When Olivia de Havilland Was 88 and I Was 22, We Became Friends in Paris
When I was 22, I took a part-time job as a secretary at an English-speaking church in Paris. Like most expatriate scenes, it was bizarre-forward with depressing top-notes, and somehow freeing: a group of people thrown together for no reason save a shared first language.
The place boasted a large cast of polyglot oddballs, but for whatever reason, I ended up spending a lot of time with three in particular, namely Eleanor, an extremely bossy, apricot-haired Englishwoman who’d been an officer in the Auxiliary Territorial Services; Felipe, the easygoing janitor of four decades; and an ancient lady named Florette who had, at one time, worked doing cleaning and odd sewing jobs at the church with her late sister but now just came around out of habit and loneliness even though Eleanor was always trying to ban her. (“No one wants to see her with that awful rag she calls a shawl,” she had actually said.)
Apparently they had been at war since the 60s. Eleanor had been the one to hire me, and took a proprietary interest in my progress. Well, she took a proprietary interest in most things.
Besides its liturgical responsibilities, the church was the site of a soup kitchen, AA meetings, a consciousness-raising group, language exchanges, and a bilingual preschool. There was also a side business for Japanese tourists. I wasn’t a congregant, but three days a week I acted as a pretend witness to the mock-weddings the church hosted in partnership with a Japanese tour company, in which couples posed as if they were getting married and then had their picture taken in front of the Eiffel Tower.
Included in the price was some very sweet, warm champagne—Felipe always gave me the leftovers—and, if Eleanor wasn’t around, I’d invite Florette into the office to share it. This was all strange enough, in retrospect. But as it turned out, Olivia de Havilland was a regular, too.
I’d known, of course, that de Havilland, who died Saturday at 104, had long since joined the club of cultural luminaries living out their emeritus years in Paris. Like Marlene Dietrich and James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett and the Duchess of Windsor before her, she presumably liked the country’s combination of reverence and respectful distance. Although this was years ago, she was already considered a living legend, and her age accorded her status rather than invisibility. Naturally, I hoped to catch a glimpse of her.
Olivia de Havilland had always occupied a special place in my personal pantheon. People often talk about the fact that she outlived the rest of the Gone with the Wind cast, but—perhaps because I hadn’t grown up watching that film—to me she would always be, first and foremost, Maid Marian.
The Adventures of Robin Hood had been in heavy rotation at our house growing up; de Havilland and Errol Flynn seemed to me the most compelling onscreen couple in the history of the world, and her Maid Marian the feistiest, bravest, and most beautiful heroine who ever lived (although I strongly disliked the maroon wimple she was forced to wear in certain pivotal scenes, greatly preferring her Archery Competition costume.)
As I grew older, I came to appreciate her subtle performances in The Heiress and My Cousin Rachel, and her incredible chutzpah in taking on the studio system. I devoured her droll memoirs and read everything I could about her long-simmering feud with her sister, the equally formidable Joan Fontaine, who was also alive at the time.
I remember I was covertly entertaining Florette in the office. I had brought her a cup of custard (she didn’t have teeth) and we were sharing our go?ter by the warmth of a highly suspect space heater. In walked a beautiful lady with a snow-white chignon and impeccable lipstick, quietly dressed. “I’m Miss de Havilland,” she said, “and I’m here to work in the garden.”
It transpired that Miss de Havilland, whose home was not far away, was taking a strong interest in the redesign of the church’s small garden, and came in with some regularity to observe and to sit quietly. No one else seemed very excited; Felipe said she was a nice lady but certainly didn’t act starstruck. “Autant en Emporte Le Vent,” said Florette, sagely, and then didn’t have much more to add.
When I asked Eleanor about it later, she repeated a lot of rumors about “Olivia’s” taste in food and jewelry and mentioned a number of friends they had in common, but since she had done the same thing about the Queen Mother and Diana Mitford, I took this with a grain of salt.
I don’t, as a rule, like speaking to famous people. As they say, better not to meet one’s personal heroes. The New York habit of feigned indifference in the face of celebrity—drilled into us from youth—dies hard, and as an American and one full of youthful self-consciousness, I felt an extra responsibility to model restraint. Besides, it was enough for me that she existed; I did not need to exist for her, too.
But she seemed to have maintained a Golden Age sense of responsibility to her public— keeping up the side, maintaining her famous blend of sweetness and steel—and as such perhaps minded being bothered less than some. Or so I told myself. Maybe she would like to know that younger people still appreciated her work. And so, after wrestling with the question for some time, one day I told her shyly that I’d been rereading her memoir, Every Frenchman Has One.
“Aren’t you a dear," she said in her resonant voice. And after that she addressed me by name. If one of my confrères was present, I didn’t say much. I did not want to be associated with Eleanor’s unctuousness (“I assume that’s Dior, of course, Olivia... will I see you at the Deauville races?”) and, to be completely honest, Florette cast something of a pall.
Other times, I told her a little bit about myself (there was really only a very little to tell) and asked her about David Niven (“divine”) and once mentioned that I had idolized Maid Marian.
“And were you terribly in love with Errol Flynn? We all were,” she said, which I thought was very gracious, given his public descent into sinister antics. She told me she preferred the blue wimple too, but I suspect she was being diplomatic. She really was a pro.
Seeing Miss de Havilland soon became one more odd if commonplace ritual at the church, along with the brisk Japanese weddings, and the pork chops we served at the soup kitchen, and the supercilious choir director, and the space heater with its ominous smell.
One day, shortly before I was slated to return to the States, Florette, who was easily overwhelmed, lashed out at one of the small children in the Montessori school, striking him with her cane. She ran into the office where I was working, in tears, and clutched my hand and begged me to intercede. But Felipe came in, and ejected her, and after that she was banned from the premises with a great many written (by Eleanor) notices to prove it in both French and English. Not long after, I heard she had fallen ill, and I went out to the outskirts of the city to visit, but when I arrived the hospital wouldn’t let me see her, and I left the sweets I’d brought with no small sense of relief.
In the end, it was Eleanor with whom I kept up, until her own death five years later. Her letters were written in beautiful penmanship and were full of bragging; she often mentioned “Olivia” and this hoary marquis she implied was in love with her.
I learned that Miss de Havilland had stopped coming around so often and was in declining health. But of course, Olivia would outlive Eleanor by a decade. (And I’ve never been at all sure about the marquis.)
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