One day she answered the telephone to Howard Hughes. Their engagement had been erroneously announced in Louella Parsons’s gossip column, and he said, ‘I understand we’re engaged. Don’t you think we ought to meet?’
Olivia de Havilland, a star of Hollywood’s golden age, lives in Paris in a tall townhouse near the Bois de Boulogne. It is snowing when I arrive and I am so cold I can barely speak. The maid shows me into a drawing room where, outlined against a blazing fire, Miss de Havilland stands with welcoming arms outstretched. She is small in stature but her charm is enormous, overwhelming. It is exactly like being greeted by the character she created, Melanie in Gone With the Wind, as she takes my fur hat and clasps it to her bosom. ‘What a hat,’ she says, adding in a low voice resonant with sincerity, ‘It must be a great comfort to you.’
Meeting Miss de Havilland restores one’s faith in film stars. So many up-and-coming starlets barely deign to give you the time of day, but this double-Oscar-winner says sweetly, ‘You can ask me anything you like. Anything!’ Over tea and cakes (smart little almond financiers served by her maid) she tells me her life story with aplomb – ‘…So I said to our future president, John F Kennedy, “I’m sorry, I can’t join you for dinner, I’m studying my lines tonight”‘ – often breaking into high, owlish hoots of unexpectedly wicked laughter.
It is hard, very hard, to believe she is 93. Only the glorious vintage of her gossip gives it away. ‘I saw Norma Shearer dancing with Leslie Howard and I thought, “I wonder what her husband thinks about that”‘ Sometimes she confides regret: ‘For two weeks after I lost out on that Oscar, I didn’t believe in God’ and briefly, when I ask whether she might one day be reconciled with her sister, the actress Joan Fontaine, she shows the pain of an ongoing family feud. ‘Better not,’ she says, smiling through gritted teeth. ‘Better not.’
[…]
