Charles Laughton (37 page)

Epitaph for the actor C.L
.

Speak of the weather

Be thankful he’s dead

Who before he had spoken

Took back what he said.

Brecht had heard of the paragraph in Kurt Singer’s book which read:

‘The play opened in the autumn of 1947. At first it had seemed destined for success. The New York drama critics hailed Laughton’s performance and admired the skill with which he adapted the original text, which was rather ponderous and wordy, into a fast-moving, stirring drama. However, the production soon ran into snags. Berthold Brecht was a dyed-in-the-wool communist … Laughton had gone into the project in complete innocence. He had more or less been kidnapped by the communists, who were very happy to have a person of Laughton’s stature to lend prestige to one of their propaganda flyers … When the facts of the matter were put before Laughton by his manager, Charles saw that he was playing into the communists’ hands. He had fallen into bad company. There was nothing for him to do but withdraw from the production of
Galileo
.’

How this piece of nonsense came to Brecht’s attention is not clear: it may have been through Joe Losey – he bitterly denounced both the book and Laughton, whose authorised biography he supposed it to be. The Laughtons in turn denounced the book, claiming that they had never even met the author. Losey then accused Laughton of possibly betraying Brecht to HUAC, a grotesque thought. This is the
background
to the premature ‘Epitaph’. Certainly Laughton and Brecht never communicated after
Galileo
. Perhaps Brecht was too strong, too overwhelming a figure for Laughton. In his task of liberating himself from the fat little boy he still felt himself to be, a father, or at any rate big-brother, figure was not what he wanted. The story ends a little squalidly: when Brecht died, Laughton received a cable from the East German Culture Ministry asking for his reaction. He contacted his lawyer, who contacted the FBI, saying
CABLE RECEIVED FROM RED COUNTRY
. The FBI indicated that there would be no repercussions if Laughton sent a telegram of condolence. So he did.

At the end of his recorded message to Brecht, Laughton (always calling him ‘Brecht’) says that he can’t wait to start work with him on another play. He never did, of course, which is a great shame for him and for Brecht. He had even started translating the
Caucasian Chalk Circle
. But there was no Azdak. No Schweik. No Schlink. No Arturo. His students never did perform a Brecht play. He never read any story or poem by Brecht in his reading tours. He omitted Galileo from his list of rôles. Brecht seemed to vanish.

Teaching

THE GIRL FROM
Manhattan
is one of the more enigmatic films in Laughton’s output, though not quite as enigmatic as its predecessor, made in between the Los Angeles and New York runs of
Galileo
. Entitled either
On Our Merry Way
or
A Miracle can Happen
, that film had four directors, three directors of photography, two art directors and a large and fairly prestigious cast, among whom the name of Charles Laughton does not appear, because his episode, for reasons shrouded in mystery, was cut. David O. Selznick, it was rumoured, offered to buy the deleted episode and destroy the rest, but the offer was not taken up. Laughton had become involved only on account of his growing friendship with Burgess Meredith, the film’s producer.
One
of the film’s producers. The other was, somehow inevitably, Benedict Bogeaus, who was also to be the producer of
The Girl from Manhattan
. The enigma of
this
film consists largely in its having been seen by no one. There is an awful silence about it, though a no doubt
apocryphal
anecdote from the filming would have brought a grim smile of satisfaction to Agate’s lips: there is (apparently) a baby in the story, and this baby would not stop crying. Finally Laughton went over to the baby and murmured something into its ears. Immediately the baby fell asleep. On being asked what he had so effectively whispered, Laughton answered: ‘The Gettysburg address. It has such a wonderful rhythm, you know.’ For the rest: the film was directed by the veteran Alfred E. Green, who had just made
The Jolson Story
, and was soon to make
The Eddie Cantor Story
; it was written by Howard Estabrook, screenwriter on
A Bill of Divorcement, Cimarron
and
The Bridge of San Luis Rey;
and it starred Dorothy Lamour, who was also in
On Our Merry Way/ A Miracle can Happen
. Most writers on Laughton pass rapidly over
The Girl from Manhattan
, and it seems the only sensible thing to do.

Certainly it must have seemed very small beer after the intoxication of
Galileo
. Fortunately for Laughton, he was able to come down gently from that experience. A succession of
Girls from Manhattan
, or worse, no work at all (which once unimaginable eventuality was becoming increasingly feasible) would have destroyed everything that he had gained in the years with Brecht. Instead, he had met a young actor called Bill Cotrell, who had had some pre-war experience with the Oregon Shakespeare Association. In attempting to establish something similar in Hollywood, Cotrell had been deluged by 1500 applications, which he whittled down to twenty or so. At first the plan, devised by him and Kate Drain Lawson, Houseman’s associate at Pelican Productions, appears to have been to involve various teachers, but at one of the sifting sessions, before the group’s composition had quite been decided on, there was a clash of titans between the two heavyweight older actors present – Laughton and Thomas Gomez, a renowned movie villain. In avoirdupois, there was little to choose between them; but Laughton put on a brilliant display, reading a great chunk of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
– all the parts, of course – till Gomez, cursing, retreated into the street. From then on, it seems pretty much to have been Laughton’s class.

This is the group referred to in the postscript of the letter to Eric Bentley. In full, it reads: ‘I have started a Shakespearean group, training a bunch of American actors and actresses in the business of verse speaking and prose speaking. We have been working together some 8 or 9 months, three evenings a week for three hours, and I believe that in another year (it will take no more, but will also take no less) we shall be the best team of speakers in the English language. I
am
doing this solely with the aim of getting a company together that can play Brecht’s plays. I want to see
Galileo really
performed, and
Circle of Chalk
and
Mother Courage
, and the rest of them. I am devoting all my spare energies to that end.’

Nobody in the group seems to have been aware that their ultimate goal was to become the Berliner Ensemble of California; but otherwise it was just as Laughton says. Very hard, methodical, regular and committed work; methodical, that is, in its thoroughness – there was no system. The group assembled three evenings a week, in the so-called schoolroom at Laughton’s Pacific Palisades house – the very room where he and Brecht had wrought their version of
Galileo
. There, buried deep in his armchair, surveyed by a Vlaminck, a Utrillo and a tiny Douanier Rousseau, he talked to his students, in Elsa Lanchester’s words, ‘with feeling and passion about being able to relate one art to another, and it was there for them to see’. Billy Wilder suggested that the classes served ‘to make them
think
, to live, to understand more – to
initiate
them.’ And years later, Shelley Winters, briefly one of the class, telegraphed Laughton:
YOU GAVE ME THE DISCIPLINE AND LOVE OF THE THEATRE THE RESPECT AND BELIEF IN MYSELF THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE POETRY THAT CONNECTS ALL MANKIND BUT FOR YOU MY FATE MIGHT HAVE BEEN THE SAME AS POOR MARILYN’S
.

Clearly what was being imparted was as much inspirational and spiritual as technical or academic. Certainly there was no question of Laughton passing on skills or tricks. He of all actors was the last person to attempt that – not that he lacked either; simply that that was not his conception of acting. It was a vision of acting that he wanted to convey, not a formula. Lanchester says that he was an alchemist who wanted to pass on his secrets. That, no doubt, is true; but his powers of transmutation were not to be worked by mechanical means. They called for a state of mind. What Laughton was propagating, in short, was art, not craft. He was trying to awaken in his students an awareness of – well, yes, in Miss Winters’ phrase – ‘the poetry that connects all mankind’.

He did have, it must be admitted, an
idée fixe
, which was both technical and academic, and must have seemed odd to his students in the light of everything else he seemed to stand for. This was The Iambic Pentameter, which, since his outright rejection of it fifteen years before at the Vic, he had now elevated to a central place in his conception of Shakespearean acting. With ruthless rigidity he imposed it on his class. The metronome dominated the room.
Sometimes
he even made them bounce a ball as they spoke: ti
tum
, ti
tum
, ti
tum
. It was as if, having been criticised in the past for failing to observe the rhythm, he had said: ‘You want iambic pentameters? Right, I’ll
give
you iambic pentameters!’ Another sort of sulk.

In his teaching, as in his work, his best results had not been, and never would be, in Shakespeare; but his engagement with the problems and the challenges of verse drama was of inestimable value to his life as an artist. It is doubtful whether a day in Laughton’s life went by without him speaking a line of Shakespearean verse, resounding it in his mind, turning it over, questioning it, trying to make it release its truth to him. It could even be that Shakespeare meant too much for him ever to perform the work successfully. Sensing the potential in every participle, unable to choose between the thousand alternative interpretations, trembling with delight at the sensuous beauty of each word, he was, like an over-ardent lover, doomed never to consummate his passion. His love was almost an end in itself.

Better, however, to love unproductively than not to love at all.

The form of the class was always the same: it started with an unstructured question and answer session, a general discussion, not necessarily related to acting; then they moved on to the session proper, in which they would work on various texts. Charles obviously strove to make the class as unpredictable as possible; he’d suddenly ask someone to read something, or he’d read something himself, now analysing the structure of a part, now looking for its
key
. He’d talk about types of actor: he divided them into, on the one hand, presentational (personality actors, stars, of whom Gary Cooper was the supreme example, who were more pure as actors because nobody else could do what they did; they were thus vertical) and, on the other hand,
re
presentational. These were horizontal; they were less pure because they encompassed aspects of other people; they were always intellectual, because they were obliged to analyse and break down their rôles. Or he put it another way: some actors put a coat on and it looked perfectly natural on them; others put on a coat and changed physically because of the coat.

Whatever the value of the teaching to his students (and at the very least, they came away from his classes with an exalted sense of the dignity and importance of the profession, and of its interconnectedness with the other arts), its value to him was enormous. As he taught, he learned: the experience of all teachers. But, listened to raptly by the eager young, he began to believe in himself; began to believe he was worth something. And watching the seeds he was sowing begin to
flower
satisfied both his creative and his paternal impulses. Elsa Lanchester notes that he boasted of his students’ achievements like a proud father – ‘mother’ might perhaps be more appropriate – nurturing them, tending them, binding them to him with strong emotional ties.

Ernest Jones had predicted that teaching would calm his soul: and indeed, ‘he became a happier, more contented man. He was less morose and actually seemed to enjoy his other activities more’ (Lanchester). Producing had been an attempt at creating something outside of himself. It was not a good choice. Throughout the forties his creativity, so vastly engaged in his performances of the previous decade, went subterranean as he grew towards a new means of self-expression. Teaching was one of the few visible outlets for it; in some senses it was the prototype of his later activities, all of which were to some degree heuristic.

On the classes went, calmly and dedicatedly. From time to time, he had to go away to make some money; bit by bit, too, the more famous members of the group (Suzanne Cloutier, Robert Ryan, and, of course, Shelley Winters) drifted off to pursue their careers. But a solid nucleus stayed together, and – a sure mark of seriousness – even continued working while Laughton was away.

His first departure was to make another film for Robert Leonard, produced, this time, by Pandro S. Berman, who seems to have ensured a higher standard of production than Laughton was becoming accustomed to. The film is
The Bribe
, little known now, little liked then, but in fact a rather good film with a distinctly wow finish – a chase through a fiesta, against a backdrop of exploding fireworks. (It is unkindly suggested that this sequence was in fact directed by Vincente Minelli. It’s worthy of him.) The tone of the film is interestingly impassioned beneath its fast pace and terse dialogue. Its failure with the 1949 critics was precisely in its refusal to send itself up. ‘
The Bribe
is the sort of temptation which Hollywood put in the way of gullible moviegoers about twenty years ago – without one little wink at the audience or the slightest protrusion of tongue in cheek’ – complained Bosley Crowther in the
New York Times
. Paradoxically, its seriousness makes it seem, at this remove, not dated, but surprisingly modern. The moral and emotional mess in which the characters work out their destinies is thoroughly familiar to us. The slight blankness (woodenness is the standard term) of Robert Taylor in the leading rôle only contributes to the sense of modernity. Ava Gardner,
as
the singer with whom he falls in love, entirely lacks the self-mockery of a Lauren Bacall, say.
The Bribe
is neither romantic nor hyper-dramatic: there is a veil of ambiguity over its events. This forms a perfect context for Laughton’s J.J. Bealer, a performance of Graham Greene-ish complexity: a broken-down sot, pawn of circumstances, craven, weakly aggressive, ingratiating, threatening. R.R. Anger writes: ‘It is Charles Laughton’s great triumph that he tears this acknowledgement of J.J. Bealer’s humanness from our unwilling selves, as we watch Bealer plot, betray and extort, driven by the basic and simple need to be relieved from pain.’ Surely something like the opposite is true: it is the pitiless revelation of Bealer’s moral bankruptcy which is borne in on us, made the more piercing by the human and ordinary weaknesses with which he is endowed – his bad feet, for example, or his hunger. The man Bealer is constantly begging for sympathy, pleading special circumstances; it is the actor’s triumph to stop us from being deflected from the utter corruption they mask. ‘Inside this moral cripple, Laughton is saying,’ continues Mr Anger, ‘is a man.’ On the contrary, inside this man, Laughton is saying, is a moral cripple. This ruthless exposure is accomplished with strokes so deft, so accurate that a whole new possibility for Laughton’s acting suddenly opens up; never, alas, to be pursued.