Charles Laughton (34 page)

From now on the main task was to get the play on. Brecht created a beautiful memorial to their collaboration in ‘Letter to the Actor Charles Laughton’:

Still your people and mine were tearing each other to pieces when we

Pored over those tattered exercise books, looking

Up words in dictionaries, and time after time

Crossed out our texts and then

Under the crossings-out excavated

The original turns of phrase. Bit by bit –

While the housefronts crashed down in our capitals –

The façades of language gave way. Between us

We began following what characters and actions dictated:

New text.

Again and again I turned actor, demonstrating

A character’s gestures and tone of voice, and you

Turned writer. Yet neither I nor you

Stepped outside his profession.

Galileo

IN DECEMBER OF
1945, Laughton started private readings of the version of
Galileo
over which he and Brecht had so long laboured. He read, in wonted fashion, to anyone who would listen: ‘wounded servicemen, fellow actors, millionaires, agents, lovers of art’ according to an entry in Brecht’s journal. ‘Not a single boo or reservation, so it seems.’ The reaction at these impromptu and perhaps unlooked-for sessions were noted and adjustments were made. Other more formal gatherings were convened; one for Eisler, the Viertels and Feuchtwanger among others; another, more importantly, for Orson Welles, who immediately expressed an interest in directing it. Brecht liked him and his response, and was confirmed in his enthusiasm by a visit to Welles’ spectacular and, in the event, spectacularly disastrous production of
Around the World in Eighty Days
. With half a mind on the carnival scene from
Galileo
, Brecht was thrilled by the circus sequence Welles had introduced, complete with animals and acrobats.
Laughton
apparently shared Brecht’s enthusiasm, although he had privately sounded out other possible directors, including, unimaginably, Alfred Lunt. ‘The nearer the hour to rehearsal, the more scared I become of being directed in the play by anyone but an actor.’ Did he regard Welles as an actor or as a director? Despite the débâcle of his relationship with Hollywood, the collapse of his political career, and the over-ambition of his present stage venture, Welles was very much the thrilling young man in a hurry, still only 30, the boy genius, the Renaissance man
de ses jours
. Whatever the temporary setbacks, his confidence and charm were supreme, carrying all before them. This must have been very hard for Laughton to handle.

So!’ wrote Welles in a jaunty postscript to one of his letters to Charles ‘you find my confidence in my own charm overbearing, do you? Go fuck yourself!’

Powerful, rich and famous though he might have become, Laughton’s caution, intellectual inferiority complex, and slow-moving cussedness remained intact. What position could he adopt in relation to this whirlwind? He could be neither teacher nor pupil. Welles would simply make him feel dull and old, blinking foolishly as Welles performed his verbal, artistic and actual conjuring tricks with Laughton not quite seeing how he did it but obscurely sensing a fraud somewhere. From the beginning of the venture, there seems to have been a sense of strain. Welles became impatient with Brecht’s obstinacy: ‘Brecht was very, very tiresome today until (I’m sorry to say) I was stern and a trifle shitty. Then he behaved.’ At first Welles resisted Laughton’s participation as co-producer – upon which Brecht was properly insistent – then acceded – but he kept becoming involved in various other projects and putting off
Galileo
. Laughton and Brecht in, it must be admitted, a fairly amateur way went behind Welles’ back and did a deal with the impresario Mike Todd, who was to supervise the entire production. Laughton, with his perennial insecurity, urged Brecht on: ‘That’s protection. That’s what you need’. They had either failed to check out or not thought important Todd’s previous dealings with Welles, which had been extremely abrasive – Todd had pulled out of
Around the World in Eighty Days
and precipitated Welles’ never-ending financial problems with it. Welles refused to be involved in the venture if Todd was, and told Laughton so; or rather, told his assistant to tell Laughton so. Laughton’s reply (‘I do not appreciate your habit of using a third party to do the calling’) complains of the procrastination: ‘Either the play was going on on the earliest possible day or I had to do a movie. Time at my age is dear.’
Laughton
was 47. Money, rather than time, was the real issue. The parts and the emoluments were dwindling. Laughton wrote to Welles: ‘The rest of Mike’s letter seems plain nonsense, including a passage which says ‘When Orson does a play (I speak from experience) he really does it.’ I was under the impression we were to collaborate all three on the idea of production and so on for the new and difficult play, otherwise how could I also function right? You are an extraordinary man of the theatre and therefore I flatly do not believe that you cannot function as a member of a team.’ This utter misjudgement of Welles is equally an illumination of Laughton: he
was
a genuine team-worker, partly from fear and insecurity and dread of the aloneness and responsibility of creation, partly from his sense of the vastness of the task – any artistic task. Welles’ Promethean dynamism was quite alien to him. Had he not stumbled badly with Prospero?

‘You are the best man in the world,’ he goes on, ‘to put the Church of Rome on the stage, to mention only one aspect of the play. This appears to me to matter. Cannot this important thing between you and Todd be worked out? Todd has never spoken ill of you to either of us. The strongest word he has used is ‘afraid.’ That also is nonsense when there is the play to be told. Brecht greets you, Charles.’

Whether the word ‘afraid’ was Todd’s word or Laughton’s may be doubted; but there’s no doubting the passion and sincerity of his last phrase: ‘there is the play to be told’ – a fine phrase that Brecht would certainly have approved of. The telling of the play was Laughton’s whole ambition, to which everything else was subservient. To Welles, it may have seemed exciting, fun, a challenge, ‘one of the greatest productions of the contemporary theatre’, in other words, more glory; but for Laughton it was the way forward for the future – the future of the theatre, but equally, perhaps, the future of mankind. To Alfred Lunt Charles had written: ‘It seems that Brecht is our man and is launching the theatre back to us on the old Elizabethan terms.’ ‘This is a new play, and it is of such stature! It is as important as, if not more important than, reviving the classics.’ He and Brecht had sustained such a productive collaboration on the basis of their common vision of the importance of the theatre; Welles, it seemed to Laughton, was a playboy. On that their partnership foundered, not on Mike Todd (who, as it happens, decamped shortly afterwards, when Brecht and Laughton discovered to their horror that he sought to costume the play with Renaissance sets and costumes hired from the studios).

During these one-foot-forward, two-feet-back manoeuvres, Laughton looked to films to provide income, not only for himself, but for Brecht, too. Drafted onto
Arch of Triumph
to replace the unwell Michael Chekhov, Laughton demanded substantial re-writing of his rôle as a sadistic and drunken SS officer in pre-war Paris. In order to lend some particularity to the stock figure of Harry Brown’s script, he proposed an intensive examination of
Mein Kampf
, which he undertook with Norman Lloyd, the director’s assistant, and a bottle of whisky. The results of their research were then turned over to Brecht. Not a line of what Brecht wrote found its way into the script; that wasn’t the point: he got paid, as did Hanns Eisler, hired as German accent coach, also at Laughton’s suggestion. Alas, neither accent nor script have the remotest vestige of authenticity, let alone interest. The film, Lewis Milestone’s reunion with Erich Maria Remarque (director and author of
All Quiet on the Western Front
together again) is a limp saga, possessing distinction only in the visual sphere, the responsibility of William Cameron Menzies, greatest of all Hollywood art directors. ‘In this slow, expensive film Charles Laughton is absurd as the Nazi brute’ (Bosley Crowther). Not absurd, but severely out of focus, like the Eisler-taught accent, which seems in its burr Dutch rather than German; or the odd, rolling walk. The monocle flashes sadistically away, but there is neither menace nor sympathy, because this Haake is neither a monster nor real. Something looks as if it might happen in the drunk scene, but nothing does. It seems that Laughton had seen the potential for something interesting which he had neither time nor perhaps encouragement enough to achieve.

The search for a director for
Galileo
continued, from Elia Kazan, who, Brecht said, seemed promising because he admitted he hadn’t the least idea how to do the play (‘so he might learn’) to Harold Clurman. But Brecht distrusted Clurman (‘a Stanislavsky man’). ‘You will try to get “atmosphere”; I don’t want atmosphere. You will establish a “mood”; I don’t want a mood … you cannot possibly understand how to approach my play’. ‘At this,’ says Clurman, ‘I roared, “My name is Clurman!”’ Despite the mastery of emigré exchanges evinced by this last reply, he was clearly not going to hit it off with Brecht, who turned instead to Joseph Losey, Laughton’s one-time stage manager from
The Fatal Alibi
. Losey was one of the first Americans Brecht met, in Moscow, in 1935. Their acquaintance continued during Brecht’s first American visit, when he saw and admired Losey’s Living Theatre productions, thoroughly Brechtian
in
manner at least. He was staying in the apartment in New York Brecht had taken with his mistress Ruth Berlau during the second half of 1946, so perhaps seemed like the bluebird in Brecht’s backyard; doubly so when he introduced Brecht to Edward Hambleton, a young Maecenas from Texas, who agreed to put the play on.

By curious coincidence, Losey had a Laughton connection as well: he had been stage manager on both London and New York productions of
Payment Deferred
, and had stayed around to work on
Last Alibi
, the Broadway version of
Alibi
. His relationship with Laughton seems not to have been especially warm, but he admired him both as an actor and as an intelligent man, and seems not to have resented the clear indication that although he would be the nominal director, Brecht and Laughton were very much in charge. This somewhat surprising fact, in view of Losey’s considerable track record in both theatre and radio, and his current contract with RKO, whose enlightened head, Dore Schary, had released him on full pay to do the play, is a measure of his admiration for the play and his respect for both men. He was, after all, not a baby – thirty-seven – and notoriously strong-willed and peppery. In the extensive preparation that followed he acted as handmaiden to the two doughty collaborators. This work, the casting, designing, composing, continued through to the middle of 1947. It might have been possible to go ahead earlier, but Laughton had a film offer which he felt obliged to take. He needed the money urgently: again his garden was crumbling, more ominously than ever this time: it carried a pre-Columbian wind god with it. He set vigorously to work on
The Paradine Case
, his reunion with Alfred Hitchcock after their unhappy experience of ten years before. Hitchcock was no happier with this film than the earlier one, but this time his displeasure had nothing to do with Laughton, who was now neither leading man nor producer. The trouble this time was David Selznick, the film’s producer and, as it happens, screenplay writer, who had vexed Hitchcock deeply by imposing Alida Valli and Louis Jordan on him in the central rôles. His interest was confined to constructing the Old Bailey setting in such a way that he could shoot scenes simultaneously from various angles. The scenes between Laughton and his wife (a magisterially compassionate Ethel Barrymore) and Laughton and Ann Todd are the ones that seem to engage Hitchcock – presumably because of the misogyny at the heart of them, to which Laughton gives full weight. His Lord Horfield is a concentrated study of malevolent authority, both on the bench and at the supper table, threatening and mocking, the glinting monocle
deployed
once more to good effect (though it had to wait for
Witness for the Prosecution
to reach its apotheosis). Nonetheless the performance doesn’t quite live. There’s something soporific about it (quite possibly intentional) that does nothing to counteract the lethargy instilled by the rest of the film, an expensively half-hearted effort.

Laughton’s billing was very firmly and very conspicuously below the title on the posters, in there with the supporting character players like Miss Barrymore and Charles Coburn. His salary was commensurately in decline; nevertheless, he was generous (or guilty?) enough to offer Brecht $5,000 dollars as compensation for the delay in producing
Galileo
. There was to be one more delay before rehearsals could start: Edward Hambleton had proposed the play to the Pelican Theatre Company, run by his friend Norman Lloyd, actor, producer and assistant director on
Arch of Triumph
, and
his
friend, John Houseman, whose association with Brecht went back, like Losey’s, to the mid-thirties and a plan to stage
Round Heads and Pointed Heads
. Lloyd and Houseman were rashly trying to establish a base for serious live theatre in Los Angeles. They embraced the idea of doing
Galileo
with great enthusiasm but judged it too difficult a play with which to open their first season. The play they chose to do this with was
The Skin of Our Teeth
, the Thornton Wilder extravaganza, and
Galileo
was scheduled for the end of May, to open on 1 July 1947. Laughton went away again to make another film,
The Big Clock
.

Laughton’s Earl Janoth, the newspaper proprietor who murders his mistress, is an adroit creation, witty and vivid. If in
It Started with Eve
he seems somehow to have foreshadowed the elderly Lord Stockton, in
The Big Clock
he appears to have anticipated Edward Heath, Broadstairs vowels, heaving shoulders and all. He plays the newspaper magnate as a Napoleon of print, master-minding his empire with an eagle eye for detail (‘there’s a bulb been burning for days in a cupboard on the fourth floor. Find out who’s responsible and dock his pay, will you?’) and an obsession with time – ‘I’ll give you six minutes to reconsider’. He’s both impassive and dynamic, tripping statistics off his tongue as he suddenly makes his staff jump with a single pointed observation; fastidiously fingering his lips as he dismisses unsatisfactory proposals for the increase of circulation (‘our aim is to sell magazines, not to pay our readers to read them’); gliding at top speed from room to room. The performance is a technical tour-de-force of high-speed throwaway, comic and powerful at the same time. The voice rarely rises in either pitch or volume – flick, flick, flick
goes
Janoth, even under extreme pressure. The scene of confrontation between Janoth and his mistress is the only eruption from Laughton, and even that is almost stylised: he plunges into a jealous reproach, puffing mechanically away at his cigarette, as she rounds on him, mocking his ugliness and undesirability (almost
de rigueur
in Laughton movies). His lip begins to twitch – only his lip, as if it had a life of its own. The camera witnesses this in extreme close-up. When the lip can twitch no more, Janoth picks up a heavy object and hurls it across the room, killing his mistress. He stands just as impassively over her, upon which the scene cuts to him quite impassively and drily confessing his crime to his assistant. Janoth has been demonstrated to us. We know nothing about how he feels, or why he is the way he is, but we know everything about what he is, and how he works – like a clock, as it happens, the image that dominates and unifies the whole film. Laughton seems to be drawing attention to the robotic heartlessness of big business. Without a trace of remorse or morality, he allows his guilt to be transferred in turn to not one but two other people; that’s how he functions. It’s a quite fascinating performance, ending with the unforgettable image of Janoth tumbling backwards down the lift-shaft as impassively as he has done everything else.