I had better declare the interest that I knew Leigh for the best part of 25 years. Moreover, she seems never to have thought about why Leigh mattered, or what happened to her in the 10 years after she gave Olivier his divorce. The failed impersonator here bears little or no resemblance to Leigh, spiritually or even physically, though Lafferty might just about pass for Joan Crawford on a bad night in thick fog. No, the real issue here is the buttock-clenching tastelessness, the apparently willful disregard of the feelings of anyone who knew or even just admired a once-incandescent star.
The mistakes in the text are not the issue, though they are legion: Leigh would hardly have referred to herself being "on the West End" as though it were Broadway, and it is highly unlikely that she and Olivier would have dined in Hollywood "with Bogie and Bacall" during the making of "Gone With the Wind," given that Bacall was only about 13 at the time. A monumentally bad-taste monologue such as this almost makes one long for the return of the Lord Chamberlain, one of whose censorious duties was to ban shows that might offend living relatives. Leigh has grandchildren by her first marriage and a devoted stepson, Tarquin Olivier, still very much alive. Even if she had given one, then or ever, it is unlikely that stage lighting would have been flashed on and off while she recalled her electric-shock treatment in a mental clinic. Probably a half dozen biographies of the actress have been published over the years, of varying accuracy, and Marcy Lafferty, who plays Leigh and credits no other writer but herself, would seem to have trawled and plundered them with all the sensitivity and elegance of a bulldozer.īy 1960, the date we are given for this hideous fictional reconstruction, Leigh was way past being able to hold a solo press conference.
Fortunately, I cannot remember the last time I left a theater quite as angry as I was by the end of "Vivien Leigh: The Last Press Conference." This tacky 90-minute travesty of a solo-show "biography" is, we are told in the program, "almost completely in Miss Leigh's own words," which will come as something of a surprise considering that she never wrote, and almost never spoke, of her tortured private life.
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