” However, I’ve had my adventures, I can tell you, and if you’ll just turn the page, you’ll learn all about them.
I was definitely under surveillance
2
When I set about to marry Pierre, I encountered French law for the first time, and, behind it, a kind of exactness and foresight which makes American law seem positively naïve and unimaginative.
When I met Pierre for the first time, in April, 1953, I was, as you know, a three-quarter divorcée. And when he followed me back to the States that summer, I became, as August passed, and as you also know, a full-fledged divorcée, with all the accruing rights, freedoms and privileges. So thought the state of California. So thought the Federal government of the United States of America. So thought I.
Two months later, in Paris, as I laid plans to make June out of January, I discovered that the United States might let me, a one-hundred-proof divorcée, remarry, but the French government wasn’t about to. I found I was not under parole, exactly, but I was definitely under surveillance. For the best part of the year following the final decree of divorce, I was expressly forbidden by French law to remarry. I asked why. “Just in case,” was the reply, “of an overly sentimental farewell with the previous husband on the day of the final decree.” The period of surveillance is exactly nine months.
So when I returned to the United States to make Not as a Stranger for Stanley Kramer and United Artists in Hollywood, I explained to my curious friends why they would still have to wait awhile before they could call me Madame.
Charles Brackett, who had produced To Each His Own, in which I’d won my first Oscar, was vastly amused by my predicament, as he’d lived in France for some time before becoming one of Hollywood’s best producer-writers, and already knew something of French custom and law.
“In France, in the case of twins, which of the twins is regarded as the senior, having primary rights of heredity?” he asked me.
“The first to be born,” I replied with my American pragmatism.
“Not at all,” corrected Charlie. “It’s the second born. On the theory that the last to get out was the first to get in.”
My husband’s full name is Pierre Paul Galante. If we should ever have twin boys, and name them after their father, and I have them in France, we shall certainly be robbing Peter to pay Paul.
This sort of precise, but to us Americans somewhat inverse, logic of French law, is true of all sorts of aspects of French life, as I found out when Not as a Stranger was finished and I flew back to France to rejoin Pierre—this time, by the way, with my period of surveillance well (and satisfactorily) over, and perfectly free to marry under French law.
My plane arrived at Orly Field in the late afternoon of December 24, and as I descended the ramp, I found not only Pierre there to greet me, but a foreign representative of United Artists as well—the saddest-looking Frenchman I have ever seen.
“Oh, Miss de Havilland,” he said sorrowfully, “what a sad time for you to be coming back to France.” I hadn’t read the papers for days, so I had no idea what national disaster might have taken place during my absence. Blanching, I asked why. “Because,” he replied, “the French Customs is on strike.” At this, thinking of my seven suitcases, I brightened and remarked that I was sorry that the strikers were having problems on Christmas Eve, but I failed to see how a strike among the Customs inspectors could be regarded as a disadvantage to the arriving traveler. “You don’t understand,” said the Frenchman, now quite ashen. “In France, when the Customs go on strike, it doesn’t mean that they refuse to examine your luggage, it means that they examine everything!”
And then, because it was Christmas Eve, the strikers decided to do it the American way after all!
Copyright © 2016 by Olivia de Havilland. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
