My Afternoon With Olivia de Havilland

It was in late summer of 2004. The magazine I worked for, Premiere, was preparing its annual “Women In Hollywood” issue. Vanity Fair had its Oscar party, and more lately, its Cannes party. But our book, the ostensible “Movie Magazine,” not as resource-rich as any rag owned by Condé Nast at that time — the era of last gasp of print, for real — OWNED “Women in Hollywood.” And we made the most of it with a star-studded Beverly Hills lunch honoring female luminaries, each of which got a corresponding profile in the October issue.

I wasn’t privy to the negotiations that netted Olivia de Havilland as an honoree, but I was given to understand that they were…involved. The legendary actress, then 88, had been retired from the screen for almost 25 years. (Her last acting appearance was in 1979’s The Fifth Musketeer, a not-quite-successful throwback to the legendary action-adventure pictures with which she was teamed with Errol Flynn and others back in Hollywood.) She lived quietly in Paris, where she had settled in the early 1950s, upon her second marriage, to the magazine editor Pierre Galante (the marriage dissolved in the early ’60s, although she did not divorce until 1979).

de Havilland was an apt honoree for a variety of reasons. There was, of course, her filmography. Her work as Melanie, the saintly victim of Scarlett O’Hara, in 1939’s Gone With The Wind, is just as iconic as Vivien Leigh’s incarnation of Scarlett. While she did not get to steer her career, or the kind of characters she played, until the late-’40s, before that time she was a stalwart of studio pictures directed by hard-driving filmmakers like Raoul Walsh and Michael Curtiz, and co-starring Flynn, Bette Davis, Rita Hayworth, Ann Sheridan and more. To this day, who doesn’t love The Adventures of Robin Hood, where she played Maid Marion?

But there was more to de Havilland’s story, which made her especially appealing to contemporary women of Hollywood. As her friend and colleague Bette Davis had done in 1937, de Havilland sued Warner Brothers to get more autonomy over her career. She had already been suffering at Warners because of her participation in Wind, a non-Warners picture — on return from that shoot, she was subjected to a silent treatment by crew members on at least one subsequent film. In December 1944 she won the suit, and sure enough, she was able to get herself in films that really mattered to her, including 1948’s The Snake Pit, a searing expose of mental health institutions, and the brightest jewel in her acting crown, The Heiress, a sensitive and heartbreaking Henry James adaptation co-starring Montgomery Clift. For that 1949 project, de Havilland hand-picked director William Wyler, and the result was exquisite. (And it won her a Best Actress Oscar.)

Such were her bonafides as both a performer and a pioneer for the rights of women in film.

Honestly, I really still don’t quite know, to this day, why I was picked to interview Miss de Havilland. Yes, at Premiere I was the Guy Who Knew About Old Movies, but I also wasn’t entirely valued for my couth. I do recollect that when my future mother-in-law found out I had drawn the assignment, she called me up to express admiration and envy. I told her I had no idea what I was going to wear to my appointment at the Pierre Hotel, where de Havilland had her New York digs.

“Well, Glenn, you must wear something nice,” said my future mother-in-law. “She’s a lady.”

I did not wear jeans, that is certain. I also think I put on a cardigan. It wasn’t a particularly hot late summer.

What I remember, upon being shown in to speak to the legend, was the hush of the suite. We were rather high above the city, so the noise of traffic did not provide even a faint background for our conversation. But it was also as if de Havilland herself had an aura of quiet about her.

I wrote, in the introduction to the published piece: “Olivia de Havilland is spellbinding. When she speaks, in her convivial, confiding tone, of the quiet life she now leads in Paris, describing the chestnut tree in her backyard that blossoms ‘unfurling its little leaves, which grow into these great fanlike clusters,’ you can practically see the tree. She tells stories about films she performed in over 60 years ago as if she’d just gotten back from the set…

“Her once-dark hair is swept up in a regal white mane, but her brown eyes still burn with all the warmth and wit that animated her greatest performances.”

Yes, 16 years later, I think that’s about right. What was so disarming about Miss de Havilland, for me, was her genuine friendliness, her willingness to take you into her confidence. I wish I could say that I proved myself with my Guy Who Knew About Old Movies prowess, but I don’t think that was the case at all. Nevertheless there was, almost instantaneously, a genuine rapport, and her responses got more frank and detailed as we went on, for almost two hours.

When we spoke of Gone With The Wind, we did not touch on the movie’s racism. An arguable error on my part. But de Havilland’s individual perspective on the movie is worth revisiting: “The movie has universal appeal for not only individuals but whole nations. I get letters from every country in the world. All countries have experienced war and defeat. And survival. They can identify with that film, I think, for that reason. Whole populations know what it’s like to flee. And then of course individuals, their lives go through great crises and events and disappointments and worse than that.”

She gave me thoughtful, affectionate reminiscences of Flynn — of how, when watching 1939’s The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex with Bette Davis, many years after the fact, she got Davis to admit that Flynn was a good actor. “This happened, alas, after he was dead. Otherwise, it would have pleased him very much to hear what she had to say.” She weighed in, without a hint of embarrassment but with appropriate slight bemusement, on The Swarm: “A great nonclassic! It was quite a ridiculous film. Really ridiculous.”

And frankly, her interviewer missed a few things. Never asked her about her kooky twins movie, The Dark Mirror, directed by auteurist fave Robert Siodmak. Or about the book she wrote, Every Frenchman Has One. Or about her affair with John Huston. Or, finally, the supposed feud between her and her famed sister, Joan Fontaine. I should point out that there were no conditions attached for the interview. I chose not to bring up John and Joan…maybe because of at least a slight case of love at first sight? To sit with her while she reminisced happily, even on difficult subjects that she herself brought up, was such a delight. Why should I potentially spoil it by being hard-nosed?

She gave me a warm hug when it was time for us to part. Alas, dear reader, you can’t see the whole Premiere interview unless you have a copy of the print edition; the onetime “Movie Magazine” has never been properly digitized, for reasons too infuriating to get into here.

I did not get to go out to Beverly Hills for the “Women In Hollywood” lunch, at which Ms. de Havilland was quite properly ooh-ed-and-ah-ed over by the other honorees, including Angelina Jolie, Queen Latifah, and Anne Hathaway. But I was later told that Olivia had asked after me. That made my day. Still does sometimes.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.

Where to stream Gone With The Wind