Charles Laughton

by Simon Callow

  Du Maurier’s question was presumably a reference to the hysterical and malicious qualities Charles had brought to Walpole’s Crispin. But it must have given him a nasty turn. Because of course he was. He had not spoken of it to anyone, least of all to Elsa. If he had hoped that marriage would divert his desires, he was disappointed. His need for sex with men had not cleared up like acne, he was still impelled to find young men and sometimes even to bring them clandestinely home. Elsa Lanchester believes that these encounters were furtive and inspired by self-lacerating guilt: that Charles needed to sin, like a minor key version of that figure of whom he sometimes seems to be a thwarted alter ego: Oscar Wilde.

  She may be right. There may also have been great pleasure; though certainly little happiness, in the long run. In either case, one thing is sure: he was leading a double-life. This can be tormenting, or exhilarating. To have a secret; to have a dark and unknown other self, cavorting and exulting in strange, dark and forbidden places – can give an excitement to one’s life. And work.

  Lanchester is certainly right when she says that Laughton was essentially a moral man. He must have regarded this side of him as excremental; but he may have enjoyed the smell of his own shit.

  Was it Charles’ sense of his own ugliness that led him to desire beautiful men? All this must be guesswork. Even when he was completely reconciled to his sexual inclinations, in the last few years of his life, and sought out the companionship of fellow homosexuals, he only spoke of such matters with the utmost pudeur, according to Christopher Isherwood. It is reasonable to assume that Laughton’s sexual appetite was strong, in view of his vast appetite for everything else: food, beauty, work. Had he so desired, he could have indulged it quite easily in the demi-monde of London’s homosexual society, with its access to the easily and quite cheaply purchasable bodies of members of His Majesty’s Services: it was a question of knowing the right bars (the Long Bar at the Trocadero, the ‘Troc’, for example) or the right private addresses. But even that required a certain boldness, a certain bravado, a touch of ‘Here I am!’ But now that was impossible for the plump young star, wishing his too, too solid flesh would melt. So perhaps he sought out the shadows. Perhaps that seemed more appropriate for the dirty thing he was about to do. Best perhaps to pick up some whorish lad, one of the many idly standing around the ’Dilly, and quickly discharge the pressure that had built up inside him, paying a few shillings at the end.

  The idea of being looked at by a man with desire, not to mention love, was of course absurd, and probably wrong. That was his conviction.

  He was nothing if not complicated. In life, as in acting, there could be no ‘just getting on with it’. He must arrive at everything by the most devious and the most painful route, feeling perhaps that what was easily won was not worth having. This temperamental inclination led to a wonderful complexity in his work, but also to great misery for himself and those who surrounded him, privately and professionally.

  In his social life at this time, he might have been expected to be riding the crest of a wave. Fame in the West End Theatre between the wars was something very different to what it is today. West End actors were pop stars, mobbed at their stage doors; but they were also the toast of that now defunct institution, smart society. Success on Laughton’s level would be immediately rewarded by a sheaf of invitations to be propped up on the mantelpiece: cocktails with the Cunards, soirées with the Astors. Gossip columnists would be dispatched at regular intervals to discover his opinions on marriage, fashion, jazz; to winkle out his hobbies, his favourite reading and his taste in neckwear.

  They found him a tough nut to crack. Lacking the later audacity of the Hollywood rags, they confined themselves to describing his appearance as eccentric, and that went for his conversation, too. ‘There is a touch of arrogance in Laughton’s manner; he gives the impression of a person who would not like to be contradicted or corrected … Laughton is himself one of the oddities of human nature: that pale puffy face, curious manner of walking, his shoulders hunched up, one a little higher than the other, that jerky step.’

  They were too polite to mention it, but he was somewhat unusually dressed: not to put too fine a point on it, he was scruffy. And had perhaps not had a bath recently? Ever? His finger nails were certainly innocent of manicure, and probably soap, too.

  Laughton was always careless of his appearance, to the end of his life. Lack of vanity? More likely a hatred of ‘dressing-up’, of formality of any kind – a childish pleasure in being ‘mooky’, in revolting against Eliza Laughton’s sartorial strait-jacket. There also seems, as with his fellow-Yorkshireman, W. H. Auden, equally unenthusiastic about personal hygiene or sartorial propriety, an element of aggression in it. Auden hated his own body, too, the way in which it failed to conform to the norms of desirability, and Laughton and he both seemed to be refusing to engage in the doomed task of improving their appearance – think I’m ugly, eh? Right. Well look the other way. The body might have been being punished as well, the betraying body, letting the whole side down.

  A couple of years later, in Hollywood, Tallulah Bankhead would refuse to shake hands with him because of those dirty fingernails. But in London, in 1928, Laughton’s toilette was no obstacle. He could have more or less what he wanted. On this occasion what he wanted proved to be a major misjudgement, his first.

  He’d seen an adaptation of The Pickwick Papers made for Basil Dean, and begged to be allowed to play Pickwick. Somewhat reluctantly Dean agreed, feeling that ‘there was always something vaguely sinister about Charles’ personality that he was never able to suppress, even in the most desirable characters.’ He was evidently right. Even Theatre World was moved to observe: ‘Laughton did not shine quite as expected’ – though ‘he looked the part completely’. Dean comments on how hard Laughton as usual worked: ‘He could be seen in and out of buses, tubes and restaurants poring over a large volume of Pickwick Papers’ (The large volume is a characteristic touch. Laughton liked to feel he was really working). But: ‘in spite of his devotion to the Immortal Memory it must be admitted that (he) failed as Pickwick. A fruity voice, a jocose manner and a wonderful make-up were no substitutes for the inner benevolence of the character.’

  It’s hard to imagine the schoolmasterish martinet Dean getting on very well with Laughton, but his blunt words seem to have the truth of it. Benevolence was not a quality Laughton could easily command at this time of his life. It came more easily later. It would have made him feel hopelessly vulnerable to have exposed his goodness. There was far more muck to be got out first before he dare stand up in public and lay claim to any virtue.

  It is not difficult to see what drew him to his next play, a ludicrous farrago called Beauty. Now that word always sent a shiver through Laughton’s heart. The central character, whatever the absurdities of the plot, must have struck home very hard, too: Jacques Blaise ‘an ungainly and unprepossessing astronomer for whom fair ladies are as remote as the stars themselves’ becomes nonetheless convinced that a beautiful young woman has fallen in love with him, and tries to improve his appearance (by weightlifting and manicure!). In the end she falls, absurdly and unmotivatedly, into his arms. It was not a success; nor was he, specially (‘It was asking too much of Charles Laughton to transform this tedious affair into something credible or worthwhile’); but the review contains an interesting aside that suggests that the whole-heartedness of his commitment was almost a byword: ‘Blaise weeps once in every act and, Mr Laughton being one of our finest actors, very possibly during the intervals as well.’

  Emotional intensity was still an uncommon quality on the English stage – not the rhetorical, high-flown emotionalism of certain classical actors, but direct self-exposure of Laughton’s kind. He was accused of self-indulgence and indiscipline, which charges Laughton expressly rebutted some years later in an article for Film Weekly. For the time being, there continued to be an unease in some quarters about certain aspects of his work.

  1929 was not his best year for
reviews: ‘Charles Laughton gives a remarkable impression – obviously it can be no more – of the handsome, athletic, Harry Heegan.’ Then, even more unkindly, in praising Ian Hunter’s performance of another role in the same play, the reviewer comments: ‘It is a pity he was not given the role of Heegan.’

  The play was The Silver Tassie, O’Casey’s anti-war masterpiece, with its famous expressionist second act, designed by Augustus John. C.B. Cochran, the Diaghilev of English revue, had bravely decided to produce the play rejected by Yeats, and equally bravely cast in the leading part of the sportsman crippled in the trenches the young actor he had admired as Ficsur the pickpocket. O’Casey was delighted: ‘he is a genius’ he wrote of Charles to his friend, Gabriel Fallon. The director was Raymond Massey, and among the cast young Emlyn Williams, hot from Oxford, not missing a trick. His picture of Laughton at the time is brilliantly vivid, from the first readthrough on.

  While everyone else stood around in the awkward or hysterical way of these occasions, Laughton was already in the wheelchair he would have to use in the last act, furiously trying to manipulate it. This drew unfavourable comment from the other young actors. It seemed ostentatious. It was. But it was probably the only way Laughton could handle himself. Small talk was not his forte; he felt neither one of the stars nor one of the company. And he knew he was physically miscast. ‘Footballer, my foot’, said one of the dozen or so walk-ons to Emlyn, ‘he looks more like the ball.’

  His fellow actors never saw him offstage ‘except as a brooding baby in a wheelchair, obsessed by the difficulties of his part’ – although, very occasionally, ‘something would bubble out’ – something about the difficulty of the bloody Irish accent. He would laugh helplessly – then return abruptly to misery. It’s very understandable behaviour, but not, probably, very endearing.

  Of the performance (the final act entrance) Emlyn has this striking thing to say: ‘The broken soldier whirled among the dancers like a maimed bull on wheels. With a dance tune, and an invalid chair and the mask of a great actor, the moment encompassed the tragedy of war.’ J.C. Trewin writes of him: ‘speaking each word in the last two acts as if they were stamped with a branding iron … this podgy young Yorkshireman had given promise of genius.’ Whatever else you could say about a Laughton performance, it was clearly never dull, and always the result of monumental labour to unlock the thing in himself that he needed. He always must find the key.

  It must be stressed that his ‘keys’, which were to become more and more important to him, were not intellectual solutions – his understanding was perfectly able to solve the more or less simple psychological problems of the characters he played. The ‘key’ was the thing that would enable him to flood himself with the character’s emotional state. And until he had found that key, his work was without life for him.

  Theatrically, Emlyn seemed to follow Laughton around for a while. After The Silver Tassie came a revival of Reginald Berkley’s farce, French Leave, in which Laughton was promoted (‘you’ll be pleased to hear, my dear chap’) from Private to General – ‘an easy light-hearted success’ with Charles, more comfortable with a smaller cast and enjoying the mild satire of his part, transformed in rehearsal into ‘a happy enfant terrible’.

  ‘Frightful dissensions are rife about Mr Laughton’s assumption of General Root … Mr Laughton has been blamed not because his performance fails to evoke salvoes of laughter – his success in this respect is freely admitted – but because it does not keep the received truth concerning Brigadiers. The point about Mr Laughton’s performance is that it is a performance, meaning a piece of deliberate acting and not the normal, hand-in-glove, round-peg-in-round-hole miracle of coincidence. Felicities of this order have no more to do with acting than changing the labels on bottles has to do with wine’ wrote Agate in his notice – and then he was off into panegyric, which is nonetheless worth quoting because it contains sharp analysis of Laughton’s equipment: ‘The actor is young. His figure is podgy and devoid of any approach to military bearing. His features are dumpling: you might liken them to a broad champaign of flat, moon-struck rather than moonlit country. All this makes an admirable actor’s mask just because, like Coquelin’s mask, in repose it means nothing … mark, too, one feature which every great comedian has had – the long upper lip. But good character acting must be more … [it requires] intense apprehension of, and joy in, the character to be presented. Then again, good character-acting, like good art-work of any kind, must not only carry the artist’s signature, but must bear the impress of his mind. I understand that Mr Laughton, when he took up the present part, went to look again at the Orpen portraits in the Imperial War Museum, with the result that his Brigadier is a reproduction of all that Sir William Orpen made us see in the more serious medium.’

  During the run, he took a few days off to have an operation on his throat which he’d resisted and feared. After it the residual huskiness in his voice which had dogged him in the last few years disappeared completely.

  This was done in preparation for a part which would need plenty of voice – a part written for him: On the Spot, by Edgar Wallace. It was to be the greatest triumph of his stage career, a phenomenon, both as a performance and as a play; though the play depends entirely on the leading actor’s performance. It has never been revived with success.

  The sensational aspect of the play was not simply its action; though in 1930 its tally of seductions, suicides and brutal killings must have seemed lurid in the extreme. What gave the play its electric charge was the fact that events almost identical to the ones portrayed on stage were happening at that very moment on the other side of the Atlantic. To that extent, the play resembles the Jacobeans’ depiction of supposed Italian iniquities of their day: a sort of living newspaper: shock, horror.

  The language has no poetic resonance, but it has an arresting actuality and urgency, hot from Wallace’s visit to Chicago. Wallace took all of ten days to write it: a record, for him – ten minutes was more usual.

  The central character, Tony Perelli, is preposterous, until you think about Al Capone; then it seems quite naturalistic. Discovered at an organ fondling his Chinese mistress, Perelli swiftly moves through sexual assault, betrayal, murder, and pimping, to end sobbing in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary. If the actor playing Perelli can make you believe in all of this, then the effect is breathtaking. If not, it’s ridiculous.

  Wallace knew his man. He’d seen Laughton in A Man with Red Hair and the moment he’d finished dictating the play to his secretary, 36 hours after he’d stepped off the boat from America, he sent her, with the script, round to the Laughtons in Dean Street. Miss Reissar struggled up the stairs, past whores and small snivelling children to the top flat, whose door was opened by a sluttish figure saying, ‘Charles is out.’ This was Elsa Lanchester.

  Wallace was not disappointed by Laughton’s reaction. He directed the play himself, and Miss Reissar was present throughout. She reports a most curious incident on the first readthrough. The whole cast was gathered on the stage of Wyndham’s Theatre, with Wallace at the head of the table. No Laughton. Calls were made. Still no Laughton. Miss Reissar was despatched to the stage door. Had the stage doorkeeper seen Mr Laughton? Certainly not, he replied, the only person he’d seen was a tramp that he’d had to eject several times. Miss Reissar opened the door. There, smirking, was Laughton, none too formally attired. He accepted her invitation to come in, and the readthrough began. He read brilliantly; then left.

  Miss Reissar did not report this story to anyone at the time, but, though it was unheard of behaviour for an actor of his time, it would not have surprised many people. His reputation was increasingly that of a man apart, an eccentric.

  Rehearsals proceeded conventionally. Emlyn Williams (thanks to Laughton) was co-opted into the cast after two or three days of rehearsal. Charles had felt that his predecessor in the role was too much the conventional heavy. Such, now, was his prestige. At the age of 30, four years after leaving RADA, he now had casti
ng approval for a major West End production.

  Again, it is Emlyn’s account which gives us the most striking picture of the young star. It demands to be quoted at length.

  Only one figure was discernible picked out under the working light, centre stage: Laughton.

  As when he had swung about in his wheelchair, he was feeling his way to something, alone and absorbed. But this was different: he was pacing to and fro like a caged hobbledehoy, glaring and growling.

  First, he experimented with a clumsy waddle, from which emerged a walking gait, lithe, graceful, tigerish; then the hobbledehoy stood stock still and scowled into the dark, blubber-lips pursed. He might just have been told that for the school play he had been turned down for the part of Cupid and was settling for a sulky Bacchus … as before the actors in the shadows studied him with the amusement of bystanders at a fair: weird way to work, rum cove, make a good story in the Green Room Club.

  Edgar Wallace was certainly pursuing no avant-garde methods. Arriving late at rehearsals, he breezed in saying ‘Sorry Charlie, ’ad to go to see a bloke about a racehorse. ’Alf a mo’ while I catch up on the serious side of life’ – the Evening Standard racing page.

  There was no end to Laughton’s avidity for perfection. Emlyn spoke some Italian, so was set to teaching Charles the phrases he needed for Perelli. ‘In corners, syllable by syllable, I coached an eager bumbling pupil who immediately bumbled ahead of teacher. To see Laughton catch fire, and set fire to me, was intoxicating.’

  Years later, his friend and pupil Belita said: ‘Charles was a learner, he was always learning. If you were a learner too, you would get on with him. If not, it could be difficult.’

  Although Wallace had written the part for Charles, it was scarcely typecasting (in the light of his previous 15 roles, what would that have been, anyway?), but it was totally within his range. He could command from within himself danger, violence, passion, authority, caprice, sarcastic wit. The only dimension hitherto unknown in his work was the blood in the veins of the role: naked sensuality. To release this, he devised a make-up which transformed him out of all recognition. The cameras of Pathé News recorded the process by which, before our very eyes, Charles Laughton gives way to Tony Perelli, a Jekyll-and-Hyde act as fascinating, in its way, as anything he ever put on film. He strides, vigorously and directly, into his dressing-room. He looks straight into the camera and tells us, in an impeccable cut-glass accent, what he’s going to do: wig, face-paint, boot-black to match his own hair up, finally – ‘a real secret, this’ – the false eyelashes, ‘a tip from Greta Garbo’. Bit by bit ‘this pudding’, as he calls his face, assumes contour, line, definition. As it does so, his accent becomes more and more Yorkshire, until, climactically, he assumes Perelli’s Sicilian-American tones. ‘Nize fella, very nize fella,’ he says, flashing a mean look at us, which, through all the crackle of the poor copy of the crudely made film, tells with some of the force that so bowled his audiences over. It contains real sexual aggression, and is both sexy and alarming, a million miles away from the suavely masterful campness with which he introduces the film.