Charles Laughton (23 page)

Why was von Sternberg in the London Clinic in the first place? His memoirs simply state that he had been flown over from Bali to be operated on by ‘the King of England’s surgeon.’ It was an interruption of a tour of the Far East he had abruptly undertaken after the completion of the eccentric house he built in the middle of the American desert: ‘No sooner was the house completed than I knew that it was not far away enough from everything I wished to leave behind, and I looked around to see where else I might find refuge from the etiolated ogres I had evoked.’ In other words, he was on the run.

In seven years and seven films he obsessively worked through his complex relationship with Dietrich, creating a series of versions of
her
, ravishingly framed and set, in which her fatally passive beauty was seen to have destroyed the ruined men who loved her. The cycle came to an end with
Capriccio Espagnol
, banned in Spain, and retitled
The Devil is a Woman
by the head of Paramount, Lubitsch, who then sacked its director. His always rocky relationship with Dietrich came to a full stop. Sternberg’s emotional and physical exhaustion must have been extreme. He then executed two journeyman pieces, a
Crime and Punishment
with Peter Lorre, quirkily played in modern dress (with a ludicrous Mrs Patrick Campbell as the pawnbroker); and
The King Steps Out
, a Fritz Kreisler operetta starring Grace Moore, which betrays no single trace of von Sternberg’s touch.

‘I had had enough,’ he quite understandably writes. He went and found the ‘barren and forlorn landscape’, in which he built the house of steel and glass to which he withdrew. ‘While it was going up, I planted a thousand trees.’ But, as he says, it was not far enough away. So he fled as far as he could go, to the other side of the world.

And then he came to London, to hospital, for reasons of health, possibly physical and possibly mental, the man who, born Jo Stern into an ordinary Viennese Jewish family, had, by his absolute mastery of the technical elements of film-making, become king, emperor, dictator; who had uncompromisingly used the screen to dramatise his claustrophobic, obsessional view of life and, more particularly, love. He was now an emperor without an empire and he had no screen on which to inscribe his bleak message. His old friend Alexander Korda, disheartened by the failure of the film he directed, creatively run down, offered him ‘full partnership in all his enterprises,’ which von Sternberg declined, and the script of
I, Claudius
to direct, which he accepted. It was a subject that interested him: ‘to show how a nobody can become a god, and become a nobody and nothing again, appealed to me.’

If he’d discussed this view of the character with the actor who was to play it, he would have met opposition, for Laughton’s view of men and life, though pessimistic, was neither reductive nor negative; but he didn’t. Why should he? Laughton was an actor, a not very remarkable one: ‘who was this comparatively minor actor whose antics had to be taken so seriously? An actor is rewarded with attention out of all proportion to his services. An actor is turned on and off like a spigot, and like the spigot, is not the source of the liquid that flows through him. The intelligent actor knows this and submits without a question. The problem was only to see that the values that bounced back from the material were under my control. And these
values
rarely depended on the actor. What became visible was produced by an interplay of light and shadow, of foreground and background, point and counterpoint, inclusion and exclusion of content, a balance of pictorial and acoustic impact. And how is that to be conveyed to an actor?’

It is almost comic to contemplate the prospect of the author of these sentiments approaching the actor who was trying to make acting rival painting and music as an art, and who, in all innocence, was looking forward to a unique creative collaboration.

Von Sternberg, as Elsa Lanchester said, rose from his bed ‘like the phoenix,’ on the run no more. He was back in harness! Into the jodphurs and boots he climbed, on went the turban acquired en route in Java. He took the reins in his hand and drove like the very devil. Korda had not left him much time, but he strode about, galvanising every one, issuing commands, bullying, harassing, getting results! Making people jump! And every so often, this fat and shambling and self-opinionated actor would come up to him and ask him how he saw the character? And should he limp with the left foot or the right? And what did he think was the meaning of this speech, or of that? These trivial and tiresome questions were answered with injunctions to read the script, to read the novel, to go away until the shooting began, when he would receive his detailed instructions. But the actor wanted to
talk
. Intolerable. Von Sternberg, calmly, patiently, humoured him. ‘I was opposed to no method he might think valid for impersonating himself.’

Impersonating himself. The phrase expresses everything von Sternberg’s approach implied. ‘I became somewhat suspicious when he became a mystic. Apparently he was attempting to imbue his characterisations with meanings that an actor should not attempt to express, intent on soaring into a rarefied air where he could pass Dali, Picasso, Kandinsky, and Chagall in full flight … with genuine diffidence, Laughton asked how one should address the gods. I decided to test other methods and be as devious as was possible outside of a lunatic asylum. In order to address the gods, I said, if the words he was to haul out of his intestines were to be effective, he must make the audience feel that the hull of the galley was encrusted with barnacles that impeded its speed. As if galvanized, Laughton understood at once, and vouchsafed that every barnacle would be heard in every syllable, and that he could bring into his voice the brine, the tang of the salt in the air, seaweed, two or more dolphins, and the screech of the seagulls. He stormed out of the office as if chased by the
Furies
, and it appeared that now everything was in good shape,
except perhaps, the director
.’

The lines for battle were well and truly drawn, the director, straining at the leash, waiting to whip into shape this story and these actors (by now including Flora Robson, Emlyn Williams, and Ralph Richardson in the part Raymond Massey had turned down, according to von Sternberg, because ‘nothing on earth’ would persuade him to work with the actor he had directed in
The Silver Tassie
); and the actor, still, despite some rather unfriendly and patronising behaviour from his old friend the director, looking forward to their partnership in trying to give life to the hapless vocal and physical cripple he hoped to embody. He had already given some excellent help in the scene in which he had to address the gods, an almost impossible thing to get the feeling of: the ancient Roman gods so personal and so near, and yet still gods. Von Sternberg’s note had been excellent; neither intellectual nor technical: it had done what a note should do: it had released something in him.

He had, moreover, himself hit on something which conveyed some of the anguished, romantically bruised dignity of Claudius: King Edward VIII’s abdication speech: ‘the woman I love,’ and so on, recently released on a best-selling gramophone record. It was a key. It worked. Who knows why? It was a comfort, a little nudge into the part. Every day he played it, dozens of times, in his caravan, on the set, at home.

Thus armed, battle commenced. From the beginning it was evident to Laughton that he could expect nothing but cold command from von Sternberg. Still genuinely grateful for the kind services rendered at the time of the fistula, and respectful of his skills, Laughton never raised his voice against his director, never created a scene, was never once ‘difficult’. He simply couldn’t work in the conditions von Sternberg had created. The words of the part became meaningless to him, he was standing outside himself, nothing was filling his being: like his mind, it was a blank. He could hardly remember a line; he, who had been word perfect a week before, when he and von Sternberg had gone through the script together. Von Sternberg had been worried that he seemed expressionless, that his face had seemed amorphous, empty. He had (rightly) attributed this to the actor’s ‘artistic pregnancy’. Elsewhere he speaks of him ‘squirming like a woman in labour’. Now that Laughton wanted to deliver, he received no help. He would repeat the same scene over and over again, always losing his lines or suddenly being distracted by some trivial thing – an
odd
note in his voice – a light – a movement. Self-consciousness kills any inner life. Laughton would try desperate remedies: moving to another set for a different sequence, trying new moves to break the pattern. Nothing availed except momentarily. A kind of blushing modesty, a feeling of nakedness overtook him.

All of this was incomprehensible to von Sternberg. His greatest praise for Dietrich had been her ability to translate his ‘instructions’ into actions without explanation. His word was her command. ‘Given the proper motivation and some guidance, acting is nothing remarkable, providing of course, that the actor is an actor and has the necessary shamelessness to expose his emotions and antics to inspection. To give face to expressions used by millions of human beings all around us, day after day, requires only a relatively minor ability to mimic.’

Von Sternberg had discerned ‘a tendency toward masochism’ in Laughton and decided to test it. He set up a scene in which Claudius would walk down a street surrounded by a jeering mob, and specially chose the ugliest, most evil-smelling extras he could find, directing them to howl abuse at Charles as he passed. The lighting was specially designed to highlight their savage expressions; they were placed to hem Laughton in. ‘We began what everyone thought to be a rehearsal only. My diagnosis proved to be correct. The scene was fine and Claudius superb.’ Not surprisingly, as von Sternberg had at last done something actually to help Laughton. Of course it could have been done mechanically, by skill alone, by the actor working in isolation; but it is hard to believe that the scene would have been as charged as the performance revealed in the footage assembled by Bill Duncalf for
The Epic That Never Was
, his television documentary about the failed project. Thank God for Laughton and for what he was trying to do as an actor that this footage exists. Otherwise von Sternberg’s account and the insidious rumours of the detractors would have convinced us that all that was going on during that doomed shoot was a monumental case of primadonna-ism, an actor self-indulgent to the point of buffoonery wrecking the work of his fellow-workers.

Instead we can see that Laughton was struggling to give life to a performance of unprecedentedly searing pathos, to show a man mocked and spurned though sensitive, gentle and intelligent: a simple enough character who, by the intensity of his inner feeling, he was transfiguring into a paradigm of pain, a Dostoevskian creation, almost too painful to watch.

The twenty-five minutes or so of surviving footage are painful to
watch
in another way: it is almost embarrassing to eavesdrop on the public humiliation of this struggling man, constantly breaking off – ‘I’m sorry, I’ve lost it’, or ‘that’s the broadest London accent you ever heard in your life’ – as the extras and his fellow-actors shuffle nervous and bored in the background. When he does forget a word or a line, von Sternberg, off-camera, shouts it out – always a terrible reproach. If the
director
knows the line and you don’t … what’s curious is that as far as one can see up to the point Laughton breaks off, he seems to be giving a wonderful performance. Something obviously snaps in his brain, the thread is lost, belief is suspended. Self-consciousness overtakes him. Very often when an actor forgets his lines, it is because a voice inside his brain has whispered to him, ‘Wouldn’t it be dreadful if you forgot the lines?’ And that voice has generally entered the brain at the moment the actor loses contact, however momentarily, with the character in the situation, and, looking back to examine this or that line, turns, like Lot’s wife, into salt. And
this
often happens when there is no contact between actor and director, and the actor becomes convinced that every time he opens his mouth it is a further source of displeasure. This shortly becomes paralysing, and unless the actor can get hold of some form of self-confidence (most likely anger against the director), it will only get worse; until, in the theatre, the director goes away and the performance can begin to exist. But of course, in a film, the director never does go away.

From the evidence of what has survived, Laughton was desperately in need of support because he had chosen to walk a very high tightrope indeed. The physical gesture of the performance is enormous: the stutters and the tics are nearly incapacitating, and the limp is one of utmost deformity, like a man walking along with one foot in a trench. The point is not that people do have just such terrible distortions in life, which they certainly do, but that behind them, inside them, is a quite different person, not a loon or a cripple, but a gentle, wise, and humorous man, a scholar and a poet, who has remained untarnished by his physical disadvantages and people’s crass and cruel reaction to them. It is this gap which creates the scale of the performance – the huge obstacles surmounted by a witty and shrewd spirit, and which makes the climactic speech in which Claudius finally takes command in the Senate such an overpoweringly emotional experience (‘One of the greatest performances in the history of the cinema”, Dirk Bogarde says in his commentary to
The Epic That Never Was
). We see the spirit totally overcome the flesh. It is a moment to bring forth cheers from an audience, because it celebrates, as Charles Laughton liked to
celebrate
, the triumph of reality over appearance. It becomes an epic moment because of the actor’s choices. Another man might have striven to show Claudius’ pain and suffering, which would have created sympathy, but would not been remotely as moving as what we see, because then we would have become involved in what Claudius was feeling instead of seeing what was being done to him. Equally, another actor might have tried to minimise, to rationalise, his physical distortions, to join the two sides of the character closer together. What Laughton does is to sound the furthest notes of the octave as loud and clear as possible, and thus to strike the chord of maximum resonance.