Despite Olivia’s grace in accepting defeat for a second year running—after losing for her supporting role as Melanie in Gone with the Wind (1939)—Joan was appalled that she had triumphed over her sister and felt a rush of mixed emotions and pent up childhood animus resurface. Olivia would go on to win two Oscars of her own, for To Each his Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949), but the damage was already done. That moment in the ballroom of The Biltmore Hotel seemingly crystallized the fraught relationship and uneasy rivalry the sisters had already endured. The hair-pulling, childhood wrestling matches and the fractured collarbone Joan received were already in the past, but now, with their joint nomination and Joan’s win, the sisters were catapulted into very public professional enmity that would endure as Hollywood gossip for decades. Joan’s probably unintentional slight of omitting mention of Olivia in her acceptance speech would be repaid in 1946 when Olivia would allegedly snub Joan backstage after winning—wheeling away from her outstretched hand and leaving her sister to shrug things off in a moment famously captured by a Photoplay photographer. The seeds of this sibling rivalry went all the way back to their unconventional early childhood in Tokyo. /////////////////////////////////////// Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland entered the world on October 22, 1917 in Tokyo. Her mother Lillian would later claim that she’d been conceived on the chaise longue when tall, handsome Walter de Havilland came home early from his chess club and had a moment before it was time to dress for dinner. The couple had met at an embassy tea party in Tokyo, where Lillian’s brother was Walter’s colleague at Waseda University—Walter also taught at Imperial University and was a patent attorney. It was in that role that he assisted Tokyo School for Foreign Children (the former name for ASIJ) in obtaining property from the Union Church at #17 Tsukiji in 1910 when the school needed to move location. Prior to that he had stepped in to act as interim principal for the school in the 1906-07 academic year. Walter pursued Lillian for the next year and followed her on a return voyage to England via the Panama Canal. As the ship steamed out of New Orleans harbor, he proposed marriage for the last of many times. Lillian replied that they should toss for it and a silver coin was duly flipped. She lost and when they docked in New York a hasty marriage was arranged, an equally hasty honeymoon taken at Niagara Falls and then the onward journey to their home country completed. Back in Tokyo, they settled into a large, comfortable residence close to the American
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THE AMERICAN SCHOOL IN JAPAN
Embassy in Toranomon in what is now the new wing of The Okura Hotel. The couple soon started their family and Olivia Mary was born on July 1, 1916. A little over a year later Joan joined the family. Right from the start the sisters enjoyed separate existences, each with their own day and night nurses as amahs were plentiful and cheap. Sickly Joan, with her baby eczema caused by her diet of goat’s milk, was of little interest to the active, olive-skinned Olivia. Joan’s parents maintained an uneasy marriage those first few years. Lillian would later tell TIME magazine that her husband “spoke like God, but behaved like the devil.” Lillian had studied acting at RADA in London and had toured with renowned composer Ralph Vaughn Williams In Tokyo, she put her talents to use entertaining the foreign community with dinner shows, much to the annoyance of her husband. Joan would later quip that Walter “felt women should be seen, preferably undressed, and not heard at all.” He pursued his own interests—chess, go, tennis and geisha—and “delighted in upsetting the social smugness of the British colony as much as possible.” Soon it was his young wife who was upset, when one of the upstairs maids began wearing increasingly costly kimono. It was clear that she’d become more than just a maid and an ultimatum was issued—either the family or Yoki-san would have to go. The de Havillands set sail for San Francisco in February 1919 for a climate that Lillian felt was more suitable for the children. Walter immediately headed back to Tokyo alone, to Yoki-san, leaving the children and his wife in an apartment near Golden Gate Park. Lillian consulted lawyers and abandoned the idea of continuing on to Italy, as California divorce and custody laws were more sympathetic to mothers. It was an uncertain few years that followed with the family first moving to the Vendome Hotel in San Jose, then to The Lundblands, a Swedish-run boarding house, and finally Green Cottages in Saratoga. The family also spent time at Hakone, a beautiful Japanese estate in the hills near Saratoga complete with tatami rooms, teahouses, ornamental gardens and ponds. Joan later remembered the estate as a “child’s paradise” and a place she felt reconnected with the land of her birth—today it is open to the public and appeared as a location in the film Memoirs of a Geisha (2005). While they waited for the divorce proceedings to be figured out, Lillian and the girls got on with their lives. Olivia and Joan had already identified their mother’s next husband in the park in San Francisco. Olivia had spotted a mild-looking American gentleman reading a newspaper and decided that he was a good candidate. She pointed at him and called out “Dana-san, Dana-san!” to her mother. Lillian recognized that she was still speaking Japanese and saying