Charles Laughton

by Simon Callow

  Two years before, Laughton had gone to see Laurence Olivier play Henry V at the Old Vic. Going back to congratulate him after the performance, he asked Olivier if he knew why he was so good. ‘Because you are England, that’s why,’ Laughton told him. Elsa Lanchester claims that the remark is apocryphal, uncharacteristic of Charles. On the contrary, it is exactly what he believed: that acting could transfigure the raw material of the actor and the character into the embodiment of huge ideas and human realities.

  But the intensity of feeling that was the pressure behind his work, that was the source of its size and richness, was never indulged in the performance; quite the opposite. His Quasimodo is rarely seen to suffer at all. One of the most striking images of all is of the hunchback turning round and round on the wheel as the lash falls, expressing no pain, simply turned to stone, the suffering motionless, as eternal as a negro spiritual or the tombs of Belsen, numb, vast, fathomless. Then he glimpses Frollo, who may be coming to rescue him. His eyes light up with a dog’s mute yearning – but Frollo passes on, followed by the still yearning eyes of Quasimodo. Esmerelda climbs onto the wheel. She offers him water. He pulls away. She persists. He drinks, knowing he can trust her. He gobbles it greedily. He’s released from the wheel and limps alone back to Notre Dame. He goes in through the great door, locks it carefully behind him. He sees Frollo. ‘She gave me water,’ he says, with the utmost simplicity.

  Every moment in the sequence is simple, direct, precise. Its emotional impact is overwhelming, because of the suffusion of every cell of the actor’s being with the essence of the character’s experience. The character’s gestures, actions, utterances reveal this essence at every moment. There is no need for the actor to try to be moving, or impressive, or to show why he does this or that. The doing is enough. When Quasimodo approaches Esmerelda with a bird in a cage and having given it to her tries to tell her of his love, he places his hands, very simply, over his face. It is almost impossible to watch the scene, such is the piercing expressiveness of this gesture; but it is simplicity itself.

  In the bell-ringing scene, his laughter as he compares himself to the man in the moon stems from very deep indeed, and is sustained so long that it becomes a laugh at the whole idea of deformity, at the idea of appearance at all.

  In short, Laughton does with acting what great creative artists attempt: to sound the deepest and the highest notes of human possibility, to exalt the human soul, and to heal the damaged heart.

  It is absurd to speak of Laughton’s Quasimodo as a great performance, as if that were some quantifiable assessment. It is acting at its greatest; it is Laughton at his greatest; it is a cornerstone of this century’s dramatic achievement; it is a yardstick for all acting.

  At the time, some people liked it; and some didn’t. It was his third and best gift to impressionists the world over; and it was the last time he risked madness and physical collapse to fashion from his own psyche an image of the human condition. He decided, instead, that he would join the human race, and try being Charles Laughton instead of Philoctetes, the bleeding, smelling patron of artists, exiled to his island with his wound and his bow.

  Now he wanted to like himself, and to be liked; to create, certainly, but from materials that lay outside his own body. He climbed down from the cross, pulled out the nails, and made with uncertain steps for real life.

  PART TWO

  Change of Life

  THERE IS NO evidence that Laughton saw his career as falling conveniently into two halves – the first, everything up to Quasimodo, the second, everything after it; there is no evidence that he took any conscious decision to find his ultimate fulfilment elsewhere, or to find a different channel for creative expression. The fact remains, however, that if all record or mention of his work up to 1939 were lost, the remaining performances would seem intelligent, well-observed, powerful, striking, often moving, and always, even at their very least inspired, watchable; but – with two remarkable exceptions over the twenty odd years left to him – in none of them does Laughton function as a primary creative artist, as he did in Nero, Bligh, Barrett, Quasimodo, even Phineas V. Lambert. In short, from now on he put his talent into his acting, his genius elsewhere.

  The factors involved in this re-routeing of creative energies are complex, but principal among them is a change in Laughton’s attitude to himself, whether on account of his experience playing the hunchback, or merely after it. It can hardly be coincidental that all the new elements which entered his life during the next few years – teaching, public reading, directing, and having love affairs – were activities which focused on him as himself, rather than as a character. It may be that he had exorcised his self-loathing in taking on, not merely the hideousness of feature of Quasimodo, but the lunatic self-destructive urges of all mankind: as Elsa Lanchester so vividly put it, ‘he took physical torture over and above what was needed – a sort of purging of his human weakness and general guilt. Not guilt for any piddling little act. Just guilt for an overall insufficiency of perfection in life and work.’

  Elsa Lanchester had joined Laughton just before the start of filming, in the weeks of tension which preceded the invasion of Poland. When war did break out, they, like the rest of the Hollywood Brits, were advised by the British Ambassador, Lord Lothian, to stay in America where they would be of most use in making out the British case. The pro-German lobby was powerful and vocal, and every positive image was needed to counteract it. So they, and most of the English actors, stayed. Some, like Laurence Olivier, defied the ambassadorial advice and stole away in secret, passionate for action. The rest, feeling oddly guilty, were as conspicuous in England’s cause as could be. In the end, they undoubtedly did more good where they were; but back home, there was a widespread feeling that they had got off lightly. Most of them were well beyond enlisting age; many of them, like Laughton, had seen action in the First World War. The feeling in England was that, fighting or not, an Englishman’s duty was to be inconvenienced. In fact, during the blitz, the Laughtons’ house in Gordon Square was hit by a stricken divebomber – the only house in the square to suffer. ‘I should be glad to sacrifice twenty houses if German divebombers would smash themselves to bits on them. To hell with the cash if they can bring down the Junkers. It was a glorious end for the house’ Charles told the New York Times; but a lurking impression of malingering persisted.

  His first assignment after The Hunchback of Notre Dame was, one might guess, specially chosen by him as light relief: an adaptation of Sidney Howard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, They Knew What They Wanted, a genial piece set in the Italian community in the Napa Valley of California. Laughton plays Tony Patucci, the simple, good-hearted but unprepossessing vineyard owner who, on a rare visit to town, falls in love with a waitress (Carole Lombard) whom he hasn’t even spoken to. He proposes to her by post, sending her a photograph, not of himself, but of his handsome employee, William Gargan, with whom she then, of course, falls in love.

  It’s a classic Laughton character, and a classic Laughton situation: too classic. How much longer could he go on re-cycling the same complex? As long, presumably, as he needed to. But now, it would seem, the wound was healing. His approach to the rôle reveals a marked reluctance to tear the scab off again. Other actors could have made a great deal of the touchingly written part of Tony – indeed they had, in the two previous filmed versions (one starring Edward G. Robinson) and in its musical apotheosis, Frank Loesser’s Most Happy Fella; Laughton could only have done something remarkable with it by living through every painful step in the character’s journey through hope, doubt, self-hatred, pity, anguish, to the final hard-won happy resolution. On this occasion, and increasingly hereafter, he declined. The result is a performance in which, despite occasional flickers of intense expression, the actor appears to be sulking. This unattractive quality sadly pervades a great deal of his work in the two remaining decades of his career.

  By chance, we have extensive documentation of this unsuccessful performance in this un
important film, because it was directed by Garson Kanin, whose career as a chronicler has long since eclipsed his career as a creator. His account of the filming rivals von Sternberg’s chapter on I, Claudius as the most vividly one-sided portrait of Laughton. It appears in his book Hollywood, and like von Sternberg’s account, it presents its author as the epitome of sweet reason and patience, bewildered by the antics of the child-monster, Laughton. In fact, Kanin was something of a boy-monster himself at the time of filming: twenty-seven-years-old, flushed with his, as it turned out short-lived, triumph as a director (The Great Man Votes, Bachelor Mother, My Favourite Wife, all within a year), ex-jazzman, hoofer, vaudevillian and finally Broadway actor, quip-happy, bursting at the seams with what on the cocktail circuit passes for intelligence, he viewed the fat, battle-weary veteran of the unequal struggle to forge Art from unyielding life with brisk amusement going on affection: ‘C’mon, cuddles,’ he’d say to him; or ‘C’mon Chuck.’ Faced with the complex inertia of the man of a million quivering impulses, he tried to josh him into giving a performance. This was a miscalculation.

  Added to Laughton’s usual pre-natal apprehension at the start of any project was a particular displeasure at the casting of his co-star, Lombard. He and she had proved to be out of sympathy in White Woman. He found her broad, ‘one-of-the-boys’ social style impossible to handle, and her preferred dialect, Anglo-Saxon, offended him deeply. To Kanin, on the other hand, she was a model actress: he admiringly recounts how she simply picked up her page of dialogue before the shot, learned it, and then spoke it with perfect naturalness. Well, if that’s your definition of acting, of course Laughton would seem to be making a lot of fuss over nothing. The fact that in the finished film she gives a performance of unrelieved one-dimensionality seems not to excite Kanin’s censure; she had a great personality, she learned her lines, she looked pretty. What else is there? Laughton, on the other hand, was slowly circling the dreaded task. His preparation was oblique, as ever: oblique because the undertaking was not a simple one. He was not aiming for verisimilitude: he was erecting the derrick which would enable him to drill for the deep black oil which was lurking – even hiding, he may mournfully have thought – inside him; the substance which would turn Tony Patucci from a chap with a girl-problem in some Californian valley into an icon of the transcendence of physical limitations, the transforming power of love – whatever. Who knows what Laughton might have made of Tony Patucci? He never got there. It wasn’t worth the effort.

  ‘From now until the first day of shooting, I propose to study the paintings of Michelangelo, listen to nothing but Vivaldi, and read aloud, in the original, the epic poetry of Dante.’ How Kanin’s friends must have shrieked with laughter when he reported to them this remark of Laughton’s. What had any of that to do with Tony Patucci? Just learn the lines, Chuck, it’s all there. After all, Sidney Howard won a Pulitzer Prize for them. What point explaining that by touching some essence of Italian-ness, he might release a dimension in Tony Patucci that would resonate through the whole film, enriching its character beyond recognition?

  Kanin complains that from the first day, Laughton seemed to want to ‘take charge.’ Certainly he must have attempted to define the parameters of what he was going to attempt; and certainly, he wanted help. In his assault on yet another mountain, he wanted a partner in imagination, a companion, a comrade. He did not want someone shouting ‘Get up that mountain!’; nor did he want some loon burbling ‘It’s not a mountain, Chuck, it’s easy.’ He did want acknowledgement of his contribution. When he emerged from the make-up room after the first tests, totally unrecognisable, he presented himself to Kanin with the innocent joy in his transformation he always revealed on these occasions. ‘They’ve done a very good job,’ said Kanin, carefully choosing his words. ‘They?’ replied Laughton, ‘they simply did what I told them to do.’ It is an arrogant reply, but essentially truthful. Most make-up artists – Perc Westmore, the Charles Laughton of maquillage being a notable exception – place their considerable skills at the disposal of ‘their’ artist, who, they assume, knows more about the character than they do. Achieving the desired result is of course their department, and endless the virtuosity and inventiveness that goes into it. Kanin’s remark was a calculated denial of Laughton’s responsibility for his own work. Carole Lombard, of course, would have acknowledged her make-up artist without hesitation; but then as that artist’s task was confined to the most direct presentation of her bone structure, the question of creativity did not arise. To Laughton, his creativity was the central issue in his work, and he was fiercely jealous of it.

  Before Kanin had administered his little put-down, Laughton had been capering around, doing a tootsie-fruitsie Italian accent. Kanin panicked: was Laughton really going to do it like that? He bearded Laughton about it. Laughton turned suddenly nasty: did Kanin think he was auditioning for the part? He’d been fooling around with the accent – obviously he wasn’t going to do it like that. Kanin said he just wanted to be certain that Laughton had a method of acquiring an authentic accent. Of course he had, said Laughton, grandly: the Michelangelo-Vivaldi-Dante method. Kanin, he claims, was impressed – until the read-through, when Laughton’s accent was so incomprehensible that he had to stop the proceedings and send him off to a voice coach. After a few hours’ tuition, says Kanin, he had found an accent that was not merely accurate, but entirely personal to the character.

  Of course there was an element of old mullarkey in Laughton: an obstinacy, sheer Scarborough cussedness. And there was also an element in him of masochism, of welcoming the big stick when it was finally wielded – that at least has the advantage of relieving one of personal responsibility. At the read-through, Laughton may have been groping towards some deep immersion in the sensations provided by the experience of strange sounds passing through the mind and the mouth. Or he may just have been being difficult, protesting in a general way against the Lombard – Kanin axis, the pros.

  Kanin observed: ‘Laughton enjoyed being difficult not because it disconcerted others, but because being difficult made him special, the centre of attention.’ Not even his worst enemy has ever accused Laughton of being ordinary, or having trouble commanding attention. Why would he bother to engineer what he already had? Where he was ‘difficult’ was in bringing his problems with the part to rehearsals, instead of concealing them, or solving them in the bath at home, à la Laurence Olivier. He was also obviously intensely self-absorbed in a way which left him little energy or inclination to engage in the good-humoured banter usual and, to most mortals, indispensable on the studio floor. He did like people to know what it was all costing him. In this way he was like someone who has a bad headache and won’t let you forget it – wants his nobility in being there at all to be recognised. This is not the most charming of traits; but it is a mitigating factor that he did have a headache; that he was, that is to say, engaged in painful and frustrating efforts to reach a result which was substantially more ambitious than what most of his colleagues were even attempting.

  There was little sympathy for his approach from his fellow-players. William Gargan, playing the handsome hired-man, wrote,

  On the set, he was the most difficult man I’ve ever worked with. An inveterate scene-stealer, not at all subtle, without any of the charm of Barrymore (or his talent), he was a grubby man who fought and clawed for every inch of celluloid. In an early scene, as I would say something, Laughton would begin to writhe, his heavy face hanging over my shoulder like a full moon. Every line I’d speak, he’d growl, grimace, wipe his nose, lick his blubbery lips; he’d grovel, rub his hands, do everything but have a fit. Finally he had his fit as well. So did Garson Kanin … he was a fine director, perhaps the finest I ever worked with … but Laughton needed no direction (Charles knew best); Laughton would take no direction (from an American!).

  Gargan, who, in the film, gives a constricted and charmless performance, may well have resented Laughton’s inventiveness and force of personality; it was hard for any
actor to keep up with him in those regards. Laughton had but to walk into the same frame as Gargan and the scene was stolen.

  Kanin dubbed Laughton a ‘privy player’: one who works on his rôle in private and is then unable to adapt his performance to the needs of the moment. ‘Giving a direction to Charles was like offering him a cup of hemlock.’ Laughton never developed the technique of appearing to accept a suggestion in order to consider it at leisure. Having indeed worked (and worked and worked) on his rôle in private, he had begun to create something rather complex. Any ‘direction’ requires some accommodating, unless, of course, the director is deeply in sympathy with the actor’s aims and methods. What is clear is that Kanin had sympathy with neither. Like von Sternberg before him, he couldn’t see what the problem was. As far as he was concerned, Laughton was talented and well-cast. End of story. He describes an incident which demonstrates, according to the angle from which you view it, either Laughton’s determination to go to any lengths to achieve something new and alive, or his grotesque obstinacy and perversity. Interestingly, Kanin’s account begins with him failing to find anything ‘wrong with the scene or with Laughton’s attack on it’ and ends with how he ‘saw and heard and felt great acting’ in what was ‘perhaps the best scene in the whole picture’ (it would be truer to say that it was the only scene in the whole picture.)

  As told by Kanin it’s a very funny story: how Laughton was unhappy with a scene he was due to shoot the next day, how he went to Kanin to talk about his difficulty, how he persuaded him to go up to the vineyards with him though it was nearly midnight, and, then, striding about, waving his arms around, finally broke through. ‘All at once the quality of his voice changed. Laughton disappeared. Tony Patucci replaced him … we had stopped in a clearing. There was a certain amount of moonlight. Laughton’s genius turned it into sunlight.’ Actor and director were equally thrilled. They went back to their respective homes. Next day, Laughton had lost it again. Shyly, tentatively, he asked Kanin if they could go back to the vineyards. ‘There are people who possess strange powers. Laughton was one of them. He had the power to draw one into the orbit of his pattern of thought, sense of feeling and mode of behaviour.’ Kanin agreed. Laughton found it again. They returned to the set. Kanin was allergic to the crop-spray, and started to sneeze, ruining a take. Laughton lost it again. He and the production secretary went back to the vineyards. Kanin stayed behind, taking soporific anti-allergy tablets. Laughton returned, did a number of takes which Kanin, drugged to the eyeballs, barely saw.