I love to read a good trashy book. Generally, my taste in literature (like my taste in television) veers towards procedural crime dramas, thrillers, detective stories and psychological suspense. But I have another guilty reading habit: I love celebrity biographies. I will pour through a celebrity biography any day of the week – whether it’s Cary Grant or Jack Nicholson or Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe, it doesn’t really matter to me. I just find their stuff interesting, especially if the celebrity was really decadent. The Daily Mail has excerpts from a new biography that I’m totally going to get – it’s of English actress Vivien Leigh, a star most famous in America for her roles as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, and as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. Leigh was famously married to Laurence Olivier, and she rather famously had a long history of mental illness – so her biography was always going to be juicy. But I wasn’t expecting some of this – apparently, she was bisexual, she loved male prostitutes (“rough trade”), and she boned Marlon Brando and Rex Harrison. Scandal!

She was described as ‘the essence of English womanhood’ by the then poet laureate John Betjeman. On top of that, Vivien Leigh’s romance with Laurence Olivier was a fairytale that wowed 1930s Hollywood. It was, of course, all too good to be true but the full extent of Miss Leigh’s fall from grace can now be revealed.

According to a new biography, the actress who starred as southern belle Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind was a serial bisexual adulterer. Her marriage to Olivier was a sham, with both cheating on one another within months of becoming lovers in 1937, according to unpublished memoirs and witness accounts.

At least three of the Oscar winner’s lesbian conquests are revealed in ‘Damn You, Scarlett O’Hara’, to be published in the U.S. And, according to reports, the biography describes her insatiable appetite for ‘rough trade’ – male prostitutes picked up at Scotty’s, a Los Angeles brothel that masqueraded as a petrol station.

‘In the 1940s the world’s most recognisable star would drive down to Scotty’s with her friend George Cukor, the initial director of ‘Gone with the Wind’, and they would pick out young men for the night,’ a publishing source said.

‘They would pay the men with gifts such as cigarette cases, jewels or even stocks and bonds. She depended on the professional discretion of men not to boast they had just serviced Scarlett O’Hara.’

Miss Leigh was apparently even kicked out of an Italian hotel for bringing back too many ‘street boys’.

‘Today, she would be diagnosed as bipolar and there are drugs that would help, but in those days people did not know how to deal with a star who tore off all her clothes and ran out of her house,’ the source added.

The memoir is by Darwin Porter, who knew the British actress in the 1960s, and Roy Moseley, Olivier’s former assistant.

‘They were both beautiful and both wanted more,’ the authors say. ‘Vivien loved to torture Olivier with her affairs, especially after she grew more mentally ill, depressed and manic.’

In addition to flings with British actress Isabel Jeans and two other women, Miss Leigh also cheated with co-stars Marlon Brando and Rex Harrison, they add.

Miss Leigh was born in Darkeeling in British India in 1913. She married barrister Leigh Holman when she was nineteen and still studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. But despite giving birth to a daughter, Suzanne, she returned to acting and ended up falling for Mr Olivier, then another rising star, who left his lesbian wife for her. They married in 1940, the year after GoneWith The Wind shot Miss Leigh to international stardom.

Among the ten Academy Awards won by the film was a Best Actress statuette for its leading lady. She won a second Oscar for her portrayal of the emotionally fragile Blanche DuBois in 1951’s ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’

In 1960, she and Sir Laurence divorced and he went on to marry actress Joan Plowright.
In his autobiography, he described her illness, saying: ‘Throughout her possession by that uncanny evil monster, manic depression, with its ever-tightening spirals, she retained her own individual canniness – an ability to disguise her true mental condition from almost all except me, for whom she could hardly be expected to take the trouble.’

The actress died in 1967 aged 53.

[From The Daily Mail]

It sounds good, right? I didn’t realize that Vivien was bipolar, but that posthumous diagnosis makes sense – she reportedly had very extreme ups and downs, and by the time she worked with Brando, she was allegedly extremely fragile. According to a Brando biography I read a few months ago, Brando loved to be a savior, loved women who were like “wounded birds” that he could rescue and romance. It makes sense that he and Leigh would get it on. Rex Harrison on the other hand… eh. I’m more interested in hearing about the “rough trade”!