Charles Laughton (35 page)

The film itself has been as unjustly neglected as Laughton’s performance. Directed by John Farrow, the reliable Australian director of any number of unremarkable films, it has a great elegance and flair in a style that might best be described as nearly
noir
– visually the film is dominated by the big clock itself, a massive tower within the Janoth building which would not seem out of place in Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis
. The play of shadows is handled in a masterly way; while the plot with its inversions and convolutions (Ray Milland as a crime detective spends much of the film trying to track himself down, as does Laughton) presents an image of nightmarish reversals. Milland, Maureen O’Sullivan (the director’s wife) and Henry Morgan as a psychopathic masseur are sharply focused. Elsa Lanchester provides rather un-comic relief as a whacky lady painter; for once, her work seems out of key with both Laughton and the film.

Richard Maybaum, the producer, reports a curious incident, a week before shooting began: Elsa and Charles appeared in his office at the studio with long faces. ‘Dear Mr Maybaum,’ said Elsa, ‘it’s so terribly sad, but we can’t be in your film.’ ‘Oh’ said Maybaum. ‘No,’ replied Lanchester. ‘You see, we don’t know who we are, and we never take anything on unless we know who we are.’ And they left. A few days later, they burst in on Maybaum, who had – wisely in the
event
– just decided to sit tight – to announce joyfully, ‘It’s alright! We know who we are!’ ‘And who,’ asked Maybaum, ‘are you?’ ‘Dorothy Parker and Colonel Macormack,’ Elsa replied. Maybaum accepted the news phlegmatically. Their performances in the film bear no resemblances to these prototypes, but obviously it made them happy. Or one of them, at least. Maybaum drily observes that Laughton said nothing whatever at either meeting, and he was never certain how seriously he took it. Interestingly, on this film Laughton’s fee – $100,000, a very decent whack – included Elsa’s fee, as clear an identification as could be imagined of the disparity in their respective standings. Even Charles, however, had been an unattractive casting proposition to the front office and was only finally given the rôle after every other possibility had been considered. When the film was released, he was held to be a liability in certain areas: in Nebraska, his name was actually taken off the marquee in deference to local disfavour.

Filming complete, Laughton returned, refreshed, to
Galileo
. Brecht and he continued last-minute revision on the play up to the very last minute – and beyond. (They were still revising when the play transferred to New York.) They spent hours in the libraries and museums looking above all for visual stimulation both for the characters and for the settings. They gave a young actor whom they were trying to interest in the part of Lodovico, for instance, a reproduction of the magnificent Bronzino
Portrait of a Young Man
, gazing coolly and almost insolently out of the canvas, his finger marking the place in the book he was reading. It is claimed that Brecht did not have a high degree of visual awareness but his perceptive account of, for example, the Brueghel
Fall of Icarus
(the same painting that inspired Auden’s ‘Musée Des Beaux-Arts’) seems to give that the lie:

‘Tiny scale of this legendary event (you have to hunt for the victim). The characters turn their back on the incident. Lovely picture of the concentration needed for ploughing … special beauty and gaiety of the landscape during the frightful event.’

Clearly Brecht felt that the painter’s technique was similar to his own; that is, a method of drawing the eye to what was important, to what was new. He puts it even more clearly in his comment on the same painter’s
Flight of Charles the Bold
:

‘The fleeing commander, his horse, his retinue and the landscape are all quite consciously painted in such a way as to create the impression of an abnormal event, and astonishing disaster. In spite
of
his inadequacy the painter succeeds brilliantly in bringing out the unexpected. Amazement guides his brush.’

Laughton too studied painting not merely sensuously but to learn, and to learn about his own art. He spoke feelingly about painting on many occasions, but one particular observation is worth repeating: ‘Figures should in fact be depicted in such a way that you want to change places with them.’ Both men looked to the visual for enlightenment. Brecht, in particular, relied on his designers, (above all Caspar Neher) to suggest stage pictures which expressed the crux of the scene, groupings, to which all the stage movement should lead. He and Laughton commissioned John Hubley, an ex-Disney animator and later close collaborator of Losey’s, to make sketches for each scene. It’s a concept of pre-planning the placing of a scene which is rarely practised in the modern theatre, where placing is held to ‘evolve’; but it’s an interesting measure of the degree to which both Brecht and Laughton were concerned with the expressive impact of the staging: no question here of actors ‘just standing around’, taking up the most convenient position; on the contrary, the placing of the actors was gestic: a crystallised manifestation of the thing to be shown.

Brecht and Laughton also seem to have done the casting themselves: a few emigré actors, like Hugo Haas, as the Pope, quite a number of serious young Hollywood actors, acquaintances of Laughton (Frances Heflin, sister of Van, for example), but for the most part, in James Lyon’s phrase, ‘both Laughton and Brecht wanted unspoiled, teachable, younger people.’ Many of these they found in the recently defunct Actors’ Lab, including one, Bill Phipps, who, as it happens, became Laughton’s lover, a troubled but none the less sustaining relationship. He played Andrea, though Eric Bentley, for one, reckons he was overparted. In general, the company they assembled was young, eager and talented.

By mid-June when official rehearsals began, many of the cast had already done a great deal of unofficial and unpaid work – not that there was much money around for anyone. Laughton and Edward Hambleton had each stumped up $25,000 dollars: not peanuts, in 1947, but not a great deal, either, with a cast of nearly 40, innumerable scene changes, a band and a huge wardrobe requirement. Laughton and three other actors were on $40 a week, three more were on $20, and the rest on little or nothing. The 265-seat theatre could never have made enough money to pay for all that; this was a labour of love, in three cases above all: Helene Weigel, Brecht’s wife, who, though one of the greatest actresses in the world, offered her services as wardrobe
mistress;
Ruth Berlau, Brecht’s current mistress, who took the many production photographs (which still survive, giving a clear indication of what the play must have looked like); and Laughton himself, suddenly very nervous at the prospect of actually doing the thing he had dreamed of for three years.

Rehearsals were dominated by Brecht. His rage was famous and terrible, but seems to have been reserved for the technical aspects of the production. Houseman observes: ‘his attitude was consistently objectionable and outrageous … he was harsh, intolerant and, often, brutal and abusive. The words
scheiss
and
shit
were foremost in his vocabulary … that he was almost always right in his judgements did not diminish the pain and resentment he spread around him during the long, intense weeks of rehearsal.’ It seems to have been Laughton who worked most closely with the actors. Houseman again:

‘throughout his own rehearsals, and in his relations with others, he was consistently modest, sensitive and understanding. He appeared in every scene but two of the play; yet his preoccupation with his own rôle did not prevent him from spending hours of patient unselfish work with his fellow actors.’

Brecht himself, in
Building a Rôle
, echoing that judgement, adds:

‘the playwright was impressed by the freedom he allowed [the younger actors], by the way in which he avoided anything Laughtonish and simply taught them the structure. To those actors who were too easily impressed by his personality he read passages from Shakespeare without rehearsing the actual text; to none did he read the text itself.’

No doubt to balance Brecht’s terrifying ways – as when, for example, he screamed at the choreographer Anna Sokolow that he wanted none of her ‘tawdry Broadway dances’, after which she was replaced by Lottie Goslar – Laughton consciously brought the temperature down. This directing-in-tandem may well have suited him very well: relieved of the anxiety of supreme responsibility, he could gently and doggedly pursue the truth and the life of the play. His own performance, however, was a slightly different matter.

Norman Lloyd observed that in rehearsals, Laughton would be ‘like a baby. “You’re just being a big baby,” Losey would say. “Yes, I am,” Charles would pout. It was just games.’ Losey later said of him:

‘Charles was very mannered. One of the things that I tried to do … was to make him not use his mannerisms. He was an extraordinary actor. Extremely sensitive, extremely moody, very intuitive but with an excellent mind, tremendously moving when he got it right,
often
undisciplined, finding it difficult to keep something when he got it.’

The young physicist Morton Wurtele, scientific adviser on the production, reported that Laughton handled the instruments used in the experiments ‘with remarkable ease for someone without scientific training.’ There are no reports of any crisis in Laughton’s understanding or realisation of the character, and clearly no problem with realising the physical aspects of the part. The rising panic was fear of exposure: first of all in such a progressive and provocative piece; secondly to an audience at all. It had, after all, been ten years since his last stage appearance (in
Peter Pan
). Houseman reports that he kept his panic perfectly under control until a dress rehearsal at which Ruth Berlau was taking photographs. Suddenly Laughton released a howl of rage followed by a wave of abuse as he threatened to murder her if she did not desist at once. She fled.

‘Laughton’s outburst that night was far more than an actor’s tantrum: it was a desperate act of revolt against a man he loved and revered … the man for whom he was about to expose himself, after so many years, to the horrifying risk of personal and professional disaster on the stage.’

Brecht continued to rail at technical deficiencies: the opening was postponed by a week to July 30; at the last minute he threatened to cancel the first performance because the set had been coated with shellac. It was duly stripped ‘to reveal the grain of the wood’, as he required. Laughton had retreated to the caravan he’d had drawn up outside the theatre to serve as a dressing room. Here, according to Houseman, he fell into heavy psychosomatic slumbers ‘from which it became increasingly difficult to rouse him’. There had been a crisis at a dress rehearsal when Weigel, appalled by Laughton’s unconcealed fumbling with his scrotum during the early scenes, had sewn up his pockets. Laughton was enraged and his access to his organ was restored. Whether he continued to fumble is unreported, and indeed reports vary as to Brecht’s attitude to the whole episode: was this particular
gest
beyond a joke, or did he privately admire the audacious connexion Laughton was apparently making between thinking and sex? It seems a perfectly Brechtian notion.

The first night arrived, more than usually terrifying. The audience contained among others Charlie Chaplin, Billy Wilder, Ingrid Bergman, Gene Kelly. ‘Turn out for the Theatah,’ crowed
Variety
. ‘Cinema Intelligentsia and just plain folks flocked to the Coronet Theatre last night to see Charles Laughton do his stuff as Galileo.’
Galas
are ten a penny in Los Angeles, but the cross-section in the audience that night is remarkable. It was a blistering summer. Brecht reports ‘Laughton’s chief worry was the prevailing heat. He asked that trucks full of ice should be parked against the theatre walls, and fans be set in motion “so that the audience can think.”’ No doubt; it was not perhaps Laughton’s
chief
worry. ‘Am I doing a terrible thing?’ he asked Elsa Lanchester. ‘I have to do this. It is right. I know Larry’s company is wonderful’ – the Old Vic, then at its height under Olivier – ‘but I must do this play. This is a play for now,’ he said to Norman Lloyd, as he sipped soda water and burped – going back to babyhood, Lloyd thought. Brecht, for his part, left the theatre with the memorable phrase, ‘
Ich muss ein 7-Up haben
.’

Just before the show began, Lyon reports, Laughton received a telegram from Orson Welles saying that he would reveal him as a fraud: he, Welles, happened to know that the play had not been translated by Laughton at all but was the work of his, Welles’, friends, Duffield and Crocker. Welles had planned the arrival of the telegram for the minute before the curtain went up. Small surprise that Laughton is described by some reviewers as being nervous during the first scenes.

The notices, were, in a sense, irrelevant. The play was already, in the words of Oscar Wilde, ‘the most enormous success.’ It had sold out the moment booking opened. Admittedly, there were only seventeen performances. Interest seemed equally divided between Laughton, Brecht and the theatre company itself, Pelican Productions. And in fact, though Brecht represented the reviews as being universally bad, they were mixed; even when favourable, however, they were uncomprehending, trying to deal with the play in terms of history, biography, ‘art theatre’, even propaganda. ‘An arresting footlight event’ (
L.A. Times
); ‘It will start as many theatre discussions as anything paraded across the stage in years’ (
News
). The
Los Angeles Examiner
found it ‘a juvenile fussy harangue’;
Variety
said: ‘There is a symbolic bit of business in the final scene of Bertolt Brecht’s new play. Galileo, investigating the laws of motion, rolls a small metal ball down an incline and measures its ability to roll up the other side of the U-shaped chute. It doesn’t make the grade. Neither, unfortunately, does the script.’

It’s hardly surprising that the critics, good or bad, missed the point. They still do, after thirty years’ exposure to Brecht’s plays and the theories. Curiously dour and fragmentary it must have seemed. As for Robert Davison’s sets and white curtain and all the rest of the
Brechtian
stage apparatus (a more or less faithful impression of what Neher, had he been able to be present, would have done) they were thought to be the result of thrift (‘in the abbreviated, implicit Shakespeare mode – altogether pleasing’). Eisler’s music, again, failed to create atmosphere, which is surely, they felt, what theatre music is for? Expecting high drama, confrontation, thrills, an evocation of the Renaissance, the critics were disappointed: ‘the production somehow lacks the impact implicit in the story. It seems barren of climaxes and even sparse in stirring moments. Hardly a sigh of sympathy is inspired when Galileo’s scientific determination cuts off his daughter’s romance. His recantation comes out cut and dried.’ (
Variety
). Little had been done to prepare them: Laughton in an interview before the première had said that the purpose of the play was ‘to bring that mysterious personage who works in the laboratory out into the light.’ The audience, public and critics alike, at the Coronet Theatre simply had no idea how to respond to this play. Bred on Aristotelian (or more likely culinary) theatre, as far as they were concerned this was merely wilfully unengaging. If they had known that Brecht spent every hour, when he wasn’t working, eating or making love, reading thrillers, they might have approached his work differently, more like Gilbert Adair’s brilliant account of the thriller writer and his reader, ‘like two players hunched over a chessboard, they lock themselves in combat, each acknowledging his adversary’s existence and skill’. What could be a better description of the ideal member of the audience of an epic theatre than Adair’s: ‘not for an instant does he [the reader] identify with the characters or their motivations; in a sense, he identifies with only one character and his motivations, [the author herself]’? But the sharp-questioning state of mind of Brecht’s ideal audience, taking nothing for granted, ‘cigar in mouth, sitting on the edge of their seats,’ as he described them, was not to be found in Los Angeles that summer. They weren’t interested in engaging with the author. They had come for Galileo and Laughton.