There was an extremely enjoyable small party on Saturday night for the re-launch of Anthony Holden’s biography of Laurence Olivier, one of the best in a large field, by the small publisher Max Press.

Max Press herself, a glamorous 28 year-old publisher, not all that small, whose name is given to this enterprising imprint of Little Books Ltd, welcomed us to her Notting Hill eyrie where, from the balcony, we could see the whole of London laid out before us and fireworks shooting in all directions.

It was truly spectacular. As each cluster of rockets and kaleidoscopic conflagrations illumined the night sky, Tony “Golden” Holden proclaimed the top-hole show of the Battersea Park Olivier appreciation society, or the splendid efforts of the Alexandra Palace and Primrose Hill Larry lovers association.

We sipped Bellinis and red wine, while Max and her friends treated us to a sumptuous array of home-made canapés – her mini sausage rolls and devils on horseback were to die for – and conversation was joined with various industry insiders and such street-wise flaneurs as John Walsh of the Independent and Richard Kay of the Mail. Larry himself was hardly mentioned at all, but the sight of the new minted book piled high in the corner was a constant reminder.

Tony has added a final chapter to his pretty complete publication of 1988 (Olivier died in the following year) and this reports the sumptuous memorial in Westminster Abbey (the Queen chose to send in her place Lord Zuckerman, “a zoologist and authority on baboons”) and wraps up all the posthumous gossip about the great man’s affairs (well, the one with Sarah Miles, at least) and unconfirmed reports of his homosexual obsessions with Marlon Brando, Noel Coward, Danny Kaye and even (impossible to credit) Kenneth Tynan.

As an actor, Olivier was a seductive flirt, so his onstage make-up was no mere disguise. Holden makes this point by replacing his original dust jacket of Olivier as a beetle-browed King Lear with a sexy studio shot from the Hollywood glamour days.

And the author has now removed his own handsome portrait and details of his age (he was born on the same day as Olivier, forty years later) and also Prince Charles’s recommendation that Holden’s style is “most enjoyable.”

It became less so for the future king when Holden, the prince’s first biographer, changed his mind about him – “I felt like a dog returning to its vomit,” he now says, charmingly — in his third royal tome and switched allegiances to Diana. 

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 4th, 2007 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.