Charles Laughton (40 page)

His directorial work on
Don Juan
did not pass unnoticed. Its calculated simplicity sounds cunning, and may have effected the mysterious transformation of non-dramatic material into something
genuinely
theatrical. Jed Harris, the awesome figure of the twenties and thirties, by now a more or less spent force, had this to say about it: ‘By appearing to read, but actually knowing their parts by heart, they make the whole thing come alive. In a theatrical production, the power of illusion would be much more difficult.’ Under pressure of the urgency of any particular speech, any one of them might suddenly leave the podium and stand in the centre of the space. There’s an interesting tension in that, as if the actors were pushing against the formal constraints of the setting and staging. Laughton himself said of his staging: ‘Every movement of the body, even the turning of the pages, becomes important. You mustn’t move, except for a startling effect.’ He himself introduced the evening: ‘Playing the part of a modest, jovial, scholarly fellow in a well-cut but loosely worn tuxedo, he invites the audience to share with him and his associates the pleasures to be derived from a public reading of one of the lesser known masterpieces of contemporary literature. Disarmingly he warns that it will not be roses all the way: it will require concentration and effort on the listeners’ part too. Eagerly,’ continues Houseman, ‘the audience accepts the challenge, and the show is on.’

It was on for a year, a triumphant progress from campus to stadium to concert hall in every town big enough to have one. ‘Audiences throughout the US – in Oakland, New Orleans, Salt Lake City, Syracuse and Williamsport, PA. – have been eating it up. Businessmen and bobby-soxers, college students and clubwomen have jammed theatres and auditoriums and high-school gymnasiums to hear the Devil and Don Juan swapping epigrams,’ according to
Time. Variety
drooled: ‘STICKS OUTSHINE BROADWAY.’

Only once was the triumphant progress checked, and that was in England, where the Drama Quartette had been invited to participate in the Festival of Britain. Once there, it transpired that they were to be confined to the provinces; John Clements was putting on
Man and Superman
, and Laurence Olivier, as executive officer of the theatrical arm of the Festival, ensured that the rival group never played against him. ‘I would no doubt have been on John Clements’ side as he was a closer friend of mine than Charles, and Charles seemed to be coming home rather too late to make any claims upon the loyalties.’ So the production limped around the provinces, unheralded and overpriced. Cedric Hardwicke: ‘They had expected to see Hollywood stars glittering with wisecracks. They got the four of us … we played to half-empty theatres which normally resounded to the gurglings of rock-and-roll singers. I was glad for only one thing – that the author
was
spared this sorry spectacle.’ It saddened and enraged Charles to feel that he was regarded as a foreigner; his espousal of American citizenship had been an act of love for that country, not a renunciation of England. It also crystallised a vague antipathy he had for Laurence Olivier. In an interview he gave to Kenneth Tynan at the time, he criticised Olivier’s approach to Shakespeare: ‘You’ve got to bring
today
into Shakespeare. That’s what Olivier never does. He is the apotheosis of the 19th-century romantic actor.’ Whether this is actually an insult is debatable, but Laughton certainly thought that Olivier would think it was, because he wrote him an apology, which Olivier gracefully brushed aside, writing: ‘I was only distressed that you were bamboozled into giving the little fucker an interview.’

Laughton and Lanchester loathed it, but the little fucker’s profile of Charles is characteristically elegant: ‘A few weeks ago, Charles Laughton returned to England, a Prodigal son bearing a strong resemblance to the Fatted Calf … the man of fifty looks a mere boy of 40, a lordly urchin playing a hard game of marbles with his own talent. He is as ageless as Humpty Dumpty’. It contains a brilliant verbal cartoon of his physical impact: ‘He walks top-heavily, like a salmon standing on its tail. Laughton invests his simplest exit with an air of furtive flamboyance; he left the hotel for all the world like an absconding banker.’ ‘Furtive flamboyance’ is very fine. But the piece offers more than natty phrase-making. Tynan goes on to analyse Laughton’s art:

The secret of his freshness possibly lies in his boredom with anything that has gone before. As an actor he goes to fantastic lengths to avoid the obvious: called upon to express simple love or hatred, he will offer instead lechery or disgust. His style is circuitous, and rarely steps onto the direct highroad to an audience’s heart. In this he is like the man in Chesterton’s poem who would travel to John O’Groat’s by way of Beachy Head. Laughton arrives at his characterisations panting, having picked up a hundred oddments on the way, and the result is always a fascinating and unique mosaic.

The critics who did come to see the show at Manchester or Birmingham were as enthused as their American colleagues, and in similar terms: ‘It was an unforgettable spectacle. Through this Quartette, Shaw is himself again. The Drama Quartette has done something remarkable for the cause of theatre by their bold, pioneering spirit’ said the
Evening Dispatch
. Manchester’s
Evening Chronicle
found it ‘sheer delight. The relish with which Charles Laughton
licked
the lines and turned and twisted was the Laughton the world loves.’ Despite the box-office flop, and the show’s non-appearance in London, Laughton himself was perceived to be renewed and revitalised. In Tynan’s words: ‘He looks the reverse of tired and disenchanted; Captain Hook has returned in the character of Peter Pan.’

And indeed, the English performances of
Juan
were a brief interlude – after Los Angeles, before New York – in the Drama Quartette’s unstoppable progress, which lasted until the beginning of 1952, by which time Paul Gregory reckoned they had played every viable date in the land. It had restored Laughton as an actor to the serious theatre-going audience, and it had introduced him as a director. At the very first preview, Martini-maudlin, he had sobbed that he was responsible for destroying his cast’s careers. In fact, he had revived them: theirs and his.

Abbot and Costello meet Captain Kidd
is generally held to be the low-water mark of Laughton’s career, a proof, if one were needed, of the terrible
dégringolade
this once-great actor had suffered. While it would be hard to argue that the film is a significant work of art, its context offers extenuating circumstances. The film was one of a series – others that Abbot and Costello had encountered included Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and The Mummy. They were the top-grossing comedians of the decade; were, indeed, regularly among the top-grossing stars, full stop. To be invited to make a film with them was a sort of humorous accolade, just as it was for English legitimate stars like Glenda Jackson and Keith Michell to be asked to appear on television with Morecambe and Wise in the late seventies. Moreover, Laughton, as we’ve seen, had a great passion for knockabout comedy, here given the freest possible rein. The result, within the limits of Bud and Lou’s woefully laboured routines, is by no means displeasing. Laughton really does seem in this case to be having fun, entering into the spirit of things with a performance not so much slapstick as slapdash, but all the more charming for that. There’s not a trace of the elaborate contrivance which often mars his comic playing; instead, he hurls himself into the action, recklessly proliferating double-takes, keeling over on the slightest provocation, doing comic walks and comic runs, spending quite a large part of the movie in his underpants, and ending up hanging from the mainbrace. It’s all wonderfully game; he even joins in the opening chorus of ‘Captain Kidd! Captain Kidd!’ (The performance, incidentally, bears almost no
resemblance
to the 1945 film, nor even to Captain Bligh. It’s more like the performance that everyone
thought
he’d given in those roles.)

Laughton usually enjoyed working with old comedy pros, and the director, Charles Lamont, was certainly
that
: veteran of all the Abbot and Costellos, the Ma and Pa Kettle series, and responsible for two films which subsequently – at least for readers of
Cahiers du Cinéma
– attained cult status,
Salome, When She Danced
, and
Frontier Gal
. He seems to have done nothing more than point the cameras at the actors and the drastically tacky sets and painted backcloths. Surprisingly, the cameraman is the great Stanley Cortez, with whom Laughton was shortly to have a remarkable professional association; on this one, he, too, presumably decided to have fun and take the money.

Immediately afterwards, Laughton slipped in a quick appearance in yet another compendium movie,
O. Henry’s Full House
; this time, however, it was a proper film (a pretty dull one, too, in the non-Laughton sequences, despite direction by Jean Negulesco and Howard Hawks), in which he gives a more than proper performance: it’s rather lovely, in fact. O. Henry was an author whose stories he often read on his reading tours, and this little tale,
The Cop and the Anthem
, is a wry fable that Laughton brings off with much delicacy, almost as if, in fact, he were reading it. He doesn’t characterise it with any particular depth of feeling, but he tells the story wonderfully: with winter coming on, Soapy, a tramp, decides to get himself, as usual, arrested and imprisoned for the duration of the cold months. Try as he may, he can’t, and in some depression repairs to a church, where he’s so moved by the music he hears there that he decides to reform his life. Just as he makes the decision, he’s arrested for vagrancy and sentenced to prison. It’s deftly directed by Henry Koster, Charles’ partner in schmaltz on
It Started with Eve
, and still with another fifteen years’ film-making in him (
The Robe, The Story of Ruth, The Singing Nun
). This charming little film becomes immortal in a breathtaking moment when Charles’ elaborately courteous Soapy approaches a girl in the street in the hope of being run in for propositioning, only to find out that she’s a streetwalker by profession. The girl is Marilyn Monroe in her last rôle before stardom hit in a really big way. It’s a brief but electric couple of minutes of celluloid. Marilyn had informed her friend Shelley Winters that Charles was ‘the sexiest man she’d ever seen’; perhaps a suggestion of that informs their little exchange.

Laughton’s other film for 1951,
The Blue Veil
, was almost a compendium film. It charts the journey of Jane Wyman, a bereaved
mother
who finds fulfilment in looking after other people’s children, through the lives of her many infant charges. This results in a number of more or less self-contained episodes starring, among others, Joan Blondell, Don Taylor, Everett Sloane, and, in the first episode, Laughton. He plays a genial widower with a tiny baby, to whom Wyman takes an immediate shine, which leads Laughton, in a scene of some delicacy, to propose to her. Describing himself as ‘the fourth largest corset house in the East’ and – a first this – ‘not the plainest man who ever lived’, he invites her to share his life, but she, with the restrained calmness which characterises virtually everything she does in the film, gently refuses him. Instead he marries his secretary, who sees no further use for Wyman’s services. She moves sadly off to the next child, and on to the next episode. The film is solidly put together by Curtis Bernhardt, with a literate and sober script by Laughton’s friend, Norman Corwin. Perc Westmore did the make-up, but this was largely confined to supervising Miss Wyman’s forty years’ ageing, so his contact with his one-time foe was limited. Though receiving top billing after Wyman, Laughton’s importance had much declined, almost in direct proportion to the decline of the importance of film in his own life. But the performance is charming, skilful and benevolent in a way not usually associated with Laughton. ‘The most sympathetic role of his career’ wrote
Picturegoer
, ‘and he makes the most of it.’ He does, but it is a slight use of a great talent.

Back to serious work: the theatre. Gregory was eager to push Charles’ career as a director as hard and fast as it could go within the context of the new form that they had pioneered. They had discovered America’s appetite for being read to; almost accidentally, they had also discovered the aesthetic as well as the economic gains of having little or no setting. Gregory’s suggestion of Stephen Vincent Benét’s
John Brown’s Body
as the next project was as shrewd as his notion of getting Tyrone Power to lead the company. The Pulitzer Prize-winning verse epic of the Civil War is admirably suited to distribution among several voices; its celebration of America was guaranteed a welcome on the new Chatauqua circuit Gregory and Laughton had opened up; and Power was a loved star, almost a national hero, whose film career was, however, on the wane, and who desperately wanted to prove himself as a ‘serious actor’; ‘to pay his dues’, as he put it, ‘to the theatre,’ into which, as the son of a famous stage actor, he had been born. Gregory’s commercial calculation in the choice of stars was masterly: he knew his audience perfectly and, as Elsa Lanchester points out, by creating
a
groundswell of excitement around the country before attempting the metropolis, created the conditions for a triumphal entry; which is what, once again, happened. With Judith Anderson and Raymond Massey as Power’s partners (Laughton confined his efforts to adapting and directing), the production was hailed as ‘refreshing the whole conception of theatre.’ After its sold-out tour of sixty cities, it played sixty-five sold-out performances at the New Century Theatre in New York, before going off to another eighty sold-out performances all over America, including places where, as Raymond Massey wrote, ‘Lincoln had not yet been canonised and fiery crosses on the lawn were not unknown.’

Laughton had encountered Benét’s poem before; he and Elsa and others had performed excerpts from it on the radio in the late thirties, and it is precisely the sort of work which appealed to him: a grand evocation in varied verse (and sometimes prose) forms, infectiously rhythmic, essentially straightforward in its poetic method, depending neither on complex metaphor nor on sophisticated verbal manoeuvres. It is, most of all, a story; a story about America which celebrates the land and the people, almost equally divided in its sympathies between North and South. Its peroration identifies the death of the Southern ideal as the necessary condition for the birth of industrial America, and there is in this a quality of lament.