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That reaction certainly shows I'm no casting director!"
TO begin with I'd like to state that despite what a lot of papers said there was never any feud between Vivien Leigh and me during the filming of "Gone with the Wind" or at any time thereafter.
Hollywood goes just as much to extremes when it comes to male and female stars cast together as it does on any other subject. Get a man and a woman in a picture together and you are immediately reported as either fighting or romancing. The fact that in eighty per cent of your pictures you have no emotion about the beautiful creature opposite you, other than an interest in her acting ability, is never printed. Yet that's the truth more often than not.
As for any possibility of Vivien Leigh's falling in love with me I knew that was out from our first glance. For never have I seen any girl more completely in love than that one is — with Laurence Olivier. It's as visible as a Neon sign that she can't think or talk of or dream about anything or anyone else on earth — except when she's on the set. When she's on the set, she's what a good actress should be. She's all business.
As for my falling in love with her, I'm sure that could have been plenty pleasant except that, added to her lack of interest in me, I didn't have any heart to give away, either. Mine was staked out to that Lombard girl who is mighty beautiful and brainy. Carole and I weren't married when Vivien and I first met, but we did marry while I was working on the picture and there's a story about our wedding that has never been told and which I'll get to presently.
I'll be truthful about it, however; I'll confess that the first time I saw her I doubted that Vivien could really play Scarlett. That reaction certainly shows I'm no casting director. But, accustomed to the more abandoned and superficial personalities of Hollywood girls, Vivien seemed too demure to me, at that first meeting, for the vivid, relentless Scarlett.
David Selznick introduced us to each other at a dinner party at his home. Vivien was wearing a very plain, tailored dress. She's much tinier in real life than she appears on the screen, and since she uses little make-up she has
a very young, unsophisticated air. Besides, she had all the fires banked that evening and that Olivier guy was her escort.
Now I know I should have stopped to consider all that. But having seen Vivien only in "A Yank at Oxford," in which she didn't have a lot to do, I just looked at her that first evening at David's and wondered if that keen-minded producer had gone haywire when he signed her.
I knew he hadn't the first day Vivien and I got on a set together. (David doesn't go haywire, anyway, which is another thing I should have thought about — but as a profound thinker I'm a good duck-hunter.) The best alibi I can offer for my thickheadedness is that my mind was preoccupied with Rhett Butler. He had me plenty worried, so worried that I didn't want to play him.
Don't think that was because I didn't realize what a fat part he was. Rhett is one of the greatest male characters ever created. I knew that. I'd read the entire book through six times, trying to get his moods. I've still got a copy in my dressing room and I still read it