Charles Laughton (20 page)

Clark Gable was unlikely casting for the eighteenth-century Englishman, Fletcher Christian, and felt so himself. He particularly dreaded wearing breeches. To the amazement of both himself and his studios, he had become the very image of American manhood, admired by guys and gals alike – ideal husband, lover, friend, boss, buddy. His acting was limited, but true; his powers of transformation negligible. Good looks and inimitable sexual charm were his strong suits; that, and the rare quality of relaxed masculinity. He was a heaven-sent partner to a succession of divas – Garbo, Crawford,
Constance
Bennett – but he was less easily matched with men. Good-natured and generous though he was, he was nervous about competition in the area where he felt himself vulnerable: acting; and in 1935, Charles Laughton
was
acting.

Laughton’s feelings about Gable, as may be imagined, hinged on appearance; though not, as is commonly assumed, a simple opposition of his ugliness with Gable’s good looks. Gary Cooper’s perhaps even greater beauty had not disturbed Laughton in the least: he had frankly admired him, both as an actor and in physical terms. Perhaps the key word, here, however, is ‘beauty’. Cooper, with his ravishing androgyny, full of lip, luxuriant of eyelash, gentle of manner, had – at least in his performing personality – found a perfect balance between his masculine and his feminine elements, which was no threat to Laughton. It was exactly the balance that he longed to achieve himself but which for most of his life resolved itself into a battle, rather than a blend. Gable, on the other hand – ‘certain as the sunrise,’ as his
New York Times
obituary put it, ‘consistently and stubbornly all man’ – was the very thing Laughton could never be; and also the very thing to which he was always deeply drawn, sexually. In his oblique way, as so often, he expressed some of the complication of his feelings in a comment to a newspaper: ‘Clark Gable dramatizes himself. He makes you feel full of pep. You see Clark Gable and you say, I’ll go out and have half a dozen dates.’

It could well be that this underlying feeling was responsible for the thing that distressed Gable so much during filming: his only real complaint against Laughton, with whom he otherwise got on very well: namely, that he wouldn’t look him in the eye. For Gable, to whom acting essentially meant re-acting, this was fatal. Having a clear and real relationship with his fellow actor was Gable’s life-line. If Laughton delivered his speeches sideways, into the ocean, he was lost. Laughton undoubtedly had good reasons of character and situation for doing so, though Gable was not the first to complain of it: Flora Robson, likewise an essentially ‘relating’ performer, had found it intolerable, too. It is, in fact, rather in the nature of Laughton’s view of his characters: each man a self-contained universe of pain. This was of no interest to Gable. Again and again he stormed off the set bitterly denouncing Laughton for trying to exclude him, cut him out of the scene. This was his technical naïveté, his innocence of the art of acting, his lack of inner resource.

As it happens, the conflict was very good for the movie. The relationship between Christian and Bligh is tense and competitive and
full
of underlying complexity; perhaps, in Gable’s case, the most complex piece of work he did until the performances of his last years, when life and disappointment and illness had added a layer or two to his persona.

Laughton’s performance is again remarkable for the vision he offers of a soul trapped by itself. His first appearance, replete with Frank Lloyd eyebrows, Gieves’ uniform, and mouth downturned with self-disgust and rage, introduces us to the whole cancer of repression, inner and outer. Here is a man who is no vulgar sadist; he is someone in whom rigid application of rules has filled his brain and cast out any vestige of tender feeling. There is no flicker of enjoyment in his harshness; he is serving an exigent god, punishing himself as much as his victims. The clipped adenoidal voice, godsend to a million mimics thereafter, perfectly expresses the pressure inside the man. The sense of an impending explosion is hypnotic, and makes every scene in which he appears dangerous and disturbing; against one’s instincts, one feels for him as much as for Christian – hating him and fearing for him simultaneously.

Almost the peak of the performance, because the most naked revelation of the cancered soul, is the scene in which the Tahitian chieftains step on board to greet the crew. Bligh attempts to be charming. It is an excruciating spectacle, brilliantly funny and painful, as he attempts to reverse the downward trend of his mouth, and somehow summon a smile. Again, there is the sense of the armour cracking, huge inner urges long since imprisoned surging towards the surface; but the lid is clamped firmly back on.

After the mutiny, aboard the little rowing boat in which he and the loyal rump of the crew have been set adrift, expecting to drown or die of dehydration, he hurls his famous defiance of Christian, and enters the music hall forever. It’s such a famous moment that it risks seeming to be a parody of itself, but, no, it transcends its imitations and remains one of the most enduring images of a brave villain, a man true to his lights, prepared to go to hell in the name of a false code. It, and the journey, during which the sun slowly fries the passengers of the little boat, are magnificently real, all the more, perhaps, for having been shot (not on the ocean, as were the early scenes on board ship, but in the tank on the MGM lot) not merely once but
twice
, because of an error in continuity. ‘We have conquered the sea!’ cries Laughton at the end of the voyage, and the cast and crew are reputed to have cheered and wept. It’s not hard to see why.

‘When I have a part like Father Barrett or Bligh, I hate the man’s
guts
so much that I always have to stop myself overacting and be real. Parts like that make me physically sick,’ Laughton told a journalist. The problem was to strike a balance between the character and his attitude to him. With Bligh, as with his best performances, the balance, or perhaps one should say, the tension, is perfectly found, so that not merely do you see the man, see what he has become – you want to do something about it. The effect of Laughton’s work at its best is to make the audience active instead of passive.

His relationship with Gable had warmed over the shoot. One day, according to Higham, Gable, as a supreme gesture of comradeship, had taken Laughton with him on his visit to a brothel. Laughton was apparently deeply touched (and presumably deeply anxious). On another day, Gable had found him gazing sadly at a fisherman, saying to himself, ‘I wish I were that man.’ They seemed by the end of the movie, at any rate, to have achieved a degree of understanding.

The shoot ended relatively happily. On the last day, Laughton assembled the crew and the cast and recited the Gettysburg address, to enormous applause. It increasingly became Laughton’s habit, at home and at work, in the streets and over supper, to quote, at considerable length, great pages from world literature. He apparently did so with complete unselfconsciousness, and they were received with attention and admiration. He had a comprehensive memory of large sections of the Bible, the novels of Thomas Wolfe, the masterpieces of Jacobean prose, and so on. He had a wonderfully resonant, if not very strong, voice, and he phrased with fine timing and a unique ability to sound the vibrations of meaning and association in a word. None of this makes these impromptu performances any the less extraordinary. It is most unusual, it must be stressed, for an actor to act when not being paid for it. Unlike pianists or singers, we are not ready at the drop of a hat to perform for the delight of our fellow-guests. Indeed, most of us would rather die than do so. But Charles Laughton obviously found it easier than making small talk, which he anyway regarded as a waste of time. So, without preamble, and assuming everyone else to be equally keen to do something profitable rather than twitter away, he would recite. And his shyness would disappear.

It is here that one can see for the first time the drive towards story-telling, or rather, being a story-teller, which finally became his preferred self-image.

Laughton parted from Thalberg, looking forward, no doubt to a long and continuing partnership. Thalberg – ‘the most brilliant
producer
in the world today,’ Laughton had said – had collaborated most happily with Charles, advising him, being advised, sharing dreams and visions. He believed that Laughton, with his enquiring brain, good taste and inexhaustible energy, should produce as well as perform in his films. They planned to set up a company together. This company might have been a highly creative and productive harnessing of Laughton’s talent. But Thalberg, alas, died; the heart disease which had haunted him for years finally turned fatal. Laughton never knew an anchor like him again.

Nick Schenk, a junior movie mogul, saw the preview of
Mutiny on the Bounty
, and cabled head office: ‘
TELL THALBERG IT IS THE WORST MOVIE EVER MADE
.’ Nick who? Otis Ferguson’s review begins ‘
Mutiny on the Bounty
is one of the best pictures that have been made.’ It is in fact a marvellously competent piece of work, exciting and economical in its story-telling, seductive and imaginative in its creation of the Tahitian paradise, and containing a good performance by Franchot Tone, as well as a fine performance by Gable, a great one by Laughton, and a tremendous partnership by them both. The film was nominated for an Academy Award, as were
Ruggles of Red Gap
and
Les Misérables
. Laughton himself was nominated for (but did not receive) an Oscar for Bligh, which was voted the best performance of the year by the New York Critics’ Circle. Otis Ferguson wrote: ‘He is genius itself and in an exacting role: he has never played a part of such devious subtleties and frank power and neither has anybody else in the movies. For his soundness of instinct, his range of talent and perception, it should be enough to say that no man can really wear the shoes of a great character without, in his own way, fitting them.’ Mark van Doren, most distinguished literary critic of his day, wrote: ‘Charles Laughton’s performance fixes him in my mind at any rate as by far the best of living actors.’

A couple of years later the performance received an accolade which may have meant even more to him: in
Donald Duck goes to Hollywood
Walt Disney included Captain Bligh among those met by the eponymous fowl. Like many subsequent impersonations, the cartoon emphasises the stiff upper lip aspect of the performance, and misses the inner rage completely. But what can you expect from a duck?

Korda Again

NEEDLESS TO SAY
, Korda was very keen to acquire Laughton again. Nothing he had done since
Henry VIII
had had quite the éclat of that international blockbuster; while Laughton had gone from triumph to triumph. The project they lighted on,
Cyrano
, was an ambitious one, and they went a very long way towards making it happen; but ultimately, for reasons which are not entirely clear but can easily be guessed at, it was not to be.

In fact, after an almost unbroken arc of activity from the day he left RADA, Laughton now had a substantial pause: ten months, which is a long time in the career of the hottest film star in the world. Of course, he was under contract to Korda during all of that time – and longer; for two years, in the end – but his frustration must have been considerable as Korda thrashed about, looking for suitable vehicles. (This was a common experience of actors under contract to Korda, trapped in gilded cages.) But Laughton gave himself passionately to the work on
Cyrano
. The author of the translation, Humbert Wolfe, later published it, with an introduction which memorably conveys the madness of working for Korda – the sudden summons by telephone, the bouts of intense work, the subsequent silences, the financial generosity, the charm, the sheer Hungarian-ness of it all. He also gives an account of working with Laughton which leaves one very impressed.

He and Laughton were sent away together to work on his version, written in three weeks flat: the version, in fact, that he later published, and very decent it is, too. Korda and Lajos Biro, his literary advisor, felt that maybe it was a little too slavish to the French text. Laughton and he were to free it up.

‘I am not likely to forget the evenings which I spent with Laughton in his upper-part in Gordon Square. The ritual was always the same. I arrived at eight to find in the austere room a new floral welcome … Laughton wore a bright dressing-gown over some form of black silk pyjamas, looking with his yellow hair like the raw material of all the actor that there is. We sat at a long bare table, where all that could be done with meat and vegetables was skilfully and quietly served. We spoke chiefly of Shakespeare and Chekhov. To Laughton a great play was a source of lovely terror. He knew exactly the effect of every line, but how, he would ask with blazing eyes, could any man have ever known enough to produce that effect? It wasn’t human, he felt … This was, I have subsequently thought, a deliberate preparation for
the
work that was to follow. You could not, Laughton felt, move straight from dog-racing to the immense concentration which his conception of acting verse demanded.’

It is hard, in reading this, to resist a feeling of suspicion. Wolfe had never met an actor before he met Laughton, and he seems to have gone for the whole Great Actor package hook, line and sinker.
The Thinker, The Votary of Art, The Humble Servant of The Author
, not to mention the black silk pyjamas – Laughton seems to have acted out a whole sequence of
tableaux vivants
for the innocent poet.

But then he delivered the goods. ‘He stood there, a little square man in an ordinary drawing-room. As his strangely thrilling voice began to bring the words to life, the room melted. A shadowy theatre took its place. Crowds of musketeers, citizens, fruit-sellers and gentlemen of the court suggested themselves in the middle-distance … a stage came into remote being with its scenery for ‘Clorise’. And in the centre of it all, all magnificently insolent, arms akimbo, raking moustaches, insinuated, threatened, laughed, gesticulated and finally drew his sword with a great parade, Cyrano – all Gascony in a string of couplets.’