by Simon Callow
He didn’t probe or delve into the personalities of his actors, he simply goaded them on to deeper and deeper depths. In the rehearsals he created a strongly emotional feeling, which could easily dissolve into laughter or tears. In his notes he was often, says Richard Lupino, a young English member of the group, ‘on a knife edge of cruelty’ – but ‘if you fitted in with his crusade of the moment, you were part of him. If he saw something he loved he would make it part of him.’ He expected unflagging work till all hours of the morning, and you wouldn’t be surprised if he called you up at four in the morning because he thought he’d discovered something new in the script; or wanted to show you a Japanese print he’d just bought.
There is an unavoidable sense of ego-massage in all this, which is not denied by his pupil/fellow-artists’ love of him and of his approach. What matters is that it worked. ‘Steadily the century turned and the globe and, in spite of all, the time and place became Chekhov’s. The audience laughed, was hushed, and wept. Hearts were touched, minds fired, emotions disturbed. It all added up to as pure a piece of theatre experience as I have ever known,’ wrote Ruth Gordon of his Cherry Orchard. Her husband, Garson Kanin, with all the reason in the world to find nothing pleasant to say about it, wrote: ‘He had assembled a group of unemployed and unemployable players … and directed the whole company as though he and they were truly Russian. It is a play I go to see performed at every opportunity, but I have never seen its quality as fully realised as in Laughton’s production, not even by the Moscow Art Theatre.’ In addition to Leontovich, he had recruited the distinguished Italian actress-manager Maria Bazzi to play Charlotta Ivanovna, had persuaded Harry Homer, one of Hollywood’s most famous art directors (Our Town, The Little Foxes), to design the play, and Karl Struss, the great lighting cameraman (Sign of the Cross and The Island of Lost Souls amongst many others) to light it. He had given minute attention to every aspect of the production. His own performance as Gayev – genial, melancholy – was held to be very fine, and the performances of the company, as Kanin implied, were better than they knew themselves capable of. It was an ideal cornerstone for an ensemble. ‘The future is bright,’ wrote Ruth Gordon in Theatre Arts, ‘there will be tours and a repertory company. And perhaps, one day, a theatre of their own. And new actors, perhaps directors and playwrights as well. All because an urge to move forward was somehow crystallised, because an unselfish man took a courageous chance, because work and achievement came before gain, because the theatre is a living treasure, and because there are still the stage-struck.’
None of it was to be. The reasons are several, but they come together in the striking person of Paul Gregory, agent, hustler, manager, promoter, producer, who leaped into Laughton’s life from nowhere, and played at different times the rôles of fairy godmother and demon king.
New life
THE FORTIES HAD been a period of germination, of slow exploration of new possibilities. Paul Gregory seemed to act as a catalyst on Laughton, turning possibilities into actualities. Within a couple of years of the new decade, Laughton, up till then apparently drifting aimlessly but generally downward, had become one of the best-known, best-loved, most formidably creative and respected figures on the American scene. This transformation of fortunes was largely wrought by Gregory, who shrewdly and with flair exploited some of the vast resources of his unique property. A junior agent at MCA, the giant artists’ agency, he had seen Laughton read the Burning Fiery Furnace episode from the Book of Daniel on television (the Ed Sullivan Show, in fact) and had suddenly conceived a brilliant and fully-fledged notion: Laughton should devise a whole evening of readings and tour the country with them, playing one-night stands in auditoria – they needn’t even be theatres – all over the country. It would cost nothing whatever, and he could ask very substantial fees – perhaps 2,000 dollars a show. When he finally got to see Laughton, he proved very persuasive, and, in early 1950, they went out on the road for the first time. It was a huge success, beyond even Gregory’s enthusiastic projections. Charles then returned to Hollywood, to work on The Cherry Orchard. It ran for nearly six months, and, true to the group’s programme for the future, they started to rehearse another play, Twelfth Night, in which Charles was to play Toby Belch. They reached a fair state of readiness, too, when Gregory (who actually managed Cherry Orchard), pulled the plug on it. His reasons were mainly financial: Charles could be making a fortune on the road; at the Stage Theatre, he, like everyone else, was on an Equity ‘Little Theatres’ minimum salary of $10 a week. And Charles needed the money very badly. Gregory, moreover, felt, as he revealed some years later, in a somewhat hysterical interview for Barry Norman’s profile of Laughton in the Hollywood Greats series, that the teaching ‘was just an ego-trip for Laughton. He fancied himself with people following him around adoring him’. Several members of the group felt that Gregory was implacably hostile to it, with a hostility that went beyond mere financial self-interest. He was impatient to get on with handling Laughton. His creative energy was roused by the thought of what he could do with Laughton; he felt, in some way, that Laughton was his. Gregory has been described as demonic, even diabolic, and the young actors of the group felt that this startlingly handsome young blond was Charles’ dark angel.
Norman Lloyd and others have suggested that Laughton was in love with Gregory, which is both possible and understandable; what is certain is that he was only too willing to be handled, to have someone lick his life into shape – provided, of course, that it was a shape he approved of. In the case of the readings, it most certainly was. He had found (Gregory had found for him) an ideal medium for his gifts.
At the heart of the enterprise was his passion for story-telling. In his introduction to the compendium, Tell Me a Story, that he published in 1957, he writes this touching account of that passion.
As I am not an inventor of stories – I have many times tried to write very simple stories, but they all looked and sounded terrible the next morning – I have become a teller of stories. I would like to become the man who knows all the stories … That can never be, because no man will ever know all the stories. When I go into a good book-store or library, I often feel sad when I see the shelves of books of all kinds that I know I will never be able to enjoy. I think of all the wonderful tales I will never know and I wish I could live to be a thousand years old.
For him, ‘story-telling’ (the term was a comprehensive one for him, embracing poems and psalms and plays alike) had always been the most direct means of communication. He had read to all and sundry over the years; he had been especially moved by the response of wounded GIs to whom he read regularly during the war. He was shy and self-conscious initially, uncertain of how they would react.
I read sentimental and innocuous things which I thought would please them. I read three times a week, but one day I tried something heavy and tragic, and there was an immediate response. They started to talk about their own problems – being in bombers over Germany, or in foxholes, or how they felt after they had been maimed. And so I found that serious literature was a great help to them because other people in centuries gone and in the present had had all the experiences there are to be had, and the GIs felt they were not alone.
When he extended his reading to large halls in front of a thousand people, or more, the sense of communication and the cancellation of loneliness, was just as powerful. ‘We all do the same thing together – laugh or wonder or pity – and we all feel good and safe because the people around us are the same as we are.’ This was something quite different from acting in plays, where the actors and the audience must perforce be separate. Here he was sharing something that meant a great deal to him. ‘When I was reading from all the books I loved, I found the business of reading aloud was a matter of making the effort to communicate something you love to people you love.’ During the war, the GIs had protested when he started to read to them from the Bible. ‘They did not want to hear anything from a dull book. The Bible was not dull to me, but I had to prove to
them that it was not dull. I used every trick that I had learned and they liked it and they asked for more.’ How to tell the story in the clearest, funniest, most vivid way was the simple task that Laughton took to with such relish. It returned him to a sense, so vital for his self-respect, of the importance and dignity of his job. In a moving phrase, he writes: ‘I found that people had – contrary to what I had been told in the entertainment industry – a common shy hunger for knowledge.’ He took the task of trying to satisfy that hunger very seriously indeed.
To describe Laughton’s performance as ‘reading’ is not, strictly speaking, accurate. For one thing, he had actually memorised all the material and used the book as a mere prop – as he freely admits during the course of the performance. But the readings anyway comprise only about half of the show; the rest is linking material – one-liners, anecdotes, introductions. The experience of listening to the records he made of the show is very pleasing, like spending time with, not a professor, but a lover of art and life. It’s cunningly constructed for variety of tone and for fruitful juxtapositions. And behind everything is a sense of points being made; nothing is there without a reason. In the gentlest, least patronising way, it is a kind of lecture, or, rather, perhaps, an introduction to culture. Because it is done with such love and modesty, it communicates directly. Although Laughton flatters the audience to some extent, there is never any question but that there is someone real there, not a mere front-man. He obviously knows what he’s talking about, and it obviously matters to him. It is above all generous.
It started with him shambling onto the platform in an overcoat from which, balefully eyeing the audience, he would remove books, one by one, making a pile out of them. Then the overcoat would come off to reveal him attired much as he would be in the street, i.e., shabbily. He’d chuckle: ‘Here we are again – an actor and an audience …’, and he’d be off, with the first reading, after which, ‘I’ll tell you a story,’ he’d suddenly say, and it might be a four-line gag about a little boy he spoke to in Athens, Ohio, or it might be an anecdote about Henry Moore. He was at great pains throughout to humanise contemporary artists, to explain why they paint or sculpt the way they do. His range of readings, too, goes from the Bible to Shakespeare to Shaw to Jack Kerouac. ‘The spirit goes on,’ he says, after a reading from The Dharma Bums. The readings themselves vary in quality; he is prone, when faced with a lyrical or emotional text, to use what Brecht described as ‘the well-known international clerical tone’. With a dramatic text, like the Burning Fiery Furnace story, the characterisation of each separate character, and the evocation of action, amounts to great virtuosity. He reads the whole of the oration scene from Julius Caesar, playing all the characters, not least the crowd, and makes a very vivid job of it. Now that authors no longer read their plays to the cast on the first day of rehearsals, it’s a novel experience to hear a play read by one person – stage directions and all. It proves to be strangely satisfying – you ‘get’ it very strongly. This was an art form that Charles had perfected over the years. He reads a passage from Plato’s Phaedrus dialogue, loosely and speakably translated by Christopher Isherwood. It is a section about the lover and the beloved that might be thought to be very close to Laughton’s heart; interestingly, though, he chooses neither to characterise Socrates, nor to connect very strongly with it emotionally: he is concerned to pick his way carefully through the difficult material, striving for clarity rather than expression; and he succeeds. It’s completely lucid. The most remarkable – and laudable – thing about it is that he chose to include it at all.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the heart of the show lies in his less formal linking comments and stories. One of them, about Chartres Cathedral, and his encounter with the curator, Étienne Houvet, is a little masterpiece, like something by de Maupassant: he went to Chartres when he was nineteen, and had the good fortune to be shown all of its wonders by the curator, a very old man. Twenty-five years later, he returned, and as he gazed round the building, a voice came out of the dark: ‘Where have you been for 25 years?’ But the exceptional feature of the story is his description of the cathedral: ‘There are blues and greens in that window like you’ve never seen!’ he cries. ‘This building was built by the trade unions of the day, ordinary men and women, craftsmen, traders.’ He uses his voice at its most thrilling in such passages, the rallentandos on crucial phrases, the shouts of joy as he describes something particularly beautiful. It’s easy to believe that he may have been a very good teacher, not from his analysis, or from intellectual stimulation, but from his ability to open one’s eyes to beauty, to the wonder of things. He renders aesthetic emotion highly attractive, and so he works his ends by example. The public got an absolutely true encounter with the impassioned aesthete that was Charles Laughton, with only the dark and the pain edited out.
‘You looked so beautiful tonight,’ said Paul Gregory to Charles after he’d given the show one evening. Laughton wept. ‘You bastard, you bastard,’ he kept saying, ‘what did you tell me for?’
It exhausted him, but it exhilarated him. ‘I believe this is something people want,’ he told Elsa after the first tour. ‘You look very tired and fifteen years younger,’ she told him. He continued doing the show to the end of his life, visited every part of the country of which, since April 1950, he and Elsa had been citizens, became a national figure, made a great deal of money (soon he was earning $4,000 an engagement) and above all was a triumphant ambassador for beauty. It was all missionary work, a kind of one-man peripatetic university. ‘Charles believed that in America people never stopped wanting to learn,’ wrote Lanchester. ‘That was one of the things that attracted Charles to America in the first place: the eternal student point of view.’
The energy which had for nearly a decade only fitfully found a channel was now fully engaged. He no longer looked to movies for artistic activity; now – by an exquisite irony – he looked to them to publicise his reading tours. It was in this spirit that he made The Strange Door, a half-hearted, half-baked adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s story, ‘The Sire de Maletroit’s Door.’ Joseph Pevney directed it, Irving Glassberg wrote it and there is nothing that can be said in its favour. Boris Karloff, an old colleague, though never a friend, gives a grey, dull performance, whereas Laughton himself does exactly what he was so often (and so often unfairly) accused of: he messes sloppily around, pulling faces, slobbering, leering, chuckling, wheezing, a nightmarish display of an acting machine out of control. Even the obligatory eating scene is perfunctory, as he crams the grub mechanically down his gullet. He plays a wicked nobleman who’s imprisoned his own brother for twenty years. The character (insofar as there is any character at all) emerges as a blend of Squire Trelawny from Jamaica Inn and Captain Kidd with none of Trelawny’s incipient dementia or Kidd’s rough amorality. Evidently it satisfied Laughton’s purposes, however: it did decent business, it kept his name before the public until he reached them in person, no doubt very surprised that the coarse ham of the film was the same person as the eloquent, passionate votary of the muses that addressed them so ardently from the stage of their town hall or social club. As it happens, and perversely enough, the performance was in some quarters (Time magazine, for example) hailed as return to form. ‘How good it is to see Mr Laughton enjoying himself again.’ In fact there is no shred of enjoyment in the performance; it is ice for father’s piles with a vengeance. Monthly Film Bulletin assessed the film more drily: ‘A costume shocker which is by no means devoid of atmosphere. Charles Laughton appears to overact – perhaps to assure us of the Comte’s insanity. The other players perform in the usual convention.’
It was again Paul Gregory who turned Charles in the direction of his next venture. Seeing the extraordinary impact of Charles, unaided by scenery or props, he asked why not two actors? Or more? Perhaps reading a play, or part of a play, or even something non-dramatic: Shaw’s Prefaces, for example. Laughton suggested the third act of Man and Superman, known as Don Juan in Hell. And
they knew they were onto something. It was Gregory who insisted that it would best be performed on a bare stage, in front of podia, in evening dress, instead of the cloaks favoured by Laughton, and that Charles Boyer should play Juan, which Laughton had fancied for himself; and in all these things Gregory was right.
