Charles Laughton (28 page)

Kanin complains that from the first day, Laughton seemed to want to ‘take charge.’ Certainly he must have attempted to define the parameters of what he was going to attempt; and certainly, he wanted help. In his assault on yet another mountain, he wanted a partner in imagination, a companion, a comrade. He did
not
want someone shouting ‘Get up that mountain!’; nor did he want some loon burbling ‘It’s not a mountain, Chuck, it’s easy.’ He
did
want acknowledgement of his contribution. When he emerged from the make-up room after the first tests, totally unrecognisable, he presented himself to Kanin with the innocent joy in his transformation he always revealed on these occasions. ‘They’ve done a very good job,’ said Kanin, carefully choosing his words. ‘
They
?’ replied Laughton, ‘
they
simply
did
what
I told
them to do.’ It is an arrogant reply, but essentially truthful. Most make-up artists – Perc Westmore, the Charles Laughton of maquillage being a notable exception – place their considerable skills at the disposal of ‘their’ artist, who, they assume, knows more about the character than they do. Achieving the desired result is of course their department, and endless the virtuosity and inventiveness that goes into it. Kanin’s remark was a calculated denial of Laughton’s responsibility for his own work. Carole Lombard, of course, would have acknowledged her make-up artist without hesitation; but then as that artist’s task was confined to the most direct presentation of her bone structure, the question of creativity did not arise. To Laughton, his creativity was the central issue in his work, and he was fiercely jealous of it.

Before Kanin had administered his little put-down, Laughton had been capering around, doing a tootsie-fruitsie Italian accent. Kanin panicked: was Laughton really going to do it like that? He bearded Laughton about it. Laughton turned suddenly nasty: did Kanin think he was auditioning for the part? He’d been fooling around with the accent – obviously he wasn’t going to do it like that. Kanin said he just
wanted
to be certain that Laughton had a method of acquiring an authentic accent. Of course he had, said Laughton, grandly: the Michelangelo-Vivaldi-Dante method. Kanin, he claims, was impressed – until the read-through, when Laughton’s accent was so incomprehensible that he had to stop the proceedings and send him off to a voice coach. After a few hours’ tuition, says Kanin, he had found an accent that was not merely accurate, but entirely personal to the character.

Of course there was an element of old mullarkey in Laughton: an obstinacy, sheer Scarborough cussedness. And there was also an element in him of masochism, of welcoming the big stick when it was finally wielded – that at least has the advantage of relieving one of personal responsibility. At the read-through, Laughton may have been groping towards some deep immersion in the sensations provided by the experience of strange sounds passing through the mind and the mouth. Or he may just have been being difficult, protesting in a general way against the Lombard – Kanin axis, the
pros
.

Kanin observed: ‘Laughton enjoyed being difficult not because it disconcerted others, but because being difficult made him special, the centre of attention.’ Not even his worst enemy has ever accused Laughton of being ordinary, or having trouble commanding attention. Why would he bother to engineer what he already had? Where he was ‘difficult’ was in bringing his problems with the part to rehearsals, instead of concealing them, or solving them in the bath at home, à la Laurence Olivier. He was also obviously intensely self-absorbed in a way which left him little energy or inclination to engage in the good-humoured banter usual and, to most mortals, indispensable on the studio floor. He did like people to know what it was all costing him. In this way he was like someone who has a bad headache and won’t let you forget it – wants his nobility in being there at all to be recognised. This is not the most charming of traits; but it is a mitigating factor that he
did
have a headache; that he was, that is to say, engaged in painful and frustrating efforts to reach a result which was substantially more ambitious than what most of his colleagues were even attempting.

There was little sympathy for his approach from his fellow-players. William Gargan, playing the handsome hired-man, wrote,

On the set, he was the most difficult man I’ve ever worked with. An inveterate scene-stealer, not at all subtle, without any of the charm of Barrymore (or his talent), he was a grubby man who fought and clawed for every inch of celluloid. In an early scene, as I would say
something
, Laughton would begin to writhe, his heavy face hanging over my shoulder like a full moon. Every line I’d speak, he’d growl, grimace, wipe his nose, lick his blubbery lips; he’d grovel, rub his hands, do everything but have a fit. Finally he had his fit as well. So did Garson Kanin … he was a fine director, perhaps the finest I ever worked with … but Laughton needed no direction (Charles knew best); Laughton would take no direction (from an American!).

Gargan, who, in the film, gives a constricted and charmless performance, may well have resented Laughton’s inventiveness and force of personality; it was hard for any actor to keep up with him in those regards. Laughton had but to walk into the same frame as Gargan and the scene was stolen.

Kanin dubbed Laughton a ‘privy player’: one who works on his rôle in private and is then unable to adapt his performance to the needs of the moment. ‘Giving a direction to Charles was like offering him a cup of hemlock.’ Laughton never developed the technique of appearing to accept a suggestion in order to consider it at leisure. Having indeed worked (and worked and worked) on his rôle in private, he had begun to create something rather complex. Any ‘direction’ requires some accommodating, unless, of course, the director is deeply in sympathy with the actor’s aims and methods. What is clear is that Kanin had sympathy with neither. Like von Sternberg before him, he couldn’t see what the problem was. As far as he was concerned, Laughton was talented and well-cast. End of story. He describes an incident which demonstrates, according to the angle from which you view it, either Laughton’s determination to go to any lengths to achieve something new and alive, or his grotesque obstinacy and perversity. Interestingly, Kanin’s account begins with him failing to find anything ‘wrong with the scene or with Laughton’s attack on it’ and ends with how he ‘saw and heard and felt great acting’ in what was ‘perhaps the best scene in the whole picture’ (it would be truer to say that it was the
only
scene in the whole picture.)

As told by Kanin it’s a very funny story: how Laughton was unhappy with a scene he was due to shoot the next day, how he went to Kanin to talk about his difficulty, how he persuaded him to go up to the vineyards with him though it was nearly midnight, and, then, striding about, waving his arms around, finally broke through. ‘All at once the quality of his voice changed. Laughton disappeared. Tony Patucci replaced him … we had stopped in a clearing. There was a certain amount of moonlight. Laughton’s genius turned it into
sunlight.’
Actor and director were equally thrilled. They went back to their respective homes. Next day, Laughton had lost it again. Shyly, tentatively, he asked Kanin if they could go back to the vineyards. ‘There are people who possess strange powers. Laughton was one of them. He had the power to draw one into the orbit of his pattern of thought, sense of feeling and mode of behaviour.’ Kanin agreed. Laughton found it again. They returned to the set. Kanin was allergic to the crop-spray, and started to sneeze, ruining a take. Laughton lost it again. He and the production secretary went back to the vineyards. Kanin stayed behind, taking soporific anti-allergy tablets. Laughton returned, did a number of takes which Kanin, drugged to the eyeballs, barely saw.

It may have been ‘perhaps the best scene in the whole picture,’ but the price was too high, both for the film and for Laughton. He never again made that kind of fuss over a performance, because he never again tried so hard. Except for
This Land is Mine
and
Advise and Consent
, with both of which he had, for different reasons, a strong personal identification, he increasingly saw films as a source of easy money – ‘paying for ice for father’s piles,’ as he and Elsa Lanchester used picturesquely to describe it.

Laughton made a significant remark to Kanin at the rather subdued end-of-shoot party. ‘What’s so terribly, terribly sad about all of this is that some day you’ll come to know what a damned nice fella I really am.’ He was beginning to like himself – wanted to be liked by others. His art of acting, which consisted of driving himself relentlessly to reveal unpalatable aspects of his personality, was not calculated to endear him to anyone. So he began to withdraw from it. To be loved was more important. Perhaps on
They Knew What They Wanted
he was already looking for release from the behaviour his relationship to his art demanded of him. Some years after the film, he and Kanin were both at a supper party. Kanin, asked how he handled difficult actors, ‘heard the pompous side of me take off,’ he says. ‘“Well Frances,” I said, “Take charge. Never lose control, not for a moment. Let them know that either they’re going to do what they’re supposed to do, or else get rid of them at once. That’s the only way.”’ Charles looked up from his soup and said, “Why
didn’t
you?”’

They Knew What They Wanted
was produced by Erich Pommer; it is the last fruit of his unhappy collaboration with Laughton. ‘Mayflower’, the name of their company, turned out to be oddly prophetic: they had both emigrated to America. Pommer stayed for a few more years until, in 1946, he returned in U.S. uniform to
Germany
to help reorganise the shattered film industry. Elsa Lanchester reports that Pommer’s son claimed that he had been killed by Laughton’s impossible temperament. If so, it was a long-drawn out death: he outlived Laughton by four years.

Charles’ next film presented a very different face of Laughton, both as actor and as man:
It Started with Eve
, whipped cream topped with sugar and drenched in chocolate sauce. It’s not a very agreeable experience, watching it today, but Deanna Durbin, whose vehicle it was, is pleasantly straightforward on the plump brink of womanhood, and Charles is larky. He seems to be having fun; indeed, there is every evidence that he
was
having fun. He got on famously with Durbin – another daughter substitute, like Maureen O’Hara and, later, Margaret O’Brien – and they liked to play practical jokes on Henry Koster, the good-natured director, a Durbin veteran (
Three Smart Girls; One Hundred Men and a Girl; Three Smart Girls Grow Up
). ‘Thanks to Charles,’ Deanna wrote, ‘I discovered that making pictures could be fun, lost my tenseness, and discovered that Hollywood and making pictures were not the most important things in the world.’ It was exactly what Laughton had been discovering for himself. The result in his case is a performance which is fun, but not funny – not
seriously
funny at any rate, so his work becomes a mere diversion. This is a new development in his work. It is the flip-side, the Bank Holiday, as Oscar Wilde might say, of his sulking. It is still a formidable talent, but frivolously used.

He plays an aged millionaire who is revived on his deathbed by the life-enhancing sight of Miss Durbin, apparently his nephew’s fiancée. She isn’t, is in fact a last-minute substitute for the real one, but when he’s back on his feet, he demands to see her. The film resolves into the story of his attempts to bring her and his nephew together. He effects this with great twinkle. It is, in fact, a considerable physical transformation on his part – he seems tiny, thin and incomputably ancient: the very image as it happens, of the late Lord Stockton (Harold Macmillan). It is said that Deanna Durbin wasn’t introduced to him by name on the first day of filming and passed the entire day wondering where Charles Laughton was. There are many good physical gags (with cigars, and, particularly, an up-ended sofa) and he finds a wonderful wavering voice for the character. The performance is suffused with the quality that is said always to have eluded him: benevolence. It is, in a word, charming.

The Tuttles of Tahiti
, which followed
It Started with Eve
, is more dispiriting, as the talent itself is in question. Jonas is a sleepy, mildly whimsical descendant of Ginger Ted, surrounded by his enormous family of toothsome Tahitian youths, distant descendants, perhaps, of Fletcher Christian (the film is based on a novel by Nordoff and Hall, authors of
Mutiny on the Bounty
) but hardly of the irredeemably Caucasian Laughton. There are, of course, pleasant interludes, especially in his scenes with Florence Bates, an amateur actress, with whom Laughton, always attracted to the simplicity and directness that eluded him in his own personality, struck up a friendship. There are the obligatory eating and chase scenes – showing him, as usual, in the one, shamelessly indulgent, in the other, comically fleet of foot, but there is no animating spirit. He acts like a little boy persuaded to play, but determined not to enjoy it. Laughton is often accused of mugging, implying a certain relish, an actor unrestrainedly indulging his favourite tricks, but that is a false definition of the word. Mugging is what an actor does when he is not engaged. He manipulates his mug into shapes, instead of reconstructing the impulses which would create those shapes. In
The Tuttles
, Laughton is mugging. There is, moreover, no connection between his performance and the
ideas
of the piece (such as they are). Generally, good acting spontaneously engages with the ideas of the script: Laughton, in his performances of the thirties, evinced a positive genius for doing so. His Jonas, alas, is a mere blur of hastily assembled characteristics.

Again, as in
They Knew What They Wanted
, the sense of resistance comes off the screen. Neither physically nor as a personality was Laughton capable of being dull or routine. Unsatisfactory as a performance, his Jonas nevertheless exists as a substantial phenomenon: another actor’s discomfort in a rôle might pass unnoticed, but Laughton’s is palpable. It is as if, like one of Woody Allen’s characters in
The Purple Rose of Cairo
, he would like to step out of the screen and be released from his celluloid prison. It is, indeed, as if playing this character in this film were an indignity, a humiliation that had been imposed on him.