Category: vivien leigh

Tickerage Mill Revisited

By Kendra + June 29, 2011

“My wife and I happened to be in England during the month before Vivien died and we visited her at her country house, Tickerage Mill, near the village of Black Boys, Sussex. This is one of the most beautiful small estates in the country and is approached down a winding lane, the last turn of which reveals the compact, weathered brick house and the high wall which encloses the rose garden. It is not until one has passed through the house, and admired its old oak beams and lovely period furniture, that one steps out on the terrace and sees the lake; weeping willows overhand its banks, with here and there clumps of graceful reeds. It was one of those rare and magical days that Englishmen everywhere dream about, radiant, warm and tranquil. An old boat lay moored to a post and a family of moorhens moved across the water, slowly and in single file. Beyond the lake rose a small, soft Sussex down, crowned with a copse of trees. Rooks cawed in the elms. It was a traditional scene, so often described by Victorian novels and poets, yet still so moving in its beauty.” — Brian Aherne

Last Sunday, I went to Tickerage again. This time I joined my lovely friend Shiroma and her daughter Christina on a walk through the Sussex countryside. The weather has been so horrible this month, but we had sun and really high temperatures on Sunday and Monday, rather like Brian Aherne described above. I took the train down from London, and we got stranded at Hever because of a signal failure or something. The conductor allowed us to get off the train for some fresh air, so I did, started chatting with a guy who had been waiting at the station since the previous train came in an hour earlier, and then had to run when the train started leaving without me! Luckily, the conductor saw me and let me back in.

I finally made it to Uckfield, where Shiroma and her family picked me up in the car and we drove out to the Blackboys Inn for lunch and a nice, refreshing Crabbie’s ginger beer (can you tell I’m obsessed?). Apparently ownership of the Inn had changed quite recently, so the current owners could tell us nothing about the days when Vivien Leigh used to frequent the pub for an infamous pink gin. After lunch, we drove to Tickerage Lane, and Shiroma, Christina and I got out and walked. We didn’t have any luck meeting our friend from last time out mowing his lawn, so we snapped a few photos from the drive and continued our hike through the Sussex countryside en route to Buxton, the stop on the line before Uckfield.

I love Sussex so much. The scenery is so tranquil and lovely old houses sit in secluded glens surrounded by trees and pastures, well manicured lawns and winding country lanes. Every house we passed had a name: Beggar’s Barn, Gables, Scantling’s Inn. There is such a contrast between the slow life in the country and the fast pace of London. No wonder people like to have a place to get away for a while.

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The Sixth Sense is Dress-Sense

By Kendra + June 16, 2011

Vivien Leigh in a magenta velvet with turquoise tulle gown by Victor Stiebel | Photo by John Rawlings

A couple months ago I wrote a guest post for The Girl Who Stole the Eiffel Tower titled Style Icon: Vivien Leigh, in which I explored Vivien’s side-job as a fashion model and style maven. Like many actresses who become famous, however briefly, Vivien graced the pages of fashion and women’s magazines. Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Ladies’ Home Journal, among others, reported how their readers could relate to Vivien Leigh, star-as-woman, by observing her unique fashion choices.

In doing research for my dissertation on how “Vivien Leigh” was created through the media, I’ve come across many references to fashion being an integral part of a female star’s image. Throughout her career, Vivien was classified by Vogue and other magazines as a certain “type” of woman. She was “exotic,” “strange,” “beautiful” outwardly “flawless” and these traits came across in the characters she played on film. Today I spent some time in the Westminster Reference Library with my friend and research partner in crime, Sammi, flipping through old bound issues of Vogue in effort to find blurbs about Vivien. The following is one of my favorites because it describes her to a T.

The Sixth Sense is Dress-Sense

Vogue, December 22, 1937

Miss Vivien Leigh strikes a particularly vibrant note, in a fey style of her own. She is a pixie rather than a fairy: her feline, wispish face, both elfin and worldly, has that breathless quality of perfection we associate with film stars. She has a quality of burnished metal…of finely tempered steel. She wears vivid, dragon-fly clothes that are either tautly draped around her flawless, hipless figure, or nipped into her wasp waist to billow out as does Stiebel’s tulle and velvet skirt in her picture on page 14. Her mannerisms are as perfectly tuned to her personality as her clothes. A darting glance from those strange Persian cat eyes, a shrug of those perfectly poised shoulders…a pouting moue…What assurance, what knowledge of her type lies in each one…an actress to her fingertips, in spite of what some disagreeable critics say. An actress, moreover, who knows how to change her mood with her frock. She can wear all sorts of clothes of any period, and on her lovely head, the most hysterical hats seem logical.

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Vivien Leigh at Bonhams and the Lost Gone with the Wind Manuscript

By Kendra + May 9, 2011

There have been two exciting, recent exhibitions in the US featuring Vivien Leigh. The first was at Bonhams in New York where many of director George Cukor’s personal items were auctioned off. The artifacts had been in the hands of the Estate of Charles Williamson and Tucker Flemming, and included several photos and letters from and related to Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier. The Oliviers were lifelong friends with Cukor, and their mutual friendships with the The Philadelphia Story director continued after their divorce. Along with photos and personal letters, the auction also contained and letters from Vivien’s daughter Suzanne to journalist Radie Harris about a book Radie was planning to publish about Vivien in the late 1980s.

The second exhibition is currently ongoing. 4 chapters from Margaret Mitchell’s original Gone with the Wind manuscript (thought to have been destroyed upon the author’s death in 1949) have been recovered and will be on display at the University of Georgia as part of the 75th anniversary celebrations going on throughout the state. Right now, the exhibition is traveling, and vivandlarry.com visitor Meg was able to see it at the Pequot Library in Southport, CT. She was kind enough to snap some photos (as well as the ones from the Bonhams auction) and send them in to the site. Thanks so much, Meg! I wish this exhibit would come to London.

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Vivien Leigh as a Style Icon

By Kendra + April 20, 2011

Yesterday, I was lucky enough to do a guest post at one of my all-time favorite blogs, The Girl Who Stole the Eiffel Tower! Casee Marie’s beautiful site is “an honest exploration of writing as a cultural and lifestyle blog from the perspective of a fashion-conscious young woman practicing Parisian style in the American Midwest.” Casee also happens to be a fan of Old Hollywood and I’ve been lucky enough to have some amazing discussions with her on various platforms (livejournal, tumblr, facebook, etc) over the past few years. As The Girl Who Stole the Eiffel Tower is part of the fashion blogging community, I decided to write about Vivien Leigh as a style icon. Many people talk about her films, her stage work and her personal life, but the topic of her personal style doesn’t come up that often, and it’s one of the many facets of Vivien that I find inspirational. Thank you for featuring me, Casee!

“Only England could have produced her. She was the perfect English rose. When the door opened and she was there, she was so terribly good-looking. She had such an exquisite unreality about her.” — Former Vogue editor in chief and style guru Diana Vreeland on Vivien Leigh

When people talk about vintage style icons, a few obvious names come immediately to mind: Louise Brooks with her trademark black helmet of hair, the ultimate 1920s flapper; Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly, the epitome of 1950s elegance; Jean Shrimpton and her work with David Bailey, defining mod style in the 60s; Twiggy bringing thin to the forefront in the 60s and 70s. These women defined entire eras in fashion. But while I admire the prevalence of iconography, I’ve always found inspiration in someone else: Vivien Leigh.

Many people may not even be aware that Vivien Leigh was ever considered a “style icon”. She is usually not remembered so much for her designer clothes as the remarkable way she inhabited the characters she played. She was first and foremost an actress. Her fame was instant and all-encompassing. In 1935, at the mere age of 21, she took London’s West End by storm when she appeared as a 17th century French courtesan in a play called The Mask of Virtue. Four years later she achieved international film icon status for her portrayal as Margaret Mitchell’s unflappable Southern belle, Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. Her status as one of the world’s most beautiful women lasted her entire life.

Although performance was her life’s passion, she also had amazing taste in clothes, art, music and interesting people. And she was stunning. Many of the world’s most famous fashion photographers shot her for the pages of Vogue and other magazines, including Cecil Beaton, John Rawlings, George Hoyningen-Huene, Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Clifford Coffin to name but a few. The designers she favored read like a laundry list of famous labels: Schiaparelli, Lanvin, Molyneux, Dior, Mainbocher, Balmain. If Vivien were alive and young today, we would never see her on the runway. She was only 5’3″. But “models” as we know them today did not come in to fashion until the mid-1940s. Prior to the arrival of Suzy Parker, Dorian Leigh and Lisa Fonssagrives, the women who modeled for Vogue were almost exclusively actresses or socialites.

Read the full post over at The Girl Who Stole the Eiffel Tower (and follow Casee’s blog while you’re at it, it’s seriously beautiful!)

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Vivien Leigh’s Tickerage Mill

By Kendra + April 19, 2011

**Warning: This post is image-heavy

I woke up this morning with every intention of going to the library and studying. Instead, Sammi Steward and I took an impromptu trip to Sussex to snap some photos of Vivien Leigh’s final resting place. The weather was perfect: 65 degrees and sunny. What better thing to do on a sunny spring afternoon than go to the countryside?

We met up at Victoria Station and boarded the next train to Croydon where we changed (and missed the hourly train to Sussex by literally 30 seconds) and headed to Uckfield. Sussex is a beautiful area. I remembered how I’d loved it when I did a summer abroad in Brighton my junior year in college. How time flies! On the train down, Sammi and I were having a discussion about Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier something or another when suddenly, the man in the seat across from us said, “I take it you’re going to Tickerage Mill?” How did he know? Apparently our indoor voices aren’t that quiet. He introduced himself as Duncan, the mayor of Uckfield. He said his in-laws very nearly bought the house next door to Tickerage Mill, and was very kind in not only telling us the easiest way to get out there, but arranged a little meeting between us and his friend who runs the Picture House cinema in town–apparently it’s one of the oldest indie theatres in England. Duncan also told us a lovely story about his friend’s claim to fame: Said friend had been up in London for work and had had a few drinks before catching the train back home. As Uckfield is the end of the line, he was roused out of his nap by a shake on the shoulder and a man saying, “I think you’re getting off at Uckfield.” The man was none other than Sir Laurence Olivier on his way to visit Vivien Leigh (conveniently, Uckfield is just between Brighton and London), and he offered Duncan’s friend a ride home in his hired car. We knew Larry went to visit Vivien on occasion!