Charles Laughton (13 page)

Something she never really forgave him was that he brought with him a grant of some £1,750. He had approached the Pilgrim Trust and secured the money on the understanding that it would only be spent on costumes for plays at the Old Vic – not opera or ballet. What enraged her about this was that she had herself unsuccessfully approached the Pilgrim Trust on many occasions. They had been flattered by Laughton’s movie fame into parting with the money: and with conditions! It was insupportable. But she did of course support it, because she needed the money so desperately. It rankled deeply, however, and eventually had a somewhat ugly outcome.

The incident encapsulates their difference of attitude. He wanted, as anybody would, anybody, that is, except someone with ‘a wilful desire to run the theatre like a parochial charity’, to improve standards of design. He would therefore use his new-found fame to divert some money towards the Vic. Simple. She, on the other hand, saw his move as typically swanky and West Endy and patronising. Acting in her theatre was known as ‘helping the Vic’: this was not helping the Vic, this was trying to take it over.

And so they stuck. His frustration and desire to take short-cuts is
understandable;
but her back-against-the-wall attitude has a certain nobility. To her the theatre was neither a commercial nor a cultural activity: it was a welfare service,
ad majorem gloriam dei
, akin to the facilities offered by the soup kitchens on the Embankment. Luxury of any kind was irrelevant and possibly harmful. It was the actors’
duty
to act at the Vic (for as little as possible); it was the audiences’
duty
to attend performances. Pleasure and passion had little to do with it. Laughton’s great expressive soul, throbbing with pain and the longing for beauty, baulked at this.

Nonetheless, the season was planned: ‘The Laughton Invasion,’ as a somewhat unfriendly chapter heading in
Old Vic Saga
, by Harcourt (‘Billy’) Williams, Guthrie’s predecessor, has it. Laughton would play Lopakhin, Henry VIII, Angelo, Prospero, Chasuble, Tattle and finally Macbeth: the whole gamut.

The season would open in October: meanwhile, two films, one in Hollywood for Paramount, the other, in England. This latter was the last thing Laughton could have predicted when he came back from America. ‘English motion picture production will not begin to rival those from the mills of Hollywood for more than ten years,’ he told journalists. But he hadn’t met Alexander Korda yet.

Né
Sándor Kellner, Korda had adapted his name from his
nom de plume
as a young Budapest film critic:
Sursum Corda
: lift up your hearts. This slogan appropriately describes his effect on the British film industry of the early thirties. He had moved from film capital to film capital in the manner engagingly described in his nephew Michael’s book
Charmed Lives
: taking the largest suite in the largest hotel, eating in the best and most expensive restaurants, taking a box at the opera and moving about in a Rolls Royce – all of this on credit, of course – until the people that matter are so intrigued that they invite you to dine with them and eventually they give you money and you make a film. This infallible routine had been practised in Berlin, perfected in Paris, and polished in Hollywood, leaving in its path a number of unremarkable films, and a couple of good ones:
Marius
, in Paris, and
The Private Life of Helen of Troy
in Hollywood. The English operation was just beginning.

Already there had been
Service for Ladies
(another thing Korda knew a lot about) and
Wedding Rehearsal
– ‘that amusing satire on Mayfair marriages.’ But Korda was looking for something more substantial to launch his new company with. He immediately saw the potential of Laughton, rapidly rising in Hollywood. Typically he
launched
his brilliant, charming offensive by
cherchant la femme
: Elsa. He intimated to her that he was looking for a vehicle for her and Charles: an adaptation from the French called
Gust of Wind
. It was witty and brilliant, with a wonderful part for her, and she never heard another word about it. The talk shifted to a historical subject:
Henry VIII’s Fourth Wife
, she to play Anne of Cleves. Eventually it ended up where it was headed for all along, no doubt: the sequel to the Helen of Troy film, the predecessor of the Don Juan film: the middle film in the ‘
Private Life of
…’ sequence,
The Private Life of Henry VIII
, with Charles as Henry and Elsa squeezing in as Anne.

There are many stories as to whose idea the subject was – Korda’s preferred version that he’d overheard a cabbie singing Harry Champion’s music hall hit ‘I’m ’Enery the Eighth, I am’ being as likely as any – but it hardly matters. It is a typical Korda notion: elegant, slightly risqué. Charles was an obvious choice for the part – or rather, vice versa. And it is true that the Holbein portrait
does
look like Laughton – or rather, vice versa.

The significance of it in Laughton’s career is that for the first time he was in on a project from the beginning. He was all but co-producer of the film. It was he who instigated the passionate quest for authenticity; he who dragged Korda down to Hampton Court again and again. Such texture as the film possesses derives from his research and drive, and, of course, from his nonpareil performance as the king. There is a tension between the Viennese boudoir humour of Lajos Birò’s script, cynical about politics and sex alike, and the authenticity and weight of both the settings and the central performance; but the tension adds a special flavour to the movie.

Korda was an unremarkable director, and the film has poor structure and little flair; it is well enough performed by Merle Oberon and Binnie Barnes and Robert Donat (and includes a creaky performance by Lady Tree which is a matter of some historical interest); there is the odd expressive shot by the cameraman, the lugubrious Georges Périnal, and Birò’s dialogue has a knowing, if second-hand, wit (‘Would your majesty consider re-marrying?’ ‘I would consider it … the triumph of optimism over experience!’) But it is Laughton’s film.

Although Elsa Lanchester is essentially of the James Whale school of acting – extraordinariness for extraordinariness’ sake, of which her exceptional performance in
The Bride of Frankenstein
is the apotheosis – when working with Laughton, she often transcends her quirkiness. As Anne of Cleves she is at her very best, direct and sparkling and unexpected. Their bedroom scene together is the film’s best. True,
her
German accent, despite intensive imitation of Elisabeth Bergner (
because
of intensive imitation?), is fairly ludicrous, betraying her background in revue; but they play together with perfect understanding (something Laughton may not always have received).

As for him: it remains one of the greatest things he did, and one of the most achieved performances of film history. Impossible though it now is to separate the actor from the image of the role – outside the hotel where he was born is a plaque with the silhouette of the king – and despite the facial resemblance, neither the casting nor the performance are at all obvious. Laughton had never played anything remotely like it before, and never played anything like it again (except of course, for the sequel,
Young Bess
). He had played perverted villains, haunted murderers, little men, a decadent emperor on the brink of madness – all complicated, troubled men, ill at ease with their bodies or put upon by their situation. Here he gives a performance of complete extroversion, direct, strong, forceful. He is capricious, but there isn’t the slightest suggestion that Henry’s beheadings were due to bloodthirstiness or cruelty. He is open of countenance, entirely masculine, and unhesitatingly self-confident. He is shown as susceptible to charms of music, and art, and female beauty. He himself is, in person, remarkably attractive. His plucked eyebrows open his eyes out even further, the eye-shadow gives him a certain sensuality, and he shows a fine calf and a dainty foot.

In fact, he becomes the very image of the Tudor age: vigorous, straightforward, on occasion melancholy. He had told Agate that he intended to play him ‘not as a phallus with a crown, but as the morbid introspective fellow he actually was.’ On the contrary, he shows him to be impulsive, tender, generous. He refrains from portraying this particular monarch as a baby, preferring to show him as a toddler; with all the velocity of a newly initiated walker, he hurls himself across rooms, snatching at people and things along his way. That characteristic Laughton device, the sudden spurt, is employed to brilliant effect, as is its vocal equivalent, the impatient bark.

It is not a portrait in depth; it is, rather, full-length: strong, clear, and solid. Its most remarkable quality is its is-ness. It has stopped being acting or writing or filming. It simply
is
, the phenomenon called Laughton’s Henry. It rings true.

A clue to his achievement of this quality, and of his general approach, was given by Laughton in a
Sunday Express
interview: ‘I cannot quite say how I got my conception of Henry VIII. I did not take any historical acceptance of the man. I suppose I must have read a
good
deal about him, but for the rest I spent a lot of my time walking around the old Tudor Palace at Hampton Court, getting my mind accustomed to the square, squat architecture of the rooms and the cloisters. I think it was from the architecture of the houses and the rooms that I got my idea of Henry.’

It is also, of course, a remarkable technical achievement: but we have had those from other actors and yet they have remained mere displays of skill. The ageing is superlatively done by Laughton, each phase marked by a thickening of the body and a slowing of gait, till the old king (who really
has
become a baby!) is sunk into infant cunning and greed. The thirty-four-year-old man has disappeared completely, but then few people would, on meeting, have thought the tubby diffident slightly obstinate young man they might have met at supper the same person as the massive, centred titan exploding in Jovian laughter that hits the screen.

The production was somewhat delayed, so all Laughton’s scenes were shot together – which may have added to the sense of white hot work – to enable him to take up his next task: the fifth instalment of his contract for Paramount,
White Woman
. Back to Hollywood he went; back to $2,500 a week, instead of the £1,000 he took for the whole of
Henry VIII
.

The entire Korda film had cost £50,000, a pittance, with all the players on a percentage in lieu of larger salaries. Initially, it seemed that they might never see any percentage payments, because the film proved impossible to place. Finally, United Artists somewhat reluctantly agreed to distribute it, and Korda, as if to trumpet the internationalism of the British film industry, staggered the première over three countries: Paris, New York, then London, where it opened on 23 October 1933. Shrewdly handled by Korda, the film burst on the three cities in triumph. It was a milestone for Korda, who built his whole subsequent empire on the strength of it; for the British film industry, which for the first time was taken seriously in the international film world; and for Laughton, who was also established in a way that he had not yet been. It was a crucial breakthrough. Hitherto he had carried character acting to the threshold of stardom – always held back by the eccentricity (euphemism for unpleasantness) of the characters he played. Here he was without qualification
A Star
: thanks in large part to the normality of the man he played. It was the only part for which he won an Oscar – only the seventh to be awarded, and the second to an Englishman. He didn’t collect it in Hollywood; he was playing at the Old Vic, and read about it in an announcement
on
the Stage Door noticeboard. (When he did collect it, at a dinner in London, he took his audience somewhat by surprise in his acceptance speech: ‘It was a sporting gesture – but there’s the man who should have won it’ – and he pointed to Walt Disney. ‘There’s your great man. Great because he is simple and unaffected.’)

Certainly, however, the triple premières established Laughton in a new way. He was no longer the eminent English character actor, but a fully-fledged world-famous personality. The success of the film owed much to the Korda elements – the sexual naughtiness (having six wives! The stamina!) also (for 1933) the historical and monarchical irreverence; and then the ultimate extension of every stand-up comedian’s wife gags: Henry beheads his when they get out of hand (lucky old Henry!). But Laughton received two of the greatest accolades available to an actor: confusion of the character and the actor (‘Laughton,’ the ads said, ‘never raised his hands to a woman – he just chopped off their heads.’ ‘How to eat à la Charles Laughton: 1: Tear birds to shreds with your own hands … 5: Finish meal with a few choice burps.’); and imitation. Every street-corner, saloon bar, drawing-room and green-room mimic was doing his Henry. It came three times to Laughton, this accolade: with Henry, with Bligh, and again with Quasimodo. It is a rare and extraordinary tribute. Critically the film was applauded to the echo – but it was Laughton that dominated every review.

While the fate of the movie was still unknown, Laughton was back at Paramount, turning his attention to the wretched hack-work of
White Woman
, a Malaysian farrago directed by Stuart Walker and co-starring Carole Lombard. Curiously, however, possibly still high from the work on
Henry
, perhaps out of desperate boredom, he endows the character of Horace Prin, ‘King of the River’, with a colourful life all of his own, starting with a great curving moustache, going on to a Cockney accent owing more to the music hall than the sound of Bow Bells, ending up in an odd, jaunty, rolling walk. The whole effect adds up to something that surely cannot have been envisaged by the screenplay writers. They seem to have written him as a conventionally cruel river trader. With his giggling and teasing and playacting, Laughton adds many layers of refinement to Prin’s unpleasantness. Using a whole battery of tics – screwing up his eyes, scratching his head, pulling at his moustache – he creates an impression which is oddly satirical – not Laughton being satirical (though he may easily have been sending up the script) but of Prin mocking everything, even language itself. The character takes a turn
for
the Conradian when the natives start revolting: his mockery turns to existential recklessness, spitting in the face of a delegation from the Chieftain. The last scene of the film shows him playing cards with his mate, demonically disregarding the ravening hordes outside, until the mate is speared through the heart, at which he crossly says: ‘And here’s me with a royal flush on me.’ He then creeps out of the window, presumably to death.