It is 2011 and I am a student in Paris, teaching English for a year and renting a small flat only two metro stops from Olivia de Havilland’s residence. Her personal assistant is my friend Kate, whose duties include bringing De Havilland her daily tipple – she likes to have a glass of champagne at 6pm. Planning to go away for a long weekend, Kate asks if I’ll hold the fort.
I say yes straightaway and am invited round to meet my new boss. I take the metro to Porte Dauphine, in the smart 16th arrondissement and, as instructed, phone Kate to tell her I’ll be arriving in a few minutes “so that Olivia can reapply her lipstick”. I can’t quite get my head round this: a Hollywood legend taking the time to polish herself for a scruffy 20-year-old student.
De Havilland’s home is a stately white hotel particulier, or Parisian townhouse, five storeys high, in the same street as three foreign embassies and a sprawling mansion that, I later discover, belongs to former French president Giscard d’Estaing (a police officer hovers permanently outside). Kate leads me upstairs for introductions. De Havilland is sitting on a small couch, dressed in a cream silk blouse and dark skirt (probably Dior, whose designs she’s been faithful to since moving to Paris – “under the reign of King Christian the First”, according to her memoir).
Although nearing her 95th birthday, she is a commanding presence, with her red lipstick, her large pearl earrings, her white hair set in a bouffant – and a surprisingly deep voice. I’m particularly nervous as Kate, a Canadian, has hinted that her boss isn’t very fond of Brits: being hard of hearing, De Havilland now favours American accents. Most of her former assistants are young women recruited from the American University in Paris. But when we shake hands and start chatting, I’m struck by how smiley and warm she is, at pains to thank me for offering to help out. I tell her it’s a pleasure. Afterwards, I get a text from Kate: “OdH said you were ‘adorable’ and ‘a dear’!!!!”
The weekend goes smoothly. I get on with the admin tasks, rearranging a hair salon appointment and checking her inbox. She doesn’t do email herself: her assistants print off messages and she dictates replies. On the wall of her study, there’s a framed letter. “As a young man,” it reads, “I must confess I had a crush on the saintly Melanie Wilkes in Gone with the Wind. Yours, Barack.” I notice, too, a message from her agent mentioning a Guardian journalist who has been requesting an interview for several months. “Shall I tell her to go away?” the agent has asked.
De Havilland rarely does press these days, and only makes the odd public appearance. Actually, she doesn’t often go downstairs – one day, after a mix-up over who was supposed to give me the keys, I’m unable to enter the house, so she throws them to me in the street from an upstairs window. “Yoo-hoo!” she trills. “Watch out!”
Only once do I see her ready to go out – dressed all in black, with oyster-coloured satin ballet shoes, waiting for her car to take her to some evening event. She spends most of her hours in the same small room, sitting on the velvet couch that doubles as her bed at night, and doesn’t usually venture much further than the study next door.
But De Havilland still likes to think of her life as a hectic whirl. When my temporary stint is over, she asks me to stay on to make an inventory of all the books and magazines in her attic, while Kate works downstairs. De Havilland has a fetish for parcels and correspondence to be “just so”: letters must be placed in pale blue envelopes, and Kate will often find herself re-wrapping a package to meet her boss’s exacting requirements, or noting down dictations for the third draft of an email (De Havilland is a stickler for elegant prose). “Oh, we’re so busy today!” she will often complain, clearly delighted by the idea, even though there aren’t any urgent tasks on the agenda.
I never see her so happy as the time when Emily, one of her cherished former assistants, drops in for a weekend to help out, and there are three of us young assistants milling around. Emily and I are of similar height and colouring and De Havilland jokes that we’re twins: “I’m seeing double!” At mealtimes, her cook, Rosa, is also there, busy in the kitchen – I can tell when she’s arrived by the inviting smells which waft up to my post on the fifth floor of the house.
As I’m mostly working around the dusty shelves of the attic, my boss nicknames me Cinderella and Jane Eyre. She is endlessly impressed with the pages I produce, even though it’s hardly the most demanding job: typing out titles, authors, dates of publication, leafing through stacks of National Geographic magazines from the 1970s and old textbooks from her children’s schooldays. De Havilland insists, often, on paying me far more than she owes me for the hours I’ve worked – on one occasion, double the amount. I protest that she’s being too generous.
“I’m getting a message from the Lord,” she explains, in her booming voice, “telling me to pay you more.”
“Well, that’s very generous of him,” I say.
“Oh yes,” she says, “he’s known for that.”
Her sense of humour sometimes makes me laugh out loud. Working in the attic one day, my phone beeps with a message from Kate: “Olivia told me she was once frisked at an airport. And it was ‘delicious’.”
De Havilland moved to Paris in 1953, after meeting her second husband, Pierre Galante, the then editor of Paris Match. They had one daughter, but divorced in 1979. Looking back, my one regret is that I only got the chance to work for her towards the end of my time in Paris. I wish I’d had more time to get to know her better. I can still hear her Hollywood drawl, lingering over the syllables in “maaaarvellous”. Her twinkly eyes and her deliberate, theatrical pauses. She had no time for understatement or half-measures. She was a performer, playing the part of Olivia, the veteran movie star.
I remember, once, overhearing a tense telephone conversation and asking her afterwards if everything was all right. “Goodness, no!” she said with a smile. “It’s all desperate.”
