Charles Laughton

by Simon Callow

  Of course the relationship was useful to both of them; Charles was particularly anxious that they should be seen to be together. When he discovered that by chance they were in New York at the same time, he with Don Juan in Hell and staying at the Plaza, she just returned from a European tour, in a room at the Algonquin, he told her, ‘Look, Elsa, for God’s sake, get in a cab and come here at once! This situation must not get out to the press. We’ll have to go out and be seen everywhere together.’ She also functioned as a kind of running joke in his interviews – a kind of she-who-must-be-obeyed figure, with a no-but-seriously implication that they led a life of hum-drum domesticity.

  Which, of course, could hardly have been further from the truth.

  Early in 1930, they had married. It was not an event of any great significance, insofar as they had been living together, in the modern manner, for over two years. The wedding took place in a registry office, unobserved by the pressmen who had been sleeping on their doorstep in anticipation of the event (such was their fame). Elsa attributes the marriage to Charles’ desire to please his ever-formidable mother. (Indeed, the elder Mrs Laughton and Charles’ delicate youngest brother Frank accompanied them on their honeymoon. ‘My friends thought it was hilarious.’) Elsa implies that the further seal of respectability was not entirely unwelcome to Charles, too. They were still living in digs-like accommodation in Soho. Their style remained semi-Bohemian.

  They were spoken of and written of very much as ‘a couple’ – a famous eccentric match. Ethel Mannin interviewed them jointly under the heading ‘Portrait of a Strange Pair.’ Her ‘Impression’ conveys a certain unease in their company which was a common response.

  ‘We are both naturally restrained,’ he said, ‘because we’re both self-conscious knowing that you’ve come to see us specially to write about us. How could you expect us to be anything else?’ I could only reply that if their present exuberance was to be regarded as restraint, then normally, when they are alone, a sort of riot must take place … The last I saw of this strange pair was when they stood with their arms about each other … Elsa’s tiny face … and Laughton’s pale puffy face, pressed ‘cheek to cheek’, saying goodbye and bidding me come to see them. ‘In our untidy little flat.’ ‘It’s only a little flat, but we’re fond of it!’ As I emerged, I thought of some of the ‘impossible’ things Elsa had said, and of Laughton’s irrepressible bursts of acting, and the story of the young woman who sat at the piano ‘in ’er nood’ came into my head, and the verdict on that young woman seemed somehow to apply to the odd pair I had left. ‘No, not mad, my dear, but strainge, I grant yew …’

  They seem to have been performing their relationship. There can be no doubt that there was a real bond between them, a magnetic pull, which endured for over thirty years, but its exact nature, as so often, is hard to pin down. Neither socially, sexually, intellectually, or temperamentally did they seem to have any affinity: only a mutual – but quite different – oddity seems to have brought them together; that, and loneliness. It’s almost as if they had been yoked together by fate, and somehow made the most of it – sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. They both found the existence of the other useful, not merely as a cover for whatever other activities, but as a public point of reference: ‘I asked Elsa if I could,’ he’d say, while she’d joke about his scruffiness: to present themselves as ‘a husband and wife’ and thus give their audience something to hang on to. To normalise themselves.

  To what extent during these early years they were trying to pretend to themselves that they were well matched is hard to gauge. We only have Elsa’s evidence. But even that seems to point towards a certain strain of unreality. She describes his exaggerated resentment of her going off for an early film-call: and of him suddenly bursting into her dressing-room during the run of a play, expecting to find the romantic lead, Derrick de Marne, in there with her: ‘this dramatic suspicious entrance was more like cheap melodrama than flattering.’

  Intellectually, they were poles apart. Elsa with her quick, bright brain, formed by the combative political encounters of her parents, sharpened by her experience in revue, reducing things to size and piercing pomposity with her sharp little pins – Charles, with his much less nimble wits, constantly circling round and round ideas, approaching them clumsily, perhaps, becoming ponderous and pretentious, but always searching (‘one feels,’ reported Ethel Mannin, ‘the galvanic working of his mind the whole time, so that being with him is rather like being all the time in the engine-room with all the engines running’). Her chief means of communication was raillery: tremendous fun if you were sure of yourself and in the mood, but apt to make you feel put down, sent up, and finally pissed-off, if you weren’t. She was, according to her friends of the period, ‘the quickest, wittiest, most mercurial bitch you could ever hope to meet. She couldn’t help herself. The darts just flew out of her mouth.’

  It is hard to think of a worse companion for the awkward, self-conscious, self-doubting, boy-man that Laughton was. He was capable of giving as good as he got, no mistake, and savage blows may well have issued from the mess that was boiling and bubbling within.

  Some sexual unsatisfactoriness was noticed by others, too. ‘I assumed that they weren’t very sexually involved,’ said Benita Armstrong, Elsa’s best friend of the period, ‘from the way they never left each other alone in public. They were always mauling each other.’ The gimlet eye of Miss Mannin dwelt on this aspect of things, as well. ‘Laughton laughed and said he wished someone would say of him that he had sex appeal … then he sprang up and embraced Elsa declaring that she was the only woman who had found any sex-appeal in him … Elsa reassured him, tenderly; she said that the women were ‘mad about him’ in The Silver Tassie, and he seemed comforted.’

  Over that between-shows supper at the Perroquet, Emlyn Williams had smiled at Charles’ ‘noisy jokes, some of them slanted towards sex, an area in which I sensed complexity.’

  Not so Elsa, apparently.

  Once the sexual bomb had fallen, the pattern for their lives was established – the marriage would continue, but they would go their separate ways. This pattern was never articulated by either partner, but, once the marriage had survived the initial impact, it was no doubt inevitable. It was not, however, quite as simple as that; it rarely is. The shock to Elsa must have been enormous: she ceased, as she says, to trust Charles from that moment because she had been deceived. She no longer wanted a child by him, either. Their sexual relations quickly cooled. It looks as if the brittle young woman that she was when she married him had rather unexpectedly found herself falling in love with him, only to be made brittle all over again. It is to be doubted whether his emotional centre was ever really heterosexually oriented (there is no evidence whatever of any other liaison with a woman, before or after Elsa) but he did deeply want to have children. In later years he reproached her with her refusal to have any, and formed a number of strong friendships with various young actresses: Maureen O’Hara, Deanna Durbin, Margaret O’Brien, Maureen O’Sullivan – father–daughter relationships. This longing of his may have contributed yet another layer to the opaque texture of his Lear; and Elsa failing Charles as a mother, and Charles failing Elsa as a lover contributed a layer to the opaque texture of their life together, too.

  Immediately after Charles’ confession to her of his homosexual self, and just before rehearsals for Payment Deferred started, Jeffrey Dell, the play’s adaptor, and his wife took Charles away with them for a brief holiday in Salzburg. Elsa refused to join them, hating the pretence of a second honeymoon, as she put it. Laughton wrote her a miserable letter on the back of his hotel bill. ‘Elsa my beloved’ it starts, and continues ‘Through these last two days when we have arrived at our hotel in the evening, in the mornings, and in fact at all times when I have been alone, the refrain has been going through my head: “She’s married a bugger, she’s married to a bugger, she’s married to a bugger,” and then you saying to me, “and to think this has happened to me,”
as you did once. And I know Elsa what matters most in life to me is to face it with you. I don’t care and I know now I never will care so much as I did about doing but only about being … our parting at Victoria was a very sad one this time darling, wasn’t it? We seemed to be reaching out to each other all the time inside. Ever since I left you the side that belongs to you has been sad and listless.’

  The externalisation of their separate sexual development did not occur till the beginning of the forties, theirs and the century’s. There may have been sexual encounters for Laughton before then, but if so, they must have been fleeting: his work schedule in the thirties was almost unimaginably packed. He began to discover the sexual possibilities of his chauffeurs and masseurs and batmen, and then, it would appear, when he started the reading tours, he became insatiable, a phenomenon which often overcomes men who feel cheated of their sexual youth. ‘Charles was aggressive as a homosexual … he made it more difficult for himself, too, because he wasn’t content to have one, he’d have a ménage of them,’ Paul Gregory told Barry Norman. ‘Some of them would end up in prison and you’d get calls from wardens and letters threatening him … they were the dregs, low class kind of people … he’d got this Higgins complex. They’d come and go. I didn’t have too much to do with all that except to write the cheques for him and hide them from Elsa and his accountants.’ Nothing Paul Gregory says should be accepted without corroborative evidence, but in this case there is plenty to suggest that Laughton required frequent refutation of his sense of undesirability. At the same time the ‘Higgins complex’ led him to form different kinds of relationships, often with young men who were bi-sexual and whom he tried to teach; this was his ideal relationship. His sense of physical inferiority often led him into somewhat masochistic connections, socially at any rate. Elsa describes one such set-up: ‘While Charles was performing at Town Hall, I went out and returned later to the hotel to wait for him. There were full ashtrays in the room and too many glasses from earlier in the day, so I started to clean up, to put them all on a tray. As I was doing this, Charles marched into the room with his road man. Charles was carrying a load of heavy books, and also his overcoat. The road man, arms empty, was munching on a snack. I said to the young man, ‘Don’t you ever carry the books when Charles is tired?’ … He said, ‘No’, quite simply … I felt quite angry. I stood there with a tray in my hands and said to the young man, ‘You should be doing this.’ He looked up at me and answered, ‘I don’t see why.’ So I threw the trayful of glasses and ashtrays right into his stomach.’

  But from the beginning of the forties, there had, too, been a succession of warmer and more reciprocal relationships, young men who thread shadowily through Lanchester’s and Higham’s pages under a variety of coy pseudonyms, like heroes of a Mills and Boon romance: David Higham and Bruce Ashe and Peter Jones. They were, according to Elsa, as handsome and as masculine and as teachable as could be. They came and they went, some of them staying on to become friends, others getting married and going away for good. There were the usual turmoils, rows, reconciliations, painful break-ups, trial separations, all the ordinary dramas, in other words, of human love, but with the complication that as far as Charles was concerned, it must all remain secret. He and Elsa had a little house in Palos Verdes, to which he would take his lovers. ‘As the years went by,’ wrote Lanchester, ‘I suppose I just came to accept these friends as part of my life with Charles. I worried about him, and I was always glad if and when Charles found a man he was really fond of and who liked him … Perhaps,’ she adds, ‘it was unkind of me not to show disapproval. My acceptance may have been more cruel, in a way, and made Charles feel even more guilty about it all. He was a moral man … it made me very sad that Charles should have to feel so guilty about it; that he seemed to need to be so secretive, all the while still wanting to be found out.’

  It was Charles’ drama, his dark, tragic self, his secret. He loved to tell his secret, and was always amazed and hurt when the recipient of the revelation was unsurprised or unshocked. He would announce (as he did to Robert Mitchum, for example, or Terry Sanders, and even, as far back as 1938, to Larry Adler) that he had ‘a strong streak of homosexuality in his make-up’. That was the phrase. It seems that he wanted to claim a certain special status for himself, as if to say, ‘life isn’t easy for me, you know.’ It may have been the same with his now almost legendary sense of his own ugliness. Lanchester wonders whether his constant references to his physical unattractiveness (the most amusing was ‘I look like a departing pachyderm’) weren’t cries for help, whether he didn’t actually want to be contradicted. Well, yes, no doubt; but in a way his ugliness was useful to him, too. Don Bachardy expressed it acutely: ‘It was a conscious decision of Charles’ to be ugly. He found that he could handle himself better as an ugly man. He didn’t have to compete for certain things, he could demand certain allowances to be made … Charles constantly sought excuses, indulgence: ‘This is so hard for me.’ He wanted approval, encouragement.’ For someone genuinely ashamed of his own appearance, he made remarkable flaunt of it, tearing off his clothes – all his clothes – at the slightest opportunity, and plunging into his pool, there to float in the manner described by Peter Ustinov, ‘like a topsy-turvy iceberg’. People who are truly disgusted with their appearance tend to be crippled by it; for Laughton his ugliness was a way of engaging his whole being with another at the earliest possible opportunity. His ugliness, one might say, was a technique, rather than a condition.

  And, in truth, few people found him ugly. Many women have gone on record (Belita, for example) as finding him positively attractive. His face was alive with expression and character. There is no denying that he was fat, and if that was an obstacle for you, you wouldn’t be attracted to Laughton. For a homosexual man, it can be a terrible disadvantage not to conform to the prototypes of desirability, but Laughton pre-dated the dubious dawn of gay consumerism. To be fat was not yet ‘the cardinal sin of the gay world,’ as a witty character in the film Passing Glances puts it. He was not undesired; and if there was something frantic about his lusts, that is the legacy of the early disappointments. Making up for missed opportunities is rarely an attractive spectacle, gay or straight, ugly or handsome, but it is one of the commoner manifestations of human unhappiness. What is important is that he never ceased to love, or to try to love; and in love he was tender and giving.

  The truth about Laughton and his body is not that he thought he was ugly, but that he knew he wasn’t beautiful. That was the worm in the bud, the source of his life-long inconsolability. To be attractive was not enough: it must be Beauty. His aesthetic sense was hyper-developed; beauty in nature or in art hit him square in the solar plexus; and he failed his own standards. He was that tragic figure, a disappointed narcissist. He could never forgive the face that stared back at him from the mirror for not adding to the world’s store of beauty.

  And so he tried to acquire beauty, to surround himself with it, to let it possess him. ‘Some people buy paintings, they say, because they have a love for them,’ wrote Lanchester, ‘but Charles really lived on them. It was not just love, it was a necessity. It was like drinking water or breathing.’ In hospital, his only outings were to art galleries: ‘Charles would have to be given a shot before the walk, and a nurse would give him a shot at the gallery to get him back.’ He must have his beauty. In the same spirit, he would surround himself with young men, feeding off their beauty, hoping that by exposure to it in sufficient quantities, he might catch it, suddenly find himself a member of that exclusive club, the beautiful of the earth. It is a doomed, forlorn hope, especially poignant, perhaps, for a homosexual, because there is direct comparison. In the last couple of years of his life, Laughton and Isherwood (with whom he had become close friends, wanting, as he told Elsa, to be ‘with my own kind’) were working on a play about Socrates, and had they completed it, and had Charles lived, it might have been his final Testament To Beauty. Charles could not speak the word Beauty without trembling; it
is the idea around which his life revolved.

  Happily, in the last few years of his life, great beauty entered his existence, in the form of a young man called Terry Jenkins, and the relationship came close to transcending the self-defeating tendency of so much of his emotional life. This was due to the extraordinary goodness and simplicity of nature of the young man, whose open and unquestioning acceptance of Charles began to make it possible for him to accept himself. Terry held up a mirror for Charles in which he saw a new face, one transfigured by love. They had met, propitiously, no doubt, for Laughton, in an art gallery, and the first sexual move was made by the younger man. When they repaired to Laughton’s hotel, he simply took all his clothes off. This gesture, Laughton told friends later, had overwhelmed him, the directness and frankness of it. It was a paradigm of the whole of the relationship. Terry Jenkins (a.k.a. the slightly swisher Bruce Ashe in Higham and Peter Jones in Lanchester) was one of that rare breed who is so comfortable within his own sexuality that the terms heterosexual, homosexual and even bi-sexual have no meaning; he was simply someone who communicated best and most easily through sexual means. Laughton made an instant impact on him and he sought to be as closely involved with him as possible. This absence of negotiations must have had a powerful effect on Laughton, a testimony that no amount of words or presents could have equalled. It must have done the thing that Laughton needed more than anything in life: it must have taken him out of himself.