De Havilland's Bumpy Flight | Vanity Fair | May 2016 - Vanity Fair

Posted: 04 Aug 2020 05:43 AM PDT

Although the age of the celebrity stalker had not yet dawned, the normally unflappable Olivia de Havilland could not help being discomfited by the disheveled man with the dead eyes who would not stop staring at her. It was 1957. She was at a charity ball for the costumers union at Conrad Hilton's sparkling new hotel, the Beverly Hilton. This one big gala would remind her of what she was not missing in Hollywood before she boarded one of her old flame Howard Hughes's TWA Super Constellations and made the long journey back to Paris, where she had moved in 1955.

Hollywood, Olivia felt, had changed for the worse since her glory days, in the 1930s and 40s, and everyone was blaming it on television. America wasn't going out anymore. Its citizens were staying home and watching Gunsmoke. Olivia had just wrapped a Western, The Proud Rebel, with her old friend Alan Ladd and his son David. Petite and still perfect at five feet three, Olivia, then 41, was one of the few female stars whom Ladd didn't have to stand on a soapbox to kiss. Their new horse opera was a clear attempt to recapture the box-office magic of 1953's Shane, but television was making such feats more a labor of Hercules than even of John Ford or George Stevens.

But who was this creepy man who wouldn't go away? All Olivia could do was turn her back and protectively chat with her old friend William Schallert, the son of the longtime drama critic of the Los Angeles Times and one of many talented character actors who had been body-snatched, to borrow a term from that paranoid era, by television. (He would soon have several episodes of Gunsmoke to his credit.) "Suddenly I felt a kiss on the back of my neck," Olivia recalls. She was too polite to dream of calling security. "I turned around and it was that man. He was gaunt. His clothes didn't fit. But it was those lifeless eyes that troubled me. 'Do I know you?' I asked him."

"It's Errol," he replied.

"Errol who?" Olivia genuinely didn't know. And then she figured it out: Errol Flynn. Nearly 60 years later, she remains shocked by the moment. "Those eyes. They used to be so glinting, so full of life," she remembers. "And now they were dead."

In their day, Errol and Olivia had been the Fred and Ginger of action movies. From 1935's Captain Blood to 1941's They Died with Their Boots On, the Tasmanian devil and the Anglo-Californian ingenue made seven swashbuckling blockbusters. They were Bogie and Bacall, minus the offscreen romance. Or was it really minus, and not just Olivia's legendarily discreet charm? Hollywood was still discreet, even in the 50s, simply out of fear of the snoops and scoops of Confidential magazine. There were no paparazzi allowed in Conrad's new Hilton. If they had been, and they had seen Errol's vampire kiss on Olivia's neck, how the presses would have rolled.

Soon the bell tolled for the dinner, and everyone began filing into the grand ballroom. Errol offered Olivia his arm. "Can I escort you to dinner?" No woman could refuse, especially the woman who had contributed the most to Flynn's romantic mystique, Maid Marian to his Robin Hood. So into the Hilton ballroom they strode, giants of the earth, re-united at last.

"The moment we sat down," Olivia recalls, "the table filled up with seven or eight beautiful young ladies." Inspired by the attention, Errol came to life and turned on the charm. "Somehow I couldn't help myself from being increasingly enraged that Errol Flynn was paying more attention to the other ladies at the table than he was to me," Olivia says, still chiding herself for letting emotions overtake her. "Here I was, living in Paris, happily married to a wonderful Frenchman, two great children. Why was I having a fit of jealousy over Errol Flynn?" The two icons barely spoke for the rest of the dinner. "When the ball was over, I said good night and left in a cab by myself," she says.

For the rest of her working life, Olivia would appear in only 10 more feature films and would increasingly keep Hollywood at an oceanic distance. Flynn would die two years later, in 1959, at age 50.

America's Expat Sweetheart

Olivia de Havilland told me this story when I went to see her last year in Paris, a little more than a month before she turned 99, on July 1. She is the last surviving female superstar of Hollywood's Golden Age. Only Kirk Douglas, six months her junior, can rise to bear that banner of vanished glory. Olivia doesn't seem 99. Her face is unlined, her eyes sparkling, her fabled contralto soaring (only Orson Welles had an equally imposing instrument), her memory photographic. She could easily pass for someone decades younger. (Is 100 the new 70?)

The Flynn story provides some clue to the enduring mystery of why one of Hollywood's biggest stars would chuck it all and move to France: a fallen medium, a fallen idol. For Olivia, there was a whiff of decay and disappointment about Hollywood, and the vicious, relentlessly competitive sniping of her Oscar-winning sister, Joan Fontaine, who may have been the biggest disappointment of all. After three best-actress Oscars between them, wasn't enough enough? Apparently not in Hollywood, where the de Havilland-Fontaine spat became the most notorious family feud in the town's history. For more than 60 years, it has been manna for a press eager to apotheosize sibling rivalry to dark and unheroic proportions. (Fontaine died in December of 2013 at age 96.)

"Here I was, living in Paris, happily married. Why was I having a fit of jealousy over Errol Flynn?"

Then, as now, stars didn't leave Hollywood—not American stars, anyway. Greta Garbo and Luise Rainer were foreign. Marlene Dietrich was never really there. Grace Kelly traded celluloid royalty for actual royalty—thanks, it should be noted, to Olivia's second husband, Paris Match editor Pierre Galante, who inadvertently played cupid between Grace and Prince Rainier of Monaco. But Olivia didn't come to Paris for a prince. She came to get away. She didn't want to become a princess. She wanted to be real.

But what could have been better than Olivia's reality? She had been America's sweetheart since the Flynn epics and pantheonic since 1939's Gone with the Wind, a winner of two best-actress Oscars: To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949). She is one of only 13 actresses in Hollywood history to accomplish this feat. Who walks out on that?

"I loved being around real buildings, real castles, real churches—not ones made of canvas," she says. "There were real cobblestones. Somehow the cobblestones amazed me. When I would meet a prince or a duke, he was a real prince, a real duke." She tells a story about flying from Paris to Algiers on the first commercial jet, the De Havilland Comet, with her Flynn-like cousin, the famed aviation pioneer Geoffrey de Havilland, for a lunch of couscous and ceremonially slaughtered lamb. Being abroad in the 50s, she discovered, was more interesting than being in Eisenhower's America, especially with Olivia's level of access.

Not that Olivia was fleeing to join the nouvelle vague. French cinema was indeed the cutting edge. The great films that were being made were being made in Europe, and in 1965, Olivia became the first woman to helm the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. But, she notes, without being abashed, "I never met Godard. I never met Truffaut. I never met Brigitte Bardot." What was Paris without that? Just fine, Olivia asserts. Her Paris was always Voltaire, Monet, Rodin—not Belmondo, not Delon, not even Chanel.

Joan, she says, would "put her little head on my shoulder and ask me to tell her a story."

We met at the Saint James Paris, a chateau-like hotel, once part of an eponymous clubby global chain, where she was staying while her own maison, a block away, was undergoing repairs, That circa-1880 town house— where she has lived since June of 1958—may be about the safest address in an increasingly jittery Paris: former president Valery Giscard d'Estaing lives next door, and there's round-the-clock security.

Olivia greeted me and, as spry as a Himalayan Sherpa from more than five decades of climbing the five stories of her town house, led me up the Saint James's answer to Gone with the Wind's Tara staircase to her grand suite. The bed's antique headboard featured Adam and Eve cavorting in Eden. A crisp assistant arrived with Veuve Clicquot and macarons from Faduree. Olivia was dressed all in beige, a silk blouse and proper skirt with matching ballet slippers. On subsequent days she would mix it up, wearing a slinky black silk Chinese cheongsam worthy of Anna May Wong in Shanghai Express. Olivia's one nod to glamour was her jewelry, a triple strand of pearls and her striking earrings, a gold whorl with a pearl at the center that evoked the hypnotic image Salvador Dali designed for Spellbound.

'I wasn't American at all," Olivia says, getting right down to deconstructing the myth of her as the girl next door from Saratoga, California, in the Santa Clara Valley, the "prune capital of America," now part of Silicon Valley. She was bom in Tokyo on July 1, 1916, the daughter of English parents. "I was naturalized right before Pearl Harbor," she says, citing the date: November 28, 1941. "Nine days later, I would have been classified as an enemy alien. I might have been sent to a camp." Her father, though not a solicitor himself, ran a firm of 20 patent lawyers. Her mother was a choral teacher and occasional actress whose shining moment had been taking part in a command performance in Tokyo for the visiting Duke of Connaught.

"Mummy never told me until much later," Olivia says. "She didn't want me to know she had actually worked professionally, as opposed to the amateur theatricals I had been aware of." Amateur acting was fine. Professional, well, had overtones of a fallen woman. But the thespian gene ran in the family, and once it was unleashed, Olivia could not suppress it. "When I was five I discovered a secret box that contained Mummy's stage makeup. It was like finding buried treasure. I tried the rouge, the eye shadow, the lipstick. But I couldn't get the rouge off. Mummy spanked me terribly. 'Never do this again!' she yelled at me, and ordered me never to tell my sibling."

The sibling in question was Joan, Olivia's baby sister, 15 months younger, to whom Olivia has been famously referring, if at all, as anonymously as possible for decades. They would grow up to be the only sisters to win best-actress Oscars. But before there was any inkling of a feud, the two were as cuddly and affectionate as any two siblings could be. Olivia recounted how she adored playing big sister. Joan, she says, would climb into bed with her and "put her little head on my shoulder and ask me to tell her a story." Olivia would spin fairy tales about rabbits and other creatures that riveted Joan, who was perhaps the first beneficiary of Olivia's lifelong talent for animal imitations. (Even today, she loves causing a stir in dog-friendly Paris temples of gastronomy by driving the gourmet hounds to riot with her sotto voce barks and growls.) "Joan was sick and so depressed," Olivia says. "The thing she loved most was her patent-leather cat, which somehow had lost its voice. When you squeezed, it used to meow, but it broke. So I began meowing when Joan squeezed the cat, and she loved it and got better. She was so darling, with these adorable freckles on her nose and a ducktail of blond hair, cute as a button."

The two girls were taken to California by Mrs. de Havilland as toddlers when their parents' marriage started coming apart. (Their father would stay in Japan and eventually marry his housekeeper.) Notwithstanding her globe hopping, Mrs. de Havilland remained properly English to the core. When Olivia wanted to know why Mummy insisted she and Joan sound British, Mummy's answer was simple: "Because we are British!" Olivia's "cahn't"s and "shahn't"s initially got her a lot of playground abuse, but eventually all her classmates began imitating her. To balance her image as Miss Propriety, Olivia became the class prankster, specializing, naturally, in a wide range of animal imitations. "I started with turkeys and donkeys and worked my way on to horses, dogs, and cats. I was quite good," she confesses.

All that perfect elocution paid off when Olivia, the star of the student theatricals, was discovered by an associate of the emigre Austrian impresario Max Reinhardt, who needed an understudy for the heroine Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Hollywood Bowl in 1934. Warner Bros, made A Midsummer Night's Dream into a film the next year with Olivia, Dick Powell, James Cagney, and Mickey Rooney—Olivia's big break. Jack Warner fixed on the 18-year-old actress as the new ingenue in his stock company of players. Olivia, the brainy A student, still looks back with regret about forgoing her coveted admission to Mills College, the Wellesley of the West.

By 1938, Olivia, at 22, had become a huge star, thanks to her pairings with Flynn in Captain Blood and The Charge of the Light Brigade. At 98 pounds, she was also anorexic, before anyone called it that. Mother and daughter came up with a diagnosis of Hollywooditis. "I wouldn't wish overnight success on anyone," Olivia says, the pain of the recollection not dulled by time. "You have no real friends. Everyone works endless hours at different studios, so far apart. Even on your own lot, relationships were formal, and often competitive." Olivia lets out a sigh. "Jiminy Crickets," she says, one of her favorite refrains. Mummy had the cure: get out of the celluloid Sodom and go to England. Joan remained in California, working tirelessly to catch up with her sister, notably snagging a small part in George Cukor's The Women. Neither girl had ever been to their parents' homeland. Mummy and Olivia sailed on the Normandie, "the most beautiful ship in the world," Olivia says, in the spring of 1938. Unfortunately, Sodom had long arms. Although the trip was supposed to be a secret, Jack Warner tolerated no secrets. Like many of the old moguls, he was a control freak with the mentality of a plantation overlord—hence his white-columned Dixie-esque manse in Beverly Hills. The latest (and destined to be the biggest) Flynn-de Havilland pairing, The Adventures of Robin Hood, was about to be released. How perfect that Olivia would be there, in the land of Sherwood Forest, to do publicity. Accordingly, a phalanx of press greeted the homecoming Anglos on the pier at Southampton.

The de Havillands were saved by a kindly purser who escorted them off the ship via steerage. Olivia hid in a ladies' room until the press train took the thwarted reporters back to Fleet Street. In London, the 45-yearold Mary Pickford, who had also been on the ship, denounced the young star's behavior as "unprofessional" and "regrettable."

Olivia regretted nothing. She and Mummy enjoyed a wonderful grand tour of all of English lit's shrines. In Stratford-upon-Avon, Olivia attended two plays every day, reminding herself that she too had begun her career as a Shakespearean actress and dreaming that she would become one again. But in the end, Olivia, ever the good girl and team player, did the right thing by Warner. She installed herself at the Savoy and invited the press to call upon her. "'I'm all yours,' I told them, and this time they were so grateful; they were adorable to me," Olivia says. She returned to America on the Normandie, still 98 pounds but rested and with a perspective on the "reality" she craved. The Adventures of Robin Hood was a monster hit all over the world. It was—and is— impossible to imagine Maid Marian without thinking instantly of Olivia de Havilland.

Life with Melanie

'I didn't identify with Melanie when I first read the book," Olivia says of her most famous role, in Gone with the Wind. She had read Margaret Mitchell's book when it was first published, in 1936, and had not been impressed. "But when I read Sidney Howard's wonderful script, Melanie seemed like a totally different character," she says. "In the book we saw her through Scarlett's eyes, which created a negative impression. In the him the audience sees her through their own, unbiased eyes. Now, with the script, I liked her, I admired her, I loved her!"

Even so, she still dismisses any attempt to equate her with Melanie Hamilton. The woman who masterminded her own career ("Mummy was my guardian," she points out, "not my manager"), dated Howard Hughes and John Huston, hew a plane, and broke the back of the studio system in her seminal 1944 lawsuit, which freed actors from perpetual contract bondage, is no Goody Two-Shoes, even if she was never a heller in high heels.

The hard part was not so much getting the role but getting Jack Warner to agree to lend her out to David O. Selznick. "Selznick had seen me in Robin Hood and thought I should be considered. One day George Cukor called out of the blue and said, 'You don't know me, but would you be interested in playing in Gone with the Wind? Naturally I said a big yes, and then he whispered into the phone, 'Would you consider doing something illegal?' It was all very cloak-and-dagger."

Olivia drove her green Buick to the MGM lot but parked on the street. Then, following Cukor's elaborate directions, she proceeded on foot to a secret glass door.

A man was waiting and he took Olivia to Cukor's office, where she read for him. "Wait," Cukor said when she had finished.

He dialed Selznick. "You should hear Miss de Havilland read for Melanie."

A date was set for the coming Sunday at three o'clock. Olivia drove herself to Selznick's Southern Colonial mansion, on Summit Drive in Beverly Hills. "I wore a demure black velvet afternoon dress with lace cuffs and a round lace collar," Olivia recalls. "We sat in this huge room in a bay window. The scene was between Melanie and Scarlett, and George read Scarlett. With his kinky hair and his rotund body and his thick spectacles, he was the most ridiculous Scarlett you could imagine. And he read with such drama, clutching the curtains. It was so comical. I found it hard to keep a straight face." Afterward, Selznick said, "I guess we have to talk to Jack Warner."

Selznick did talk to Warner, to no avail. So then Olivia talked to him, to even less. "Jack said no. No. He said, 'If you want to play anything, why Melanie and not Scarleft?' But it didn't matter. He wasn't going to loan me out. No was no." But Olivia wasn't one to accept nos. She decided to go over Jack's head and appeal to his wife, Ann, who was the only person in show business who could conceivably turn him around. "Ann was a beautiful, slim woman in her 30s whom I had barely met. I invited her for tea at the Beverly Hills branch of the Brown Derby. I had never taken anyone to tea before." At the tea, Ann seemed to understand what a huge project this was and that it could only enhance Olivia's value to Warner Bros, in the long run. She promised to help and she did. "I think we have you," Olivia recalls Selznick saying in his green-light call to her.

She came to Paris to get away. She didn't want to become a princess. She wanted to be real.

Olivia talks about one of her favorite scenes from Gone with the Wind, the one in which Rhett Butler feels responsible for Scarlett's miscarriage and breaks down in tears. Clark Gable cry? No way. "You can do it and you will be wonderful," Olivia exhorted Gable. "It worked. And he was wonderful." (Olivia admits that despite her many teary roles her "tears didn't photograph. They just didn't show up on film. They were constantly blowing menthol in my eyes.")

The stakes were high for all involved and the pressure was intense. Leigh, Gable, and Olivia would try to defuse the tension by playing Battleship during the endless camera setups required by the new Technicolor process. (Victor Fleming, meanwhile, had taken over from Cukor as director.) To liven things up, the supposedly saintly Olivia adored playing devilish practical jokes. One scene had Gable picking Olivia up. On what it was hoped would be the last of a multiple series of exhausting takes, Olivia had a propman secretly strap her to an immovable lighting fixture. Poor Gable nearly had a hernia. He couldn't budge her. The set went wild in what was the biggest laugh in a very serious shoot, one in which everyone was aware that an epic was being created.

If the stakes were high, so were the rewards. On Oscar night, February 29, 1940, David O. Selznick gave a small pre-party at his house. Olivia, who didn't have a formal date, was glad to be going in this gilt pack, which included the film's chief financier, John Hay "Jock" Whitney, who had escorted Olivia to the premiere in Hollywood. "He and David made the oddest couple," Olivia says of this unlikely alliance between patrician Wall Street and nouveau Hollywood. The other guests were Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier (who would marry later that year), Selznick's wife, Irene, and Robert Benchley, the Vanity Fair and New Yorker wit. During drinks the phone rang. It was an advance tip on who the winners were.

"David picked it up, and he intoned a list of names: 'Er, yes. Vivien, Victor, Hattie,'" Olivia recalls. "My heart sank. David, who was clearly the happiest man on earth, rushed Jock, Vivien, and Larry into a waiting limo, and left right away. Nobody said a word to me. It was up to Irene to take the loser—me—and Robert Benchley to the Cocoanut Grove, where the event was. I was crestfallen." (Like Olivia, Gable was nominated but lost.)

At the ceremony, Irene, Olivia, and Benchley were relegated to a little table away from the glorious high table where Selznick had assembled his team of winners, except for Hattie McDaniel, who had initially sat alone with her black companion, whom Olivia refers to as "her fellow." Then Selznick decided it would look better for Hattie to be part of a larger group. "David moved them to a 'mixed' table. I think they were happier where they had been. No one uttered a word of condolence to me. I tried to do the English thing, stiff upper lip. But when Irene saw one single tear sliding down my cheek, she rushed me into the hotel kitchen. Next to this steaming cauldron of soup, I cried my eyes out. That soup turned out saltier than the chef had planned. I went home in one of David's limos. All I could do was think to myself, There is no God."

After two weeks of misery, Olivia woke up to an epiphany. "My whole perspective changed. I realized why it was destined that I lose. I was nominated as best supporting actress, but that was the wrong category. I wasn't 'supporting.' I was the star, too. That was just a ploy by David on behalf of Vivien. Hattie was supporting, and she was the best. Plus, it was wonderful that she should win. Once I understood the system, I didn't feel horrible at all. There was a God, after all."

That God would smile on Olivia in the decade ahead with two best-actress statuettes, not to mention two New York Film Critics Circle best-actress awards, plus countless other accolades. Nonetheless, she had seen up close and personal how cruel Hollywood could be. The seeds of her eventual departure for Paris were watered by the teal's she shed on Oscar night in 1940.

On to Paris

There were offscreen heartbreaks as well. Olivia admits to having been crazy about Flynn, notwithstanding his adolescent penchant for pranks, like planting a dead snake in her pantaloons. But Flynn was married. She was also very taken with Howard Hughes, on whom she developed a crush when she saw him dancing with Dolores Del Rio at the Trocadero on Sunset Boulevard one evening in 1939. Olivia was doing Wings of the Navy, a propaganda him that, along with her family connection to British aviation, gave her and air-obsessed Hughes common ground. Hughes's courtship was anything but consistent. He might take Olivia bowling one night, fly her to Santa Barbara for hamburgers the next, and then put on the dog, wining and dining her at Victor Hugo, one of the era's temples of chic. Hughes had a fondness for classy, refined types, and Olivia was there to fill the void left when Katharine Hepburn, dubbed box-office poison, went back East while she regrouped for her comeback in The Philadelphia Story. Olivia speaks admiringly of Hepburn's resurrection: "She had left town quite defeated. The industry was confused by what I would call her New England pride. Howard called it arrogance."

Hepburn loved to fly, as did Olivia, who also earned a pilot's license. Olivia's passion for flight, ignited by Hughes, was perpetuated by James Stewart, the future air-force brigadier general who seriously dated Olivia in the early 40s, until he was called to war. The man she may have fallen hardest for was John Huston, whose second feature assignment was the tall order of directing Olivia and Bette Davis in 1942's In This Our Life. The two stars played rival sisters, competing viciously in love and life—close to home for Olivia. Although Davis, after Greta Garbo, was the female star Olivia admired most, Davis did anything but return the esteem. In the first of the four films they made together, the 1937 comedy It's Love I'm After, Davis's first take on Olivia's acting was the insulting "What is she doing?"

So now it took Huston to play peacemaker, explaining to Davis that her impossible love for the married director William Wyler and Olivia's impossible love for Huston, then locked in marriage to Lesley Black, made them two dames at sea on the same sinking ship. The analogy did the job. The stars bonded over their frustrations and became friends for fife, eventually aging out of romantic leads into the Grand Guignol of 1964's Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte.

It is perhaps another commentary on her dim view of the business that the two men she married were neither stars nor moguls, but writers. Marcus Aurelius Goodrich—whom Olivia married in 1946 and divorced in 1952— was a Texan who was best known for his World War I battleship novel, Delilah, (With him Olivia had a son, Benjamin Goodrich, who died in 1991 of Hodgkin's lymphoma at age 41.) And then there was Pierre Galante, who, in addition to his Paris Match duties, also wrote military histories, including Valkyrie, the basis for the 2008 Tom Cruise movie (which Olivia says she did not see).

Olivia and Pierre met the first time Olivia set foot in France, in April of 1952, when she came as a guest of the Cannes Film Festival. That year An American in Paris opened the event, whose awards were dominated by Marlon Brando's Vim Zapata! and Orson Welles's Othello. Olivia had initially refused because the festival denied her request for a second airline ticket, assuming, French-style, it was for her lover. When she let them know it was for her small son, Benjamin, the festival relented.

Hundreds of photographers turned out at Orly airport to greet her. She was escorted by her agent, Kurt Frings, and by a silent little Frenchman who later turned garrulous on her: Galante. The first words out of his mouth were "Austrian wine is better than French wine." (He never drank a drop.) Then he dared to hold her hand in a taxi from a lunch at Fa Colombe d'Or. The relentless journalist followed her to Fondon and then to F.A., and then got her invited on one of society promoter Elsa Maxwell's title-studded yacht cruises of the Greek Isles. They wed in 1955. In Paris the following year, Olivia and Pierre had a daughter, Gisele. (She would grow up to be a journalist, covering for Paris Match the glittering circuit that her mother had lost interest in.) With a Parisian husband and a newborn daughter, Olivia never looked back.

Sister vs. Sister

The unmentionable sibling: the elephant in any room with Olivia de Havilland.

Olivia, who can have a wickedly understated wit, doesn't believe in getting dramatic about it, but she still refers to Joan's 1978 autobiography, No Bed of Roses, as "No Shred of Truth." True to her meticulous ways, she has compiled an annotated rebuttal to what she sees as the book's discrepancies and misrepresentations, which is ready to go whenever she might sit still enough to write her own memoirs. But, for the record, Olivia wants the world to know that she doesn't look back in anger, only affection. "I loved her so much as a child," Olivia says wistfully. Ever the lady, she has steadfastly refused to discuss her sister or their relationship since the 1950s.

Not so Joan. In a 1978 interview with People—a forceful blast of sua culpa meant to publicize No Bed of Roses—Joan flatly contradicted Olivia's recollection of sibling tenderness, saying, "I regret that I remember not one act of kindness from Olivia all through my childhood."

As Olivia tells it, the sisterly love began to evaporate when Olivia and Joan hit six and five, respectively, and began taking art lessons from a teacher who had a swimming pool on her estate. One day, on a study break, Joan, who was playing in the pool, beckoned to her sister, grabbed her by the ankle, and tried to pull her in. "She had never been rambunctious like that before, so it took me completely unaware," says Olivia, who, as the Gablehernia affair demonstrates, certainly had her own rambunctious streak. Olivia was stronger than Joan suspected, so instead of pulling her big sister in, Joan ended up chipping her collarbone on the pool ledge and had to wear a cast. Olivia was punished for the incident, and her pool privileges were revoked. This moment of child's play, Olivia says, became the genesis of cinema's greatest sibling feud. (In her memoir, Joan situated the story a decade later, when she was 16 and Olivia 17, as if maturity would underscore the malignity of what she characterized as her sister's intentional and dastardly deed.)

As the girls got older, Joan's anger and physicality, as Olivia tells it, only increased. Joan

would slap her face, time after time, with Olivia turning the other cheek. When Olivia could take no more, she would pull Joan's hair, and epic hairy tugs-of-war would ensue. Olivia concedes that Joan—who liked to complain that Ohvia was an ah-too-avid believer in the rights of primogeniture—resented wearing Olivia's hand-me-down dresses and shoes; she would deliberately step on Olivia's heels when following her up the stairs. In her People jeremiad, Joan turned Baby Jane on her sister, claiming that Olivia would terrorize her by reading the Crucifixion story from the Bible aloud.

"Our biggest problem was that we had to share a room," Olivia says with a sigh, citing a cause that has launched countless sibling rivalries. She describes how Joan discovered she shared her sister's gift for mimicry and began torturing her. Olivia couldn't stand the maddening echoes and complained to Mummy, who advised her to call Joan "copycat" every time she repeated what Olivia said. "Copycat," Joan echoed her. For once, Mrs. de Havilland was at a loss for words.

The bickering sisters' new stepfather, a local department-store manager named George Fontaine, didn't rely on words. He was a dictatorial disciplinarian, whom Olivia still calls the Iron Duke, and he liked to beat the battling siblings. Fontaine gave them a choice of punishments—a tablespoon of cod-liver oil, which would make them throw up, or a whacking on the shins with a wooden clothes hanger. Once, when Olivia amassed 22 bruises on her legs, a staffer at her school intervened and warned Fontaine to cease and desist. It didn't work.

Instead of bonding against their common enemy, the sisters liked nothing more than to entrap each other in one of Fontaine's thrashings. At dinner Olivia would make faces that would force her sister to laugh and spit out her milk, leaving Joan to face Fontaine's wrath. Mrs. de Havilland was ill for much of this period, often away in a San Francisco hospital, which left the girls without a protector. The two of them eventually reached the painful conclusion that it was time to get out of Saratoga. Olivia escaped into dramatics. Joan escaped even farther, to Japan, going to live with her father and his new wife in 1933. She attended an English-language high school in a Tokyo suburb and returned to California in 1934, only to find her big sister and sparring partner on the verge of stardom. "Joan came with Mummy to opening night of Dream at the San Francisco Opera House," Olivia says. "I didn't even recognize her. She had bleached hah. She was smoking. She was no longer my younger sister. I advised her to go to Los Gatos High School and graduate. 'I don't want to,' she told me defiantly. 'I want to do what you arc doing.' "

It was as if Joan were clairvoyant, knowing how big Olivia would become before she actually got there. By the same token, Joan seemed possessed with the thought that she too could have the same success. Olivia had no idea where A Midsummer Night's Dream might take her. But when it did take her to Hollywood, she offered to use some of her new Warner Bros, contract money to pay for Joan's tuition at Katharine Branson, a prep school for Bay Area debutantes seeking Nob Hill husbands. Again, Joan refused. "I want to do what you're doing," she insisted.

"I suppose the way I saw it then," Olivia recalls, "was that I wanted Hollywood as my domain, and I wanted San Francisco society to be hers. I thought San Francisco was superior, I really did—the ait, the opera, the clubs, the balls. I thought the sophistication Joan gained from her time in Japan made her perfectly suited for high society. But she wasn't the slightest bit interested. 'I want to do what you are doing' was her mantra."

Olivia was perplexed by the little sister's insistence that she had to follow the big sister's hard-earned career path, but she finally buckled to Joan's intransigence. Yet she drew the hne at sharing her name in Hollywood. "I gave her examples of younger sisters who changed their names and had the best careers," Olivia says. "Loretta Young and Sally Blane, for instance. I even offered her an incentive: Change your name and you can come to Hollywood and hve with me and Mummy, who was moving down to be my guardian because I was not yet of age. But she wouldn't budge. She wanted to do it exactly as I was doing it, all by herself."

Soon enough, a clairvoyant accomplished what Olivia had failed at. At a party at the house of British actor Brian Aherne, a licensed pilot whom Olivia had dated, a fortune-teller predicted that Joan would enjoy no success until she used a stage name. It needed to have eight letters and start with F. There she had it, right from her abusive stepfather. The fortune-teller also predicted that Joan would marry the host. Right again, despite the 15-year age difference.

At first, Olivia did her best to help Joan make Fontaine a household name of its own. In the middle of filming Gone with the Wind, David O. Selznick decided once again to try to spring Olivia from Jack Warner to make Rebecca with Laurence Olivier. Again, Warner refused. Selznick decided it was easier to switch than fight. "Would you mind if I take your sister?" Selznick asked Olivia. "She's perfect."

"He was very elegant about it," Olivia says, with resignation about Hollywood realpohtik. "I was losing a brilliant part, but O.K." Olivia does her best to rationalize her loss. "She was really better for it than I was. She was blonde; Larry was brunette." Rebecca—directed by Alfred Hitchcock, a noted aficionado of blondes—led to Joan's first best-actress nomination. The next year, 1941, she got another one, for Suspicion, also directed by Hitchcock. She won, beating her sister, who had been nominated for Hold Back the Dawn, Joan and Olivia were sitting at the same table when Joan's name was announced. As Joan wrote in No Bed of Roses, "All the animus we'd felt toward each other as children, the hair-pullings, the savage wrestling matches, the time Olivia fractured my collarbone, all came rushing back in kaleidoscopic imagery. My paralysis was total." This was the only time a Hitchcock actor or actress would ever win an Oscar. The moment launched global headlines about "the war of the star sisters."

Just as the sisters were reaching new levels of stardom, the tabloid and gossip press was at its cattiest. This was the era of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. Much hay would be made of Olivia and Joan's supposed spat at the 1947 Oscars, when Joan claimed that Olivia—who had won best actress for To Each His Own—nastily spurned her congratulations. Olivia might have been justified, given Joan's famously bitchy remark not long before about Olivia's new husband, Marcus Goodrich: "All I know about him is that he's had four wives and written one book. Too bad it's not the other way around." It didn't help—both on a personal level and in terms of the prying press—that the sisters' personal styles were so entirely different. "Joan had a lot of dash that men admired immensely," Olivia says. Among Joan's high-profile romances were Prince Aly Khan, Adlai Stevenson, and, in another too-close-for-comfort chapter, Howard Hughes. Ohvia, on the other hand, was never a staple of the society pages, and she knew it. "I'm a simple person," Olivia says. "I don't have the flair, dash, and style of Joan."

The following decade, when Olivia decamped to Paris and the sisters' careers began to simmer down, the columnists, themselves becoming obsolete, mostly left the two alone. Establishing their own non-Hollywood fiefdoms—Olivia in Paris, Joan in Manhattan— they settled into a wary detente. But when Mrs. de Havilland got sick with cancer in 1975, her final illness produced a new and vicious contretemps as to who was the most devoted child. While Joan was on the road with Cactus Flower, Olivia and her daughter, Gisele, stayed by Mummy's side, helping prepare her passage to what, according to Olivia, her mother rosily described as "the upcoming celestial cocktail party, a reunion with everyone she loved, complete with martinis." She dressed her 88-year-old mother up, gave her pedicures and beauty treatments, read to her from the Book of Common Prayer, and kept her spirits high until the end. "I called her the Last Empress of China," Olivia says, still missing her today.

In No Bed of Roses, Joan wrote of attending Mummy's memorial service at a little country theater near Saratoga, and exchanging no words with Olivia. With the book's publication, in 1978, Joan settled this score, most viciously, in interviews, calling the funeral the sisters' "final schism." As ever, Olivia kept quiet.

Love, Laughter, and Light

Although she remains an American citizen, Olivia has made a big impression on her adopted country. French president Nicolas Sarkozy, when he awarded her the Legion d'Honneur, in 2010, gushed that he couldn't believe he was in the presence of Melanie. Most Americans never equated Olivia de Havilland with smoldering sexuality, but here in France, things were always different. Pascal Negre, an old classmate of Gisele Galante's, found his friend's mother sexy in the most understated, but powerful, way. "She told this story of how she rejected John F. Kennedy when he was in Hollywood visiting Robert Stack after his PT-109 service days," he says. "She said she was too busy and had to rehearse. Poor J.F.K.!"

In her 60-plus years in Paris, Olivia has developed a huge network of friends, many of whom are connected to the American Cathedral, on the Avenue George V, where her readings of the Scriptures on Christmas and Easter have become annual events. Several years ago she auctioned her huge teddy-bear collection, given to her by her friend the actress Ida Lupino, to restore the church's grand fagade. She is an honorary lifetime trustee at the American Library and has received an honorary degree in humane letters from the American University in Paris, where she helped settle a bitter student strike in the anti-Vietnam War 70s. (After a long separation, Olivia and Pierre divorced in 1979, and he died in Paris in 1998.)

In 1999, her good friends Lee Huebner, the former publisher of the International Herald Tribune, and his wife, Berna, gave a huge Gone with the Wind party in her honor at UNESCO headquarters in Paris to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the film. "Her toast—'Let us raise a mint julep to our stars on that great veranda in the sky!'—was typical of Olivia's unique way with words," Berna Huebner says. "No star is more brilliant." Olivia narrated Eric Ellena and Bema's affecting documentary about art as Alzheimer's therapy, I Remember Better When I Paint, in 2009, her most recent film credit, but hardly one she would ever acknowledge to be her last.

Olivia attributes her amazingly healthy longevity to "the three L 's love, laughter, and light." She does the Times crossword puzzle every day, a passion she developed as a teenager, and looks at every pain or symptom as a mystery to be solved and conquered, not a harbinger of doom. No one on earth is more positive. A lot of her precepts for perpetual health are those she learned in Camp Fire Girls, where her name was Thunderbird. She told her French doctor she plans to live to 110, which explains why she has been in no rush to write her memoirs. A terrific writer, she authored a memorable tribute to her friend Mickey Rooney in Time in 2014 that was a masterpiece of focused and powerful emotion, remembrance, and regret. Her book—should she write it—could be the last and best word on the Hollywood that, to this day, she epitomizes.

It might also offer the closing chapter on the Olivia-Joan saga. They were finally reunited, Olivia says, out of public view, with help from time's winged chariot and their shared religious roots. Olivia was always mindful of her paternal grandfather, an Anglican priest in Guernsey, as well as her mother's abiding faith in an afterlife. "Joan didn't keep that faith," Olivia recalls, "and I had dropped mine as well. Until my son's illness. So when Joan was at a low ebb, I tried to explain to her how the Church had come back to mean a great deal to me. Despite what I call her 'genuine disbelief,' she joined Saint Thomas"—the Episcopal church on Fifth Avenue in New York. Joan had once baited Olivia by telling an interviewer, "I got married first, got an Academy Award first, had a child first. If I die, she'll be furious, because again I'll have got there first!" Olivia's official statement that she was "shocked and saddened" when Joan "got there first," in December of 2013, belies a deep and enduring grief that no veteran-thespian façade can fully conceal.

She remains as busy as ever. At our last meeting, she was in the midst of writing a thank-you address to last year's Cannes Film Festival, which honored her, Jane Fonda, and producer Megan Ellison. Then she led me out to the Saint James's grand stairwell atrium and did five sprightly laps around its perimeter. "One hundred ten!" she exulted, her plus10 version of the Italian toast "Cent'anni."

As a going-away gift, she offered me those Spellbound earrings that I had admired, to give to my mother, who shares her exact birthday and has been a fan for 80 years. Then she asked me cryptically if I love Paris. At my inevitable affirmative, she presented me with a magnificent coffee-table book on the vanished glories of the city. "We'll always have Paris," Olivia said, bidding farewell with a wink to classic Hollywood and to her glorious liberation from it.