Charles Laughton (18 page)

No doubt partly to escape from the dank and fetid climate of Wimpole Street, and partly for the sake of a return match with another doughty opponent, Dickens, Laughton next signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for
David Copperfield
, to play Micawber. David Selznick was the producer, and from the beginning had been undecided as to whether Laughton or W. C. Fields was the more right for the part; but Cukor was keen on Laughton, and he contributed more classical tone to what was planned as a very
distinguished
product indeed. Laughton immersed himself in the novel and the illustrations and devised a make-up for the screen-tests which was held to be quite
brilliant
. When filming started, however, Laughton lost his confidence completely, and begged to be released, which he accordingly was, to be replaced by Fields.

These are very unusual events. Lanchester recalls that Laughton always despaired after the first few days of filming, but that the producers always persuaded him to continue, which he did,
on condition
that the first few days would be re-shot, but they never were, because no one could ever find them (a likely story, but it might have persuaded a longing-to-be-persuaded Laughton). On this occasion, however, he was adamant, and everyone agreed with him – Selznick, Thalberg and Cukor. There had been no rows, no temperaments. He simply couldn’t relax into the part. It wasn’t working at all.

His feeling at the time was that he was mis-cast, that Micawber was always ‘on’, and that what was needed was someone naturally extrovert, someone with an act of his own, as it were, which he could simply graft onto the character: Fields, in fact. Cukor suggested to Gavin Lambert that Laughton didn’t have the geniality for the part – the common criticism of his Pickwick, which had been an egregious failure of his London stage career; though it’s hard to believe that he was completely lacking in that quality to those who have seen his gentle busker in
St Martin’s Lane
.

No, the difficulty lay not in the content of the role – optimism, ‘elasticity of emotions’ and ‘that inexpressible sense of doing something genteel’, as Dickens describes it, all of which were well within Laughton’s range – but rather the form. Acting Dickens is more problematic than would appear from the printed word, where one glorious speech seems to succeed another, where the characters are so vividly realised, and indeed visualised, and where the theatrical management of the individual scenes is so assured. All of that is exactly what makes the characters live so vividly
on the page
. Stood up and made to move around, as it were, they prove to be highly ingenious concoctions of effects – catch-phrases and catch-gestures serving the scenes to which they belong as so much colour and movement. The author, moreover, offers a wonderfully droll commentary on the characters which is difficult to incorporate. This makes the books ideal material for epic theatre presentations like
Nicholas Nickleby
, but makes performances of the kind that Charles Laughton was interested in giving – namely, explorations of the Unconscious – extremely difficult. Dickens characters are nothing if not Conscious. To make them succeed, an extrovert simplification, allied to a precise reproduction of the rhythms of what are, in effect,
turns
, is called for. There is no room for manoeuvre either downwards, into the recesses of the character, or sideways, into subtext. Up, up and away with your Dickens character. So Charles left, quite rightly.

During his brief period on the film, he impressed Cukor particularly in two respects: anti-Semitism (‘a terrific prejudice concerning Jews’) and pioneer Method acting. The first, of which there is no evidence whatever from any other source, is most likely a feature of Laughton’s anti-Capitalist Establishment feeling. Jews as big-wigs, fat cats, a common radical sentiment of the early thirties. The second is of course very familiar, by now, and no doubt entirely true: ‘He was the first actor I encountered who prepared to make a laughing entrance by going around doing
ha-ha!
sounds for hours.’ One thing Laughton clearly didn’t in the least mind was being thought ridiculous.

Laughton’s next film, his last on his original contract for Paramount, called on him to do
ha-ha!
sounds more than he’d ever done before, or ever would again. It is
Ruggles of Red Gap
, his comedy vehicle, a huge success in its time, and, according to many interviews, and Elsa Lanchester, Laughton’s favourite among all his parts. Whether it is held to be funny or not is of course a matter of taste. Certainly it is enormously interesting in his oeuvre, a very personal film in many ways.

It was apparently his suggestion to remake the story, twice filmed before, by Essanay in 1918, and by Paramount in 1923, with Edward Everett Horton in the title role. Obviously the idea of the English butler lost at cards to an American nouveau riche family and translated into the Wild West had autobiographical associations for him, both personal, as an Englishman discovering America and hereditary, as the scion of generations of butlers and hoteliers. The final shape of the script owes a great deal to him, as most of it was written by his and Elsa’s old friend from Cave of Harmony days, Arthur Macrae, brought out to Hollywood at his special behest. Most importantly, Leo McCarey, the director, was his suggestion. McCarey, responsible for many of the best-loved comedy films of the century, from
Duck Soup
to
The Bells of St Mary’s
, is immortal as the man who paired Laurel with Hardy, and went on to direct many of their films. It was in this connection that Laughton was eager to work with him. He had a passion for slap-stick, reinforced by a conviction that it was a genuinely Popular Art; in which he craved to be involved.

The resulting performance – though it must be stressed that this
was
not so for its original audiences – all too clearly bears the marks of a highbrow on holiday, like a Lateran bishop in a party hat. There is no doubt that the performance is intended to be funny – Laughton all but flourishes
Laugh
! placards at the relevant moments – but the comedy is woefully heavy-handed, particularly by comparison with the gloriously funny actors surrounding him: Maude Eburne as a Tugboat Annie figure, Mary Boland and the adorable Charles Ruggles as the nouveaux riches, and above all, Roland Young (hot foot from the
David Copperfield
set, where he had just played his brilliant Uriah Heep) as Lord Bassingwell, a performance in which words proceed from his mouth with no movement of either jaw or lip. As befits a social comedy of this sort (wonderfully directed by McCarey) they – and all the other members of a flawless ensemble – portray types with such certainty, the nail, in every case, is so firmly hit on the head, that they become archetypes. Laughton, on the other hand, seems both comedically constricted and uncertain in character. The ingredients of his performance – stiff walk, bowler hat, off accent, pop eyes – have been carefully and intelligently assembled; but somebody forgot to put them in the oven. Even his appearance, in fact, jars. Somehow he fails to
look
like a butler. What does a butler look like? As many different things as there are butlers, of course; but in a film where the character’s profession is the very essence of the story, it is incumbent on the actor to look like Butlers Everywhere. This Laughton signally fails to do. With his blond flaxen hair parted centrally and his sour, petulant features, he possesses none of the classic features of that great English invention, the gentleman’s gentleman. He is neither all knowing, nor imperturbable, neither dictatorial nor fathomlessly discreet. He is instead rather emotional, uptight and, it must be said, ever so slightly camp, which could be appropriate (God knows, Edward Everett Horton was as mimsy as they come) but in this case, is not. (A famous story re-told by Garson Kanin bears on this. After a gruelling day, an exasperated Leo McCarey finally burst out: ‘Jesus Christ, Charles, do you
have
to be so nancy?’ Charles replied: ‘But my dear fellow, after eight o’clock a bit of it is
bound
to show.’ A graceful and self-knowing joke, if ever there was one.)

Why the miscalculation? In a sense it was the Micawber problem again (though this time it evidently didn’t disturb Laughton): namely, the character doesn’t call for re-creation of the actor; what it needs is for the actor to bring a ready-made persona. Otherwise the character intrudes, the audience’s attention is drawn to complexities which are irrelevant, and the machinery of the plot gets clogged up.
Secondly
, Laughton actually lacked the gift for the balletic, one might say the choreographic, side of comedy – the side in which Chaplin and Keaton, for example, excelled. Unfortunately, he seems to have been oblivious of this, and many of his films are marred by would-be comic sequences of dismaying ponderousness – the puddle-hopping sequence in
Hobson’s Choice
is the supreme instance of this deadly lack of self-knowledge – but
Ruggles
contains quite horrible examples of abortive schtick, punctuated by many a roll and pop of the eyes. Laughton was very capable of being funny, but he was not at all comic. When he tried to be, all the spontaneity on which he prided himself, all his inspired ‘amateurishness’, was replaced by a paralysing use of so-called technique – a laboured calculation and striving for effect. Thirdly, the underlying themes of the film meant a great deal to Laughton, maybe too much, in this context. The depth of feeling that he brings to some scenes is quite out of place; though in some cases very fine in itself. When he speaks of his family never having failed his lordship’s family, when he speaks of the joys of being his own master, when he ejects a disagreeable diner from his new restaurant, above all when he supervises the kitchen, the unforgettable depth of experience and feeling, and again, the sense of anger and outrage behind the observation, are quite something. They simply belong in another film, and contribute to the unsatisfactory feeling of what is in fact a very well-structured film.

A further reason for Laughton’s disappointing performance was piles; or rather, something infinitely worse, a rectal fistula, which struck during rehearsals, and caused him to spend some weeks in hospital before filming started. He was not completely recovered by the time filming began, and was indeed in some pain during much of the shoot, which would certainly account for the generally subdued nature of his performance, as well, perhaps, as certain other physical features of it. He had told W. C. Fields about his embarrassing ailment, and all he had got from
him
had been a telegram – addressed to Charles Thesaurus Laughton – saying
Hope the Hole Thing is Better
.

His time in hospital was significant in a number of ways. It marked the beginning of his brief but momentous friendship with Joseph von Sternberg. In his autobiography
Fun in a Chinese Laundry
, which is every bit as entertaining as its title suggests, and which bears as much relation to real events as his film
Catherine the Great
does to history, von Sternberg claims that Laughton, whom he hardly knew, came to him sobbing and suicidal, believing that he was in the grip of terminal venereal disease – whereupon von Sternberg, an expert, presumably,
in
these matters, arranged doctors, hospital, and treatment. Laughton was eternally grateful, although it must be admitted he later showed it in some peculiar ways. Elsa Lanchester observes that, having brilliantly and efficiently arranged matters, von Sternberg only visited Laughton once, but that seems perfectly decent.

The second thing that happened to Laughton in hospital was a slight enough incident, but it affected him deeply, and crystallised a growing feeling about himself. What happened, simply, is that after the operation and while he was convalescing, pottering around the hospital corridors he ran into a man who had come to visit his wife. ‘Won’t you pop into her room,’ the man said. ‘It’d cheer her up such a lot to see you.’ Laughton of course did, and the woman smiled when her husband introduced him as the man who had played Henry VIII. It was, said the husband to Laughton afterwards, the first time she’d smiled since she’d been in the hospital.

A simple incident, obviously, but it was the first time, he says, that he had had real contact with his audience, and understood the significance of stars in the lives of ‘ordinary people’ – though he never said anything as patronising as that. Neither on the stage in London, nor since his translation to Hollywood, had he had a direct sense of whom he was addressing. It had been the work, the part, the play, the film. It was here, in this hospital, that the evolution of his understanding of what it was to be an actor began. Elsa Lanchester says that he sorted a number of things out for himself while he was in hospital; this may have been among them.

He would do well to meditate on the meaning of fame at this moment of his life, because the release of
Ruggles of Red Gap
marked another high-water mark in his popularity and critical acclaim. None of the aforementioned cavills were shared by contemporary critics – except for one, that is: his old friend, James Agate, now more niggardly with praise, feeling that the stage had lost a great actor, and the screen gained only a moderate one. ‘If this Ruggles with the expression of a Chadband at once oleaginous and hangdog were to apply to me for a situation, I should expect him to be the inside member of a gang of crooks arranging to steal my spoons.’ His was a rare voice, however – and there is some trace of his well-known snobbery in the comment. For the rest: unqualified triumph. ‘Is this the perfect cast?’ asked Freda Bruce Lockhart, in banner headlines. ‘Laughton’s is a comedy performance of the most consummate virtuosity I have ever seen on the screen, proving him to be a film star of the first order, as none of his trick dramatic performances have
done
… he has, too, achieved an almost incredible reality … this reality is never lost sight of.’ Within the profession, too, there was great acclaim. René Clair, greatly admired by Laughton, sent a telegram of congratulation – ‘than which,’ he wrote, ‘there can be no higher praise.’